Oh Woe is Me! (1993, Godard)

"There is always something dirty... degrading even, in exposing the truth."

It must be a whole different experience to be French when watching Godard, because of the need for subtitles; he really takes advantage of the disconnect between words as expression and symbols. His movies are half-book to begin with, sauced up in quotes and abstracted alphabet. He uses the English subtitles to teach us French through repitition, running certain mythic ideas over and over, wanting us to mull on them. And we should, because when we do the following scenes create a nice sense of disaffect. We keep waiting for a narrative to begin, Godard outpaces our attention span, then brings us back to the "one" again. The words go one way, the action another, and the subtitles remind us of the difference.

The young regularly chase the old in Godard's 1980s, early 1990s films, reflecting his newfound sense of middle-age wisdom; he's amazed people want to learn from him, and he loves to be chased. Godard wants the youth of Paris to be mad as hell and ready to fight for causes, but he no longer believes in the causes themselves, or in causes at all, except in that fighting for them is "good for the youth" of which he is no longer part. But he's glad they associate him with causes, because his cold old bones are warmed by their political fire; but that's all, as soon as they leave his side to chase the next rainbow, he's back to smoking and reading the script. This is the adult Godard; he's switched from angry to fond of anger; emotion of any strength can be fire in which to forge liberation of the self; one can't free a society that is nothing but shackles by definition. Always it's back to the one, not creating as Lacan said, "new masters," via championing some explicitly rendered social cause. For Godard, all actions and points fade fast in the lapping waves, a new idea is already coming into focus as the next one is cast off; hold onto the last wave too long and you wind up bedraggled on the shore of dour daddy dogma.

Instead Godard is in full meditation on the transience of the human experience against the vastness of history and of art, particularly of writings by Marx, Nietszche or variants: "False statements are dead weights we carry for years." The mis en scene of Oh Woe is Me is a torrid soap opera for adults, a lot of standing around in fields and following each other, but the text is philosophy 666: people quote books and then their partner answers them in the dramatic manner of as if they were fighting, It's unbelievably hilarious, especially if you're the only one laughing in a room full of bored hipsters. in the U.S. we tend to think of being "weird and free" as putting on a false nose and gobbling at the moon. To us, Godard is art and therefore not to be laughed with, at or otherwise, unless the joke is bawdy and broad. Only a few directors in the deadpan tradition exist: Carpenter, Godard, Lynch. Godard I would say is the most diabolical. Lynch is the most transcendental, Carpenter the most satirical and the most deadpan as well: I'm still waiting for people to share my love for the hilarity that is Ghosts of Mars.

One of the trenchant questions asked in Oh Woe is Me: "Did you know that the communist manifesto was published the same year as Alice in Wonderland." This time he's much more on the Alice side than Marx's, or rather he's seen that there is no difference. This three disc set should be considered essential buying for anyone who professes to love Godard based on Breathless and/or Contempt. The four films in the set show that if Godard indeed had lost his sense of humor in his post-1968 communist fetish era, he got it back, with a vengeance. There's so many great Godard films still not on DVD. My Argentine ex-wife was all hammering at me about how great Nouvelle Vague (1990), I couldn't find any mention of it for a long time and tried to convince her it didn't even exist. But it's out there, along with MADE IN U.S.A and so many great others.... the question is, will Lionsgate emerge as the great new force in classic foreign DVD releasing with these awesome directors set? I must say I'm pretty pleased to be able to get four great Godard films for the price of 1 Criterion.

And speak of the devil, will Criterion ever stop re-releasing stuff that's been out on cheaper labels for decades, like Bottle Rocket and the Spy Who Came in from the Cold, or blu-raying their old catalogue, long enough to try and put this stuff out before Koch Lorber snatches them up and does their usual half-assed jobs, or worse, no one does anything at all? Pardon me, pardon my anger. I suppose it would be no use to stage a guerilla protest at the Criterion offices? In the name of Marxes Karl, Groucho et Hilliard! as Filmbo's Chick Magnet points out, we certainly couldn't do any worse than NYU.

Philip José Farmer Crosses the River

When it came to Hollywood, Philip José Farmer (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) never had the luck of SF and fantasy writers like Stephen King or Philip K. Dick. His interactions with the film industry always turned out poorly.

His terrific novella, The Alley Man, about a Neanderthal living unobtrusively in the contemporary world, was repeatedly optioned, but never produced. One of his best novels, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, introducing "Riverworld," a place where all of mankind has been reincarnated along the banks of an enormous river, was utterly botched and blanded out when filmed as a feature-length pilot (broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel) for a series that was never picked up. As Wikipedia notes with grim understatement, "A number of liberties are taken in the film with regards to the source material. The original hero [Sir Richard Francis Burton] and villain are replaced by other characters, the timeline of events is compressed (including the learning of languages which is eliminated entirely), and the nature of the resurrection process and food and clothing production are altered."

