The Unholy Howard Allan Lovepoe

In 1963 movie-goers got their first taste of H.P. Lovecraft in cinema and most of them thought they were dining on Edgar Allan Poe. Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace is by a large measure the best Roger Corman movie I've seen, filled with wonderful atmosphere and a great cast. Though as an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward it's a disappointment on many levels, failing, like most films based on Lovecraft, to capture the unique overarching dread of the original story and replacing it with broader, formulaic hallmarks of late 50s and early 60s cinema aimed at teenagers.

Corman made a series of films based on Poe stories and poems so it was decided this movie needed to ride on those successes and the title, The Haunted Palace, was taken from a Poe poem which is quoted twice in the movie without any real apparent relevance. The Curwen house in the Lovecraft novella is changed into a palace which was brought over "brick by brick" from "somewhere" in Europe. This happens in the 1935 British comedy The Ghost Goes West--I wonder if anyone's actually done this in real life. One really needs to mentally marginalise the hired help to regard a castle as still maintaining mystery after it's been taken apart completely and put back together again.

The events of the movie are moved to 1875 instead of the contemporaneous setting of Lovecraft's novella. Vincent Price plays Charles Dexter Ward and Corman gives him a beautiful young wife named Anne (Debra Paget in her last film role) to help sex up the story as he'd done with Fall of the House of Usher. In an opening scene, we see Ward's ancestor, Joseph Curwen, being burnt at the stake by the people whose descendants in the village Ward meets. They all look exactly the same as their ancestors. This makes Ward's resemblance to Curwen seem a little less special.

The portrait of Curwen seems a bit of an impressionist anachronism--it's a good thing Vincent Van Gogh didn't visit the palace and see people were way ahead of him in 1765.

Curwen's resurrection, which is divulged somewhat obviously but still eerily and gradually in the novella, also doesn't seem so special when Ward finds his ancestor's servants, played by Lon Chaney Jr. and Milton Parsons, have been resurrected without any apparent assistance or comment.

For a movie that's pretending to be based on Edgar Allan Poe, it goes out of its way to include almost every well known Lovecraftian reference--Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth are mentioned and the Necronomicon is an important part of the plot.

A fundamental difference between Lovecraft's novella and the film is that, typical for Lovecraft, the original story does not feature ghosts but rather explains Curwen's resurrection as bizarre science. In the film, Curwen's spirit takes possession of Ward's body. But the idea of scientific experimentation is kept in and the monster discovered by Dr. Willett in Curwen's lab is inexplicably moved to the home of one of the townspeople who are descended from Curwen's persecutors.

Willett's in the movie, played by Frank Maxwell, but he seems a bit superfluous with Anne replacing him as the point of view character. He seems to come in only at times when the protagonist is required to take action not deemed suitable to feeble womankind. So Willett comes in to find and open secret passages for her and make decisions.

But the film does have wonderful atmosphere, murky greys and gnarled trees, candles in the castle halls and tarnished green signs and windows in the town. Price has a lot of fun with his duel role, too.

Is It Writing?

I saw this written on a bathroom stall at the university a few days ago, the first time I've seen any bathroom graffiti at the university, come to think of it. Is it a racist message, preaching English for the official language? I'm leaning towards it being sarcasm from someone whose first language isn't English and who is fed up with U.S. radio stations being dominated by songs with English lyrics. The scratched out 'A' seems to imply someone new to English. The reiteration of the point makes it seem like a riddle though maybe it's because the writer is used to reworking sentences like this in his or her workbook.

It reminds me of how shockingly poor I've noticed reading and listening comprehension to be among students, though. To-day I took the second test for my African Literature class and the professor made a point of telling the students, "Remember, answer the questions that I ask." I was vaguely hoping I would meet some people who did things like read Shakespeare in their spare time, just for fun. So far everyone seems like what I would have imagined junior high students would be like. I'm not completely blaming them. I talked to a really nice guy to-day who is an English major and he said he was surprised that he had classes now where the students were required to read entire books. He told me he had never encountered Shakespeare before in any class he's had.

