Foregone Conclusions

Film: Le Jour se Leve (Daybreak)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Sometimes, you just know what’s going to happen. Marcel Carne’s Le Jour se Leve (Daybreak) is one of those movies. You know the basic plot within the first couple of minutes, and you know from this point on that you’re not going to have a happy ending. There’s simply no way that a happy ending is possible with this one.

We start with a murder. A man named Valentin (Jules Berry) is shot, and he stumbles out of an apartment and takes a tumble down the stairs. The body is discovered and the police are summoned to the apartment of Francois (Jean Gabin), a factory worker. But Francois has barricaded himself into the apartment and will not open the door. In fact, he takes a couple of potshots at the police, who run for assistance. In the meantime, Francois tries to remember what brought him to this particular state.

Naturally, what brings him here is a woman, or rather a pair of women. The first is Francoise (Jacqueline Laurent), who works at a florist. They meet when Francoise is attempting to deliver flowers to the factory in which Francois works. The two click immediately because of the similarities of their names (the “e” on the end makes it feminine) and the fact that both were raised in an orphanage. Francois would like to take the relationship further, but Francoise says she can’t.

What Francois discovers is that Francoise has a relationship with Valentin, who is a dog trainer and performs frequently on stage. His assistant, Clara (Arletty) has chosen this night to make a clean break with Valentin, who promises the moon and never delivers. In their conversation, Francois realizes that Valentin has something of a hold on Francoise, but he does not confront her. Instead, he starts a relationship with Clara, almost to spite Valentin and to get back at Francoise.

And so the two men battle over the two women. Both Francois and Valentin want both women, and neither will budge. Valentin spins a tale about being Francoise’s father, a tale that proves to be a lie and further shows the underhanded nature of his character. Eventually, Francois realizes that he truly wants to be with Francoise, and will do anything to protect her, hence the opening few minutes of the film.

Throughout all this, we frequently flash forward to the present and Francois barricaded into his room. A horde of police show up and take positions both inside the apartment building and outside on the roofs of the buildings nearby. These police aren’t too keen on bringing in Francois alive based on the vast number of bullets they fire into his room.

And really, the ending here should be pretty obvious. With the actions of the police established fairly early into the film, it’s evident that no one aside from Clara and Francoise are too concerned about bringing this criminal to justice in court. Aside from an unbelievable deus ex machina, there’s no way that Francois is coming out with both his life and his freedom intact.

For all that it purports to be about love, Le Jour se Leve is more about possession than anything else. Both men are willing to kill to possess the two women, and are willing to throw away their lives and futures to get what they want. While Francois is the one who actually pulls the trigger, Valentin shows up at the apartment for the confrontation with a gun and ready to kill. So the question to me becomes one of whether or not the men really love the women—Francoise in particular—or simply want to conquer someone else for possession rights. The film would have us believe that Valentin’s love is more possession while Francois’s love is more pure. However, Francois’s actions with Clara seem to belie that. From what I see, both men are equally guilty.

This is not a happy experience. Le Jour se Leve is right in the heart of the French Poetic Realism movement featuring proletarian protagonists, film noir-style lighting and sets, and ultimately downbeat endings. If that comes as a spoiler, it shouldn’t. As I’ve been saying, the downbeat is pretty obvious from the moment those first shots ring out—no one is walking out of this one with a smile except perhaps for the police.

Le Jour se Leve is stylish and smart, and plays like a real drama for the most part. The biggest problem for me to overcome in terms of verisimilitude is the actions of the police, who seriously pump about 50 rounds into Francois’s apartment in an effort to end the siege. Maybe this is how the French police acted in the pre-war years, but it’s the sort of action that ends in a class action suit, suspensions, and paperwork headaches for the police force. But for this, the value here is how much Carne reflects real life, or at least potential real life.

Why to watch Le Jour se Leve: A film that is a match for Carne’s later Les Enfants du Paradis.
Why not to watch: The ending is a foregone conclusion.

Easy Rider Lite

Film: Two-Lane Blacktop
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

For whatever reason, the acting business and the music business are tightly connected. I mean, I understand precisely why in terms of using music in movies, especially as more and more directors follow the lead that Tarantino popularized in using found music. What I mean here is that it seems like every actor is a wannabee singer and everyone who sings would really like to act. Case in point? Two of the stars of Two-Lane Blacktop had never acted before and never did again, but both of them cut plenty of records.

Having watched this film, it occurs to me that there are two distinct possibilities. It’s entirely possible that The List contains a vast number of essentially plotless films because someone really likes them. It’s also entirely possible that there aren’t a ton of them, but I have merely selected a few of them in relatively rapid succession purely by chance. Two-Lane Blacktop is basically plotless. The characters drive, often in silence, and that’s pretty much it. They don’t even have names.

