Sweetheart of the Somnambulist: SVENGALI (1931)

Perhaps its forgotten status is due to the one spliced-up source print being used on public domain DVDs, or it's the stodgy pacing and oversize performances or the highly unusual mixture of comic and dramatic/horror elements, but this Archie Mayo joint from 1931 seems right at home alongside similar early sound horror classics like FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and THE BAT WHISPERS.  The plot involves hand-out hungry beard-so-pointy uber-manipulative music teacher Svengali (John Barrymore) discovering a “mouth with a roof like the dome of the Parthenon” in Trilby (Marian Marsh). She's an artist's model who poses at the expressionistic garret of artists Taffy (Lumsden Hare), the Laird (Donald Crisp) and naïve young Billie (Bramwell Fletcher), where Sven's been known to mooch. Finding out his would-be protégé suffers from headaches, he “cures” her using hypnotism, ensnaring her to his will in the process. Billie thinks he'd rather have her suffer the headaches than be cured that way --what a patriarchal little jackass! It's not up to him whether or not Trilby should suffer from headaches or be permitted respite. No sooner has he fallen in love with her than he feels dashed to despair by realizing she poses in the nude. It's implied she's slept with nearly every artist she posed for but that shouldn't bother Billie, if he knows what's good for him. He needs an experienced woman to usher him past the breakers of uptight morality. I mean it's Paris, not Puritan New England! No wonder he couldn't handle more than a few scenes in THE MUMMY (1932) before turning into a blubbering mess.

Based on 1894 George L. Dumaurier novel, Trilby, the film holds a shallow-buried vein of anti-semitism: Barrymore is in his “dirty Jew” makeup, greasepaint-slicked beard and bedecked at times in soothsayer rags; he avoids water and never bathes to the point Taffy and company feel it necessary to force him, fully clothed, into a bath. They lock him in the room, and sneak away, leaving him to find Paddy's wallet and clothes and artist's model He answers the door in Taffy's finest duds, falling for her instantly. Who could resist? She's wearing a man's army coat, with epaulets, rocking blonde bangs and looking like she just snuck out of bed with one of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band and stole his jacket before wafting out the door, just as Svengali has stolen Taffy's. Her look is so preternaturally mod it seems the source for all the Marianne Faithfuls, Nicos, and Francoise Hardys of the mod world to come. Their rapport is great because there's more than just hypnotist and subject, lecher and sweet young thing (Marsh was 17 at the time): an undercurrent of otherworldly sympathy, the sort Veronica Lake shared with Alan Ladd, puts them no small ways beyond the wooden and/or one-dimensional characters that surround them. Their characters are united in being set apart from the others, having to live by their wits and charms, to use and be used by art students and rich society matrons the city over.

The real show-stealer here, however, is not Barrymore or Marsh, but art director Anton Grot, whose expressionistic sets and impossibly wide doors linger in the mind like a dream. The big horror highlight of the film is all his, an incredible tracking shot that starts with the white glow of Svengali’s eyes and then backs out over the roofs of a crazy miniature Paris and slowly makes its way across the rooftops and into Trilby’s boudoir. Occurring about halfway through the film, it signifies a drastic dip from the relatively innocuous stuff that has gone on before. Hypnotism is one thing but this is remote viewing, telepathy, a whole new ballgame, and there's not another shot like it anywhere.... even now.

From then on things pick up for this rough and tumble pair. Trilby heads to the Seine to throw herself in as was the style of the time for fallen, broke women, all because of Billie and his prudish rejection. Svengali rescues her but fakes her Seine jump (the way he didn't with his previous "student") and the next time we see them she's adorned in furs and jewels and he's got a dandy white tux. But she's a zombie so all his seductions end up being just "old Svengali talking to himself again." It's sad, it's the crushing reality at the core of May-December relationships. For the older person, every new day brings a wider gulf of separation from their beloved: death, impotence, and a lifetime of indulgence roar up like a Forbidden Planet monster to claim you and young bucks skulk around in the periphery of your territory, sizing you up and waiting for their chance to steal yo girl if she's hot, and if she's not, more's the pity. Top of the Parthenon indeed! But now nowhere to go but up... in smoke.

