The Filtered Portrait of Anne

There were women pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy though little is known about any of them apart from Mary Read and Anne Bonny. A Jacques Tourneur movie very loosely based on the latter, Anne of the Indies, was released in 1951. Deviating so much from historical account was probably a good idea since Anne Bonny's story isn't particularly interesting apart from her being a woman though Anne of the Indies is flawed by what one senses is the result of multiple hands at the wheel, tyrannised by 1950s morality. Yet it is a fascinating film in part for that reason, though the beautiful colour footage under Tourneur's direction and Jean Peters' enthusiastic performance in the title role makes one wish the film were more fascinating for the reasons a filmmaker might desire than as an artefact of its time.

I haven't seen all her movies but I doubt I'll ever see one that cast Jean Peters better than Pickup On South Street where she played a prostitute named Candy. But as the pirate captain Anne Providence, she displays again her enthusiasm in pursuing roles considered too rough to be healthy to an actress' career. It's obvious from the too brief sword fights that she had trained hard for them. She's no Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn but she goes to it with as much gusto, even in a friendly tavern duel with her mentor, Blackbeard himself (Thomas Gomez).

It's he that provided her crew and ship, the Queen Sheba. Her first mate, Red Dougal (James Robertson Justice), being charged personally by Blackbeard to see to Anne's safety. Nonetheless, she's clearly in command and is as happy as any of the crew to execute the British officers they capture as the film begins. However, she makes the risky decision to spare the handsome young Frenchman found in irons on the British ship, Pierre (Louis Jourdan).

I often thought of Tourneur's great film Cat People. Both have noir qualities despite ostensibly belonging to other genres--one might say Simone Simon in Cat People and Jean Peters in Anne of the Indies are femmes fatale but I think that would come from only a superficial understanding of what a femme fatale is. Unlike, say, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Jane Greer in Tourneur's own Out of the Past, Cat People and Anne of the Indies are both told almost entirely from the point of view of the female characters and we know that their motives for committing their crimes are based on feelings provoked by very real injustices that were done to them. In these qualities, they actually have more in common with noir protagonists like Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra or Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street. I think one could argue that there is a homme fatale in Anne of the Indies.

Anne has a right to be angry. Her brother was executed for piracy by the British and we see her manipulated and betrayed like Simone Simon in Cat People--and, also like Cat People, the person who commits this betrayal is portrayed as innocent and heroic, it's up to the viewer to parse what actually happened. There's the sense of a morality that forbids women from feeling truly hurt by the unfaithfulness of men, or at least from wanting restitution. The place where Anne of the Indies falls apart in a way that Cat People truly doesn't is where Anne's pirate crew begin to disapprove of her ruthlessness, and mention is made of the depths of cruelty only a woman can exhibit when Anne simply tries to do normal pirate things like marooning enemies on an island or selling them into slavery.

Also unlike Cat People, Anne has complete control over how ruthless she chooses to be. It would have been exciting to see her given full rein but the artificially enforced morality holds her back, partly in the person of her otherwise interesting ship's doctor, played by Herbert Marshall. Marshall lost his leg in World War I which you'd think would be a golden opportunity for a pirate film but he continues here to display his remarkable ability to make it look like he has two working legs.

He gives the impression of an educated gentleman who's been beaten down by the world into a life of drinking and piracy. He has a gentle affection for Anne and I would have liked to have seen a film about the two of them terrorising the Caribbean unfettered by morality from two hundred years later.

Doctor Parts

Here we are again at another Doctor Who Saturday and we visit Project: Lazarus, a 2003 audio play which continues the mutilated Doctor theme. It's also a sequel to Project: Twilight, a Sixth Doctor story about Sci-Fi vampires, apparently unrelated to the ones in State of Decay or "The Vampires of Venice" or The Curse of Fenric or any of the other vampires established on the series. I liked Project: Lazarus a lot more than Project: Twilight, though.