The Driver (James Taylor) pilots around a home-bulit ’55 Chevy assisted by The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys). The two look for other people who like fast cars and they race them, using the money they win to move on to the next town and the next race and making modifications to their vehicle. They have no real goal in mind and no plans other than finding new places and new people to race.

Things change, but not much, when The Girl (Laurie Bird) climbs into their backseat one day and goes along with them. Like The Driver and The Mechanic, she appears to have no real direction in where she is going, but simply comes along for the ride. Neither of the guys question her presence or where she came from, but immediately accept her presence in the car and in their lives.

Driving aimlessly around the same general area is an older gent in a GTO (Warren Oates) who decides that the ’55 Chevy is following him. He challenges The Driver to a cross-country race to Washington D.C. for pink slips—winner takes both cars. And they drive, sometimes try to cause problems for the other car, and more often than not end up in the same place at the same time. GTO picks up potential back-up drivers and generally just as soon ditches them while The Girl tries to decide which car she really wants to be in. And that’s really it.

For something that really has no plot, there’s a lot going on in this film below the surface. It deals in many ways with the same ideas that Easy Rider did a couple of years earlier, but with far less direction and optimism. At one point, GTO says to The Driver that he (Driver) needs to find something more in life than just driving around looking for new people to race. Then again, it appears that GTO hasn’t found much for himself, either. He tells a different story about who he is and what he’s doing to every hitchhiker he picks up, and it’s impossible to tell if he’s a former television producer or former test pilot or current location scout, or none of the above. And it really doesn’t matter. To get at the meat of this, though, it’s necessary to discuss the ending, and that means a spoiler:

*** BLOW IT OUT, GTO ***

Eventually, while our four primary characters are sitting in yet another nameless diner in yet another nameless backwater town, GTO and The Driver confront each other over The Girl. GTO wants her to go with him to Canada, or Chicago, or Florida, or New York. The Driver wants to go buy parts in Ohio. She decides…on neither of them. She gets up and hops onto the back of the motorcycle of the guy who just left the diner. As they pull away, she drops her bag and leaves it, completely letting go not only of the trio she has ridden most of the way across the country with, but her entire past.

With the girl gone, there appears to be no sense of purpose left. In reality, it seems that no one was really racing for pinks in the first place, but were racing for the rights to The Girl, who opted out of the competition completely, evidently deciding that she’s not a prize to be won. GTO picks up a few more hitchhikers and heads off, spinning yet another story of where his car came from while The Driver and The Mechanic to back to looking for suckers to beat in drag races to fund their continued wanderings.

It’s the final shot here that really sticks with me. As The Driver floors it, the sound drops out, and eventually the shot freezes and the film begins to burn, slowly burning out the image of this guy in his constant, unending, meaningless quest to go faster than someone else. Nothing has changed and he’ll keep racing until he can’t race any longer.

*** YEAH, YEAH, LITTLE GTO ***

There is a mood to this film I find hard to describe or explain, a sense of unexpressed desire for meaning that truly doesn’t exist. The Driver, GTO, and to some extent The Mechanic are all looking for something. They don’t know what they’re looking for, and they probably won’t know if they find it until much later. But it’s never where they are, and so they drive off in search of it. There’s a sense of empty accomplishment with each race. It’s not a hurdle to overcome or a challenge to meet, but merely something there.

And so there it is—an endless chasing after nothing. It seems strange to sum up a movie with such a short statement. It seems stranger to say that said film is excellent, engaging, and worth watching multiple times. But it is.

Why to watch Two-Lane Blacktop: Kick-ass cars.
Why not to watch: A whole new definition of “taciturn.”

The End of Griffith

Film: Orphans of the Storm
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Since I started getting into the silents with intent a few weeks ago, D.W. Griffith has been something of my nemesis. While innovative and important in the annals of film, there’s something about his films that’s sort of like biting down on a piece of tinfoil. When the film doesn’t involve outright racism, it tends to involve insane amounts of melodrama and thick-headedness. So it’s with some relish that I sat down with the fifth and final Griffith film--Orphans of the Storm. If nothing else, this painful chapter of my life will be behind me and I can move on to directors who may be less important in terms of cinematic language but are far more enjoyable to watch.

True to form, Orphans of the Storm contains all of the typical tropes I have come to expect from D.W. Griffith. It seems that his favorite emotion is outrage just as his favorite leading lady is the irrepressibly cute Lillian Gish. While Griffith avoids the racism that seems inherent in so many of his stories with this one, he can’t stop his politics from coming through and dominating every aspect of this story.

