Pre-Code Capsules 6: THIS IS THE NIGHT, KISS AND MAKE UP, SHE DONE HIM WRONG, SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE, RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS

THIS IS THE NIGHT

1932 - ***

Lily Damita in some righteous satin black gowns and perennially mussy hair is the big would-be star in this early Lubitsch-esque Paramount gem. Charlie Ruggles provides the bulk laughs as the travel agent pal of rich Parisian homewrecker (and perennial short square) Roland Young, who's been courting married woman Thelma Todd. We can certainly understand why he would fall for Todd, but considering her husband is an Olympic team javelin-thrower played by Cary Grant (in his feature debut), we must ask, for god's sake woman, art thou insane? Of course Grant was still just coming into his own, as a featured Paramount romantic co-star in 1932. Guys like Young and Ruggles managed to steal most of the lines while Grant just smoked and smirked and--in this case--came home early from his trip, singing along with the Lubitsch-by-way-of-Mamoulian-imitation symphonie of naughty Paris nightlife opener right as old Mr. Ruggles is leaving train tickets for Venice outside their apartment. Think fast, Ruggles!  The stage is set for a roundelay of French boudoir farce; Grant thinks they're for him and Thelma which means Young needs to find a girl as a beard so he has an excuse to follow her, for he's so smitten. Porters sniff the girl's luggage as they load it, with little train dings to signify intoxication d'parfume. And jealous Young hires a girl to pose as his own mistress so he can have an excuse to stalk after his beloved Thelma. It's Lilly Damita he settles on.

Nothing goes according to plan, naturally, but Grant at least seems to love playing the suspicious husband, barely deigning to pretend--for the sake of decorum--to buy the shorty's terrible hem-hawing excuses, but he's always ready to be amused and patient while they trip themselves up, mug and sweat before him. It's all tripe, sure, but the timing's expert; the Hollywood Venice recreations are lovely, but the night outdoor scenes in and above the canals are tinted deep blue and too dark to see clearly. As Young's beard, Damita's hair is thick and shaggy; her accent endearing but Garbo-ed; her spirit fiery but inconsistent, the romantic ending assured but belabored. TCM's restoration rich and lovely, which is important as there's not much to hold onto. But no matter, it's pure undistilled Paramount and though it never rises to anything like sophistication, it's still adorably winky like sparkly champagne. Todd's weight fluctuates from shot to shot and makes us wonder if she was secretly pregnant under all those wraps, and Damita makes a decent impression as an innocent waif struggling to feign a Dietrich-Garbo-esque worldly sophistication atop her Lupe Velez firebrand Latina sass. The more Grant, smitten, is convinced she's really Young's girl, the more furious Todd gets. Ordering him to send her away, he complies like a whipped dog, perhaps indicating that's the issue she has with Grant. Todd wants a guy she can tease, manipulate, and bully in ways a javelin thrower just wouldn't go for. But if Young thinks he's getting laid with either of them, dream the fuck on.

PS - This same boilerplate plot would be used again with most of the same actors in another Paramount production, KISS AND MAKE UP (with Horton subbing for Young) and again by Billy Wilder in KISS ME, STUPID (with Ray Walston subbing for Grant).  Kiss and make me up, Stupid! I can't stand watching dweebs like Ray Walston and Roland Young get jealous of the women they hire to pretend to be their wife so they can steal someone else's girl or stop someone else from stealing their's. It's sleazy and uncouth and, what's worse, not French.

KISS AND MAKE-UP

1934 - ***

"Don't you know that ugliness is a disease?!"

