Fulci Centi

I've seen various online tributes to Lucio Fulci today, marking the anniversary of his death, 19 years missed today. With that in mind I wanted to catch one of his films, but preferably not one of his signature works, perhaps something a little off the beaten track such as Perversion Story or Beatrice Cenci - two Fulci films I've had waiting in the wings for ages now but so far have not gotten around to seeing. I said a little off the beaten track - I'm looking thru Fulci's filmography now and any completist would have his work cut out tracking down the director's entire oeuvre. I counted 16 titles from 1959 onwards before I hit the first film of Fulci's I'm acquainted with, the 1966 western Massacre Time. Similarly, I've been lax on my post-Conquest Fulci too - all titles I know by name but have yet to investigate...

And so today it was the turn of Beatrice Cenci, Fulci's 1969 historical drama. This was my first time seeing the film and I was hugely impressed - the deft balance between lucid story-telling (the film based on actual events from 16th century Italy), and a surprisingly sophisticated chronological structure, would make it a fine rebuttal against naysayers who balk at the director's feverish, irrational Horror films of the early 80's. The film is perhaps closer in style and execution to Don't Torture A Duckling - there's not much in the way of explicit gore, but neither does the film flinch from the brutality of the age (one character has a nail plunged into, where else, his eye!), and Fulci laces the carnage with a sense of outrage at the hypocrisy and decadence of the ruling classes and the ease at the which they cannibalize even their own. Required viewing.

Seven Days In May

John Frankenheimer's Manchurian Candidate was recently released on Blu-Ray on this side of the Atlantic, and hopefully the director's film Seven Days In May, will follow soon. In this 1964 political thriller Kirk Douglas' military man uncovers a plot by his commander Burt Lancaster to unseat Fredric March's US president who has just signed a controversial non-aggression pact with the Soviets... Frankenheimer is one of the great studio directors of the 60's and Seven Days In May still feels fresher than a lot of cold war films that followed in its wake - this one would be in good company with two other excellent, similarly themed films from the same year - Sidney Lumet's nuclear war film Fail Safe and the Red October-ish submarine thriller The Bedford Incident... By the way I missed the opening credits on this one and was sure the film's stunning deep focus b/w photography was courtesy of the great James Wong Howe, but not so - the man behind the camera was one Ellsworth Fredericks whose other notable film was the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you're in the UK and Ireland, this one is currently on rotation on TCM...

Babylon

Just fresh from a screening of Babylon, the superb British reggae film from 1980... Babylon follows a bunch of black British youths as they kick around Brixton in the lead up to a sound system clash. The first half of the film is very much in the mold of a rebellious youth picture - all spliff smoking and antics, but shifts gears in the second half when the film focuses on the bigotry, racism and police violence that Black youth were openly subjected to in this particular era. The film looks fantastic as well, photographed by the great Chris Menges, and director Franco Rosso has a particularly good eye for locations, the film set in and around some of London's most depressed, and dilapidated districts. Linton Kwesi Johnson's long time collaboration Dennis Bovell provides the film's excellent soundtrack of dub, roots and lovers rock. Highly recommended.

The Silver Globe

Just watched The Silver Globe, Andrzej Żuławski's extraordinary sci-fi film... This was my second pass at Żuławski's film and it remains as incomprehensible as ever. And yet there is something exhilarating about yielding one's self to the film's strange and mysterious power - the metallic blue filtered wide angle photography, the aggressive camerawork, the jarring jump cuts and sudden tonal shifts, the baroque costumes and ritualized makeup, the spectacular locations and sets, and performances that are pitched at near hysteric levels. I think the film compares well with the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová - both films steeped in seemingly impenetrable mysticism and existing in their own hermetically sealed worlds. The troubled history of the film adds yet another fascinating layer, the film is book-ended by Żuławski's own impassioned account of the cruel fate it suffered at the hands of the Polish State Cinema board. I don't know if Nicolas Winding Refn has ever acknowledged the film, but it seems to me that the director's 2009 film Valhalla Rising owes Żuławski's film a huge debt...

Cat O' Nine Tails

I'm watching the Naked City TV series at the moment and today seemed as good a time as any to revisit Cat O' Nine Tails, starring a well-tanned James Franciscus. I must admit, about 70min into Argento's film the whys and wherefores of the plot had well and truly slipped thru my fingers, but even on cruise control, Cat O' Nine Tails still delights - Erico Menczer's 'scope photography (looking especially fresh courtesy of Blue Underground's BR), Franco Fraticelli's expert cutting, Morricone's modernist score, and all of served with a dash of ghoulish humor - I must presume the quick shot of the gravestone bearing the name "Dario" was Argento's own Hitchcockian cameo. I thought the XXY mcguffin was interesting and in a way forges a tenuous link to Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (also from 1971) in that both films kicked around ideas about criminal behavior aversion techniques. I took a listen to Franciscus' 8min radio interview on the BU disc and he makes an amusing slip, referring to Argento's debut as The Girl With the Crystal Plumage...

