When you don't own a thing: HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM, BRIGADOON, MARAT/SADE

HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM
1933 - **** - dir. Lewis Milestone
A pre-code salute to vagrancy, anarchism, and the days when Central Park was a refuge for depression-era homelessness, Milestone's delightful film is crammed with half-spoken Rogers and Hart songs lamenting the amount of work it takes to remain unemployed ("You own the world / when you don't own a thing"). There's enough economic savvy and cool Central Park set design here to make it both Brechtian and bucolic, an AS YOU LIKE IT with Central Park as Arden and Jolson the swaggering Mack the Knife from THE THREE PENNY OPERA if he was played by a balding Marx brother; with the evil duke a thousand dollar bill Jolson finds in the trash --the very rumor of which sends the park's unwashed denizens into a near riot. Hard boiled softie newspaper man-turned-Broadway scribe Ben Hecht wrote the shit out of it-- Imagine the Lubitsch touch on a SCARFACE spittoon. One of the many awesome little joys is hearing Frank "The Wonderful Wizard" Morgan saying "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home" six years early!

I've avoided ever seeing THE JAZZ SINGER (1929) on account of my apprehension of boredom, blackface and schmaltz, but now I want to, indeed, must see it. Though he may be a throwback to a bygone age of minstrels in the 'Swanee / how I love ya how I love ya! Mammy!' jazz-hands tradition, there's something blue collar grotesque about Jolson (if he was taller he could play Moose Malloy). He doesn't seem to be imitating black people or minstrels--that's just him - he's a leftover survivor from a bygone age when everyone sang and acted with gigantic smiles plastered on their pusses, irregardless of if they had huge gaps in their teeth. Watching the film nearly 80 years later, he seems like a cross between a  a lost Marx Brother impersonating Maurice Chevalier, and the misbegotten love child of Lauren Hutton and Frankenstein. With his pancake makeup, strange elocution, and black lipstick he seems like some monstrous human railroad track between all races, religions, and classes... in short, America. And respect the unique frumpiness of Harry Langdon as a  socialist agitant trash collector ("your clothes are worn and your socks have holes / but you're plutocrats down to your souls!"), and dig gorgeous Madge Evans as the mayor's amnesiac mistress, whom Jolson heroically rescues when she plunges several feet off a Central Park bridge into the shallow stream below. Needless to say Jolson falls, too, in love, and he decides to get a job to support his soaked siren, much to the shock and horror of his hobo friends and well-wishers. Capitalism, in short, is for lovers, but it's not admirable!

 BRIGADOON
1954- **1/2 - dir. Vincente Minnelli
You never thought a magical Scottish hamlet could be boring, but you're wrong. Vincente Minnelli clearly has no grasp of what makes Scottish culture great, i.e. Scotch whiskey. Alcohol here is clearly associated with a crowded Manhattan bar Gene Kelly and sourpuss drunk Van Johnson inhabit before and after their trip to Scotland (to shoot grouse, of all things). Scotland is played by various uninspired sets on which Kelly climbs and taps and sings like a silly monkey.

Minnelli stacks the deck by making everyone at the bar vulgarians and Kelly's fiancee a social climbing materialistic bitch. But associating booze with big city shallowness doesn't allay the dull piety of the mythical town itself, which is stranded in a extreme form of John Ford chaperone-and-plow malarkey but without John Ford's magic touch. I.e. this ain't the Scottish musical version of THE QUIET MAN, much as it would like to be. For one thing, more booze and fistfights, and ghosts, please. And the widescreen formatting--meant for giant Cinemascope stretch screens-- eschews close-ups and fast edits (such things made audiences nauseous and disoriented on such large canvases)  in favor of long shots on obvious stage sets, where, for example, everyone's dancing feet are at the bottom of the screen, and their heads at the top, duplicating a Broadway theater experience, perhaps, but in failing to explore the magical possibilities of its subject, even on the big screen it's enough to reduce you to napping in all the wrong places.

If you want something magically Scottish, check out I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING or LOCAL HERO. What you get from BRIGADOON is the dry notion that Scottish culture is so inhibited it makes Irish Catholics look like Haight-Ashbury hippies  Considering the awesomeness of the stars--Kelly and my favorite Cyd Charisse--there's some surprisingly awkward dancing in amidst the finery, and the super sexy Cyd is barely recognizable: her legs hidden in thick skirts, shapely upper regions sheathed in a highlands sash. She's supposed to look wan and bonny but often just seems sad and hungover.

