Acidemic - Film: Deborah Kerr

Showing posts with label Deborah Kerr. Show all posts

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Angels of Death Summer Viewing List: The Badass Brunette Edition

It's summertime here in the East Coast and if you're a Nordic in genes and temperament it's not your favorite season--in fact it's loathsome: too muggy, humid, sweaty and everyone frolicking about without a care in the world, mocking you and your Swedish allergy medicine depression. That means lots of time staying home and watching old horror movies on TV, the AC blasting, for that special chill cool horror causes. And cool horror means cool women, and if you love dark long flowing hair then you want brunettes, ideally with guns and sharp swords, slightly biker-tough. Blondes are the cornerstone of horror, but your Nordic mom is blonde, and you can't abide seeing a girl who looks like your mom when she was 29 and you were three years old and constantly struggling to get her attention, which to your three year-old emotional state is more precious than gold. Right? And then she comes at you like a wurdalak to drink your blood. You kneel at the base of her bed screaming and crying in terror, and she finally wakes fully up and you realize she was just moaning from having to deal with your three-year old's nightmare nonsense. (True story!) Nothing in my life has measured up to the fear of that three year-old nightmare moment. All the rest of our lives, mom and I used to joke about it, that is... by day. My mom was a mix of Doris Day, Bibi Andersson and Janet Leigh, and they've effectively split up for different parts of my psychic projection -- Doris I have a kind of hatred for, that aspect of mother one must reject and avoid when hitting latent puberty; Anderson, the sensual anima with far-away eyes and Nordic beauty, whose attention I still crave and lack; and Leigh, the vulnerable deer-in-the-headlights, stirring the responsibility one feels when made 'the man of the house' before they actually become men.

Knowing this you can imagine that I was sooo looking forward to Swedish director Nicholas Windig Refn's NEON DEMON; but then I read April Wolfe's review in the Voice. I can't even seem to think about it now without starting to shake in rage, like I did hearing a professor had screen IRREVERSIBLE in class without even a warning. So rather than get livid (which would just raise my heat index, the opposite of why we're here) let's talk cool brunettes, the capable women who win my affection by not depending on it. I see them completely as other - more associated with my dark-haird father, surely, and like him, strong, affectionate and kind of a partying badass.

9. Arly Jover, Natasha Gregson Wagner

VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS

Dir. Tommy Lee Wallace (2002)

**1/2

A sequel to Carpenter's James Woods-starred vamp hunting movie, it's directed by Carpenter wingman Tommy Lee Wallace and I actually like it better than the original, which seemed surprisingly misogynistic and mean-spirited for Carpenter, with little of his old Hawksian reverence for cool feminine energy. This almost makes up for it as that the main vampire villain, Una (Arly Jover) is unreservedly fierce, strong and super-sexy but in a sleek, lithe dancer way, not in a softcore bimbo objectified way as women were in the first film (except for poor Laura Palmer vampire, saddled with meta-murph Danny Baldwin, for a love interest). Lightning fast, super strong and mentally unstoppable, Una hopes a bizarre priest-crucifying ceremony will enable her to walk in daylight, but a priest has to do it willingly, so elaborate preparation (and a good hostage) is needed. Sheathed in a lovely grey lame wrap dress (high fashion meets the mummy), Jover doesn't get many lines, nor does she need them; too fast for the naked eye, we see her moving back and forth like a swaying cobra, turning herself on by tuning into the beating hearts of her impending victims, giving playful licks to the neck of lovely Natsha Gregson Wagner, seducing the claustrophobic black vampire slayer (Darius McCarey), scaring James Wood's replacement in the Vatican vamp slaying business, Jon Bon Jovi (he's great - who knew?), and his priest acolyte, she handily wins us to the dark side.

If Jover doesn't entirely make up for the direct-to-video budget, dig too the cute love story between shoot-first ask-questions-never Jovi and "I'm bit but got pills that stop me turning vamp"- HIV analogy-trundling naif Natasha Gregosn Wagner. And is that future Mexican film star Diego Luna (Et tu mama tambien) as the local kid who signs on for the kill with a (falsified?) note from his parents? It is, and even with his weird face and strange manner the kid has undeniable screen charisma; you don't know why but you can smell impending stardom all over him. Blood never lies.

10. Natasha Gregson Wagner

MODERN VAMPIRES (1998)

Dir. Richard Elfman
***

From VAMPIRE'S KISS, THE ADDICTION and NADJA in the east, and NEAR DARK and VAMPIRES in the west, the 90s was a high time for hipster vampires and this little honey of a made-for-cable horror has a lot of that 'blood as an addiction/heroin/schizophrenia metaphor vibe' so essential to the zeitgeist, only with almost none of the tired morality. This one follows the love affair between roaming vampire Casper Van Dien (showing a real relish for this kind of morale-free bloodthirsty killer romantic role, rather than his usual dull square-jawed heroes) whose arrival back in LA garners the ire of local party legend Dracula, (seems Dien initiated Van Helsing into vamp killing by turning Van's sick son way back when and Drac never forgave him). Alas, this all also coincides with Van Helsing's visit, and a girl Dien vamped out years ago (Natasha Gregson Wagner) who's been running wild, feasting on the dumb johns, rubes, squares, suckers, and marks of Hollywood Boulevard, without a thought to covering her tracks. Drac doesn't like that nonsense either. Uh oh.

What's so great about this nutty film is that, thanks to a gleefully savage script by Matthew Bright, these vamps are portrayed as nice cool folks to party with on the one hand, but vicious sociopaths on the other. These creatures don't waste their time hunting deer for blood like the Twilight crowd --they go right for the jugulars of human beings, showing cheerful disregard for all the screaming and pleading. Seeing naked bound humans terrorized and bled at the local vamp club presented as mere background to the dialogue and typical club exposition is wondrously refreshing in that its amorality is so disturbing. That may sound callous of me, but after so many films where 'newborn' vamps hold onto their moral center by refusing to drink humans, preferring to get the blood secondhand from their girlfriend vamp's vein (ala Lost Boys or Near Dark - which somehow makes it okay) or stay "vegetarian" (drinking animal blood) in order to--let's face it--spare the audience the discomfort of sympathizing with killers. I mean I'm as sensitive or more so than the next guy, but that kind of honesty is such a relief after so much of the namby-pamby compromise that deadens vamp romances. It's a reminder of just how long it was from Clockwork Orange to 1994: the Year Tarantino and Fiorentino saved us from Vampire Morality

Friend of scriptwriter Bright, and director brother Richard (the three of them worked on The Forbidden Zone), Danny Elfman delivers one of his better scores of vocalizing and vamping (ala his work on Burton's Ed Wood and Mars Attacks) which fuses nicely with wild panther noises when newbie vamp Natasha Gregson Wagner--strutting and looking glamorous as all hell even in slutty short-shorts--strikes at her johns and bloodies their cars and nearby alleys. Smokin' hot but sufficiently ferocious not to seem chintzy about it, with her shock of (dyed - hence makes the list) blonde hair, and habit of cartwheeling drunk into trash piles, Wagner just might be the best 'hot mess' vamp of the 90s. Not only that, her love affair with CVD is genuinely touching. How rare is that?

