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October Viewing – 2

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So, I enjoyed my recent first foray into old horror movies with Dracula enough to give it another whirl.  Tonight, I was going to try the Mummy but last night TCM had some Lugosi movies on so I picked “The Island of Lost Souls.”  This is a 1932 film starring Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau; a scientist who experimented on surgically converting animals into humans.  Lugosi has a relatively small part as one of his experiments.  He looks like a man-wolf and functions as, “The Sayer of the Law.”  This movie is just a renamed version of H.G. Wells’ story, “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

Okay, the first thing to take into account is that Laughton is a much better actor than your typical horror movie mad scientist.  Now granted, this isn’t “Mutiny on the Bounty” so he has to work with what he’s given but Laughton sells it well.  The rest of the cast is adequate to the task at hand.  And the movie does deliver the climax that a fiendish Frankensteinian scientist will always reap; destruction at the hands of his tortured creations.

The highlights of the movie are of Moreau portraying an omnipotent ruler as he commands the obedience of his many creations.  On a hill in the jungle, he rings a gong twice, cracks a bullwhip and shouts down to his assembled subjects repeatedly, “What is the law?”  And the Sayer of the Law gives the various answers at each repetition of the question,

“Not to walk on all fours.  Are we not men?”

“Not to spill blood.  Are we not men?”

“Not to eat meat.  Are we not men?”

And this is enough to quiet the beast within each “man” when the night awakens his blood.  And if they become especially restless, he reminds them of “The House of Pain.”  This is where Moreau rearranged their living flesh to simulate a human form and apparently anesthetic was not part of the program.  Just the mention of it triggers howls of fear.

But when Moreau orders one of his creatures to murder an outsider, a man like Moreau, the creatures put together the pieces of the puzzle.  Moreau ordered one of them to spill blood, so, “the law is no more!”  And a man like Moreau was killed, so Moreau could be killed!  And so, dragging Moreau into the House of Pain for some unskilled surgery of their own was now on the agenda!

The subplot where Moreau tried to get an outside human male to fall in love with the “panther woman” who was his most successful attempt at mimicking the human form is somewhat interesting.  And the antics of the sailors who show up in a couple of sections of the story provide a slight amount of comedy.  But the real story is Moreau playing god to his creations and the inevitable revenge reaction destroying him.  H. G. Wells was a good writer so it is no surprise that his story is somewhat fun to watch in its first Hollywood portrayal.  I very much enjoyed rewatching Island of Lost Souls.  And I assume that Charles Laughton is the main reason.  Now, without a doubt he hammed up his portrayal as needed.  But his Moreau is a successful portrayal of the mad scientist.  Kudos to Mr. Laughton.

 

October Viewing – 1

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I was thinking of watching the Vance/Walz debate.  But I just didn’t feel like it.  Around ten o’clock I was browsing my X timeline and noticed that several of the people I follow were saying that Vance was doing serious damage to Walz.  But I just couldn’t be bothered.  I figure by tomorrow if he really did serious damage to Walz there would be all kinds of highlights to watch and if there weren’t I would have saved myself a lot of annoyance.  Instead, I decided to celebrate October by watching some Universal Horror.  I watched Dracula.

Now. I’ve seen that movie dozens of times.  I know it inside and out.  But what I did was to try to watch it as if for the first time.  I divorced it from the familiarity that renders it just a collection stereotypes and associated memories and tried to look at the images and the dialog to see how they strike me as cinema.

And it’s a funny thing.  It occurred to me that an audience that was used to cowboy movies and had only in the last year or so begun watching talking pictures might have been very excited by the visuals and the scenes portrayed.  The opening scene of Renfield travelling by horse drawn carriage into the Carpathian Mountains was very atmospheric.  The backdrops of the mountains were very well done.  And Castle Dracula was equally well done.

