THE GREAT RACE (1965)
Article 2983 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-9-2009
Posting Date: 10-14-2009
Directed by Blake Edwards
Featuring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood
Country: USA

At the turn of the century, a noted daredevil decides to hold a great automobile race from New York to Paris. However, his arch-rival, the nefarious Professor Fate, seeks to win the race by the foulest means possible.

I was a little surprised to see this childhood favorite of mine enter my hunt list, as I didn’t feel it fell within the bounds of the genres that I was covering, but it looks as if some of Professor Fate’s inventions do push the movie into marginal science fiction. I loved this one as a kid; in fact, I remember seeking out SOME LIKE IT HOT because it featured the same stars, though I ended up being very disappointed by that one (at that time, I must add). Still, knowing that this movie fell into that dubious category of “sixties epic comedies” made me dread a little watching it again as an adult. No, it’s not quite as much fun as I remember it; the laughs seem more than a little obvious nowadays, and, having seen the range of Jack Lemmon’s acting over the years, I have to admit that seeing him as such a stereotyped villain as Professor Fate left me feeling a little embarrassed. Yet, I think the movie more or less holds up, at least partially because the movie keeps itself focused and refuses to succumb to the excesses of, say, IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. And it’s got a good cast, which includes, along with those listed above, Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn, George Macready, Larry Storch, Vivian Vance and Arthur O’Connell. Of course, it’s too long, and it’s really tempting to suggest they should have cut the whole “Prisoner of Zenda” sequence that dominates the second half of the movie. But I don’t have the heart, because on this viewing, truth to tell, I found it my favorite part of the movie; not only does it feature one of the funniest pie fights I’ve ever seen and perhaps the most memorable screen role for Ross Martin, but it also has the best comic performance in the movie – by Jack Lemmon, here stealing the movie from everyone (including himself) in a second role as the crown prince of Potsdorf. And the movie does have a nice sense of old time cinema and mellerdrammers, and even features a “follow the bouncing ball” sing-along. Still, for a movie that dedicates itself to Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, I can’t help but wish the movie did a little better job at tapping into the comic genius of those two greats than it does. Still, I’m glad it held up for me.

GODZILLA VS GIGAN (1972)
aka Chikyu kogeki meirei: Gojira tai Gaigan, Godzilla on Monster Island
Article 2982 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-7-2009
Posting Date: 10-13-2009
Directed by Jun Fukuda
Featuring Hiroshi Ishikawa, Yuriko Hishimi, Minoru Takashima
Country: Japan

A monster designer goes to work for a theme park, but his bosses turn out to have an agenda; they’re space aliens who plan to take over the earth with the help of two monsters, King Ghidorah and Gigan. Fortunately, Godzilla and Angilus are there to save the day…

If I were to choose the weakest of the Godzilla movies, this one would be close to the top of the list. Back when I covered DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, I expressed disappointment that they basically recycled the space aliens theme from MONSTER ZERO. This would turn out to be the most tired theme of the series, and here it is again, with the aliens being cockroaches in human form. The script is muddled and ridiculous, the special effects are at their nadir (the early shots of Gigan and Ghidorah are particularly bad, looking like they were no more than immobile toys), the English dubbing is extremely poor, and the movie is full of stock footage from earlier and better entries from the series. This is also the movie that made the mistake of giving Godzilla and Angilus human dialogue during a couple of the scenes, a poor idea even if they had anything of interest to say, which they don’t (incidentally, I have a collection of trailers from the Japanese editions of the movies, and it looks like in that version, they had dialogue balloons, which is certainly a more amusing idea). Much as I love the Godzilla movies, I find this one hard to sit through, though its follow-up, GODZILLA VS MEGALON, is just as bad. I consider this movie the nadir of the series.

THE GOLD GHOST (1934)
Short
Article 2904 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-2-2009
Posting Date: 7-26-2009
Directed by Buster Keaton and Charles Lamont
Featuring Buster Keaton, Warren Hymer, Dorothy Dix
Country: USA

A young socialite named Wally decides he wants to be alone, so he moves into a ghost town and makes himself sheriff. However, when gold is rediscovered in the area, he soon finds himself the sheriff of a bustling town.

I’m familiar with Buster Keaton’s years as a great silent comedian, and I’m also familiar with his appearances in TV and movies during the fifties and sixties, when he underwent a bit of a career revival. However, his early talkie career was a vast unexplored area to me. So I’m glad for the opportunity to check out one of his talkie shorts. It’s obvious that Keaton still felt more at home with visual and slapstick humor; he keeps the talking to a minimum, and the best moments here are ones that could have worked just as well during the silent era. My favorite moment has him playing cards with one of the dustiest decks ever found in a movie. It’s far from a great short, but it has its moments, and I’m glad I saw it. The fantastic content can be found in a short sequence where he encounters a gang of ghosts (possibly imaginary) and disposes of them with his gun.