It's both a Sixth Doctor story and a Seventh Doctor story, an idea I really liked--the story concludes in the middle and then a new story begins where the Seventh Doctor, much later, visits the same time and place only to find what appears to be his sixth incarnation still there. Colin Baker does a teasing impression of Sylvester McCoy that actually made me smile.

The story also continues the trend towards harsher, darker stories that dwell on the idea that the Doctor doesn't always win. It's really nice to have stories like that, not just because it makes his victories mean more but because it makes his universe feel more dangerous.

Let's see, what else can I say about Doctor Who. I rewatched the Fifth Doctor story Time Flight and the Twelfth Doctor episode "Into the Dalek". The former confirmed for me that the Fifth's audio plays are much better written than his television episodes and I was reminded how tired I got of seeing the Master in the Five and Six era. "Into the Dalek" holds up pretty well though I still wish the Dalek hadn't said that stuff about divinity.

Have I mentioned Twelve is my favourite Doctor of the new series? It's not even a contest, I love him so much.

I dreamt last night I was visiting Caitlin and she was showing me a large bag of keepsakes while we watched television. To get the bag, she'd had to go into a small room under the stairs. I heard a scuffle and screaming. In the bag were VHS tapes and some kind of crude objects made of twigs painted black and tied with twine.

I also had a dream about someone breaking into a room I had in the sky and moving some things from an upstairs closet to a downstairs kitchen table.

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Practical Jokes from Beyond the Grave

Leaving a will may be important for many reasons for many different people but perhaps for no-one is it more important than the infamous prankster. When Henry Russell (Hugh Griffith) dies at the beginning of 1951's Laughter In Paradise he happily leaves his family in chaos, his will instructing the talented cast of this ensemble film to do dangerous and embarrassing things for a shot at fifty thousand pounds. At times dully moral, this is mostly a delightful comedy.

The would-be Russell inheritors are Agnes (Fay Compton), Herbert (George Cole), Simon (Guy Middleton), and, my favourite, Deniston (Alastair Sim). For years he's hidden the fact that he's made a living off vulgar pulp novels and hopes to live off the fifty thousand and publish only respectable novels under his own name from now on. The trouble is, to get it Henry's will requires him to commit a crime that puts him in prison for no less than twenty eight days.

Obviously obsessed with his reputation, Deniston finds this impossible to explain to his fiancée, Elizabeth (Joyce Grenfell), the respectable daughter of a magistrate. I mean, just look at her.

Grenfell is becoming of my favourites of British comedy films, she pulls of the unselfconscious gawkishness so well. As her suitor this time, Sim has his usual tentative and sort of sedately vexed hopelessness. He finds being a criminal difficult not just for the embarrassment but also because he fails to be convincing at shoplifting and unable to commit to the act when a clerk tells him the price of what he's picked up.

Meanwhile, George Cole also has to commit a crime--the timid bank clerk is tasked with holding up his boss with a toy gun. Cole is wonderfully awkward but this plot his sadly given very little screen time, the movie too much favouring Agnes' story where the woman who's a terror to her serving staff is required to spend no less than twenty eight days working as a housemaid. It's a funny enough premise, especially in the beginning when, on receiving a telegram notifying her of Henry's death, the first thing she does is to scold her maid for not dusting her brother's portrait.

Unfortunately, the story quickly becomes a humourless, mechanical comeuppance as she finds herself put to hard work by her cranky, bedridden employer (John Laurie).

Guy Middleton's story is pretty funny--the incorrigible womaniser is forced to marry the first woman he speaks to. It's a shame he doesn't keep his word because the first woman he talks to is a cigarette girl played by Audrey Hepburn in her first credited role.

The whole movie's available on YouTube:

Nude Safari Spectacular

How do you catch a wild Cornel? Or a Cornel Wilde, for that matter? That's what a group of warriors from a south African tribe in the mid nineteenth century decide to find out in 1965's The Naked Prey, a film which Wilde also directed. An exciting adventure film with nice location shots, it's also a bit racist and mired in well trodden plot mechanics.