As with the bulk of Intolerance, this film is a costume drama, this time set in the years prior to and during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. A man in Paris goes to lay his daughter Henriette at the door of Notre Dame since he can no longer afford to feed her. Instead, he finds another foundling and brings her home. This is Louise, who is adopted into the family in no small part because of the money she is found with.

The two grow up and lose their parents to a plague. This same plague renders Louise (Dorothy Gish) blind. Henriette (Lillian Gish) vows to care for her. The two journey to Paris with the hope of a cure for Louise, who must be persuaded to go by a promise from Henriette that she will not leave her or marry until a cure is discovered for Louise’s blindness.

Along the way, they encounter the decadent aristocrat, the Marquis de Praille (Morgan Wallace). He gets a look at the sexy Herniette and demands that his manservant capture her and bring her back to a party. He does so, abandoning the poor Louise to her fate where she is picked up by a group of tramps who use her blindness to garner more money from passersby.

In the meanwhile, Henriette is rescued by Chevalier de Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut), a kindhearted noble who frequently takes pity on the poor and acts as a friend to those in need. The two quickly fall for each other, but Henriette has made her promise, and now Louise is missing.

All of this gets tied up into the French Revolution. Old grudges against the nobility come back to haunt everyone. Henriette and Louise find each other, lose each other, and find each other again. De Vaudrey is arrested simply for being a nobleman, and Henriette is arrested with him; both are sentenced to pay a visit to Madame Guillotine, sentenced by the wicked Jacques Forget-Not (Leslie King) with the approval of the equally wicked Robespierre (Sidney Herbert). Only the oratory skills of Danton (Monte Blue) and some mechanical problems with the guillotine can save everyone now. And what about Louise’s eyesight?

This is high melodrama at its silent finest, and it plays fast and loose with history, ideas of justice and nobility, and simple fact. Danton, Robespierre, and Louis XVI are depicted as old, weathered men when not a one of them lived past 40 in real life. It’s also quite interesting to see Robespierre considered a Bolshevik.

I will say this—based on Griffith movies I have already seen, there’s a surprising amount of tension at the end. His movies have both happy and unhappy endings, so there’s some real tension in the moments leading up to Henriette’s walk up the scaffold to the guillotine.

As a costume drama, this works pretty well if only because the costumes and sets are really interesting to look at. It’s interesting to see that Griffith manages to hit his anti-Bolshevik stride by commenting that real freedom wouldn’t come to France until after Robespierre was himself guillotined, glossing over the fact that his savior character Danton was guillotined on Robespierre’s order first. Ah, Hollywood—is there no history that you can’t screw with to get the desired ending and message?

So where does it rank in terms of Griffith? It’s certainly more watchable than Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Way Down East. It spins in the same circle as Broken Blossoms. It’s far less racism-driven, but it’s also far more overblown.

Why to watch Orphans of the Storm: All the joys of the Reign of Terror.
Why not to watch: For all its pomp and bombast…it’s still Griffith.

The White Man's Burden

Film: Gunga Din
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There’s a style of action film that has died out, and been dead and gone for some time. This is the sort of wild action film in which our hero(es) wink and nod at danger, ride straight into the jaws of overwhelming odds and emerge with nary a scratch because, well, they’re the heroes. The classic Western falls along this line, and it’s the sort of thing the Indiana Jones films played with, although Jones always took a hell of a beating (and Jones will come up in a few paragraphs). These “boy’s own” adventure films glorify this type of two-fisted hero, ready and willing to get into a good scrap and avoiding all of the mushy romance stuff.

And so we have Gunga Din (pronounced GUN-ga DEEN) from 1939, which might well be the most adventure-y adventure film ever made. Based somewhat on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, the film (and the poem) walks an uneasy line between racism and its opposite. Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) wants nothing more than to be a soldier like the three men he admires. But, he is nothing but a water bearer, and a very low man on the military totem pole. The end of the film serves in many ways not as his redemption, but as a sort of upbraiding to those who would consider him a lesser man.

Ah, damn. I get ahead of myself so often.

Despite playing the title role, Jaffe isn’t listed anywhere near the top of the credits. Instead, these places are held by the three men for whom Gunga Din totes water, the trio of two-fisted sergeants: Cutter (Cary Grant), MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). These three are inseparable, and our initial meeting with them is in a dust up over something that will become a bit of a theme. Cutter is treasure-mad and is sold a bum treasure map. We also soon discover that the three are first-rate soldiers despite their penchant for trouble. Sent to inspect and repair telegraph lines, the three are set upon by Indian natives who prove to be a sort of outlier for a new Thugee sect.

