Cleaning Up

Sometimes, a movie can have all the right ingredients but still not quite come off. 1996's Curdled was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino and stars Angela Jones (Esmeralda Villalobos from Pulp Fiction) as a young woman obsessed with crime scenes and beheadings. It even features a crossover character from From Dusk Till Dawn. For whatever reason, the film just can't seem to muster enough energy to come to life.

It has a splashy beginning. Jones' character as a little girl witnesses a mob hit and is immediately transfixed. Cut to years later and the young woman, chewing bubblegum, sees a TV ad for forensics cleanup crews and decides it's the job for her.

She becomes fascinated with a serial killer played by William Baldwin leading to a long scene in which she finds herself trapped at the crime scene with him. The two carry on a bizarre flirtation that should be a lot more fascinating than it is. Why doesn't it work? Maybe it's the omnipresent samba music that makes the film feel like a generic '90s indie film. Mostly I think it's the editing and pacing. This was originally a short film and maybe it works better in that format. Angela Jones is really good, though.

She was Tricked

Goldie Hawn meets handsome and friendly John Heard, marries him and has a kid with him, and everything seems fine but we know it's not because this 1991 movie is called Deceived. It's a slightly unusual suspense thriller because we, the audience, always know more than the protagonist. However, despite some exceptionally weak logic at times, this movie does generate some good suspense.

I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's famous analogy about the bomb ticking under the table while two people at the table chat obliviously. We know that Jack (Heard) has faked his death, we know that Adrienne (Hawn) has the ancient Egyptian necklace he wants. But she doesn't know either of these things. So as we watch her investigate her husband's phony past, we know all the time about the bomb ticking under her table.

There are about a dozen times in the film where any reasonable person in Adrienne's position would have called the police. When she comes home to find her apartment ransacked and her housekeeper strangled, it's implied police were on the scene but we never get a shot of a detective asking her questions. She would have had no reason to conceal any of the things she has uncovered up to that point so the movie breezes past it.

There are a few too many scenes like that and the audience is also asked to believe she would let her daughter's friend take a piece of her jewellery without even looking at what piece of jewellery the daughter's friend was taking. But a more crucial flaw in the film is its lack of a foundation given for the relationship between Adrienne and Jack. The filmmakers would have been better off not jumping five years into their marriage because we have no idea how many warning signs in that period of time Adrienne might have missed.

This loose foundation makes the film feel less psychological and more casual. It would probably be a good date movie, after which a couple could tease each other about being secret killers without feeling too disturbed about it. For a point of comparison, we could look at Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in which the signs of a long term relationship between Charlie and her uncle are established before she starts to uncover his true nature. The disturbing thing isn't merely that he's a killer but that she felt deeply connected to him. He's not just in her house, he's in her head and her heart. You don't have that in Deceived.

Deceived is fun, though. I liked the finale in which Jack chases Adrienne through a labyrinth of construction work.

The Bars of Wealth are Locked!

One of the risks of locking yourself in a cage is you might not be able to get out when you want to. Duh. Olivia de Havilland makes this seemingly elementary mistake in the 1964 hagsploitation/delinquent exploitation film Lady in a Cage. The plot is strenuously ridiculous and everyone overacts, especially the director, but its gaudiness has a campy charm.

A wealthy. elderly poetess called Cornelia Hilyard (de Havilland) lives in an enormous, decadently decorated house with her grown son, Malcolm (William Swan). He leaves early in the film and we never see him again. This is so she can be all alone in the house when the massive cage elevator she has installed to take her up to the second floor breaks down due to a power outage.

She only has this thing temporarily because she's recovering from a broken hip. By now you may be wondering--where the hell are her servants? I think we're meant to believe she and her son take care of the place all alone. Even Walter Neff had a cleaning woman come in once a week to his apartment in Double Indemnity. None of the delinquents who wind up busting into Cornelia's house even seem to worry for a moment that a maid or a groundskeeper might show up at some point.

Leading the bunch is none other than James Caan in his first major role. He and his two young cohorts bicker cartoonishly, assuring the viewer that these kids are just as devoid of compassion or morality as anyone reading the newspapers gathers about youths these days in the early '60s.

Caan and de Havilland both give good performances, though they're both dialed up to eleven for the duration. De Havilland very quickly descends into mental breakdown and is hallucinating before the end. There's a message about how she might be partially responsible for her son's possible suicide because she coddled him too much. In a scathing letter, he accuses her of adding another room to the house every time he thinks about moving out, in the process making it seem more incredible she has no housekeeping staff.

