Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Famous Monsters of Mexico I: EL VAMPIRO (1957), THE VAMPIRE'S COFFIN (1958)



Hey Classic Mexican horror fans, this is Mil Errores, escritor que lucha libre de adicciones y ego monstrouo y, here to offer this October a whole series "Famous Monsters of Mexico" - because all of it is, if nothing else, imaginative and just plain crazy AND with a strong matriachal through line thanks the numero uno monster of Mexico being la Lorona, the Crying Woman, Mexico's big crossover horror icon, recurring again and again in one form or another -- evoking a very strong matriarchal through-line - devouring aunts and mothers luring her niece to the hacienda for a sacrifice, to inhale her youth and/or drown and kill children, to keep the devil happy. Yes, queen... of evil!

Repetitious, threadbare movies, the same passages of bombastic score over and over, endlessly recycled sets and props--sound familiar!? but unlike Monogram or PIC North of the border, the imagination on display is pretty jaw-dropping. So let's get in on the madness! Starting (according to some half-memory of a documentary extra seen ten years ago).,

Kicking things off we salute Abel Salazar (left) the Mexican Carl Laemmle Jr, if Carl was also an ex-matinee idol, with a more than passing resemblance to Sheldon Leonard. He generally shows up as the good lead in the thankless role of hapless husband, passing stranger, etc. the shaky heteronormative alternative to the evil seduction of the heroine's maternal ancestors, i.e. the ultimate wicked stepmother/s, but with his name as producer in the credits as well, so you can understand why he might come off a tad distracted

The big notable differences between these Mexican horrors and ours, besides language/dubbing involves the big soundstage standing set of a hacienda, which appears over and over in many many Mexican movies of the era: it looks great, with front gate, a well in the center of the courtyard, a row of balconies like a motel, all visible and overlain with big soundstage surrealist atmosphere, and a strong matriarchal through line thanks to the power wielded by older Mexican women in the social structure, and Mexico's big crossover horror icon, recurring again and again in one form or another, devouring aunts and mothers luring her niece to the hacienda for a sacrifice, to inhale her youth and/or drown and kill children, to keep the devil happy. Yes, queen... of evil! 

Yes, Mexico is muy viejo. America can't find its own la Lorona, or Inquisition, rather than just wipe out the native inhabitants, the Spanish had children with them, Catholicism making it all OK in a way super-racist America never understood --and that's how Mexicans, LatinX-ers were born and that's the root of la Lorona, the Native mistress and the Spanish nobleman who fathered her children, but then mistreated her and triggered a Medea reaction. In the US horror movies if we do luck out and get a woman monster, she has to fall for some bland young white cipher who prefers Evelyn Ankers or something, to appease our uptight racist censors. We have to set our films in Europe to evoke ghostliness, but Mexico... it's gotta go nowhere - it's already home. And the monsters are in their blood, in the sand, in the bull ring, the wrestling mat, the spooky hacienda engulfed by evil... 

