Month: June 2017

The Ape Woman (1963)

THE APE WOMAN (1963)
aka LA DONNA SCIMMIA
Article 1952 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-19-2006
Posting Date: 12-16-2006
Directed by Marco Ferreri
Featuring Ugo Tognazzi, Annie Girardot, Eva Belami

A sideshow huckster discovers a woman working in a kitchen who is completely covered with hair, and hits upon the scheme of presenting her as an ape woman in a bid to make money. He soon discovers that in order to keep her cooperation, he will have to marry her, and this leads to an interesting chain of events…

Though this can’t really be described as properly belonging to any of the fantastic genres, it does deal the theme of deformity, a staple of many horror movies. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this movie going into it; the plot description certainly makes it sound like it’s going to be somewhat depressing look at human exploitation. Yet, though the theme of human exploitation is very much there, it never becomes a simple portrait of the vileness of man, and even though there is something offensive about his money-making scheme, one is aware that the huckster is the one human being in the woman’s life who is not allowing her to be ashamed of her appearance, and this opens up a new world of possibilities for her. This is one movie that isn’t predictable; the twists and turns of life for these two are fascinating, and in particular, you never know what Ugo Tognazzi’s character is going to do. He’s fully capable of engaging in some low activities, but he isn’t totally without conscience, and isn’t impervious to persuasion or to changing his outlook to fit the circumstances. The question that drives the movie is – Just how far will he change himself as his world changes around him? The ending is deeply (but not darkly) ironic, and quite satisfying.

 

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The Absent Minded Professor (1961)

THE ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR (1961)
Article 1951 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-18-2006
Posting Date: 12-15-2006
Directed by Robert Stevenson
Featuring Fred MacMurray, Nancy Olson, Keenan Wynn

A forgetful professor misses his wedding when he inadvertently makes a gravity-defying substance he calls flubber. He tries to win back the affections of his fiancee while keeping a greedy businessman away from his invention.

For me, the shopping-cart genre never got better than this. This one is more energetic than THE SHAGGY DOG, and the special effects are pretty impressive all around. Fred MacMurray is wonderful in the title role, capturing just the right combination of earnestness and silliness. The movie also benefits from the presence of Keenan Wynn playing the villainous businessmen, Alonzo P. Hawk, who would not only return in this movie’s sequel SON OF FLUBBER but in HERBIE RIDES AGAIN as well. The best scenes in the movie involve the use of flubber in shoes; though some may prefer the basketball game or the dance, my favorite of these is the one where Keenan Wynn’s character gets his comeuppance, a scene that involves firemen (including Wynn’s own real-life father Ed Wynn), three fisherman, a football team, a hot dog salesman, and everyone in the neighborhood. The movie even indulges in some political satire; when the flying Model T is mistaken for a UFO and is about to be shot down by missiles, I love the reaction of the man making the countdown at the knowledge that the Model T has gone behind the capitol building and that releasing the missiles could destroy Congress. This is probably my favorite of the shopping-cart genre.

 

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Week End (1967)

WEEK END (1967)
Article 1950 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-17-2006
Posting Date: 12-14-2006
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Featuring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon

A bourgeois couple takes a weekend trip and encounters an endless stream of traffic accidents, annoying people, and strange characters.

I suppose fantasy is as good a classification as any for this bizarre and at times (intentionally) annoying foray into surrealistic politically-themed French new wave cinema by one of the masters of the form. Unless I’m mistaken, I’ve only covered one other movie by Godard (ALPHAVILLE), and even when he’s being straightforward (relatively, anyway) as he was with that one, I have trouble with him. Still, I suspect that this one isn’t quite as difficult as it seems at first; its political themes and hatred of the bourgeois are out in the open, and once you realize that certain scenes exist primarily to yank our chains as viewers (including the description of the erotic encounter near the beginning of the movie and the endless traffic-jam sequence), it does give you a sense that you could probably sort it all out. The trouble is, I’m not sure Godard really makes me want to go through the trouble; his cinematic style doesn’t really speak to me in the way that, say, Cocteau or Fellini does. Even though I will admit that he can be quite effective here on occasion, he doesn’t make me want to watch the movie again, and once he decides to show the onscreen slaughter of a pig and a chicken to make his points, he loses a great deal of my sympathy. I think I’ll leave this one to fans of the director’s oeuvre.