Meanwhile Van Johnson is the ugly American personified, grousing about how he came to Scotland to shoot grouse and making alcohol look bad as he drawls off his endless flask and shotguns treed locals. Why does Kelly insist on bringing him along? He's like Ronald Coleman's ungrateful brother in FAR HORIZONS. Why go to Scotland just to deal with that kind of crap? Just don't hang out with him! On the other hand, does Kelly really want to eat haggis and smell peat moss fires and offal for the rest of time immortal? Why doesn't he just go back to New York and find a different bar? One less crowded and boorish? He's a grass is greener type, aye, and sure'n the grass is no greener than in a wee place you can never get to except once every hundred years.

MARAT/SADE
1967 **** - dir. Peter Brook.
Glenda Jackson stabs a guy named Marat during the French Revolution, while the Marquis de Sade looks on, delighted, and corrects flubbed lines--or are his corrections part of the play within the play? Meanwhile the mental institution director interrupts too, but in rhyme, so is he part of the play or not?

What are all these interruptions! Revolution!! It's based on Peter Weiss's play-within-a-play about some drama therapy at the insane asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade (the full UK title is "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade"), and since you're watching this on TV, you're watching a video of a movie of a play within a play about the French Revolution, so there's guillotines, Brechtian frame-bending through a whole maze of fourth walls, and long twisted monologues about walking through the bloody streets of Paris, rolling like a river of severed heads and blood, and bath steam, and the special way syphilis makes you insane (antibiotics had yet to be invented), and hydrotherapy might help for the moment but there's no cure for the madness of trying to create a government for the people when the people are all corrupt, murderous, uneducated, unwashed denizens!

I used to work in the creative arts therapy drama department at Bellevue, so I know the score, and this here's real! Watch out Glenda Jackson doesn't reach right out from the screen and stab you too. Superb on every level, some of the songs are almost Fairport Convention-level psych-folkish. As the NY Times TV critic used to say, pounce. Or in this case, stream! Enjoy the digital fruits of your capitalist bourgeois internet whilst you may.  New Marats are born every day, or am I thinking of mallrats? Either way, we're doomed.

Capsules d'Monstre: GHIDORAH, PHANTASM II, MANSTER, THE SMILING GHOST, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER

1964 - dir. Ishiro Honda

****

I've seen a lot of Godzilla movies as a kid but I never... until lately. Man, GHIDORAH is the best one! Maybe it's Akira Ifukube's great, blowsy, swaggering, ominous-cool score, which perfectly captures the drunken heaviness of these here monster giants; the cues repeat over and over but that's fine. And the dubbing is good for once, the framing is comic book perfection; the colors are bold; maybe it's because it ingeniously integrates a lot of fringe science elements. GHIDORAH Number One!

As the film opens, a bunch of scientists have been having nightly meetings with UFOs and they invited a lady reporter to sit in. When the UFOs don't come, they accuse the reporter of sending skeptical brainwaves out into the atmosphere and scaring the aliens off. When the reporter dismisses the idea that brainwaves even exist, the scientists smile patronizingly. That's cool despite being sexist because it shows the easy way science can flip-flop on issues, condemning non-believers with an array of defense mechanisms, from witch burning to shows like Fact or Faked and Myth-busters. One day they sneer at the 'nuts' who believe UFOs exist, the next day they sneer at the 'cranks' who believe they don't. Look at the scientist's desk above and you see the way science might have matured had not events like Roswell been so effectively hushed up.

Anyway, later that night some hot princess of the mythical kingdom of Sergina (Akiko Wakabayashi) is abducted from her private plane by a UFO right before a terrorist bomb blows it to bits. The next day, scientists investigate a meteor that crashed in the mountains and left a huge Ghidorah egg. The princess appears in a cute cap, now possessed by a Martian (below) for a dockside press conference: "I come from the planet you call Mars! The earth your planet is on the brink of destruction, and you refuse to take it seriously." They laugh. And the hatching egg is their reward. Look who's come all the way from space to show you that three heads are better than one, and killing whales, dolphins, and Nanking is wrong! Ghidorah is a kind of terrorist bomb herself, sent to wipe out violent civilizations throughout the universe before they can become a threat to the Galactic Federation (which is a real thing, according to my in-the-know informants!)