A complication arises in the group when Ballantine announces that his term of service with Her Majesty’s Army has come up and he plans on drumming out of the service and into a marriage and a life as a tea merchant. Cutter and MacChesney quite obviously don’t wish him well and scheme to keep him in the military instead of the cushy civilian life. But all of this is secondary when Cutter hears of a nearby temple actually made of gold. Din leads him to it, only for them to discover that this temple is in fact the central hub of the Thugees. Cutter allows himself to be captured and sends Din back for the others, leading to the climactic scene between the trio and Din, the marching Scottish Lancers, and the Thugee cult headed by their evil guru (Eduardo Ciannelli).

This film is done in the classic Hollywood adventure style. It’s evident from the very beginning that nothing too terrible, or at least nothing fatal is going to happen to our three main characters. They’re too likeable, too willing to step gladly into danger, and too sold on service to Her Majesty for any wound to be much more than something that requires laying about without a shirt. The reaction of Cutter and MacChesney to Ballantine’s proposed nuptials is less about his abandoning them for civilian life and much more about Ballantine subjecting himself to all of that mushy girl stuff. This is not a film made with the female viewer in mind. Instead, it’s a sort of non-serialized version of a cliffhanger serial made for the Saturday afternoon crowd of rowdy pre-teen boys who just sat through a newsreel and a couple of Popeye cartoons. Our heroes commonly handle their problems by punching them in the jaw, and most of the problems can be handled with a single punch for each. There’s no situation so dire that the three men can’t take a minute to poke fun at each other, pull pranks, or argue about what they’ll do when they get out of yet another impossible scrape. Evidently, they’re pretty confident that they won’t die, too.

I mentioned Indiana Jones at the beginning of this, and there’s a reason for it. A great deal of what appears in this film also appears in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In both films, we see a renewed and reborn sect of Thugee attempting to take over India in the name of Kali. In both, we have a mad guru wildly killing all who oppose him in terrible rituals, and in both, that guru is bald and speaks in flawless English. There’s a vibe here that feels like the second Indiana Jones film. I realize Gunga Din came first by multiple decades, but there’s no getting past the fact that the majority of film viewers these days are more familiar with Henry Jones and Short Round than with our trio of sergeants and the Indian water bearer.

And so the racism needs to be addressed as well—the racism not of the characters but of the film. Ballantine interacts little with Din. Cutter likes the man and tends to praise him. MacChesney tends to deride the little water carrier. This is part and parcel of the characters, though—three different relationships with the title character. The film itself, though, was made in a time when anyone who wasn’t white was either a lesser man or a man who aspired to whiteness. Din’s only wish is to be a British soldier; he has no real aspirations beyond imitating the three men he follows around.

This is most evident in the scene in which Cutter and Din find the Thugee cult. While Din’s eyes go wide at the sight of the terrible ceremony taking place before him, Cutter’s jaw becomes set and he fills with resolve. He is the one who allows himself to be captured while Din runs away—yes, he runs under orders, but run he does. That the film manages to redeem itself (and not Din because he truly needs no redemption) is actually laudable. But the evidence of that wanna-be-white-guy syndrome certainly creeps in.

Is it good? Yeah, it is. Films like this don’t get made anymore, but they used to be Hollywood stock in trade. An entire generation grew up on films like this and a generation of little boys learned (perhaps the wrong way) what being a man was all about from watching guys like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Cary Grant punch people in the jaw. Sometimes that’s enough.

Why to watch Gunga Din: Rollicking adventure-y goodness.
Why not to watch: For the most part, danger is met not with serious action, but a wink and a nod.

The Patron Saint of France

Films: Artists and Models, The Ladies Man, The Nutty Professor
Format: DVD from Graves-Hume Public Library through interlibrary loan (Artists) and DVDs from personal collection (Ladies, Professor) on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Just like Germany loves David Hasselhoff, France is constantly enamored of Jerry Lewis. There’s nothing especially French about Lewis; in fact he frequently seems to espouse all of the worst elements of the American idiot. On second thought, perhaps that’s precisely why the French love him so much. He’s a caricature of someone who has only a couple of functioning brain cells and is unable to get those poor, benighted cells to synchronize.

Whatever the reason for Jerry Lewis’s canonization in the salons of Paris, his wacky persona appears at least a trio of times on The List, once with his pre-Rat Pack partner Dean Martin and twice post-break up. Artists and Models may well be the prime example of the pair, and they function like a pretty standard comedy team. Like Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy before them, we have a straight man and a goof. Dean is our straight man—he’s far too suave and good looking to be comic relief. Jerry is the screw-up, unable to keep his eyes from crossing for more than a few seconds at a time. One way to look at the duo is to consider Jerry as Gilligan and Dean as pretty much everybody else on the island.