And damn right you'll be IMDB-ing Bright after this if you don't already know the name, and once you do and realize he also wrote FREEWAY and DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, then suddenly you're hooked. Who is this guy and why isn't he revered to this day as the blood-slicked gully between the Hills Jack and Walter? Not sure. He fell off the map a little bit after this and devolved into downers like FREEWAY 2: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICK BABY and BUNDY, which is a drag. Oh well, no one is perfect forever, and as far as made-for-late-night-cable schlock goes, this film is a frickin quasi-gold nugget I'd never have known about it if not for Quiet Cool puttin' me wise.

What I love about Bright, so apparent in this, DARK ANGEL and the first FREEWAY is that he has a yen for truly dangerous women--the type who don't need to be assaulted by men before they're allowed to kill them. I can sense Bright shares too my hatred of films where newbie vamps suffer tortures of thirst rather than bite some random pedestrian cuz it would be wrong or something. Dude we're adults, why not have him kill a bunch of people and then feel guilty about it later, like the rest of us probably would? That's just life... and death. We're all adults here! Or will be by the time we get to see this movie on Blu-ray!

That's not to say it's a perfect film. I abhor the gangbang scene, and Rod Steiger makes an unbearably hammy Van Helsing (that accent is maybe the worst thing he ever did - but who's going to tell him? The guy's a fucking legend). But the rest of supporting cast is to willingly die for: Udo Kier. Craig Ferguson, Kim Cattrall, and Natalya Andreychenko, plus a hilarious trio of Crips whom Van Helsing hires to help him raid vampire nests. You may have to buy the Uranian DVD to see it, but you must, no matter how missable it may seem from the made-for-cable 90s flatness of the hair and clothes.

Joséphine de La Baume and Roxane Mesquida
KISS OF THE DAMNED

(2012) Dir. Xan Cassavettes

***

Bearded screenwriter Paolo's (Milo Ventimiglio) smoldering eyes meet those of the alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) at the local video store. They both love movies, what a connection! But they can only hook up if he chains her to her bed, as she finally tells him, because she grows fangs and glowing eyes when aroused. After an impressively short bout of initial disbelief, Paolo's just too turned-on to not unchain her and let the bites fall where they may. Hey, it's like when you're so in love you don't bother with a condom. This movie gets that. It's a level of romantic attraction that can no sooner stop for 'safety' than a tidal wave pause to spare a sandcastle. In this day and age the vampire heterosexual love thing may seem trite, but Paolo and Djuna are so good together, so model-perfect without being smug or arch about it, that it's hard not to swoon regardless of any initial impulse to hate him on principle. With its impeccable color schemes (all the better to perfectly bring out La Baume's gorgeous red hair and pale skin) the occasional bouts of vivid sex (not so much it ever gets tiresome or superfluous), and the vintage mellotron slink of Steven Hufsteter's score, this retro-lyrical vampire love story would be a hard thing to fuck up, and this impressive debut from the daughter of John Cassavetes is far from fucked-up. It almost doesn't even matter if it goes anywhere other than 'not very not far' because it goes there so very coolly.

In that sense too I like it worlds better than the similarly stylized and better-reviewed Duke of Burgundy which is burdened by a fundamental bad casting decision (to use ordinary looking actresses in frumpy middle age or thereabouts rather than gorgeous clothes horses for the leads is an interesting idea but it doesn't work for the Eurosleaze genre - if you're going to do Petra von Kant or Warhol-style aging divas they at least need to be histrionic--as there's nothing else going on to hold our attention, especially in HD--we hunger for beauty). Here the delicately low-key romantic chemistry of La Baume and Ventimiglio intoxicates so much because they're both so beautiful on their own but have genuine 'cosmetic chemistry' that's both skin deep and regular deep. The result- together they transcend mere window dressing smolder. The result is sublime cinema crack cocaine for the eye, so when Djuna's wild child vamp sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) shows up, needing a place to crash after laying waste to the clubs of Amsterdam, we recoil in frustration like we're Gene Tierney cockblocked by apple-cheeked cherubs in Leave Her to Heaven in reverse... What kid of a famous filmmaker has ever made us feel that inclusive intoxication, aside from Sofia Coppola once?

12. Alison Elliott as Nora, and the reincarnation spectra of Irish druid generations

THE ETERNAL
(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda
***1/2

If Eugene O'Neill adapted Bram Stoker's "Jewel of the Seven Stars" and set it in NYC 90s with the help of Hemingway and Lew Landers, I think we'd have the ETERNAL. I found this gem by being into Almereyda's black and white vampire hipster film NADJA and learning he made this afterwards, another hip salute to classic horror films utilizing contrasting film stocks and speeds to create weird ESP interconnectivity between past, present, human and witchy... Starting in NYC and ending up on a windswept Irish shore, it's about reincarnation and a mummified druid priestess found in the basement and woken up by Christopher Walken right as Nora returns home. Noting her body's been preserved by all the tannin in the peat, Walken's pretty enthralled by his discovery--an ancestor of his family... and therefore Alison's (Alison Eliot) who's been having migraine black-outs and drinking and goes to the homestead in Ireland almost as if called by some unseen force, her fun-loving drunk husband (Jared Harris) and owlish ginger son in tow.

One of the unique subtexts at work here is an undercurrent of pro-drunken feminist anger as pointed as Eugene O'Neill's in Anna Christie. Nora regularly has drinks taken out of her hands by fellow drunk husband Jim who says "none for us, we're quitting" and makes a big show of enjoying life without it all while nipping from a flask unseen. That kind of balderdash makes me want to wretch! The way the drinks pass her wide eyes by, or the way she works hard to seem deadpan when getting offered some whiskey down in the basement once Jim's upstairs with the ginger kid --it's the kind of stuff only drunks like myself probably feel so keenly, and non-drunk directors don't even seem to notice as keenly as others when adapting O'Neill's works. Very few playwrights capture the way every offered drink, every vulnerable liquor bottle, warms the alcoholic's blood like a siren call, and every 'no thanks' on their behalf freezes the blood like a gut punch they're not allowed to wince from, lest they prove just how valid their family's concerns are. I lost my train of thought. (more)

FURTHER BRANCHING:

See also: Michael Almereyda's previous hipster/30s horror deconstruct, NADJA (Elina Löwensohn)

See also: Hammer's adaptation of Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars: BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (Valerie Leon, above)

See also: Virginia Christine in: CURSE OF THE MUMMY (1942)

2-3. Lili Taylor + Catherine Zeta Jones

THE HAUNTING

(2001) - Dir Jan de Bont
**1/2

Whenever I feel a close sisterly affinity with an actress I check when and where she was born - sure enough, like me Lili Taylor is a Pisces born in 1967 Illinois. Like me, she's an introverted mirrorer - meaning she can reflect, distort, match and amplify other people in one-on-one encounters; we love one or two people at a time, but we start to lose ourselves the larger the group. We can't mirror everyone at the same time, so we begin to vanish, or freeze, get a panic attack trying to process all the voices. Still, give us time alone with a cool chick reflector like Catherine Zeta Jones, we're like an awesome sexy feedback machine - it's only when the dull boys show up things wonk out. Jones' dialogue, clunky, in their initial meeting, her bragging about her Prada Milan boots and so forth is overcome by her knack for delivering lines with a cheeky delight: "This is so twisted, Susan Foster Kane meets the Addams Family," it's that playful knack Taylor mirrors so well.