 

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The Thrill Killers (1964)

THE THRILL KILLERS (1964)
Article 1949 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-16-2006
Posting Date: 12-13-2006
Directed by Ray Dennis Steckler
Featuring Ray Dennis Steckler, Liz Renay, Joseph Bardo

Three escapees from a mental institution are on the loose and terrorizing and killing people. There’s also a homicidal maniac on the loose terrorizing and killing people. As a result, many people are terrorized and killed.

I think Ray Dennis Steckler had some real talent, both as an actor and a director. There are moments in this movie where his handling of the attack scenes makes them genuinely creepy and quite unnerving. He also had some interesting ideas; having the final chase take place between a psycho-on-a-horse and a cop-on-a-motocycle shows a certain amount of creativity. Unfortunately, the better moments here are undercut by a weak story, the lack of convincing characters, and a propensity for campiness. It seems to want you to take itself seriously, but it’s very difficult to take the movie that way when it opens with The Amazing Ormond hypnotizing you so that you would see the maniacs in the audience, and most of the attack scenes feature the swirling hypnotic footage that’s supposed to allow you to see them. All in all, it’s a mixed bag with a split personality, which is rather fitting for a movie about psychos on the loose, I suppose.

 

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The Testament of Orpheus, or Don’t Ask Me Why! (1960)

THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS, OR DON’T ASK ME WHY! (1960)
aka LE TESTAMENT D’ORPHEE, OU NE ME DEMANDEZ PAS POURQUOI!
Article 1948 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-15-2006
Posting Date: 12-12-2006
Directed by Jean Cocteau
Featuring Jean Cocteau, Edouard Demithe, Francois Perier

A poet, floating through time, is shot with faster-than-light bullets so he can be resurrected and undertake his journey through a world where he is haunted by his own creations.

This is the fourth movie I’ve seen from Jean Cocteau. The earliest of his movies I’ve seen was BLOOD OF A POET, which I found fascinating if near impenetrable. Since then I’ve watched the relatively straighforward movies BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ORPHEUS. I bought this movie as part of set of Cocteau movies referred to as the Orphic trilogy, which included both ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET. Classifying ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET as two parts of trilogy did have me scratching my head; they didn’t seem to be separate chapters of a trilogy. It was only after having seen this one that I stopped scratching my head.

THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS was Cocteau’s last movie, and in it he returned to the symbol-filled approach to movie-making that he had used for BLOOD OF A POET. He spends much of his time musing on how his own creations take on a life of their own and search for the meaning of their existence; at least two of the characters from ORPHEUS reappear here. He also muses on the nature of celebrity, the ability of cinema to give the poet the ability to allow a large group of people to dream the same dream at the same time, and to engage in some of those fascinating special effects that mark his work. I find it fitting that the filmmaker most interested in the poetic use of special effects would come from the same country as Melies, who pioneered cinematic special effects. IMDB classifies the movie as a biography, but that word is singularly useless in conjuring up the almost giddy fantasy of this movie, in which Cocteau, playing himself, dies twice and then asks the viewer to only pretend to cry, since he himself is only pretending to die. And, like many deaths in Cocteau films, he dies only to be resurrected; in fact, he is referred to as an expert on Phoenixology at one point in the proceedings. The movie is fascinating for one willing to delve into Cocteau’s world, and it has certainly piqued my interest into rewatching his earlier films, particularly BLOOD OF A POET, which, armed with what I’ve learned of his work, may not prove to be not quite so impenetrable. On top of that, the movie is witty; I laughed out loud at some of the revelations. The movie is loaded with cameos of well-known people, including Brigitte Bardot, Yul Brynner, Jean Marais, Roger Vadim and Pablo Picasso.

At the end of the movie, Cocteau announces that this is his last movie, and hopes that we enjoyed it. I can assure him that, for myself at least, I did. Very much so.

 

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Son of Ali Baba (1952)

SON OF ALI BABA (1952)
Article 1947 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-14-2006
Posting Date: 12-11-2006
Directed by Kurt Neumann
Featuring Tony Curtis, Piper Laurie, Susan Cabot

When a slave girl of the Caliph seeks sanctuary from Kashma Baba (the son of Ali Baba), the wrath of the Caliph is incurred and Kashma Baba is forced to flee to the castle of his father. He then discovers that the slave girl is actually the Caliph’s daughter, and that it was all part of a plot by the Caliph to acquire Ali Baba’s treasure and to ruin his reputation in the eyes of the Shah. Kashma sets out to amend these wrongs.