Like me, he's a transfer student from a community college but, like most of the other students, he's much younger than me. I'd already noticed how different the standards were in my community college classes from recent years compared to when I was going fifteen years ago. I can only imagine what high school must be like.

The professors I have at the university, though, are really wonderfully competent, all of them. In particular the professor I have for pre-colonial Latin America who doesn't seem to be spending half the time obsessing over whether the students like or respect him as so many teachers do to the detriment of the subject they're teaching. He just seems genuinely enthusiastic about what he's teaching and he speaks English, Spanish, and two indigenous Mesoamerican and South American languages. He talks about archaeologist friends who show him Moche artefacts and who advance theories about possible writing systems and speculations regarding Mayan populations shifts. It's an infectious enthusiasm and suddenly I find myself wanting to read extra primary historical sources.

Twitter Sonnet #791

Treadmill ovulation derails the pan.
Unknown the drifter asks a slice of pie.
Shirley MacLaine saw Richard Conte's plan.
In time Dean Martin rigged handsome a lie.
A dainty band requests a teaspoon crowd.
A neck under an avocado hears.
Of spinning crowns the roulette pistol's proud.
Sov'reigns of brocc'li nymphs dispel your fears.
Reverse of glasses turn to blue when wet.
A fog concocts a clear and hard warbird.
Untouched the palm returns the lines to vet.
The galleons surrender swains starboard.
The too quick noodles disperse NyQuil wheat.
After-burn blemishes tell of no heat.

Scotch, Safes, and Cigarettes

What a beautiful town to pull a heist in. Las Vegas looks improbably inviting in 1960's Ocean's 11, a Rat Pack showcase in which Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford come off even cooler than the town.

Maybe this was the real nail in the Hays code's coffin that an unabashed group of gangsters should be allowed to be so charming. The movie is spoiled a bit by a compulsory moral ending but the actual subplots that make up the film aren't especially interesting anyway, mostly just excuses to have the actors lounging about or singing. Only Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. actually sing, though, Sinatra not joining them for some inexplicable, frustrating reason. Of the two that do sing, Davis, Jr. is by far the better.

He plays the only working class character, probably because he's black. We don't get much story from him. Sinatra has some minor issues with his wife played with some repressed steel by Angie Dickinson--it's a shame she's not allowed to play with the boys. Far more memorable is a drunken Shirley MacLaine who appears in cameo where she gets fresh with Dean Martin.

Standing nearby is another member of the gang, Richard Conte, who has a melodrama plot about a heart condition and a family to support. He's the most veteran star in the film, having starred in films noir like House of Strangers and Whirlpool in the 1940s, except there's a cameo by George Raft, the real life gangster who played movie gangsters since the 1930s. Just another way the movie wasn't hiding what it was.

Maybe Peter Lawford's story about a kid born with a silver spoon trying to get his independence with the job is the most interesting story but the film leaves this thread dangling in favour of its obligatory moral ending.

Lots of great suits in this movie.

Back Seat Walker

Past the era of premarital sex being socially forbidden, past the era of free love, complex forms of fear and guilt follow young people like a casually strolling stranger in 2015's It Follows. Taking the subtext of moral recrimination typical of a slasher film, this movie dissolves it into something more amorphous and intriguingly reflective of the greyer landscape of sexual freedom for young people to-day.

The It of the title, not to be confused with Stephen King's clown, isn't always a random stranger. Sometimes It's a friend but It always follows expressionless at a slow, steady pace. The only statements It offers are what one might infer from the shapes It takes. The first time we see It--or at least, the first time we know for sure we're seeing It--It takes the form of a naked woman walking towards the film's protagonist, Jay (Maika Monroe), who has been tied to a wheelchair by Jeff (Jake Weary), the guy Jay had just had consensual sex with.