 

So sock it to 'em, Martian lady! Of course, the glee with which Japan is wiped out time and again has become dampened by recent cataclysms, but can we doubt they won't bounce back? So I got to go with Ghidorah on this one, even if those cute Mothra handler sisters are around to sing their little songs to get Godzilla and the latest incarnation of Mothra (still in caterpillar form) to unite against this alien fiend.  Then that awesome blowsy score really stumbles into low, low gear, and the rumble atop the volcanic jungle is on. It's true, I used to root for the bad guys as a child watching Speed Racer. I hated the show and the good guys - so each episode, being five-ish and inexperienced--I kept thinking "This time... this time they'll finally win." They never won! Like me, in kickball. Ghidorah, I want that Mach-5 crushed underfoot!

PHANTASM II 

1988 - dir. Don Coscarelli

***

Who knows where we go after we die? The Shadow, and Don Coscarelli knows, or at least dares to look in the same trans-dimensional direction as fringe theorists like David Icke and Nick Redfern. Like its predecessor, PHANTASM II deconstructs down to reveal what it's like to see the warped mysteries of humanity's archaic funeral rituals through the eyes of a young terrified child and getting lost in the mausoleum while his parents engage in whatever odd formalities parents go through, and being freaked out by the glint of the fading afternoon sun on the shiny marble walls, imagining a flying metal ball coming around looking for you, to drill out your pineal gland (the home of the soul) for use in bizarre fourth dimensional enslavement rites. Also, there's the ingenious STAR WARS-associative use of Jawa fashions for the tall man's undead ghost-dwarf minions.

Considering all the bizarre accoutrements of the funeral trade, you can imagine there being yet another hidden white room in a mortuary, where corpses are compacted for rebirth in a dimension where the gravity is much stronger, the colors morphed, and the winds relentless. The dimension when finally shown eerily resembles near-death experiences of the unlucky ones who miss the white light. Such people report their astral body/soul floating up to the white light and then being snatched by hands emerging from the dark shadows that light the shining light path, yanked into this prison of Hell, where untold despair is instilled and harvested!

Whoa, hey! Too much? Then just enjoy this low key TERMINATOR-meets-EVIL DEAD thrill ride movie, with its periodic in-jokes (the name on one bag of cremation ashes is "Sam Raimi") and pretend you're in a car at a crumbling drive-in in the early 1980s, the world alive with youth, health, and bravado... all of which about to shortly crumble down around you, like the drive-in itself, until all that's left are ashes in an urn, an undead dwarf in a brown robe, texting furiously.

THE MANSTER

1959 - dir. George P. Breakson

***

Here's something you don't see often: a black and white Japanese horror movie where all the actors speak English (i.e. they are not post-dubbed). Pretty awesome, as is the moody but economical black and white photography and surplus of monsters. The story has the evil Dr. Suzuki (Tetsu Nakamara) and his hot assistant (Terri Zimmern) drugging (with experimental mutant-making serum) a dimwitted American journalist named Larry (Peter Dynely) then having Terri seduce him so that he'll stick around Japan and they can monitor him as he d/evolves. Adrift in the Tokyo bar scene, he starts drinking heavily, and skulking around at night killing random people, and cops, lusting for Terri and avoiding his journalistic responsibilities.

Terri Zimmern

Dialogue is awesome in its directness; acting is okay; low-key B-movie expressionism rocks, as in the famous Dali-esque eyeball shoulder scene, and a Val Letwon-RKO kind of midnight ramble through a Zen Buddhist temple. So keenly felts and observed is  the way that serum makes Larry into a hard-drinking, surly mess that I would recommend this movie to rehab centers. There's even some intervention-style drama with a clingy gaijin wife (Jayne Hilton) who wants Larry to come home and live a life of quiet desperation and he can't stand quiet desperation! As we say in AA, I really related.