If the trailer of this movie is to be believed, this movie was made because of the outpouring of fan letters requesting that the romantic leads in THE PRINCE WHO WAS A THIEF be reunited in another picture. Maybe that’s so; I wish they had asked for a decent script as well. Actually, I’m being a little unfair; the story isn’t just a rehash of the usual Arabian Nights tales that I’ve seen, and when you consider that I went into this movie with a certain glum weariness at the thought of enduring another entry in a genre I had quite tired of but then emerged from it having been somewhat entertained, that’s to be taken in its favor. But the heightened artificial Arabian Nights style dialogue is quite bad, and the actors struggle with it with varying success. Some of them emerge from it fairly unscathed; Victor Jory, Morris Ankrum, Gerald Mohr, Hugh O’Brian and Susan Cabot manage all right. The two leads are somewhat hit and miss in this regard. Those who fare the worst are the actor playing Kashma Baba’s guardian Babu, and the two bimbo man-hungry girls, but I don’t really blame them, because they’ve been given the worst roles; I can only feel sorry for Leon Belasco (as Babu) anytime he is called on to deliver the line “Aieeee!”, a line I hope I never encounter in my own experience as an actor. I also find it necessary to point out that the fantastic aspects of this movie (which are supposedly the main reason I covered this one in the first place) do not exist; there are no magic carpets, magic lamps, genies or anything of that nature. I guess it’s time to move on to the next one.

 

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Atlas Against the Czar (1964)

ATLAS AGAINST THE CZAR (1964)
aka SAMSON VS. THE GIANT KING, MACISTE ALLA CORTE DELLO ZAR
Article 1946 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-13-2006
Posting Date: 12-10-2006
Directed by Tanio Boccia
Featuring Kirk Morris, Massimo Serato, Ombretta Colli

Nicolas the Czar is a mean ol’ tyrant who oppresses his subjects, but not if our three-named hero Atlas/Samson/Maciste has anything to say about it!

Some thoughts on ATLAS AGAINST THE CZAR.

1) The Italian title of this movie roughly translates into MACISTE IN THE COURT OF THE CZAR. Given the other two titles are ATLAS AGAINST THE CZAR and SAMSON VS. THE GIANT KING, I can only be grateful to a resource like IMDB that helps me keep these movies straight.

2) And while we’re on the subject, where does our hero get off having three names? I think he’s trying to monopolize the market. It’s not really fair, not while Clint Eastwood has to play a man with no name and America has to sing about “A Horse with No Name”. He may be a loinclothed hero, but I really think Samson/Atlas/Maciste might find it in his heart to share some of his names with those less fortunate, don’t you?

3) And to further compound matters, he can’t even remember his name when he appears, despite the fact that the opening titles tell us that he is “Atlas, who is now named Machiste”. If you have three names, you should be able to remember at least one of them.

4) Note to proofreaders – there’s no “H’ in Maciste.

5) I’ve speculated in the past on Maciste’s strange knack for appearing in widely divergent time zones. Filmmakers didn’t flinch when they had him appear in thirteenth century China (in HERCULES AGAINST THE BARBARIANS, (and don’t get me started on this fourth name) or in seventeenth century Scotland (in THE WITCH’S CURSE), but having him appear in nineteenth century Russia must have given them pause; they spend the first third of the movie setting up a scenario for having him appear in this time period, which involves suspended animation. They never do figure out why it is he speaks Russian like a native, though.

7) So how do nineteenth-century archaelogists revive Maciste out of his slumber? They rub oil on his chest. Now you know why these big sword-and-sandal heroes look so slick.

8) Of course, once he’s revived, it’s the usual sword-and-sandal shenanigans. Maciste lifts up big rocks and throws them, etc. etc. One item of note; Maciste is dressed in a loincloth while the rest of the cast is dressed in Russian garbs, such as long coats and furs. Either one member of the cast was freezing during the shooting of this movie, or the rest of the cast was sweating bullets.

9) The biggest surprises in this movie come near the end. Instead of the main villain dying in a last bit of treachery, he lives so that Maciste can turn him over to his former subjects so they can punish him. And when the time comes for him to leave the woman he’s found so that he can help people in other lands, he changes his mind and takes her with him. These breaks from sword-and-sandal tradition would be interesting if the rest of the movie wasn’t so hackneyed.

10) There are no evil queens in this movie.

 

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Pinocchio in Outer Space (1965)

PINOCCHIO IN OUTER SPACE (1965)
Article 1945 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-12-2006
Posting Date: 12-9-2006
Directed by Ray Goossens
Featuring the voices of Peter Lazer, Arnold Stang, Jess Cain

Pinocchio, having been turned back into a puppet again when he became disobedient, resolves to prove himself worthy again by capturing Astro, the space whale. To that end, he spends his lunch money on a book on hypnotism and joins forces with Nurtle the Twertle (a secret agent from outer space) to defeat Astro using hypnotism.

