THE BIG CUBE (1969) - Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser

Acid has long been considered a safe, healthy, happy, spiritually freeing drug, at least by me in the late 1980s, but even then I was a conscientious individual ever aware of the mind-bending, never-ending roller coaster of terror that results from taking too much --not to mention the left-out feeling of boredom and missed opportunity that results from taking too little, and by extension the danger of trying to then take more, before the first hits have given their all. A very, very powerful substance is our friend LSD. One drop can set your soul free to be alive on inter-dimensional levels beyond time and space. Five drops and you better get sloppy drunk... fast. Or, if no one can spare a Valium, you can always chug some Nyquil before the demons get you.

Chakris advises his ant customers

If you're malicious and unscrupulous and have a a vial of liquid you can do a great deal of damage to someone's conception of reality by emptying said vial into someone one's drink. The CIA did some notorious experiments in that regard, and much clawing out of eyes and off of faces ensued. Even if you know what you're getting into you're liable to claw your way through this disguise before you make it to the ER and its waiting drip of sweet Thorazine. The equivalent of cutting or anorexia at the time, in my crowd, was, I remember, taking like half a sheet of blotter in a last ditch effort to break through the veil before the depression makes you do something even more desperate (this being long before Prozac went mainstream). Those who dared always wound up hospitalized.

Pamela Rogers (left) almost saves Lisa from being a stone drag

A similar thing occurs with the maligned Ropey, i.e. Rohipynol. Today it's stigmatized as 'the date rape drug,' which means, yes, it removes inhibitions and zonks you out and eliminates memory and motor coordination and spiking anyone's drink without their consent should be a crime in and of itself. However, in small doses, taken intentionally, with a consensual partner, it can be rather liberating. A half a pill makes for a dynamite Halloween party; a whole pill makes it suddenly Sunday.

All of which is a preface to the candy-colored opus of bargain basement glitz and now generational posing known as THE BIG CUBE. An underrated camp classic from 1969, year of the Manson, and starring Lana Turner as a former Broadway star who's retired (in a Mexico-L.A. hybrid) with her new wealthy industrialist husband (Dan O'Herlihy) and his sheltered 'pure' stepdaughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg), who dresses like she's still 12 and at her first church social.

Lisa reacts not well to the new step-mom, and in a passive-aggressive moment of naivete, takes up with a smooth-talking med student played by George 'Shark' Chakris and his gang of former and future lovers and hipster pallies, including the cat-like blast and cool soul of the film, Bibi (Pamela Rogers). Captive Wild Woman (from whom I cribbed many of these screenshots) loves Pamela Rogers in this film, and I totally dig it:

Saving it all from becoming a big snore-fest is Pamela Rodgers as Bibi, who appears to have landed from the planet DumbSlut1969. She is the BEST! I was going to include some of her dialogue but then I found a YouTube clip (see below) that does her much more justice. I could never convey the fantastic bubble-brained delivery she strives to deliver so expertly. I LOVE all scenes featuring Bibi and only wish the entire movie revolved around her. (more)

 Alas, Bibi is only on the periphery, as the story has places to go, and drive crazy. Chakris' med student status means he has unlimited access to commercial grade LSD and since he uses it for evil he's a dangerous mix of Manson and a SHAMPOO-style gigolo. LSD wasn't even officially illegal until around '68 and was used all over for psychiatric treatments (with great effect, making its banning the true crime). And when the dad conveniently dies in an off-camera yachting accident, the stage is set for the unscrupulous doser and Lisa to drive the already shaken Lana over the edge via massive LSD spiking of her Valium supply.

An interesting comparison can be made between this film and the AIP title ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO! (1968), which also concerns an heiress getting involved with the now generation and letting a charismatic young cult leader type convince her to arrange the deaths of her rich parents (Jennifer Jones fills the Lana Turner glamorous mom role) and let the gang move into the mansion. ANGEL kind of loses momentum by the time it decides to critique materialism, while CUBE ends up being a self-reflexive epiphany ala Freud (the only way to 'cure' Lana of her strange affliction is to write a play about her boating accident so she can make peace with her drowned husband). The subtext bespeaks a very conservative prurience about this new craziness amongst the youth. It's like once you go into the world of LSD the only way out is to go post-modern Brechtian and re-imagine your life as a play which you can then act out with a different ending. And of course, that's how it happens in real life!

The moments with Lana on acid are freaky, but the really scary moment is when Chakris spikes the drink of a guy at the club... just for being a douche. The guy freaks out, starts tearing up the joint and is thrown out on the street raving like a foam-mouthed, face-clawing lunatic. As someone whose been there, I had a lot of sympathetic frisson for this clown. Taking the right dosage can be like being lifted up the ladder of your own evolution. Too much is like having the ladder shoved down your throat while Hell's full roster of demons peel your skin off and every kid who ever hurt you in grade school materializes like accusatory, sneering ghosts to laugh at your extreme skinless nakedness.