THE SMILING GHOST

1941 - dir. Lewis Selier

**1/2

This non-nonsense studio B-picture concerns a layabout man-for-hire (Wayne Morris) brought to a mysterious estate to marry an heiress (Alexis Smith) with a rep as 'the black widow' since her last three husbands have died. She wants to find out why so marries our hero as bait. Cue sheet metal thunder and secret panels! Meanwhile a spunky female reporter (Brenda Marshall) hangs around, and an old uncle (Charles Halton) tries to add Willie Best's slackjawed noggin to his shrunken head collection. I've seen some horribly racist caricatures of black people in old horror movies, but nothing quite like this. Willie Best even withholds vital information that could save lives: When he witnesses a secret passage open and shut--even after armed good guys burst into the room moment later--all he can do is run away gibbering and bug-eyed. It's almost enough to make you forget the rest of the movie's pretty good. It's not Best's fault of course, and he does the whole wide-eyed fear thing pretty good--but unlike Mantan Moreland's similar roles, there's no subversive actorly subtext (that I noticed anyway).

Brenda Marshall

Tiffany Bolling and friend

KINGDOM THE SPIDERS

1977 - dir. John "Bud" Cardos

***1/2

A loose remake of THE BIRDS, this spawn of the post-JAWS environ-amok genre, stars William Shatner as a small town Arizona veterinarian and Tiffany Bolling as a bigger town etymologist. Sent in to help when toxicology on a dead calf reveals spider venom, she's the Melanie Daniels and Marcy Lafferty (Shatner's real-life wife at the time) is the Annie Hayworth. The meet cute is at a gas station instead of a pet store but is otherwise the same, and there's still the holing up at the hotel bar with the cross section of the populace, and the big attack with people running around in panic. The Arizona scenery is beautiful with mesas like the ones in STAGECOACH. The worried black rancher (Woody Strode) fearful of losing his livestock in a quarantine-- "he worked for seven years to get that bull!"--is allowed much dignity and concern, so we're slowly climbing up the stereotypes from Best's cowardly manservant to over-serious humble sobriety... it's still a cliche, though, and he and his wife are the first humans to die. It's pretty dumb that the white folks decide to go on a picnic after finding the dead black couple, dumb but typical.

But hey, you know this film is awesome when a tarantula--with scary library music cues filling the soundtrack--slowly climbs up onto Bolling's desk and into the drawer while she's in the shower. When she finds it, Bolling doesn't flinch, just smiles like she's found a kitten, cradles it in her hand, then releases it outside. Tiffany Bolling, in other words, kicks ass! I love the way she towers over Shatner, and gently mocks him when he tries to seduce her, while still letting him do so -- it all adds up to make her reputation amongst the Psychotronic set well-deserved. I instantly ordered BONNIE'S KIDS after seeing this, and rented TRIANGLE (1970). Bill Shatner earns his cult, too, especially when he does an awesome high-stepping dance to not step on any of the spiders. He sometimes failed in that regard, but at least no hairpieces were harmed during the making of this movie.

Columbine Queen: PJ Soles in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

 

Part of the PJ Soles Blogathon on Day of the Woman

The blowing up of one's school was a sacred fantasy to sugar-crazed kids in the 1970s, we imagined films about take-overs and revolts ending with big explosions and gym mats and sneakers raining down over our neighborhood. It was a time long before ADD, Columbine, or Anthrax, wherein we could guzzle sugar and watch cartoons without parental concern, then freely dream about elaborate ways to destroy our daily prison - school, with parents never worrying about our mental health. At Knapp Elementary in Lansdale, PA, we were more into KISS than the Ramones. If KISS starred in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, I might imagine someone stole it from my brain. Irregardless, blowing up your educational alma mater has never since been depicted as such a heroic feat of rock defiance as it is in this 1979 film. If ROCK was released now, well... it just wouldn't be released at all, so why even ponder? As it is, we'll always have 1979, the year of OVER THE EDGE.... and ROCK.

The story concerns the arrival of a new principal (Mary Woronov, drawing on her experience playing cruel dyke prison wardens in AIP WIPs) at Vince Lombardi High. She's determined to weed out the bad kids, such as Riff Randle (Soles) -- the platter-spinning Ramones devotee who just knows if she can get her songs to Joey, he'd sing them, and if PJ Soles can think Joey Ramone is dreamy, there is surely hope for us all. Meanwhile Vince Van Patten is an insecure jock taking make-out lessons from the school's drug dealer, and since wherever Woronov is, Paul Bartel is thar, he's the music teacher who ends up joining the kids side when sides are picked, cuz if Beethoven were a student at Vince Lombardi, he'd be a Ramone!

The music of the Ramones infects the entire rhythm of the film, gradually pulling the narrative away from Randle and Co's high school persecution, for as that song by the Velvet Underground goes, "her life was saved by rock-and-roll / hey baby, rock and roll." And in particular, the album Road to Ruin, which Riff Randle plays while relaxing with a joint in her bedroom, the THC causing Ramones to appear even in her shower.

