Telly on the Plane / Telly on the Mountain / Telly on the Train: LISA AND THE DEVIL, HORROR EXPRESS, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

I'm not saying times are tough, I'm saying now more than ever we could use a man like Aristotle "Telly" Savalas to toss us a shiny lollipop and/or a cigarette and regale us with that marvelously sonorous poli kala voice, that deep octave Greek zest for whatever comes along, that signature oral fixation. And ain't it our good luck he didn't just do Kojak? That show was and is a little too rugged for my taste, but I'm a fan of the man from Garden City, NJ, especially a bunch of wild and wooly films he made in Europe during the early 70s. Sometimes he just pops in for a few scenes, but he always leaves an impression. He steals the show and sometimes saves it from the abyss. Like an actor version of the counterpoint melody in an Ennio Morricone theme, he instinctually recognizes dead areas on the spectrum and fills them in, and always without seeming to ever act at all, at least not in any other role but himself. 

Who could forget his sonorous cooing ("remember when you came here? How you hated chiggens? ") as the best of all Blofeldts in maybe the best of all Bonds? How about his swaggering Cossack officer in Horror Express ("Who are da killers? Who? Who are da troublemakas?")? And of course, the the mannequin-toting mephistophelean butler in Lisa and the Devil  ("Very little escapes me")? Those films are all classics in their respective ways, largely, or at least partly, because of that charismatic bald-headed, chain-smoking, stuffy nosed Greek-American with that wonderfully sonorous boom of a voice. Paradoxically debonair and earthy, larger than life yet hardly a ham, he'd be perfect doing one man show about the Russian revolution, oscillating between Rasputin, Czar Nicholas, Lenin, Marx, Stalin and even Peter III, crushing every part without even needing a wig. Regardless of whether he's supposed to be Italian, Russian, or Swiss, his characters all disappear into his oceanic vastness. He encompasses them, devours and forgets them without so much a waiver in that groovy New York accent. 

Every moment in his company is a treasure. I can't really watch Kojak (too gritty) but man do I want to hang out with him every moment he's in Europe, gluing cracked mannequins back together with him while knocking back cognac and cakes at his fog-wreathed Italian villa, knocking back cognac and cigarettes in his wintry Alpine mountaintop fortress, or knocking back vodka and cigarettes in a cozy Trans-Siberian train station.

On that note, here are the troublemakers. 

 LISA AND THE DEVIL

(1974) Dir. Mario Bava 

Lisa (Elke Sommer) is a German tourist on a bus tour in Spain who gets left behind after getting lost at one of the stops, a maze-like small Spanish town. Her time is thrown of of joint after spying a jolly demon in a Middle Ages fresco that looks just like Telly Savalas. Then she sees a swaggering man in a natty beret who looks just like him buying a mannequin at an antique shop. The dream symbolism has.... begun. She can never find her way back to the bus. She's thrown into what Carlos Castaneda might call 'non-ordinary reality' and what Lisa's director Mario Bava might call purgatorio, but what we, today, call 'surreal 70s Euro-cult heaven...' 

Or hell, of course. It is the same. 

Obsessed by a little musical carousel of macabre figures chronicling the looped procession of love and death and back around, Lisa begins to wake into that special nightmare we've all had wherein you turn around on a cool autumn afternoon and suddenly its dark and you're all alone and lost in an empty narrow streeted maze in a foreign land, all the windows shuttered and no one in sight. You finally catch a ride in old car from a rich couple (the younger wife having an affair with the chauffeur, the older husband too world-weary to care) But then their car breaks down near a weird old villa where you run up against a cockblocking Hitchcockian matriarch played by Alida Vialli (Suspiria, The Third Man) keeping her deliriously John LaZar-eyed son Maximillian (Alessio Orano) from hooking up with you. And he's..... so lonely. And of course, emceeing the show is Telly as their mephistophelean butler, replete with white gloves and a lollipop since Madame doesn't like smoke in the house. 

Naturally, Lisa looks just like Alessio's dead wife and--when he later corpses her in the same bed as his dead wife's sleeping skeleton, his lonesome kinkiness gets so creepy on so many levels you just have to laugh a mirthless mocking laugh. Then it's like he hears you, and thinks it's his dead wife's ghostly mocking, ringing out at what was probably his inability to get it up with a girl who could look back at him; eventually she takes a lover, who of course ends up cracked in the head, and of course he's also the cracked mannequin she sees in the beginning. 

Yes, this is a zone where mannequins come to life and play the parts of long dead lovers or whomever is needed, and the killer kills them. Funeral marches are held on the spot, as the latest body is wheeled around on a serving cart through the vast semi-decayed mansion, around in an endless procession, life to death, two by two, in procession, crib and corpse cart all bound up in one ornate dessert tray. So much death being around, a whole lavish room of the mansion has been converted to a wake/funeral parlor, which Alessio later tries to change into a marriage chapel by kicking over the plethora of decaying wreaths. Of course for him it's really all the same, but he's too far gone to see the music box procession tightening around his neck with a song i

n its black heart. And that song is of course Rodrigo's Concerto of Aranjuez. 

Depending on your affection for that 'giant pointed 70s collar out over smoking jacket lapel' look Alessio sports you may not like the fashions. And if the score was Morricone twang instead of lush, endlessly repeating orchestrations of Rodrigo's Concerto of Aranjuez or if Bava was his own cinematographer and giving us his usual deep painterly colors instead of the twinkly romantic haze offered by DP Cicilio Panaqua (union rules dictated the film needed a Spanish DP), this would be Bava's best 70s work, but hey, there's interesting giallo-esque sing-song motif playing under all the broken clock cutaways, of which there are enough to rival Bergman's Wild Strawberries. 

And I almost forgot, whether macking on a lollipop the color of Elke's raincoat, dropping double meaning Satanic inferences like "very little escapes me," sneaking one of the chauffeur's cigarettes before loudly admonishing him for smoking indoors when the blind Madame complains, or wryly talking to himself and having a good time drinking cognac and repairing mannequins, Telly loves the screen, and he loves you, baby, and the screen loves Telly.  Devil or not, he's divine.  Some say his performance swamps the rest of the film; it becomes the Telly show. But you can't blame the devil for doing the devil's work. 

HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE:

(1969) Dir. Peter R. Hunt

George Lazenby's first and last Bond is also the one where he goes undercover as a posh British snob and then later gets married and then cries when he loses her. He also goes undercover as a poncy genealogist to infiltrate Blofeldt's top of the Alps allergy clinic. Between the crying and the poncy airs, and all falling in love and showing weakness, Lazenby was derided as a weak, bland, snobby Bond. But criticizing Lazenby for having range isn't really fair. I can't even imagine Connery being vulnerable or actually dimming down his swagger and actually turning dull, stiff and pompous to go undercover as a dull genealogist or falling in love, not in a tacky way, but in a real way. Especially in the 60s, for some reason, the public rejected a good actor as Bond-- they want a handsome mannequin tough guy to project themselves on. So Pierce Brosnan is picked over Timothy Dalton, and it's not really until Daniel Craig that we finally get both, and then some. But for Craig's era, men were allowed to cry. We'd all gone WEAK! 

