Month: December 2016

Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958)

PANDA AND THE MAGIC SERPENT (1958)
(a.k.a. HAKUJA DEN)
Article #1580 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-12-2005
Posting Date: 12-9-2005
Directed by Kazuhiko Okabe, Taiji Yabushita, Robert Tafur
Featuring the voices of Marvin Miller, Mariko Miyagi, Hisaya Morishige

When a young man falls in love with a beautiful maiden who is actually a magic serpent, a wizard, believing she is evil, tries to break up the relationship.

According to IMDB, this is the first color, feature-length anime film, though I would have to say that the character style is certainly a far cry from what we think of as anime today. Watching these types of movies can be an interesting experience; one senses a big cultural difference while at the same time seeing the universalities of certain stories. Though this movie looks nothing like what you’d expect from Disney, the story itself embraces a fairly common theme about the non-smoothness of the true course of love. Some of the plot points are very familiar; when the enchantress decides to give up her powers and her immortality for the sake of the one she leaves, I found myself hearkening back to similar scenes from SUPERMAN II and one of the Steve Reeves Hercules movies. Actually, the bizarre dubbing is the most jarring aspect of the movie; it’s hard to believe that the panda would have such a deep voice, and having a voice translate the Japanese lyrics of some of the songs after they have been sung is rather unusual. My favorite sequence is the battle of the wizards, and my favorite character is the enchantress’ perpetually smiling handmaiden. And then of course, there’s the giant catfish – er – dragonfish – who pops up at the end. Despite the headache-inducing dubbing, I must admit that I liked it; I’m just not sure how much yet.

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Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937)

ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN (1937)
Article #1579 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-11-2005
Posting Date: 12-8-2005
Directed by David Butler
Featuring Eddie Cantor, Roland Young, Raymond Scott

A hobo makes it to Hollywood in the hopes of filling up his autograph book. He ends up being hired as an extra in an Arabian Nights movie, but falls asleep in an urn and dreams that he has been transported to the land of the Arabian Nights.

I found myself trying to remember the name of the Eddie Cantor movie I’d seen previously for this series. Once I remembered it was ROMAN SCANDALS, I immediately knew why the premise of this one seemed so familiar; in both movies, Cantor falls asleep and finds himself in another world. I also knew what was missing from this one; the stunning musical choreography of Busby Berkeley is sorely missed, and this post-code movie simply lacks the daring and the darkness of the earlier movie. To compensate, we have Roland Young as a sultan, and John Carradine in three different roles (as a studio exec trying to get Cantor to sign a release form after he suffers an accident, as a scheming Arab, and as himself). As for Cantor, he’s not bad, but as a comedian, a little of his perky brightness goes a long way with me. The musical numbers are good, but it’s here I miss Berkeley the most as well. The satire is more cute than pointed, and much of it is fairly dated anymore. Still, the end of the movie has the best moments; there’s a stunning sequence involving a ride on a flying carpet that is the high point of the movie, and the final scene in which the Hobo attends a Hollywood movie premiere features lots of entertaining cameos, and sets up the best joke in the movie when the REAL Eddie Cantor shows up. Another good moment has Cantor trying to figure out the native language of a group of African musicians and discovers that they speak Cab Calloway.

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Orpheus (1949)

ORPHEUS (1949)
(a.k.a. ORPHEE)
Article #1578 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-10-2005
Posting Date: 12-7-2005
Directed by Jean Cocteau
Featuring Jean Marais, Francois Perier, Maria Casares

A poet has a strange encounter with a woman in black known as the Princess, and then begins to hear bizarre poetry on the radio of the princess’ automobile.

There’s a moment in this movie where the poet puts on a pair of clear gloves that will help him to pass through a mirror. Instead of showing footage of the poet donning the gloves in a straightforward fashion, Jean Cocteau used footage of the poet taking off the gloves and ran it backwards. On the basis of purely practical story-telling, this use of footage is eccentric and useless, but in terms of adding that special touch of surreal lyricism and giving the sense of truly other-worldly action, it’s a brilliant moment. That is certainly one of Cocteau’s charms; he uses special effects not to give a sense of reality to fantastic events, but to give that sense of exotic unreality that underlies much of his work. The fact that some of his special effects techniques are obvious (he loves to run footage backwards and does it quite a bit during this movie) does not in any sense reduce its cinematic power.