Red Beard

Just watched Red Beard, Kurosawa's 1965 picture set in and around a 19th century hospital located somewhere in the lower depths... Toshiro Mifune in his final film for Kurosawa plays the titular Red Beard, less a doctor and more a lion battling sickness, poverty and injustice from his underfunded medical practice. It's a long and leisurely film and over the course of three hours Kurosawa sidesteps his central narrative to include a few interesting subplots, and despite the intimacy of the hospital set (where most of the film takes place), Kurosawa occasionally steps outdoors to startling effect - two lovers meet under a gentle snow shower, a man sifts thru the infernal wreckage wrought by an earthquake for his missing wife. It's a pleasingly idiosyncratic film too - in one famous sequence Red Beard uses his anatomical knowledge to disarm (literally so) some braggarts, and in another startling moment, some women wail the name of an ailing child into a well in an effort to reclaim his soul from the spirits of the dead - a bit of folklore filtered thru a scene which might have wandered in from a Japanese Horror film. Wonderful stuff indeed and it was particularly nice to see cameo appearances from Takashi Shimura and Ozu regular Chishu Ryu.

Heart of Darkness

On this day, March 5th 1977 the future of Apocalypse Now was hanging in the balance. Martin Sheen, the film’s lead actor suffered a heart attack which threatened to permanently shut down production of the film in the Philippines. Coppola and his family had arrived Manila just over a year before, with principal photography starting soon afterwards. The loss of Martin Sheen would have been catastrophic to Coppola’s already troubled epic – a devastating typhoon had destroyed Dean Tavoularis’ elaborate and expensive sets, effectively halting the production, and sending the budget rapidly soaring beyond United Artists’ initial investment. And now Coppola was facing into replacing his leading actor (for the second time) and re-shooting months of footage for a film that he had yet to devise an ending for. According to the film’s documentarian Eleanor Coppola a local priest had administered the last rights to Martin Sheen but fortunately Sheen’s heart attack was less severe than initially believed and the actor was able to re-join the production just six weeks later to complete principle photography.

New York City's Finest...

After 25 episodes John McIntire who walked the beat of The Naked City as Lt. Dan Muldoon has bowed out in a shocking and fiery demise. James Franciscus is promoted to the top billing slot while Horace McMahon playing the hard nosed Lieutenant Mike Parker takes over Muldoon's office. I'm about 5 episodes into this change of personnel but finding it hard to adjust - from the very beginning I quickly came to love John McIntire's Dan Muldoon, an Irish cop who brought compassion and justice to some of those 8 million stories... I've just taken a quick inventory of John McIntire performances in my collection - The Asphalt Jungle, The Phenix City Story, Psycho (pictured below), as well as two Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a single Twilight Zone - all of which I hope to catch at some stage...

The Doors

Listening to The Doors In Concert album, the Absolutely Live LP portion of the CD, and the remarkable Celebration of the Lizard suite performed at the Aquarius Theater in LA, July 1969. Along with The End from the first album, it's probably my favourite 13 minutes worth of The Doors on record. Oliver Stone recreated the suite for the film and it's the most thrilling part of the movie... Speaking of The End, the live cut on disc 2 of In Concert, recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968 is also terrific. I love Morrison's weird little tangents ("Ensenada, the dog crucifix, the dead seal, ghosts of the dead car's son") and the band are in stellar form effortlessly following Morrison where he goes. I imagine by '68 the band could reconfigure the song into whatever shape Morrison required on the night...