Renfield’s interview with Dracula was just the right combination of comedy and menace.  I will confess that I never found Bela Lugosi menacing enough to make his Dracula compelling but Van Helsing’s scientific vampire hunter is highly entertaining.  When he confronts Dracula with the mirror and later during his conversation with the vampire where he promises to find Dracula’s coffin and drive a stake through his heart, we are witnessing the central tension of the movie.  Everyone else is blind to how their neighbor from Transylvania is the nexus for all of the death and inexplicable occurrences.  But once Van Helsing shows up with his wolfbane and crucifixes even Renfield starts talking sense.

And that brings me to another aspect of the movie.  The humor between Renfield and the psychiatric orderly Martin is hammy and over the top but provides a very enjoyable counterpoint to the wildly unrealistic dramatic story.  The working-class manners and behavior of Martin and the rest of the staff contrasts to the more aristocratic manners and speech of the Sewards and their friends.  Even the madman Renfield is humanized in his dealings with Martin who affectionately calls Renfield “old fly-eater” and seems genuinely friendly to this vampire-in-training.

The final climax of Van Helsing and Harker storming Carfax Abbey and finishing off Dracula with the promised stake through the heart is a little underwhelming but I think that at the time and at first view Dracula must have been an exciting motion picture that thrilled audiences, especially young women who would have personalized the erotic danger that Dracula was meant to imply for them.

Now of course, for us, after nearly a century of time in which the movie has accreted mostly comical connections to everything from breakfast cereals to Sesame Street characters it’s hard to imagine real fear associated with this film.  But looked at as a piece of art it can definitely be enjoyed for what it is.  There is still blood left in the movie.  And as Bela reminds us, “The blood is the life.”

Update:

War Pig commented:

To the contrary, since I first saw it as a child, Lugosi was the perfect Dracula. While Christopher Lee was more intimidating, Lugosi was the epitome of the Count. Suave, debonaire, charming, intelligent, faultless evening dress which he wore with dignity and aplomb. So smooth and with the east European accent. Yet he was also the very image of evil when he went for the throat.

Mom and my sister sat and watched it with rapt attention. The vampire is, of course, the ultimate Casanova, as well.

 

Long, Long Ago, In a Franchise Far, Far Away

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In the late 1970s a movie studio green lit a modest science fiction/fantasy film called Star Wars that made so much money that the studio and the creative team that owned the rights to it made billions of dollars from sequels, toys and every other monetizing scheme imaginable.

And why did all this happen?  Well, accidentally or on purpose the makers of that original movie tapped into the primal desire of young men (and it was almost exclusively boys and young men) to watch an exciting updating of the young apprentice’s journey to becoming a hero.  Whether it’s young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone or the Marine recruit proving himself on the battlefield of Iwo Jima or the hot shot pilot in a Top Gun movie, every boy (and man) enjoys the visceral experience of seeing the hero prove himself in combat and if he’s lucky enough win the heart of the princess (or in less monarchical times, some pretty girl in general).

And 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm rode that male archetypal fantasy to fame and fortune for almost forty years.  But in 2015 Lucasfilm (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney) launched the seventh film in the Star Wars franchise, “The Force Awakens” and drove a stake right through the heart of that golden goose.  With Kathleen Kennedy producing and J. J. Abrams directing all of that male-oriented story-telling was jettisoned and replaced with “girl-power.”  Kathleen Kennedy gleefully proclaimed that “The Force is estrogen.”  Well, “The Force Awakens” made billions.  Of course, it would have made billions even if it was just an empty screen for two hours.  That’s how much good will had been built up over the course of decades for the franchise.  But the following two films and the various spin-offs like the recent television series “The Acolyte” have completely dried up those wells of enthusiasm that had been produced previously.  The last couple of movies have lost money, in fact hundreds of millions of dollars.  And now the folks at Disney have cancelled a number of Star Wars productions and they’re trying to figure out how to fix their dying franchise.