This may be his best-known work after his masterpiece, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. It’s not the equal of that one, largely because the story itself (an update of the Orpheus story) is more obscure and difficult than the one of the earlier movie. It is also very difficult at time to fathom the motives of the main character; in particular, I’m never sure how Orpheus really feels about either the Princess or Eurydice. But the imagery has a definite staying power, and there’s something rather compelling about the vision of the world of Death and the dead as it is portrayed here. At any rate, the visions of Orpheus travelling on the other side of the mirror with the chauffeur have stayed in my memory from my first viewing of the movie years ago. It makes me rather sad that Cocteau only directed 10 movies in his life, but other than an obscure silent film and the short BLOOD OF A POET, he really didn’t start directing until he was well into his fifties. Cocteau was one of the filmmakers being emulated by Herk Harvey when that man directed CARNIVAL OF SOULS.

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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962)

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE (1962)
(a.k.a. LA RIVIERE DU HIBOU)
Article #1577 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-9-2005
Posting Date: 12-6-2005
Directed by Robert Enrico
Featuring Roger Jacquet, Anne Cornaly, Anker Larsen

A Confederate spy is being hanged off of a bridge by Union soldiers during the Civil War. When the rope unexpectedly breaks, the spy makes a desperate attempt for freedom.

This short French film won an award at Cannes, as well as taking the Academy Award for Best Short Subject in the live action category. Though these are indeed great honors, this movie would have most likely faded into obscurity over time. However, fate had one more surprise in store for it. The producer for the final season of “Twilight Zone” had seen the short, and since the season for the show was running over budget, he decided to buy the television rights to the short and then showed it as an episode of the series. It was an excellent choice; not only does the mood of the short fit well with that of the series, but since there were only a handful of lines of dialogue (and these were in English), no dubbing of lines was required.

Another reason the short fit the format is that the whole movie builds up to a single final twist, and this twist is essential to the tale; without it, the story becomes merely an adventure story (exquisitely directed, but rather ordinary). The twist is what gives this one its power, impact and haunting quality. Still, the movie is only marginally genre; the only quality that makes it so is that there is something rather horrific about the twist. Still, I do find myself wondering as to whether Terry Gilliam was familiar with this story when he made BRAZIL.

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Non-Stop New York (1937)

NON-STOP NEW YORK (1937)
Article #1576 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-8-2005
Posting Date: 12-5-2005
Directed by Robert Stevenson
Featuring John Loder, Anna Lee, Francis L. Sullivan

When a mob lawyer is murdered in New York, the authorities arrest and convict an innocent man. The only person who can save him from the electric chair is an English actress who can prove his innocence, but the mob has whisked her away to England in the hopes that she will be unable to clear him.

When I appeared in a production of “Witness for the Prosecution” a few years ago, I remember the director telling all of us who played the trial witnesses that he wanted each one of our characters to be little gems of character acting. Someone must have given that same note to the actors in this thoroughly delightful thriller; it is packed to the gills with fun and offbeat characters. As a result, this makes for one of the most engaging thrillers this side of Hitchcock; in fact, writer E.V.H. Emmett (who is credited with ‘additional dialogue’) had previously worked on Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE. The fantastic content appears only in the latter half of the movie, when most of the interested parties board a new luxury airplane (with cabins, observation decks, dining rooms and no seat belts), but it provides a truly memorable setting. The performances are uniformly excellent, but special notice should go to Anna Lee as the English actress who knows too much, Francis L. Sullivan as the mob boss who disguises himself as a Paraguayan general and who has a novel way of lighting his cigars, and Desmond Tester who takes a potentially annoying role (as a precocious and sassy musical child prodigy) and makes it hilarious. Fans of DR. STRANGELOVE will immediately recognize actor Peter Bull as a man who has the presence of mind to save a torn-up letter to sell to a blackmailer. This one is definitely recommended, especially to fans of Hitchcockian thrillers.

