Month: January 2020

Going to Bed Under Difficulties (1900)

GOING TO BED UNDER DIFFICULTIES (1900)
aka Le deshabillage impossible
Article 4124 by Dave Sindelar
Date:1-5-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Comic trick film

A man’s attempt to retire for the night is hampered by the magical appearance of new pieces of clothing on him as he tries to undress.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Melies’s sense of humor was sharpest in his earlier films; this surreal piece of absurdity is perhaps his single funniest film. What makes it work is that the man becomes more frantic and desperate as new clothes constantly materialize on him; he can’t even ignore them and go to sleep because his bed vanishes as well. Perhaps it’s fitting as well that the movie has no ending; this man will be removing clothes forever. It’s not surprising that this silly little short engendered a few imitations from other directors.

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La glace a trois faces (1927)

LA GLACE A TROIS FACES (1927)
aka The Three-Sided Mirror
Article 4123 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-3-2013
Directed by Jean Epstein
Featuring Jeanne Helbling, Suzy Pierson, Olga Day
Country: France
What it is: Psychological avant-garde drama

The story of a man and his affairs with three women is told.

Let’s get the fantastic content out of the way first. This is one of those cases where it’s not embedded in the plot, but rather, in the distorted cinematic styles employed in the movie. The Walt Lee guide describes them as “dynamic distortions of reality”, and that’s about as good a way to describe it as any; we often see double and triple exposures that reflect the mental life of a particular character, and this at least nudges up against the genre of fantasy.

It does make for some fascinating viewing. Director Jean Epstein had a real talent for capturing telling facial expressions and expressive movements that can often tell volumes about a character while keeping the dialogue (or, in the case of this silent movie, title cards) to a minimum. It is sometimes elusive and difficult, but that’s not entirely unexpected. Still, one has to have a taste for this sort of thing, and I suspect fans of fantastic cinema will probably prefer to stick with his version of THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.

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Fugitive Apparitions (1904)

FUGITIVE APPARITIONS (1904)
aka Les apparitions fugitives
Article 4122 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-1-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Magic trick short

A magician makes a woman appear and disappear.

This is another of Melies’s magician shorts, which I’ve discussed before. About the only surprise in this one is that Melies opts for fade-ins and fade-outs for his tricks rather than the substitutions that he usually used. I suspect he may have been experimenting with a new technique or trying to find new wrinkles in an old one. Whatever his intention, this one’s a pretty minor entry of his, and not one of his essential works.

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Prime Risk (1985)

PRIME RISK (1985)
Article 4121 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-31-2012
Directed by Michael L. Farkas
Featuring Lee Montgomery, Toni Hudson, Sam Bottoms
Country: USA
What it is: Thriller

A female hacker and her aspiring pilot boyfriend concoct a scheme to rip off money from ATMs. However, they stumble across a plot by spies to destroy the economy of the United States.

To point out that this movie is basically a rip off of WARGAMES is a no-brainer; the blurbs on the VHS packet hint so persistently at the identity of its model that it could justly be accused of wearing its Xeroxed heart on its sleeve. The main differences are in the details, especially in choosing economic disaster over nuclear destruction as its Armageddon. That being said, the movie is passable; not great, not awful, it serves as an acceptable time-killer when nothing better is on, and can easily be forgotten in time for the next movie that comes along. The biggest names in the cast are Keenan Wynn and Clu Gulager; the former seems a bit bored by the whole thing, while the other is fussy and cranky. All in all, this is another movie that I can now take off the hunt list.

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The Cabbage-Patch Fairy (1900)

THE CABBAGE-PATCH FAIRY (1900)
aka La fee aux choux, ou la naissance des enfants
Article 4120 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-30-2012
Directed by Alice Guy
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Novelty short

A woman displays babies found in a cabbage patch.

Sometimes the title is the main source of the fantastic content of the movie; if this one had been called WOMAN FINDING BABIES HIDDEN IN A GARDEN, no one would have seen any fantastic content at all. It’s the title that tells us that the woman is a fairy, and the garden is where the babies come from. Well, at least the movie doesn’t steal any special effects from Melies, but that’s because there are no special effects to speak of; the babies are hidden behind garden displays, and she just finds them and sets them down in our line of vision. And that’s about all this slight little short gives us.

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The Enchanted Drawing (1900)

THE ENCHANTED DRAWING (1900)
Article 4119 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-29-2012
Directed by J. Stuart Blackton
Featuring J. Stuart Blackton
Country: USA
What it is: Early trick short

An artist draws a face and several items on a large pad. The face reacts as the artist pulls the various items from the pad and uses them.

This is a simply conceived but well-executed trick film. It’s basically the simple trick of stopping the camera and substituting new items, but it’s done with a sense of wit. It isn’t quite an animated film, but it does point in the direction of animation and can be seen as a film connecting the dots between animation and the simple substitution trick. Blackton himself seems at ease as the artist at work, and this also makes the short fun to watch.

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Hot Water (1924)

HOT WATER (1924)
Article 4118 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-28-2012
Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Featuring Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Josephine Crowell
Country: USA
What it is: Comedy

A newlywed discovers that married life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be… especially when the in-laws show up.