Well Bob Iger, I’ve got an idea.  First off fire Kathleen Kennedy and all the people who decided to create the monstrosities that caused all this damage.  In fact, don’t just fire them but publicly abuse them verbally and force them to apologize for their heinous sins.  Then make a short trailer video for the next film.

It will consist of all the most egregious scenes from all of the horrible movies you released since 2015 in short snippets in a nightmare montage.  Then we switch to Han Solo in bed waking up from a nightmare and expressing relief that the whole thing was a bad dream.  He then gets up and joins his son, wife and brother-in-law at breakfast and he tells them some of the details of his nightmare and they all have a big laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds.

Then you get some good writers to reread the Arthurian legends and the pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s and you start making money again.

Lights, Camera, Action!

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Today Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has a movie out in pretty wide distribution called, “Am I Racist?”  I’ve seen some of the coming attractions and it’s in the vein of a mocumentary where he interviews various anti-racism experts disguised as one of them.  In this guise he gets them to say the most absurd things about racism and American society.  It looks like it might be interesting and potentially very funny.  And I say this after watching his first movie, “What is a Woman.”  It was very effective at exposing the incoherence of the various transgender hucksters and their victims.  I hope this new movie gets lots of attention and makes lots of money for Walsh and the Daily Wire.

This movie opening got me thinking.  It shows that stuff is starting to appear from our side of the street on a more regular basis.  But the problem is that it takes an outfit like the Daily Wire that has its own built-in readership to provide publicity.  What’s needed is an honest search engine that would act as a substitute for Google.  Of course, X is already beginning to provide a social media locale for everyone but the bias that Google uses against the Right is a big deal and can’t be overstated.  Maybe it’ll take the government busting up Google’s monopoly to finally even out the playing field.

In addition, it would be nice if someone would provide the same kind of integrated entertainment and media presence for the Right that Time-Warner provides to the Left.  Now I’m not crazy.  Amazon has decimated the book and movie businesses with its Kindle and streaming businesses.  And whatever is left of the movies is limping along under Disney.  But an underserved niche like traditionalists seems like a safe way to make money in the present environment.  Just look at Disney.  They own all the most successful franchises in the entertainment world but because they object to the traditionalist aspects of these intellectual properties, they routinely sabotage the success of the movies they produce in these franchises by injecting woke plots and characters.  Competition, any real competition is bound to make money by just following time honored precedent; sell sex!

If someone purchased existing stories in these same genres and just told the stories the way they were written fifty or a hundred years ago, they would be equally successful to the earlier movies like the original Star Wars or the earlier installments of Indiana Jones or the Marvel superhero stories.  All of these earlier works are just variations on the theme of the western hero that fights the monsters or villains and wins the girl.  This is as old as Odysseus or as new as Spiderman.  All anyone has to do is make sure that the man acts like a man and the girl is really good looking and falls into the hero’s arms in the last act.

It really isn’t that complicated.  But for whatever reason no one has attempted to build a lean, mean studio to do just that.  There are plenty of people; actors, directors, producers who have been cut out of Hollywood for the simple reason that the studios now have a quota system that excludes white people.  Hire a few of the better people, probably at a discount, and most importantly hire some of the best writers and put out movies at a reasonable price (not in Hollywood obviously) that tell stories that people want to hear.  And make money.

Well, eventually it will happen.  But will it happen in my lifetime?  Ah, well.  Where’s my fedora and bullwhip?

Darth Vader is Dead!

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The iconic actor James Earl Jones has passed away.

I think it was the summer of 1972 (but I could be wrong) I went to see Shakespeare in the Park with a girl I was going to high school summer school with and it was Jones playing King Lear. The park was full of unwashed hippies and life was good. There was a convenient summer thunderstorm during the storm scene. He was a fantastic King Lear.

