Beyond and Back...ish

Films: Audrey Rose
Format: DVD from Manteno Public Library through interlibrary loan on the new portable.

It seems like a year since I’ve posted something (and it has been almost two weeks). Daughter’s graduation and last show with her dance school, preparation for college, end of term for me, and a death in the family will do that. It honestly feels like more than a week since I’ve even watched a movie. When life spirals out of control, entertainment and hobbies are the first things to drop off. This hasn’t changed the fact that there is a stack of movies to my immediate right. Now that things are starting to calm down, it’s time to get to them. The one movie from interlibrary loan seemed like a good place to start, thus this review of Audrey Rose.

I remember vaguely when the book Audrey Rose was published only because one of my sisters was intensely weird about it. The basic story is that a little girl named Audrey Rose dies in a car accident and is immediately reincarnated into the body of another girl. Audrey’s father searches for the new vessel of his daughter’s soul and eventually finds her. That’s pretty much the story of the movie as well, just with added Anthony Hopkins and Marsha Mason.

Dig It!

Film: The Body Snatcher
Format: DVD from LaSalle Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There’s something very special about the films that were produced by Val Lewton. With Lewton as the producer, a film needed to work with a negligible budget but still deliver some thrills and scares. The enduring power of Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie are indicative of just how good Lewton was at his work. The Body Snatcher is perhaps less well-known, but it comes with a hell of a solid pedigree. It’s another Karloff/Lugosi film (although Lugosi’s role is quite small and Karloff is the real star), and it was directed by no less a luminary than Robert Wise.

The Body Snatcher falls directly into the Burke and Hare realm, the snatching here being (at least initially) grave robbing for the benefit of the medical profession. We have a poor medical student named Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) who is looking to give up the practice because of financial difficulties at home. This revelation comes just after he demonstrates good bedside manner with a crippled young girl named Georgina Marsh (Sharyn Moffett). His teacher, a respected physician named Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), offers Fettes the position of being his new assistant.

Off Script: The Curse of the Cat People

Film: The Curse of the Cat People
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’m all for a good sequel, but for something to be a real sequel there has to be a genuine connection to the original film. In the case of The Curse of the Cat People that connection is tenuous at best. We’ve got the same cast who are playing the same characters, which seems like it should be the sort of connection we need. Plot-wise, though, there’s absolutely no connection between the original film and this sequel. Evidently when the story was written there was absolutely no connection, but the studio wanted to build on the success of the low-budget first movie, and so the name was changed to become a sequel.

The Curse of the Cat People isn’t really a horror movie. It’s a lot closer to a film noir with some horror elements. It does a lot of things really well. In fact, it does just about everything well except make a solid connection to the film of which it is supposed to be a sequel. It brings up some very interesting ideas and goes in some fascinating directions even if it doesn’t all work completely.

Tobruk

Films: The Desert Rats
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve said before that I grew up at least in part on war movies, so when I encounter one that I haven’t seen before I get a little excited. More than that, for many years, a lot of my pleasure reading was history of World War II, and of that war, I was the most interested in the North African campaign. That means that The Desert Rats hits on all of my trigger points. It’s a war movie I hadn’t seen before, it’s a World War II movie, and it focuses on the siege of Tobruk and at least in part on the Afrika Korps. Better, it even has James Mason reprising his role as Irwin Rommel that he played two years previous in The Desert Fox.

So I’m sorry to report that The Desert Rats did not live up to my expectations. This isn’t a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just not a great one. It’s too short, for one thing, at just 88 minutes long, and it tries to pack far too much into that 88 minutes, where a film that ran two hours would be able to much more account for all of the story. More seriously, it treads on the same ground as a lot of war movies that have come before it, and that have in many cases done this better.

It's a Gas!

Film: I Want to Live!
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I Want to Live! is a polemic. As it happens, it’s a polemic that I happen to agree with in terms of its ultimate message. That unfortunately doesn’t change the fact that I Want to Live! gets at its ultimate message by playing significantly with the underlying story we are being told. This is a film that evidently fudges the truth to tell a better story. How much does it fudge the truth? Frankly, it apparently reverses events completely.