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As I say, there seems to be only one existing print of this film. The best transfer I've seen so far is the old Roan DVD, with deep blacks, and more detail visible in the sets than I saw in my old VHS dupe, but also a fine layer of grain, and lots of film blemishes, lines, acid marks visible throughout, which to me is part of the charm. It's a constant companion in my little go bag of emergency DVDs, all that great Anton Grot expressionism, the unusual tone. Marsh's mod look...

So is Svengali a monster ala Dracula, a sad clown ala Lon Chaney or comic relief ala Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY? He's all that and more but we still get no answer, only the lovely hiss of the film going through the sprockets and the gorgeous playful innocence--and occasionally lustful knowingnes--of Marian Marsh adding an ephemeral ache we wouldn't really experience for another actress until maybe... Heather Graham?

(this is expanded from an old review I wrote for Scarlet Street magazine in 2002)

Behold with awe, and weep: THE UNDEAD (1957)

"Do you see my hand? There is no end to my hand, is there?" 

My favorite Corman movie, this loopy black and white tale of reincarnation, hypnotism, knights, witches both good and bad, devils and Satanic graveyard dancers zips by in an hour and leaves my jaw agape every time. I love Charles B. Griffith's and Marc Hana's droll script, and Corman's speedball econo direction, the array of sexy, over-the-top, or otherwise awesome performances, the feeling of flowing poetic weirdness that it can only come from being shot in sequence over one long night in an empty supermarket full of black toxic mist to disguise the lack of backgrounds. Starting in some Edgar G. Ulmer fog with Pamela Duncan as a 'weak-minded', bombshell-shaped streetwalker, recruited with gallons of money (for a 48 hour or more stint on a psychiatric couch going deeper and deeper, into her unconscious's unconscious's unconscious's, by Val Dufor's bug-eyed "trustworthy" past-life hypnotist Quintas. And then, weirder still, a medical doctor cautioning him against it every step of the way, regularly taking Lorna's blood pressure to make sure she doesn't die from the excitement of lying on a couch. Like Charles Haid in Altered States, he seems to exist to provide a kind of antithetical validation.

Meant to tie in to the then-craze for reincarnation (set in motion by the popularity of the Bridey Murphy story) the story quickly throws logic and even metaphysics to the wind, and ends up derailing the 'Grand Scheme of Things' when Lorna Love is able to whisper advice to her about-to-be-beheaded for witchcraft Middle Ages incarnation, Helene. Whoa! That's not how hypnosis works, but hey -- go for it! We don't (or shouldn't) really care about logic in a Corman movie, when there are so many more cool things going on. And here, it's clear, he just saw THE SEVENTH SEAL, newly arrived from Sweden and blowing his open Californian mind wide open. The idea that archetypes like Death, the Devil, the Kinght and the Witch could be directly represented as if straight out of a woodcut, this redefined 'so old it's new' and it fit Corman's loose ballsy style like a glove. Besides, what else is intuition and spirt guidance if not hypnotized selves of the future shooting us tips and cautions from their future psychiatrist's space couch? And what else are the voices one hears in one's head that-- if you answer --either means your schizophrenic or a witch depending on the century. Only in this case, her past self is able to act on the counsel, and soon her loyal suitor and the palace guards are giving chase through the gnarled trees, and the hypnotist has no choice but to get hypnotized himself and join her in the past to try and correct the matter. Whoa! You will be either outraged at the total disregard for logic or jumping for joy for the same reason. It's the kind of looney premise we wouldn't see repeated until EXORCIST II.