In Artists and Models, we find the pair in a Greenwich Village apartment desperately trying to make ends meet. Rick (Martin) is a struggling artist who wants to be hung in galleries and art museums. Eugene (Lewis) has aspirations of being a writer of children’s books, but continually gets sidetracked by his love of comic books, especially The Bat Lady.

Fortunately, or unfortunately as your opinion holds, the artist of The Bat Lady, Abigail Parker (Dorothy Malone) moves into the apartment above Rick’s and Eugene’s with her friend, Bessie Sparrowbrush (Shirley MacLaine), who is the model for The Bat Lady and the receptionist at the publisher’s office. So this sets up the classic romantic comedy pitch—two men and two women living in close proximity, with one of each being perfect for each other.

What follows is a lot of misunderstanding, goofing around, and bizarre occurrences all circling around that wicked comic book market, much of it centered in the office of the comic book publisher, Mr. Murdock (Eddie Mayehoff). Abigail quits her job and Rick takes it, writing and drawing a new comic book based on Eugene’s vivid (and loud) dreams. However, Eugene now believes that comic books are evil and need to be stopped, which means Rick can’t admit that he’s drawing one. Plus, he needs to get Abigail to fall for him, and Bessie is trying desperately to get Eugene to notice her.

The problem with Artists and Models is that it has no idea what it wants to be. It starts as a wacky romantic comedy with these two made-for-each-other pairs and then spins off into a number of directions by the end. The whole plot of Rick drawing a comic book without Abigail and Eugene finding out is never resolved—it’s completely dropped for much of the last part of the film because the last half hour or so starts an entirely new story in an entirely new genre.

Essentially, Rick’s comic is published, and one of Eugene’s ravings happens to be the exact chemical formula for part of the United States’ rocket fuels, which brings both the Feds and the Russians into the mix. This means that instead of hiding his comic book drawing from Abigail, Rick now needs to hide a Russian spy who is trying to seduce him. All of this somehow culminates in a musical number with Rick and Eugene at a pageant, a kidnapping, a rescue, and a final song and dance number.

In short, I don’t get it. There are certainly some good bits. Dean Martin is hard not to like, even when his character is essentially a sexist wolf, and the numbers he sings are pretty good even if they don’t really fit. The “Innamorata” number is quite good with some excellent choreography toward the end. There are also a couple of nice gags. Once, as Dino sings to an unknowing Abigail, she comments that his voice is familiar. Bessie replies that it’s the same singer who had a hit with “That’s Amore.” Later, a guy with a camera says in Jimmy Stewart’s voice that he can’t get a good view out of his rear window. That’s cute.

But too much is either completely random or simply defies belief. Eugene is completely inept in everything he does and can barely communicate at even a rudimentary level. When confronted by Rick about why he came to New York, Eugene can’t answer. Instead, he has to mug for the camera for thirty seconds and then mime typing so that Rick can essentially pat him on the head for being a good boy and remembering something. So with that as part of the film’s reality, who in their right minds would put him on stage for a revue at a banquet? And why really were either of them performing? And what’s up with the shoehorned spy thing?

And then there’s the predictability. It’s obvious who will end up with whom. The two normal ones (Rick Todd and Abigail Parker) with normal names will wind up together just as the two kooks (Eugene Fullstack and Bessie Sparrowbrush) with the wacky names will end up together.

As a whole, some parts hit, but most of it’s a miss. Dean’s heart didn’t seem to be in it, and it shows.


The Ladies Man is Jerry solo, without Dean to buffer him or act as his straight man. In this film he again plays a guy with a goofy name—Herbert H. Heebert (the “H” stands for “Herbert”) who swears off women on the day of his graduation because he sees his childhood sweetheart in the arms of another guy. This takes him to Hollywood where he lands a job as (wait for it) the housekeeper and superintendent of an all-girls boarding house.

Naturally, this environment is a problem for Herbert, and we discover that it’s been a problem for a number of other men, too. Evidently, no maintenance guy has lasted more than three days at the boarding house, so the two women in charge, Katie the Cook (the immediately recognizable Kathleen Freeman) and Miss Wellenmellon (Helen Traubel) tell the girls that they should treat Herbert with a lot of kindness and shower him praise to keep him around. Fay (Pat Stanley) takes on Herbert as a special case and helps him overcome his fear of women.

Throughout, a couple of Hollywood big shots show up as themselves, most notably George Raft, who pulls a tango with Herbert around the middle of the film. Others appearing as themselves include Jack LaLanne, Harry James, and Marty Ingels.