THE VAMPIRE (EL VAMPIRO)
(1957) Dir. Fernando Méndez

Producer Abel Salazar is the nominal mortal hero here, playing the super skittish and inconsistent psychiatrist Dr. Enrique, who's been called to the Sicomoros, a remote, crumbling, spooky villa way out in Sierra Negra, under the guise of helping fellow traveler an all-around clueless naif Marta (Ariadne Welter) get 'home' safe after they get off the train (they hitch a ride on a wagon with a big coffin full of earth, so you know whassupa. She hasn't been there since she was a kid, and it was sunny and normal--now; she find the whole landscape is twisted and foggy and dangerous; the hacienda is rundown, cobwebbed and twisty tree roots and fog. Servants have all fled or bled- Oh dios mio. She's been working in a shop, now called back because the good aunt who raised her-- Maria (Alicia Montoya)--is sick, or crazy; and actually dead, or at least has a funeral procession to Sicomoros' atmosphere drenched crypt. She is the one who Enrique was called in to diagnose since she was raving about vampires --now she's dead, and the medical association is pretty strict about psychiatric diagnoses once the patient is dead. On the other hand, the bad sister, Eloisa (Carmen Montejo) is alive, but not really. She hasn't aged a day since Marta left. Now she sleeps all day, dresses all in black, can't be seen in mirrors, is averse to crosses but--you know, the idea of vampirism is scoffed at. In between, a milquetoast uncle Emilio (José Luis Jiménez) tries to stay out of it. Salazar's shrink however just can't leave without diagnosing someone, so spends his time trying to put his clumsy flirt moves on Marta rather than letting her grieve. But vampiros?! Dr. Enrique would much rather commit the dead body of Amelia to the sanitarium than risk his standing in the scientific community by believing his own eyes. Any layman can easily to diagnose a vampire--and in case he forgot there's a book from the library that the not-dead Maria pushes out from her hideout behind the bookshelf, to catch him up. But he only thinks it's fiction; leaves Marta foolishly exposed to Eloisa and her urbane, hip vamp novio Count Duval (the amazing German Robles), then promptly pronounces her dead after she drinks drugged wine, and declares its "impossible" when her finger moves. This guy is really a terrible doctor! Marta's aunt is less than 48 hours dead but he doesn't want to believe she might still be alive in her crypt, either. He pronounces Marta dead but she's alive too, and he thinks Eloisa is alive, but she's dead! 
The atomsphere is great, though, when you're in the Halloween type of mood. The problem with this film alas is that we spend way too much time with the fussy Enrique--Salazar vacillating between trying to be romantic lead and Van Helsing at the same time, regularly giving the distraught Marta a kind of super lame "let's see a smile" come-on, saying she shouldn't cry over her aunt because he thinks it makes her less attractive--one can't tell if he's meant to be so creepy about hitting on her, invading her space. One really appreciates Bob's tact and light touch in The Cat and the Canary all the more after this.  And Marta isn't any better. Her crazy scream seems uncalled for, and refusal to believe her own eyes--over and over, stretches credulity and patience to the limit. Vampires are pretty easy to spot, so you really need to not think about it too closely. Just how old is she supposed to be?

And thus it's hard not to root for Eloisa and her Dracula-esque novio. Soaking up the night vapors, standing very straight and still deep in the great soundstage forests wreathed in fog, webs and twisty branches, her black scarf whipping out behind her like the lady version of a cape, staring out at nothing and then slowly vanishing or turning into bats, what a kind of a love story! He bit her first (before the credits) and now wants to own the Sicomoros and has made a good offer, all just so he can visit his brother's crypt (Duval backwards!) which adjoins the property and maybe disinter him. I'm not sure why he doesn't just marry Eloisa and not have to deal with real estate taxes. Instead Duval puts the bite on Marta and maybe Eloisa suspects he won't be the freshest nest in the roost, or whatever. But hey, dig his crazy mirthless laugh where looks like Richard Devon as Satan in The Undead

Luckily, all those dumb little narrative points vanish in the bat-filled breeze once Aunt Maria appears, creeping  in and out of her niece's bedroom via secret panels to plant little straw crosses on her pillow and otherwise save the day. She's the only cool, good person and she's been driven half-mad from fear and  trying to convince the glass-eyed normals around her that vampires are real. There's a fine line, as we learn in our undergraduate feminist lit courses, between being driven crazy by no one listening to you and no one listening to you because you're crazy. At a certain point, even that fine line is gone. 

Sights of the aunt wafting around closed-off bedroom clutching a giant cross to her chest, her hair long gray hair and grey dress taffeta trails flowing behind her like ghostly afterburn, her huge eyes wide, stricken with having to behold too much horror-- it all gives her a kind of wild/wise woman sex appeal one-off archetype: the good undead Christian spirit who wields the cross instead of fears it. I've always wondered why being entombed alive seems to automatically turn people into monsters once they escape  (ala Corman's Poe films, Lewton's Isle of the Dead, etc.), so I'm glad Maria stays nice, if still a a little rattled and unworldly. We need more of these vampire fighting eccentric aunts with long hair and big crosses and huge eyes, countering each vamp machination from behind her secret passages.

In the end it's all about real estate -- and, take it from me in the 90s: after a long night of decadence and potent potables, a conveniently located crypt you can reach before dawn is worth any price.  