Cary Grant is a Parisian plastic surgeon / 'cosmetician' / beauty spa impresario who gets a steady stream of high wallet women through his palatial parlor (Warren Beatty in SHAMPOO is a eunuch by comparison) as devoted and 'decent' secretary Helen Mack fumes in the background and disgruntled husbands continually sneak in with the help of a plumber disguise that the plumber rents to them outside, by his truck. Long tracking shots with direct-to-camera staring / POV action as hotties in various stages of undress greet our good doctor on his strolls through his Apollonian beauty temple. The farce angles heat up once the action moves to the Riviera, where Grant's prize patient, Eve (Genevieve Tobin) threatens to get fat "in all the wrong places" unless he sleeps with her. In order to preserve his masterful handiwork, Grant makes a tremendous sacrifice: he marries her and then finds her cockblocking him with all his own beauty tips, even sabotaging his career while she debates which outfit to wear. Oh the humanity! And by the time she's all ready for bed, bedecked in gross oils and plastic gloves, she's a sexual purgative.

Horton as her previous cuckolded husband has a great monologue about the hell of dating a too-beautiful woman, and he's right, it is hell. Helen Mack might change all that though with her modest Maureen O'Sullivan-style straight shooterhood (when she gets mad you can hear some of that Brooklyn accent that comes out so strongly as Molly Malone in His Girl Friday) --Horton gets to her on the rebound, and they sing a duet: "Corned Beef and Cabbage, I Love You." Man, Horton sure got a lot of sweet, smart, capable and sexy young girls nearly to the altar before guys like Grant, Cooper or March woke up to the flaws of their flashier diva-du-jour. Meanwhile Grant also gets a chance to sing--"Love Divided by Two," twice! These songs stick out like sore thumbs... and I like that. Grant was still just a fledgling star at the time, a Paramount arm candy hustler with a music hall trill in his singing voice. Meanwhile, a sheik brings his harem in to see Grant --they go in as old depressed old Muslim women and come out as El Morocco flappers. Sublime, quintessentially Paramount moments like Grant huffing ether and tipping his top hat while covered in rabbits during the car chase finale, or a great dissolve between a champagne and the splash of the beach resort surf make up for the shallowly bourgeois anti-beauty polemic aspect of the source material (it's based on a play). Find it in the Cary Grant - Screen Legends Collection DVD.

 SHE DONE HIM WRONG

1933 - ****

Continuing our thread of pre-stardom Cary Grant Paramounts, this was Mae West's big breakthrough and she's amazing. Even if you're not a fan of turn-of-the-century clothes and manners, this film is so mega rich in robust good cheer and accumulated details you're apt to become one. The big saloon where Mae works, singing "I Wonder Where my Easy Rider's Gone," and "A Man That Takes his Time," is etched so well you can smell the beer-soaked sawdust and cigars. As a missionary next door trying to rehabilitate wayward souls, Grant lingers in the corners as saloon owner Big Dan rocks West (in both slang senses of the word) and works a white slavery racket sideline. Meanwhile Chick--a lifer up river at Rikers--is serving time for a crime he committed to buy Mae's more diamonds. The big lug bouncer is her pal and encourages Mae to take the train up the river and visit Chick, cuz "bein' up there without the woman what makes you feel that way? It ain't no picnic."

This one has passed the Erich acid test: the black and white air is thick and breathable, the death hangs in the air -- vice and despair are never more than a breath away, and Mae's sense of humor is a warm beacon in a jet black galaxy.

SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE

1933 - ****

The kind of cinema I love can be boiled down to a few images: Kim Novak hypnotizing Jimmy Stewart with her cat in BELL BOOK AND CANDLE; Marion Crane driving with a twisted look on her face in PSYCHO; and now Gregory Ratoff as a Lugosi-as-Svengali-esque White Russian in SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE, standing behind a hypnotic wheel while he programs a young Parisian flower girl into thinking she's Princess Anastasia. True sensationalist pulp, the film's awash in mystical pre-code gimcracks, some reminiscent of expressionist greats like TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE--with the criminal helping the cops, but this time robbing everyone blind in the process. At least he's patriotic: "I never rob a Frenchman." Frank Morgan is the very cool police chief, always acting a little behind the eightball when he's actually three yards in front of it--a good, rare strategy! This is the second awesome 'discovery' I made on TCM starring Gwili Andre, whom I never heard of before ROAR OF THE DRAGON. For just these two films alone, TCM has proved the worth of my entire cable package.

RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS

1932 - **1/2

MGM pulled out the Eisensteinian stops for this exercise. The FAIL SAFE to the Von Sternberg's SCARLET EMPRESS STRANGELOVE, it's a fascinating and detailed look at a huge chunk of Russian history relatively unrepresented in Hollywood - the years preceding the WWI-revolution, with Rasputin caught trying to make it with the sexy young sister of the hypnotized czar. MGM goes all out with moody lighting schemes and Lionel Barrymore knows how to work a lantern in the dark to really amp up the evil lechery. But man, how much better it would be if Lionel had switched roles with brother John, who's more or less wasted as the straight man? Was Rasputin too much like Svengali, who John played so ham-finitively the year before at Warners? Meanwhile sister Ethel Barrymore is pretty underused, looking the most hungover, which is saying a lot. And what an awesome and underrated movie SVENGALI was, much better than this, which is a little too talky, too many scenes of the royal court looking with unease at the million-strong peasant protests. And Anastasia is even in it, pre-revolution and before getting lost in the chaos and then turning up dazed in White Russian ex-pat circles all over Paris, as we saw in SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE.

PS - The real life version of John Barrymore's character was still alive in 1932 and successfully sued MGM for defamation, and that's why that "resemblance to living or dead" blurb was ubiquitous from then on, even in biopics. Thanks for teaching me that, Robert Osborne! I like to imagine granddaughter Drew Barrymore as the czsar's little sister, thus completing the family portrait. But for all that, a much better film about the Barrymores, if you can find it, even though no Barrymores are in it, is THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY.

Red is the color of my true love's helmet: QUEEN OF BLOOD, JET PILOT

Top: Queen of Blood (Florence Marley) / B: Jet Pilot (Janet Leigh)

QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966) and JET PILOT (1957) are two fascinating examples of Russian-American relations, each with a sexually carnivorous female pilot in a red helmet wowing the American astronauts or military. QUEEN's footage of this "red" planet vampire woman's ship and various astronauts wandering across hostile Martian lunar surfaces comes recycled from a Russian sci fi film Corman bought the western rights to, 1965's MESTRE NASTRESHU. These shots are almost Bava-esque with deep red filters and eerie gel lighting. JET PILOT's woman is Janet Leigh, a Soviet military jet pilot, claiming being denied promotion for being a woman as the reason for defecting, taking Uncle Sam up on its offer of sanctuary and $$ in the west in exchange for landing a MIG on US soil. Leigh's helmet is dark red when she defects, and her hotness in that white flight outfit is not to be denied, as effective as any Martian hypnosis. John Wayne all but swoons right there in the hangar, and so do we. When that helmet comes off and that hair comes tumbling out it's like you want to drop to your knees in worship, if she says come to Russia and freeze with me - honey, you're going.

Back to QUEEN OF BLOOD: In the Curtis Harrington-filmed US footage we have Dennis Hopper and John Saxon as the recognizable faces amidst the astronauts, who in the ALIEN-prefiguring plot are sent to Mars' orbiting moon, the Island of Phobos where a being from another galaxy has crash landed. She's a vampire alien from godlessness knows where, but hey --she's a delegate so just open up your neck and be polite ---we need the eggs. The elderly Basil Rathbone, still sharp as a tack and nutty as an heir of Frankenstein, here advising the masses, with his lead scientist sageness, points out that this is a once-in-a-million year opportunity.

 

Acting as a fine mirror to issues of gender as well as Soviet-American relations of the era, the footage is matched brilliantly to its respective sides - the Dionysian and ornate deep red Russian footage for the female vampire Martian - while the Earth scenes and space ship interiors are re-shot on threadbare Apollonian sets by Harrington. The result is a perfect metaphor for the repulsion/attraction between the US and Russia...one side an ornate red samovar (Mars / the alien ship), the other an institutional gray cafeteria. Together it's like an unholy union written in the stars and read by lovers holding hands across the Berlin wall. When the astronauts of both planets get together for the flight home, the hypnosis starts and the blood drinking and the orders from on high not to harm the specimen, no matter how many human astronauts perish like so many sailors on Dracula's London-bound schooner. This time however, everyone but John Saxon agrees: save the queen! If she wants to drink Dennis Hopper's blood just warn her first: the Thorazine is long gone!