The influence of Psycho is clear from the Saul Bass-ish opening titles with animated lines and rapid tempo score. None of Hitchcock's subtlety or psychological insight is present but by the end I couldn't help smiling at the film's heights of absurdity amid its heavy-handed political allegory. When de Havilland stabs Caan in the eyes in an update on Oedipus I was kind of delighted.

From Silver to Gold

The train from LA to Chicago is the scene for murder, sex, and occasional slapstick in 1976's Silver Streak. Drawing some influence from Hitchcock, the film's an intelligently written suspense comedy and a nice showcase for Gene Wilder. Richard Pryor, as a thief, doesn't appear until late in the film but steals most of it.

Wilder plays George, a man in publishing, who explains to a blonde he picks up on the train, Hilly (Jill Clayburgh), that he's edited sex books but what he's really good at is editing gardening books. This leads to him murmuring advice on raising azaleas in their sex scene which was kind of funny and sexy but mainly made me feel like the two of them would be completely over each other in the morning.

Wilder is great, though, and nicely subtle. There's a moment I really liked when she asks him why he'd gotten a divorce. The quiet struggle you see him go through, trying to decide how to explain succinctly what must be a complicated and painful matter, that's brilliant.

Then George sees a dead man thrown off the train--but briefly and after he's had a lot drink. So Hilly can convince him it was his imagination. Of course it wasn't and there's a gang of thugs aboard which includes Ray Walston and Richard Kiel.

Kiel has metal teeth in this movie a year before he first appeared in a James Bond movie as Jaws. I wonder if he was cast in Bond because someone really thought he had metal teeth.

George gets kicked off the train a few times. He meets Pryor on one of these occasions. He's a thief named Grover who decides to help George for reasons that are never made clear in the screenplay. Fortunately, the affection Wilder and Pryor had for each other is so evident that you don't really need an explanation.

I got the feeling George and Grover will be together long after Hilly leaves the picture.

Silver Streak is available on The Criterion Channel until September 30.

A Disconnected Web of Shadows

A beautiful young American tourist witnesses a murder in Rome. Perhaps. It's hard to say what's really happening in Mario Bava's preposterous 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much ( La ragazza che sapeva troppo), aka The Evil Eye. But it sure is beautiful.

Italian actress Leticia Roman plays the tourist, Nora, and American actor John Saxon plays her Italian love interest, Marcello. Like most Italian films from the period, a lot of the stars aren't speaking the same language and everyone's dubbed.

One night, Nora's mugged and, lying dazed on the ground, she witnesses a woman being stabbed. Everyone says it's her imagination because she has a habit of reading pulp murder novels. Later in the film, a neurosurgeon she meets at dinner explains that she must have had a vision of a murder that had occurred ten years earlier. He says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. And that's one of the more sensible scenes in the film.

It's a serial killer targeting victims who line up alphabetically--first a victim whose name began with A, then one whose name began with B, then one whose name began with C. Now it's Nora's turn because her last name is Davis (Drowson in the cut called Evil Eye). When the killer's revealed, it makes absolutely no sense of the clues that had led up to the reveal, particularly a fantastically creepy scene where Nora wanders into an apartment of white walls and bare, swinging light bulbs.

Bava brings the visuals to be sure. There are so many gorgeous shots of Roman.

And a few nice ideas, like when Nora decides to make a spider-web of yarn to frustrate any intruders.

If only the writing matched the visuals. Well, I guess it all kind of works in a sort of dream logic way.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye is available on Shudder.

Identity of the Killer, Identity of the Spy

1944's Ministry of Fear has many of the hallmarks of a great Hitchcock movie--a man on the run from sinister forces as well as the police, a beautiful blonde woman, and brilliant suspense. But it's not a Hitchcock movie, it's a Fritz Lang movie and it bears many of the distinct qualities of that brilliant filmmaker, including a protagonist whose innocence or guilt is never totally clear.

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from an asylum where he was placed after being found guilty of murdering his wife. The first thing he does is wander into a charity event where children are playing and grownups are cheerfully socialising. He wins a cake by guessing its weight after a helpful clue from a fortune teller--but then Dan Duryea shows up looking sinister as usual and there just may be more to the cake than it seems. It may be part of a Nazi plot.

That sure is a lot to happen to a guy on his first day out of the asylum. But it doesn't end there. Neale gets on a train that's derailed by a Nazi bomb and he's briefly knocked out by a fellow passenger who'd been pretending to be blind. The "blind" man steals the cake, shooting at the pursuing Neale, before another bomb takes out the man and the cake, too. Naturally concerned for his own welfare, Neale absent-mindedly pockets the man's gun and goes the rest of the way to London. Get a load of that Expressionistic countryside. It's like a dark dream.