This fantasy sequence--Joey singing to her while she reclines in bed--is a delight; no hanky panky happens with this spunky minor, the band's too busy playing and syncing to ever submit to the petty lusts that drag the rest of the cast down. Soles and the Ramones remain like puritans of punk, devoted only to the spirit of anarchy and destruction. And when the Ramones come to town, read aloud Riff's letter on stage and come to the school the next day; they instinctively know this is a nonsexual thing, and they're cool with it. They tap into Randle's almost spiritual devotion to the primitivist rock energy of the Ramones. They live and breathe punk rock, with sex--if anywhere--still deflated in the trunk... as nature intended.

 

This is awesome because without this kind of sublimation, the female adolescent fantasy cannot develop at its own pace. It's threatened from without and whole roads of exploration and rebellion are avoided by the wary girl traveler, and the result are movies about teenage girls that are mired in boytoy mirroring and anti-objectification/prurience dichotomies like LITTLE DARLINGS, FOXES, and FOXFIRE. In ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL there's none of that, aside from the confused hormonal intentions of the side players. The Ramones become Riff's surrogate beast of burden between the ponies of childhood and the boyfriends of full maturity. For their part, the Ramones see in Randle someone who's love of their music transcends the urge to merely ride in the tour bus and put out.  What a joy to find this kind of thing, since in addition to the issue of blowing up the school, letting underage high school girls around mature punk rocker skeeves would raise so many eyebrows in a few short years that the laws of self-fulfilling prophecy would take effect and a parent's worst fears become realized.

 

The big concert setpiece of the film finally un-moors the movie from traditional sex comedy orbit altogether (the success of PORKY'S the following year undid the progress and once again sex and boys were all girls were allowed to think about) and into the wild frenetic anarchy of a good all-ages punk rock show. Director Alan Arkush had worked as an usher for the Filmore, so both this and his unjustly unavailable 1983 masterwork GET CRAZY reek of the pot, cigarette and a thousand crushed-together perfumes ambiance of rock concerts, resulting in a chaotic but good-natured you-are-there feeling! Hey! Why not? And the kids can come too, that's the important thing. I've been there and can ascertain, this is how it is/was.

As the villain, Mary Woronov's character is all bark and no bite, plotting dastardly vengeance but mostly just standing around and covering her ears noting "they play very loud!" This is as it should be of course, implying Woronov's principle understands Lacan and the nature of the Big Other as the non du pere, meant to be overturned and challenged, and indeed existing for no other purpose than as a challenge to be overcome. After slaying the dragon and becoming king, the king's first duty is to replace the dragon for the next contestant.  "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" is not an order but a challenge to become that very curtained man... and Riff Randle rolls right past him.

Soles, who so often played best friends to final girls--goofy, devoid of any shred of insecurity or self-consciousness--lets fly to become an infectiously goofball lead here. Her only lead role in any major film, she's fantastic: her little lithe body bouncing around covered in the bright shiny colors that had not yet come to signify the encroaching 1980s; her natural tendency to make funny faces, bugging her eyes out, tightening and pursing her thin lips; it can't be dismissed as mugging since it's so perfectly apt for the age.

 

Indeed, the film straddles a border between 50s JD movies, 70s teen rock sex and 1980s John Hughes films, with the best of each. There's little in-fighting amongst the high-schoolers, and Riff Randle's honorary Ramone position is based not on the desire for power or dominance--or sexual putting outedness-- but on the purity of her love for the rock and roll rhythm of the Ramones, which makes her fearless in the face of all danger or desire. She's like Lancelot, and the Ramones are her Guinevere.

In short, PJ Soles rocks and if you have problems getting through the first bits of this movie, with ancient Og Oggleby as a school official in a board room scene and all the typical teen sexcom clownery, hold fast, and return to let the rock of the Ramones work its magic. You might end up as I did, bouncing around your living room in the thrall of the incessant jittery magic of their protean punk and alive to PJ's awesome bug-eyed purity. Never adding more smarts than a normal teen would have, and twice as much heedless momentum, her Riff Randle becomes a force for good out of a sheer love of a band, and if a school is blown up in the process, well, in the 1970s that's what we had instead of today's dollar store orgasms. Soles never dies!