As this movie was closing in on its last few minutes, I found myself scratching my head over what the fantastic content was, and found myself checking the Don Willis guide (which listed the movie) and the Walt Lee guide (which consigned it to the “out” list). I was just about to consign it to the land of genre false alarms when the movie, in the last four minutes, threw in all of the fantastic elements at once; there’s a resurrection from the dead, a ghost, a haunted house, and a crawling hand. Granted, they’re all misunderstandings, but at least they were finally there.

As for the movie in its entirety, I found it a highly entertaining entry in the oeuvre of Harold Lloyd. Like so many of the comedies of this type, it plays like a series of shorts, and falls roughly into three sections. In the first, Harold has to negotiate his way home while carrying a huge amount of groceries, a problem further complicated when he wins a prize turkey that is very much alive. The second section has Lloyd taking the family out for a spin in the new family car, only to have disaster follow in its wake. The final sequence has Lloyd getting drunk so he can stand up to his mother-in-law, but ends up mistakenly believing that he has inadvertently murdered her; it is the complications that follow this sequence that lead to the fantastic content. Lloyd is such a confident and likable presence that he makes it all work smoothly; my favorite sequence has him mistaking the meaning of the actions and words of several people to reinforce his fear that he has committed murder. This is a truly amusing comedy.

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Secrets of Sex (1970)

SECRETS OF SEX (1970)
aka Bizarre
Article 4117 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-27-2012
Directed by Antony Balch
Featuring Richard Schulman, Janet Spearman, Dorothy Grumbar
Country: UK
What it is: Anthology involving sex

A mummy narrates a series of stories involving the battle of the sexes.

To be truthful, I was expecting a movie that would settle for little more than a series of sex scenes, and the cover of the DVD package certainly did little to convince me otherwise. I turned out to be wrong; the movie has a theme (namely, the stranger manifestations of the battle of the sexes) and it sticks to it, as each of the sequences does deal in some way or another with sexual politics and manipulation, and not just sex per se. In fact, some of the sequences don’t even involve nudity; the opening story about a man who thinks his wife’s lover may be hidden in a trunk certainly has none. It doesn’t quite live up to the claim to be one of the strangest movies ever made, but it gets a lot closer than I thought it would. Outside of the framing device (an ancient mummy narrates the various stories), a couple of the stories do have fantastic content; the story about the photographer doing a study on torture lapses into horror before it’s all through, there’s a spy pastiche among the stories, and the story about the old woman and the greenhouse has some fantasy elements. Those catching it for the sex scenes only will be the ones most disappointed; I found myself rather intrigued and amused by the whole thing. I found this one to be much better than I thought it would be.

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The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador (1912)

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROCKS OF KADOR (1912)
aka Le mystere des roches de Kador, In the Grip of the Vampire
Article 4116 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-26-2012
Directed by Leonce Perret
Featuring Suzanne Grandais, Emile Keppens, Leonce Perret
Country: France
What it is: Melodrama

An heiress is under the guardianship of her tutor, but the latter stands to inherit the fortune for himself is something happens to his ward. The tutor plots against the heiress…

One of the first things I noticed about this one was how familiar the basic premise was. Then I realized it was the same premise that drives the whole serial THE PERILS OF PAULINE, and the fact that the villain of that serial resembles the villain of this short (played by the director, Leonce Perret) makes me wonder if this might have influenced the other one. This is also one of those movies that ended up on my “ones that got away” list because I hadn’t been able to match up the title that I was given (IN THE GRIP OF THE VAMPIRE) with the French title of this one; it was only with the help of a member of CHFB that I was able to make the connection. The fantastic content of this one includes a drug that renders the heroine unconscious, and an original and rather intriguing cure for the madness of the heroine; the crime is recreated in a film and shown to the heiress, thus restoring her sanity. On the surface the story seems a bit silly, but Leonce Perret was a skilled and innovative director, and that skill goes a long way towards making this one an intriguing and fun movie, with strong acting, creative staging, and a nice sense of character.

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Jesus of Nazareth (1912)

JESUS OF NAZARETH (1912)
aka From the Manger to the Cross
Article 4115 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-25-2012
Directed by Sidney Olcott
Featuring Robert Henderson-Bland, Percy Dyer, Gene Gauntier
Country: USA
What it is: The tale of Jesus Christ

The life of Jesus Christ is told from the angel’s visit to Mary to Jesus’s ascension into heaven.

I do not gear my series toward the holidays, but this one came up spontaneously as my title for Christmas Day, which, though it can’t be called strictly a Christmas movie, is closer than I’ve ever gotten before. It’s listed in the Walt Lee reference guide for fantastic films due to the fact that many of the events (the angelic visitations, the miracles, the resurrection, etc.) qualify as fantastic content, and that is why I’m covering it. It is pretty much what I would expect of a silent treatment of the life of Christ; the movie forgoes Christ’s teachings for the obvious reason that this would swamp the movie with words, and emphasizes the highlights of Christ’s life story. I’m not surprised it’s very faithful; I doubt that the audiences for which it was intended would have tolerated anything else. The movie originally ended with the crucifixion of Christ, but a rerelease several years later added the Resurrection and Ascension sequences that were on the version I saw. This explains one thing I was curious about; throughout the movie, every title card consists of a direct Biblical quote (by verse and chapter) until after the crucifixion, when the technique is abandoned. All in all, it’s an acceptable adaptation for its era.

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