Lazenby's Bond has since been reappraised in today's more socially enlightened clime, and we can't help but admire how he fearlessly puts on a posh droning bore professor demeanor that--on closer viewing--is a dead-on impression of the posh genealogist who briefed him. So rather than label Lazenby dull, why not blame Salzman and Broccoli for daring to expand a working, beloved formula into something more meaningful. I guess it's like if Michael Myers started talking, or Groucho Marx decided to do a serious dramatic role, sans mustache and cigar and glasses. Even if they nailed it, and the movie was great, maybe later on hailed as a masterpiece, the damage to the characters cohesiveness would be done. Fans would consider it a betrayal. And rightly. The movie is not made for them, but for the future audiences to finally appreciate. 1969 was a year of major upheavals, of course, so Bond was simultaneously an imperialist relic for the hippies and a source of macho comfort for the hard-hats. This sensitive Bond was a source of alarm for a core audience whose idea of a swinging sexually-satisfied super-hipster was being directly threatened both onscreen and off. 

And another one who got slightly drubbed is Savalas, who for some makes a funny Blofeldt. And he is, but there's no way you can say a line like "to begin with, I was born without ear lobes" and keep a totally straight face and yet let you know he's cracking up deep inside?

Me, I always crack up when Bond's mountain fortress conquest throws herself to sleep at the sound of Telly's voice booming out with mind control tape and color lights: "You remember when you first came here? How you hated chiggens?" Savalas' nicotine perma-cold nasal voice can't do the hard-K but he makes up with it by turning the cooing Telly magic on full blast. It's just so random ---no chickens have even been mentioned up to now. Nor are any ever seen. Filthy things. But Telly gets the ladies over that hump: "But all of that is over now.. I've taught you to love chickens.. to love their flesh, their voice..." 

But I love that he doesn't put on any phony airs--he's already bald so that's covered but rather than get all feline like Dr. No or Donald Pleasance's or Charles Gray-ish like Charles Gray, he just stays himself but with more of a self-satisfied air. You get the impression he could be launching this cockeyed 'Vida Omega" scheme, or speeding along in his luge, or doing any other macho cool thing Bond can do as well as, in the end, getting the ultimate revenge by sten gunning Bond's bride and then making him cry like a little bitch!  

And though she's nowhere near the level of Lotte Lenya, Ilse Stepatt  comes off like Divine crossed with a German shepherd as Blofeldt's butch administrative assistant/enforcer. Together they're as tenacious and relentless as Bond in that justifiably renowned downhill skiing to parade to ice rink, to car chase sequence, the grim shadow to Bond and Emma Peel - who does some great defensive driving to show she's just as capable and cool as anyone else, and so there's a much more even match between them, which is refreshing, as it's almost always Bond and his target gallery while the villain just boasts of his master plan and then maybe blows up.  Savalas is more like a gypsy than royalty, but unlike so many others in his role, he seems at ease and believable as someone who enjoys being evil for the sake of it, like a true megalomaniac, which explains why he's so quick to brag out his plan to Bond, that's what those guys do - they can't not do it. Yet he's also legit believable as a leader--the type who wouldn't throw a lackey to a shark just for failing some difficult task 

HORROR EXPRESS

Original title: Pánico en el Transiberiano

(1972) Dir Eugenio Martin

This Spanish-British horror union of Horror Express (1972)  is really the best of everything--the best pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (as posh scientists), Alberto de Mendoza as a superstitious priest playing the Rasputin to a bemused young countess (Silvia Tortosa) and her older inventor husband), and the best 'frozen ape man/alien defrosts aboard the Orient Express' film ever. The Chariots of the Gods-savvy script zips along most pleasingly and in addition to the countess there are several strong female characters, including Miss Jones ((Alice Reinheart) the droll older assistant to Cushing who wryly sizes up the other women and delivers acidic bon mots: a sultry corporate spy (Helga Liné) and a lady passenger, friend for the countess (Faith Clift)

I love train films in general but when they switch tracks as deftly as this one, like when a drop of ocular fluid from the ape man's eye is seen under the microscope revealing images of dinosaurs and what the earth looks like from outer space. But that's not the reason that superstitious beady-eyed monk steals it off the tray and offers it to its new host, the detective investigating the first murder, now possessed, flipping over to worship him as the devil ("thy will be done as it is in Hell!"). Hey, he plays the favorite, you can't blame him. Or can you? 

As a fan of classic Mexican horror I also notice a lot of weird similarities between the Horror Express alien and its habid sucking brain contents through the victim's eyes and the comet-riding, brain-sucking baron in The Brainiac (1961). They even both drink the brain of an inventor of a new steel that can withstand a flight to space, so they can each presumably build a rocket to finally leave this shitty brain-dead planet, if they ever get a chance. The alien may be relentless here, hopping from body to body, but his possessed characters hint at the intense centuries of loneliness it's gone through and we also feel for it. Crash-landed here long before life even began, working his way up from single cells up to the caveman he was then frozen in since the last Ice Age; it's bound to make anyone a little desperate. 

All that is rather marvelous, but then comes the final perfect late-inning addition as scene stealer Telly Savalas and his Cossack crew come barging onto the train once it stops on the Siberian border, rocking his usual awesome ridiculous hamminess after receiving orders to board the train and take charge, rounding up everyone in first class in the dining car and giving them the collective third degree: "Who are da killas!? WHO!??" he shouts at them, waving his gun and whip around. "Who are da trubble makers!?" We love you, Telly! 

"You're excellency," says the possessed cop, "I'm a police inspector." He shouts back "Everybody here Is UNDER ARREST!

And there's so much else to love, especially if you grew up watching this on TV all panned, scanned and truncated into oblivion and you still loved it. Now it's like you pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming, because what a beautiful world to have such clear, anamoprhic pictures. . Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing make an engaging Holmes-and-other-Holmes style duo (aided well by Tortosa's countess) and the Orient Express makes a perfect setting for a tale of existential steam-powered escape, where the steady movement of the train makes a fine metaphor for the ever-increasing momentum of early 20th century progress, with an alien who has spent so long trying to guide life on earth into a form that can build a rocket so he can escape at last, after all these billions of years. His devouring red eye pairs poetically with the train's lone guiding red light, hurtling through the snowy Siberian tundra like the Ice Age is still in effect; the train whistle's scream perfectly folded blended into John Cacavaslectric guitar score, and the whistling refrain that passes from one character to another like "Isn't it Romantic?" Love Me Tonight, is an ingenious way to remind us where the alien is now (he picks it up from the baggage car guard who picks it up from the Countess playing piano in their private car, and whistles it through the rest of the film, even from his frozen ape form. And it all makes a perfect metaphor for human evolution on this fickle earth--roaring through the cold vastness, blazing across the aeons, ripping through time and space like a steam-powered mega zipper. 