 

PS - I actually saw the Ramones play City Gardens in Trenton NJ at least five times in the 1983-91 era. I was bored every time, but for at least a few songs each show I sustained a rock exaltation. The last time I saw them I was finally 21 and could drink in the back room, and so barely peeped my head out at the band. Oh well, any band who incorporates songs from FREAKS ("Hey gabba gabba hey!") is all right with me.

A Plea for Badder Elderly

The recent pair of "Bad" movies - BAD TEACHER and VERY BAD BOSSES - gives me hope for the cinema future. I've not seen either, but I have seen my cinema nation gradually morph from something occasionally edgy into this weird saccharine sarcophagi, where the only bad guys are cardboard super villains whose daddies didn't love them enough, or ourselves.

Another thing is old people. Did no one get old in the 50s so we can have them play crazy old bat lunatics, like Bette Davis set the trend for in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and then Roman Polanski made them even creepier in ROSEMARY'S BABY? Many followed her lead and though none captured Satanic inevitability like Ruth Gordon, or the horror of realizing you're old like Davis; but all tried their best, if they weren't too drunk. They all smoked, told dirty jokes, and fooled around with unwary grips. Has there been any crazy old bats since these, from that golden rhinestone era? The era that brought us aging divas not only wrestling with impending mortality, but chewing its ear off and kicking the referee in the crotch?

The problem with having a youth-obsessed pop culture for too many generations has become apparent in every empty gesture of our rom com heroines, every vacant slackjawed stare of our actors, CGI-laser beamed divided between clean shaven hunks trying to maintain just-sex relationships with hotties from THE BLACK SWAN; and the stoners tell dick jokes and wallow in a post-FREAKS AND GEEKS adolescence while the women comediennes roll their eyes and try to make the best of whatever few dumb lines they have. They're lacking substance, the substance that can only come from being made miserable by live-in relatives.

If they bothered to not only live with their parents but bring in the grandparents and all live under the same roof like before the World War Two, then they'd actually see more old people, and on long enough a basis to be so creeped out they'd have to make movies about it. And forget Hollywood - their old people are all farmed off to Palm Springs, never to be seen again. The rest of us see the old ones on holidays when they are on their best behavior, and in hospitals when they're sucking our future social security up their IV tubes.

Don't blame me, a simple messenger, blame the pre-fab tract house suburbia boom that followed WW2. Soldiers came home from the war and balked at suddenly being expected to adhere to centuries old curfews. Since the rocket-pocket 1950s we've been bred to associate fleeing the nest with being the first step to true fun and freedom. It's only later, much later, that you get the bill for this luxury- and by then you're far too old to benefit from the lesson - you don't know how to act now that you're old. You haven't changed, it's just that now there's only one generation ahead of you, and more creeping behind you all the time, younger and younger... and ever more clueless with only the facts of the internet to guide them, and not the shaky logic and maddeningly repetitive and racist stories of their great grandparents.

I'd love to see, for example, a film about a crazy old lady who lures young men to her on the internet, then drugs them with sticky candy and makes them listen as she reads the bible, or kills them. But nooo, old people won't learn to use the internet, so we'll have to wait til my generation's old enough to crave company. Our actresses will be needing work once their plastic surgeons have finally said "finis!" So maybe they'll be down for it. I know I am. Will BAD TEACHER lead to this crazy old axe murdering bat renaissance? If AA has taught me anything, it's yes.

DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE vs. The Destruction Company

A black magic-dabbling Hollywood star from the 1930s named Lorna Love (Marianna Hill) reaches from beyond the grave to fuck up a couple of married biographers in this priceless 1976 made-for-TV film. Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner play the couple. They move into her crumbling mansion to soak up the atmosphere of her many mementos. With all the spooky stuff going on it takes forever to get started; Wagner likes to brood over the portrait of Lorna (painted by his own late father) hanging in the study. Lorna's beautiful corpse is even kept on display in a glass case out in the backyard as a shrine to her beauty and vanity. What chance does 'the smart one' of Charlie's Angels have against such a powerful REBECCA / LAURA / LIGEIA - ish ghost icon?