An Aires born 1969 in Wales, Jones has a twin sign reflector skill herself. She's never been outshone in any film - always able to reflect her co-star/s' radiance, no matter how acclaimed they are. Put two reflectors together like Jones and Taylor in the first chunk of Haunting- and there's instant lesbian affinity that overwhelms Taylor's character right out of her mousy caretaker role, and delights Jones who in turn is fascinated by Taylor's instant crush on her, then quickly moves on once the rest of the guests arrive. Most hilariously is the way, for example, Taylor echoes the ominous words of the uptight housekeeper ("we lock the gates after dark") while giving Jones a sly grin. If only it was just the two of them, running through the house in all its giddy overdressed splendor (funhouse rooms with mirrors and revolving floors, etc), secret panels, living griffins, imprisoned souls, et al. Haunting would be a total classic. But then comes the boys--Liam Neeson and Owen Wilson--in career acting lows apiece. It's as if--realizing the film's already been stolen by these two raven-haired demonesses-- they decide to just wreck the remaining reels with their smarmy banality.

Jones toys with Owen, bemusedly, partially to get under Taylor's skin, partially out of habit, but always good-naturedly (girls who want guys to stop hitting on them without making them feel angry and dejected should study her deflector skill), and eventually Owen drops the "my smile is so disarming" confident smugness and starts to accept his position in her life as a little brother figure not a possible lover.

As for Neeson, well, he is --plain and simple-- an embarrassment.

As I've written, I prefer this film to the original Haunting - I know its' heresy--and I know the original is a vastly better movie, scarier, better acted, far more artistic and psychologically complex-- but I'm sorry - Russ Tamblyn's little Bronx gremlin face and one-track greed dialogue and hipster "don't give me any of that supernatural jazz" is as wearying as the smug puns, strained exposition ("that's the easiest way to dismiss the supernatural, by pleading insanity or accusing others of it"), diatribes, and shrill shouting. Between Julie Harris' snapping at everyone, the rest of the cast patronizing her so relentlessly, it's hard to tell if they're right and she needs psychiatric care or they are provoking her deliberately for some sadistic 'scientific' effect. Either way, it all aggravates my hangover whether or not I have one. More proof? Compare Harris' dowdy provincialism to say, Deborah Kerr's 'unhinged Poppins' in The Innocents and you're reminded that while some Brit actresses lend oomph, warmth and gusto to even their spinster roles, others--like psychic vampires--just drain the life out of everything but their own repressed bitterness. On the other hand, the 1963 version has great prowling camerawork, an ethereal paranoia-engendering sound mix, and goddess Claire Bloom. When she's wearing that pendant and black sweater I feel my soul waken from its elder god slumber. When Harris calls her "nature's mistake," implying her lesbian tendencies, I lose all sympathy for that spinster bitch. That never happens with Taylor, even if the film goes way off the rails around her.

Also check Taylor in THE ADDICTION (1991) my favorite of both Taylor's and of Abel Ferrara's- with perfect fusion between her off-the-cuff whispery thrilled aliveness, Ferrara's druggy downtown cool, and screenwriter Nicholas St. John's doctoral thesis in philosophy-on-heroin stream-of-consciousness and the Village at the height of its rock sticker-layered post-punk decadence. I was living on 15th and 7th and used to walk past all these spots, hungover or drunk out of my mind, and lemmie tell ya, it was really like that - all the black tailgate partying on the weekends, Rastas sellin' ganja (maybe), used record and clothing stores every half-step, awesome. All gone now... god damn it all.

4. Rose McGowan

PLANET TERROR

(2007) - Dir. Robert Rodriguez
****

Now that I've had the chance to see the Hateful Eight three or four times, it's become apparent to me just how much that film belongs to Samuel Jackson--how he 'owns' it and centers it and gets the bulk of dialogue. Similarly, seeing PLANET TERROR seven or more times it becomes apparent just how much Rose McGowan's movie this is - how even surrounded by heavy hitters (Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, Freddy Rodriguez) she OWNS it. As go-go dancer Cherry, she gets the most lines and screen time and chances to display range; she changes the most as a character, starting from 'it's go-go not cry-cry' to becoming all she can be all over one long crazy night, spilling gallons of infected blood while running (with one leg and no crutches) the gamut (bottoming out with her crying one-legged striptease for a repugnant Quentin) and then ever upwards.

Part of what makes the film work is its moral twilight where none are good or evil without some part of the other (for example, Marley Shelton plays a terrible mother and wife, but one of the intrepid hero survivors; Brolin is at least a 'great 70s dad' and good doctor ["we're gonna have to take the arm, Joe"] while also being Shelton's murderously jealous husband); Biehn focuses on arresting El Rey ("are you a 'wrecker,' Rey?") rather than focusing on the town going to shit all around him; Bruce Willis shot Osama bin Laden and was screwed over by the army brass so went rogue, etc. Only Rey himself and Cherry (McGowan)--the least respectable on paper (ex-con, go-go dancer)--are truly the knight-errants. Repeat viewings reveal McGowan's journey is one shared by every college graduate with no prospects - how to make use of your list of seemingly useless talents to find a life purpose, all while the biological clock is ticking and opportunity windows are closing before they're even all the way open. Sometimes the less options there are, the bigger the yet-uncreated role you were meant to fill. Is that what real heroism is all about? Funny that her and Rey's motto is 'two against the world,' when they're the most unselfish ones of their group, and therefore truly their sisters' keepers and the finders of immune survivors.

Rose McGowan
PHANTOMS

(1991) **1/2

I suppose most people would think of Charmed or Scream when they think of Rose McGowan (1), but me? I think of Planet Terror and this. I don't love it but I sure can watch it a lot. It's got several things I like (strong, cute women with guns walking down a deserted snowy street, flanked on all sides by mountains; a lowering of the line of the chains that separate walks of life and law so the civilians, the military, cops, crooks, drunks etc. unite against a common foe; a cool monster); and nothing I don't. There are no tedious small town Americana details, no kids, moms, and old folks and checker games and moseying along familiar set-ups and corn pone cliches; there is no feel-bad Kramer-esque liberalism of the 'we're the evil aliens' soapboxing, like Day the Earth Stood Still, Man from Planet X, etc. And I love its shades of Carpenter's Thing, and Prince of Darkness (and that it's set over one long night). And I relate to being all freaked out when a sibling or best friend lures you to their bohunk town for the holidays, and you're all cranky and anxious, dreading being stifled by the above small town niceness, only to find the town empty, dark and seemingly alive inside its own shadow. I like the ominous pipe groans, the readiness of the girls to cowboy up at the sheriff's office. I don't love it, but I like it all.