Acid is shown in the film almost purely as a weapon in THE BIG CUBE, and it shows how it's too dangerous to be left to criminals. Legal, it could be diluted to the point where overdose was a difficult task, in the twilight world of schedule one substances, it's a risk in the best of times. So... know your dealer, stay away from sleazy gigolo med students, and err on the side of prudence til your batch's strength is tested. Or you could just say no, but don't you want to see what heaven and hell look like before you die?

Speaking of movies, Michael Frost at Helsinki Productions as used footage from the CUBE as jumping off points into deep strangeness. They are awesome and truly weird. If for no other reason, THE BIG CUBE is a classic. 



Here's the second in what we can only hope is a million part series, LANA TURNER AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (I'm hoping the next one is LANA TURNER'S PERSONA). Stick around for the climax, where Turner is revealed as the Goddess worshipped by the cats of the blue and pink inter-dimensional plane of cats!

Men Who Are Frozen

Top to Bottom: Forever Young; Captain America; Matter of Life and Death

Is FOREVER YOUNG (1992, top) in its blessed ignorance of the 9/11 to come, a sequel out-of-time to CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011)? Taken together they form a Moebius strip: AMERICA ends 70 years after it begins, with a psychedelic steampunk abstract version of WW2--replete with octopus swastika that's a cross between the dragon swastika of the Thule-esque fringe group in HELLBOY and the 'later' insignia for S.P.E.C.T.R.E... FOREVER YOUNG begins in 1939 and ends 53 years later, in the then current moment of 1992. Both film's stars death defy (Mel Gibson in YOUNG is a test pilot) and both are deeply frozen in their (and our nation's) prime--one is motivated grief, one by sacrifice.

In this way there's also some echoes throughout all this with Powell and Pressburger's classic STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, AKA A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946). David Niven isn't deep-frozen in that one, but he does hang suspended between life and death after he has to jump from his burning bomber without a parachute, and like Hellboy, Captain America, and Mel Gibson in FOREVER YOUNG, he has a hard time talking to the girl he loves, June (Kim Hunter). Oh, he can talk to her when he thinks he's going to die, and she's safely on the other end of a radio receiver, trying to guide him in through the fog from bomber command. Their chemistry in their scene is terrific, but then again they aren't really in the same scene at all, or even the same altitude. But they fall in love just the same. In wartime there is no room for waffling and being coy. When love strikes, the victims act, in great spasms of each-breath-may-be-your-last intensity. The thought of having to die and not be with June is too much for Niven to bear, though his angelic summons bearer consoles him he may get to meet her again... when she's 97.

So the age thing comes up again. Men are immortal but the women age.  The man snoozes through the decades in ice or clouds without suffering the long-term wear and tear that erases the youthful bloom from the woman. And what happened to the lady Captain America (Chris Evans) left behind in the 1940s, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell)? Atwell is aces and I appreciate they made her way tougher than any Lois Lane-type, but still she seems to have traveled back in time from our more liberated decade. Unless I missed something in the credits, by the time 2011 rolls around, she's presumably wicked old or dead.

What in 1992 with Mel Gibson became a geriatric-romantic fantasia as he races to find his old bitty becomes in 2011 not even worth asking about; a mere regret. Captain A. notes to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D (though Fury too, presumably was frozen since he fought WW2 as Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos and looks relatively young... and suddenly black), "I had a date." According to the Comicvine, Peggy Carter is "residing at the Larkmoore Clinic due to old age and possibly Alzheimer's disease."

You think Mel would have let that stop him?

Luckily for Mel's lovelorn pilot he starts to rapidly age soon after he's thawed from his (co-invented with George Wendt) cryogenic prototype. Thawing him, by accident, is a plucky young boy (Elijah Wood) and his pal who help Mel reach his eighties right as he reunites with his lost love, who just happens to have a landing strip-sized front lawn. For Captain A., however, there can be no such strip and no such Wood. Seventy years is just too damned long to pick up the pieces. And so it is on this past Thanksgiving I celebrated via and through CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, a country built on the urge to escape... from religious oppression, from time, from the ice, from girls your own age.

But Americans don't stop there. Even in our new safe haven we knew that to be free and safe and cozy we must go deeper still, into the tinsel-and-celluloid palm trees, into the pulp novel and comics, into 3-D and Cinemascope, ever searching for a new and novel way to chill ourselves out, to get away from our parents, or our screeching spouses, or our needy, nagging children. Freezing ourselves, as Americans, becomes the new sky-diving, the new crack, the new coke, better than a quart of bourbon and a W.C. Fields tape. You go to bed, and when you wake up technology and changing tastes and inflation have altered the landscape so fast that in a mere half a century you may as well be on Mars.... and you skip the hangover.

