MYSTERY LINER (1934)
Article #998 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-8-2003
Posting Date: 5-6-2004
Directed by William Nigh
Featuring Noah Beery, Astrid Allyn, Edwin Maxwell

An ocean liner is the site of experiments involving a robot pilot device called the S-505. Unfortunately, it also becomes the site of murders.

This movie is based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, and consequently, there are some interesting plot elements here; in fact, I’m sure there’s a decent plot in here somewhere. Unfortunately, the whole thing is directed in that static bottom-of-the-barrel early Monogram style in which people stand around, talk and stare at each other, all without the benefit of background music. When the characters are novel enough to catch our attention (Noah Beery’s Captain Hollings or Zeffie Tilbury’s Granny character), you can get by, but almost always these are either minor secondary characters (you don’t see much of Beery after his first scene) or comic relief characters with little relation to the main plot. As a result, the endless scenes of exposition are deadly, so that by the time you get to the exciting sequences you really don’t care much anymore. You might entertain yourself by keeping your eyes open for Gustav von Seyffertitz or a beardless George “Gabby” Hayes, but overall, this is perhaps the weakest Edgar Wallace adaptation I’ve ever seen.

MOON PILOT (1962)
Article #997 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-7-2003
Posting Date: 5-5-2004
Directed by James Neilson
Featuring Tom Tryon, Brian Keith, Edmond O’Brien

A man slated to be the first astronaut to orbit the moon finds himself being followed by a strange woman who knows everything about him.

The surprising thing about this movie is not that it occasionally falls into slapstick comedy; the surprising thing is that it does it as rarely as it does. This is, after all, a shopping cart film (my term for a Disney comedy of this time period), and slapstick humor is part of the package. It’s the satirical edge of the movie that makes it unique for its breed; it takes potshots at the military, national security, and the government (I want a copy of the book, “Simple Science for Senators”). In fact, the movie is probably the most sophisticated of Disney’s many comedies, and generally only stoops to slapstick when a convenient opportunity arises (such as the appearance of monkey or a scene where people try to bust down a door). Brian Keith and Edmond O’Brien are great when they’re not yelling (which they do a lot, which has less to do with bad judgment on their part than it does with the fact that yelling people are a mainstay of shopping cart movies). Dany Saval is also quite good as the mysterious lady, Lyrae, though the descriptions people give of her are highly questionable; they say you can’t tell what kind of accent she has (she sounds French to me) and that she looks like a beatnik (she looks a lot more like Audrey Hepburn than a beatnik). The latter description does lead to the strangest scene of the movie, where witnesses are expected to identify the woman from a line-up of female beatniks picked up for questioning, all of whom are either playing bongos, dancing, or reciting poetry in the line-up.

MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1947)
Article #996 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-6-2003
Posting Date: 5-4-2004
Directed by George Seaton
Featuring Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn

A man hired to play Santa Claus by Macy’s claims to be the real thing.

This Christmas perennial takes aim at two targets; the increasing commercialism of the holiday (a trend which has only gotten worse as time passes) and the underlying cynicism that is the ultimate cause of it. There are many reasons this movie works, though perhaps the strongest is Edmund Gwenn’s gentle and strong performance as Kris Kringle; he is so utterly charming in the role that you find yourself willing to believe that he is the real Santa Claus, particularly during an effective sequence when he addresses a Dutch girl in her native language. Natalie Wood and Gene Lockhart also stand out as respectively the little girl who has the most resistance to believing in Kringle’s identity, and the judge presiding over the case to prove it. I find it quite interesting that two of the biggest factors that come into play in determining the result of the trial include the fear of public and private embarassment on the parts of several individuals, and the passing thought of a postal employee who has hit upon a scheme to decrease his workload. The fantastic aspects of the movie aren’t overt, but they’re there for those who wish to believe. All in all, this is a movie that has definitely earned its place as a Christmas perennial.

MIRANDA (1948)
Article #993 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12/3/2003
Posting Date: 5/1/2004
Directed by Ken Annakin
Featuring Glynis Johns, Googie Withers, Griffith Jones

When a husband out on a fishing trip is held captive by a mermaid, she only allows him to return if he agrees to take her with him.

According to a few sources, this movie runs eighty minutes, but my print only runs about sixty-five; based on some of the jump cuts, I’d say the missing fifteen minutes occur somwhere near the beginning, which might explain the speed with which the movie gets to the encounter with the mermaid. It doesn’t really effect the plot all that much, but that’s because the plot is so slight to begin with; basically, the mermaid causes problems with three different romantic relationships because of her constant flirting with virtually every man she meets. It’s not bad, if not particularly engrossing, and everyone does a good job, though Margaret Rutherford steals the show as the nurse. The movie spawned a sequel, MAD ABOUT MEN.

MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960)
(a.k.a. IL MULINO DELLE DONNE DI PIETRA)
Article #992 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12/2/2003
Posting Date: 4/30/2004
Directed by Giorgio Ferroni
Featuring Pierre Brice, Scilla Gabel, Wolfgang Preiss

A writer has an affair with a sculptor’s daughter who suffers from a mysterious illness. Her death brings on a series of strange events.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what one of the horrible secrets of the mill will be; the print ads and trailers actually leave little doubt to the nature of one of the revelations in this story. On the down side, the first half of the movie is very slow, confusing, and the dubbing is very awkward. Things do pick up quite a bit during the second half of the movie, though; once certain key events take place, it becomes a better-than-average Italian-French horror thriller. It also benefits from some truly eerie moments, and a wonderful milieu; it mostly takes place in a mill where the wind causes a parade of stone figures to pass by on a stage, and it makes for an exotic and unusual setting. Unfortunately, the movie opens with some stupid and sexist narration about the perfidy and evil of women that implies that the horrible events perpetrated by the two villains of the piece are really the result of the daughter, who (unavoidably) plays a passive role during much of the proceedings; this isn’t logic, this is trying to pass the buck. Remember, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

THE MEDIUM (1951)
Article #991 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12/1/2003
Posting Date: 4/29/2004
Directed by Gian Carlo Menotti
Featuring Marie Powers, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Leopoldo Savona

When a fake medium is unexpectedly touched by a spirit during a seance, her life and sanity begin to unravel.

In my voyage through the waters of Fantastic Cinema, I have touched on many more genres than just fantasy, science fiction and horror; since I also cover movies that have fantastic elements even if they don’t strictly belong to the above genres, I have also covered mysteries, film noirs, comedies, dramas, soap operas, espionage thrillers, action/adventure, musicals, and biographies, among others. In fact, are there any genres that I haven’t yet touched upon in my travels?

Well, how about opera? For that is precisely the type of movie THE MEDIUM is.

Now, I’ll start out by saying that I’m not an opera buff; though I like many types of classical music, opera has remained elusive and unsatisfying to me. Watching this movie helped me to pinpoint why; in most vocal music, the lyrics are prepared to bow to the demands of the music. With opera, the opposite appears to be the case; the music seems designed to play a secondary role to the words. As a result, I find most opera music to be singularly devoid of any real melodic value; I can’t hum them, I can’t whistle them, and they don’t stick in the memory.

I’m also not keen on operatic vocal techniques. To illustrate, let me describe my initial moments of watching this movie. The first five minutes were just fine; the music was largely a voiceless prelude, and the movie concentrated on visuals. When the singing began about five minutes into the movie, I moaned in frustration, as I thought it was in Italian, and not subtitled to boot. Then, five minutes later, I made a new discovery; the movie wasn’t in Italian, as I thought, but in English. It was at that point that I realized that it didn’t matter to me what language it was in; I would have preferred subtitles, so I could understand the English. The problem is that operatic phrasing is such a distinct and precise thing that listening to it is like hearing English being spoken in some unknown and alien dialect. Furthermore, even if I could understand the occasional line, all it took was for the diva to hold a note for several seconds in the middle of one of her sentences for me to start to lose the thread of what she was saying. Now I’m willing to believe that continued exposure to opera would eventually enable me to understand the vocalization better, but that would requre me to watch a lot more of it, and I’m not sure I want to make the investment of time.

So, bearing in mind that this movie already had several strikes against it (in my mind), I’m quite pleased to say that nonetheless, I enjoyed the movie well enough. There are several reasons; first of all, it was only eighty minutes long (most operas run three and a half hours, and though that statement is probably not strictly true, that’s what it feels like to me). Second of all, it was shot like a movie rather than like a photographed stage play, relying on visuals and close-ups to clue us in on the emotions of the characters; this created a much greater degree of intimacy than I expected. Thirdly, the acting is very good indeed, especially Marie Powers as the medium who finds her life falling apart because of her inability to cope with her experience. And lastly, I actually liked the story; it was real drama with strong fantastic elements rather than the melodrama that seems so prevalent among opera plots. As a consequence, I liked the movie.

Odd how these things work out, isn’t it?