Jane Campion's The Piano

Re-watching this masterpiece today.  I'd forgotten just how bewitchingly beautiful and haunting this film really is--as are so many of Jane Campion's films.  Her most recent film, Bright Star, was one of the most moving love stories I've ever seen.

Warlock (1959)

I love Westerns, but I wasn't always so fond of the genre.  As a child, I sat glued to the tube watching the exploits of James West and Artemis Gordon in The Wild, Wild West--but that show was a campy masterpiece, actually more akin to Star Trek and Batman, than the traditional Western.  My dad watched Gunsmoke religiously; a show which I found insidiously boring at the time.  He was also an avid John Wayne fan, and that just seemed to confirm his "old man" taste to my young mind.  Of course, Wayne was a political lightning rod back then; and although the Vietnam War was very far from my consciousness, Wayne still seemed to be part of an old world that had little relevance to me.  Until I saw True Grit.  I fell in love with Duke after that.  True Grit, and I mean the FIRST True Grit, was a rough and cantankerous kind of a film.  It had a special lovable seaminess to it.  After that, I saw a whole series of what were known as revisionist Westerns: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Jeremiah Johnson, Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse.  They were all wonderful; but again, very much different from what my mind understood by the term "Western".  I think I had some idea that a Western was a simple black and white melodrama with yodeling cowboys, and Snidely Whiplash type villains--and undoubtedly there were many, many Westerns that fell under that description.  As a young adult, I had no time for such silliness; unless, of course, it WAS genuine silliness, like Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.  So I stayed away from Westerns for a good, long time.

Sometime in my college years I discovered the treasures of the Golden Age: John Ford's many wonderful Wayne vehicles--especially Fort Apache, Howard Hawks' Red River, George Marshall's Destry Rides Again, John Sturges' Magnificent Seven, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon.  I started to realize that the Western was a great genre, not because it simplified moral truths, but rather because it focused one's thoughts upon the complexity of moral truths by simplifying the stage of their performance.  Every rich and complex sentiment has been carefully and thoroughly catalogued in this genre; and the very best Westerns remain poised in the tensions of moral ambiguity, leaving their audiences with as many questions as answers.

It amazes me that after 47 years of avid film consumption, I still manage to find again and again masterpieces that I've never viewed before.  Edward Dmytryk's Warlock is a great example.  Made in 1959, Warlock features Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, and Richard Widmark all pulling in some of their finest performances.  The story is clearly a loose re-adaption of the famous gunfight at O. K. Corral.  A rancher and his band of rowdy cowboys is filling the citizens of Warlock, Utah with fear for there homes, lives, and businesses.  They form a citizens' committee and agree to bring in big guns-for-hire, Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda) and Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn), to clean up the town and bring back order.  But it becomes immediately clear that the new guns represent a threat to law themselves.  One disaffected cowboy, Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark), breaks with his hoodlum friends, and bravely takes on a deputy's star--thus, effectively putting himself squarely in the middle of the fight.  So, who now represents justice in Warlock?  The dialogue is rich, thought-provoking, and mature.  The characters are multi-faceted, ambiguous.

 I'll finish this tomorrow evening!

Warlock 1959

Sorcerer - Le convoi de la peur - 1977

This is an astonishing sequence from William Friedkin's Sorcerer, a pretty amazing remake of Clouzot's Wages of Fear.  I'd really love to know how they filmed this!

The Wages Of Fear - trailer (Le salaire de la peur )

My friend Brook told me he saw this film on cable the other night.  It is one of the greatest and darkest adventure films ever made.  Henri-Georges Clouzot created many masterpieces, but this is the one that resonates the most deeply with me.   Four lost souls driving two trucks loaded with unstable dynamite down a crumbling jungle road to put out an oil well fire.  Gut-wrenchingly bleak and breathtakingly tense.  Unforgettable.