The point is, if if you ever watch Mario Bava with the sound off just for those great lighting schemes and purple gel spots, you'll love QUEEN OF BLOOD. All the metatextual yin-ynag dichotomies are in place: one one side: Russian film/Dionysian/Female/Plant/Mars/red, on the other US/Apollonian/Male/human/Earth/blue interior-shot/mammal. All these great dichotomies lining up so splendidly are just gravy on the GHOST OF MARS train of course, as is Judi Meredith with her sexy smoker's voice and enough black eyeliner to darken the sun. In short, the film would be a great double bill with Josef Von Sternberg's JET PILOT (1957) and is clearly meant for a double bill anyway since it's so short (78 minutes).

JET PILOT comes directed (mostly) by Josef von Sternberg and produced and partially directed by Howard Hughes, so you can imagine the arguments. Apparently writer Jules Furthman reshot some of it after von Sternberg left, and Hughes of course shot the airplane stuff, which is almost 1/3 of the entire film, but it's real stuff - up there in the cold air on top of the world, so like QUEEN, JET has a split identity which works meta with the Red meets White and Blue in bed scenario. Sure it gets tawdry and cheap, but there's real chemistry with Leigh and John Wayne. She seems very young, carnal, smart, and doesn't even bother with a Russian accent (unlike Kate Hepburn's dull Russian defector and Bob Hope as the John Wayne in the far less lively same plot comedy of THE IRON PETTICOAT). Leigh and Wayne cram as much lust into their restricted gazes as the censor will allow while the cold war freeze of the empty gray sky above US bases in Alaska and Russian bases in Siberia makes a fine metaphor for the general iciness that is the post-code American perennial stalemate battle of the sexes.

 

 
It's a suitable metaphor not just for sex, but for bad sex, cold sex, post-children (no privacy) sex; sex where falling in love carries a lot of dangers --the other side may be a spy, but aren't you? Like an early version of Roger Vadim or John Derek, Howard Hughes was notorious for seducing pretty girls and making them stars via inert films with awesome posters (like THE OUTLAW), and usually firing the original director along the way in order to ensure no scrap of fun or originality survived, replaced by a weary but knowing sexuality, the inertia of the well laid vs. the meticulous energy and totemic, elaborate lighting that comes from being a sexually frustrated masochistic, pining for, rather than bedding, the leading hottie. But JET PILOT is a rare exception in both their cases. Von Sternberg at least got in some good subtextual masochism out of Jules Furthman's excellent script. This pair of red star-crossed lovers constantly attempt to escape their warring governments and just get it on, alone, for a few hours. And when they do there's that comedy of remarriage sensibility - a come closer / go away back and forth that recalls the great screwball comedies.

The Russia/US divide angle also illuminates the disparate polarities’ lack of ultimate difference: when her Soviet relations cockblock it’s because she has to seem disinterested in anything but following orders -and maybe she is; when Wayne's US friends and commanding generals cockblock it’s because of a temporary housing shortage. At the same time both superpowers encourage them into bed with each other for various pumpings for information on jet maneuvers, what the other side has and doesn't --and so there's a lot of great jargon Hughes no doubt made sure was legit and Furthman made sure wasn't boring. Von Sternberg takes a cue from military olive and bathes every set in shades of green until the whole film glows in the mind like a lime in a gin and tonic with the occasional maraschino cherry; and Lenny Maltin awards it a scant two stars as if begging to be punished by the State (read instead David Thomson's cautious enthusiasm for it in his indispensable Have you Seen...? ). Find it on DVD hidden deep in an old John Wayne set that includes--Lenin preserve us, THE CONQUEROR: John Wayne - An American Icon Collection (Seven Sinners/ The Shepherd of the Hills/ Pittsburgh/ The Conqueror/ Jet Pilot)

But find it, for the sake of the red stars and white stripes! And thanks to Another Film Blog for some of the above stills!