THE GOLDEN ARROW (1962)
aka La Freccia d’oro
Article 2841 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-16-2009
Posting Date: 5-24-2009
Directed by Antonio Margheriti
Featuring Tab Hunter, Rossana Podesta, Umberto Melnati
Country: Italy

A thief with royalty in his blood is able to perform a task that should have won him the hand of a sultan’s daughter. However, he becomes an outcast because of his calling, and finds himself wanted both by rival suitors and his own gang of thieves. Fortunately, he has three guardian angels who will help him in his quest to prove himself.

I’ve always felt that sword and sandal movies have a bit of an affinity with Arabian Nights movies, so it should be no surprise that one of them came out of Italy in the early sixties. It also got a much classier presentation in this country; it came to us via MGM, which made sure the dubbing was far superior than what we could get from a movie that came to us via AIP. Furthermore, the movie is well preserved; my copy is letterboxed and in beautiful Technicolor, which is better than most sword-and-sandal movies I’ve seen. Still, it’s a pretty tepid affair; it rehashes a goodly portion of the various versions of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, but it’s a bit too juvenile for my tastes, and lacks the sense of magic that permeated those earlier movies. The presence of Tab Hunter as the hero only makes the movie that much fluffier and blander. It is interesting to see Antonio Margheriti working in a different mode here, and MGM even bills him as such, without using the Anthony Dawson nom de plume that was often used to try to hide the foreign origin of his movies. I find this less confusing than his science fiction films, but rather uncompelling, and not as much fun as it would like to be.

GIBEL SENSATSII (1935)
aka Loss of Feeling
Article 2800 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-6-2009
Posting Date: 4-13-2009
Directed by Aleksandr Andriyevsky
Featuring Sergei Vecheslov, Vladimir Gardin, M. Volgina
Country: Soviet Union

In order to solve the problem of workers going crazy on the assembly line, an inventor creates a corps of robots to do the work.

Because my copy of this movie is in unsubtitled Russian, it was rather difficult making heads or tails out of some aspects of the plot. However, knowing that the movie was made in the Soviet Union (a country which practiced governmental control of motion pictures with the aim of spreading Soviet philosophy) and given their probable stance on machines that would take the place of the proletariat, I wasn’t really surprised at the attitude of the movie towards the robots; the key piece of information that I found out from a plot summary after watching this was that it does not take place in the Soviet Union, but in an “English-speaking capitalist land”. It’s visually inventive, and has some truly memorable scenes, including a cabaret number about robots, and a stunning scene in which a saxophonist performs a solo amidst an army of 9-foot tall robots who are waving their massive arms about. From what I can tell, it’s very well done and quite effective; the fate of the saxophonist is particularly shocking. The opening scene conjured up visions of both METROPOLIS and MODERN TIMES, and you might suspect it’s a version of R.U.R. when you see that acronym emblazoned across the robots’ chests, but it’s not based on the Capek play and has an entirely different viewpoint. Let’s hope that someone eventually gets some subtitles on this and it gets an official release; it looks to be one of the great early science fiction movies.

GHOSTS – ITALIAN STYLE (1968)
aka Questi fantasmi
Article 2788 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-25-2008
Posting Date: 4-1-2009
Directed by Renato Castellani
Featuring Sophia Loren, Vittorio Gassman, Maria Adorf
Country: Italy / France

A couple whose marriage is suffering is offered a chance to stay at a castle rent-free. The drawback is that the castle appears to be haunted.

This movie should not be confused with FANTASMI A ROMA (GHOSTS IN ROME); that movie has a gaggle of real ghosts and an unusual plot, or at least as much as I can make out of one since I’ve only seen it in unsubtitled Italian. This one has a plot that looks quite familiar indeed; people moving into haunted houses is a setup as old as the hills. To its credit, this movie takes it in a different direction that moves it more into the area of bedroom farce, in which the wife’s prospective lover is mistaken for a ghost by the husband, a situation that results in a series of amusing complications. The movie has a lukewarm reputation, but I found it quite hilarious at times; my favorite gags revolve around the name of the orphanage and the arrival of a huge group of nuns at the castle. As you might suspect, the main plot involves no real ghost, but, like a number of comedies that revolve around hauntings that really aren’t hauntings, it can’t resist slipping in a real ghost in the final reel, which involves cameos by both Francis De Wolff and an uncredited Marcello Mastroianni. I found this one quite enjoyable.

THE GHOST (1963)
aka Lo Spettro
Article 2719 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-15-2008
Posting Date: 1-22-2009
Directed by Riccardo Freda
Featuring Barbara Steele, Peter Baldwin, Elio Jotta
Country: Italy

A doctor is having an affair with a rich man’s wife. She urges him to poison her husband, which he does. Afterwards, they begin to suspect the husband has come back from the grave.