Barbara Graham (an Oscar-winning Susan Hayward) is the ultimate good-time party girl. She’s been booked for a number of misdemeanor charges including solicitation, but that hasn’t done anything to change her ways. At one point, she is asked by a couple of associates to lie for them on the stand to prevent them from going to prison. Not only do the two cons end up spending hard time, Barbara gets a year for perjury. Once she’s out, she decides to go straight. She marries Henry Graham (Wesley Lau) and attempts to enter the regular world.

The Sand Pebbles

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I have come to realize that a lot of the films I’ve been watching lately are extremely short. I do plan to watch everything on these lists, but watching too many short films leaves me in a position of only having the longest films left. When I did the 1001 List, I made it a point to watch a few of the longest films on the list I had left every month. It worked then and it should work now. With that in mind, it made sense to watch one of the longest films I could get hold of today in The Sand Pebbles, a very unusual war film and a very long one.

This is a very strange war film in that it takes place between World War I and II. In a real sense, it’s not an actual war film because there isn’t a great deal of war that happens with the main characters of the film. We start with machinist mate 1st class Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) who is in Shanghai attempting to get to his new ship, an ancient gunboat called the San Pablo, nicknamed the Sand Pebble by the crew. The ship is an American presence in China, where a great deal of trouble is brewing. The country is torn apart by factions, predominantly the Nationalists and the communists. Holman finds his ship and discovers a few important points.

Saccharine

Film: The Sound of Music
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

You should know off the bat that I really hate The Sound of Music. I hate every glurge-soaked moment of this film, every over-eager, exaggerated expression of joy and forced laugh, every sugary, syrupy song, every gloppy, saccharine frame of this celluloid diabetic coma. I reserve the right to root for the Germans in two films: Das Boot and this one. I’m saying this at the top because obviously these opinions are going to dramatically influence what I have to say in the paragraphs to come.

Maria (Julie Andrews) is attempting to become a nun in an Austrian convent, but she’s far too much of a free spirit. Instead of staying at home and being penitent, she’s compelled to run off to the mountains and traipse around singing about how those mountains are filled with music. Of course they’re filled with music; she’s running around singing. When she comes back, she finds the nuns singing about how they should solve a problem like her. I have a suggestion. It involves a garrote made of piano wire.

Winnipeg vs. San Jose

Film: West Side Story
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Before I started this journey, I had a track record with musicals. I don’t like them much, although there are some exceptions. If we disregard those exceptions, though, I had basically two opinions on musicals. First, if I’d seen it, I didn’t like it. Second, if I hadn’t seen it, I didn’t want to. Those few others were held up as the exceptions proving the rule that musicals leave me cold. I don’t like something that purports itself to be the real world, but contains choreography and orchestras evidently hidden around every corner. Of the musicals that inspired my wrath, one of the chief ones was West Side Story.

Oh, I know its long and storied history. I know that it’s based on Romeo and Juliet, and that it won a shit-ton of Oscars. I know that the songs are generally regarded as some of the finest in the history of musical theater (and by analogy, film). But I hated it, admittedly more on the general principle that it’s a musical rather than for any concrete reason.

So I’ve watched it again. I still don’t love it, but now I have reasons more sound than just it’s a musical and therefore icky.

Let’s start with the ending, and yes, I’m going full-bore into spoilers here. West Side Story has been around for 50 years, is highly acclaimed, and based on a story that’s been told for 400 years and was itself reminiscent of ancient Greek tales (Pyramus and Thisbe come to mind). If you don’t know how Romeo and Juliet ends (or for that matter how West Side Story ends), it’s your own fault at this point.

Bluntly, they mess with the ending. The whole point of Romeo and Juliet is that the star-crossed, tragic lovers both die, and do so from a misunderstanding. Maria (Natalie Wood) survives the film. She threatens to kill herself, but doesn’t. So this major theme, this significant part of the ending, is simply ignored. I’m not saying I want Maria to die; I’m just saying that her death is sort of an important part of the tale being told here.

Next, let’s deal with the fact that our characters here are, essentially, punks. These are not heroic characters except in their own minds. They are juvenile delinquents bent on fighting to protect a little patch of ground. And, of course, they seem to spend a lot of time practicing their choreography and singing as opposed to, y’know, doing gang stuff.