The bad guy, the Red Skull, is seen in alternating set-ups, Hugo Weaving doing a Christophe Waltz accent in the key of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK meets JONAH HEX-style world domination. He's real only in the need of the creators to outdo the Nazis, to take evil one better, in insignia and in style. Captain America was always a throw-back to the dawn of comic books, when nearly every superhero tangled regularly with the Axis, including Captain Marvel, Captain Midnight, Captain Blackhawk, and so forth, and the colors of their uniforms needed to be bright and distinct from the backgrounds for the crude 4-color newsprint process. These early comics were cozily satisfying, but their idiotic use of sidekicks (Bucky Dent is here at least an adult) and easy victories has made them easily outgrow-able. Sidekicks were abandoned once the fans of comics grew up and took over the writing jobs.

 

But seriously, does anyone really love Captain America? No. He seems like he was created by some drab civics committee to deflect flak about juvenile delinquency. Comic book fans in the 1980s loved, as I did, the Fantastic Four when drawn by Kirby or John Byrne. We loved the X-Men as written by Chris Clarendon. We loved Frank Miller's stint with Daredevil, but Captain America (I presume since I never read the CA comics) could never get too dark, he stood for something, and thus seemed wooden, like a support rod for a tomato plant --and here the baroque steampunk version of WW2 is, in retrospect, vaguely disrespectful. In the 1940s comics it was okay to give Nazis superpowers and gigantic death rays, but it seems now to diminish the true heroics of the men and women who fought in that war. And when I see villains wasting time staring  at glowing green or blue power sources I begin to think of RED SONJA (1985). Man, I really wanted that movie to be good. But it wasn't. Each bad scene and haircut stretched time to tedium where freezing oneself to get to the credits, seemed to be already happening. Red Skull fares only moderately better in that regard. Red does not mean hot in these cases. Like Captain America, Red Sonja even as a comic character seemed exist soley to indulge some base instinct (patriotism is the last refuge of the sexually frustrated).

As a comic reading middle schooler, is it worth it to escape the dread of having to make a move on a pretty girl with your whole rep hanging in the balance as buddies egg you on from across the playground, without blushing like a moron, or feeling your knees were going to collapse beneath you? All the self-sabotage made retreat into comic book-reading on my bedroom beanbag chair all but the only option, the great American escape story.

In the summer, in the early 80s, I'd put my feet up on both sides of the central air vent, letting my crotch cool from the blasts of arctic frost. What I mean is, I never had time to have a child thanks to permafrost sterility, over-population, and varicoceles. And all my loves now since aged into dreadful moms and withered forty year-olds. It's enough to make me wear a beard, and a mask of a younger man to cover my too-late completely blushless mummy skin. If I freeze myself until their grandchildren are over 18, does that make me skeevy to hit on them when I am woken? These are no longer just the concerns of 100 year-old hunk vampires, but of cryogenic America, a country built on the freedom to defy authority, natural aging processes, time, space, and the lessons of history. 

Freeze me, then, Big Red Sonja Skull, so I can miss Christmas and airport anxiety and just magically get to the time when that AVENGERS movie is finally released... as an eye drop of digitally encoded biotechnology that lets me dream it in 4-D. Freeze me, December, and let me remember a time when I, too, felt human... and 22.

When I was 22, I had a very good year.

Prepare the ray and let's pull this spinning planet to a stop. Lois Lane crawls through the bushes looking for her Indiana Jones blue pills but there is no blue pill. That's what no one told Neo - the blue pill was a sugar placebo. There never was a choice of not burning in blushing idiot reject hell. Every decade spent hiding in the cold just postponed our initiation until the girl we wanted to ask to the prom went and married someone else, and is now dust, or worse, a mom.

Thanksgiving with the Matriarchy: THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME (TVM-1978)

This rare and delightfully strange TV movie, based on the Thomas Tyron novel, makes fine post-autumnal equinox-style viewing. It's all in the name: harvest, home, and it's about family, and agrarian matriarchal cults that bring back the old ways but.... I've said too much already. They may be listening, the cornucopia held up to the door to hear my whispered clacking.

Anyway, iis a strange feminist-phobic film starring a young Rosanna Arquette, a Bette Davis-eyed matron, and TV vets like Linda Marsh and Michael O'Keefe. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and I never saw the end. Parents made me go to bed. I missed the ends of countless movies in those hard years. But I heard the end from the kids at school, and I never forgot THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME.

The story involves the typical suburban family settling in a strange New England town. A blind man listens to books-on-tape there. How did he get blinded? What does he know too much about? Why do women run everything like some Neil LaBute nightmare come to life?

Would Camille Paglia dig this movie? She would. Is it the perfect family film to see on youtube in 13 chapters while your dad watches football, or your grandparents aw gee over the family fare that chokes TCM on holidays? It would. Long live the sisterhood of the scythe!

Part 1 of 13

Twilo When I was Young

"Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence. It cannot always be understood by social models, which feminism, as an heir of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, insists on imposing on it... It cannot be "fixed" by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society." - Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

"I can't help it if you might think I am odd / If I say I'm not loving you for what you are
but for what you're not." -- Bob Dylan, "I'll Keep it with Mine"

 Haters love to dismiss the Twilight films sight unseen, but they do so at their own peril. The New Sincerity, you can't escape, any more than our collective rattletrap beachfront condo can escape the wrath of 2012's rising tides. Will you be drowned in the pool of tweenage tears, or stand up and be counted, neck seared by the puncturing flames of angst along the water's edge?