The alien red eyes sucks up information way fast, especially the count's knowledge of metallurgy, but we get a tragic and profound sense of science still having a long way to go before we can escape the gravity of these archaic bone machines, and return to our true home... out there, in a galaxy far away. 

With plenty of droll humor, lush atmosphere, nonstop action, no wasted time on pathos or some lame romance, instead there's this liberating feeling that everything that happens is quickly disseminated through the passengers and crew, taken as fact rather than scoffed at, "you mean to tell me a two million year old ape man is alive on this train, killed the baggage man and locked him in the crate all neat and tidy!?" / "YES!" and all of it building to its apocalyptic finale as Telly's men get their brains wiped out by those glowing red eyes (but that's just the start of it, once the light goes out. The result of all this makes Horror Express a shining jewel in the Euro-horror crown. And Telly, you bald-headed bounty of badass bliss, who loves ya? Europe, since it's smart, and me of course (don't ya think ahm smaht?!). You're the walking talking equivalent of a warm fire, ready to burn you or save your life if you need thawing. And damn do we ever. 

Hairs of the Incoherent: AFTER BLUE: Dirty Paradise (2021)

French women, ah, mon ami, ils sont sauvages! Their five main differences from American women? O Monsieur! They speak the language of love and fine wine; they stay fierce and cool into their 40s and 50s; they find male artists and writers sexy more for their talent than their success; they treat premarital and extramarital sex (Le cinq à septs, etc.) as a necessity rather than an offense; and they let their lady hairs grow wild and free, where they wilt. If you're an American girl and are bristling with indignant umbrage reading the previous sentence, then your own extreme reaction proves the sixth difference: they don't take the childish generalities of men as something worth a single bristle. And I didn't mean you anyway, obviously, since you're cool enough to be reading this. 

In short, give me a fierce middle-aged, art-loving Frenchwoman any time, or give me to them, for they belong to no one and take what they want. I'm a dilettante aesthete of no common rankness; I stand, however wobbly, a man undaunted by menstrual blood, DSM-IV-charting madness, beaucoup hair, or if she's already married or seeing other people--especially if it means I don't have to go out to dinner with her petit-bourgeois amies. Vive la France! (oui, mi amor, Rormandy aussi). 

I burden you with all this so you know I'm the ideal audience for the gender-broken films of Bertrand Mandico (The Wild Boys,) Don't go into see his films thinking they're suitable for the whole family, or anyone who isn't at least somewhat debauched a priori. If you are, on the other hand, so debauched, and you love vintage European science fiction, and are fond of cursing, smoking, blue fire and azure skies and éros sans la érotique - welcome to After Blue, your Dirty Paradise.

Of course it's not really paradise. And it's dirt is more literal. A crystalized embodiment of Camille Paglia's infamous quote (1), After Blue's matriarchal council is determined to keep science and technology off their all-woman planet so they live in grass huts, and import horses instead of flying cars (and reproduce via cloning and imported sperm sample). But these are French women, the category that produced Isabelles Huppert and Adjani, and la Beatrice Dalle, so they're rougher than any Harvest Home-style matriarchy. Turns out, surprise surprise, human savagery thrives on whether men are around or not. The only difference is that the savagery is more theatrical, glam-ham sinister, catlike, and includes way more shouted dialogue and glowing jewel-lined Meiko Kaji/Jordorowski-style black hats.

To reiterate, to drive the point home: adult French women, ranting and raving in all their screaming, moaning, tripping, swigging, swinging, overacting, flirting and not giving a shit about your stupid feelings, their neck and arm hairs growing, abound on the planet called After Blue. It's a planet where--even in the wilderness of unsettled 'Poison Mountains'--starving for food and forced to eat hallucinogenic moss--they somehow never run out of cigarettes or whiskey.  And the skies roar pink; the fire burns blue; surrealist set design gaps the bridge between statue and landscape (sculptures halfway to becoming rocks or vice versa); dreamy artificiality eschews realism (frond silhouettes against wild-colored rear projection and dry ice evokes forests), and every shot is a perfect overload of originality from eight different directions. 

Half a century ago, After Blue's mix of sex and psychedelia would need a thick shellac of cutesy camp (ala Barbarella) to avoid critical circumcision (and the dreaded 'X' rating). Times have changed; sex is no longer cute or campy, and Mandico is nothing if not of his time. As it wriggles through the tight hallways between all genres and styles, you can't find camp anywhere on After Blue, making it much more of a piece with Paris's 20s-30s surrealists (Bunuel, Cocteau, Clair) than the post-68 Parisian dream eroticists (i.e. Rollin, Metzger, Vadim). Somehow it out-obscenes and out-dreams all of them.

In fact it's so unique it needs its own film movement just to have a place to belong. In meta echo of the luddite matriarchy of After Blue, Mandico and some peers (like (which includes Yann Gonzalez, whose adorable You and the Night I've written about earlier) have formed Incoherence movement. Some tenets include: shooting only on expired film; keeping all special effects in-camera (rear-projection rather than blue screen, etc.); using found objects for set design; post-syncing all sound but adding no post-production; and avoiding anything resembling a familiar trope or narrative 'act' structure. After Blue is probably the zenith, the cultural peak,  of this movement. In the age of the mood-altering gummy, it's the perfect post-dosed park picnic or party pick. 

AFTER BLUE (Dirty Paradise)

(2021) Dir. Bertrand Mandico

In a mythic story kind of sourced from Androcles & the Lion, or Aladdin, a young bullied gamin named Roxy helps free a wild-eyed, glitter-covered naked woman named Kate Bush who she finds buried up to her neck in the sand. But that's where all familiarity ends. Freeing the wild Kate turns out to be a catastrophically bad idea; she starts blasting everyone in sight. Then, she turns the gun on Roxy; and then, turns on Roxy and soon Kate Bush is riding naked on a horse with a Nordic crown and sword through Roxy's erotic dreams while drenched in gold glitter, while three of Kate's victims haunt her nightmares, tearing Roxy apart in a perfect illustration of Lacanian jouissanc. And now, since she freed the demon, Roxy has to pack up her hairdresser mother and le cheval and set off to the poison mountain to kill.... Kate Bush. 