It all sounds crazy, it all looks like a dream. But is it? Lang never lets you off the hook too easily and I suspect his own experience fleeing Nazi Germany played into the story's ambiguous, weird dread. That may be what it's like when you become subject to an irrational but popular hatred arising all around you (it possessed Lang's own wife, after all). One doesn't like to see one's society as irrational so one might well try to rationalise things on society's behalf. Which could make the world itself seem crazy indeed.

He wanders into another seance. He meets the weirdly cheerful brother and sister heads of the charity, the latter of whom is the beautiful blonde, Carla (Marjorie Reynolds), who starts to fall for Neale and says so in the one scene that breaks from Neale's point of view. But it does nothing to solidify the impressions of reality, it only makes Neale's accounting of his own actions less certain. Does Carla love him because she's a good judge of character, or is she taken in by his own madness?

Ray Milland as Neale walks that line brilliantly, being charismatic but also like he's on the verge of cracking. You're afraid for him in more ways than one.

The Perils of Cinemagoing

The battle between film and television has been waged for over half a century. Filmmakers aren't always above anti-TV messaging in their films--1956's Eyewitness not so subtly pits an imprudent husband who spent too much money on a television against a frugal wife who goes to the cinema instead, witnessing a murder and robbery in the process. A decent thriller with good comedic undertones, this is one of the few films of the era to have both a female director and screenwriter, Muriel Box and Janet Green, respectively.

Lucy (Muriel Pavlow) comes home one night to find a brand new 23 inch television in the living room. Her husband, Jay (Michael Craig), explains he got it on an instalment plan despite the two of them having agreed he they won't buy anything else. Lucy says it's her or the television and storms out.

An amusing juxtaposition follows of Jay trying to watch television alone only to find himself on a programme about bad marriages while we see Lucy in a movie theatre, miffed at the couples about her making out. So she leaves and witnesses two crooks assaulting the theatre manager and cracking the safe.

They chase her, she's hit by a bus, goes to the hospital in a coma, and the bulk of the film becomes about the two thieves trying to figure out how to sneak in and murder her. Wade (Donald Sinden) is a cold hearted killer while Barney (Nigel Stock) is a more pathetic character, a mostly deaf man who just wants enough money to get to New Zealand and never wanted to hurt anyone.

An inordinate amount of the film is set in shrubbery as the two thieves from this location watch and bicker, sometimes violently, until the cruel Wade finally busts Barney's hearing aid. Meanwhile, inside the hospital, there's a running gag/thread of suspense in which an elderly patient (Ada Reeve) continually insists to a strikingly beautiful nurse (Belinda Lee) that she sees men outside.

It's no Hitchcock film but it's a decent enough way to spend your evening. Eyewitness is available on Amazon Prime.

A Hijacking and the City

When you're going to see a movie about a train heist, you don't necessarily expect the film's chief virtue to be settings and characters so astonishing they go beyond credible to absolutely wonderful. But that's what you get with 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. A gang of four men taking a subway train car full of passengers hostage is a good plot but the film gathers force long before that by introducing the ornery menagerie of New York citizens and train staff. This combines with the robbers' threats and establishes a captivating, real sense of threat.

How the hell did anything get done in 1970s New York? The contrast was particularly potent for me because I've been riding trains in Japan for about a month now. The trains are always clean and the passengers almost all observe strict etiquette--no-one talks to each other, no-one talks on their cell phones, people keep their bags on their laps so they don't take up too much room on the seats, and extra seats are always set aside for the elderly, people with heart conditions, and pregnant women. Pelham One Two Three is a riot of grime, a can of noisy hookers, flushed drunks, and generally obnoxious citizens.

Walter Matthau stars as Garber, a Transit Authority police lieutenant, who does most of the negotiating with the leader of the hijackers, "Mr. Blue", an Englishman played by Robert Shaw. We're introduced to the inner workings of the Transit headquarters when Garber gives a tour to, of all people, a group of administrators from Tokyo's train system. No time is really spent comparing the two administrations but the scene is a fascinating glimpse into a world long before computers handled everything. A world of flashing dials and wall maps with colour push pins.

Can you imagine all the skill and instinct that doesn't exist anymore?

Matthau is brilliantly cast, coming off as both blue collar and cagey enough to be a good leader. Subordinates played by Jerry Stiller and Dick O'Neill are just as terrific.

One supervisor, Caz Dolowicz (Tom Pedi), takes the cake, though, whose increasing incredulity that a train seems to be stopping and losing a car and even moving backward is brilliant. Of course he marches right down on the tracks to the hijacked train to give these guys a piece of his mind despite warnings from the cops. Talk about a guy not ready to grasp a situation.