All this is well and good, but there isn’t a lot of plot going on here. Most of the film is really nothing more than a platform for Jerry Lewis to be himself. Half the time, he is his cross-eye, screaming persona. The other half of the time, he’s sharing an aside with the camera and the people in the audience.

While there’s really not much more going on here than a series of sight gags, I enjoyed this film more. I’m not exactly sure why, and I won’t say that I loved it. But I liked it more than I liked Artists and Models.

A few last notes—the set for this film is huge. Essentially, Lewis built half of a four-story house on a sound stage so that he could show all of the girls in the boarding house in their rooms at the same time. It’s pretty impressive. However, during the sequence in which Miss Wellenmellon is interviewed, it’s really evident that it’s a soundstage for them, too. It’s one of those moments where the verisimilitude vanishes and reminds me that the actors know it’s fake, too. Also, don’t get this confused with the Tim Meadows film of the same name. Really. It’s also worth noting that this film, for all its nuttiness, has a tremendous pedigree: Bobby Van choreographed all of the musical numbers and dances, and the costumes were done by Edith Head.

The quintessential Jerry Lewis film is The Nutty Professor, and it’s the film he’s still best known for despite the Eddie Murphy remake of a decade and a half ago. Chemistry professor Dr. Julius Kelp (Lewis) is also the perfect distillation of a Jerry Lewis character—the buck teeth, the glasses, the annoying voice, the little bow ties, the ankle-length pants, etc. He’s also a klutz frequently does things like cause his lab to explode, and he’s frequently the target for some of his larger, more football-oriented students. When an attempt to buff up at a gym fails miserably after six months, he looks instead to science.

What he creates is a Jekyll and Hyde potion that turns him into Buddy Love, and it’s this creation that makes The Nutty Professor almost a collaboration between Lewis and Martin again. Buddy Love is a smarmy bastard, a slick operator, and a complete (pardon the term) ladies’ man. Everything that Julius Kelp is not, Buddy Love is.

The appearance of Buddy Love causes no end of problems for Professor Kelp. The first reason is that the potion has a tendency to wear off, often at precisely the plot-appointed worst time. The second is that Buddy Love becomes Julius Kelp’s greatest rival for the affections of attractive and perky student Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens).

In terms of character, Julius Kelp is an interesting one based on what Lewis typically played. While socially inept and bumbling, Kelp is at least an intelligent scientist—he does, after all, create the formula that turns him into Buddy Love. The typical Lewis character is inept on all fronts, so this is a step forward for him. Buddy Love is an equally unique Lewis character, although he really does appear to be based in a large part on Dean Martin. It’s either homage or sly dig—take your pick, but this film comes a half dozen years after that pair split and the blood between them was pretty bad.

The Nutty Professor is perhaps too predictable, and where it really fails for me is in its level of appropriateness. After all, Julius Kelp is a college professor and is pursuing a student romantically. As a college teacher, I find this a little difficult to swallow, although it’s certainly not unheard of. One school at which I taught for a short while (not my current employer) had no standing policy against teachers dating their students, a fact that at least one co-worker contemplated with considerable relish. Still, it’s not the healthiest relationship to promote, is it?

This film is unquestionably dated, not the least in its treatment of Stella Stevens as more of an object than as a person. It’s a harder sell today than many comedies of the same era, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t possess a particular charm. The main problem it has is that it no longer has a real market. It’s too much for kids and not enough for adults. Maybe it can still find an audience in France.

Why to watch Artists and Models: Dino is one smooth operator.
Why not to watch: Two hours of Jerry Lewis’s “hijinks” requires ibuprofen.

Why to watch The Ladies Man: It’s the best movie ever made with that name.
Why not to watch: It frequently breaks the fourth wall.

Why to watch The Nutty Professor: It’s Jerry Lewis at his most Jerry Lewis-y.
Why not to watch: It’s Jerry Lewis at his most Jerry Lewis-y.

Oh, Behave!

Film: Blow-Up
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol' television.

There’s a particular fascination people have with fashion. It’s a combination of glamour and the idiocy that seems to come with fashion. The only television show I watch regularly is Project Runway despite the fact that I know nothing about color, clothing, fashion, or style. Movies tend to be intrinsically tied with fashion, too. Movies both reflect the trends of their time and set the style for their time. It’s impossible to divorce particular movie scenes and styles from the fashion of those films. So, it only makes sense that there would be a number of movies involving the fashion world.