I saw UNDEAD when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment, Dorothy Neumann the definitive good witch. Her crooked nose, clearly made by cheap putty that seems always about to dry and fall off (you can see the line between Neumann's real nose and the false one), bubbling cauldron, and other trappings, puts to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly" (the bad witch is sexy Alison Hayes, flying around with her cackling mute imp played by Billy Barty) and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon. Or her explanation of how she got her powers from the same evil place Livia did, but managed to keep her soul, and how Livia and Meg Maud size each other up and admiringly realize "you will make a good opponent" in a wager for the life of Helene and love of Pendragon (Richard Garland), Helene's super-boring handsome (and dimwitted lover).

I could go on and on, but just a final word, about Satan himself, played with the perfect mix of beatnik sardonicism and mellifluent delight by Richard Devon. He shows up only in the last quarter of the film, when midnight, the hour of the Witches' Sabbath begins, bringing along his autograph book to give out gifts (and pitchfork tattoos like hand stamps at a rock club) and take signatures. Before he shows up the film is just a great weird and well-written mix of basement Shakespeare and black fog graveyard impishness but after he begins his meeting with the dancing graveyard witches it enters a sublime mania all its own. Recognizing the hypnotist with bemused calm, Satan greets him by name: "so, Quintas, you've managed to slip the bonds of time at last!" as if he's been expecting him sooner.

Once the rubes leave, the site of the black mass becomes a point of contact between the by-now-insane hypnotist, Duncan, the devil, and both witches as they all argue for and against Duncan going back to the executioner in the morning. Ingeniously, Corman finally moves his camera outside, making the sun and sky seem suddenly more unreal and dreamlike than the black fog supermarket-bound night that came before. Gather ye pleasures while ye may, cautions the Devil, to Quintas. And I have lived by that code. To me there is no finer pleasure to be gathered than this sweet hour of dark weirdness, THE UNDEAD. Slide it into a night of Halloween pleasures with SPIDER BABY and HORROR HOTEL/ CITY OF THE DEAD, and gather the pleasures like graveyard shivers spilling out of a graverobber's trick-or-treat bag!

THE FOURTH KIND: Take us to your Benzos!

"I'm having a hard time understanding what happened here!" 

--The Sheriff (Will Patton)

One of the common drawbacks of reaching adulthood is the loss of magic in one's perceptions; the child's wide aperture for mysteries shrinks as the world is 'figured out.' Elements of life that used to baffle and intrigue are made plain, robbed of their dark aura by cold explanations in the light of middle school health class. The mysteries and horrors that can fill a child with dread and delight are to jaded adults merely nostalgia; if we get scared in these days of global deadening it's probably a sign we need to up our meds.

You may remember being a kid making rec room haunted houses at Halloween, where you blindfolded a willing, cocktail-addled adult and bid them dip their hand in a bowl of warm spaghetti. "This is brains!" you'd say. "Yuck!" they'd say, playing along. The adult may know it's not brains, but if they allow themselves to believe it is even if only to validate the kids' imagination, the result may be fun. So why not? It's for the kids, so it doesn't make the adult seem naive.  

Movies like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS, and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, THE FOURTH KIND play off this 'brains in a bowl' idea, encouraging us to play along with the idea that what we're seeing is real. If burdened with scary music cues, special effects, and known actors, we're limited by how 'scared' we can really get. But a documentary might be true, hence the 'found' is frightening. As rational adults we may 'know' it's not really true, but if it feels true enough to fool us, to act as that blindfold in a dark room, maybe we can relax our tired grip on blase adult certainty enough we get the feeling we might get from a scary campfire tale heard in real woods at night. Tell us it's true and we may not 100% believe you, but it's way scarier than 100% knowing it's not, that's why all the best stories are myths, and urban legends have power because we may have smug skeptics decrying their factuality but they feel so true, those skeptics can seem like they're just whistling in the dark if we give them the benefit of the doubt.

