LA SOMBRA DEL MURCIELAGO (1968)
aka The Shadow of the Bat
Article 4920 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-6-2015
Directed by Federico Curiel
Featuring Jaime Fernandez, Marta Romero, Blue Demon
Country: Mexico
What it is: Mexican wrestling movie

A horribly scarred man who wears a mask becomes enamored with a singer at a nightclub, and kidnaps her. He also kidnaps wrestlers so he can have death matches with them to get the cheers of an imaginary audience. Can Blue Demon defeat him?

There’s something rather comforting to me to know that Mexican wrestling movies exist; just knowing that the world is big enough to have this kind of cinematic weirdness helps me to sleep better at night. This movie is the result of what would happen if you reimagine THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA translated into a Mexican wrestling movie. In some ways, it hardly matters that the copy I found was not dubbed or subtitled in English; the basic action and story are pretty clear once you know the PHANTOM connection. There’s five wrestling scenes; one in the ring, one in a training session, and three death-matches with the villain. There are four musical numbers, my favorite of which has Mexican teenagers boogieing to a Spanish version of “Wooly Bully”. The heroine screams her head off every time she sees a rat; for that matter, she screams her head off when she sees practically anything. And it all takes place in that world where the police wouldn’t solve any crimes were it not for the help of masked Mexican wrestlers. If you’re a fan of this genre, this is an entertaining one.

THE SERPENT’S EGG (1977)
aka Das Schlangenei
Article 4917 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-3-2015
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Featuring Liv Ullmann, David Carradine, Gert Frobe
Country: USA / West Germany
What it is: Period drama

An alcoholic Jew who was once a member of a circus acrobat team finds himself trying to survive in Berlin during the economic collapse of the nineteen-twenties.

It’s been a while since I’ve covered any works by Ingmar Bergman for this series. This one was filmed in English with an international cast, and though it is well-produced and directed, it remains a bit of a disappointment. This is not to say that the movie is bad; far from it; it’s a solid and quite dark drama about an important subject, but from Bergman, we expect something more in the philosophical department that doesn’t seem to be present here. Part of the problem may be David Carradine’s performance as the main character; it’s very difficult to understand or care about his character because he remains something of a cipher. As for the fantastic content, I’m not sure the movie really qualifies as well; the latter doesn’t really show up until the end of the movie, where we discover the truth about the clinic at which Carradine’s character is working, and though it’s certainly horrific (think of the experiments of Dr Mengele), it doesn’t quite turn into horror. My favorite scene is the one which I feel is the most Bergmanesque; it involves a cameo by James Whitmore as a priest who proves singularly unhelpful to Liv Ullmann’s character. It’s an interesting movie, but again, it’s not Bergman at his most compelling.

STEPPENWOLF (1974)
Article 4914 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-31-2015
Directed by Fred Haines
Featuring Max von Sydow, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clementi
Country: USA / Switzerland / UK / France / Italy
What it is: Literary adaptation

A middle-aged man, torn between the spirit and the flesh, plans to commit suicide upon reaching fifty, but meets a woman who steers his life in a new direction.

One of the primary differences between reading a novel and watching a movie is that movies are meant to be watched as a piece from beginning to end at a specific pace, whereas novels may be picked up and set down at will, or read at different paces depending on the time it takes to grasp the themes at play in them. I’ve not read the Herman Hesse novel on which this is based; for that matter, I’ve not read any of his work at all. However, one impression I get from the movie is that the book delves into philosophical and psychoanalytic matters that require a certain degree of time to ponder and appreciate; unfortunately, a movie version doesn’t really give you that amount of time unless you try to swallow the whole thing at once. The movie does a game job of trying to express some of the concepts at play here; there’s an animated section that seeks to explain the concept of the “steppenwolf” (the wild beast within us that is the other side of our natures). Certainly, once you’ve grasped this concept, parts of the movie seem much clearer, even simplistic and obvious. However, as the movie digs deeper, it becomes more of a chore to grasp the relevance of what you’re seeing, and it’s very easy to get lost and confused in the final third of the movie, where the protagonist visits a surreal, non-realistic place called the “magic theater” to open doors to the various parts of his soul. It’s at moments like these where I find it more useful to see the film as a path to the novel rather than as being a stand-alone entity. The film is also hampered by the fact that several major characters have some very thick accents which make it rather difficult to discern what’s being said. The fantastic content revolves around the definite non-realistic manifestations of the story (people disappearing, signs appearing out of nowhere, the symbolic “magic theater”). In the end, I suspect that any chance of really grasping what’s going on here is to go to the book.