I'm excited about the EMERGING DAWN or whatever it's called. When I flew down to visit my mom and grieve my late father this weekend, pictures of Kristen Stewart rubbing her flat white pregnant with half-vampire baby belly were all over the USA Todays and NY Times papers floating around the airport lounges and airplane seats. In the rush of pressurized cabins and the endless boarding calls, these pictures took on an unheimliche aura that I found irresistible.  Then, watching ECLIPSE and NEW MOON on my mom's huge flat screen I could appreciate the films' sublime mix of gorgeous scenery, operatic brooding (the kind WB Aaron Spelling himbos only dream of) and mythic family dynamics. The latter in particular is so strong --the sense of belonging or wanting to be belong, or about to be initiated into a pack of cool older kids--and so central to any alienated youth fantasy's success you'd think it would be a regular feature of teen movies, but you'd be wrong, and that in itself shows what idiots most filmmakers are. Like overpaid hack Joe Ezterhaz's Catherine Trammel, who is given Lecter-like powers of manipulation thanks to her 'Bachelor's in Psychology', Mormon author Stephanie Meyers wins by default, because her fantasy world is genuinely Jungian, not Freudian, not smarmian, not dickheadian. It never snickers or leers, and even when confronted with a bunch of muscled Native American males, there's never a wolf call. Just as the douche bags and dillweeds never make it past the chicken wire fence of our psyches, so too is the Pacific Northwest of Meyers' imagination a perfect mirror of a genuine dreamworld. That it's a 15 year old girl's dreamworld and not mine matters not. In dreams we are all ageless, and gender is as flexible as set and setting, we all dream Tiresias. All that matters for true myth to function is that the chivalry of Camelot meet the wild woods of Hans Christen Andersen; that the nightmare projections of lonely girls making out with their tear-stained pillows in the dead of night sometimes come to life in white-as-a-sheet complexioned animae; that cool music by Bon Iver and Mazzy Star-stained chanteuses find its ultimate visual in the misty mountain hops of the Pacific NW.

As an older viewer I identify neither with the Edwards nor the Jacobs, but with the moldy old growth forest bearing witness to their duels. I view it all as the Merlin-Green Man or Tiresias, bearing fathomlessly patient witness to the unfurling events from the vantage point of the fern camera. And since most straight guys in their 40s like me wouldn't give the Twilight films a viewing even if they were forced to on a plane, I take it as a duty to flaunt my championing, even as I question the 'rightness' of it. I'm not sure I'll ever actually pay to go see Breaking Dawn in the theater, but I salute its existence eventually on DVD rental. And when I'm old and enfeebled like T.S. Eliot I'll probably buy the complete set on blu-ray to watch all alone in long sittings when I'm emotionally disturbed and afraid to leave the house. But until then, come with me into my past writings on this great series. First, ECLIPSE:

"...the realization of modern myth requires teenagers to resonate, as all fairy tales involve the very young. Never forget that in the days of King Arthur, the oldest person–Merlin–was probably in his early 30s...  Considering the sexist neoconservative consumerism-product placed orgasm-oriented flicks that predominate so-called ‘women’s pictures’ or rom-coms, TWILIGHT alone understands the supernatural power that can be had in rejecting bland hand-me-down values. The pro-virginity aspect is the 21st century Antigone move, the way not being a virgin was in the 1920s. I know very well the way a woman you haven’t had sex with can inspire like no other muse, and the way a 100-year old lecher in a teen idol’s body can wreak merry havoc on pouty-lipped teenager brain stems, and I know these things to be true, and that as an artist or writer, that kind of inspiration should always trump the pitiful and misleading call of the proprietary orgasm. Edward knows it too…. sigh (Bright Lights, 1/11)

Then, on the first two films and the general 'concerned mom' backlash over the second film I wrote the feature length (for Bright Lights Film Journal)

"Eternal virginity via sacrifice in the Twilight-verse thus equals the preservation of youth, of sparing a beautiful creature the passage into the world of cruel, devouring nature. This is essentially what Edward works towards in refusing to punk Bella out to the vampire way of life, to prevent her from having any traumatic or otherwise significant experiences, to keep her isolated from "the real." Yet the imaginary level he exists in hinges on promises of danger, sex, and being turned into a vampire for it to hold any interest at all. For Edward to, in a sense, "exist" in Bella's life, she must stay virginal; the blood he drinks is supposedly from animals or something, but it's clear his spiritual power is derived from keeping Bella sustained in perpetual adolescence." - "Someone to Fight Over Me." (Bright Lights #68, May 2010)

I bring in this Neil Diamond song as 'Shilo' is an excellent anima example, Shilo as the Edward to Neil Diamond's Bella: "When no one else would come / Shilo, you always came."And of course, Twilo (left) was a once very popular, now closed, mostly gay but extremely hetero friendly all-night dance club - the place to go when the rest of New York was finally closed, the sun was coming up, and dawn was breaking, and you were still too high on ecstasy and/or cocaine and/or acid and/or shrooms to consider going to sleep.