One might see this as a body image issue, Jay's confrontation with a prototypical female body provoked by the unfamiliarity of the sexual experience though this was not Jay's first time having sex. It was her first time with Jeff and presumably the first time her partner has chloroformed her and tied her up afterwards. There's a bit of a chicken and the egg thing--is a monster manifesting because she's been traumatised, or has she been traumatised because of a monster manifesting? Because that's why Jeff's tied her up--so she doesn't run away when he's trying to warn her. Jeff has passed It on to Jay—before, It followed him, now It follows her. If It kills her, It'll follow him again, and so on.

It's no surprise that many have interpreted It as a sexually transmitted disease and I think it's certainly fair to look at It that way. But I like how It can function for many different things, some purely psychological.

The movie makes quite a lot of references to literature and other movies. The first date we see Jay and Jeff go on is to a screening of Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, a movie about a woman pursued by several men, including one who at one moment seems to be an enemy and at other moments a comrade. The very concept of a charade implies It is a mask for something else.

Jay's friend reads from Dostoevsky's The Idiot and says "It's about Paul," Paul being Jay's innocent, true hearted childhood sweetheart, connecting him to the chaste, forgiving, and Christ-like protagonist of the novel. A recitation of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" introduces the discord between ideals of sex and messy or banal realities.

The film's also an exciting chase and suspense story. Quentin Tarantino liked the movie but criticised it for not being consistent with its mythology. I'm not exactly sure what he meant unless he meant a scene where It seems to catch up with Jay over a very long distance quickly after we've been told It only walks everywhere. This didn't really bother me but I did like the idea that one might get the idea that this was something that could be staved off indefinitely but only with constant wariness.

Strata of Errors

Why can't I like productions of Shakespeare plays set in periods and places different from what Shakespeare intended? Well, I don't necessarily hate them. But there's no production in a creative setting where I don't think, "This would have been better if they'd listened to Shakespeare." It held true when I saw The Comedy of Errors last night at San Diego's Old Globe, built to resemble the original Globe in London. Not that you'd know when the stage was dressed to look like New Orleans in the 20s.

Everyone else in the audience seemed to eat it up. The broad, Jim Carrey antics by the guy playing the Dromios, the Calista Flockhart style wailing from Megan Dodds, the woman who played Adriana. Actually, I thought she was the best performer in the show. She and Rory O'Malley, who played the Dromios, were the only ones who didn't sound like high school theatre students with that same annoying, vaguely Nathan Lane-ish, tinny even volume delivery that seems to be standard issue now for aspiring Broadway actors. The sets were nice, the costumes were cool despite the fact that everyone was wearing c-crown fedoras which didn't really become popular until the late 1930s. But I guess that's a real nitpick when we live in a day and age where people are locked in debate over what's a trilby and what's a fedora.

I saw the show for the Shakespeare class I'm taking now. One of the actors came to the class to talk to us, the guy who played the person the jeweller is indebted to. I asked him if he's performed in many plays set in the time and place Shakespeare intended. He rolled his eyes and said, yes, he's had to wear the "pumpkin pants" and complained how some of the theatre's sponsors demand plays set according to Shakepeare's desires. These people don't understand, he explained, that Shakespeare, "needs to be relevant." He talked about how the director of the play employed various different forms of cliff notes and something called "No Fear Shakespeare" when putting the production together. It was all rather depressing.

The Duke was portrayed as a gangster, the idea being that the gangs who ran the cities during prohibition would be the real authorities. So to someone I guess it makes sense that a gangster would take time to pity a humble merchant but also still feel bound by law to execute him. I guess it was crucially "relevant" to the audience that Doctor Pinch was an American faith healer instead of a conjurer. Well, it was a cute idea. The worst thing about these productions isn't that the ideas are all bad but just that they're ideas, they're someone else's art shouldering out Shakespeare's. I guess I should just be happy they didn't insert a new subplot or two.