Rose McGowan is great as the grumpy visiting heroine and some cute chick named Joanna Going is her sister, the local. I don't even mind Ben Affleck as the pleasingly nondescript sheriff or the miscast Nicky Katt and the beady-eyed Schreiber as the deputies. I don't mind that these three New Yorker types are so out of place in Colorado law enforcement. The only person in the whole cast who seems believably from the Rocky Mountain area is Bo Hopkins, stealing a scene with O'Toole in a private plane. Affleck's too young and his hair's too slick and short to be believable as a sheriff but he's not all Batman pudgy yet either, so... hey, and there's Peter O'Toole for god's sake! Are you not hooked?

4. Melanie Scorfano

WYNONNA EARP

(SyFy series)

***

Sharknado is the kind of movie Syfy premieres, but they also import cool shows from Canada, where strong female leads remind us that not every country is as repressed and sexist as us. I was a fan of Lost Girl for awhile but it got annoying when Bo started getting all self-righteous and refusing to kill people and suck up their souls. Wynona Earp is comfortable with killing in cold blood, and I like that. I'm also a fan of the star Melanie Scorfano, playing an accursed direct descendent of Wyatt Earp, whose past enemies, whom he hung all in a row, are back to haunt his ancestors, and she has an ornate demon killing gun to help her finally undo the curse. Wynonna's sister Waverly tends bar at the local watering hole and has a lesbian relationship with a cute cop. It's Canadian, so booze and casual sex aren't considered inherently evil, thus there's lots of both, occasionally on-point Black Hills-ish South Dakota country accents, and creative plot twisets. Even the main bad guy (Bobo) is at least cool in a Hitchcockian sort of way, even forging a strange bond with Waverly, etc. and there's females in traditionally male roles (like the blacksmith) and so the intersection of newer progressive values and old school western traditions making it all very nice and wry. Kickass Scrofano could be the cooler little sister of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction and manages to hold it all together without ever becoming bitchy, maternal, or cross, all without an ounce of cloying sedimentary sweetness, but plenty of sisterhood, drinking, and weird curses, hellfire, and two-fisted-but-very-womanly gusto that's way beyond most American actresses.

6. Famke Janssen - WITCH!

HANSEL+GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS

(2012) - Dir Tommy Wirkola

**1/2

Since I have distant ancestors hung as witches in Salem I'm still sensitive on this issue (that's a joke, how could I possibly remember them? 300 years is a long time, even the ancestral curses have worn off) but you can't call a film misogynist for using the words 'witch' and 'hunters' back to back (though when this first came out I certainly did try), and if there's any unsettling aura of gynocide in this semi steampunk past it's only in dickweed Peter Stormare and his good ole boy constabulary, who try to get rapey with our Gemma Arterton (sister witch hunter) and get smashed up real troll-wise instead. Still we learn not to budge jooks by the clubbers as there's a good witch too (Phila Vitala) and the bad ones are led by the great Famke Janssen, fast proving herself to be such a welcome beauty that perhaps the entire world is as smitten with her as poor Logan in X-Men (and me). We'd follow her off a cliff and director Wirkola (who gave us Dead Sno 2 after this) pulls no punches, even as it's got so many strong females that if it is misogynist it's also a tribute to the inner resilience of womankind. See also Famke's great work in Lord of Illusions, Deep Rising and fuckin' love you, Famke.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Satanic Blondes of '66: INCUBUS, EYE OF THE DEVIL

Ah 1966, what an excellent year for an animal or human sacrifice, what with any worry about an EXORCIST still eight years away. Hell, even two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's twin devil offerings, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are polar opposite heralds to Polanski's influential hit: one co-stars Polanski's then-wife (he helped get her the gig) and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being a wife shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is off on some crazy hipster dream in a language all its own (literally, since it's the only film ever made in that forgotten 'experimental' language, Esperanto, at least the only one that anyone's ever seen). Soon the fangs would be properly installed in the balls of horror cinema, but for now it was all just rumors and poetry and urban legend. There are those in insider circles who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretch through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment via his extra-dimensional Manson hook.

In case you are not up on your Hollywood Satanic conspiracy theories, some say the strange accidents and macabre coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in producer William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past his usual chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, instead he went psychologically nefarious, going for the paranoia seed-planting that can spread like wildfire from a single cocktail party to infect the collective unconscious in ways deeper than any normal 'fiction' ever can. As Sutter Kane might say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate.

Reality is as susceptible to insanity as anyone.

We know it's relatively unlikely a real skeleton is going to come flying through the screen during a revival showing of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, that's why we love Emergo! so much. It's not really scary-scary, it's Boo! Ahahah scary. The devil doesn't need skeletons to be scary. An old lady neighbor who baked you cookies for some reason and keeps wanting to be invited in - that's genuinely scary.

Besides, maybe there's a reason superstitions began that does have scientific validity. Maybe not walking under a ladder prevents paint can concussion, and people made shitty ladders back when that superstition began, so they just told everyone not to walk underneath them (the guy making ladders was really mean so they didn't want to suggest he tighten the screws); maybe salt thrown over the shoulder absorbs negative ions; maybe Castle didn't mean to create a real curse by starting the rumor going, but rumors do tend to zero back in, like a curved sacrificial karmic arrow, on the one who started them, even if he himself didn't believe it.. at first. (1)

Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar because, if you don't know yet, I'm afraid it's going to be... you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.

So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position: where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation. Only those who revere repression need fear him. And they're likely the ones bound to be caught up in a sex scandal sooner or later. Sexual repression is the devil's distillery. And its release in an evil act is the devil's drunk tank. He gets them going up and gets them going down.

If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE (just how did he get it for her?); Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (by blinding the EYEs of rival Tony Curtis)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress. And the devourer is always... Moloch.

On the other hand, even if for the moment we believe all this fateful 'nonsense,' it's mighty fuzzy logic. Impossible to confirm by any one set of truths, its also impossible to deny--and thus like all fiction that explores this realm, dangerous. The best way to approach it is as a true skeptic, which means you don't scoff at either side, because unlike the pragmatist, you know your own eyes and ears are easily fooled. Thus, a Satanist who believes in an actual physical devil is as rigidly dogmatic as the rationalist who denies the devil's existence, even as a metaphysical concept. When corporeal reality tries to limit itself to expression within either set of parameters, there's always nightmare overflow. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls sticking out like bleached whites in a soiled soul sea, and the ones who are so sure he's a living being succeed in--as far as their own direct experience is concerned--making him one. Eventually every conception of good and evil comes 'literally' true. Especially if you do lots of drugs, are schizophrenic, or have a really bad fever.

I mention all this to eat up the time because when Sharon Tate's not onscreen, EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. And she's not on an awful lot. The tale of some grand ancient sacrificial rite that ensures good grape harvest at a sprawling South of France winery, it draws us in as outsiders through the eyes of a prim and overbearing wife played by Deborah Kerr. She spends the whole movie trying to get her half-asleep nonentity husband, the marquis (David Niven) of the area to come back to London so she can resume boring him to death with dreary classical music salons. Here in France he's being prepared for some even worse fate (she thinks); it's some some kind of diabolical ceremony and he's being prepared to participate somehow, but how? She must know, so she can stop it, like a nanny no one invited, still chasing after old charges, trying to make them go to bed at nine and drink their milk,long after they've grown up and filed restraining orders.