The character Wilde portrays is credited as "Man" and he's a safari guide under employ of "Man #2" (Gert van den Bergh). They're the only two white characters which may explains why the film reserves the word "man" for them and not the many male black characters. Man #2 talks about going into the slavery business and annoys Man with generally obnoxious behaviour, including a failure to pay tribute to a tribe whose territory they travel through. I guess this is where the film satisfies itself it's playing on even terms but when Man One and Two are caught it's by a whole community who apparently have no other pleasure in life but tormenting, killing, and eating white men.

Sure, Man and Man were in their territory and I don't expect them to be nice. I don't even expect members of the tribe to speak out against torturing the two. But surely one or two people could have something else on his or her mind. Maybe food, caring for a child, something. They're all either tormenting or laughing at the intruders. That's all there is to them.

I've never thought much of Wilde as an actor--I don't think I've seen any of the other films he directed. In 1945's Leave Her to Heaven, part of the fun is seeing what an absolutely tone deaf performance he gives as his character is wildly and ignorantly inconsiderate of his wife played by Gene Tierney. It's one of those noirs where you really root for the villain because the "hero" is such a putz. I kind of felt that way about him The Naked Prey, too, especially since he keeps surviving due to some really forced luck, like spears that continually miss him when he's not looking. But the reality of the environments makes up for Wilde's unconvincing plight a little.

By the way, don't expect to see him actually naked. They strip him and he's wearing some flesh coloured briefs I think are meant to be read as nude. Then he steals one of those nylon speedos everyone in Africa wore in the nineteenth century. I think they came from the same manufacturer who made the trunks in 300.

The One Who Calls

Did we know Saul was a genius before? Well, it's been proved over the course of the first season of Better Call Saul, the finale of which aired on Monday. It proved that Saul is the Walter White of this series, where White was godlike with chemistry, Saul knows how to manipulate people whether it be through the law or, as demonstrated in the finale with a whole lot of charm, through grift.

Like Walter White, Saul/Jimmy has been pushed out of success in the legitimate world by the betrayal of people close to him and he turns to crooked ways in response. I guess the key difference is that Saul does it from the beginning for self fulfilment whereas this was a revelation that only seem to come at the end for Walter who told himself most of the time his motives were revenge and money. Despite what Saul says to Mike at the end of the episode, we've watched him walk away from one lucrative opportunity after another because it's not the life he wants. His petty conman friend makes this clearer when he begs Saul to do one more scam before he goes back to Albuquerque, even though neither of them need the money.

So one could say that, more than a prequel, Better Call Saul is a continuation of Breaking Bad in that it thematically starts at the place where Breaking Bad ended. Now the hero knows who he is and what he wants--and those things happen to be against the whole world. Now what happens? I, for one, am looking forward to season 2.

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Horns On Gentle Minds

The best way to lead man or beast to slaughter is to make it look like a good idea. 1973's Touki Bouki uses the music of Josephine Baker, a woman known for presenting a fantasy version of Africa to Paris, to present a fantastic dream of Paris to two young Africans. It's a story about a local culture devalued in favour of a foreign one but the strengths of Touki Bouki are in the less argumentative moments where it presents its two misfit heroes enduring their humdrum and perilous lives in Senegal.

We're introduced to the city of Dakar first through a tired man in brown uniform who wanders slums and marketplaces. A woman buys fruit from a friend who tells her she doesn't have to pay to-day prompting a rebuke from the fruit seller's daughter, Anta (Mareme Niang).

Neither are swayed by the drably dressed young woman who goes off to find her similarly unappreciated and drably dressed boyfriend, Mory (Magaye Niang).

His motorcycle with a cow skull on the front seems to connect him with the cattle we see gently led to a bloodsoaked slaughterhouse at the beginning of the film. And indeed, it's not long before we see Mory beaten and tied up by a gang of his peers and the skull stolen from his bike.