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The Night of the Sorcerers (1974)

THE NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS (1974)
(a.k.a. LA NOCHE DE LOS BRUJOS)
Article #1575 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-7-2005
Posting Date: 12-4-2005
Directed by Amando de Ossorio
Featuring Mario Kosti, Simon Andreu, Kali Hansa

An exploration team in Mumbasa find themselves victims of the curse of the leopard people.

This movie opens with a bunch of African natives performing a sadistic ritual on an unwilling white woman. They have just completed the ritual when a surrounding military force opens fire on the natives and kills them all. Then there is a startling twist that would have worked a lot better if it had been edited well, but in some ways, this moment is indicative of the whole movie; one hand giveth, while the other hand taketh away.

To give an example of what I mean, some of the horror scenes here are really eerie and effective, particularly when the dead natives pull themselves out of the cairns built for their bodies. Other moments are unintentionally hilarious; any sequence with the fanged leopard women cavorting around in their fur bikinis in slow motion is more likely to elicit snickers rather than shudders. At least one thing both of these types of scenes have in common is that they’re still better than scenes of conversation between the main characters; for some reason, director Amando de Ossorio just can’t bring these scenes to life.

Still, I think I’ll cut the movie a bit of slack. It’s a lot better than MALENKA, for one thing. For another, I have the short dubbed-in-English print, and this of course drags down the quality a little. Still, this one just doesn’t hold a candle to Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies.

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Night After Night After Night (1969)

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1969)
Article #1574 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-6-2005
Posting Date: 12-3-2005
Directed by Lindsay Shonteff
Featuring Jack May, Justine Lord, Gilbert Wynne

A series of ripper murders are being committed by a repressed judge, but the policeman handling the case believes the culprit is a young womanizer.

When faced with a title like that, the first word that comes to mind is repetition. Unfortunately, that word ends up applying all too well to this psycho-killer movie. Though I appreciate the fact that the relaxing of standards of censorship opened up opportunities for movies to be more explicit, there is such a thing as excess. You see, our slasher here is determined to put an end to the evil in the world by killing those evil temptresses, women. Then, to illustrate these temptations, the movie embarks on an endless array of scenes of scantily clad women, leering perverts, double entendres, make-out sessions, voyeurism, etc. etc. etc.. Now, I can appreciate how some of this may be essential to understanding the characters and the situation, but this movie is so incessant with it that it comes fairly close to soft-core porn. For example, we know that the judge has a secret room full of pin-ups of naked women; do we need the camera to pan endlessly across the pinups every time we enter the room? There are a couple of good ideas in the mix; I especially like the fact that the man arrested for the murders finds himself being tried under the judge who is actually guilty of them. But the blatantly exploitative approach to the story puts me off and starts to grate after a while.

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Neutron Vs. the Maniac (1962)

NEUTRON VS. THE MANIAC (1962)
Article #1573 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-5-2005
Posting Date: 12-2-2005
Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna
Featuring Wolf Ruviniskis, Gina Romand, Rodolfo Landa

Neutron tries to catch a knife-wielding maniac who films his victims.

Break out the party hats—it’s another Neutron movie! You remember Neutron, don’t you? Well, if you don’t, the title cards will remind you that Neutron is the Atomic Superman. This is all well and good, except for the fact that he’s not atomic (though you could have a lively debate about just what makes someone atomic or not) nor is he a superman (no superpowers, average strength). In short, he’s a masked Mexican wrestler, except he doesn’t wrestle. So how does the movie compensate for the lack of wrestling scenes? It substitutes musical numbers, all of which have been left in their native Mexican language (though I really wish I could follow the lyrics of the novelty doo-wop number).

Neutron is trying to figure out the identity of the maniac. The only person who has seen him is a blind pianist (who isn’t blind, though he plays the piano). All the pianist really knows is that the killer made his escape to an asylum. The question is—which person in the asylum is it? Is it the suspicious doctor? One of the thuggish attendants? The battle-fatigued soldier? The mystic? The Russian royalty with the gout (who doesn’t really have the gout)? Or is it the unbeatable wrestler who loses every match (I take it back; the movie does have wrestling scenes)? The famous actress who is neither famous nor an actress?