Tate and David Hemming are sublime, meanwhile, as a pair of magical blonde twins doing all sorts of macabre arcane prepwork, but they're barely in the film at all. Even Niven's angry flogging of a sexy black turtlenecked Tate makes it onto the poster and opens new chamber doors in our telltale hearts but it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr's prim outrage over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. After she first spies him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property. Like who put this dame in charge? Intentional or not, Kerr is as irritating a nosey parker as Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here). Inviting herself in to take charge of a situation she doesn't understand, she's a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order wherever she goes, never thinking to examine her own mess or to just go home and resume micro-managing her servants. As her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness of what's actually going on, we begin to understand both Niven's passivity and his eagerness to complete the ceremony to come Every husband in the world stuck with a wife this much of a buzzkill would gladly cut off his own arm to escape her. Soon we're rooting for Niven to pursue the one avenue of escape she leaves open... the one avenue even she dares not follow.

I don't mean to slight Kerr - or this kind of weird set-up. As a kind of unwittingly dosed quasi-pedophile Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS (right), Kerr was amazing in a similar role. Destroying the lives of two children through wicked hallucinations of a groundskeeper animus, or else trying to save them from incestuous possession --either way she was invited, hired for the job; she was assigned the position and expected to take full charge. DEVIL is different; if those two weird kids in INNOCENTS grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking their ample mansion grounds like Warhol superstars able to turn doves into lizards, then Kerr's meddling would just seem petty and aggravating but still it would be nowhere near as depressingy mundane as in EYE. In INNOCENTS, the three of them--or four with the maid--are so cut off from the rest of the world, we sympathize with how lack of connection to the social order can allow things to spin way way out of control.

The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white governess, driving her like a flaming hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her full-grown husband and bring him back to her tedious London social orbit. We just want to ride with the twins on their weird evil errands, but instead our camera follows Kerr everywhere, like a priest trying to score a fat donation: she lopes after Niven as he lurches hither and yon, as stricken by his impending doom as a bones-tossed Queequeg. She judges and condemns the wicked, wicked twins as they loiter in black turtlenecks; they drive poor Flora Robson to tears because... oh no, the nightmare--it's all happening again... Sign, Robson's always great, and if we can't run amok with the twins we'd be happy hanging around her for awhile, but noooo, on this endless bucolic French vacation we're stuck with the most boring character in a 60-km radius, and meanwhile all this cool stuff is going on behind our backs. She's like my mom used to be, forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. And then wondering why I need to just sleep the day away and then stay up all night.. where she can't get me.

Luckily, the weird devil 'becoming'-ness I mentioned earlier is all over EYE: the music played during the local festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" --we'd think it a homage or even rip-off had it not come first--and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY 2 might be like if Rosemary had twins and 18 years later she's still in denial about who their father was, chasing after them with mittens and rubbers as they burn churches and slaughter priests.

All that said, if not for Tate's real life fate lending EYE even more of the eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity that plagued ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST, it would be worthless. But in its eerie prescience it's Tate's equivalent to James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She's the bizarro super sexy Satanic Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy, especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast. It shows us just how far ahead of us England was at celebrating the eerie self-confidence of badass babes in black (Mrs. Peel, we're needed) rather than ever trying to shoehorn them into pretty dresses and tie their hair back in a cruel mirthless bun.

Working our way back out of the EYE, it should be clear now that the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence. His name is a kind of interactive tarot deck wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Manson murders.

But... even then, man oh man -- there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archer? Nein! It's too impersonal. It lacks the fears we harbor for the knife. And another thing: if there's anything a drunk like me hates, it's a buzzkill. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to Niven to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr scold us for our curiosity about such things. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what, evil or not, because she's gorgeous, young, and confident. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!

Mom, go back to bed!

If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost!

It's hard to believe that EYE, this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger in spirit if not in form than the new wave-y EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least two characters with ample wit and sparkle: Charles Gray as Mataxa and Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter. Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think -- another connection and proof the area's rife with possibility! Is it some secret knowledge that the south of France is devil cult country?).

RIDE understands--the way few devil movies do--that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help you roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere. That would be truly uncharitable.

Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 -- INCUBUS.

INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!

Put your feet up

Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mic jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single Big Sur weekend, INCBUS would make a good double bill with THE TERROR and/or THE SEVENTH SEAL (as it no doubt intends). The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the already weird story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, corrupting infirm male travelers and then hastening their deaths so big daddy Satan can devour their souls. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the already stained, but her older sister advises against it. Sis is right (I tried it once and look at me - I lost the fight and now am pure as snow.) Then William Shatner shows up, and he's not there for the waters, baby, but to play a variation of Jack Nicholson's lost Napoleonic solider in THE TERROR: sick of war, wandering the Big Sur coast, so noble he can't be beat. Luckily the sisters have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus (their brother) on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!

Second thought, scratch the other two, this would actually make a good double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller who loves lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low-budget concoction from Leslie "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Bergman" Stevens, but both love the Big Sur surf as much as we all do, if we've been there. And if we haven't been, what are we waiting for?

Sure, I know what your saying, man: INCUBUS sounds over-baked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her into a church to get out of the sun while she was asleep? Senpreza!

In conclusion, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL share a lot more than their date. They're burdened by similar faults: EYE is way too dry and disdainful of its subject; INCUBUS is way too singleminded and didactic. Yet, they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on, as films. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST, the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough that we don't wince at their every word, and the evil spirits--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we don't want to go party with them. But in both these 1966 films, the 'average' voice, the establishment figure, so to speak, is an unshakable bore. He or She is as a fruit tree ripe for shaking. Every second of screen time they are not being shaken to the core is nigh unbearable to us, the hip post-67 viewer. Maybe it was still dangerous in 1966 to feel ourselves rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE. That we feared for their plan to be interrupted because of Kerr's imperialist meddling must have felt transgressive in that more innocent, staid era; and in INCUBUS not to spoil the ending, but did we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Satano, liberigu miajn malbonajn junajn knabinojn!

NOTES:
1. William Castle got painful kidney stones right as the film was released - didn't you hear?

Monday, May 24, 2010

A Voluptuous Crucifixion: My Long Day's Journey into NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)

There's movies about drunks made by sober folks for sober folks (i.e. Days of Wine and Roses) and then there's movies about drunks made by drunks for drunks, such as NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. It's directed by John "drunk in Mexico" Huston, written by Tennessee "alcoholic beachboy junky" Williams, and stars Richard "King Drunkus" Burton. Whether snoring through high-steppin' crap like EXORCIST 2: THE HERETIC or THE MEDUSA TOUCH, chewing scenery indiscriminately between woozy waves of hungover nausea in DR. FAUSTUS and BOOM! or--in very rare moments of clarity--brilliantly acting, Burton was always one drink ahead of his slur, a surfer sliding and grinning wild-eyed and mirthlessly down the tube as lightweights collapse in his wake. If he didn't always land gracefully, we could blame the floor or the script, not the man, usually.