That breaking dawn vibe of your heart beating like mad at the thought of bedding one of the three girls still up with you and how to sneak away from the others, and where the hell your keys are but you're so high you don't care, that's what the Twilight films conjure up for me, that and the aching soul vibe that my mom's LP of Neil Diamond's 12 Greatest Hits gave me as a six year old in the 1970s, where Kate Jackson was my Shiloh, and she always came, but I had to go bed before Charlie's Angels came on (damn you, ABC!)

And, from 1/7/08 (The Beautiful and the Darned) after the first film came out:

"TWILIGHT it must be remembered, has nothing to do with "real" high school or "real" horror films - it's a fantasia of maturity deferment; a snapshot of how pregnant with dangerous, giddy possibility the world seems before one gets their first "bite." It's permanently frozen at the moment of rapture/rupture, right before the disillusionment of the first sexual experience (see also: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) with a guy who promises you the world, then splits. The idea of an ageless vampire here becomes an excuse for the eternal virgin prepubescence; an eternity dwelling at the edge of the cliff that all your friends are now beginning to dive off of (and looking kind of busted when they resurface, if they ever do).

"Aren't movies primarily vehicles for escape? In the case of TWILIGHT, what the girl demographic is escaping from is their own wooden stake penetration, the pink dawn of the mighty crowing cock. Who can blame them? I remember my revulsion at seeing hairy 1970s nudist magazines being circulated in elementary school. Could people really be doing these things with their... ? It seemed unsanitary, violent and most of all, painfully humiliating. The giddy night of the prom starts out flowers and anticipation, it ends up pig's blood and Trip Fontaine splitting before you wake up in the wet grass of the football field.

"What eased the fear of this sullied maturation when I was of TWILIGHT age? Pamela Sue Martin as TV's NANCY DREW, Kate Jackson in CHARLIE'S ANGELS...much of TV at the time fostered a dependable sexlessness, the promise of an eternity of hand-holding and chaste confessions of love and adoration, as opposed to a humiliating orifice merger."

  Finally, from 1/20/09, Tortured Longing is the New Coke:

"TWILIGHT fuels the fire of sadomasochistic alchemy wherein torture becomes pleasure, denial becomes acceptance, submission becomes freedom. Through recognition and release of the associated fear, not having becomes having it all. The girls of TWILIGHT ween themselves off desire through recognition of its impossibility. They’ve been set free, like Jonathan Pryce at the end of BRAZIL, looking out at the clouds while one of his torturers (Michael Palin) sadly realizes, “he’s gotten away from us, Jack!” These TWILIGHT girls have gotten away from us, Jack. They’ve found a streak of neo-Victorian repression that leads them clear away from Big Brother and his sublimation dream wheel."

The dream wheel, damn right. So this Thanksgiving, if you see a weird looking dude alone in the Twilight Twilo Shilo sea, getting his ticket with shaky hands, the 90s ecstasy abuse still leaving nervous tremors long after the last club's closed, have a little sympathy and don't judge him as some perv... maybe he just finds in the quiet passions and purple scenery and lush music and pouts and paleness something 'real' for his psyche that no other avenue can provide. We Tiresiae and Merlins and vampires all transcend our age, gender, and desire. And PS - there's nothing gay about... THE IMMORTALS!

Pre-Code Capsules 9: BEHIND THE MASK, DR. X, TROUBLE IN PARADISE, BLESSED EVENT, THE BLUE ANGEL

BEHIND THE MASK
1932 - ***
The great forgotten Jack Holt plays the worst federal agent in the world, endangering his witnesses and letting himself be snowed over by any old disguise or pretense, but he he has a yen for weird undercover work in this pulpy thriller, and he's not afraid to go to jail and pose as a convict so he can win the trust of nervous flunky Boris Karloff. It's all so he can hit him up later for a job and expose a racket that hides dope in caskets and is masterminded by a shadowy Mabuse-type. Edward Everett-Sloan is around and there's a vast spy network full of dark-eyed bit players.  Meanwhile Holt's girl, Constance Cummings, tries to save her dad, a doctor in 'a lot of trouble' and a little romance bloometh. And she's even remarkably capable with a .45, which is a switch for these things.

It all climaxes in a scene where the masked evil doctor makes a great show of refusing to give the tied-down Holt anesthetic for a planned vivisection, because he wants him to experience the magic moment when excruciating pain becomes ecstasy. Batailles and dimestore pulp come together with the Universal horror stock company so you need to see it, but it's not until the last five minutes that it approaches the cock-eyed madness of any five minutes of DR. X (1933).