 

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – A Movie Review

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(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to recommendation section at the bottom to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

“Sweet Smell of Success” was produced by Burt Lancaster’s independent production company and starred Lancaster as J.J. Hunsecker a New York City newspaper entertainment columnist whose influence allows him to make and break careers of entertainers, politicians and anyone who displeases him.  Tony Curtis plays Sidney Falco; a cynical and morally bankrupt press agent who depends on Hunsecker’s largesse to survive in the shark infested waters of New York City’s entertainment industry.

Falco is being punished by Hunsecker because he hasn’t been able to break up a love affair between Hunsecker’s sister Susan and a jazz musician named Steve Dallas (played by Martin Milner).  And most of the plot revolves around Falco and Hunsecker’s efforts to smear Dallas’s name and/or have him arrested for marijuana possession.

Hunsecker’s influence with a brutal NYPD police detective named Kello eventually leads to Dallas being arrested on a trumped up marijuana possession charge, assaulted by Kello and hospitalized.  Near the end of the movie Susan rebels at the plot that her brother and Falco concocted against Dallas and she tells Falco that Hunsecker will blame him after she commits suicide by jumping out the window of her Manhattan penthouse.  Falco stops her from jumping but when Hunsecker walks in on them and sees his sister in her underwear with Falco he believes her when she says that Falco had attempted to sexually assault her.  He slaps Falco several times.  At that point Falco reveals to Susan that it was Hunsecker who hired Kello to beat Dallas.  As revenge Hunsecker calls Kello and reports that Falco framed Dallas and he should be arrested for this offense.  But Susan finally rebels against her brother and walks out of their apartment to join Dallas.  When Falco tries to flee the apartment, he is met on the street by Kello who beats him mercilessly and drags him away to jail.

Recommendation

This is one hell of a strange movie.  Lancaster and Curtis spend the whole movie bantering back and forth at each other with a rapid-fire dialog composed of some kind of 1950’s beatnik/hipster patois, or at least what someone in Hollywood thought beatnik/hipster patois should sound like.  It’s truly bizarre.  Such lines as:

”I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

“You’re blind, Mr. Magoo. This is the crossroads for me. I won’t get Kello. Not for a lifetime pass to the Polo Grounds. Not if you serve me Cleopatra on a plate.”

“You’re dead son. Get buried.”

“Sidney, this syrup you’re giving out with… you pour over waffles, not J. J. Hunsecker.”

And as you could imagine this is an incredibly downbeat movie.  Almost none of the characters are admirable or even likable.  The ending is something of a redemption for Susan but hardly worth the ordeal of swimming through J.J’s and Falco’s cesspool.  I can’t recommend this movie to most people.

I’ll confess that about once a year I want to watch this movie, sort of as a joke.  Maybe I just kind of like Falco saying, “You’re blind, Mr. Magoo.”  And there are many people who admire this movie for its gritty portrayal of something or other.  I’ll leave it to the individual to decide.

Stage Fright (1950) – A Movie Review

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Stage Fright is an Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jane Wyman is Eve Gill an acting student who is in love with Jonathan Cooper.  Unfortunately, Jonathan is in love with Charlotte Inwood (played by Marlene Dietrich) who unfortunately is married to a man she doesn’t love.  One day Jonathan comes to Eve and asks her for her help.  He tells her that Charlotte came to his apartment in a dress covered in blood and told him that her husband started beating her and in self-defense she killed him with a fireplace poker.  She asked Jonathan to go back to the scene of the crime to get her a clean dress.  But while he was there the maid saw him and called the police.

Jonathan asks Eve to help him hide from the police until he can figure out how to escape from the trap, he has found himself in.  Eve enlists the help of her father “Commodore Gill (played by Alistair Sim) who owns a boat that Jonathan hides on.  Meanwhile Eve goes to Charlotte’s home to see what the police are up to.  While snooping around she meets police detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding) who happens to be working on the case and she proceeds to fall in love with him.  She also manages to insinuate herself into Charlotte’s household by impersonating a relative of Charlotte’s maid and theatrical dresser.  In this role she discovers that Charlotte has no intention of disrupting her life but instead expects Jonathan to flee the country permanently.,

Meanwhile Jonathan sneaks into the theater where Charlotte is playing and confronts her.  She explains that she will not be joining him in permanent exile and he reacts by saying he has the bloody dress and he might give it to the police if he has to.

