Le charcuterie mecanique (1895)

LE CHARCUTERIE MECANIQUE (1895)
aka The Mechanical Butcher
Article 3500 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-17-2011
Posting Date: 3-15-2011
Directed by Louis Lumiere
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Early science fiction

A pig is fed into a machine and pork products come out the other side.

One of the first names you’ll encounter in any comprehensive history of film is that of the Lumiere brothers, whose filmed snippets of everyday life were the the very first movies ever made. Most were plotless, and did little more than capture everyday events; people walking out of a factory, babies being fed, children playing, men at work…that sort of thing. I do remember reading somewhere that these films weren’t always quite as spontaneous as they seemed; the action was sometimes rehearsed to make for an interesting visual sensation. A few were obviously contrived; there’s one involving a prank with a hose that was obviously being acted, and in this one, the machine in question is obviously made up. This is the first science fiction movie, and, unless the machine counts (it’s a box with a spinning wheel in back), there’s no special effects; they put a pig in one end and pull out pork products from the other, all in one take. Oddly enough, there would be a trend of similar films, usually involving dogs being turned to sausages. This is now officially the earliest film I’ve seen for this series.

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Tracks (1977)

TRACKS (1977)
Article 3499 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-15-2011
Posting Date: 3-14-2011
Directed by Henry Jaglom
Featuring Dennis Hopper, Taryn Power, Dean Stockwell
Country: USA
What it is: Postwar Vietnam drama

A soldier returns from Nam with the body of his friend and accompanies it on a train across the country to where he believes his friend will receive a hero’s welcome. However, the experience at Nam has left the soldier rather disturbed.

According to John Stanley’s CREATURE FEATURE MOVIE GUIDE STRIKES AGAIN, this movie qualifies due to the fantasy nature of the hallucinations of the soldier. Still, I’m not sure whether these sequences really take us into the realm of fantasy, though he is obviously imagining things that aren’t happening. Of course, there’s the theme of madness to contend with, but it’s obvious that the main brunt of the movie is about a man who fought in a war that no one cares about; except for the moments where the soldier brings it up himself, nobody talks about the war. The movie is about the great distance between the soldier’s perceptions about what war should be (it’s fitting that all the music in the movie is from World War II, perhaps the most romanticized war of the twentieth century) and what it turned out to be in this case.

I recall having seen a Henry Jaglom movie years ago, but I don’t remember it much. If you like bizarre snatches of conversation, he will probably appeal to you, but I do find that over the length of a movie, it does wear thin. Dennis Hopper is excellent as an extremely neurotic man having trouble adjusting, but that gets a little old after a while as well. It’s an intermittently interesting watch, but those wishing to view it for its fantastic content should go elsewhere.

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Clair de Lune Espagnol (1909)

CLAIR DE LUNE ESPAGNOL (1909)
Article 3498 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-13-2011
Posting Date: 3-13-2011
Directed by Etienne Arnaud and Emile Cohl
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Early trick short

A man takes a balloon into outer space where he gets into trouble for taking potshots at the moon.

This movie does owe something to the Melies and de Chomon fantasies of the time in style and action. What really sets this one apart, though, is the fact that it features animation from an early pioneer in the field, Emile Cohl. The moon is the main animated part of the movie, with the traveler’s interactions with it being one of the highlights of the movie. The short is not complete; the first minute of the movie which features the actual voyage into space is missing, but the movie is still quite satisfying even with this segment missing. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more of Emile Cohl’s work as time goes by.

NOTE: I’ve now seen the full version of this one, and the opening is mostly life action and is concerned with events in a pub that lead up to the man being taken away by the balloon.

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Starik Khottabych (1956)

STARIK KHOTTABYCH (1956)
aka Old Hottabych, The Flying Carpet
Article 3497 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-11-2011
Posting Date: 3-12-2011
Directed by Gennadi Kazansky
Featuring Nikolai Volkov, Aleksei Litvinov, Gennadi Khudyakov
Country: Soviet Union
What it is: Children’s fantasy

A child discovers an urn which contains a genie who has been sealed up for 1000 years for being obstinate. The genie wishes to serve his new master and make him happy, but his willful nature causes the boy more problems than it solves.

This being a Russian movie, it has a tendency to get a little propagandistic at times; the children in particular seem a little unnatural in their unswerving dedication to the communist cause. That aside, the story takes an interesting tack in that it is really not a story about the possibilities that the genie opens up for the boy (the usual approach). Instead, it is a fish out of water story; the genie’s detachment from the world during his confinement has left him ill-suited to understanding the modern world, and his knowledge is antiquated. To this mixture is added a genuine warmth and affection (the genie and the child truly care about each other), and when the genie’s magic causes things to go awry, he is honestly upset and confused. Nikolai Volkov’s sly performance as the genie is the glue that holds it together, and this turns out to be an interesting and entertaining children’s fantasy. One of the alternate titles is THE FLYING CARPET, but that item plays a part in only a short segment of the proceedings.