BLESSED EVENT
1932 - ***1/2
If you've been always a bit cold on Lee Tracy this is the film that will make you warm up. He's like Jimmy Cagney crossed with the adenoidal scarecrow as the quintessential fast-talking gossip columnist, ushering in a new low in journalism via the ratting out of 'blessed events' - i.e. children born less than nine months after the couple's been married, or outside of wedlock, or etc. Remember when that was a scandal? Me neither. Highlight: Tracy bluffs Allen Jenkins' mob hitman via a monologue about an electric chair execution he witnessed that brings Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY-worthy manic pantomime to some balls-out ghastly places. (The infamous electric chair picture chronicled in the Cagney film PICTURE SNATCHER is seen).

As he talks and goes on in his demonstration of the execution Tracy gets more and more hysterical, his voice cracking, movements getting sharp and jerky as he describes the anguish of waiting in hopes of  a reprieve, the shaky steps of the last mile, puking up the last meal, the rigor mortis and hair burning. It's the sort of thing that only the pre-codes could delve into, and this delves so deep you're quaking along with Jenkins by the end, and all traces of your dislike of Tracy have been obliterated in the burnt hair and ozone-rich air. 

Roy Del Ruth directed and the rapid patter pace is awesome except when Dick Powell's lame songs slow things down. Edwin Maxwell, Ned Sparks, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Jack La Rue, and Rita Cunningham all come over to the table, adding plenty of moxy. Add references to Jews. ("Do you know many Jews there are in New York?" - "Oh, dozens!"), Amos and Andy, and a wild-eyed girl at 'in trouble' played with deranged ferocity and desperation by a ragged-looking creature named Isabell Jewell (left), and you have a whipsmack pre-code that makes your scalp stand on end. PS - You will also come out of this film learning what 'nadir' means.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE
1932 - ****
It took awhile for the greatness of this film to resonate with me but now I dig the way the film doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, but bothers to fill it with Italian, and then French, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room. I love the elaborate tale of how fast gossip travels, so that Miriam Hopkins is getting verification requests from duchesses mere minutes after being spotted in the lobby by a nosy count. (and it's all rot, of course). While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or Melvyn Douglas, or even Ronald Coleman, he swoons well and convinces you, through two layers of subterfuge, that he's genuine as a man confident in his sexuality, in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him.

Who wouldn't be? Miriam displays her wide, loose midsections proudly in some tight-clinging dresses, giving you the vibe that, as Dave's mom used to say, "She moves cunt-first." I love the way their first kiss on the couch seems to make them slowly dissolve until the couch is empty.

As always, Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles are Francis's effete, bitchy suitors. And Gustav Von Seffeyritz  humbugs with gusto as the chairman of the board who suspects Marshall is a crook, just as he is himself, the blighter. But who would be able to resist robbing Kay Francis?

"I'm a saaad panda..."

THE BLUE ANGEL
1930 - ***
BLUE ANGEL might best be understood as the chrysalis between the caterpillar of the silent era's 'deformed circus freak loves pretty trapeze artist' plot boilerplate which Acidemic contributor Budd Wilkins has termed the "masochistic melodrama" genre (See his fine Chaney reviews here)  and the sound era pre-code butterfly of the Hollywood Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations. As such it's neither here nor there, like watching Wallace Beery get stuck in the doghouse door trying to sneak out of the cast of MGM's FREAKS and defect to Paramount rom-coms. 


But Emil Jannings is a damn unsightly kind of creepy crawler, way uglier and uncharismatic than Beery, and it's clear Sternberg can't stand his character. Rather than stir our sympathy Jannings' ever more out-maneuvered Herr Professor inspires nothing but ennui so there's little masochistic payoff. He's asking for a take-down; his smug judgment of Lola and her postcards (which he finds in his student's schoolbooks) sets him up like a turkey under Lady Eve's axe. And as he makes his downward slide, his slow motion expressionist pantomime reaches for grand tragedy in a way that makes you think Chaney is down to his last few faces, and is searching vainly in the mud for one more piece of sawdust and/or tinsel. With his bug-eyed outraged head facing the camera from the same angle, round glasses and Satanic facial hair swirling, Jannings works very hard at keeping his head always in the center of the frame while his body twists and turns like a big old bug caught in a spider web. But to what effect? Nevah vanted doo.

 

Shot in Weimar Germany before her studio-ordered nose job, molar removal and diet,  Dietrich would be unrecognizable here if not for world weary smile and flashing, darting eyes --she might pass for her own sister, the one who stayed in Berlin mit die schwarzwaldkuchen und bier. But Von Sternberg is in fine form; he lights the Blue Angel club like a crazy expressionist side show and if you just act like the lighting and shadows are the real stars of the film, it definitely is the masterpiece so many claim.