Finally, Eve and her father arrange for the police to eavesdrop on Charlotte being confronted about the bloody dress in a fake blackmail conversation with Eve.  But in the conversation Charlotte states that even though there is blood on her dress Jonathan murdered her husband in front of her.  Meanwhile Inspector Smith has captured Jonathan at Eve’s home and he has been brought to the theater for questioning.  He breaks loose and Eve helps him hide in the theater basement with her.  While this is going on Smith reveals to Eve’s father that Jonathan is actually a dangerous maniac who has killed before.

While hiding with Eve, Jonathan confesses to Eve that he did indeed murder Charlotte’s husband more or less at her instigation.  He also admits that he previously killed another man, but was cleared based on self-defense grounds.  And then he hinted that he would be executed for this new murder unless he was thought completely insane.  And the only way he could think of convincing a jury of that would be if he killed another person for no reason at all.  Now Eve sensed her personal danger and she tells Jonathan that they must escape the building before the police got down into the basement.  And as he walked through a door ahead of her, she locked it behind him and screamed to the police to capture Jonathan.  Jonathan was now on the stage and trying to escape so the police dropped the heavy fire curtain (actually a heavy metal sheet) to trap him but just as he reached the edge of the stage he tripped and the steel curtain crushed and killed him.

Great Caesar’s ghost, I’m exhausted just reciting that plot.  And I left several subplots and characters out.  There’s Charlotte’s manager that she’s having an affair with and Charlotte’s mother who is estranged from her father and Eve’s friends, one of whom is played by Hitchcock’s daughter, and on and on.  It’s a bit much.  Plus, Dietrich sings several songs and that maybe okay for her French song but the one in English wasn’t so good.  Without a doubt this movie is very odd.  I enjoyed it, maybe because of its oddity, but I tend to doubt most people are like me.  Let’s say this is for Hitchcock fans who like the theatrical.

Au Revoir Lesbian Space Witches of Color

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Over the last decade or so it has become obvious that Hollywood and specifically, Disney is more interested in producing content that adheres to a social justice message than they care about making money.  Examples of this are plentiful.  Every recent installment of the Star Wars movies and their spin-off television series has suffered heavily from this policy.  And recently the fans have reacted to this decision by abandoning the franchise.  And to a greater or lesser degree similar results have been seen in the other Disney entertainment franchises; Indiana Jones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and even things like the Toy Story movies.  It’s gotten so bad that Disney has been forced to fire directors, cancel series and scale back earnings estimates.  Which is something no CEO wants to do.

I have heard that Hollywood is claiming that they’ve heard the message and they will rededicate themselves to producing entertainment that is actually entertaining to regular people.  Now if that happened, I would be ecstatic.  Seeing Hollywood learn its lesson and focus its significant talents into putting out original and entertaining movies would be phenomenal.

But it won’t happen.

The people who run Hollywood are social justice extremists from the soles of their feet up to their eyebrows.  They would rather see their companies go broke than give up their message.  They will keep pumping out Star Wars movies that feature lesbian space witches of color as the main characters until Disney has to shut down the studio.  The idea that the ticket buying public wanted to see Luke Skywalker rescue Princess Leia with the assistance of Han Solo and that all three were white, sexually normal characters is completely unacceptable to them.  They have the same message as the Harris campaign, “We won’t go back.”