And so begins Roxy's call to adventure, kicking, puling, licking, and sulking all the way while her wide-eyed mom, Zora (Elina Lowensohn) slowly goes mad from hunger and motherhood. So ushers forth a hypnogogic haze of frond-shadowed alien landscapes, blue fire, azure beaches, blue forests, filthy Dickensian outlaw vagrants sniffing around their saddlebags in search of food and/or a new wife; a gaggle of local inhabitants, easily colonized triffid shamblers with crystal cave mouths who can become your dreams (everything is fluid here, not just gender but between animal, vegetable and mineral). 

Once the arrive, Roxy finds plenty of distractions: trees to climb, holes to hide in, nightmares to scream to, and an enchanted grotto with phallic little monsters to kiss. Zora runs into a very cool and sexually slithering expat artist ("The second avant-garde") Sternberg (Vimala Pons) who lives 'next door' with her dog and android-male lover/muse Olgar 2 (Michaël Erpelding) and loves to drink and shoot everything in sight with her designer gu. If Kate is a new high of wildness in the wild woman archetype, Sternberg is a new quintessential aesthete, a libertine, alcoholic, rich, decadent, and ultimately both supportive and unhinged. She kind of steals the picture, even though everyone else more than holds their own. I love her. And Kate. Roxy is a whiner; Zora is a wide-eyed sad sack, but the other ladies, beaux sauvages for the revisionist fairy tale ages. 

It's all very colorful and helped immensely by the electronic score by Pierre Desprats: an eerie electronic/ambient mix of Morricpme western grandeur, spiked with well-timed deep pitch shifts dropping the bottom of almost Vangelis' Bladerunner-style cathedral Hell elegance (helligance?), like we're plunging way way down over Deckard's rainy 10th floor parapet. It's in French with English subtitles, but don't worry about having to read while your pupils are still micro-dilated, tu monolinguiste analphabète américain lâche fils de pute! Words can't hurt you if you pretend not to read them. Listen instead to the musicality of the le langage de l'amor; don't even look at the subtitles until first trying to decode the words and be grateful. French art movies never work in English dubs. The pretentiously unpretentious poeticism of lines like "you like my hat? It is an extension of my thoughts" or "I'm just a woman... as inoffensive as the wind" might wake you from the hypno-erotique spell in a fit of cringy twitching. But in French, with English subtitles, c'est adorable. Even the occasional overdone nod to contemporary chic, like giving all the guns names of designers (Guccis and Chanels instead of Lugers and Colts) is forgivable as its exotified by the musicality of the language.

But be warned: this is a world where everyone is almost always almost kissing and any actual kisses must drool comically with secretions; any fondling is done with clawed fingers that tear clothes and skin. We're not in some foamy Venusian clamshell anymore, honey; this is Red Riding Hood's wolfblood-baptized honeymoon nightmare, evoking a whole network of weird femme-fantastique gender-devouring mythic revival. Think Angela Carter (Passion of New Eve, Company of Wolves), Maleficent, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White & The Huntsman, Wizard of Oz, only with props scrounged at Cronenberg's post-Naked Luch yard sale (phallic alien protuberances and smokable caterpillars), a setting from the Cat Women of the Moon / Queen of Outer Space all-woman planet tradition, and awash in Jean Rollin 'two girls in a weird world' dreaminess. That's not to say Mandico is not also checking in with the more sophomoric French sci-fi ancestors (i.e. Gandahar, Barbarella), just that the target demographic isn't horny16 year-olds but experienced adult libertines, as debauched as Zorg in Betty Blue. It may have the second (sub?) title Dirty Paradise but rest assured, the 'dirty' is real dirt, or rather gold glitter; we're no longer ripping beamers with your little brother's friends in the basement on Sat. night cuz we ain't got girlfriends; we're upstairs snorting lines with Maria Louise von Franz and Tennessee Williams (After Blue would make a good double feature with Suddenly Last Summer, for all the right and wrong reasons). 

RETURN OF THE (REALLY) WILD WOMAN

Above all, forget about that stacked broad in Heavy Metal, and remember Kate Bush! Kate gives Anita Pallenberg's horned dictator in Barbarella, Beatrice Dalle (in everything) and all of the Baader Meinhof Complex a sound trundling. Hairy-armed, heavily clawed, jagged of teeth, this wild sandy blonde runs rampant through the mist and the wild fantasies of our young Roxy; gleefully shooting down anyone she pleases, disguising herself and harnessing the local 'Indians' to ride. Assertive and carnally violent as Tura Satana. wilder than Marsha Quist in The Howling, there's no woman capable of undoing After Blue's snippy power structure as singlehandedly as she. 

On the masculine spectrum of wild man Jungian archetype is a vivid neighbor to the sage/senex'who represents the wild man energy absorbed into the hero/soul and thus acquiring the best of both worlds - outside of the social sphere but able to step in and out of it easily. For my CinemArchetype series I found plenty of both to choose from, so tried to pick as wide an array as I could. For female characters I could only find a handful wild  (Un-absorbed) examples, hence the categories were merged 'The Wild/Wise Woman." Even within fairy tales that have female protagonists, the wild element is usually a male for girl's myths, i.e. the animus (think Edward in Twilight, Hannibal Lecter, or the Big Bad Wolf/Woodsman), so bringing in a voraciously homicidal wild woman archetype/shadow into a girl's story (where the female villain is usually a devouring mother/stepmother - a gatekeeper of a social sphere out of balance, rigged by hypocrisy and patriarchal fear, or 'the Red Queen' - an evil narcissit  rather than a true outsider of 'Iron Jane' style magnitude.) is truly revolutionary; Kate is agressive enough to shatter any old Grimm's fairy tale paradigm. You can almost hear Jung wake up and start clawing footnotes on his coffin lid, excited to contextualize her within the pantheon, and maybe use her in an paper trying to update his theories to the #mefirst movement.  There's only like three or four women in her archetypal class in all of cinema, which is so outrageous it should make any Frenchwoman reading grab her scissors and cut Willem DaFoe's genitals off instead of her own in Antichrist.  We need more! But Zulawski is dead (one of the other best examples is in Szvamanka (aka She-Shaman). Figures both Kate and Zulawski are Polish. Polish women be like French woman on angel (mountain) dust/

The real name of Kate Bush (Agata Buzek) is Katarzyna Buszowska -as there are Polish settlements on After Blue, and it was the Polish militia who buried her originally) and in her way she's the female equivalent to Manny in Runaway Train or the thing in Where the Wild Things Are. It's the kind of role Beatrice Dalle could have played a few years earlier, but luckily Buzek is there to carry the blazing out-of-control (laughing even as it catches her dress on fire) torch!     