Sorry. But they are delinquents, with the exception of Tony (Richard Beymer), who has a job and has done his best to get out of the gang world. His gang, the Jets, is run by Riff (Russ Tamblyn), and is made up of American mutts of various ethnic backgrounds, but all born in New York. The rival gang, the Sharks, is entirely Puerto Rican, and run by Bernardo (George Chakiris), who happens to be Maria’s brother. Of course, he is overprotective of his sister and most especially wants her to have nothing to do with the white kids, Tony in particular.

And there are some pretty good fights, and a bunch of songs that go around them. The Jets suggest one big rumble with the Sharks to decide who gets to go where, and Tony convinces them that it should be fists only, and only one member from each gang. Why? Because he is immediately enamored of Maria and she of him, and so he’d like there to be some measure of peace between the two gangs. Of course, everything goes wrong. Bernardo kills Riff, Tony kills Bernardo, and then all of the Sharks want to kill Tony, who only wants to run away with Maria.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the songs aren’t good, or that the dancing isn’t good, or even that it is poorly staged. It simply comes down to the fact that I don’t like it very much. I’m not a tremendous fan of the story, and that’s a big part of this. I don’t love Romeo and Juliet in terms of Shakespeare’s canon—there are a number of his plays I like a hell of a lot more. And that really damages my opinion here.

It’s also long, and could probably stand with a little chopping here and there. Perhaps a song here or there to get us to something a bit under 150 minutes. It could do with some trimming, although in all honesty, we could shave off a good 8-10 minutes by getting rid of the essentially pointless overture and unnecessary intermission.

Would I like it if I liked the story? Well, probably. The songs really are good, and it is beautifully filmed. In fact, the story is really the only place I can find real fault here. And that’s something that no film can overcome.

Why to watch West Side Story: It’s a classic musical for a reason, and it’s based on Billy the Shake.
Why not to watch: There’s that whole “it’s a musical” thing.

How to Make a Scary Film

Film: The Haunting
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.


The world is filled with movies, and many of those movies are bad. There are probably more bad comedies than any other genre. Coming in second is undoubtedly bad horror movies. It’s not that difficult to gross people out or make them jump, but to really inflict terror on an audience is incredibly difficult. There’s a reason that great horror movies are treasured by those who love a good scare. It’s not just the visceral thrill—it’s also the fact that it’s so rare.

One of the standout examples of a truly magnificent horror film is Robert Wise’s The Haunting from 1963. This is a film that exudes more atmosphere than any ten slasher movies or knock-off alleged scary films. The Haunting is a relatively low-budget film, contains almost no special effects, and has only five actors who are in the film for any length of time. There is no giant monster, no ghost, no dude in a rubber suit. Nada. And yet this is one of the scariest film experiences ever created.

The film is based on the Shirley Jackson novel “The Haunting of Hill House.” A researcher into psychic phenomena, Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), has rented a house reported to be cursed since the time of its building. Several people have died around the house, and always in terrible or unusual circumstances. His goal is to discover a true psychic phenomenon, a true ghostly occurrence or spiritual sighting.

To help him, he enlists three people. The first is Eleanor “Nell” Lance (Julie Harris), a frail woman who can sense the presence of spirits. Nell has little life experience, having spent the last decade caring for her ailing, overbearing mother. The recent loss of her mother has left Nell particularly fragile, in no small part because Nell’s sister, who she lives with, blames her for the mother’s death. The second arrival is Theodora (Claire Bloom), who has no last name, at least publicly. Theo is a witch of sorts, and also something of a sensitive. Third is Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), a skeptic who hopes to inherit Hill House some day.

Almost immediately, strange happenings start around the house. Noises that only some of the people hear, terrifying thumping footsteps, doorknobs moving on their own, and voices all begin to plague the new tenants. Particularly affected is Eleanor, who is more sensitive to such things than she thought. Eleanor herself is strangely attracted to Hill House just as she is completely terrified by it. While frightened of the terror and unexplainable noises, Eleanor, for the first time, feels as if she belongs somewhere. She is also attracted to Markway, and is disturbed when his wife, Grace (Lois Maxwell) appears.