The film seems to break with linear, literal storytelling at times as we go from Anta, panic stricken at learning from a local witch that Mory has killed himself to seeing her taking her top off and embracing him as he relaxes by his fully intact bike. The shot of Anta removing her top is repeated a moment later. Was the witch lying? Did Mory survive his "suicide"? The literal truth doesn't seem to matter and we're left with a more interesting emotional impression of the places these two young people occupy in their society.

The scheme they implement to get to Paris seems even more based on dream logic as a rich man who tries to seduce Mory from his shower for some reason is unaware Mory is stealing all his clothes. Mory and Anta pile suitcases in a car painted with American flags and tell the wealthy man's chauffeur to take them to town. We see them later in a motorcade, dressed to the nines--in clothes that curiously would never have fit on the man who tried to seduce Mory--waving to crowds of onlookers like royalty.

The use real locations and natural lighting combines with strange logic to convey the impression of being stuck in a limbo between insubstantial, unreachable, superficial beauty and a violent, uncaring environment.

Another Bug Hunt

At my parents' house for Easter yesterday, my mother had everyone do water colours so I improvised this innocent pastoral. Mind you, I haven't used water colours since I was thirteen. Nonetheless, I think I captured something of the Easter Bunny's indulgent contentment at the sun setting on another Easter Sunday, his ragged body for now divested of the many thousands of eggs which by to-morrow will again begin to harden and discolour in his various organs repurposed as ovaries.

I went home and revisited the tale of another legendary egg layer, James Cameron's Aliens, a film which holds up really well. I can think of few instances of so many memorable characters being created in such a short space of time. We all remember Vasquez, Hudson, Bishop, Hicks, Apone. No one of them feels like a "type" but with just a few bits of dialogue they seem like real hardass marines contrasted with Ripley stepping onto the drop ship with what seems the grace of a ballerina by comparison.

Pausing the movie a moment to use the bathroom, I found this cricket:

How did a cricket get in my bathroom? Aliens suggested the answer to me--the air shaft. I remembered during the incident last year where my upstairs neighbour's fish tank had fallen and large portions of my ceiling had to be replaced my landlady remarking to me with horror how the tenant had all sorts of insect pets, including crickets. I caught the fellow last night in an empty blank DVD spool case, it looked back at me with what I swear was more intellect than I expect from insects. I let him go out the front door.

Finally, here's a bird from my parents' fountain yesterday.

Under the Fan Now

By now, if you're a David Lynch or Twin Peaks fan of any kind, you've probably heard the news that Lynch has announced he's pulling out of the Twin Peaks relaunch. His statement, via Facebook:

Dear Facebook Friends, Showtime did not pull the plug on Twin Peaks. After 1 year and 4 months of negotiations, I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done. This weekend I started to call actors to let them know I would not be directing. Twin Peaks may still be very much alive at Showtime. I love the world of Twin Peaks and wish things could have worked out differently.

Which sounds rather final. Showtime released a statement expressing surprise and hinting that they still hope to talk Lynch into coming back on board. I would hope people close to Lynch are encouraging him to reconsider and I'd hope the petitions and general Internet outcry would have some sway on him. Maybe someone should tell him about Kickstarter and what it did for Veronica Mars. My instinct, though, is this isn't about money so much as it is about Lynch getting cold feet.

Directing nine episodes would essentially be like directing a nine hour movie. Lynch has never done anything like that in his career and as he is a very "of the moment" artist I wonder if he doubts he could hold onto a dream that long. And the idea of revisiting an old project may have been daunting enough. Maybe he saw the looming shadow of stagnation that Steven Spielberg didn't see when he decided to make Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

In any case, I'm disappointed and do hope Lynch changes his mind. If Showtime does go ahead without Lynch on board, I have no interest in seeing the product. I think everyone knows if that happens it'll just be the bad part of season two all over again.