Some animated movies become so magically engrossing that you get caught up in them completely; take the original PINOCCHIO, for example. And some never tap into the magic, and when watching them, you remain awkwardly aware at all times that you’re watching an uninspired foray into juvenile pandering. Such is the fate of this one. One major problem is that it bends over backwards to run over some of the same ground of the original story – why else return him to his puppet status and have him prove himself all over again, and then getting duped by the fox and the cat and finally, having to face Monstro wannabe Astro, the Space Whale? At least he doesn’t turn into a space donkey. The movie might fly with children who are eager to see a follow-up to the original movie, even one not from Disney; since I have no children handy to test this on, I can’t say. Still, they’d be better off watching Disney’s version again, or, barring that, they might be more satisfied with similarly themed movies like ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS or GULLIVER’S TRAVELS BEYOND THE MOON. Still, I must admit that the child in me liked the giant space crabs.

 

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Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Bad (1967)

OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMA’S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELING SO SAD (1967)
Article 1944 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-11-2006
Posting Date: 12-8-2006
Directed by Richard Quine and Alexander Mackendrick
Featuring Rosalind Russell, Robert Morse, Barbara Harris

An overbearing mother takes her repressed son on vacation to Jamaica. She takes along two venus fly-traps, a fishtank of piranhas, and her former husband, whose corpse has been stuffed and which she keeps in the closet. She tries to net a rich Commodore while protecting her son from the wiles of a lusty young woman.

Let’s get the fantastic content out of the way first. The movie is narrated by Jonathan Winters, who appears as an angel in heaven during the opening sequence. Outside of this, its main fantastic content might be that the movie feels something like a black comic version of the early years of Norman Bates; I found myself thinking of the movie PSYCHO several times during this viewing.

The movie is based on a stage play by Arthur L. Kopit, and I can actually see how this might have worked fairly well on stage. As a movie, though, it falls rather flat. I haven’t read the stage play on which this was based, but I suspect that there was quite a bit of tampering with the script; certainly, Jonathan Winters’s narration feels out of sync with the rest of the movie, and the fact that each of these one-liners is punctuated by still pictures of Winters in the action makes me suspect that this was all added after the fact to make the movie more overtly comic and more commercial. Unfortunately, the commentary isn’t particularly funny, and it undercuts the natural weirdness that is actually the movie’s strength; I find some of the bizarre touches (like Robert Morse’s sickly complexion and Rosalind Russell’s costume-and-wig collection) to be the most interesting thing about this movie. The cast is rather interesting; on top of the people mentioned earlier, it also features Hugh Griffith as the smitten Commodore, Lionel Jeffries as an officious airport commander, whose face I’ve definitely seen somewhere else before, even if I can’t say where. It’s a failure, but not an uninteresting one, and my curiosity about the original stage play has certainly been piqued.

 

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Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)

NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948)
Article 1943 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-10-2006
Posting Date: 12-7-2006
Directed by John Farrow
Featuring Edward G.Robinson, Gail Russell, John Lund

A man with a mind reading act discovers he has the ability to see into the future. When he has a vision of the death of the daughter of a former lover, he tries to use his knowledge to save her.

The director of this movie, John Farrow, was responsible for ALIAS NICK BEAL, another dark drama with strong fantastic elements. This, along with the presence of one of my very favorite actors, Edward G. Robinson, made me hope for something special with this one, but I’m afraid I found myself a little disappointed by the results. Robinson does a fine job with his role, and I do like the movie’s serious approach to the story, even to the point of making sure that a potential comic relief character (Wiliam Demarest’s detective) is played straight. However, the story feels just a bit too familiar and predictable, and after a while I found myself merely waiting for the someone to knock over the line of dominoes the movie had spent setting up. This wouldn’t really have been a problem had the movie effectively ratcheted up the suspense quotient, but it fails to do so; in fact, I found much of the movie to be turgidly paced. In some ways, it’s similar to THE CLAIRVOYANT from the previous decade, but I found the earlier movie to be a little more creative. Incidentally, this wasn’t Robinson’s first cinematic encounter with mind readers and precognition; the same themes popped up in his earlier movie THE HOLE IN THE WALL. The cast also features Onslow Stevens (billed as Onslow Stevenson, which I assume was a mistake) and Douglas (THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD) Spencer.

 

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