Blow-Up (sometimes just Blowup) is perhaps the first and greatest of films that combine cinematic elements with an eye for fashion and fashion photography. Our main character is Thomas (David Hemmings), a young hip photographer who makes his living doing fashion photography even if his heart really isn’t in it. His real goal is to publish a book of his more serious photography, and he leaves a fashion shoot to find some final shots for his book.

He finds as a subject a couple who are apparently quite in love, or are at least pretty amorous while he’s filming them. Eventually, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) spots him taking pictures and confronts him, wanting the film and the negatives. He demurs, but she tracks him down, evidently willing to do anything to get that film back. This makes Thomas all the more curious about its contents, and he gives her a different roll of film and makes prints of the shots he took of the woman and her lover.

When he looks closely at the shots, it appears to him that there is something more going on than just a woman and a man standing in a park. In one shot, it appears that a hand holding a gun is sticking out from some trees, and in a final shot, it looks like the man’s body is lying half concealed by the hedge. Now, in addition to some real shots to end his book, Thomas has a mystery on his hands that only he has the keys to.

There’s a lot going on in Blow-Up. In his opening shoot, Thomas shoots the model Veruschka (as herself) in one of the steamiest few minutes ever filmed. Moving on, he shoots a collection of five women in various poses, but quickly becomes bored, setting the plot in motion. This scene will look mildly familiar to you—it’s undoubtedly the inspiration for the photographic career of Austin Powers—the conversation with the models, the shouting, etc.

Thomas as a character is fairly misogynist in that women are merely things for him to photograph and sometimes have sex with. His only non-sexual relationship is with his neighbor’s lover (Sarah Miles), and in one particularly aggressive escapade, he has pretty violent foreplay with a pair of young girls (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills) who want him to photograph him. (On a similar note, Jane Birkin became infamous as the partner and singing partner of Serge Gainsbourg on Je T’aime Moi Non Plus which featured her simulated orgasm. She’s also the namesake of the Hermes Birkin bag.)

The film is framed by a troupe of mimes, but their meaning can’t be discussed without spoiling the film, which means that I can either stop writing or put a few paragraphs under a spoiler warning. Guess which I’m going to do:

*** A REAL SPOILER ***

Thomas goes to the park and finds the body of the man and realizes that the woman has probably been complicit in his murder. When he tries to involve anyone else in discovering what happened, though, he gets nowhere. He goes to the park and sees the body himself, but when he goes back to photograph it, the body is gone. Similarly, his studio gets raided and all the negatives and blown up photographs have been removed.

The mimes at the start of the film seem to indicate that we’ll be treading in territory that borders between reality and non-reality, or actual and filmed life. At the end, the troupe performs a mock tennis match that Thomas observes. When the “ball” goes over the fence, Thomas retrieves it for them and mimes tossing it back to them. Once he does, the mock tennis game resumes, but this time with the actual sounds of two people playing tennis.

It’s an odd moment that seems to imply this same sort of divide between reality and image, or truth and illusion. This appears to be confirmed in the final shot of Thomas standing on the field with his camera, slowly fading out and leaving the field empty.

*** ALL DONE ***

I think this is a film that needs to be watched multiple times to really get. There are a lot of nascent ideas milling around in my brain with this one—the mimes, the connection of the field a the start of the film and again at the end, the seemingly unnecessary presence of The Yardbirds toward the end of the film and the scrum that results from a destroyed guitar. Antonioni packed a lot into this film that requires some thinking and some fermentation.

For all that, Blow-Up is remarkably slow to develop (yes, pun intended). Thomas doesn’t spot the body until about halfway through, and there seem to be some side plots and actions that don’t do much but take up some space. I’m certain that Thomas’s desire to purchase an antique shop and the massive propeller he buys have some specific meaning, but I haven’t ferreted that meaning out yet.

Ultimately, I think I’d like a little less artistic oomph and a little more story earlier on. With repeated viewings, who knows what I’d think?

Why to watch Blow-Up: Sex, drugs, rock and roll, jazz, fashion photography, and possibly murder.
Why not to watch: Despite everything that happens, it’s slow to start.

Ars Gratia Artis

Film: Dog Star Man
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Experimental films are very much their own thing. Watching one takes intense concentration. This seems to be especially true of the film in question was made by Stan Brakhage. Dog Star Man could not legitimately be called anything other than an art film or an experimental film. It consists of layered images, film leader, seemingly random shots of trees, mountains, solar flares, and Brakhage’s naked wife, plus blood moving through blood vessels, frames marred (and sometimes completely obscured) by scratches, burns, and paint, the moon, and landscapes. This is not to say there isn’t a narrative in here somewhere—a man (Brakhage himself) walks up a mountain with is dog and chops down a tree. I said there was a narrative—I didn’t say it was War and Peace.