The Champion of Easter is Here

Happy Easter, everyone, the day we commemorate learning that Christ's sacrifice was completely pointless. All I'm saying is, there's a reason Nicholas Meyer didn't want to direct Star Trek III. Well, Star Trek III doesn't really diminish Star Trek II because, unlike Jesus, Spock didn't know he was going to come back. The Doctor's regenerations on Doctor Who work because each Doctor is so different. Christ was just playing with us. Well, he was trying to make us ashamed of ourselves. And maybe a little shame is healthy.

So, if he wasn't the son of God, we wouldn't be ashamed because it would be just another execution. If he didn't come back from the dead, he would have just been some nobody. Hmm. Well, it's a good thing I never went into the clergy.

What we need right now is a hero or a bunny, ideally a hero in a bunny suit.

Remember, the radish you water to-day is the spaceship of to-morrow.

Twitter Sonnet #733

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Eggs, bring me gold or bring me the Sampo!

Space Exam

Disney's decision to wipe out the old Star Wars Expanded Universe and make all their new Star Wars releases officially canon seems increasingly unwise. This past week I read the first volumes in three of their Star Wars comics releases through Marvel--Star Wars #1, Darth Vader #1, and Princess Leia #1. The Darth Vader comic was the best, following Vader on a visit to Jabba the Hutt that amusingly contrasts with Luke's visit in Return of the Jedi. Instead of using a mind trick to move the Gamorrean guards, Vader simple kills them both. And things proceed from there as you might imagine. There's also the sense of Vader and his relationship from the emperor following organically from the events of Revenge of the Sith which I like a lot. Vader not so much as the flat villain of A New Hope or as the vaguely struggling old man in Return of the Jedi but as the confused and angry man in Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith whose friendship with the Emperor isn't so heartfelt, more opportunism based on dearly held, uncertain philosophical goals.

The art isn't very good, making Vader look weirdly tiny and giving him a scrawny neck. But it's better than the art in the other two comics. Princess Leia is done in the American faux manga style with the usual invisible basketball palming or invisible basketball dribbling as in this panel:

Can you imagine Carrie Fisher--or anyone--using a gesture like that in conversation?

Princess Leia #1 makes maybe the riskiest addition to canon in that it begins exactly where A New Hope ends, at the awards ceremony. Conversation immediately, awkwardly turns to evacuation and the plot becomes one of Leia trying to talk people into allowing her to go out in a ship and help scout. She eventually has to sneak away with a helpful female Alderaanian X-Wing pilot to look for survivors from Alderaan though Luke and Wedge try to block their ship from entering hyperspace. There's a really forced subtext of boys versus girls. Does anything about the end of New Hope suggest to you Luke's up for adhering to weirdly tyrannical Rebel Alliance protocols before siding with Princess Leia?

Star Wars #1 spends the whole issue stretching about four pages of content as we watch Han, Leia, and Luke infiltrate an Imperial base. The art is especially bad, a single minded dedication to making the characters look like the actors almost entirely robs them of natural facial expressions. It comes off like The Adventure of the Cinema Lobby Cut-outs. Dialogue feels wrong--would Threepio refer to Han's ship as simply "The Falcon"?--and the sense of action is stifled by the stiff caricatures.

I paused on this panel

and thought, "Why does this look so familiar?" I realised I'd just seen it recently in Batgirl #40.

And even then it'd looked familiar. I've seen it in at least three or four other comics--and I don't read a lot of comics. I think it's time to retire this one, fellas. I doubt I'm the first one to notice this stock panel--does it have a name? If no-one else has named it yet, I want to call it the "Ooou Punch".

Of course, none of us actually has to consider this stuff canon just because Disney says so. As much as I do like the idea of a wide shared universe there's no reason I should have to accept mediocrity. I feel like I'm in conflict with Disney just by saying that, though. Which reveals the beauty of the old Expanded Universe--the canonicity was vague, Lucas would borrow elements he liked and just keep mum on whether the rest was "official". It was the best of both worlds, it was a huge expanded universe and there was no pressure to take everything as gospel.