Twitter Sonnet #790

The sandwich dimples grate not the gouda.
No rougher bread approached the cutting board.
A bird could walk and maybe it shoulda.
Says God, no lunch has come for Bruce's ward.
Denounced and pantless rabbits saw carrots.
Windmills disproved machismo finally.
Ask not for whom the piano garrottes.
A stripe recalls the hornet cannily.
Evangelical go-backs fill the cart.
Unspent spectators trickle down the street.
The brightest lights obscure the cold Wal-Mart.
A sixteen hundred foot fell on no beat.
Cool questions blankly melt in bourbon clouds.
Copious grease has pierced the to-go shrouds.

The Evolving Relationship of Hero, Damsel, and Villain

What if Maid Marian, while held captive, decided to have sex with Prince John? What if Penelope decided to sleep with one of her suitors in The Odyssey? You might have a situation not dissimilar to the one depicted in 1981's Banovic Stahinja, remarkable not only for its subversion of the familiar pattern and traditional views of men and women but also for the fact that the film apparently hews rather close to the mediaeval epic upon which its based.

This Yugoslavian film stars Italian actor Franco Nero as Strahinja Banovic, a hero who as we join him at the opening of the film seems to have already led quite a successful life of adventure. The opening credits give us this badass, rather metal depiction of him:

Just out killing dragons with his naked woman and his falcon. One could easily imagine him swapped out for Stephen Colbert.

He's settled down in a small castle with his beautiful young wife. Not beautiful, actually--intensely pretty better describes actress Sanja Venjnovic who plays Andja.

One day Strahinja goes hunting and while he's away the castle is attacked by Muslim Turks. Strahinja gets word of the attack but has wandered so far that the Turks have ample time to rape all the women and kill all the men because one of the Turks, Abdulah (Rade Serbedzija), had been secretly living in the castle disguised as a servant and lets the attack force in. The leader of the Turks, Jug Bogdan (Gert Frobe), who is also Abdulah's brother, stops short of raping Andja. He cuts her clothes off and she looks down her nose at him and calls him a slave.

Everyone's gone by the time Strahinja returns. He vows revenge and vows to get his wife back despite the fact that her wealthy parents have given her up for lost. Not because she might be dead but because she's likely been raped and therefore not worth the trouble. Andja's mother is firm in this belief despite the fact that her own eyes had been put out as punishment for having been raped when she was younger.

But despite being held captive in Jug's tent, he hasn't raped her. Like many fantasy villains he actually wants to woo her. When she does consent to sleeping with him, though, it looks a bit more like Stockholm syndrome. I really liked the way the story treats this part. The archetypes really collapse under a pile of ambiguity--Strahinja is humiliated in an ambush where he's left alive and Andja's feelings for Jug change based on the logic of a different reality created by the situation. Jug is forced to execute someone close to him and she's drawn to the torment he feels, the fact that she's seeing one enemy kill another seeming less relevant in the absence of the genuine hero.

Strahinja, in a rather potent bit of symbolism, trades the crucifix he wears around his neck for a force of enslaved criminals. It's with these he stages a successful attack on Jug's camp only to find that Andja is now openly declaring her loyalty to Jug.

The final act of the film has wonderful shades of ambiguity about who deserves to be punished, who deserves to be forgiven, who deserves love. There's a marvellous uncertainty to the ending.

Karn Again

We're a week away from the new season of Doctor Who and a prologue has been released to YouTube:

Nice to see Karn again. The Brain of Morbius, the Fourth Doctor serial in which it first appeared, is one of my favourites. Steven Moffat first resurrected the planet Karn and the Sisterhood for the 50th anniversary prelude The Night of the Doctor.

So now it's time to speculate on who they're talking about in the new video. We can assume it's not the Master. Maybe the Brigadier? Morbius? Someone completely new? Peter Capaldi's character in "The Fires of Pompeii"? Jack Harkness? Santa Claus? Really it could be anyone, there aren't enough clues.