So why can't we access that primal fear on command? If we can feel spooked by our own shadows the way we were as kids when walking to the bushes to pee after a night of campfire ghost stories when everyone else has gone to sleep, then it's worth meeting a found footage horror movie halfway. If we can't, I for one blame science! Scientists discover a giant ghost frog that breathes fire in some remote volcanic island, but within minutes they've given the thing a name--horribilis pikelianis -- so now it's just another frog, big deal. Science is all about making sure, in short, that no one gets to have any mystery in their lives. I mean, is it fun if that glowing weird ball in the sky is dryly explained away as "marsh gas" or "the close proximity in rotation of the planet Neptune"? Zzzzzz. But until then, even an adult skeptic can awake their gullible inner child, and if they can't or don't want to, well, who wants to have dry pompous unimaginative bores like that around? 

In the end it makes no real difference if I truly believe in aliens or not, except to me. But there are some who are terrified of even getting that little bit ambiguous. If an uptight scientist is blindfolded by the kids, at the aformentioned cocktail party, and subjected to the tactile 'cold spaghetti/brain' experience, he might get very irate and lecture the children on the way brains actually feel, and that they need to do more research for brains are actually very dense. Ugh... Why can't they let it go and just go "ooooh yuck!" so the children can laugh and play? Are they.... doing things... with brains... in their secret labs? Or are they just terrified that once they relax their conservative naysayer mindset, their whole damned self is going up in flames?

By nearly every "uptight scientist" standard, THE FOURTH KIND (2008) is a terrible film. But yet, one must admire it because it's gutsy enough to make nearly every mistake in the book. It's just like that bowl of cold noodles that's supposed to be brains. Maybe the kids got it wrong, and forgot to actually cook the noodles first, so in there all dry. You just have to laugh and play along if that happens, not yell at the kids or ground them for inaccurate brian representation. And so you will maybe laugh and play along when you first see Milla Jovovich walking towards the camera to explain that what you are about to see is true... based on real events...too shocking to reveal til now! She'll be playing a crazy shrink hypnotizing people in Nome Alaska to recount their being invaded orificially by owl-eyed 'things.' 

They're victims of.... alien abduction.

At first the abductees are merely scared. Then, to up the ante, they start acting like they're possessed by the space edition of the demon from THE EXORCIST. All the writhing and talking in ancient Sumerian and levitating and opening mouths wide enough to accommodate even the most acromegalous of dentists.

A bizarre mishmash of fake real footage, real fake footage, allegedly real footage, totally fake footage and an assortment of spoken audio from sessions that many people think is faked, THE FOURTH KIND gamely presumes it has the kind of savvy to hide the fact that a solid 80% of this film consists of people being lying in bed or on couches, coming in and out of hypnosis and acting super scared. Frankly, I don't mind that, it's cute, or could be if anyone involved with the production researched an actual hypnotist, or been to Alaska or read up on actual alien abduction cases. Nome is played I think by Vancouver and one of the Eastern bloc countries currently cheap to film in. Names have been changed to protect the innocent... and then changed yet again to confuse the guilty.

But hey, Milla has a really cozy yet gigantic home/office, her own single engine plane instead of a car, even a roaring fake fire, which is good since nearly the whole movie occurs in her den where she does her work. And PS - Nome must be really short of shrinks, because her character is way too familiar with her patients to maintain the professional objectivity needed for real hypnotism, and worse, she's unable to make a simple diagnosis of anxiety and prescribe meds, i.e. Xanax, even as her patients roll on the floor screaming in overwhelming horror and panic for minutes at a crack. Instead she accepts help from that old pro nostril-flarer Elias Koteas... and the work continues. Koteas has apparently never heard of benzos either. They really should have studied before going into business; pharmacology has wrought wonders in the last century alone!

Actually, let's fixate on this issue because indulgent bemusement or no, watching three doctors do nothing but stand around and watch a guy basically trying to tear his face off in hypnotized terror is not reassuring. I kept shouting at the screen, "You're supposed to be a shrink, give him a Xanax! Or if you're just a therapist, give him a recommendation for a shrink who will give him a goddamned Xanax." God forbid someone came to her with real problems like full-blown psychosis. She'd probably tell them to go just hang on for a few years while she fumbles with the tape recorder and tries to learn her job.