But he had his weaknesses. He had appetites. And he fed his appetites. And when a great writer knew him and too knew appetites, of the sorts condemned by moral matrons blind to their own butch yearnings, then a mighty force was in the works. Only a great shaper of drunken, mighty forces like these could harness such a booming noise into a manly tune, only a towering friend to the drunken titan, like John Huston could craft from this crazy madness something truly mythic and even transcendent in scope. The result of this great meeting of three minds, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, has been called indulgent male narcissist male gazing by bitch-ass punks and people who never knew the awful terror of depression, loneliness and fear that coalesce when a day of youthful waggery, public adoration, groupies, endless free drinks, and velvet ropes parting before you like an admiring red-faced sea suddenly gives way to hostile, indifferent nights, alone - shivering, unemployed, fired, bested devastation - paying full price for even a plain diet coke as you clutch your sweat-stained AA pamphlets like the last rope out of the jaws of the long swim crashing surf Medusa.

I don't like to regale you with tales of my own grandiose drunkenness (hah!) when writing about my favorite drunkard films, except in ways that illuminate the impossibility of being objective about a film when it hits close to home. So let me tell you a story that mirrors Rev. Shannon's own, a story that takes me back twenty years - to good old summer 1990.

I'd graduated college in Syracuse in '89, where I'd been played bass in a very popular (on the college scene) acid rock cover band, I quit them on good terms thinking my stardom would illuminate wherever I next alighted. I moved to Seattle with my hot girlfriend; I did the Noel in a Hendrix Experience cover band until the Hendrix guy got arrested and I wouldn't co-sign his bond and put up my car as collateral, whatever. No one came to see us anyway, except our progressively less-impressed girlfriends. Being just 22, bloated and wild-eyed with progressing alcoholism, and naive as all hell, I was genuinely surprised how hard it was translating my Syracuse local rock god glory to a town that, as anyone who's tried to move there knows, is very insular, and depressing. I became a hopeless drunk with few friends (all from California). I hung out at the Blue Moon tavern a lot, trying to score weed while various people tried to pick up my hot girlfriend and I let them (actually, as anyone in that situation knows, there's not much you can really do about it without coming off swinish) on the off chance they had weed. At home I read Hate and Eightball comics and listened to records of old blues and/or old radio shows while guzzling whiskey highballs and eating peanut butter on crackers; I watched endless WC Fields and Jack Hill movies (fell in love with Spider Baby for the first time), and drank more and more while the endless rains fell on our U-district one bedroom apartment's flat-top roof. A great way to sink into a cold depression, and loving every sick minute of it, at least in hindsight.

My too-hot girlfriend became disenchanted. She had too many good offers from affluent non-screwed up hippie bros. We broke up while shrooming at the aquarium, the sadness of a tank of black fish polluted her viaducts with melancholy. I left her there in our apartment and hit the road for home, shrooming all the way across the country via route 90. I hit Syracuse along the way, right in time for the hardcore psychedelic revels that mark the end of the semester every spring (or did), especially on Earth Day, at which used to be held an annual block party on the huge strip of lawn between the roads on fraternity row. Crashing with myriad yet-to-graduate friends and bandmates, I was out of the band but still invited onstage to jam and do funnels. I may have been nothing but a cut-rate Noel Redding imitator in Seattle, but in Syracuse I was still a lizard king-ish icon. Free at last, girls literally standing in line to welcome me back after the show as I sat there on my bass amp throne, each forcing each other out of the way, clamoring for my ear; my head full of cocky entitlement and psilocybin (a great combination), it was the happiest two weeks of my life. Unfortunately, looking back, I overdid it. I became a notorious slut, figuring out the best plan to deal with two housemates on Victoria Pl. both hitting on me was to sleep with them on successive nights, thus earning both their lifelong ire. They weren't even my only lovers during that two week stretch. I also got so high and drunk I actually accelerated out of my depression for the first time since 1987.

But May ended, the last of the straggling students left, and finally, the last person I knew still dawdling had left for home. I had nowhere else to crash, so--. still glowing from two weeks of validation, sex, drugs, rock and roll--I finally drove home--fanfare trumpets in my Lou Reed and Stones-soaked ears--to New Jersey and the Kuersten family tract. I was three grand in debt and a week late. I walked in expecting to just say hey and make a drink.

My mom was there, furious, waiting.

She started right in lecturing and a man had been waiting there, in the kitchen, to give me a urine test for life insurance. She hadn't even told me. This being the time of "Just say no," when you could go to jail for decades just having a joint in your car, I knew what would happen if I complied. So I went from living the "lush life" as king of the world to making hurried, vague excuses why I couldn't give a urine sample to my mom. Enduring her scathing silences and near-tears looks, the beige walls and the hostile yet disinterested depressive silence of that empty-but-for-disappointed-parent's house hit me like a tidal wave. I had no friends in town, nowhere to go, no one even to call.

That night I lay in my crappy little twin bed in my old room, as miserable as I'd ever been. I finally missed my hot Seattle girlfriend; it ached. I missed the girls I'd rebounded with in Syracuse - though by then they were all mad at me as they'd found out about each other. I was reaping the shit I'd been sowing for six years, all at once. My pillow wet with tears, I was too young (23) to understand the anguish of validation withdrawal, going from a life of constant drunk, stoned, tripping, collective love, to one of silently hostile maternal indifference and crushing solitude. I felt the full weight or all the great shit I'd thrown away in the name of what I called at the time "the sacrifice of love for love's sake," of walking away from the band and the girl while the memories were still sublime - not riding it into the ground. That sense of sacrifice made it all so sweet at the time. But now.... there was only pain.

Men weren't allowed to cry back then. We were supposed to man up, tie our ties and take temp agency typing tests every day until we died or got a real job. Man, that Seattle girl was so hot, bro. Shit. Now that I wasn't rebounding right and left, I really missed her. The things I disliked about her faded into trifles while her beauty glowed every more painfully from the 3,000 mile vantage point and I was yet too young to understand why that was. Now I'd be unable to smoke pot for at least a week (when the urine taker returned), needing to wash my system out with daily jugs of water and refraining from all "dry goods" in a state of uneasy paranoia. There was no recourse, no outlet for my longing.

I was so sad that night, I couldn't sleep. I'd never been too sad to sleep before. I never had a pillow soaked with literal hot tears before. Never. It was hell and it went on forever, hour after hour as I lay there until I could finally hear the snores of both my parents in the next room.... like an 'all clear' alarm.

I crept downstairs to see if I could perhaps find solace in TV and the parental liquor cabinet.

My ginger touch in removing dad's booze ever-so-quietly from the shelf was still in effect. I could negotiate the creaky stairs in pitch blackness without making so much as a creak. I could make myself a large "heroic" tumbler of rum with a dash of pineapple juice without rattling a single ice cube. Thus armed, I began the torturous cycle through cable channels that was two AM TV in the pre-internet early 1990s, and all so quietly no creature would stir around me.