Much of the film takes place in Eleanor’s head in the form of her thoughts. These start merely as her thoughts but quickly become more and more disturbing. One of her final voiceover segments is brilliantly directed, particularly for the time in which the film was created. While Luke, Theo, and Dr. Markway argue, they slowly fade into black while Eleanor is brightly lit. Her inner monologue begins, and the voices of the others drown out.

Robert Wise, who began his career doing uncredited filming on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, is perhaps better known for his musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music. As will be apparent when I get to that particular film, I dislike musicals in general and that one in specific with a burning passion. However, The Haunting is so good, and so good specifically because of the direction and genius of Robert Wise that I can forgive him Austrian children singing about deer and sunshine.

What makes the film so good is precisely the fact that nothing is ever shown. The closest we get to a real spook is a rickety spiral staircase, a few statues, and some bulging woodwork. All of the scares here are done with magnificent camera work and incredible use of sound. There is truly only one great jump moment, and this comes very near the end of the film. Despite this, the film is oppressively frightening. Wise uses camera angles and tricks to convey the fear and paranoia of the people in the house.

True terror is nearly impossible to achieve in any audience. Scare ‘em, sure, but to genuinely create a feeling of dread and paranoia in the people watching the film is difficult, and because of this, the gold standard for horror movies. If you can truly get your audience to feel as if their own life is haunted during the watching of your film, you have succeeded in no small respect, and that is what Wise does here.

One of my favorite movies of all time, El Espinazo del Diablo, begins with a line about the nature of the spiritual visitors who plague Eleanor: “What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.” Hill House seems to be all these things, but my favorite of these is “an emotion suspended in time.” Hill House wants Eleanor, just as Eleanor’s mother wanted her, just as former resident Abigail Crain wanted her caretaker. Hill House, and Eleanor, and the film itself, are all filled with pent-up emotions that both cannot be revealed and must be released. Is the house truly haunted? Is Eleanor manifesting psychic abilities to remain in the house and become the center of attention? These questions are not answered. Also unanswered is the question as to whether Eleanor—or any of us—truly belong anywhere, or are deserving of love and acceptance.

Special effects would have killed this film. What the audience imagines is always more terrifying than what they are shown. Anyone looking to make a scary film that actually scares someone should watch this one over and over. Skip the stupid remake. This one is the one that asks you to walk alone.

Why to watch The Haunting: True terror.
Why not to watch: You need to have special effects, gore, and a guy dressed like Satan.

Remakes Suck!

Films: The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Wicker Man
Format: DVDs from personal collection on laptop.

First of all, I apologize for being a bit late for this post.

I realize that it’s dismissive to say straight off that all remakes suck. There are a number of remakes that are as good or better than the original versions. For instance, the 1980s versions of The Fly and The Thing are far more interesting than their original versions made in the 1950s. However, in the main, remakes don’t have the same power or the same impact as the original versions of a given story. I’ve had a number of students tell me how much they loved the film Disturbia. Good film, but I liked it better when it was directed by Hitchcock and called Rear Window.


With that in mind, I selected today’s films carefully. Both have had remakes done within the last couple of years. Both of them, in their original forms, are classics worthy of watching and rewatching, and both of them have remakes that have ranked as massive jokes. The Day the Earth Stood Still began life as a hopeful prayer for world peace and turned into a trendy environmental message with a ridiculously oversized killer robot. The Wicker Man, once a disturbing little mystery with religious overtones turned into a badly realized treatise on militant feminism.

No matter, since both of the originals are readily available. In fact, one of the only reasons to buy the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that at least one edition of the movie comes with the original on the disk as well.

TDTESS (sorry, the acronym is easier) begins with the landing of a flying saucer on a baseball field in Washington D.C. A stranger (Michael Rennie) emerges and claims to be coming in peace, but when he pulls out a strange device from his suit, an overzealous soldier shoots him in the shoulder. This brings forth Gort, a massive robot with the ability to melt anything it looks at, an effect that still works pretty well today. The wounded spaceman is taken to a hospital and patched up, where we learn a number of interesting things about him.

For one thing, he is considerably older than he looks, heals faster than he should, and is refreshingly naïve about Earth realities. He wants to meet with all of the leaders of all of the countries of the Earth, a reality that almost certainly couldn’t have happened in the 1950s, and wouldn’t happen today. Rather than wait around, the spaceman (his name is Klaatu, but he goes by Mr. Carpenter), escapes the hospital and takes a room at a local boarding house.