Since the plot is relayed to us via tape recordings of the sessions there are lots of shots of close-ups of cassette players and spinning tape wheels -- and there's really no way to tell whose voice is whom's from the confusing mishmash of voices on tape. Is this a real patient's voice we're hearing or the dead husband's? If the latter, is it the 'real' dead husband or the 'fake' one, i.e. the actor? Is this her own husband, or a patient? And again, is it the 'real' one or the one acted for the purpose of this film? Is this a hypnotically recovered memory of a patient listening to a tape recorder? Is this tape recorder remembered by Milla in the over-reaching taped interview with the director? Or is it live? Erich, are you under hypnosis, even now? Is this all just on some tape... somewhere?
 

One guy who would love this film? Jean-Luc Godard! It's got accidental Brecht written all over it. I'm 45% sure that with the addition of French subtitles to add yet another layer of structural hyper-reflexivity, THE FOURTH KIND would become as post-modern as any of Godard's 80s minimalist comedies with half the running time devoted to watching reels of tape spinning in their plastic casings. Just substitute petit bourgeois capitalism for aliens and it writes itself!

But other than its problems with criminal pharmacological neglect, I take no umbrage with the film's gross incompetence. There's good music (creepy!) set design (cozy!), and Milla's eyes (forget not her breakout role was as an alien in THE FIFTH ELEMENT!). The lame execution adds to the chilling faux-cumentary effect, especially as this kind of subject matter needs ersatz trimmings--the faker the better--for don't we deal with traumatic truths much easier when presented in laughably inept form? If you were to reach your hand into a bowl of real brains, wouldn't that somehow defeat the purpose, drain the fun? By that definition, FOURTH KIND is the truest and best bad fake real film about the real problem of alien abduction since PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE! (my praising herewith).

Science should take note of this approach, because if you try to fight Medusa through a mirror, you wont know where she is and one day you'll accidentally see her straight on and die instantly. You think by blocking the horizon line of your life with a lot of props and nonsense you can obstruct your view of her-- and when someone mentions Medusa might be real you arrest them or kick them out of your lab because you're afraid if you believe in her she will come. The alien agenda is like that, but worse-- it not only wipes away those blocks so you see your death looming past the credits, you also see the alien agenda after your death, how they're waiting even farther past for your newly separated soul to rise up towards the light so they can catch in their soul harvesting nets!

So yes, I like THE FOURTH KIND. I never want to have to see it again, but I like it for its misguided bravado and humorless self-importance, like the way you want the kid who leads you blindfolded through the haunted house to the bowl of brains to not crack up or apologize but to solemnly warn of what's to come and try his damnedest to be scary. If we're going to get all into aliens, the filmmakers seemed to reason, let everyone overact and have a good time and we can confound the whole idea of truth and get away with saying whatever we want; we can even slip in the real truth and no one will panic because audiences will think its fiction disguised as truth and only the brave and bold (or just paranoid) will suspect it's not. And with no way to prove it, there's no genuine panic.

Send in the clown cover memories

Big plusses: Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off. Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable.

Big minuses: a few under-rehearsed moments of 'family angst' such as the now cliche'd dinner table of single mom with two kids--a sweet young girl and bratty older boy who wants his daddy back-- "How'd dad die, mom?" -- you can practically set your watch to the big scene of Milla freaking to the heavens: "They took my baby!!!" Elias Koteas seems like he didn't know what kind of film this was before he signed on and is acting in a kind of counterpoint to the hysteria around him, conveniently vanishing every time a corroborating witness appears to make Milla seem less nuts. I never could learn to like Mr. Koteas who's nostril breathing and Kevin Kline-ish pomp creates too much hairy proximity. I won't deny he's a fine actor - but sometimes fine doesn't cut it, sometimes only a bad performance can be truly great. When in Nome....

Whether or not you believe this story, believe one thing: dogmatic crank skeptics are your enemy! The noodles really are brains! And if you have any spare benzos, please send them to the stressed out abductees of Nome, Alaska, or better yet, to me. Everyone, everywhere, keep watching! Keep watching! Keep watching the pharmacist!