Because there is no story here, what we’re left with instead is the images that Brakhage presents and an attempt to make sense of them through the five parts of the film—Prelude (about a third of the running time), and Parts 1-4. Brakhage repeats images frequently, flashing back to solar flares and mountain scenery, for instance, and often rotates the film around so that we see the same image in multiple ways—the flares coming from the top of the sun, then the bottom, and left and right. Additionally, the film starts completely black for several minutes and stays black for a long time—long enough at points that it seems prudent to see if the disc is still playing.

The Prelude seems to be a sort of filmed equivalent of a life as told by Camus or Jean Paul Sartre. It starts in darkness, then shows brief flashes. While it never becomes coherent, it does develop as a series of images that metaphorically could work as a person’s life—we see work (the man, shirt off, with an axe), sex (Brakhage’s nude wife), birth (their child), aspirations (the sun, moon, and stars), and obstructions (the scratches and paint as well as the overlaid images on top of the main image), ending with a return to darkness and brief flashes of light.

Part 1 is the most coherent of the five parts of the film as well as the longest. While there is still some flashing around of images, this is the part of the film that contains something the most like an actual story. The man, now in winter, climbs up the side of a mountain, struggling the entire way, often slipping back almost as much as he advances through the heavy snow. It’s also the easiest to follow in the sense that there is no overlay of film through most of it, which makes it easier to see exactly what is going on at all times rather than trying to parse something out of the visual equivalent of having multiple people talking at the same time.

Part 2 brings in the image of Brakhage’s infant child. We still get the man trudging silently up the hill with his axe, but much more frequently we see the baby sleeping, yawning, eyes opening. Additionally, much of this section consists of two layers of film—a sort of main story of the infant with an overlay of scratches, snowflakes, and lens flares. Brakhage gets very artsy here, essentially scratching out parts of the film and placing new images inside these burned out locations. Inventive stuff.

Part 3 adds a third layer of film over the story and seems to be obsessed with the body. We get extreme close-ups of Brakhage’s wife’s nipples, for instance, plus blood coursing through veins, a beating heart, shots of genitalia often layered with film of internal organs, a sort of porn for serial killers. It’s like massively non-erotic hippie erotica, making this a difficult part of the film to watch. Thankfully, Part 3 is pretty short. There’s something gratuitous-feeling about seeing shots of the director’s penis and larger-than-life pictures of his wife’s labia.

Part 4, overlaid with images almost to incomprehensibility, is blessedly only a few minutes long. We get flashes back to all of the earlier parts—the solar flares, the infant, and functioning organs, plus a lactating breast or two. We also get religious imagery for the first time. So with work (Part 1), family (Part 2), sex (Part 3), we finally get a realization of mortality and a grasp for meaning and something beyond this life.

It’s worth noting here that Dog Star Man is completely silent—not even a musical soundtrack, which makes it quite punishing to watch. I had never really realized how attached we become to the idea of sound in a film; the music is so intrinsic to the experience. In this sense, watching this film is not unlike watching what amounts to Brakhage’s home movies. You may want to supply your own soundtrack for this. I recommend either something full-on psychedelic or something slowcore. Pink Floyd and The Amboy Dukes or Low and Red House Painters —your choice.

More to the point, this is a film that I think would be far more interesting to study frame-by-frame than to actually watch. Some of the specific sequences are quite striking, as are some of the frames covered in scratches, burns, and pockmarks. Going past at 24 fps, they become a sort of radiant blur, difficult to capture. I did pause the film a few times on some great shots that I feel I would have easily missed had I not stopped the proceedings. The scratches in places are so intricate that they deserve to be studied like a great painting, particularly when Brakhage puts other images inside burn marks.

All this is fine, and I understand why Dog Star Man made the list. But I don’t like it. It’s like talking to a stoned hippie. The stoned hippie is so completely sure that he or she is blowing your mind by telling you about his or her great revelation that came from an extra hit of acid or by smoking a little more pot than medically necessary when in reality, you’re just having the tits bored off you. Seeing what amounts to someone else’s acid flashback isn’t really that entertaining.

As a final note, The Book lies about this film. It claims that it is a mere 30 minutes long. Part 1 is about that length, but the entire thing runs somewhat over 75 minutes. That’s quite a shock if you were expecting a weird little short you could knock out easily. Even at half an hour, it’s an ordeal. At 150% longer, it’s an epic tale told by someone who has burned out his brain on a hash pipe.

Why to watch Dog Star Man: It’s truly ars gratia artis, and that should be celebrated.
Why not to watch: Overwhelming bongwater stench.