It’s here that I start to understand the desire of some filmmakers to redo classic stories like this one. TDTESS is hopelessly a product of its time. At the boarding house, Klaatu/Carpenter meets two people of interest: Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son, Bobby (Billy Gray). Klaatu/Carpenter spends a day with Bobby while Helen spends time with the man looking to marry her, a reporter named Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe). On their walk around Washington, Bobby and Carpenter pay a visit on Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), a thinly-veiled Albert Einstein.

As Carpenter learns about the world, he eventually confesses his identity to Helen, who works with him to help attempt to bring peace to the world.

There are also things made funny simply because of what we know now as opposed to what we knew then. Watching doctors talk about the advanced medicine of Klaatu’s planet while lighting up cigarettes—normal back then—is hysterically funny now. Klaatu claims to have come from 250,000,000 miles away, which translates as to a location within our own solar system. And that kid…he’s easily the dumbest human being ever filmed. Given perfectly flawless diamonds by Klaatu, diamonds the quality of which have never been seen before on Earth, the kid can’t figure out that he’s dealing with the spaceman, but is convinced that Klaatu/Carpenter is a jewel thief. He doesn’t even ferret this nugget of information out when he sees Carpenter walk to the spaceship and signal Gort the robot (Lock Martin) and then walk into the spaceship. Seriously, this is a very stupid kid. Professor Barnhardt is not specifically a professor of anything but SCIENCE!, and he seems to know everything about everything. Finally, any mother who left her kid with a guy she’d known for one day is just asking for her kid to be abused. The wires holding Patricia Neal when Gort carriers her are especially evident as well.

Still, this is a powerful and moving film, and far superior to its most recent incarnation. If nothing else, it’s a marvelous vision of human behavior, particularly how quickly public opinion changes and alters based on what happens with Klaatu.


Like TDTESS, The Wicker Man is also very much a product of the year in which it was made and also had a vastly substandard remake made recently. Also like TDTESS, The Wicker Man features a man desperately out of his element and trying to make sense of a strange and incomprehensible situation. A police sergeant named Howie (Edward Woodward) is sent to a small island off the coast of England. A young girl named Rowan Morrison has been reported missing.

However, when Sergeant Howie gets to the island, he discovers that no one has heard of the girl or recognizes her picture. He also discovers that the island itself is home to a number of very strange people. At the inn, before being shown to his room, Howie endures a song from the villagers about the innkeeper’s daughter (Britt Ekland). The song paints her as the town slut, although she doesn’t seem to mind it. Outside, Howie sees a group of people copulating on the lawn. That night the landlord’s daughter, Willow, attempts to seduce Howie.

Stranger for Howie, as he investigates the next morning, he discovers that the people on Summerisle no longer worship the Christian God, a terrible thing for Howie, who is a devout Christian. He sees a group of young women dancing naked around a fire, again something far beyond his ken. He finally discovers that Rowan Morrison has died, but can find no record of a death certificate, and the people of the island are convinced that the girl has been reincarnated as a march hare.

Eventually, he tracks down Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), who appears to be as insane as everyone else on the island. From Summerisle, he discovers the source of the religion. Summerisle’s grandfather brought back the ancient religion to the island as a way to give the people of the island something that would make them happier and to have a greater connection to nature.

As Howie continues his investigation, fueled mostly by the discovery of a march hare’s body in Rowan Morrison’s casket, things become stranger and stranger, eventually leading to a staggering climax, one of the true great endings ever filmed.

The Wicker Man is unquestionably a product of the time in which it was made. There’s plenty of folk music and nudity as befits a bizarre little film at the beginning of the 1970s. It’s a heck of a thriller as well as an interesting commentary on the nature of belief and the power of the same. Skip the ridiculous remake, but don’t miss this one.

Why to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still: A grand commentary on human nature and the desire for peace.
Why not to watch: As good as it is, it’s very dated.

Why to watch The Wicker Man: One of the greatest endings ever, and probably the most pro-Pagan film ever made.
Why not to watch: You’re easily offended by non-Christian material.