Still, more than in any subsequent films, Sternberg's masochism is a downer. Always portraying the suitors of his lovely star Dietrich as buffoons, bug-eyed blowhards, shameless masochists, or authoritarian bullies (or else they rarely speak at all and operate as sex objects themselves, like Gary Cooper in MOROCCO), Von Sternberg's obsessions can sometimes seem the cinematic equivalent of a jealous, angry lover defacing pictures of his romantic rivals even as his studio bosses insist he cast them. One would normally ask of a pre-code: maybe it's fun and sleazy but is it art? But in DER BLAU ENGEL one knows it's art, and sees it's sleazy, but is it any fun? As Herman Cain would say, Nein Nein Nein!


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DR. X
1933 - ***1/2
Fay Wray is the daughter of Lionel Atwill, who gets lots of ham time as the titular Dr. Xavier, out to trap the "full moon killer" amongst his creepily-lit collection of scientific colleagues, each of whom grows more indignant and suspicious the longer we hang out with them: Dr. Welles, for example, has made a 'study' of cannibalism and has been keeping a heart alive in an 'electrolysis solution' for the last three years but his missing arm preempts further suspicion; Dr. Haines on the other hand was shipwrecked for years and his tasty, plump colleague was never found; and the one-eyed Dr. Rowen studies lunar rays effects on criminal minds but notes that "the lunar rays will never effect you and me, sir, because we are normal people."

Time and digital re-colorization has been kind to the early technicolor hues of DR. X. What used to look blurry and muddy and depressing now glitters with glowing emeralds and murky pinks and deep, bloody reds make it like a candy fountain of shadowy death. And dig the post-modern self-reflexivity of the the climax, with the doctors all chained to their chairs, their pulses linked to vials of blood that overflow like a buzzer at the top of a Coney Island strength tester when they're aroused by the murder tableaux staged before them, just like you in the audience! Scream ladies and gentlemen! The Tingler is in this theater!

 And notions of the duality inherent in language gets a lot of subliminal attention too: Xavier's outrage over each of the new accusations of his colleague belies its opposite: "Dr. Rowen could never never be the guilty one," means the opposite, while Lee Tracy regularly promises not to do something while then turning around and doing it, as expected. Meanwhile, Xavier's grave pronouncements of things like "There can be no doubt about it, gentlemen - this is cannibalism!" are allowed no argument since they carry his medical weight. And now that you're not annoyed by Lee Tracy anymore maybe you wont want to tear his picture apart with your bare hands when you learn he gets Fay Wray in the end. Chained, for your own amusement, indeed. 

Screams within Screens within SCREAM 4

O Courtney Cox, you were my favorite Friend; now with lip all ducky and face glowing like a luminous nerve toxin mask and your character foolishly yoked to David Arquette's ever-wincing and criminally incompetent sheriff yours is truly a SCREAM 4 for the Munch. Just as the ghostface mask is frozen in a 'Scream' so is your once gorgeous face frozen in a world you never made, and which you haunt in a shadow state like that other memorable Munch painting, Madonna.

The rest of the cast is also back, with changes reflecting the longer stretch since the last carve-up. Now Sidney's a chastened author of survival memoirs, Courtney's a stay at home fiction writer wife to Dewey, who's incompetence has devolved into something akin to mild retardation. His bewildered, pleading look lets your know he can't find his cell phone when the killer calls, let alone a hole in the ground, though he's determined to do all the decision-making. He's the sheriff! Meanwhile, he's given a cute but bonkers deputy with DSM-IV-darkened teeth, upping the ante of hot mess women in his life. This poor debuty doesn't even think to take her gun out of the holster even though she knows there's a mass murderer in the next room!

"Take me to ze towns with incompetent sheriffs!"

The last time a sheriff and deputy were this outmaneuvered was in Monogram's 1944 classic, VOODOO MAN (above). As happened there and in SCREAM 4, the characters eventually learn to not even bother calling the cops, who would likely just shoot them by mistake. But Dudley Manlove, or Wally or Dewey or whatever his name is over in Screamville is worse, for in his refusal to receive any help from his far more competent wife he directly endangers the lives of his entire town.

The tragedy that marks SCREAM 4 as the logical extension of the first three lies in media evolution, which is the best thing about it, that post-modern edge, the accidental jackpot of realizing that self reflexivity heightens scariness. The first one was just itself in relation to other horror films, specifically from the 1970s-80s. SCREAM 2  added a film called Stab, based on the 'true events' from the first film.  The third brought the cast to the making of the sequel. The fourth finds the Stab sequels up to number seven, and everyone watching them on youtube, even while they're being stalked and stabbed in 'real' life.

The 'ghostface' voice that calls everyone on their cells to taunt them and ask them horror trivia (PS- I knew every answer!) is aactually available as an iPhone app so even getting the call is no guarantee it's the 'real' killer. And the real killer sounds less scary and more just old--a Stuntman Mike from beyond the film's ageist cast list--and slick from over-familiarity. More could have been made of him sounding old as if Hamlet's father's ghost or Charlie on Charlie's Angels. We never see old people in the film, so he becomes--even though we know the voice isn't 'his' but some phone app--a  representation of age and decay more sad than scary, less scary by far than  the creepy old couple in MULHOLLAND DR.