Surf the Maelstrom: POSSESSION

One of the cool things about Europe (and Buenos Aires) as opposed to the US is that trends seem to come and go more slowly, with an innate, even mature, ability to stay cool that shows up the reactionary youth market-kowtowing of America for the panicky insecurity it is. After the US had foregone 70s mature horror ala Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Exorcist and Alien in favor of teen-sucking 80s slashers, there were still sexy, druggy, fucked-up adult horror movies coming out of France, Poland, and Germany. If they came to our shores, such as happened with the truly disturbing genuinely adult Andrzej Zulawski film, POSSESSION (1981), it was only released here, apparently, in a severely truncated, nearly incomprehensible edit aimed at VHS shelves and back ends of drive-in double bills. While America was cowering at home in their stone-washed denims, Europeans--who had way had more legit reasons to hide at home and be freaked out than we ever did--were still dropping acid and going to the art house cinema..

Europe had been through the war right in their own backyard; the dividing between sunny tranquil capitalist west and dour, psychotic grey unrestored east ran right across their Berlin lawns.. Aside from Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Americans still haven't had a lot of shit get blown up in their faces while they tried to read the paper. Considering the trauma endured just from those two single day events, can you imagine watching your whole country more or less go through a giant Nazi thresher machine, for the first five years of your life?

It might make you a little twisted.

Polish director Andrzej Zulawski was born during just such a time and place: nightly bombing raids became like a lullaby for him (he says); part of the comforts of childhood, like a night-light or teddy bear. This weird amniotic death hybrid explains much of POSSESSION's full-spectrum insanity. If you've wondered what it's like to be high on acid while having a miscarriage alone in a Paris Metro station after having to leave a European history lecture because you started frothing at the mouth, this is your movie.

Zulawski get it: when you're gone on strong drugs, baby, none of the old signifier chains apply -that's also art, the Antonioni signifier melt-down. With a head full of mescaline you are just like a child, new to the world, free from labeling and judging your sensory impressions, things are neither this or that, good or bad, they are all just new and 'weird.' Without judgment, it's all good, until you gradually realize it's all bad, because it's gnawing on your leg... and working its way up to your crotch. Whatever it is, better kill it quick, and eat it for its placenta nutrients. Second chakra sacral wheels alight in twisted backfiring surges of desire and loathing, rust and dried blood flaking off the re-ground gears. Eat or be eaten, and don't hesitate. If the cops come in and see you've been eating a helpless old neighbor who came to the door to borrow some flour, well, eat them too. You're on a roll - and you taste great. Or at least it tastes intense.

If you never experienced all that, man, you might not dig all of POSSESSION. But for some of us, those who can still hear colors and see sounds, the ancient, semi-ancient, and recent history of the human race is always clattering on the kitchen floor of our collective mind like a dropped casserole dish that grows Rob Bottin spider legs on contact with linoleum. European border tensions live in our sacral chakras, interlocking serpentine tentacles connect every groin, mouth, and fingertip in the whole of existence, to the tip of our extremities, which is not more infinite than a tomb, and our breathing. The flushing of the toilet sounds like the diving of Stuka followed by VE day revels as the tank refills. But is that American jubilation in the west VE or the screams of East Berlin women being mauled by drunken Russian soldiers? Don't judge, man - you were doing so well. Here, do this shot.

Even if your knowledge of post-war European social psychology and bad trip acid horror iconography is incomplete well, there's bound to be something in POSSESSION still able to suck you down with the cigarette butts into the tangy blood-flavored mud of 70s Euro-horror, which is the same really as just shrugging your shoulders and sashaying toward the exit while the huns are distracted.

POSSESION is set in West Berlin, in an apartment with windows that look out over towards the Wall (so you can see East German guards smoking and looking at you in the distance, feigning neighborly disinterest) But meanwhile everyone speaks English all the time, except when Adjani speaks French while torturing a girl in her ballet class in a super 8mm movie that Neill's fellow cuckold, a sexually fluid and tantric fellow named Heinrich (from the East side), sends over. My point? Less.