There was a way of shooting movies in New York in the 70s and 80s, movies like Taxi Driver, Manhattan, Stripes, or even Ghostbusters, we just don't have anymore. Cities in American movies always seem to be a thin Hollywood fantasy version of cities, never populated by people who feel real. It's a shame because it's everything that makes a movie like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three so amazing.

Twitter Sonnet #1346

A sea of fish replaced the land of men.
The market weighed the oranges 'gainst the lime.
A better sword could beat the fountain pen.
A stranded beak required only time.
The dusty star returned to planets full.
In baggage damp with spinning thoughts it washed.
The time would come to thank the hunting bull.
A thought occurred a second 'fore 'twas squashed.
The leading car contained a continent.
Above the stash, a mouth requests a bill.
For any face the cash is pertinent.
The crowd combined to write another will.
A patient train delivered cops and tracks.
The dollars rest on quarter robber backs.

Off the Tracks and in the Game

"Fight yourself and the part that wins doesn't count. It's the part that loses." There's a great film noir line for you from 1948's Inner Sanctum, a film based on a long running anthology horror suspense radio show. A low budget B-movie by the short lived M.R.S. productions, it nonetheless features an intriguing and subtly weird story.

Charles Russell plays the film's anti-hero, a murderer whose name we never learn but who calls himself Harold Dunlap. His voice is a dead ringer for Jimmy Stewart but he's not so bad in his own right--he certainly has an effectively unnerving gaze.

He impulsively murders his angry girlfriend at a train station then dumps her body in a passing caboose amid some distinctly noir-ish shadows. He's unaware he's been seen by average, innocent kid Mike (Dale Belding). Lucky for the murderer, Mike doesn't realise what the "bundle" was that he saw being dumped and the murderer gets away with hiding his face. He starts calling himself "Dunlap" when he's picked up on the road by a friendly local named McFee (Billy House).

They take turns driving but, when it's Dunlap's turn, he ends up driving the two of them right back into town because roads have closed due to flooding. And then, as luck would have it, McFee deposits Dunlap at a boarding house where none other than kid Mike resides.

Ending up here could be put down to rotten luck but a lot of the bad breaks Dunlap gets can be traced pretty quickly to his own decisions, beginning, of course, with his choice to murder his girlfriend. Mike doesn't recognise Dunlap but for some reason Dunlap decides to make extra sure by forcefully telling the kid he was never at the train station and telling the kid to remember that. If he'd told the kid directly, "Yeah, that was me at the station," he couldn't have more strongly impressed the idea on him.

Also staying at the boarding house is the beautiful Jean Maxwell (Mary Beth Hughes--MST3k fans will remember her from I Accuse My Parents), a frustrated, small town girl with dreams of depraved and glamorous city life. When she tries to get Dunlap to play Checkers with her as part of her designs on wooing him, he sits across from her but just sullenly stares into the night instead of playing. When she remarks on how she's sure to win if she plays against herself he delivers that significant line which certainly seems appropriate after he's damned himself time and again.

A framing story involving a mysterious stranger on the train (Fritz Leiber, Sr.) gives the film a supernatural element, something reflecting the nature of the radio series and its likely influence on Tales from the Crypt. He tells the story of the film as a warning to a young woman who accidentally hurts herself with a nail file when the train hits a sharp curve. The end of the film reveals the strange man has actually been telling her future. But how much of what he said was really meant as a warning? Or did he just mean to mock her and Dunlap, who were always doomed to make their own choices? Inner Sanctum is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1245

Returning faces change to newer scalps.
A careful watch predicts a passing train.
As Holmes and Watson climb the pretty Alps.
Attempts to dodge the mind were all in vain.
A rapid current wrought a distant screen.
Banana bones were crunched in tightened grip.
The light of travel painted blue or green.
Along the glowing veins the faeries slip.
A gang of phones intrudes in phantom class.
In steady marches students learn to speak.
As ev'ry thought congealed in spoken mass.
A better word could drift from corner squeak.
The pieces paint a certain red and black.
The ghostly fleet begins an eastern tack.

The Dizzy Reality of the Screen

Last night I went to see the greatest movie of all time, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in a movie theatre. Well, it's the most current number one in Sight and Sound's poll of critics worldwide. It's certainly my favourite movie though I've always felt weirdly uncertain that it deserves that top spot more than Citizen Kane, partly because I know very few people who like Vertigo that much. Generally the reaction I see is people think it's okay but don't quite understand what the fuss about.