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Though he gets star billing and positioning as "The" vampire," Spanish actor German Robles only shows up about 1/3 of the time, but what an entrance he makes, arriving in an ominous black carriage that rolls through the mist-shrouded villa gates with ominous fanfare. Dressed to the nines in prime Lugosian formal finery, he's like a brooding and sublime mix of Christopher Lee and George Chakiris. After the ineffectual tio being the only other man to counterbalance Salazar's light-footed ineffectual doctor, it's nice to have someone with some swagger. While the doc runs high and lo, hands waving in a perpetual tizzy, struggling to believe his own eyes as he vacillates between Van Helsing savvy, skepticism-masked denial, and Lou Costello st-st-stuttering, Roble's poised charismatic Duval majestically arrives in full award ceremony regalia, replete with badass hypnotic pendant, manages to loom over everyone else even while looking up from the ground floor. Would that we spent more of the film's running time with him and Eloisa, perhaps in some kind of Addams Family-style Morticia/Gomez macabre courting ritual, or back in the shadows with the good aunt. But you can't have everything. And the score is pretty epic, booming and hissing like some Mexican Max Steiner (it would be recycled frequently in the films to come); the idea of the good vs. evil aunt thing is relatively original, and there's misty, gnarled tree and spider web atmosphere coursing through, in and around the hacienda in the best Halloween perennial sort of way. Fans of the Spanish language version of the 1931 Dracula may rightly wish Robles had been old enough back then to take the role away from the miscasted Carlos Villarías. Now that would be a classic. But this is definitely worth your time anyway. Maybe I've been too hard on it. Truth is we have to love it because its success launched the Mexican horror mini-boom of late-50s-60s; many of which showed up on US TV thanks to K. Gordon Murray and his Florida dubbing team (whose voices one grows quite fond of as the films accrue). And dig the short diegetic time period - it's over in the course of two nights and a day ... and it's the good old lady does the stakin' - and you got to like that.  Es verdad! 

You can find this on Blu-ray, usually paired with El Vampiro's goofy sequel....

THE VAMPIRE'S COFFIN
("El ataúd del Vampiro")
(1958) Dir. Fernando Mendez

One issue with having Salazar as a producer and a star: who's going to tell him to stop hamming? Or that his romantic co-star Amelia from the previous film shouldn't be playing a professional dancer as she seems pregnant and it's a marked deviation from her goody-two-shoes from last film. Both actors seem determined to unveil their weak areas but Salazar is especially insufferable. Determined to wreak every last drop of comic tic-indulgence from his nervous l-l-l-line readings, he tries to convince his now hospitalized novia that everything from the last film was entirely her imagination. Why he deliberately endangers her life by not even giving her a cross and some wolf bane or something, even after his idiot fellow intern (?) steals Duval's coffin to run some scientific tests (he finds out that, among other things, that when a vampire is staked you can see his skull in a mirror rather than nothing.... that's science!). 

What the idiot intern doesn't bank on of course is that the thug he hired to help steal the coffin (Yerye Beirut, i.e. the Mexican Marc Lawrence) sneaks in later to pull out Lavud's stake in order to get at his jeweled hypno-necklace. Big mistake, Yerye! Unless of course you like being a Renfield/ henchman to a vampire who wastes no time launching a reign of terror at the hospital Marta is staying at, appearing and disappearing, putting the bite on a small kid just like the last film(irregardless of the giant cross above her bed) and angling to make Marta his bride - as fate suddenly decrees. Why he should fall in love with her of all people, remains a mystery, outside of script convenience. Wasn't he all up in her evil aunt? Make up your mind, Duval!  Fans of Halloween 2, and I hear there are some, might note the obvious similarity in plot points - heroine in hospital cuz the last film's trauma, now has her justified fears smugly disregarded by overconfident staff, the killer wiping out the whole hospital in an effort to get to her -- and it makes a good comparison in quality as well as, while both sequels are fine in their own right, they're rather inferior to their antecedents. 


Furthering the disconnect, Abel Salazar dyed his hair blacker and lost some weight for this film, making him seem younger than he was in the first film (just as he's now an intern instead of a psychiatrist), and if you can get past his senseless gaslighting of Marta you're bound to despise him for trying to rat out his vamp-stealing fellow intern to the head of the hospital  (say what you will about Abbot and Costello, they weren't narcs). Eventually, he realizes he'll come off like a tattletale, even to the hospital director, so he takes full blame ("I stole a corpse last night,") then ups the ante ("it was a vampire.") Jesus Marta and Joseph! What is a stressed Mexico City hospital director supposed to do with that information, aside from firing you and/or locking you up, tonto? With the count using his hypno-necklace to get her under his will on one side, and the overacting hysteria of Salazar's amorous doctor trying to overprotect/gaslight Marta, one wonders if this competing 'control' of the 'feminine agency' is a backlash from last film's relative matriarchal strengths. A jumpy gaslighting narc convincing you it's all in your mind, or a sophisticated urbane necrophile who has to anesthetize you before busting a move--what a choice of suitors for a young lady! Hell you're better off with Claude Rains in Notorious. At least she gets a big comfortable king-size bed.