Obscenity - who Really Cares? (answer - AMERICA)

Unsurprisingly, mainstream (RT) US (where sex is too esteemed in theory to be anything but degrading in practice) have been mixed. That's OK. Employed ($) movie writers don't often get to pick the films they see a week So when they may not wamnt to wade into  some weird morass of pre-Oedipal confusion and shouting. On which set of criteria can they judge After Blue? What template in their secret file can they use for tone, structure and genre analysis? How can you even judge it after one viewing? You don't even know what's going on!. I've seen four times and I don't know either!  How can a film be funny without slapstick; artsy without depth; erotic without titillation; stylish without campiness? Are the effects meant intentionally to be artificial? Are we supposed to find it Brechtian, Godardesque (if intentional) or Woodian (if not)? I hope to god there isn't an answer. 

On the other hand if the viewer is either micro- or macro-dosing. I might be confused and annoyed too if I was a critic on the clock on some cold screening room; but if you can visit it in 20 minute spurts, with long breaks in between, it's amazing; I've watched it, three times over 12 different viewings. Never in one sitting, unless showing it to friends in an 'altered' state.

As Mandico demonstrated in Les Garçons Sauvage, only after you clear out all the stale genre tropes, getting down to the nitty gritty, can eros chew its way out of the softcore bower, to burst forth flashing the R-rated fangs of some Zulawski cocaine withdrawal nightmare. Once it calms down it bursts forth into gaudy peacock strut of an Almodovar or Jarman fashion show/Pride float.

What a gift we have in the nouveau Incoherence. And in Mandico, a new luminary of dangerous Parisian surrealist transgression. If he keeps it up we can slide in next to De Sade, Huysmanns, Batailles, Genet, Corbiere, Baudelaire, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. There's surely a reason Americans like Terry Southern, Hemingway, and Henry Miller all had to go to Paris before they could unleash the full gorgeous obscenity of their human howls.

Get over it, America! it's just hair. 

(above) from Mandico's newest, She is Conann - a gender revisionist Conan the Barbarian if played by seven different female actresses of different ages, slashing their way into legend. "What if there was a talking dog,"  you ask? Let it be so. Your cannibalized artist souffle de violence glam punk prétentieux is ready.

NOTES

1.("If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.")

FURTHER RELEVANT READING:

Isles of Löwensohn: THE WILD BOYS, LET THE CORPSES TAN

Unbreak the Wind: YOU AND THE NIGHT

Hey Betty Blue, Come Blow Your Mind

The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA

Derek Love vs. the Buzz Killer: TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

 

Tough GenX SWMs like me were confused when we first saw James Dean in movies. He looked badass enough on the posters that adorned our dorm walls, smoking with his feet kicked up over his steering wheel in the one from Giant, or his loafing against the wall with his red windbreaker and cigarette for Rebel, or smoking in his big black coat up in a rainy Times Square for Dennis Stock-but who had seen his movies? No one. So when Rebel without a Cause came to our college's revival house we were psyched for a dash of serious cool. 

Instead we got goddamned crybaby narc!

This doe-eyed gentle little greaser faun who cries cuz his parents are too easy on him? Who snivels at the cops' office because his dad doesn't hit his mom? This kid was worse than a narc, he was a jinx. Such a coward over a friendly little knife fight he gets three people killed? 

"If he'd just... belt her one, occasionally."

You doubt me? Consider the facts: No sooner has he arrived at his new school than he's stomping on the school seal, befriending a craven puppy killer, and trying to crash the A-list with his stupid planetarium "Moo!" The A-list, a rowdy gang of toughs (that include Dennis Hopper!) give him a chance to audition for the gang, a friendly invitations to gentlemanly switchblade duel. Outside the planetarium on a nice sunny LA day, what a pleasant way to get to know the boys. Sure maybe a few little cuts, punctures, but that's hazing, Jim! You want in, you gotta play be the rules, not run to momma. It takes so long to goad Jim into that by the time he's finally started his stick and move routine, the afternoon is over--the astronomer in residence is yelling at them to stop. That kind of leaves everybody hangin' as they say, so they have to reschedule for an evening chicken run instead 

He's a jinx, that's the thing. Picked up on a public drunkeness? What did he get a little sip of a beer somewhere? A weensy little pint of Wild Irish Rose? Crying like a little bitch in a cop's office because his dad's not mean enough, trying to give his jacket to a little wuss hauled in for killing puppies!  Screaming at his parents like a hissy fit-throwing neurotic because mom and dad can't decide how to punish him.  This is the guy with the cigarette on the posters in our dorm rooms!??? 

Rumors were Dean was bi, into sub/dom shizz, would go to gay bars and ask guys to stamp their cigarettes out on his chest. This was the 80s -- we couldn't believe it. Right up there with Richard Gere mouse rectum scandal - maybe just a rumor. That was enough back then. 

We couldn't know just how brave it was back in the early 50s for a young man too be gentle and faun-like. It was a time when men had to pose and posture in studded leather straddling hogs to indicate they weren't gay. Times change, but one thing that doesn't is the behavior of Jim Stark in this movie--separate from Dean's sensitivity--makes him not only a literal (as well as figurative) Buzz kill, but a little bitch--in a sense that has nothing to do with feyness or tortured posturing, but everything to do with being a narc. In other words, Jim is no better than that blonde hash slinger in Over the Edge. He had a pool, too. 

That Rebel has all the postures and JD rites of cool makes Dean's narc attitude especially problematic. This is a Nicholas Ray's film, after all, a man who never met a drug he didn't want to get at least an ounce of, or a person he didn't want to either fight, borrow money from, or have an affair with, a filmmaker second only to John Ford as far as violence to denote and enhance rites of masculine passage. Only with Ray, who came a bit later, that violence was no longer accepted, or was being drained of its ceremonial initiatory function, either by laws or draggy moms (moms seldom factored into Ford's equations--if anything they rooted from the sidelines while the men tried to block their view). In fact, if you couch Rebel with Ray's Bigger than Life, and In a Lonely Place, you get the full spectrum of male dysfunction- the rites of Ford run smack into the iron mom of Hitchcock. 

The tragedy with Ray is in the matriarchal obstacle: We could have easily overlooked Dean's many faux pas in the police station, and even the planetarium because that night at the chicken run he's all of a sudden cool as McQueen. It's his one big moment of Wild One moxy, and he does it all real good, but then after Buzz goes over the cliff, he undoes it all by trying to rat out the attendees after everyone runs home.  Jim, the jinx. And now the narc. You've got one person killed already through your bad decisions, through trying to do the right thing (according to your overbearing mom). But the night is young, isn't it Jim? And don't blame your mom, either! Even your mom is cooler than you! After Buzz's death she wants him to just shut up about it, never say a word to anyone, and go to bed, like all the other kids who were there. He snivels and demands his dad back him up in his desire to throw himself at the feet of strong police men, no matter who else he drags down with him.

Son, both parents think you should forget about it and go to bed. That's what you call a 'free pass'!! 