Of course, the dubbing is atrocious and the translation feeds us a number of hilarious lines. Taken as a whole, the story is pretty muddled as well. Nonetheless, the setup for the mystery is pretty amusing, and the revelations in the final scene are very entertaining, though it has more twists than you can shake a stick at. I also have some fondness for the comic relief character; his encounter with the maniac is really memorable. In short, this one is dumb, but fun.

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The Miracle of the Bells (1948)

THE MIRACLE OF THE BELLS (1948)
Article #1572 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-4-2005
Posting Date: 12-1-2005
Directed by Irving Pichel
Featuring Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli, Frank Sinatra

A press agent arrives in a small Pennsylvania coal town with the body of an actress who died after making her first big picture, a biography of Joan of Arc. While making funeral arrangements for her, he conceives of a publicity gimmick to make the producer release the film, which he shelved.

This is one of those religiously inspirational movies that Hollywood made during the forties about angels, miracles, etc. Most of them are actually quite effective due to the fact that they fleshed the movies out with complex situations and characters, humor, and a sense of real curiosity about how people would really react to the fantastic situations portrayed; check out THE SONG OF BERNADETTE as one of the best examples of such a movie. This one fails to do so; it’s sincere, but trite, simplistic, and overly serious. It’s also marred by a weak performance by Frank Sinatra, but I can’t really blame him too much; he was miscast and his uncomfortable performance seems to reflect his awareness of that fact. It makes its biggest mistake, I think, when the Lee J. Cobb character mentions an actress named Genevieve James; I was immediately able to figure out the real actress being referenced, and that just called my attention one more time to THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (a movie which also featured Cobb), and this movie really suffers by comparison.

It’s not totally ineffective, though; when the central miracle occurs late in the movie (which supplies the movie’s fantastic content and merits its inclusion in this series), the movie does offer an alternate explanation which somehow makes the whole movie stronger because it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still an amazing coincidence. It also includes a few greedy characters in the bunch to keep a certain amount of drama to the proceedings. However, I do find it hard to swallow that a town that had to endure three days of church bells ringing would react with awe-struck mystical reverence (not while annoyance was still an option, anyway). And somehow, I couldn’t watch the movie without thinking about a song and a comedy sketch. The former is “The Bells Are Ringing” by They Might Be Giants, in which the ringing of bells turns people into mindless conformist zombies. The latter is a Monty Python sketch in which an agnostic is attacked by a church steeple with a ringing bell and has to destroy it with a tactical nuclear missile. (“There’s nothing an agnostic can’t do if he really doesn’t know whether he believes in anything or not!”) Somehow, this didn’t really add to my reverence for the proceedings.

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The Mind Benders (1963)

THE MIND BENDERS (1963)
Article #1571 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-3-2005
Posting Date: 11-30-2005
Directed by Basil Dearden
Featuring Dirk Bogarde, Mary Ure, John Clements

In order to clear the reputation of a dead fellow scientist from charges of having been a traitor, a colleague agrees to undergo an isolation experiment that he believes changed the personality of the dead man. When the man from the ministry observes that the experiment brings about a state similar to that of brainwashing techniques, he takes the experiment one step further…

This is one of those rarities; a real science fiction drama. Despite the espionage angle, the movie is really concerned with how the experiment affects the characters and the relationships between them, and despite the fact that the DVD package mentions THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and ALTERED STATES (both of which share strong thematic similarities to this movie), I think it bears the strongest similarities to CHARLY, another movie about the effect an experiment has on a man’s character. The acting throughout the movie is strong (especially from Dirk Bogarde and Mary Ure as the scientist and his wife), and the opening scenes really suck you into the story. The movie does get rather slow on occasion, though some of it is necessary; in order for the plot to work, it requires we have a good knowledge of how the scientist, his wife, and a friend feel about each other. However, I still think that it could have used a little pruning of its 109 minute length. Nonetheless, this is a compelling and memorable movie.

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