And when Adjani moans up at the cross in a church, unleashing a prolonged, piteous whine, one senses Harvey Keitel stirring from his noon feeding, and making a mental note that would lay buried for 10 years until BAD LIEUTENANT.

Still, even if you're type of crazy psychedelic surfer who used to watch the R. Bud Dwyer suicide tape over and over on acid, fascinated by the suddenness of it (one split second Dwyer's in the room, and then BAM - he is completely gone - where'd he go?) even then, that hardcore as you are, Adjani's prolonged miscarriage in the tunnel scene might be too much.  Her convulsive jerkiness might be read as an interpretive dance, encompassing the history of mental illness--from electroshock to the miracle of Clozapine--it's mind-bogglingly fearless and fully committed in ways I just don't think it's possible for American actresses to ever be, nor would they want to, for certainly it won't win them an Oscar. Adjani could give a shit about your Oscars; she just goes for it with more gusto than most American actresses ever dare muster without an A for 'Art' burnished on their chest, not this isn't artsy. Has America ever had any women either this beautiful or this crazy? Nein. The English have maniacs like Kate Winslet, Australia has Judy Davis, who was originally attached to POSSESSION since Zulawski and his casting director loved MY BRILLIANT CAREER (which was why they cast Sam Neill) and maybe her wanting to do it is why she gamely wound up in a similar legless monster sex scene in NAKED LUNCH ten years later.  (it all fits, doctor, since the whole creature / pregnancy angle--a kind of symbol-made-flesh ala 'psychoplasmics' in THE BROOD--was done by Cronenberg two years earlier, with super crazy (Brit) Samantha Eggers). But whom do we have? No one --our actresses can afford good SSRI meds and the best clinical care Beverly Hills ha$ to offer. Their health is Hollywood's loss.

Perhaps it's because the terrifying freedom of flying fast and loose atop the ever-inward spiral of the maelstrom is just not an American thing anymore. It used to be. We had Poe and we had Melville. In the former's "A Descent into the Maelstrom," for example, a sailor finds himself on a damned ghostly boat hovering ever on the edge of a vast never-ending whirlpool wave, trapped in a time loop. Our hero eventually escapes and is rescued only to find his ship mates no longer recognize him: "My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now."

Sometimes that change of countenance has to happen: you've seen too much; you've peered beyond the veil and the veil has left its gnarly mark. Or you've aged 100 years in a goddamn 13-day bender. Or just got old, suddenly, as it always is when you dare to take the voyage into the maelstrom or walk that yellow "brick" road. Some of us are called to the curtain and bid look beyond, and some do, and they get white hair, if not a diploma. I've never seen a film before or since that made the color white such a violently post-modern wrenching force (not even in Kieślowski's WHITE or Argento's TENEBRE) except maybe--in a humorous and romantic way--ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, wherein white swallows up whole bookstores and kitchens of Jim Carey's memory of Kate Winslet.



In fact, the hair and split subject aspects of POSSESSION are there in SUNSHINE's mind washing machine, with Sam Neill trapped in inescapable loops with the same woman in different forms, with Winslet's hair changes and bi-polar mood swings reflected in Adjani's careening back and forth between the sterile apartment she shares with Neill and their son, Bob, and this decayed East Berlin apartment building with its goop-covered floor and writhing tentacled lover, looking like a decayed animal carcass swathed in glistening rainbow brown blood / oil paint palette runoff and being devoured by long large white worms. "He's very tired, he's been making love to me all night," Adjani says before bashing a cop's brains in with a paint can.

At such times as these, Adjani makes Klaus Kinski seem dull as Walter Pidgeon.