Ten Seriously Great But Overlooked (Except by Filmbuffs) Films

An interesting shot from Mr. Arkadin

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success

1. Odd Man Out (1947, Carol Reed)  A notorious Irish resistance leader is shot during a botched bank robbery. Abandoned by his comrades he wanders the darkening streets of an unnamed city, steered by a panoply of allies and adversaries toward his final fate.
2. Mr. Arkadin, or A Confidential Report (1955, Orson Welles) A would-be blackmailer is hired by his victim, a mysterious tycoon, to uncover the tycoon's presumably forgotten past.  Every person he questions ends up a corpse, as he suspects he may become one soon himself.
3. The Day of the Locust (1975, John Schlesinger)  An aspiring artist in Depression Era Hollywood cynically discovers the fastest way to the top, and loses his ideals along the way.
4. Slaughterhouse Five (1972, George Roy Hill)  A man "unstuck" in time jumps back and forth between a WWII German prison camp, Fifties suburban America, and an extraterrestrial zoo.
5. Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)  Trench warfare in France during WWI.  A squadron turns back from an impossible assault and three men are court-martialed to set an example.  Their colonel defends them, but unsuccessfully.
6. Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica)  An elderly pensioner and his beloved dog are turned out onto the streets by a heartless landlady.  The old man searches for someone to adopt his pet, but finds no one trustworthy enough.
7. Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander MacKendrick)  A slick press agent is blackmailed by a powerful gossip columnist to break up a relationship between his overprotected sister and a rising jazz guitarist. Degradation ensues.
8. Oscar and Lucinda (1997, Gillian Armstrong)  Two gamblers in turn-of-the-century Australia, a minister and a glassworks heiress, form an unique bond of friendship.  The minister sacrifices everything for her, transporting a glass church across the Outback.
9. Slither (1973, Howard Zieff)  A parolee joins forces with his former cellmate's partner-in-crime to recover their hidden plunder.  Strangers in mysterious souped-up black vans are in hot pursuit.
10. Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer)  A bored banker exchanges his drab life for a new identity in a revamped body. It turns out to be a Faustian bargain he can never step back from.

Trailers

My friend, Julie, left a comment on facebook about The Pit and the Pendulum trailer I posted.  It got me thinking about trailers: how some are magnificent little films in themselves, sometimes better than the actual movies they're made for; or how sometimes they deceive, and manipulate in creative ways to frame our expectations of a film.  Julie mentioned the quote in TPATP trailer about John Kerr, "..in a challenging role." Well, if you've seen the film, the most challenging thing for John Kerr was probably the blade of the pendulum swooshing over his body, and I'm willing to bet it was done with an extra and some special effects.  So, yes: a wonderfully unintentional bit of humor there.  I've posted two of my favorite trailers of all time--tried to post a few more, but youtube wouldn't let me.  These two trailers got my teenage imagination overwrought with excitement for the movies themselves. I wanted to post the one for Being John Malkovich which conspicuously contained a very memorable piece of the soundtrack from the movie Brazil.  Did the movie marketers want us to make a subconscious connection between the two films?  What trailers stick in your memory, and why?

Alien 1979

Star Wars - Episode IV - Trailer (original 1977)

Movie Soundtracks

A friend of mine, Jeff Wanless, posted an update on facebook the other day that got my memory juices stirring.  He asked, what was the best instrumental film soundtrack ever composed? There were many very good answers: some truly excellent choices; some I'd never heard of before; but all interesting.  I suggested many myself.  Blade Runner I decided was my favorite, though perhaps not the best ever composed.  I love how scintillating that soundtrack is; how its aural landscape gets under your skin, and into every crevice of your brain.  What do you think?  What is your favorite soundtrack?

In Reference to the Previous List: "Ten Films..."

The list of Ten Films that Influenced Me as a Child was written in some haste, and more as a kind of humorous dig at myself.  I was hoping to lead you to wonder about what kind of strange creature is produced from such a collection of unsettlingly over-the-top influences.  The Jungle Book I added as a punch line.  But I'd love to go through some of these films, and explain to both you and myself what it was about them that was so powerful to me.  I'll do that soon.

Beginnings 2

Here comes the first "hiccup".  After reading, re-reading, and reflecting over my first post--short as it was--I've decided I'm not quite satisfied with it.  The thing I immediately noticed is a simultaneously irritating and pleasurable aspect to blogging: how easy it is to tinker with its content and its shape.   The choices seem endless.  Take for example the "wallpaper" I decided to use.  I chose an image from Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an astonishingly beautiful animated film from 1926 made entirely with hand cut paper silhouettes.  This film I felt captured a number of subtle suggestions that I wanted to enhance the blog.  It was a film that conveyed immediately the idea of "shadows" on a screen; a reference, not merely, to movies, but also to Plato's famous allegory of the cave, Indonesian wayang kulit shadow puppet theater, hand shadow puppets, and folk shadow puppet theater in general.  In each of these examples there is a substitution of a "higher" reality for a "lower" simulation, but always with the implication that the greater truth is casting the shadow in the first place.  A wonderfully rich philosophical way to think about the artistic power of cinema.  Perhaps I haven't clearly framed this notion yet, but I'll keep trying--to clarify it for you, and for myself.  Also, silhouettes as an art form have fascinated me for many years.  I love the delicate and intricate silhouettes of Hans Christian Andersen, as well as Kara Walker's more recent politically charged work. 