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The Wild Wild West Revisited (1979)

THE WILD WILD WEST REVISITED (1979)
TV-Movie
Article 3496 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-10-2011
Posting Date: 3-11-2011
Directed by Burt Kennedy
Featuring Robert Conrad, Ross Martin, Paul Williams
Country: USA
What it is: TV show revival

James West and Artemus Gordon are called out of retirement to investigate the substitution of several world leaders by uncanny replicas. They discover it’s part of a plot by the son of their old arch-nemesis Dr. Loveless, who has also created the first atomic bomb.

If there was any TV show from my childhood that I would call “mine” (a personal favorite that I felt and still feel very strongly about), it would be “The Wild Wild West”. The adventures of cool secret service agent James West, the antics of his sidekick Artemus Gordon, and the nefarious schemes of their primary foe Dr. Miguelito Loveless were one of the passions of my childhood. As you might imagine, I’m a bit of a fanatic about the original show, and I hate anyone messing with it; I avoided the movie update featuring Will Smith because I knew it would have little in common with the original series. However, I did catch this late seventies TV-Movie revival of the series, overjoyed to see my old favorites back on the air… and I ended up hating it, finding it a betrayal of all I loved about the series.

I fully expected to vent my spleen about this movie when I watched it for this series, but I found it much more palatable this time. For me, the main concern was whether it would capture the ambiance of that series, and watching it now, I can say that it managed to do it for about half the time. It stars the original leading men, and they still had good chemistry. Paul Williams makes an acceptable son of Dr. Loveless (though I hated him originally for the simple reason that he wasn’t Michael Dunn), and the story more or less is an appropriate one for the series. It does miss a few points; there’s precious little gadgetry on hand (the old James West always had something up his sleeve, in his belt, or in the heels of his boots to help him), and the wild fight scenes where West would take on several assailants at once are missing, except for a disappointing one near the beginning.

Where the movie doesn’t succeed is why I hated so badly when I was younger; though the original series was a satire of sorts, it wasn’t, save for some of Gordon’s comic characters in disguise, played for laughs or camp; the show did it all with a straight face. This one plays for laughs. Sometimes it works, such as during the scene where West encounters a beautiful woman in a saloon only to discover that she’s the daughter of an old lover; in scenes like this, the humor is appropriate and character-driven. For the most part, though, it plays too broadly, especially in the scenes involving Harry Morgan and Jeff MacKay as the head of the secret service and his nephew. Artemus Gordon’s scenes in disguise were always a highlight of the series for me, but here, when he dresses up as a female barroom dancer, it’s done for no discernible reason and played purely for laughs. It was scenes like this which fueled my ire back then. Now I can at least appreciate the ease with which Robert Conrad and Ross Martin handled the comedy, and I can accept the movie for the moments when it works. But it does make me wonder whether any remake or update of a TV series will ever really be able to tap fully into the ambiance of the original. Quite frankly, I have yet to see that happen.

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Ghost Valley (1932)

GHOST VALLEY (1932)
Article 3495 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-8-2011
Posting Date: 3-11-2011
Directed by Fred Allen
Featuring Tom Keene, Merna Kennedy, Kate Campbell
Country: USA
What it is: Weird western, comic style

A judge hires a young drifter to portray one of two heirs to an abandoned ghost town in the hopes that he can talk the other heir (a beautiful woman) into selling; the judge knows there is a fortune in gold there. What the judge does not know is that the drifter is indeed the other heir for real, and has decided to thwart the judge’s scheme.

This weird western concentrates on the comedy for the first part, then has a few spooky sequences involving a masked rider during the middle section (these scenes are actually quite atmospheric), and then concentrates on western thrills for the climax. It’s not bad and fairly entertaining, though the story becomes a bit confusing in the middle section. Still, I do have to admire some of the stunt work in this western, particularly the scenes where horses are ridden down fairly steep inclines. Tom Keene had a long career in B westerns, but his last movie role would be in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

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Flying Elephants (1928)

FLYING ELEPHANTS (1928)
Short
Article 3494 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-5-2011
Posting Date: 3-9-2011
Directed by Frank Butler and Hal Roach
Featuring Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson
Country: USA
What it is: Silent caveman comedy

When the king orders all residents of the tribe to be married or face banishment, two cavemen find themselves vying for the attention of the same cavewoman.