Suddenly out of the fog of paid programming whom should appear? Richard Burton, in color on TNT (Ted Turner was colorizing everything it could get its hands on), fending off Sue Lyon's irresistible advances down in Mexico and basically giving voice to all my miserable woe right there on the spot and the rum hit me like a warm hug right as I saw Burton's magnificent drunk face and recognized the girl as the same hottie from "Lolita."

I was going to be all right... the warm flush of rum hit me as I realized the whole movie was about what I was going through, the kind of night that's tough to get through, but saved by frank and honest discussions of, for some reason, Hannah Jelke's bizarre sexual experience in a gondola. Deborah Kerr's performance is, I realized only later now that I'm older (and many years sober, thanks to AA and the grace of etc.), the other major source of power in this movie, as her own descriptions of getting through long nights ("any light looks good after being so long in a dark tunnel that you thought was never ending") rattling any emotionally vulnerable soul to tears of catharsis.

In short, Night of the Iguana "makes it easier to get through nights that are hard for us to get through," Miss Hannah Jelkes says of her poppy seed tea. Watching it that night, after my hours of tear-stained despair, I realized a part of me was enjoying being at the end of my rope "on a green carpet hilltop instead of Golgotha, the Place of the Skulls," i..e. my parent's tract home in Bridgewater, NJ, bathed in the forgiving glow of rum and orange juice. "Isn't that a comfortable, almost voluptuous crucifixion, Mr. Shannon?"

I rushed to tape it, missed about the first 45 minutes, realized it was playing again the following night so I could tape the whole thing. Thank you, God! Thank you, rum! There was still some left! And Richard Burton, his thick black eyeliner-lined eyes wild with hungover desperation so palpable I knew I was not alone in ways I wouldn't know until AA ten years later. Thank you, John Huston! Thank you, you old savior and lonesome Tennessee Williams! They all 'got it' And of course, thank you, Sue Lyon and all the other irresistible, cool, unique or awful women that Burton deals with in the film: thank you, tangle of closeted lesbian cock-blockers, nymphs, sexually active widows and middle-aged virgin quick-sketch artists with your tins of opium poppy seed tea.

I'd avoided the film prior to this moment because of childhood resentments against the misleading use of "Iguana" in the title. What monster-loving child expecting giant iguana attacks wants to see an "alcoholic priest dealing with various women in Mexico" (as per Lennie). Other people don't like this film for other reasons than its lack of rampaging giant iguanas. They see Reverend Lawrence T. Shannon as too passive, letting himself by fought over, pursued and pushed this way and that by various ladies, including Lolita's butch guardian, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall). To these critics he's little more than a rag doll, flopping in one pair of jaws after another, barely able to choose or fight back, unwilling to sober up and escape. They said he was pathetic with self-pity, trying to swim out to his death the minute he doesn't get his own way. They were right, but can I suggest that if you hate him because of that, well, maybe you wish some girls would fight over you while you laid back in a similar rag doll fashion?

Take it from me, and Burton, Huston and Williams - you're better off wishing for it than getting it, because as Liz Phair would sing a few years later, if you do get it "and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." And worse, as hollow a pleasure as it is, you get addicted to it pretty fast, and then, the minute it stops, the agony of not having it kicks in, like opiate withdrawal (which if you don't like this movie, it's clear you never experienced). You see the results of this 'admiration withdrawal' all the time in Hollywood, the aging starlets turning themselves into duck-like gargoyles to vainly try and get their 'fix' back. In short, it's the male version of Charlene's 1982 hit "I've Never Been to Me" - no faint praise.

But before you find the solace of 12-Step Groups (or death) you--in desperation--grab at any straw with all the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. When a ride shows up you nearly always say yes, wherever it's going. And that's never good because they want you for reasons not your own. The only way out of one dysfunctional lover's claws is when some other chick bothers to scoop you up and steal you away for another. Whatever the new temptation is, you take it. The alternative is an ever-tightening noose of co-dependence as your last temptation slowly ages into a death trap, or what AA calls "taking a hostage" or worse, dying alone - over and over, through every minute of every night. Eventually all the girls you messed around with behind each other's back are going to get together and compare notes. Girls might get branded slutty in high school but they're always absolved (it's the men's fault), but men get branded later by secret female cabals and it's forever. They never look at you the same way again.

You know the score, dear reader, everyone has had their May 1990, that shining moment when more than one person is fighting to take you home to their place and you just soak it all up and let them fight it out, and then, in the end, you can only go home with one of them. You can't decide which to pick, and anyway, the party is in full swing, so you stay, drink more, and then around dawn, you realize you are alone, your options are expired; the person you've been talking to for the last hour is long since asleep. You laugh at your own absurdity but even that doesn't help allay the sense of isolation and anguish. You wake up the next evening and it's already dark and its sadder than if nothing ever happened because something did... and you blew it. And hearing dear Hannah sat "Drink was never your problem, Mr. Shannon" is quite a comfort, as is the withered old poet lost in a grapple with his verse which will only ever be heard by whomever happens to be around when it's finished, but he doesn't care. As long as it's good. Now in the age of the internet we can all imagine all our work read and treasured by anonymous strangers, as opposed to existing only in a few Kinko copies, read only at open mikes by yourself, literary journal editorial offices by rejection slip-mailing interns, or no one, and all chance for notice dying as soon as your parents moved and threw all your old boxes away. Where could you find the strength to be a writer in that hellish environment of complete isolation and Father Mackenzie writing his sermons that no one will hear / with no betrayal of despair?

You could be one day as lucky as the old gentlemen - it doesn't matter who hears it, as long as it's finished, and as long as it's good. Since in the end we're just looking for a reason to keep writing, some assurance we're not speaking only to ourselves (not even noticed enough to be forgotten), or that it doesn't matter even if we are, there's a goal now. Get so good that when someone does read your work in the future, it cracks their mind apart. Like yours is right now! Bro!

"endurance is something blue devils respect"

There are critics who also dismiss Iguana as being talky and grandiose, but you have to understand the mindset: if you're a talky, grandiose drunk grappling with the realization that you've already had your glory days, that you're like Sebastian Venable if he was smart enough to take a cab out of that godforsaken beachside bar in Cabeza de Lobo and so survivied, aging to become the oldest 'working' poet, still galavanting around with a female 'procurer'; and if you keep photos of ex-girlfriends in secret drawers, to pore over longingly in between your serial monogamous string of relationships, and if you reread your illegible notebooks of slurred poetry and tear-stained letters from the only girls you ever loved, all while vainly drinking your way out of a pre-internet suburbia NJ hell, then Night of the Iguana is your movie.

Few things are more boring than a sane artist. And of course, academia and the bourgeois are flooded with them. Not to rationalize, but in my opinion if you're an 'artist' and not down there in the sludgy flooded basement of your inner mansion, digging for monsters and jellyfish and risking being dragged under by monsters from the Id, then where are ya? In the living room having tea? A spot o' tea, guvna? Then you're not an artist - you're a 'craftsman' and/or a tenure track hack.