By this point in the film, Neill has more or less detoxed and is playing the clean-cut parent, subject to fits only when Adjani comes careening back to put laundry away (in the fridge) and throw some cold cuts from the pantry into her suitcase and carve herself up with an electric knife while shouting and convulsing like she's not in their kitchen at all but receiving electro-shock therapy in a mental hospital while performing a MACBETH monologue. Now split between two opposite roles (either two characters or a fragmented persona), one is a nurturing elementary school teacher / potential love interest  (ala Susan Hogan and Egger and in THE BROOD) the other is the homicidal birther/fucker/self-mutilating/cop-killing painter of her own monster, a blazing insane nightmare woman, shrieking and miscarrying an array of colors all over the Metro, as if dissolving a painting in her womb and reproducing it as performance art. (there's a kind of mention that she brought the ejected fetus whatever-thing over to that apartment and its been her sickly lover ever since).

Is this monster a metaphor for her art, the way a true artist is in a state of exalted frenzied madness when working on their project, giving themselves over completely, maybe never to return, except in the form of that immortal art? A squid. Three Olives. A feather. A dead bike messenger. bombs.

Oh yeah, SAM... whom I never liked much in films like DEAD CALM or THE PIANO (or worst of all, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS). He's just somehow dislikable, though that's inevitably why he's often cast, there's just something about him that if you're a dog you'd want to bark at him. Often his characters need to be cock-blocked by some younger, looser man, i.e. Harvey Keitel, Billy Zane, even Jeff Goldblum, in order for his wormy smug petulance to have context. But when delivered from being just a weird side platter of Pierce Brosnan /Anthony Perkins surf-and-turf, when given a part that calls for truly insane and giddy grace, and looking young and actually handsome, he's suddenly big as all the ocean. He makes you want to keep an eye on him so he doesn't suddenly appear behind you, or show you his new razor from your insides out. What makes him such a good secret agent (his last mission was something across the Wall where he'd been sizing up some scientist defector in pink socks) lies in his ability to ride this tide of lunacy with confidence and eye-for-eye madness glint. Wherever Adjani's crazy boat's going, he's going to be on it, bob for bob. Sometimes going under, sometimes rising above, absorbing everything and everyone he sees. From his son's crashing toy airplanes to his rival's 'love of everything,' he's always reacting and seeing deep, surfing the crest of that Poesy maelstrom.

Whoa, bro, now that I do the math I realize Neill hadn't even yet tried to compete with Zane or Keitel when this film was made. 1981: the same year he rocketed to the bottom as the adult Damien in OMEN III: THE FINAL CONFLICT -- in which he was cast at the request of co-star James Mason who loved him in MY BRILLIANT CAREER! Now we realize the inevitable truth, it's all James Mason's fault and it makes sense, since-- in acting style--Neill could be like Mason's psychotic younger brother. His accent here and the way he can start refined, and wind his way down slow spiral staircase into jealous madness by the end of the scene, is reminiscent in many ways of Mason--especially in LOLITA, such as in the scene where he must be restrained by hospital orderlies after Lo flees, for example, which finds a methamphetamine mirror in Neill's being piled on by the entire staff of 'Cafe Einstein' after chasing Isabelle Adjani out the door in a whirl of empty wooden chairs. His nose and face strangely cleft, teeth crooked, Neill's still got a bit of Timothy Spall floating around his features, as if the mirror halves of his face didn't quite line up, like it's ready to split down the center, to open like an egg hatching some newfound man. But he knows how to fucking act. During his big initial meltdown, for example, he seems to be suffering from serious withdrawal of either heroin or alcohol --the latter I've experienced, and I handled it very similar to how he does, shaking and twitching, barely able to talk, trapped in isolation. Good times.

And like Neill, Mason is a guy who you can never quite trust no matter how refined and loquacious his character is onscreen. Well, maybe you do trust him for a few reels, but then he takes that cortisone again and he's at you with a knife.

So there's your moral: sometimes you can't get at the audience with a razor, so you have to use the only thing you can find that's even sharper, and sometimes that thing is named Sam Neill. POSSESSION stabs us with him until even the screaming sound of Stukas dive bombing his neighborhood to hell is like a soothing nursery school lullaby and the scorching beauty of Adjani is like a freezing of the blood in the veins and on the floor. Lick it up, like a good dog.. (tape cuts off)