Kate is nonetheless sharp as always in her silk scarves and pants, and is beautiful and warm and nurturing and sweet and then menaced by a phantom in a pentagram-covered purple robe. Wagner drinks booze in the den and moons over the portrait, and screens her old films over and over on the wall and he calls Kate crazy. He starts having gold-tinted hallucinations whenever Kate's in danger, thus rendering him useless. In the most awesome moment, his lost Lorna comes to life in a slow mo gold-tinted mirage, smiling and calling his name from inside the film he's projecting! As someone who, as a child, believed he could make Kate Jackson fall in love with him if he stared hard enough at her pictures in Teen Beat, I caught the meta frisson from this scene, big time... projection, man, the anima.

Wagner gets rude, patronizing, and dismissive of Jackson's legitimate worry that someone is trying to kill her and has left a Satanic knife in her drawer and cut her face out of their author's photo. As Kate is so rational and intelligent you start to imagine what Charlie's Angels would be like if every suggestion, clue, or even event the Angels reported was dismissed by Bosley and Charlie as womanly hallucinations and hysterics. They'd need more than an hour to solve the case, that's for sure... or would they?

Anyway, despite all that, the pace is brisk and there's a whole cavalcade of pre-war Hollywood stars in cameos: John Carradine as Lorna's old Svengali-style director; Sylivia Sydney as the nicotine-voiced housekeeper; Joan Blondell as a deranged fan and coven member; Dorothy Lamour, I forget what she does. Marianna Hill is a fine choice as Lorna - a leggy tall blonde you may remember her as Fredo's rebellious Vegas wife in GODFATHER 2.

Being a confirmed sadomasochistic Charlie's Angels fan as a child in the 70s, writhing Sternberg-like on the vine of Kate Jackson pictures I ripped out of magazines on the sly at 7-11, you can imagine how I longed to see DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE, which was mentioned often in TV Guide along with the equally awesome sounding SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, both TVMs that came and went before I was aware due to my parent's strict bedtime laws.That made me imagining of them all the sweeter. I desperately wanted a job at any school with a name like that.

In the pre-Xerox, pre-video 70s, the only way to acquire pictures, you must remember, was to take them with a camera yourself, or buy them, trade them, or steal them. Only with great difficulty could you reprint them (in schools copies were done on mimeograph machines - all the print was in blue smudgy ink). As for films, the best you could do was to get a super 8mm projector and buy little loops from the camera store. These loops had one or two key scenes from the film edited together and running maybe five or six minutes.

Due to that inability to 'own' movies or have instant access to zillions of photos of our favorite stars; our lack of access made images more sacred - more valuable due to their ephemeral nature. There was no way my parents would let me stay up that late, at that age... so I was forced to lie in bed in a prepubescent miasma, imagining Kate Jackson in all these ghostly, Satanic, and love-death situations.

 

You could say that obsessive, morbidly image-obsessed pagans like me have had the last laugh with DVD and the internet--having nearly every film we ever imagined or read about available at our fingertips, but it's a devil's bargain. The unbearable surplus, the vast, the staggering force of ever-expanding internet sites, online books, streaming films, etc., saturates the eye to the point of numb despair, robbing us of our grand masochistic longing, decreasing the value of everything. Sooner or later, all our deepest fantasies end up in the $1.99 Used -- Very Good bin at Amazon.

So Lorna Love died, for there were no more worlds to conquer.  The center cannot hold and without that externalized desire, the subject implodes under its own horrid weight. Look at these recent revolting news stories about 'the Destruction Company' - where dumb rich kids need to pay someone else for the right to smash their own TV sets, and you see how universal availability forces the entitled into a crisis of desire. The more stuff we have, the less it has value... and for the person who constructs their whole identity around ego and ownership, this is a truth too horrible to face. The race is lost due to all the races being run simultaneously. So rather than go back and bet on Devout Non-Attachment in the Third, they just buy the horse that lost, and pay for the right to shoot it to death. Such people are what DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE are all about. Rather than admit they can't get their youth back, they try to stop time; to freeze themselves in amber; to go rigid in their glory rather than let go and flow in the current of anonymity, to relish the disillusionment that comes with attaining your desire in order to move into egolessness.

Of course, you can always pick your obsession more wisely - find something very hard to attain. Pine with me then for that legendary original edit of Orson Welles' MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), yet to be unearthed in some Brazilian vault,  if it even exists.

As you may know, Welles' finished an original cut of the film, more or less, in Rio, while his studio butchered it all down to under two hours and dumped into theaters.  So even though the version that sometimes shows up on TCM seems boring and indulgent, and leading star Tim Holt plays a drab and uninteresting fop. I pine and long for the day when the original cut is found... that is my film geek grail.