Speaking of the wisely implemented vague canonicity, I listened to two Doctor Who audio plays this past week, the not as bad as you'd think but still not great Doctor Who and the Pirates and the pretty good subversion Creatures of Beauty, both from 2003.

Doctor Who and the Pirates really feels like something badly improvised as ideas that seem like they're going to lead somewhere are completely abandoned and the well meaning ending about grieving comes off a bit trite.

Creatures of Beauty, written surprisingly by Nicholas Briggs whose writing I normally dislike, is a Fifth Doctor story in which he and Nyssa visit a planet where the population is dying and has been made horribly disfigured by atmospheric pollution. It's a grim subversion of several standard Doctor Who story elements--the idea that the Doctor can always help wherever he goes, that he and his companion can always find a way to escape, that everywhere they go there are clear Good Guys and Bad Guys. Every single one of these things is turned on its head and it's pretty satisfying. It's the sort of story I like to imagine happens pretty often in between the stories we actually see.

Imprecise Scales

The widely held perception of geisha is that they don't necessarily have to sleep with their clients, that they have the freedom to choose whether or not they have sex during an engagement. Like many romanticised, capitalist ideas, the reality isn't quite so neat and pretty as Kenji Mizoguchi demonstrates in his 1953 film A Geisha (祇園囃子, or Gion Bayashi, an annual festival in Gion). Not a condemnation of the geisha institution as his later film, Street of Shame, is a very balanced argument against prostitution, A Geisha focuses more on how geisha were affected by American cultural influences after World War II. It does so brilliantly through careful crafting of character, the film is told from the perspective of two geisha, one who was trained before the war and her new, post war apprentice.

The movie begins by acknowledging a potential negative quality in the profession itself as the elder geisha, Miyoharu (Michiyo Kogure), is introduced rejecting a man who's come to her for the affection he's familiar with her bestowing only to find she isn't so accommodating when he doesn't have any money. But as she explains to him, what she does is a sort of performance. And after all, a geisha's got to eat.

Before long, she's entreated by someone else with no money, Eiko (Ayako Wakao), the daughter of a deceased former geisha of Miyoharu's house who left the business to get married. Now that Eiko's father is broke as a physical problem causing his hand to tremble has destroyed his craftsman business, Eiko has come to Miyoharu hoping to follow in her mother's footsteps and become a geisha herself. But training and outfitting a new geisha isn't cheap and Eiko's father obviously can't pay for it, which is the traditional thing to do. He gives his consent for her to do whatever she wants but essentially disowns her. Miyoharu takes pity on Eiko who continues to plead and, to fund her training and pay for her kimonos and jewellery, takes an enormous loan from the most powerful geisha madam in town, Okimi (Chieko Naniwa).

Even without the loan, Miyoharu would still be under Okimi's thumb as she has the power to prevent any tea house or other establishment from hiring Miyoharu or any geisha working under her. When Okimi has a client who wants to close a big deal for his company for another man who wants to sleep with Miyoharu, realistically Miyoharu really doesn't have a lot of choice.

Eiko, meanwhile, is influenced by ideals of personal liberty introduced by the Americans and asks her fellow apprentices during flower arrangement training if a geisha can take recourse if she's raped by a client. The instructor laughs and says such questions are over her head.

The movie never backs away from the characters to a scene where people divulge exposition at each other, the problems in the systems and economic philosophies are all illuminated by the series of obstacles the two women encounter and how they deal with them. The ultimate problems emerge gradually as things opposite to the supposed ideal manifest with a sense of inevitability.

40 Million Lost at Sea

Well, now that I trust the Batgirl cover controversy is squared away I can safely defend an underrated Roman Polanski film. Though 1986's Pirates is not a great film and its defects are the sort particularly problematic for its 40 million dollar budget. It lacks the energy and innocence generally necessary for a blockbuster. But to those of us who enjoy great period costumes and set design and unlikely good casting, and to those of us who liked Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, there's a lot to like here.