The gang sure made the right choice by scorning him. Imagine if he was accepted by the gang and someone gave him a puff of a reefer, you know, Mary Jane?  He'd probably freak out, and demand the gang drive him to the ER, shouting: 'Sorry, but just this once I wanted do something right!' as everyone at the party is led past him in a handcuffed row... for their own good. So they don't get hooked, right Jim?

And just imagine who Jim would want to bring around to gang meetings if he was in. Considering his new best friend is a super needy rich kid who just killed a whole boxful of puppies the night before, which is the slam dunk hat trick of red flags.

God help your cat, Jim, if you ever cancel a playdate. 

And man was he getting close! Luckily three guys from the gang found him first - So Plato shoots one, then hides out in the planetarium (where the days trouble began). Our bright 'right'-doing Jim Stark decides to save the day by racing past past the cop's cordon and into the planetarium to try and talk Plato into coming out, without even explaining his intention to the cops. Think, Jim! How can they know for sure you're not bringing Plato ammo rather than taking it away!? 

Then, in a final jinx move, staggering in its idiocy, Jim gets Plato to give him the gun, then takes the bullets out, but then gives him back the gun!! You should have just given him the bullets, Jim. The cops don't shoots kids who wave bullets at them, as you will soon find out.

Dean's big acting moment, the one that almost made him live up to the hype as a powerhouse actor, is his great slur-shout of "I-got-the-BULL-ets!" after Plato falls dead. Waving them ineffectually, as if trying to shoehorn his own roaring teen angst into Plato's big Buffalo Bill butterfly moment, I think we're supposed to 'feel' for his chutzpah at this juncture, and even rail against the callousness of the Big Bad World. But I say if its big and bad, its to protect itself by 'heroes' like Jim Stark.

 Jim, next time, just shut the fuck up when people make animal noises. You're worse than Tony in West Side Story, who gets two people killed just because a girl he met a few hours ago tells him "any kind of fight's no good for us."  Well, at any rate, Jimbo my lad, now now you don't have to worry about your cat. 

I know it's not a popular trope these days, but as a deep tissue Jungian I'm partial to the idea of masculine rites of passage. I think it's imperative for masculine identity to make a social rite out of the brave facing of fear, pain, death and humiliation, and above all, most importantly, cuts and bruises (women's reproductive system includes built-in rites, they don't need any more).

 John Ford gets it. Nicholas Ray gets it, Colonel Blimp and Crocodile Dundee get it. Apollo Creed every boxer in the world gets it. Tyler Durden, John Wayne eventually gets it, and all of Ireland.

Luke Skywalker, squares, Maria, Jim Stark don't get it. Cops and school principals don't get it but they're not supposed to, so it's OK (they're the referees) 

If we'd all just belt each other occasionally. 

You got to do something. 

I used some color screenshots, as I generally don't like colorizing, but in this case it's by a fan on YouTube for
their own amusementand in Teen's case the purple/green schemata adds a weird sense of dislocation

Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) does plenty -- it's the rampaging Yin to Rebel's puling Yang.  Dean might get all the posters can't hold a candle to the endearingly Dumbo-eared Derek (David Love) as one of the....TEENAGERS. Almost totally emotiionless, he gives an actually lovely demonstration of how a man might be sensitive, and decent, and nice yet no coward, kibbitzer, or narc. He's not some 'rebel' against middle class conformity, to him middle-class conformity is rebellion. The planet he comes from is void of things like comfort and emotion. So when he winds up in a perfect small town, as warm, inviting as Rebel's is dour and lockstep, in soothing b&w instead of Rebel's garish color (Natalie Wood's garish lipstick makes me shudder just to think about). But after that the similarities are striking. 

For example: both occur within a single day/night. Both involve a new guy in town who finds himself protected by a girl who likes him and pursued by a gang of boys who want him to stop trying to change the Way Things Are. Both involve puppy killers who pay for their crimes, alas, indirectly. In Rebel the black sheep is surrounded by perfectly into their small town 50s conservative (heteronormative) social structure; he finds a small group of fellow outcasts, who like him are unable to sublimate their dysfunctional daddy issues.  Meanwhile a runt with a gun tags after him, demanding full attention -i.e.trying to Jim into his daddy.

Derek comes to a new town from a lockstep conservative but all male (structured around one big daddy issue) social order where being an outcast means longing for small town heteronormativity, and finds one in a friendly 50s social structure where there is no daddy at all just a friendly old suspenders-wearing Harvey P. Dunn, and you know he's harmless and gentle because just the sight of a girl with long nails nearly kills him in Ed Wood's NIGHT OF THE GHOULS, and his cool granddaughter, just about Dereks's age.

 If only Jim and Derek could trade places! 

I'll grant you, Derek really lucks out when he stumbles onto friendly gramps and his nerdy-cool granddaughter. Unlike Jim Stark, he doesn't need to be all "you're tearing me apart!" whiny about feeling alienated from his assigned-at-birth tribe. Derek never freaks out, just flatly asserts his preference for a warm, emotional environment. But you know how that team can be when you try to jump ship and who can blame them?

I love a lot about Teenagers from Outer Space (though the title put me off seeing it until only a few years ago): I'm a big fan of post-sync dubbing with these lower budget numbers as it lends them a weird dreamlike unrealistic air--Carnival of Souls wouldn't be half as surreal without it, and it's a perfect vehicle for Derek's flat emotionless (in character) delivery, he's like the anti-Dean. His rebellion stems from realizling his peers are going to bring in the 'gargal' (indestructible giant shadow lobsters) and turn Earth into kind of giant pasture / feed lot / lobster bed. How does it feel to be thought of as food for someone else's food, America? Probably not very good. You might ask the third world how they cope. You migth ask the buffalo... or Black Elk. 

The hypocrisy here comes not from American society but from the aliens. They're not supposed to bring the gargans to an inhabited civilization-havin' world, but Thor, his psychopathic saucer mate, decides a zapped dog's tag is not sufficient evidence to halt the plan. As far as Thor goes, they're not supposed to wipe out sentient beings, the way the US Cavalry is not supposed to massacre all the Native Americans, including unarmed women and children. In other words, the powers that be want 'plausible deniability' in order to get rid of the problem once and forever, therefore the underlying (nonspoken) orders are carried out ("with extreme prejudice") contrary to the written 'official' order.  Feigning empathy with those you kill in order give your country's liberals are a panacea for their guilt is the bedrock of 'colonization.' Thor--jealous and bloodthirsty, trades on the friendliness of the townsfolk in his pursuit of Derek, but repaying kindness with merciless zapping as he goes, like any good 'civilizing' influence might wipe out the indigenous population of a land they were claiming for the crow after first getting to know them, maybe taking some pictures, directions, gold... and then, almost as an afterthought, wiping them out on your way to the next. 