Hans Christian Andersen silhouette

Kara Walker silhouette

There is also Peter Weir's flawed but interesting film The Year of Living Dangerously, in which I was first exposed to the magic of Indonesian wayang kulit, and of Indonesian folklore and spiritual traditions.  Movies have opened my consciousness to many things.

Indonesian wayang kulit

 Anyway, I've segued here pretty badly.  What I started to say was that the myriad choices offered to a blogger are both frustratingly infinite, as well as pleasurably so.  And this leads to endless tinkering. 
My first post, Beginnings, was one in which I wanted to capture a sense of what it was like to be a child in the mid-Sixties exposed to so many movies via TV, and the strangely comforting familial sharing of horror films.  I launched into an unscholarly but innocuous rendering of film history, which I believe I learned from an old PBS documentary I watched ages ago, and then tried to meld it to the particularly personal experience of viewing The Pit and the Pendulum for the first time with my family.  I don't think I conveyed the thrill of a small child being invited to share an adult pleasure, or the sense of both mischievousness and protection that my father represented to me.   I was being played with affectionately, and yet the images from that film still haunt me.  Their power has diminished over time, but they still give me a strange rush of vertigo and pleasure.  And this had so much to do with my father, who served as a kind of gatekeeper: exposing me to the small, less threatening horrors of movies, haunted houses, and amusement park thrill rides--my own childhood Virgil.  So horror films in general, and those of my early years particularly, are embellished with a kind of shining bronze of warm nostalgia for him.

Ten Films That Influenced Me as a Child

• The Pit and the Pendulum
• King Kong
• The Blob
• The Man with the X-ray Eyes
• Quatermass and the Pit
• Chamber of Horrors
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Dracula
• The Exorcist
• The Jungle Book

Pit and the Pendulum (1961) - Theatrical Trailer

Beginnings

After much cajoling and encouragement from my friends, I've finally decided to create a movie blog.  I'm very new to this, and learning as I go; so you'll have to forgive any unfortunate hiccups along the way.  I don't presume to be a movie critic; I've never received a degree in film theory or history; but I've loved movies with a passionate intensity bordering on neurosis ever since I was a small child.  This is a chance for me to share with you thoughts about the films that have shaped my imagination and the person that I am.  Hopefully, you'll enjoy this enough to share back.

Some of my very earliest memories from childhood are of movies.  I grew up in the Sixties, at a time when the old Hollywood system had already gone through a dramatic downward death spiral.  Most of the major studios, seeing the enormous growth in popularity of television over the previous decade, began to release their vast archives of films to the networks in the hope of gaining renewed profitability.  They released hundreds of classics from the Golden Age, as well as many more recently produced films.  These movies on the small screen served as a sort of social glue for my family, giving us a chance to extend our time together past the dinner hour.  We had a big, beautiful old wooden-consoled Zenith television set in our basement at 54 Eastwood where we'd gather together in the dark and watch these treasures unfold.  Many of them were horror films, and I developed a taste very early for getting the wits scared out of me.

The Pit and the Pendulum, 1961

Dad or Mom would make a batch of popcorn, and as we huddled together Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum would spill out before our eyes in all its garish glory.  I remember Vincent Price's tragically demented, Don Medina, and Barbara Steele's evil Elizabeth.  The sea-swept, rotting castle; the dank, cobweb strewn dungeon; and the horror of the withered corpse that had desperately tried to escape its premature entombment.  That last image scared the CRAP out of me.  I think I must have been only four or five years old when my responsible parents allowed me to view this terrifying spectacle.  It gave my dad a good chuckle to see how much I wanted to be frightened.   The giant swinging pendulum with its loud whoosh echos in my mind to this day.  And I will never forget the very last moment during the final scene: Barbara Steele's magnificent freakishly huge eyes glaring out of the securely bolted iron maiden.