Focus, please.... focus

It's all meta only in the way that the characters say the word meta and pretend to be empowered even as they tastelessly prank call each other mere hours after learning their friends have been murdered, like eloi in The Time Machine. No one thinks about arming themselves, or staying indoors at night, or not answering the door, or yelling for help, or calling the cops, or looking in closets in advance of letting their guard down and feeling 'safe' in a room. The film would have benefited from someone who doesn't wait before she is the final girl before they finally pull one of the ever-present butcher knives from the tasteful wooden counter top knife block, or gouge the eyes and poke the sweet spot when being strangled.

But there is that subtextual fear of aging working strange magic: the smearing the lens with Vaseline and deep color washing makes all the girl's faces til they glow in an airbrushed blur that lights them up in the dark. It can only be some stipulation in the Cox contract, but the message is clear - no one knows the difference between movie and real life anymore, even inside the movie itself, and the high color style gloss underwrites a miraculous disconnect that helps people hide from their own aging or sense of self-preservation. They even cheer bloody movies based on their own future deaths; like a man cheerfully devouring his own foot and working his way along the digestive ouroboros centipede until all that's left is a desert snifter of credits and theme crunk.

The only one who sees past it all is the mighty Sidney (Neve Campbell who stars even without plastic surgery addiction) who, like all chastened lovers in films, comes home on a book tour for her self-help memoir. Sidney's self-serious pout and moistened eyes show she's secretly well-aware that the only one who survives these events takes them super seriously, but even she doesn't bother to employ standard dirty fighting tricks until all of her friends are dead. The rest of the cast lives only for their death scenes and have all the survival instincts of Yvette Mimieux and company when the horn goes off and morlocks come calling or one of them almost drowns (above). It's mildly scary when the SCREAM kids encounter the killer but once they're stabbed and bubbling blood out their mouths, there's no longer pain or tragedy --they become merely actors game for a throe, even tossing off bon mots right before their death rattles.

The sad thing about survival is this: If you're lucky you get old. If you're lucky! In Hollywood is it perhaps better for your legend to not get lucky? Marlene Dietrich and Garbo both retreated into exile to spare their fans the shocking Baby Jane-in-the-mirror moment (Dietrich performed into her 70s before retiring, however). Marilyn Monroe perhaps knew that if she took her life at least her fans would have what they always wanted--an immortal Aphrodite for the icon-stellation--and she could finally get some real sleep. 

The alternative is not always good: Hollywood is cruel to those over 30, like that game of 'carousel' in LOGAN'S RUN! Man, is SCREAM 4 really science fiction? Imagining a future where screens and streaming have so overtaken us that we don't even have to worry about a Japanese ghost girl getting us through the screen like THE RING. We're already in the screen, and barely outside it, and only hoping just to get as much face time with the camera as we can before we get stabbed, and to have the bloodiest, best death scene. For them life is measured not in heartbeats but in hit counts (I'm paraphrasing the killer here, though shan't reveal its name).

In the end, that ducky overbite on Ms. Cox and the Streisand-ish Vaseline fog spell out that just maybe, mummification on the altar of the image is the answer. It's pretty squirmy when she makes wry references to her hit sitcom COUGAR TOWN by coming on to nerdy film geeks, but it's nothing new in Hollywood. The nerds were never meant to have this much power, or get hit on by this kind of weird, desperate Mrs. Robinson-meets-the onabotulinumtoxin A type of sitcom icon. They don't know how to handle it, but it's there nonetheless; because their youtube views run in the millions they suddenly run the world, right through the screen, with a ripping sound.

Pauline Kael, Wonder Woman, Bright Lights #74

The latest issue of the awesome BL is up, and in it I salute Pauline Kael, the voice of madness in an age of damned dull sanity. And there's William Leung's How to Play a Superhero: Lynda Carter, Popular Culture Feminism, and the Search for Wonder Woman

"As long as popular culture has a place for a woman hero, Wonder Woman is relevant; as long as Wonder Woman is relevant, Lynda Carter is relevant." -

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

Reviewed by Erich Kuersten


"We miss her and need her today — someone with enough literary clout that her praise can define and refine the response to a movie the way she helped define and refine the responses to Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Carrie. There are recent movies that have gone panned and forgotten but would surely have been embraced by Kael, like Observe and Report (she would have saved it from getting lumped with Paul Blart, Mall Cop), Enter the Void, and the Twilight series (panned by adults who haven't seen it or are ashamed to admit they have — she would no doubt recognize that they fill a too-long-ignored, underserved demographic). She was confident enough to get wise to Fellini's and Woody Allen's essential shallowness... she was wary of film critics who prized themselves for elitist judgments. "I don't trust critics who care only for the highest and the best, it's an inhuman position, and I don't believe them. I think it's simply their method of exalting themselves" (265)

We need her! Luckily there are some great critical voices still out there, in the Village Voice, in fact, and on websites like Bright Lights Film Journal!