One of my sources claims that director Riccardo Freda bet that he could write and film a movie in one week, and this is the result. If that story is true, then I will give him credit; he managed to come up with a coherent story, which is more than Roger Corman managed to do with THE TERROR. It’s something of a loose sequel to THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK, a movie which I quite like, but this one dispenses with the necrophilia angle, which was actually for me the best touch of that movie. Without it, this movie must rely on standard sixties Italian horror trappings and the presence of Barbara Steele to make it work. Unfortunately, I’m not a particular fan of Barbara Steele, and I usually find the standard sixties Italian horror trappings to be a little dull and predictable, so I find it only mildly entertaining. However, some of the fault must surely go to the weak dubbing on this one.

Addendum: According to Tim Lucas, this is not a movie Riccardo Freda made on a bet, though the story is true of a couple of other films of his.

GAMERA VS. MONSTER X (1970)
aka Gamera tai Daimaju Jaiga
Article 2718 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-14-2008
Posting Date: 1-21-2009
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Featuring Tsutomu Takakuwa, Kelly Varis, Katherine Murphy
Country: Japan

When a stone idol on Wester Island is removed so that it can be brought to
Expo 70 for display, a monster that it was keeping prisoner is resurrected. It’s up to Gamera to defeat the monster and save Expo 70.

The movies that bookend this entry of the Gamera series (GAMERA VS GUIRON and GAMERA VS ZIGRA) both go off the goofy meter a lot more than this one. Nevertheless, this is one of the more solid entries of the Gamera series; Jiger is one of the better (and better-looking) monsters Gamera faced, and he’s got an interesting array of attacks that take Gamera out of the action not just once (as is usual in a Gamera movie), but twice. It’s the second one of these that gives the movie its most memorable sequence; Jiger injects Gamera with its eggs, causing a miniature version of the monster to grow inside of him, and two children take a miniature submarine and enter Gamera’s body (a la FANTASTIC VOYAGE) to root out the problem. Yes, it’s typical Gamera silliness, but it keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace, it mostly avoids boring sequences common in other movies of the series, and not once does it fall back on lengthy clips from previous movies in the series to fill out its running time. In fact, it may be the most consistently entertaining of the sixties/seventies Gamera movies.

GALLERY OF HORROR (1967)
aka Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors
Article 2714 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-9-208
Posting Date: 1-17-2009
Directed by David L. Hewitt
Featuring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Rochelle Hudson

Five tales of terror are told. In the first, a clock revives a witch’s curse. In the second,a vampire is on the loose. In the third, revenge comes from the grave. In the fourth, a dead man is revived. In the fifth, more vampires are on the loose.

For those who encounter this one under its alternate title, please don’t mistake it for the vastly superior Amicus anthology DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS. Though both of them are horror anthologies, this one looks as if had a budget almost one-hundredth of the amount it cost to make the other movie (that is, if you discount the stock footage taken from some AIP movies). Even when the actors are decent, they’re still struggling with a clumsy, awkward script, and the twist endings may rank with some of the worst in history. The winner (or is it loser) in this regard is the last story; for a while, it looks as if this segment is going to tell a straightforward rendition of the Dracula story, but it goes off track after ten minutes and then reaches an ending so cockamamie that you’re liable throw something at the TV. Add some long-winded story introductions by John Carradine, and you’ve got one profoundly awful movie. Still, perhaps we should be grateful; if Hewitt hadn’t made an anthology movie, he might have tried to make features of each one of these tales. Now there’s something that will bring on nightmares…

THE GIRL IN THE KREMLIN (1957)
Article 2674 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-23-2008
Posting Date: 12-8-2008
Directed by Russell Birdwell
Featuring Lex Barker, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jeffrey Stone
Country: USA

While on a case in which he is trying to locate a woman’s twin sister, a detective stumbles across an amazing story; Josef Stalin did not die in 1953, but, through the use of plastic surgery, is now living abroad under a fake identity.

We’ve seen this type of plot with Hitler quite a few times; why not one with Stalin as well? As you might expect, it’s a sensationalistic piece of exploitation propaganda, in which the most interesting element is the revelation that Stalin had a fetish for women with shaved heads. The opening sequence in which actress Natalie Daryll’s hair is shorn is easily the most memorable scene here; after that, the movie becomes a snoozefest of the first order, despite the fact that it gives us a one-armed man, William Schallert as Stalin’s estranged son, and Zsa Zsa Gabor having a fight scene with herself (and I’m willing to bet neither of the fighters is Zsa Zsa). Outside of that, the most interesting thing about this is noticing that the writing credits include both Val Lewton writer DeWitt Bodeen and “Star Trek” writer/producer Gene L. Coon in his first writing assignment. All in all, this is little more than an obscure curiosity piece.