But Derek, true teenager in his liberal phase, undoes the hidden meaning in a reverse counter-revolution --sticking to the letter of the law, using the oppressor's law against the unwritten (he even gets the press involved, symbolically at least). You go, Derek! That's the kind of teenager rebellion that works - a rebel with a cause. 

Take a lesson, James Dean / Jim Stark, Derek rebels against his corrupted order via its own strict guidelines, like a boss. 

WHEN STRAIGHTNESS WAS A BIG TENT.

Luckily the more rabidly homophobic the society the less gaydar they seem to have. Dawn Bender surely doesn't have any--all but chasing Derek around and instructing him to make decisions based on her interpretation of things she doesn't understand, clueless her new man's alien orientation. She uses her old boyfriend-friend (i.e. the equivalent of that guy who loves her unconditionally, even under the condition he's relegated to 'friend' status, so common to movies even today, though the 'gay bestie' has now taken his place), a reporter played by Graef himself, to do the legwork so we can easily go from q) to z) as far as getting the whole town to back Derek up as Thor comes blasting. It's a refreshing switch from the tedious swaths of parents and cops not believing the teens in the more conventional (i.e. straight shot) films, perhaps reflecting a kind of 'grass is always greener' along the outlaw divide effect, where the outcast fantasizes about communal acceptance and vice versa. Meanwhile, in her naive moral certitude, Dawn becomes a kind of saint /  heroine / representative of all Anytown USA has to offer. She and gramps become kind of a fantasy for lonely orphans--- instant love and acceptance, as if they'd been waiting all this time just for them. For St. Sebastians lashed to the wheel of intolerance, they are the ultimate heteronormative/tolerant backup, the solace they dream of. Meanwhile, someone like Ray Stark has to go to all sorts of ugly lengths to escape the accepting arms of his own family, clumsily lashing himself to whatever wheel he can find, invariably leaving one arm free in case he needs to itch, or take a selfie of his anguished struggle. 

NEITHER AWAKE NOR ALEEP NOR DEAD

As with a lot of post-sync films from the era, the air itself seems different -- eerily still. There is no wind, very few birds, everything is muted, the voices all right up front, the way people's talking sounds when you come to from a concussion, the way Carnival's small Kansas town becomes when Candace Hiligoss is suddenly plunged into an in-between place where no one can see or hear her. The difference here is that the weird quiet is benevolent. Before this film I didn't think a benevolent alienation was remotely possible. There's something for everyone here in town! There's even a foxy and sexually assertive single girl down the street-- with a pool! I mean, I suddenly wouldn't want to leave either. Too bad his jealous ex is stalking him, disintegrating everyone he meets--all of whom are too nice and kind to realize what he threat he poses, including the pool girl. It breaks my heart every time. Why not leave her alive, Thor!!!?

Like Jim in Rebel, Derek is a stranger in a strange world, but unlike him, Derek is no narc. In the end he makes the ultimate sacrifice to save humanity in general and the small town in particular, and he does so without any browbeating, giggling, grandstanding or adult-shaming.  Even after the boys send for his sugar daddy, his hairy-chested biological papa, the leader of their planet, he stands firm. I don't think Jim Stark would be able to. For him and his daddy-starved friends, Derek's papa would be like a gift from god. 

--

With those hooded Peter Lorre eyes, Bette Page bangs, Edith Massey teeth, 'Bette Davis whispering into the ear of a sleeping Val Lewton' vibery, and that starchy retro-hipster dress, Dawn Bender is a totally unique presence in movies. It's like a whole new category of 'types' has to be invented to support her her.  A whole new kind of 'small town cool' is born. Perhaps it's the queer perspective of the film that she--the only woman with any real skin in the game--is the most unique and thoughtful character, a true lead and not just another endangered love interest / lab assistant. In yet another of his innovative but weird editing choices, Graeff lets all her scenes play out a few seconds longer than an ordinary editor would, letting his camera keep an eye on what she does after the action in the script is completed, how she fills out the gap between the end of the scene and the actual cut. She uses the time by wistfully gazing through windows as if she's Lilian Gish on the lonesome prairie after yet another day with no mail from her far-flung fella in a DW Griffith silent. It's archaic yet ahead of its time. It wouldn't matter if she just shut down emotionally at the end, like a robot; we'd still be with her all the way, enraptured and confused by her weird charisma. (As in so many films by gay auteurs, the women are as handsome as the boys are beautiful.)

Regardless of which tent you currently live in, Dawn's gentle sewing needle and Dunn's folksy business can patch the tears, reminding us--regardless of how we perceive its perception of us--not all small towners are intolerant. And even if some are, all they need to change their minds is the right alien boy, the right Bronson Canyon cave mouth, and the right stock volcano explosion. Proof that innocence and sincerity can thrive without sacrificing difference. At least in this one film. This one time.

Oh, also in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter.  Just these two times. 

I forgot about Night of the Hunter--another movie about the strength of innocence in the face of hypocrisy  that was made by a gay man? And the only movie that man directed? And recognized as a cult classic only long after that man was dead? 

What is wrong with this f--ed up world? 

Less then a decade after making Teens, Graef would kill himself with car exhaust. Seven years after the critical and box office failure of Hunter, Laughton died of cancer, or a broken heart. 

God bless little children. They abide. 

Eventually.

The Joy of Recycling: THE WHITE GORILLA (1945)

If your idea of endlessly re-watchable half-asleep outsider gold /accidental surrealist multi-meta collage is the same as mine--which seems almost impossible--viddy well the THE WHITE GORILLA (1945), streamable everywhere. and don't even bother trying to figure out what's going on with all the flashbacks and animal reaction stock footage cutaways. It's better that way. Just find the best transfer you can, wait until you're nodding off in your easy chair with  slippers, loyal wolfhound, glass of port, and unlit pipe at your side, and stream away (you can find it on my YouTube mix Vintage Jungle Madness). Why? Low stakes, a pleasing narration, and the gorillas, and the liberating sense of 'seeing the seams', whereas the tools of covering lack of budget are revealed. Stock footage, foreign releases, public domain classics, home movies, silent documentaries--whatever is in the fridge, so to speak, can become integral to some story tellable only by the few actors and sets you have at your temporary disposal. When it 'works' it's priceless, that sense of found object outsider art you might get at the gallery show at a mental hospital.  