I only had time to listen to one audio play this week, a Fourth Doctor Lost Story--that is, part of a series from Big Finish where they record adapted scripts from the old series that were never produced for television for one reason or another. I listened to Foe from the Future, adapted from a script by Robert Banks Stewart who wrote Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom. The Foe from the Future features Louise Jameson as Leela and Tom Baker reprises his role as the Fourth Doctor.

I don't know why this script was never produced for television unless it's the extreme violence. It features a lot of grotesque mutation and cannibalism but The Brain of Morbius featured stitched corpses, The Seeds of Doom had people ground up in a large machine. I guess none of it was as graphic as The Foe from the Future would have needed to be.

It begins like a Scooby Doo story with the Doctor and Leela investigating ghost sightings in Devon in the late 1970s. The ghosts turn out to be holographic projections, of course. They're caused by a society in the future trying to build a bridge to the 20th century to take refuge from some giant insect menace. There's a lot of fun had parodying this future society's attempt to imitate the 20th century--for some reason they think Bruce Forsyth was Prime Minister. Then things get weird and horrifying. It's a good story.

No-one Knows Like Kronos

If this guy doesn't look like he'd eat babies to you it's because he's not Kronos, the titan who ate his children, but Captain Kronos--Vampire Hunter, star of the 1972 Hammer film that was supposed to be the beginning of a series that didn't pan out. It has one of the more impressively nonsensical plots for a Hammer horror film and its star is a bit lacklustre for the charming swashbuckler he's meant to be but the film is fun and has an engaging Dungeons and Dragons style party of adventurers at its centre.

This Kronos (Horst Janson) really hates people who eat people so he's pledged himself to eradicating them. He's a nobleman of few words, he has kind of a numb smirk on his face for the whole movie.

The first half of the movie switches between Kronos and his assistant, Professor Grost (John Cater), travelling about and unconnected scenes of different pretty girls being menaced by an off camera vampire. Kronos and Grost rescue a woman named Carla (Caroline Munro) from the stocks where she's been put for dancing. Throughout the rest of the film, she is often smirking beside Kronos and they have sex occasionally.

So how to foil a vampire menace? Well, luckily when you put dead frogs in boxes and bury them they come back to life when vampires pass over them. This, combined with a rather conspicuous looking system of red ribbons and bells tied to trees, helps them finally track down the home of the vampire. They send Carla in as a decoy to the front door while Kronos and Grost break in through the ceiling. Why did Carla need to be sent first? Maybe it was too complicated to explain to the audience.

There are some nice sword fights. Kronos uses a Japanese sword sometimes at first and then it randomly seems to change into a sabre in some scenes before he gets a special broad sword near the end.

I watched the whole film on YouTube where it's actually hosted on the official Hammer channel--so, for any snitches reading, restrain yourselves.

Twitter Sonnet #789

Unappeased cloud rain cover crumbles nuts.
Forgotten shells impair the barest sole.
A foot remained between the sodden huts.
Distance was breached by a courageous vole.
Eggs boiled are walking the blazing street.
Reminders now demand flyers to bake.
Spinach has turned to smoke on the concrete.
A rain drop flees for humanity's sake.
Unsought the ice has nonetheless melted.
A sheaf of curling irons reddened at dusk.
The brain with burning gingham was belted.
Wan grains are floating dry inside the husk.
Aghast the streamer golems gallop home.
Above the Queen Alien paints the dome.

The Highway Cage

It's a lonely experience, driving a long distance alone at night, with no-one to talk to. For Ivan Locke in 2013's Locke, it's a lonelier experience because he does have people to talk to--his wife Katrina, who's leaving him; Bethan, a woman he had a one night stand with who's going into labour; his boss, who wants to fire him; his sons, who can't understand why he's not home watching football; and his subordinate at work who's up the creek without a paddle without Ivan. An entire film set inside a car with one visible actor, the film is almost an academic exercise and yet it is genuinely effective.

There are other characters in the film but they're only voices on the speaker phone. Ivan (Tom Hardy) also talks to his deceased father whose presence I found to be suggested by two headrest supports that look like eyes.

I don't know if that was intended or if Ivan was meant to be talking to an empty seat but it was nicely eerie. Ivan was the unintended child resulting from his father's indiscretion and, as he explains to the phantom, he's keen not to repeat that mistake. Though he does stress rather awkwardly at times that he doesn't know Bethan (Olivia Colman) even as he tries to comfort her while she's in labour. She complains that waiting for him is like "waiting for Godot" he's taking so long. He doesn't get it and she becomes angry at having slept with someone who doesn't share her passions.

Ivan's wife, Katrina (Ruth Wilson), also reveals a lack of sympathy with Ivan's priorities when he reveals to her that he's still trying to make sure a crucial construction job goes off without a hitch even though driving to London for Bethan means he won't be there for the job in the morning and he's going to be fired.

I rather liked the film's attention to Ivan's construction job. I loved that Ivan's sense of honour is so heartfelt that he wants to see the job done properly regardless of whether he's going to be rewarded. How often do we see that kind of work ethic in film, particularly for something as lacking in glamour as pouring concrete? It's really refreshing.

Director Steven Knight keeps things visually interesting by playing with lens focus, different lighting from passing cars, and camera angles, the ride never becomes monotonous even as the stifling feeling of being locked, if you will, in a car when so much of Locke's life is in critical condition comes across quite well. More than anything, though, it's Tom Hardy's performance that sells it as a man very earnest about doing what he sees as the right thing even though he has the nagging worry there are aspects about his life he's failed to examine properly.

Uneven and So Visible

It may be impossible to define oneself without having other people for contrast. One's spouse may provide a consistent reflection of differences and similarities becoming as essential as a limb but for identity. So much so that the loss of a spouse, through death or separation, may be such an insuperable loss that one attempts suicide or reflexively creates a surrogate for the spouse. 1968's The Odd Couple shows two men in this predicament who bond through their mutual need for this other. It's a very funny film with great performances from Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, particularly Walter Matthau.

The film opens with Felix (Lemmon) attempting suicide while the looping theme song plays on the soundtrack, a lightly troubled tune which seems to both belittle and sympathise with Felix's dilemma. His wife has just announced she wants a separation so the devoted husband and father finds himself absolutely bereft. When he can't get the window open in the lofty hotel room he rents to throw himself out of, he hurts his back, so decides to wander the town until winding up back at the usual weekly poker game at Oscar's (Matthau) apartment.

One thing leads to another and the fastidious Felix ends up moving in with the sloppy Oscar. Oscar's apartment is huge with several bedrooms, a relic of his own failed marriage. He seems much better adjusted than Felix not only because he's had more time but there seems to be a flexibility permitted by Oscar's careless mode of life that is not allowed into Felix's tightly organised world. The battles the two have over the cleanliness of the apartment become like manifestations of their respective psychological issues--Oscar's fear of confronting the void in his life and Felix's obsession with confronting it.

At the same time, the conflict creates for each man a new complementary other in his roommate. Both accidentally refer to the other using the names of their ex-wives in a rather blatant symbol of this process coming to completion.

Jack Lemmon was great but I really loved Walter Matthau in this film. His delivery is odd and appropriate in such ingenious ways.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a Bat, It's Great, It's Not Bad, It's Finished, It Needs Work, It's an Undisputed Success

There's an article on io9 now about how Warner Brothers studio brass are insisting on adding more Batman to Batman v Superman. "Two years ago, when Ben Affleck was cast as Batman, no one would’ve guessed it could come to this." Yes, it's been two years since we heard Ben Affleck was cast as Batman. For a movie that comes out next year. Gods, this story. It is really starting to fascinate me. In case you hadn't heard, Batman v Superman, which was supposed to be released a couple months ago, was pushed back a year. Warner Brothers CEO Kevin Tsujihara explained:

It was a tough decision at the time because it was going to create a hole in 2015, but it was absolutely the right decision for the franchise, for DC and the movie. Having seen the movie multiple times, and again last night, I'm extremely confident it was the right decision to make the movie better. And it's so important for the studio to get the foundation right on DC.

I think people are shitting their pants at the growing impression that the Spruce Goose just isn't going to fly. But at the same time, the mechanisms cannot be stopped. They've gone all in. Two years on and no-one has seen the Batfleck except in trailers but to keep it alive they have to pump some blood into it. Paying audiences may not have seen Batfleck, but people at the studio have and, just between them and us, he's really good. Oh, he's so good. This movie is definitely going to come out and no-one should worry about it. Stop worrying about it.

That's the latest exciting development in the movie that was supposed to be in the can three months ago. Oh, what glorious gas.

I'm pretty tired from walking in the 104 Fahrenheit weather so here are some photos I've taken recently:

Twitter Sonnet #788

A temporary sleeve of black has stretched.
Across the card a cup demolished quotes.
Reclining peaks of salamanders fetched
Reprove a mess of holiday bound boats.
Computer hopes negotiate with lives.
Transporters won't report broken waistcoats.
When Bilbo's buttons were given for tithes
Gargoyles looted necks for their ascots.
Spaghetti hidden under collars wait.
The seeds of citrus condemnation root.
On aprons scissors slip off to their fate.
A dizzy deity shoved hearts in soot.
Virginia no the mark is a spider.
I'll ignore there are flies in the rider.

Gangster Gravity

How do you escape the yakuza when the yakuza own every operation in the country? A young man makes a go of it after he falls in love with a boss's daughter in 1964's The Flower and the Angry Waves (花と怒濤), possibly the least experimental Seijun Suzuki movie I've seen so far but it's not a bad film. It was certainly fascinating to see a yakuza movie about how Japanese organised crime runs industrial labour in a situation not dissimilar to the one depicted in On the Waterfront.

Ogata (Akira Kobayashi), the young man, flees his old crew and takes a job in a mining operation while his lover (Chieko Matsubara), the boss's daughter, becomes a waitress.

But Ogata just doesn't blend in. He's got the cool demeanour, something cooler than what's to-day called "swagger", of a top yakuza, the other miners instinctively defer to him and are astonished when he actually does some manual labour.

He quickly rises in the ranks when one of the bosses of the yakuza clan who owns the mining operation is impressed by Ogata's attitude. He captures the interest of three other dangerous individuals--a police detective, a quiet assassin in a broad brimmed hat and red lined black cloak, and the most popular, and unattainable, geisha in town. Here she bares her back to a boss she doesn't like in order to save Ogata's life.

Ogata finds himself increasingly drawn into yakuza business. The further in he goes, the closer the cop and assassin get.

Like Youth of the Beast, most of the interest here comes from Suzuki's visual flair than from the story but it's an enjoyable enough tale.

She Got It Unholy and That ain't Sacred

She's committed the perfect crime, Diana Dors tells us at the beginning of her 1957 film The Unholy Wife. I don't know about perfect but it's pretty clever considering directly admitting to the murder on the witness stand is part of the plan. The second of the two films Dors made in her brief American career, The Unholy Wife is a lot better than I Married a Woman but it's still a deeply flawed film noir and not half as good as some of Dors' efforts in Britain like The Long Haul and Yield to the Night.

The Unholy Wife was directed by John Farrow who had just recently made Back from Eternity, the remake of his own Five Came Back (which I talked about a few days ago). While the Five Came Back movies functioned perfectly well as mostly clever plot exercises, one of the main flaws with Unholy Wife is its attention to plot mechanics which become absurd the moment one starts to imagine real people doing these things instead of people in a movie.

Rod Steiger plays Paul, husband of the unholy one, Phyllis (Dors). In charge of a winery in Napa valley, an important part of the story is his bizarre family tradition of never locking the door (that could've been the tagline for promotions--"He didn't lock the doors and he couldn't lock--Diana Dors!"). This peculiar practice was clearly invented to fill a necessary link in the chain of Phyllis' plot which involved shooting either her husband or her lover and then claiming that she'd thought it was a prowler who'd come through the door. A gun is conveniently located in a drawer by the entrance. No-one stops to think about the contradiction of having a door always open to strangers and a gun next to the door at all times. Our doors are open to all, but we might kill you.

The worse thing is that characters get so caught up in figuring out the whys and what fors of who killed or didn't kill who that people seem to forget to feel very upset when family members or dear friends die. Method actor Rod Steiger remedies this a little with a characteristically great performance that sticks out like a sore thumb. Dors tells the story from a prison cell where her hair is put in a dowdy ponytail in a clear attempt to channel some of her performance in Yield to the Night but mostly she never really stretches her legs here. I saw an interview with Steiger who said he felt Dors was never permitted to be as good an actor as she could have been. The two supposedly had an affair, it might have been interesting to see a Diana Dors who took up method acting under Steiger's tutelage.

The film isn't exactly bad. There's a nice thought towards ruminations on fundamentally good or evil people that's sabotaged quite a bit by the mechanical quality of the story. And so it was back to Britain for Ms. Dors.

The Unholy Wife is another one that's just about impossible to find. I watched it on Daily Motion, which tends to be a bit more lenient than YouTube, but since the last time I posted a whole movie on my blog it was immediately taken down I think I'll avoid embedding another one here for now unless it's indisputably public domain. I wonder if I have a narc among my readers.

A Pitt for All Doctors

The great Ingrid Pitt, star of some memorable Hammer horror films and a supporting player in The Wicker Man, appeared in two Doctor Who serials. The above image is from the 1972 Third Doctor story The Time Monster, my favourite Third Doctor story. Pitt came back to Doctor Who to play a scientist in the 1984 Fifth Doctor story Warriors of the Deep, an inferior story and Pitt was given inferior hair, makeup, and costume.

A big contrast to the ravishing image she presented just a year before in a BBC production of A Comedy of Errors.

Around this time, Pitt was also trying to participate in Doctor Who in another fashion--she and her husband wrote a script for the Sixth Doctor a year after Warriors of the Deep. That script, The Macro Men, was rejected but was finally produced as an audio play in 2010, just months before Pitt's death, starring Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as his companion Peri.

Gods only know why this script was rejected originally though it was par for the course in a season defined by a series of bad decisions. The Macros, as the audio play was retitled, isn't one of the best Doctor Who stories but it's at least as good as anything that appeared in Colin Baker's run, saving possibly only Robert Holmes' scripts. Possibly it was rejected due to the fact that the story partly concerns The Philadelphia Experiment and in 1984 a Hollywood film based on the same subject was released. Pitt's script is a bit weirder than that movie, though.

The TARDIS materialises on the time jumping ship, the USS Eldridge, which had been the subject of an experimental invisibility shield--essentially a cloaking device--during World War II. That much is part of the real legend. The Doctor and Peri find most of the crew unable to see or hear them, endlessly repeating the same actions for years. The story feels much more like genuine science fiction than Doctor Who usually does as the plot ends up concerning energy uses and distorted cultural perspectives in the form of a microscopic society where slave labour is employed to produce less energy than what's stored in a torch battery the Doctor has in his pocket.

In real life, Pitt, as a child, was placed in a concentration camp in World War II and barely survived. With this in mind, the strange story of terrible military power pursued by culturally isolated minds or leading to chaotic results rather than peace or dominance takes on a poignant light. The story's not perfect--the Doctor comes off as oddly naive in several scenes in order to move the plot along, but Pitt overcomes one of the more infamous shortcomings of the Sixth Doctor era by having the Doctor and Peri actually expressing concern and affection for each other. I wouldn't mind seeing this story adapted for television now in the new series.

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