So that means the future of entertainment won’t be Hollywood.  And we’re already seeing the alternatives.  I’ve been informed by one of my grandsons that movies are being made based on the fiction produced by YouTube influencers who write stories based on video games.  So, a space video game has an audience of tens of millions of boys and young men.  And one guy writes a narrative story as an adventure in that game and millions of these gamers read the story and because of this immense popularity a movie studio (Amazon or Netflix) produces a movie from this story.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.  Eventually that will replace Hollywood nicely.  Someone said to me that this won’t avoid the social justice activists because all the studios are the same.  But there are indications that isn’t true.  A couple of years ago Netflix produced Dave Chappelle’s comedy series that was pretty strongly critical of the transgender agenda.  When Netflix employees protested the series, they were told overtly by Netflix that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to work for a company that produced the Chappelle series, they should work somewhere else.  And that put an end to the protests.  I suspect that a home will be found for content that has an enormous built-in audience even if there is an extreme shortage of lesbian space witches of color in the script.  Maybe it’ll be Netflix that steps in or maybe it’ll be a new company that an entrepreneur like Musk founds.  But at this point it’ll happen because people are still people and they want to be amused and message fiction isn’t entertaining.  It’s boring so something will have to give way. Au revoir lesbian space witches of color.

This is a Free Country You Know!

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I was looking for something to watch on tv tonight and I noticed that I had recorded “A Man for All Seasons” recently.  But when I started it, I saw that I had missed the beginning and it started in the middle of Henry VIII’s visit to Thomas’s home.  I was disappointed but then realized that even watching part of this movie was more enticing than watching any one of a hundred movies that I had ready in their entirety.  Now why I haven’t already added this movie to my collection is a mystery for which I should be rebuked.  It is indeed an inspirational film.

But what struck me while I was watching it was a line that two of the characters used in the story.  At two separate points someone says, “This isn’t Spain you know, it’s England!”  And this is meant to mean that England is a free country and not full of religious zealots that would burn you at the stake for superstitious nonsense.  But of course, one of them is Cromwell who arranges perjury to have Thomas More beheaded for refusing to sign an oath confirming Henry’s legitimacy as head of the Church in England.  Even more amusing, the Cardinal who assisted Cromwell in this witch hunt was literally burned at the stake a few years later.

And now the reason I’m writing this essay.  That little phrase that the characters recited reminded me of what we used to repeat, “It’s a free country, I can say what I please.”  It was a trite saying.  But it was true.  You could say or believe whatever you wanted to.

But is that still a true statement?  No, it is not.  There are many things you may not say.  The COVID episode proved that.  The government proved that.  They ordered the social media platforms to censor anything they didn’t like about COVID.  And they did it.  And they hid the fact that they did it.  So, most people never knew there were other sides to the story.  They did it so successfully that most people still don’t know just how many lies the government told about COVID.  And they did the same sort of thing about Hunter’s Laptop and a host of other stories that were embarrassing to the Biden administration.

And it’s gone well beyond political issues.  They censor stories about pediatric transgender drug therapies and surgeries, illegal immigration criminality, price increases on food and housing, unemployment figures; basically, anything that makes the Biden administration look bad.  And of course, the biggest coverup was the fact that Joe Biden was suffering from dementia.

So, is this really still a free country?  I would have to say that since the “Patriot Act” was signed into law we have ceased to be free.  The government knows everything we say and the government now censures anything we say that they don’t like.

Well, that’s where we are.  It’s a discouraging thought.  But watching More’s story helped.  Here was a man surrounded by jackals and yet he lived his life in service to the good.  He exemplified intelligence, honesty and humanity.  His enemies ultimately destroyed him and yet history has recognized his excellence while branding his persecutors as pernicious, dishonest and cowardly.

I hardly see myself as martyr material.  I enjoy annoying Camera Girl too much to want to end up on the chopping block either figuratively or literally.  But I do think we should all be willing to pay some price to oppose the forces that have gained a stranglehold on America.  We’re all guilty of laziness in some sense or other and it behooves us to step up and try to make a difference in our families and local communities.  This isn’t Spain you know!