It’s great to go back to the silent era for a bit and revisit old comedy teams like Laurel and Hardy. This one has its moments, but is a little disappointing since the boys don’t really work as a team. There’s a few scenes near the beginning with Hardy, the middle section is with Laurel, but they don’t meet for a final battle until the end of the movie, so you don’t get the usual relationship between the two. On top of the caveman milieu, the short actually provides some flying elephants (in a short animated bit inspired by an offhand piece of dialogue), and it has what may be a dinosaur; all I know is that Laurel is threatened by a big creature at one point, but I couldn’t get a good look at it (it seemed roughly the size of an ox). The highlights include Laurel’s fishing technique, and the club battle between the pair.

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The Initiation of Sarah (1978)

THE INITIATION OF SARAH (1978)
TV-Movie
Article 3493 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-4-2011
Posting Date: 3-8-2011
Directed by Robert Day
Featuring Kay Lenz, Shelley Winters, Tony Bill
Country: USA
What it is: CARRIE clone

Two sisters, one adopted, go to college. They find themselves pledged to different sororities, and the beautiful sister ends up in the snobbish sorority which forces her to swear not to consort with members of the sorority the other sister has pledged to. However, the adopted sister has psychic powers that manifest when she is angry, and the house mother of her sorority has uses for them…

I remember my mother explaining to me why she never went out to the movies; it was because that sooner or later a TV-Movie would be made on the same subject, and she could watch that for free at home instead. Though I doubt she ever had a hankering to see CARRIE, but if she had, here’s the TV-Movie she would have settled for. Now it’s been years since I’ve seen the De Palma movie (and I’ve never read the Stephen King novel), but I don’t recall anything in that movie about a sisterly conflict of the sort that drives some of the storyline here, and when this movie concentrates on this aspect, it’s at its best. It’s also not too bad when it concentrates on the relationship that develops between Sarah and a timid violinist. I’m less impressed by the black magic angle that is thrown into the mix. Still, the movie is at its weakest when it when it blatantly steals from its model, especially in a “we’re-a-TV-movie-and-we-have-to-soft-pedal-the-horror” way (think mud instead of pig’s blood). At least it doesn’t try to throw in a silly twist ending.

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The Spaceman and King Arthur (1979)

THE SPACEMAN AND KING ARTHUR (1979)
aka The Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court, Unidentified Flying Oddball
Article 3492 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-1-2011
Posting Date: 3-7-2011
Directed by Russ Mayberry
Featuring Dennis Dugan, Jim Dale, Ron Moody
Country: UK
What it is: Shopping cart movie, British style

A young inventor gets caught inside an experimental rocket, and ends up being hurtled through time to end up in the days of King Arthur.

This doesn’t feel like your typical Disney “shopping cart” movie, but I’ve noticed that their British movies do have a different feel about them. I find a copy of this one on YouTube, but I must admit that the copy is pretty wretched. This may have affected my feeling that the movie itself is one of the weakest ones of its type; it feels tired, forced and obvious, and, were it not for some curious historical humor from a certain Sir Winston and a sight gag inspired by falling dominoes, I wouldn’t have laughed once. The presence of Ron Moody as Merlin and Kenneth More as King Arthur adds a bit of fun, but Dennis Dugan is one of the least memorable of Disney’s comic leads. This wasn’t the last of the shopping cart movies (at least one of the Herbie movies came after it), but it was awfully close to the end of that cycle, which had kicked off in the late fifties, hit its peak in the early sixties, and then went into a long decline. And if you want a King Arthur comedy, I’d suggest you hunt for one that came from Monty Python.

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Un Matrimonio Interplanetario (1909)

UN MATRIMONIO INTERPLANETARIO (1909)
aka Interplanetary Wedding
Article 3491 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-31-2011
Posting Date: 3-6-2011
Directed by Enrico Novelli
Cast unknown
Country: Italy
What it is: Lighthearted early science fiction

With his new telescope, a man finds his true love on the planet Mars.

I’m guessing a little bit on the plot of this one insofar as the planets in question, but I think the woman he loves is on Mars, and they meet and marry on the moon. I managed to find a copy of this one when some members of CHFB pointed me in the direction of a YouTube video that consists of several musicians performing music to fantastically-themed silent shorts. Granted, this isn’t a clean viewing of the movie; the footage from the film is interspersed with footage of the musicians, but I saw enough of it that I don’t think I missed a whole lot. The short has some fun visuals; I especially like when the man sends a telegram to his love on Mars, and you see the letters flying through space. It does make me want to go through the whole video concert and see what other movies they cover.

P.S. I have since been given a copy of this with English translations of some of the hard-to-read sections, and I turned out to be correct on my plot interpretation.

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