An entire Spanish galleon was built for the film which is set in the late seventeenth century, somewhere at sea. It begins with Captain Red (Walter Matthau) and his lieutenant, Jean-Baptiste (Cris Campion), stranded on what very little remains of their ship.

Many critics derided the choice of Matthau for the archetypal pirate captain role but I found him surprisingly perfect despite his imperfect cockney accent. Who better than Matthau to make callousness so charming? We find him explaining to Jean-Baptiste that he needn't worry about the sin of cannibalising his young companion because that's "what confession is for."

The first half of the film has a subtle recurring theme of religious hypocrisy. Red and Jean-Baptiste are taken captive aboard a Spanish galleon under the command of the sadistic Don Alfonso de Salamanca de la Torre (Damien Thomas) who's backed up by a vacillating Catholic priest.

In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Don Alfonso forces Red and Jean-Baptiste to eat a rat after they've attempted to start a mutiny. It seems slightly out of place with the rest of the film with its portrayal of cruelty that feels credible in a way that reminds you Polanski knows what he's talking about.

There is a sense of two Polanskis at odds. The relationship of Red and Jean-Baptiste recalls the central characters of the parody film The Fearless Vampire Killers and yet, by virtue of the production design and some of the more insightful moments, it seems the Polanski of Repulsion and Chinatown is also present. Those of us seeking the latter will feel a little impatient with some of the film's broader comedic moments--particularly one involving a very fake looking python--and the unsuccessful, robust score by Philippe Sarde that attempts to pay homage to Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Those who seek a lighter comedy adventure film would likely be put off by the more grim aspects. Which you might think is a funny thing to say in this age of Game of Thrones. But this gives me another moment to comment Game of Thrones, as much as I like it, isn't the hardcore, realistic portrayal of human behaviour people claim it is. But that's another kettle of fish.

For me, the visuals and Matthau's performance were enough. But this could have been a much greater film.

Twitter Sonnet #732

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When an Enemy Approaches . . . Stryke

As a film exploring the fundamental alienation of human existence, the ever lurking barrier between one human being and all others, no film has surpassed The Stranger. No, not Orson Welles' 1946 film, though that one's okay, I guess. I speak of course of 1973's The Stranger, a.k.a. Stranded In Space, the tale of an ordinary man who finds himself stranded on a world eerily like . . . his own.

Doubtless production costs were lowered by the use of nearby, unaltered locations. The history of cinema is filled with stories of studios unwilling to adequately fund bold, innovative visions. But, like the French New Wave films of the preceding decade or the independent art house films of the 90s, the minimum production values become a blessing as we're forced to recognise the alienness of Plymouth cars or cardigans.

Auteur Lee H. Katzin reflects the minimalist production with his compositions, frequently framing actors' heads in dialogue without angle or lighting designed to impose his comment on the events, leaving the viewer exhilaratingly stranded themselves in a frightening, existential porridge.

Neil Stryker (Glenn Corbett), whose assertive, confident name perhaps marks him as a forerunner of none less than William Riker, is an astronaut returning home with two comrades from a mission in space. Interiors of the ship are simple, beige cubes, looking eerily mundane. The exterior of the craft is largely unseen and already Katzin's film works to disorient the viewer as size, shape, and function of the vessel are left to our surmise.

But the bulk of the film takes place on the planet surface where Stryker awakens, almost immediately becoming a fugitive in this world controlled by a New Order. Katzin presents a world where bookshops only carry history books that an alien traveller can instantly see only go back thirty years, where radio shows speak blandly about how good the government is, where the government oppresses its citizens in other ways left tantalisingly vague. Stryker, whose very name implies a man willing and able to "strike", if you will, against this system is of course seen as a threat.

Sadly neglected for decades, this film is available now on YouTube with illuminating commentary.