Love In the Afternoon

I watched Eric Rohmer's 1972 film Love In the Afternoon yesterday and the first hour of bedtime last night was spent pondering the question whether Bernard Verley's character (pictured below) would stray from his wife again or whether his dark afternoon of soul had finally scared him straight ? I tend to lean towards the former, perhaps because I don't particularly like Frederic by the end of the film. One aspect of the film I enjoy is how my opinion of the two lead characters mutates over the course of the film - at the beginning I like Frederic - I like his life, his smart, beautiful wife, his young family, his legal business (his secretaries!). In contrast, I find Zouzou's Chloe troublesome, like an agent provocateur to be carefully managed. But by the end of the film, my allegiances have shifted - I very much like Chloe and am sympathetic to her needs, while I find Frederic rather pathetic... Incidentally, I love the film's brilliantly incongruous credit music, which sounds like an early moog workout. You hope that a check of the credits would yield a "name" (Bernard Parmegiani lent his music to Walerian Borowczyk for some of his early shorts) but Love in the Afternoon's composer, Arié Dzierlatka doesn't ring a bell, and there's little information to be found about him...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Part Two)

My final post on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which I finally finished last night. I read this book in fits and starts which I regret - the novel is short enough to read over the course of an afternoon and might have benefited more for it... Overall, I thought it was fine, it compares badly to Blade Runner - being one of my favorite films, Scott's picture could not be easily relegated to the back of my mind. My biggest dislike in the book was the Mercerism religion that's interwoven throughout the book - I felt this PKD's ideas on this point were vague and confused. Perhaps my favorite episode in the book - which is not in the film ironically enough - is when Pris pulls the legs off a spider just to see if it could still move, a very powerful and cruel moment that quite effectively stacks the deck against the runaway androids...

Chaplin

I’m just past the halfway mark of Season 1 of 50’s police series Naked City and by now I have acclimatized to seeing oblivious New Yorkers gawking into the camera when filming calls for a street scene. It’s a nuisance every film maker suffers at some stage I suspect, and it put in mind Chaplin’s very funny 1914 Keystone short Kid Auto Races at Venice where Chaplin’s tramp constantly strolls thru the field of vision of a film camera covering a go-cart race. One could be a little charitable towards the Tramp – film cameras were still new-fangled things even by 1914, although he’s rather brazen about it even after his rough handling by Henry Lehrman’s furious director. If you haven’t seen this one before be sure to check it out, it’s six minutes of wonderful Silent comedy…

Do Screenwriters Dream of Electric Sheep ?

When it comes to reading fiction, I try to keep the rule – if I've seen the film, I’ll skip the book, but there can be value in breaking this rule: at the moment I’m reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? and it’s illuminated an exchange of dialogue from Blade Runner which has always puzzled me somewhat.

Deckard: "It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react ?"...

Rachel: "I wouldn't accept it. Also I'd report the person who gave it to me to the police."

Rachel’s response in the film seems extreme and draconian, but it has more resonance in Dick’s book, where Earth’s animal species are virtually depleted, and what animals are left are coveted, cherished and change hands for large sums of money. This theme of the book had fallen by the wayside by the time Blade Runner’s screenplay was locked down and makes the Voight-Kampff test question about the calfskin wallet feel just a little too idiosyncratic for its own good. Similarly, Leon's line in the film: "I've never seen a turtle. But I understand what you mean" makes him sound a little infantile. But in the context of the book, his admission is perfectly understandable. The perils of adaptation !

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep ?

I've seen Blade Runner in all its various permutations over the years but only now am I getting around to reading Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? I've only scratched the surface of the book but the differences between Dick's novel and Scott's film are already considerable. However one line of dialogue from the book made me smile - during Dekard's first visit to Rosen Industries (or the Tyrell Corp in the film), Rachel remarks on the company's rare and highly coveted, live owl: "All our purchases are from private parties and the prices we pay aren't reported." She added, "Also we have our own naturalists; they're now working up in Canada. There's still a good deal of forest left, comparatively speaking, anyhow. Enough for small animals and once in a while a bird." As soon as I read the line I thought of Blade Runner's original ending where Dekard and Rachel have escaped Los Angeles for the more pleasant climes of Montana.... or perhaps Canada. The line I quoted above doesn't legitimize that disastrous ending the studio grafted onto the film, but for fans who still find some worth in this much maligned version of Blade Runner, it might make it at least bearable...

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Just watched The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Lotte Reiniger's wondrous 1926 German silhouette animated film. In the film, a young Arabian prince is whisked away on a flying horse to do battle with mythological creatures, and with the help of Aladdin and the Fire Mountain Witch, thwart the plans of an evil sorcerer and claim the love of his life. Jean Renoir called this Reiniger's film a masterpiece and it's entirely deserved, an absolutely beautiful work with delicate, fluid animation, and vibrant backdrops and textures that anticipate psychedelia by some 40 years. Despite the exotic Middle East setting, this is unmistakably Germanic - it very much feels like a Bergfilme and some of the backdrops reminded me of the romantic landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. And I wonder did Coppola have the film in mind when he put together the opening sequence of Bram Stoker's Dracula ? I must tune in to the commentary to see if the film is mentioned...