Three, Seven, Ace

Film: The Queen of Spades
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

There are times when I will get kind of locked onto a particular movie that I can’t find because of the name. That’s definitely been the case for some reason with The Queen of Spades, a late-1940s film that has a number of horror elements. This is very much a period piece, and it has the sort of connection to horror that many films of the time did. This isn’t genuinely scary in any real sense, but it touches on the supernatural and at least tells the audience that there are demonic forces involved. For post-war society, that was probably enough to get people squeamish.

The film takes place in 1806 Russia, in both military and societal circles. The military men spend their time playing a game they call faro, and it seems to be based on a real game. While it’s never fully explained, the game seems to work like this. One player picks a card from his own deck of cards and places it face down. The dealer then goes through his own deck of cards, separating it one by one into two piles. If the player’s card comes up in the dealer’s half of the deck, the dealer wins. If it comes up in the player’s half, the player wins. While the men play, engineer Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) watches, intrigued, but never betting. We learn soon enough that he is far from wealthy, a fact that he attributes to his lack of upward mobility through the ranks.

Thai-ing One on

Films: Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
Format: Turner Classic Movies on laptop.

Documentaries have a long history, and early documentaries have an interesting history in that realism was often eschewed in favor of compelling narrative. That’s at least partially the case with Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, the only documentary ever to be nominated for anything like a Best Picture award. It was actually nominated for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, an award that vanished after the first Oscars and became essentially a part of the Best Picture category. This is sort of an ethnography, albeit with some bits that were staged. To the credit of the filmmakers, though, these events were evidently restaged because the original footage didn’t turn out, so these are at least based on real events.

Chang is the story of a “family” in Thailand back when it was still called Siam. On its face, it’s the story of a family trying to survive in a jungle and trying to raise a small crop of rice while dealing with predatory cats and stampeding elephants. Based on that, it’s hardly a shock that this was such a hit the year that it was released.