Just try to lead one of these sane artists down the stairs and see how they fight to get back up, screaming in litigious terror.

Then there are the ones with completely clean basements, they have nothing left to dig for and so their writing moves from "fiction" or "non-fiction" into "spirituality" or "Self-help."

All of which is preface to saying Night of the Iguana comes from a messy basement, a star, director and writer all with messy basements that they are deep down in the muck of, pulling up all sorts of deep archetypal mythic relics, as ancient as Cronus' broken rusty chains. It's there in the shy, ashamed way Shannon can't even drink in front of the ladies, he has to take a bottle of the cart and sheepishly slink off to his room like Popeye ashamed to let Olive see how shaky he is with the spinach can opener. I've also endured the hissing vibes in the eyes of women my own age as I walk down the street with hot babes half theirs... I've been victim of rumors, and shakes, and blue devils. I've been saved, as well, by beautiful angels who fed me when my hands shook to much to lift a fork. Hannah Jelkes calls these moments examples of "broken barriers between people." It's when you're so vulnerable and sensitive you see the beauty and kindness of those women who stick around and comfort you as truly angelic --glowing and absolving. You have no wall to hide behind and they are drawn to that nakedness of soul like a holy flame. "What is important," notes Hannah, "is that one is never alone." Yeah, booze, man, and Central, NJ, and being a barely published young writer in the age before internet, with intense social anxiety. She gets it.

"Did someone call for a recitation?"

Yet, in getting it, she can undo it. Her love for a humble man turns him cocky, and then needy when she's not into him anymore (due to his cockiness) - thus hard-won self-knowledge seems to be swallowed up by women, who leave the man having to start all over again shedding his post-cocky neediness. Similarly, recognition and fame makes mundane formalist status quo keepers out of once visionary artists. Like a woman's love for a humble man, the public's love for writers and artists turns them cocky, then needy when their cockiness (as seen in the infamous 'sophomore effort' curse) shifts to neediness Rather than prizing process all else, famous artists fall prey to to the addictive (naturally this process applies to all addictions) craving of attention. While self-aggrandizing is a necessary thing for some artists to overcome blocks, eventually old Ego chokes all the pipes and the bullshit starts to rise, coprophiliac sycophants may gather like hyenas in some mad night club nature show; the first line you cross is free but the costs rise until suddenly the limelight isn't over your head anymore, it's below your feet and all you're left with is a stamp on the back of your hand, now slowly washing away in the early morning rain like Roy Batty's tears. When you wake, mom wants a urine sample, and there's Bim maybe, letting your mom know a bed has opened up in the Bellevue alcoholic's ward.

A summary of Iguana's own plot is a great example of the has-beenophobic male as well: right at the beginning Lawrence T. Shannon is derided by his pinch-faced congregation, for "praying" with one of his more attractive young (female) parishioners. We never see this girl but when we next find Shannon, he's acting as a Mexican tour guide, showing old church ladies around, trying to stay awake or semi-sober as best he can in the heat. Complicating matters is Charlotte (Sue Lyon) a wanton nymph under the care of Ms. Fellowes, a lady so misandric she could go toe-to-toe with Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar.

"oh, courage..."

Charlotte is madly in love with Shannon, promising him a job at her father's church and completely deluded and swept away in a girlish infatuation tide generated by boredom on the one hand, and the girlish sense of safety created by his being a 'born and bred' clergyman on the other. For his part, Shannon's conscience is so strict about messing around with an underage girl that he has no choice but to drink said conscience clean into oblivion. The line is sanity, honey, and he crosses it. Fellowes catches them one too many times in a clinch and threatens to have him fired from Blake's Tours. Shannon strands the tour bus near his old drinking grounds, tries to keep Fellowes' call to Corpus Christi, TX, from happening, way off in a suite of bungalows up in the hills above the beach, run by yet another female (played lustily by Ava Gardner) with an eye for defrocked Welsh priests. Brother, the heat is on! Literally as the hill is super steep and the sun hot enough to fry the minds and shaky lower intestines of some of the older ladies in the congregation.

Shit, man... and to see it all in color the first time was really nice. The TNT folks did a fine job. You could practically smell the coco de oro in the air (especially with what I was drinking at the time, 50/50 rum and orange juice). I managed to tape the entirety of a second showing and to see it a dozen times or more before finally seeing the b&w original. And now it just doesn't feel like the same movie. Still, now I'm sober so the tales of Hannah's few sexual experiences --one in the Nantucket movie theater, the hand job or whatever it was ("he was arrested, for molesting a minor / I told the police it was a Garbo picture.") and Shannon's mix of hostility during his panic attack and flashes of compassion and wisdom --has all lost a little of the magic I felt deep in my rapturous veins watching it on that colorized TNT print back in 1990.

And it's easy to see why Williams wanted his go-to muse, Anna Magnani to play Maxine (like she did on Broadway). He wrote the role expressly for her, and--as she showed in her other William's-written vehicles The Rose Tattoo (1955) and The Fugitive Kind (1960)--Magnini's slightly-dowdy sexually super-needy persona might be manna for gay boys (Brando in Kind) and grinning idiots (ala Lancaster in Tattoo), but is terrifying for any straight men who's grown up and moved out of his parent's house. Magnani' brash 'to the rafters' powerhouse dowdiness is terrifying, while Gardner's beauty is apparent no matter how down she dresses. It's fine by me, of course, that Gardner is in Magnani's role. I feel suffocated by even a few minutes of her in The Rose Tattoo and that a gorgeous man like Brando would choose her over Joanne Woodward at her sexiest in Kind is, frankly, as unconscionable as the idea that shacking up with Gardner would in anyway be a consolation prize instead of sexless Deborah Kerr (while it it was Magnani, it would make sense. No offense to that actress meant, of course. But Gardner is a raspy doll that any man would love to shack up with on a hilltop overlooking the sea, the cradle of life (and death, for brave poets to sail off into), no matter how much make-up she lost and weight she added and hair she mussed. On the other hand, shacking up with Magnani is daunting. She's legit larger than life and it's only with her in mind the part makes sense. She's the kind of woman a man needs to drink into focus, otherwise she's a blur of resonant movement. That's sometimes the best feature about forces of wild nature like her (i.e. my favorite adage (that I made up for my folklore final), "there's no such thing as ugly women, only sober men"). And Nadine's has a fully stocked bar (if Shannon doesn't drink up all the profits), so why he wouldn't be leaning that way from the get-go is the one false note.

Since Gardner plays her though, it's hard to imagine why he seems to think twice about it. She's a lifeline tossed to Shannon the way this movie was a lifeline tossed to me in my hour of woe. I took it, as did he. Drunks may be a lot of things, but they're no fools, and they're in no position to refuse hospitality, be it Nadine's rum cocoas or Ted Turner's colorized cradle of life. Save us once, in our hour of woe, and we're loyal to you forever. Even now my relationship to this film is strong, unbreakable I quote it so often in this blog I don't even notice it anymore. Amen.