I was hoping to get some impression of the audience's reaction last night though, as it turned out, it was a blessedly quiet crowd of about twenty five people, nearly all women, ranging in age from mid twenties to mid forties, from what I could tell. Whether or not they liked the movie, they were good movie-goers who kept quiet for the most part and I was able to thoroughly enjoy the experience of the film. I wish it'd been louder, I was hoping for Bernard Herrmann's score to really blast in the opening credits but otherwise I have no complaints about how it was shown.

Fathom Events is screening Vertigo in cinemas for its sixtieth anniversary. It also happens to be the ten year anniversary of the week I spent obsessively watching it over and over before I wrote this analysis in 2008. I stand by all my opinions in that analysis and I think it's one of the best things I've written. But one of the great things about Vertigo is my perspective is different every time. Like the protagonist in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, who watches Vertigo in one scene and explains the movie is different now because he, the viewer, is different now, I find myself responding to different things.

I'm more interested in religious symbolism now than I was ten years ago and I found myself thinking about how Hellish Elster's office looks. That desk looks like it was carved from the bloody flesh of tortured souls. A lot of people talk about how green is used in the film but there's a lot to be said about its use of red, too. There's the black cherry wood in the McKittrick hotel and the intense, almost magenta wallpaper at Ernie's, the restaurant where Scottie first sees Madeleine.

When I wrote my analysis in 2008 I spent a lot of time reading what other people had written about the film and tried not to repeat anything but I'm not doing that to-day. So maybe it's already been pointed out but it occurred to me last night that Judy's fate at the end being caused by the sudden appearance of a nun may be seen as an act of God. Scottie's finally broken free of all the illusions and the manipulations to reach the moment of clarity that cures his vertigo. One could say that a benevolent God watching this said, okay, he's done enough, now I'll take Judy off the table so he won't be tempted to go back into that cycle. But there doesn't seem to be anything good in Judy's death--a repeat of her apparent death earlier in the film, it seems mainly to be confirmation that Scottie's trapped in a cycle instead of breaking free of one.

It's a deliberately frustrating and uncertain ending, not unlike the ending of the new season of Twin Peaks. In both cases, we have a detective character traversing hazards of dream and illusion in an effort to save a woman who may or may not be real, a journey that questions the criteria for what we regard as reality. Having recently watched Mississippi Mermaid, I was compelled to think of how important Vertigo was to the French New Wave filmmakers. Like Godard continually thwarting audience expectations by abrupt changes to the score in Pierrot le Fou, Hitchcock continually plays with what audiences expect from a movie and uses those expectations to make the audience a part of the story. He sets up Scottie as a hero and thus makes us complicit in his deviance, he sets up a spirit possession plot and then dashes it aside because, after all, that's a bit fantastical, right? What were we thinking?

But is Carlotta's ghost really a hoax or is its reality simply in a different and deeper form than we're conditioned to expect? The effect of Carlotta's haunting is there, the paradigm of freedom defined by the control of others is set up by her story, and the pattern of dominated people trying to dominate others has an echo in the idea of Carlotta, victim to the whims of a man in life, controlling the fates of men and women after her death. The lack of any explicit proof of her haunting, aside from possibly Scottie's attention being drawn to the necklace in his dream, is in a weird way integral to the power she asserts. Just as "Madeleine" holds so much influence for not truly existing.

Last night I was struck by this pair of shots as Judy and Scottie discuss her dream that leads them to San Juan Bautista:

Hitchcock keeps cutting back and forth between the two. Judy and Scottie are in two different places but their faces are placed in almost exactly the same relationship with the lamp. Like Scottie's dream where he falls into Carlotta's grave or when he falls onto the roof the shot seems to suggest he and Madeleine are the same person. One could say that Madeleine is the joint creation of Elster, Elster's unseen wife, Judy, and Scottie but primarily Judy and Scottie. It's like a masque written by Elster about his wife in which Judy is the actress and Scottie is the audience/participant. Or maybe more accurately, it's like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written by Elster, Judy is the Dungeon Master, and Scottie is a player. Scottie isn't a passive audience and Judy isn't simply a performer of written lines, they're both creating the story. The lamp is a little clearer next to Judy's face but it's closer and blurrier next to Scottie's--she gives him the dream, raw material, he interprets the dream and comes up with a plan of action based on it.

Yes, I guess this movie will always be fresh for me. It was an incredible pleasure seeing it on a big screen. The incredible visuals, apart from any interpretations of them, are wonderful to experience in themselves. I love these two consecutive shots as we watch Judy and Scottie leave the forest and then we see Judy at the beach by that twisted tree: