Impose No Expectations on Vampires, Please

Nothing spoils an extravagantly amoral honeymoon like a languorous, immoral vampire. And not just any vampire--1971's Daughters of Darkness features Elizabeth Bathory herself, turning up at the beautiful Hotel Astoria in Belgium in modern times. A lovely film with delicious performances, it stumbles a bit when it tries to mean something or when it drifts into certain conventions of the vampire genre. But the mood and atmosphere it conjures makes it all worthwhile.

A young Englishman who grew up in America, Stefan (John Karlen), has been married to a Swedish woman called Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) for three days on apparently very short acquaintance. We see them having sex on the train through a violet lens filter and each confesses to not loving the other. It's not clear if they truly believe it or if it's the insolent posturing of cocky youth. In any case, Stefan is afraid of telling his mother about their marriage and constantly puts off the phone call. When he finally does make the phone call, we see Stefan has very different reasons for his reluctance than one might expect. It's a plot point that fits in with what seems to be a partial attempt at anti-queer allegory, one that's best ignored.

My god, how beautiful is the Hotel Astoria. I'm happy to say the bulk of the film was shot there. Here, the beautiful couple meet the Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) and her "friend", Ilona (Andrea Rau). Both women give distinctive, intensely attractive, sensuous performances enhanced by director Harry Kumel's compositions.

There's the usual string of murders nearby--victims drained of blood--Stefan accidentally cuts himself while shaving, the concierge (Paul Esser) remembers Elizabeth looking exactly the same when he met her forty years ago--all this standard vampire movie stuff is really unnecessary though it is interesting to see how fascinated Stefan is by the murders. If the movie were just about Elizabeth seducing everyone and driving a wedge between Stefan and Valerie it would be perfectly fine. Maybe the director just didn't know how good he had it.

Seyrig is so great at choosing the most charming, insinuating way of saying things. She accidentally on purpose meets Stefan and Valerie in the lobby and insists they join her for a drink--you can sense the hypothetical accident and an unconcealed deliberateness and desperation under an effortless, breezy self-deprecation. How could they refuse?

And then they meet Ilona who conveys a peculiar mixture of pouty innocence and the solemn wisdom of a lifelong servant. I could've watched these two for many hours.

Daughters of Darkness is available on The Criterion Channel.

Nobody Knows What it is to be a Cat

The last movie to be approved by Walt Disney and the first to be made after his death, 1970's The Aristocats seems like a safe bet. The premise seems almost identical to Lady and the Tramp except with cats instead of dogs--a cat from the world of wealth and privilege finds herself cast out and her saviour is a scruffy male cat from the wrong side of the tracks. The title of the film even seems to pick up more explicitly on the earlier film's subtextual theme of class. But, while The Aristocats has some great background art and animation, it falls well short of its predecessors in terms of story, character, and suspense.

I'd never really appreciated Disney films as suspense films until I found The Aristocats so utterly lacking in suspense. The characters never seem to be particularly threatened and they don't act like they are. Duchess (Eva Gabor) and her kittens never have anxiety about whether or not their mistress (Hermione Baddeley) loves them the way Lady does about her owners. The kittens never worry about being killed and turned into coats like the dalmatians. And no-one fears being eaten or torn to pieces by a tiger the way Mowgli did.

I'm reminded of my frequent complaints about a lack of suspense in Rebels and The Mandalorian. If this is some secret, set in stone part of Disney's charter, we certainly can't blame Walt Disney himself for it. Nor does this lethal timidity seem to be a permanent fixture after The Aristocats but it does crop up all too often and it's bad in a particular, consistent way. Maybe I could coin a term for it. Would "Mickey's Impotent Softball" be too graphic? I'm not sure I'm so good at coining terms.

Unlike Lady and the Tramp, the film spends much more time focused on the humans in the beginning. Even more than 101 Dalmatians which was at least narrated by Pongo. We get to know Madame Adelaide, the owner of Duchess and her kittens, an eccentric, well animated woman with the kind of large eyes usually reserved for younger characters.

We see her cute, ongoing flirtation with her even better animated lawyer. It's a shame they get the xerox treatment. Madame in particular is unjustly served by technology as her white hair shows seemingly every pencil mark.

I wonder if anyone's considered digitally polishing these movies or if Disney's too married to the idea that this was all a legitimate stylistic choice.

The backgrounds, at least, carry something of the beauty of the French fashion art that inspired them.

Disney's love affair with England--all Disney's animated films of the '60s were based on works by British authors--would finally seem to have broken with The Aristocats being set in Paris, having been written by Americans. Though the movie features a meandering, misguided detour with a group of geese who conspicuously refer to themselves as English again and again. Aside from the visual design, there's not much to give the film a French atmosphere except the opening song is sung by Maurice Chevalier. He performs one of the few remaining songs in the film composed by the Sherman Brothers who departed from the studio after this film, apparently upset by how the company was managed.

One of the most well remembered songs of the film, "Everybody Wants to be a Cat", was written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker. It's performed by the various cats led by Scatman Crothers. Crothers was a last minute replacement for Louis Armstrong but he certainly does a fine job. His presence takes on a little more significance when I'm reminded of his later role in Ralph Bakshi's animated examination of racism and the black experience in America, Coonskin. Recently Disney added disclaimers to their animated films--I was unable to skip this statement at the beginning:

The Chinese cat featured in the "Everyboyy Wants to be a Cat" is certainly a dumb racial caricature--not quite as spiteful as some of the depictions from the '50s but certainly obnoxious. The disclaimer, though, is sure to be meaningless to the average five year old and unlikely to change the mind of the average adult. I suppose it fits with the general unsubstantiality of the "Everybody Wants to be a Cat" sequence which continues the strangeness of the film deliberately invoking economic class only to say absolutely nothing about it. Lady and the Tramp showed Tramp begging for scraps and had a reference to The Lower Depths. The Aristocats showed no apparent difference to how comfortably Duchess lived and how Scatman Crothers lived. The bohemian gang of cats seems to be a softcore fantasy version of Parisian poverty. One wishes this Mickey's Impotent Softball had an ounce of Coonskin's courage, or even just that of The Jungle Book.

After his success with his improvisations as Baloo in The Jungle Book, comedian Phil Harris was brought in to work the same magic with Thomas O'Malley the alley cat. He and Eva Gabor come off a little like Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres but with less tension and chemistry. Harris deliberately chose to play Thomas differently to Baloo and comes off a bit sleazy, making it odd that Duchess naively acquiesces to everything he says and does. The film seems to be aiming for an It Happened One Night style road romance but the oddness of Thomas' arrogance paired with Duchess' dull, inexplicable placidity completely undermines the idea. When two lovers from different economic backgrounds fall in with each other, there ought to be at least a few sparks, that should be obvious.

One key difference to Lady and the Tramp's premise is that Duchess already has offspring from a previous relationship. No comment is made on it by any of the characters until the geese realise Thomas isn't the father of the kittens and they immediately start to decry the scandal. When Lady spent the night in the park with Tramp, any adult would have recognised the tone of the reactions she gets as being like reactions to a young woman having premarital, impulsive sex. But children could also appreciate the tension because, on the surface level, the scandal was to do with Lady having spent the whole night out. There's no such context in The Aristocats and combined with the lack of much character for Duchess, the whole thing falls pretty flat.

The movie also suffers from the absence of an interesting villain. A good villain isn't completely necessary to make a good film but The Aristocats has a lame villain--the butler (Roddy Maude-Roxby) who's trying to get rid of the cats so he can have all the inheritance Madame plans to leave to them. He's thwarted easily by two dogs who are never even aware of the cats' existence and who speak with southern American accents. The film ends on a deflatingly postmodern note as the two dogs argue over who will say the movie has ended.

The scene also reuses animation from earlier in the film without a background. It's hard to imagine how it could have been lazier.

The Aristocats could have been an interesting rumination on the rococo beauty seen in Madame's world contrasted with the hodgepodge aesthetic of Parisian bohemians and the value in each. It could've presented the conundrum of how both worlds can coexist without one of them suffering. Maybe that's a bit much to expect from a Disney film but this is the same company that made Pinocchio.

The Aristocats is available on Disney+.

The Most Frightened Eyes

Oh, Fay Wray, what big eyes you had! Here she is in 1933's The Vampire Bat, a cheap Dracula knock-off released a couple years after the Tod Browning film. Borrowing sets from James Whale movies and deploying some star quality with Wray, Lionel Atwill, and Melvyn Douglas, this film builds some atmosphere and has some nicely creepy shots but sabotages itself with a comedy subplot about a silly hypochondriac aunt.

In a small German town, there's a series of murders in which the victims are found with two puncture wounds and their bodies drained of blood. Melvyn Douglas as the local police inspector amusingly derides the very idea it could be a vampire.

Wray plays Douglas' fiancee, Ruth, who works as an assistant to Dr. Von Niemann (Atwill). She doesn't have much to do in the film beyond responding to her lover's flirtations until the end of the movie when she's kidnapped and starts showing those peepers.

It's not just that she has large eyes, it's that they don't usually look so large. They seem to triple in size when she's frightened which makes the whole situation weirder and more fascinating. Speaking of weird fascination, the film also has Dwight Frye in a role as a murder suspect.

Best known for playing Renfield in Browning's Dracula, he has the archetypical madman's face. I think his face is embedded in the subconscious of the world as the face of madness. He's nice and creepy in this movie, too, talking rapturously about how nice and soft bats are.

The Vampire Bat is available on Amazon Prime with an annoying watermark.

Twitter Sonnet #1406

A simple suit defined the furtive shape.
The glowing man awaits a rocket thought.
A magic wove the solid magnet cape.
Remembrance fills the shrinking metal pot.
The timer told its final temple dock.
Rerouted bins deployed the stuff to field.
A thousand feet dissolved a single sock.
Producing toes engaged a digit yield.
The frozen ant contained a bead of sweat.
Mistaken heads were placed above the knee.
And never digits 'tween the knobs shall meet.
As limbs were sprouting far as eye could see.
Reliant madness makes the cave at dusk.
The herring cape was now a woollen husk.

The Right Outfit for Peace and War

Is Garek really a good tailor? Looking at his outfits in the first season Deep Space Nine episode, "Past Prologue", I'm not sure. The one he wears always looked sort of Mork & Mindy to me. The ones on the rack in his shop were pilfered from various episodes of The Next Generation and have that general quality of garish yet also dull that too often distinguished Next Generation wardrobe.

The episode is, of course, far more interesting for its conversation on terrorism. Deep Space Nine usually is and the older it gets, and the more disconnected it gets from contemporary culture, the better it is because any biases on the part of the writers become less and less relevant and the bare ideas show through. The episode centres on Kira's (Nana Visiter) moral dilemma as a former comrade returns to Bajoran space pursued by Cardassians, the former occupiers of Bajor.

What would seem to be cut and dried at another time--a Cardassian warship attacking a small Bajoran transport--is complicated by the pilot being linked to a terrorist organisation, still committing acts of violence long after the Cardassian withdrawal and the formal cessation of conflict. But the question over whether Bajor acquired independence is complicated by the Federation presence so this Bajoran terrorist group is still in operation. Tahna Los (Jeffrey Nordling), the terrorist in question, accuses Kira of being a mere politician now that she's trying to use official channels to get him exonerated, as though he's now rebelling against the very mechanisms of government rather than oppressive occupiers.

One of the high points of the episode is Kira's conversation with Odo (Rene Auberjonois) where she mentions nightmares about attacks she took part in as part of the Bajoran resistance. It's a brief moment but I thought about the maturity and emotional courage it must take for someone like Kira even to admit to herself that her actions were horrific. I felt this particularly watching the episode at a time when political factions in the west are routinely trying to impose definitions on groups trying to spread terror with violence, labouring to define them as not terrorist.

Andrew Robinson as Garek is always a delight. I love how everything he says sounds like it has a double meaning, even a simple hello--he behaves in a broadly suspicious way that is exactly how a spy shouldn't behave. Either he's deliberately flouting the suspicion everyone harbours for the only Cardassian on the station as a comment on life's irony, or it's a double blind and he really is a spy. Even the obvious truth may be a cunning ploy. Which to him, of course, may be an even more darkly amusing irony.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on NetFlix and Amazon Prime.

Bereft on Earth

How many of us have had that nightmare where you show up naked and invisible on an alien planet? That's just what happens to the poor extraterrestrial in 1953's Phantom from Space. An extremely low budget film consisting of little more than a few people talking interspersed with stock footage there's nonetheless something genuinely eerie and sad about it.

A group of expert men from the government start investigating reports of a strange man wearing what's described as a diving suit wandering the countryside. The Geiger counters tell them this fellow is radioactive.

Witnesses say that without his helmet he has no head. So, apparently panicked by being pursued, the creature removes his clothing, rendering himself totally invisible. He makes contact with the one beautiful woman among the group of investigators, Barbara (Noreen Nash), and tries to communicate with her by tapping some kind of code with scissors on the table.

She's surrounded by guys who are handsome and confident, it seems an awful imposition for the alien to think he's worth her time, yet circumstances have forced him to be naked, unintelligible, and alone with her. Not reading into this would require a herculean effort of will.

When we finally do see him, still naked, still trying to escape, still unintelligible, it's a really eerie shot and there's something genuinely disturbing about how helpless and weird he is.

Phantom from Space is available on Amazon Prime.

A Pocket for Doctor and Companion

I love the Third Doctor's velvet jackets so much, though I wish he wouldn't so often pair them with shirts that are just lighter shades of the same colour. This is from Carnival of Monsters, a 1973 Doctor Who serial, in which the Doctor and Jo find themselves shrunk and put in a sort of ant farm, to use the Doctor's analogy. It's a particularly fun story and I love the two alien carnies who keep the miniature menagerie.

Perhaps their fashion choices are less defensible than the Doctor's (Jon Pertwee) but I love the colourful antennae ball tiara worn by Shirna (Cheryl Hall). One of the advantages of her scenes being shot on sound stage is that you can hear the little balls clacking against each other while she lectures Vorg (Leslie Dwyer). I also like how genuine her reactions to Pertwee seem to be.

Directed by series producer Barry Letts, this serial also features a number of remarkably nice close-ups. I like this one of Jo Grant (Katy Manning).

She and the Doctor just happen to be wearing high black boots that prove perfectly sensible for the muddy puddles they encounter on an alien marsh.

Jo's colours are a little more nicely complimentary--surprising given she usually looks like a gender swapped Mick Ronson, which gets no complaints from me.

Carnival of Monsters features Ian Marter in a supporting role, the actor who would go on to play the Fourth Doctor's companion Harry Sullivan. He's a 1920s ship's officer in another pocket of the ant farm along with a sweet 1920s Major (Tenniel Evans) and his pretty daughter (Jenny McCracken). I love how quickly the Doctor slips into their uppercrust lingo but is utterly baffled by Vorg's use of Polari. The dandy Doctor indeed.

Twitter Sonnet #1405

A carpet question lingered past the wall.
The ancient phone was torn beside the sheet.
A second bet was placed to roll the ball.
Entire pants were caught beneath the seat.
A sudden sleep is all the water needs.
Above the mask surprise betrayed a list.
A wealthy world returns in form of beads.
The buttered tennis ball was widely missed.
A glitter shadow lodged below the eye.
The absent speaker plugged the music late.
A team of cherries filled the baking pie.
Enlisted crew should weighted the second rate.
A bigger puppet came of smaller hands.
The soldiers saw a glowing bunch of bands.

The Extra Room

I've continued reading M.R. James' ghost stories this past week. "Number 13", about a scholar named Anderson travelling in Denmark, is another nice example of how a characteristic layering of perspective helps give a sense of reality to the horror. The first person narrator is giving the story second hand, as it was told to him by Anderson, whose description of the strange occurrence is preceded by the process he went through in choosing his hotel room and then an account of why he was in a position to notice something so subtly strange.

He had nothing to tell me (I am giving the story as I heard it from him) about what passed at supper, and the evening, which was spent in unpacking and arranging his clothes, books, and papers, was not more eventful. Towards eleven o'clock he resolved to go to bed, but with him, as with a good many other people nowadays, an almost necessary preliminary to bed, if he meant to sleep, was the reading of a few pages of print, and he now remembered that the particular book which he had been reading in the train, and which alone would satisfy him at that present moment, was in the pocket of his greatcoat, then hanging on a peg outside the dining-room.

If there was nothing to say about supper, why tell us? The implication of the comment suggests the reader's or the speaker's interest in supper--it's a significant irrelevance at the same time that it starts to circle Anderson's objective: the time after supper, when he should be sleeping.

It becomes a "wrong geometry" kind of story, one in which the dimensions of Anderson's room change at a particular period during the night. It works so well because the feeling of disorientation upon awaking in the dark of a room is so familiar to virtually anyone reading. Published in a collection in 1904, it's easy to see the story's influence on H.P. Lovecraft and, of course, on Danielewski's House of Leaves.

In the hall, Anderson notices a room number 13 beside his own which he hadn't noticed before. When he brings it up to other people, he first finds an annoying shock in a series of his own misapprehensions and then slow confirmation of his senses being accurate after all.

Next morning he was woke by the stuepige with hot water, etc. He roused himself, and after thinking out the correct Danish words, said as distinctly as he could:

"You must not move my portmanteau. Where is it?"

As is not uncommon, the maid laughed, and went away without making any distinct answer.

Anderson, rather irritated, sat up in bed, intending to call her back, but he remained sitting up, staring straight in front of him. There was his portmanteau on its trestle, exactly where he had seen the porter put it when he first arrived. This was a rude shock for a man who prided himself on his accuracy of observation. How it could possibly have escaped him the night before he did not pretend to understand; at any rate, there it was now.

I also love how unremarkable Anderson deems any observations he makes regarding the occupant of 13 before he realises there's anything truly odd. This bit is pure poetry, and would probably have been much more effective before the existence of movies:

He went to the window—the right-hand window it was—and looked out on the quiet street. There was a tall building opposite, with large spaces of dead wall; no passers-by; a dark night; and very little to be seen of any kind.

The light was behind him, and he could see his own shadow clearly cast on the wall opposite. Also the shadow of the bearded man in Number 11 on the left, who passed to and fro in shirtsleeves once or twice, and was seen first brushing his hair, and later on in a nightgown. Also the shadow of the occupant of Number 13 on the right. This might be more interesting. Number 13 was, like himself, leaning on his elbows on the window-sill looking out into the street. He seemed to be a tall thin man—or was it by any chance a woman?—at least, it was someone who covered his or her head with some kind of drapery before going to bed, and, he thought, must be possessed of a red lamp-shade—and the lamp must be flickering very much. There was a distinct playing up and down of a dull red light on the opposite wall. He craned out a little to see if he could make any more of the figure, but beyond a fold of some light, perhaps white, material on the window-sill he could see nothing.

Now came a distant step in the street, and its approach seemed to recall Number 13 to a sense of his exposed position, for very swiftly and suddenly he swept aside from the window, and his red light went out. Anderson, who had been smoking a cigarette, laid the end of it on the window-sill and went to bed.

There's nothing so strange about a head drapery or red flame. Context is everything.

Here's the whole thing read by Michael Hordern:

The Last Leaves

Autumn continues apace here in Kashihara but a few leaves are stubbornly hanging on.

These crows were busily ransacking some garbage before I walked up.

The rice harvest continues apace, too:

A couple days ago, I was in the old broadcasting club room at the school where I work. The teacher I was with didn't know how long it'd been since the room had been used.

The school is around 50 years old so it could be the room hasn't been used in quite a while.

Well, I guess it was recently enough for there to be CDs.

There are more and more spiders about getting bigger and bigger.

Twitter Sonnet #1404

Expressions faced a nose of smelly love.
According grace to capes, the ball began.
A gentle hand presents a golden dove.
A flipping film alights inside the can.
A purple pillow held a gummi ring.
The ticking finger fixed the broken clock.
Redundant tinkers bade the kettle sing.
A buoyant wind conducts the captive sock.
The certain end was only seen at night.
Some time had passed and blossoms full were liked.
Considered flowers fell behind the light.
A secret bat was waiting late to strike.
The laundry waits for years to wear itself.
The Christmas dreams for shoes to shod the elf.

Varied Eyes in the Jungle

If anyone questions the value of Walt Disney's contributions to the films animated by his studio, 1967's The Jungle Book is an edifying piece of work. The last Disney animated film to be produced during Walt's lifetime--he died during its production--this beautiful, captivating, and surprisingly sharp feature benefits from his personal involvement. The difference between this film and the previous two, particularly The Sword in the Stone, is the difference between a mosquito bite and Mount Everest. Keeping a tight focus on character, he quite deliberately diverged from Rudyard Kipling's brilliant collection of stories to tell another kind of story, a story about guiding a child through clashing influences of ideas, society, and environment. It's a story about helping a child navigate a world that's confusing enough for adults, let alone a boy raised by wolves.

It's interesting Disney chose to produce two movies back to back about a boy pupil. Movies centred on a child protagonist were hardly new for Disney--their best two animated films, Pinocchio and Dumbo, were both about boys finding their way in life. Peter Pan was also, to some extent, about a boy learning about life and Alice in Wonderland attempted the same for a girl, though it lacked the fidelity to character necessary to make this kind of story effective, a problem repeated with Sword in the Stone.

The Jungle Book doesn't have this problem. Mowgli (Bruce Reitherman), although he bears no resemblance to the character in Kipling's books, is solidly established as an innocent and curious child. He also has an internal conflict in that he's trying to find a world and people to belong to. Yet, as clearly and charmingly rendered as he is, the movie is much more about his parental figures, Baloo the Bear (Phil Harris) and Bagheera the black panther (Sebastian Cabot). Although Disney's films had often featured children, it was really with Sleeping Beauty that they became more about the parents--the three fairies in Sleeping Beauty, Pongo and Perdita in 101 Dalmatians, and Merlin in The Sword in the Stone.

Perhaps this was because Disney and his filmmakers were at places in their lives where it just became more interesting to think about the experience of parenting, perhaps their ability to identify with children had weakened and certainly Bambi was their last truly interesting child character. It's worth thinking about the period in the late 1960s when The Jungle Book was made and the myriad destabilising issues current in the culture. Radical change was in the air and conflicting influences and ideas on how to approach governing an every day life were topics of fierce debate and anger. It fits with the clashing influences Mowgli is presented with and for the first time in the series of movies about parents we see rival parents--Baloo meets Mowgli for the first time as a child in the film instead of being present, as he was in the book, at the point when the infant Mowgli was accepted by the wolves. He and Bagheera are in philosophical conflict for much of the film over how to raise and instruct Mowgli. Tellingly, the only piece of dialogue, as far as I can tell, retained from Kipling is when Bagheera argues with Baloo's choice to hit Mowgli as part of his instruction.

Oddly, just as in the stories, the wolves who accept Mowgli among their cubs have very little to do with his education. This adds another layer of instability--his birth parents are, in the Disney film, never seen; his wolf parents are rarely seen; and he spends most of his time with a panther who, in the Disney film, has no particular obligation to him. In Kipling's book, Bagheera trades a dead cow for the infant's life so he formally enters a bargain. Disney removes any sort of contract or ritual of connexion.

When the pack decides Mowgli must return to the human world, he meets more influences on the way, including the python, Kaa (Sterling Holloway), and Louie (Louie Prima), ape king of the monkeys who seem to be caricatures of '60s counterculture.

Kipling's descriptions of the arrogant and feckless monkeys was one of my favourite parts of the book and the disdain Bagheera and Baloo feel for them helps establish a sense of the jungle society:

“Listen, man-cub,” said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. “I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till today?”

Reading this, I can't help thinking, "How did Kipling know about Twitter?" Disney takes these characters and gives them the mannerisms and hairstyles of '60s, rebellious youth. But it's not an outright satire--although we're clearly meant to see their advocacy of irresponsibility as bad, the musical talents of King Louie, with his fascinating song about wanting to be human, are admired by Baloo who can't resist joining their dancing, using Beat slang as he does so: "I'm gone, man, solid gone!" Baloo, with his "Bare Necessities" lifestyle, is quite Kerouacian, perhaps to be taken as the truly Beat while the monkeys are only Beatniks. I doubt Disney had it in mind but it makes me think of the contempt an aged Kerouac felt for the hippies in the late 1960s.

Baloo was voiced by comedian Phil Harris who improvised much of his own dialogue, a technique that can backfire but which works very well in this case to make Baloo one of Disney's most memorably earthy characters, particularly since the improvisations do little to break the integrity of the world in which he dwells. There's very little postmodernism in evidence aside from the lamentable, continued use of the xerox process, but at least the beautiful background paintings look finished.

The animation, despite suffering from the xerox process, is phenomenal, particularly when it comes to the animals. The time the artists spent studying the movements of beasts clearly shows, one of my favourite examples being Kaa the python.

When he slinks away after being pushed off a tree his coils remain partly rigid and you can sense accurate python anatomy under the scales.

In the book, Kaa is an uneasy and frightening ally of Baloo and Bagheera when they rescue Mowgli from the monkeys. In Disney's film, he's a minor villain and a bit silly. One wonders if there was any moral lesson intended when Mowgli risks falling prey to the snake's hypnotic powers. Could he be meant to represent hallucinogenic drugs? Maybe, but there's little to make that specific connexion. As a villain, he's more amusing than threatening.

Much, much more effective is Shere Khan, voiced by George Sanders. The choices Sanders makes with his lines are so brilliantly sinister, dripping with sadistic pleasure--they give me chills.

Again, a change was made by Disney to reflect contemporary issues. Shere Khan's reason for wanting to kill Mowgli in the book is because the infant was part of a group of humans he'd killed and he considered Mowgli his prey by right. In Disney's film, he hates all humans, apparently making him a racist.

Some of Bagheera and Baloo's dialogue has a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner vibe, especially when Bagheera asks Baloo, "You wouldn't marry a panther, would you?" as part of an argument about whether creatures should stay with their own kind. But the awkwardness of this analogy makes it well that Disney didn't push it too far.

The Jungle Book had been adapted to film before in 1942 by Alexander Korda, as a live action film starring Sabu. There could be no actor more perfectly suited for the role of Mowgli than Sabu. At 18, he had the visibly muscular physique to support Kipling's description of Mowgli's extraordinary strength, he had experience handling animals, and he had genuine swashbuckler charm, as did the character in the book. When Mowgli receives a wound, Kipling describes him as laughing:

Mowgli laughed a little short ugly laugh, for a stone had hit him in the mouth. “Run back, Messua. This is one of the foolish tales they tell under the big tree at dusk . . ."

A far cry from Disney's skinny little Mowgli is this virile child of the jungle. Unfortunately, the Sabu film has little else to recommend it and is otherwise far less faithful to the book than Disney's version. Disney's film is, at its heart, a very different story to Kipling's but it also happens to be a great one and a fitting swan song from Walt Disney.

The Jungle Book is available on Disney+.