Further rubbing in the patriarchal revisionist agenda, the coolest, strongest character from the first film, the cross-wielding, wild-haired wild woman archetype Maria (Alicia Montoya) gets the short shrift. She follows the coffin to the hospital and starts running high and low and carrying on about the danger, only to be prevented from visiting Maria by Salazar, still in full denial - and then after bravely stalking Yerye to the wax museum, meets her fate, unheralded and forgotten, in the iron maiden before the movie is halfway over and no one ever wonders where she is or if she's OK --she's just totally forgotten about. Does the doctor's 'treatment' include pretending she doesn't even have an aunt? Seriously between him and Charles Boyer in Gaslight, you're better off with - 

But all that aside, once again the cool Halloween horror atmosphere is in abundance thanks to a weird interiority dream space where hospital, theater, outdoor cafe, wax museum, all seem linked as if on a giant soundstage, all of it connected by weird ladder systems and twisty stairs leading up to the light rigging rafters. When Duval whisks Marta away from her dance troupe, and up to the rafters, he only has to cross a few ladders to come down into his wax museum hideout. The almost empty all-night indoor/outdoor (?) cafe where one of the dancers goes to relax between rehearsals has a weird expressionist Edward Hopper glow, with the welcomely ominous deep black shadows offset only by high-contrast diegetic electric light sources; streetlamps, stage lights, hospital nighttime track lighting, all of it barely holding back the dark thanks to the Stanley Cortez-esque work of cinematographer Victor Herrera. Compare that to the comparably banal 'every corner of every room must be visible 'somehow the old castle is all lit up with no visible light source'-style look of Hammer and Corman (and even post-code Universal) and you realize how precious that inky black is. It must be savored and celebrated. It helps fill in the empty spots in the sorriest looking wax museum you'll ever see. It just seems like damaged mannequin storage space. The bit where Yerye lurks and poses like a waxwork to evade discovery evokes Marc Lawrence in Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum or Bronson in House of Wax. They even bring out the old guillotine demo gag and the one where the killer stands next to his uglier wax image, you have to take their word for it they look alike. They missed the opportunity to replace the figures with real actors holding very still, a trick very well implemented in the original 1935 Mystery of the Wax Museum, and in Tourist Trap. Mostly they're all mannequins whose heads were melted and reshaped or just given a head made in papier mache by a blind five year-old. In case you can't tell, that means I love them. 

Performances other than Salazar's are all pretty choice, too. Nobles is back, as Lee/Chakris-hybrid charismatic as ever and Adrianne Welter is a much more animated Marta this time, except onstage, where she's shockingly half-assed as the lead dancer. She's strong, too -- she even shoves Duval at one point and he goes spinning into the opposite wall. Those same thunderous library music cues from the last film may repeat endlessly, but I love that, in the big climax, though I've been hard on him, Salazar gets to demonstrate his athletic side. That he can full-on fight with a giant bat without getting tangled in its visible strings indicates some nimble dexterity to balance out his hamming, never missing a chance to show off his fencing or bannister leaping, and I love the weird final ending ("Those stairs lead to the roof," says the incredulous police chief after Salazar and Marta try to walk up into the sunlight ala the end of 1931 Dracula.) When they take the front door, it's still night out, and the diner across the street still has its noirish ambient Hopper's Nighthawks kinda vibe. You can see them cooling off with a drink at the outdoor cafe before going home. It's a pretty good, meta way to end things, with the flippant attitude of Salazar finally making contextual sense. Well, like they always say, you don't come to Mexico for the meta resonance or lush production valies, you come for the oomph, the imagination, the shock to the senses. In Mexico, the power of myth is right there, in full form- alive like a fire that's never gone out. It may not give much of a flicker at times, but it never has to be re-lit. 


Wednesday, October 09, 2024

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. 

(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. 

Friday, June 21, 2024

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

Sunday, May 26, 2024

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.


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