Ed Wood validating his cross-dressing via blue collar conversation heard over industrial footage of steel girders pumping white hot out of the forge, or building a movie around a home movie of Bela Lugosi sniffing a flower outside his house for Plan Nine--it's like poetry structured from whatever word magnets happen to be on the fridge. And what about the way 1981's Game of Death II composites a Bruce Lee performance out of classic footage (stretching back even to when Lee was a child actor), outtakes from Enter the Dragon, and even Lee's actual funeral? Ingenious, even if it, or especially because, it never quite gels. And Curtis Harrington Queen of Blood with young pre-fame John Saxon and Dennis Hopper as astronauts encountering a a martian queen conjured up via footage from a Russian sci-fi film?  Sublime! Peter Bogdanovich making Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women from a different Russian sci-fi film by folding in new scenes of Mamie Van Doren in a blonde wig and glittery silver hip huggers? I'm floating on a lava sea of Lady from Shanghai references. And like Ed Wood's Bride and the Beast and the Luigi Cozzi Godzila Redux, of late, two composite gems I keep on my emergency dial, so to speak, made eminently hypnotic by the ingenious methods they use to match footage from disparate places. I've recently found a new favorite... alas it's barely an hour long. Would it was a million.

THE WHITE GORILLA

 (1941) Dir. Harry L. Fraser

Starring  Ray "Crash" Corrigan

"The jungle.... weird...."

Godardesque meta manna cascades like a waterfall, thundering library stock music crashes and recedes in glittering harp glissandos over the credits proudly kicking off the post-modern edge with a credit that says "An All-Star Cast." We know right away that the normal handrails of narrative are going to be coming and going. And then there is Ray Crash Corrigan"--usually inside a gorilla suit or doing stunts-- stars, narrates, and probably fights himself. He's kind of got an Ed wood drinking buddy vibe (I hear they were). He's no milquetoast. He's played gorillas in every movie ever made, and here is in a gorilla movie, as a human, (and probably also one or both gorillas). We're off and walking! We cut through the usual roster of dangerous African animal stock footage as his narration sets the scene, and the result: magic. Flashbacks are composites of three sources: animal footage, which silent film characters react to but was clearly shot in a totally different place (sometimes it even seems like a zoo) and then Steve in a separate frame as well, shot later--each in turn reacting to something it can never share a frame with - leaving us watching suddenly feel eyes on us: god watching us watching Steve watch silent serial stars watch even older safari footage. We feel seen, at long last. 

And hurrah for Corrigan, mostly underplaying as Steve Collins, a chewed-up guide who stumbles out of the African jungle and into the trading post (the actual only non-stock set) where three white guys are drinking and kvetching about jungle noise. Naturally after a drink to steady himself he starts with his tale of the doomed safari he was guiding, and how his client, Bradford "wouldn't listen" to him. And would always camps near a stream ("always near a stream,"--an odd detail, he'll mention again, though we never see one, or even a camp). And so we flashback to the meat of the movie, highlights lifted from the only known surviving chunk of an old silent serial Perils of the Jungle (1927). Silent Tarzan Frank Merrill is Bradford, sporting an arm band tattoo (or claw mark) and getting into all sorts of scrapes with animal footage while searching for 'the Cave of the Cyclops' (just a statue, alas). We get lots of lions try to break through the cabin door, while sad-eyed apes look on, or charging elephants, angry natives running hither an yon, a little jungle boy (it's all good cuz he's fiercely Hawksian deadpan rather than Sheffield cutesy) who does all the deux ex machina rescuing, including operating the arm of the cyclops statue so the tiger men think his crazy mother--who wears horns and rattles a skull stick--speaks for the gods. 

Steve, wishing he could help

These scenes are all narrated by Steve and peppered with regular cutaways of him peeking out from behind bushes or up in trees, periodically offering rationalizations like "with the lions between my hiding spot and the endangered party, I was powerless to help" to explain why he never shares their frame.  Like a good guide that he is, he merely bears witness. 

Yes, he's less of a fighter and more of a rationalizer, and Corrigan does his weirdest bit of acting when spying his nemesis the white gorilla through the trading post window back in the present, while about to take a shot of whiskey. Instead of pounding it to steady his nerves like a real man he lets it slip through his fingers in the most ridiculously forced manner, and starts this intense little pule / whine of "there it is," almost like he's in a long bathroom line. Then he's back to narrating derring-do with lions always trying to break down thatched huts ("as the lions continued their attack, I thanked my lucky stars for my decision I made never to be caught too close to Bradford...")

Since Corrigan is usually the one growling and snarling (he plays every gorilla in 40s movies), it's surprising to hear his soothing, masculine and low-key voice that fits him perfectly. He's kind of a beefy, normal looking guy, but the lyrical language and conversational way he speaks (in a kind of repetitive hypnotic style where the key word of the previous sentence is the first word of the next) creates a pleasant kind of trance. Distant jungle noises outside the trading post, the nature footage, and the rich music, and foley for the silent film flashbacks, all run under his voice, like soothing 'green noise.' It's mostly seamless, even if they sound recorded on vastly different equipment. 

Furthering the pleasant sense of dislocation is the use non-spatial distance and tribal relations in this part of the jungle ("jungle where the natives hated the white man.") Steve says he and Bradford stayed at he old man's camp 'for months' while coming ever closer to finding the treasure via his coveted map. So they trek all day and then turn around and trek back? The inner jungle turns out to be almost two-dimensional, with native villages overlapping each other and the camp in a foggy blur where no shot seems aware of its connection to the one that precedes it. It turns the camp of Bradford, and the trading post are all no more than few miles the Cyclops cave (which is where Steve leads Bradford and co about to to be fed to a pair of anachronistic tigers--clearly stock footage of them trying to climb up the concrete wall in the zoo enclosure-- as a sacrifice). When the other guys at the post go off to check it out they're back the next day, it's just long enough to give Steve just time enough to face off with his deadly alabaster foe, and rescue the girl. Her strategy: shoot once, scream three times, throw the gun to the ground and pass out at the white gorilla's feet (Steve notes "as I passed her rifle laying on the ground, I knew something had happened").

The climactic highlight is a battle with the much larger black gorilla, who slaps his own face and conks the white one with a big stick from behind his back. The likely grim fate of Bradord, the jungle boy, his horned mom, Bradford, and the daughter of the blind treasure hunter better left unsaid. The other men return from checking it out and note there were only bones and the two tigers. Since that's where the surviving chunk of Perils ends too, Case closed! So Steve is going home to America with the rest of them, rationalizing once again in his conversational, muffled tone: 

"After all, we have no right to the jungle. It belongs to the natives, and the animals, not the white man. It was theirs before we came, it should be theirs now." 

All is right with the jungle, the white outsiders are all gone--even the little jungle boy--and Steve has learned some important things.  Even as they walk away his narration continues, no longer bearing witness, but just imagining the jungle's denizens giving the gorilla a kind of moment of silence as a sign of belated respect.  Considering the blithe unconscious colonial racism and animal mistreatment on display in 99% of all other jungle movies from that era, it's almost woke. Not that you'll be by then, if you watch it late at night in bed like I do, almost every night, always near a stream.