But! Confident they'll never find it, I'm spared the anxiety of having to actually buy it for $39.99 on Criterion Blu-ray if it ever is found, and since I paid so much, having to watch it, I'd have to endure and even like all three hours of claustrophobic late 19th century sound and shadow. AMBERSONS is Welles' AMARCORD, his FANNY AND ALEXANDER, his STAND BY ME, but with the selfish rich brat who taunts Spanky in OUR GANG as the star, the type who would surely join 'The Destruction Company' so he could wail on Joe Cotten's car. 

And what is that crazy translation of the serpent Baudelaire poetry Wagner's reading? We get a long look at the page in his book:

Kisses will I give thee, chill as the moon
and caresses shuddering and slow,
as a writhing serpent uncoiling a tomb.

Like angels with bright savage eyes
I will come treading phantom-wise
Hither where thou art wont to sleep
Amid the shadows hollow and deep.

Alas, the only DVD version of this film--or SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS--comes from the odious Cheezy Flix - those rats who release hard-to-find films on Public Domain multi-generational dupe-quality discs for premium prices-- and yet, perhaps that's for the best, again, for when desires are examined under a Blu-ray HD stethoscope, they tend to dissolve like million dollar ice sculptures in the fires of Hell of our gaze. So at least we can still long for a 'better' edition of these two films, the way Wagner longs for Lorna, even back from the grave trailing blurry clouds of shuddering, slow serpents, uncoiling from the tomb as she comes shambling like a 'Very Poor (VP)' quality first printing of her own sad fanzine.

Netflix Streaming A-Z: D is for DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE (1971)

This 1971 Hammer film, long unavailable on DVD is the States, acts as a kind of HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN Victorian era all-star murderer cast, with the implication that the Jack the Ripper got started when Burke and Hare were lynched by an angry London mob, thus depriving Dr. Jekyll of fresh girl glands for his experiments in prolonging life.  Directed swiftly and smartly by Roy Ward Barker, it stars Ralph Bates as Jekyll, who reasons that in order to prolong his life, so he has time to cure all diseases in the world, it's okay to murder prostitutes for their glands, cutting them up so it's not easily apparent what organ he was after, Ripper-style.

But this movie has a cynical detachment from his struggle. We root for the result of his glandular tests since it means he gets a sex change and morps into the fabulous Mrs. Hyde, played by Martine Beswick, who at least is a cold, calculating sexy killer and not some deluded hypocrite with a yen to make it in the history books.



Martine Beswick was one of my dad's favorite science fiction actresses growing up. She was the hot Neanderthal rival of Raquel Welch in 1000 YEARS BC (1967). She was a hot CIA agent working with Bond in THUNDERBALL (1965). She tore it up as a bitchy queen in PREHISTORIC WOMEN. She was everywhere sexy British cinema needed to be. Her sexuality was robust and uninterested in flattering or teasing weak men. And woe to her girl rivals!

As Ms. Hyde, her astonishment at her awesome breasts during the first transformation is hilarious, reminiscent of Ellen Barkin's first scenes in SWITCH. And when s/he notices her hair's grown substantially longer in the few minutes of transformation you feel her conveying a slight comical mirth about the nature of fantasy, shrugging it off as the whims of her unseen director. Why bother explaining how one's hair can grow six inches in a matter of seconds? And be shiny, sexy, and well combed, make-up on perfectly? Drag queens who labor four hours to look pretty must be miffed at the ease with which pasty old Jekyll becomes this bombshell.

 

Adding to the all-Victorian splendor is a Nicholas and Kate Nickelby style family upstairs, with the elderly mom (Dorothy Allison) at the piano, and the hot sister Susan (Susan Brodrick), longing for the cold Jekyll while Nicholas-y Howard (Lewis Flander) longs for Hyde, who is "a widow," as Jekyll explains, passing his alter-ego off as his own sister! She gets a big Italian soap opera piano cue when she materializes, like it's love at first sight in the mirror. Meanwhile his professor mentor (Gerald Sim) who tells Jekyll "get a good woman and one day you'll look in the mirror and see a changed man." Rather than the hoped for lesbian seduction, Hyde's desire leaks over into Jekyll, resulting in Bates making a kind of unconscious pass at Howard. Right there, that's four stars. Netflix you rule!