In short, everything interesting and original in Farmer’s Riverworld stories was either altered or eliminated altogether.

Which is really too bad, because Farmer was one of the smartest, funniest, and most conceptually original writers to work in American SF. He was among the most experimental SF writers of his generation, the first American SF writer to deal seriously with the taboo areas of religion and sex. He saw the hidden depths in pulp fiction, and wrote serious "biographies" of pulp characters like Tarzan and Doc Savage. Venus on the Half Shell, a novel written in the style of, and attributed to, "Kilgore Trout," a fictional character created by Kurt Vonnegut, sold better than anything published by Farmer under his own name.

And so, sadly, there are no great or even good Farmer adaptations to which I can refer you. The closest film ever came to even approximating a Farmer book was George Pal’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), one of Pal’s lesser efforts that was made in consultation with Farmer (as Doc’s "official" biographer). As in the case of the Riverworld pilot, further entries in the Doc Savage series were anticipated, but the first film, compromised by the campiness that was fashionable at that time, did too poorly to warrant them. One more sad fact via Wikipedia: "Another script was written by Philip José Farmer, and included a meeting between Doc and a retired Sherlock Holmes in 1936, but it was never filmed."

The New York Times obit is here.

Oil Painters of the World Unite!

I just made the discovery today that one of my most treasured "classic" films, a relic from the deepest, most Oedipal-laced fluid of my childhood memory well, is finally getting a DVD release through Criterion's ancillary Eclipse label: Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII. I doubt there's a film buff who writes for or reads this site that has yet to enjoy this comfy mock-drama period piece, but I find it interesting that the movie is only just now being digitally printed, and in a fairly inconspicuous format. Eclipse doesn't restore prints in the painstaking manner of Criterion's flagship releases, and Henry also comes in the standard bundle, with a few other historically-minded Korda productions from the same era; in other words, it's likely to be gobbled up by fans of Korda and the magnificent Charles Laughton as voraciously as Henry devours and discards those turkey legs, but causal moviehound parents looking for something saucy and vintage to screen for the kids on Sunday afternoon will likely pass it up. This is a damn shame, because some of the fondest memories I have from my preadolescent years (read: some of the only memories that do not trigger debilitating conniptions of vaguely sexual self-loathing) involve curling up on the den sofa and watching Charles Laughton chew and ham his way through a sloppy script.

Once upon a time Laughton was my favorite actor. In addition to being a journalism geek and a band-o in high school I was a drama nerd, and participated in a number of (admittedly hideous) local productions, including the countywide-renown Children's Theater, which staged adaptations of books like "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Velveteen Rabbit" for elementary school classes. Our cast and crew were expected to perform, in front of an easily-distracted audience, in some cases 10 times a week for three or four months. What I admired in Laughton, who I obviously never observed on stage, was his ineffable presence; his ability to leverage the girth of both his body and public persona -- the stodgy, puffy, playful, and British "Charles Laughton" personality -- into a role. It was something that -- as a fairly belligerent and overweight 16-year-old -- I could see myself doing as I struggled to make a bit part interesting week after week.

Laughton would never lose himself in a role; he'd simply find the character's attributes lurking within his own psyche and mold an appropriate version of his personality (or, at the very least, the personality he shared with the public...the darker side of the actor, particularly in regard to his sexual orientation, has been well documented by Simon Callow and others). When I think of Mutiny on the Bounty or even the Hunchback of Notre Dame it's not images of Captain Bligh or Quasimodo that erupt in my mind, but of Laughton relishing his own performances, allowing Bligh's sneering imperiousness to drip from his tongue or lingering nearly too long on some pathetic lamentation from the resident of the Notre Dame cathedral. I can nearly see him in the make-up chair, his face stony and his bottom lip curled up, like an antiquarian bust of Caesar. As with the best actors in the theatrical tradition, Laughton brought the vigorous heart of the backstage to the proscenium.

By the time I reached high school and the small stage there, I had a number of Laughton tours-de-forces under my cinematic belt -- including three films in particular, also favorites of my dad, the key scenes of which still blossom in my mind with the mention of Laughton's name. The first is Henry, of course, which I'll be happy to acquire in May. The other two are Witness for the Prosecution -- an oft-revived Agatha Christie noir ably shot by Billy Wilder wherein Laughton plays crippled, steals swigs of booze when his nurse isn't looking, and gets marvelously duped by Marlene Dietrich -- and the seldom seen Ruggles of Red Gap, which shows a much softer side of the actor as he portrays a befuddled uppercrust butler forced to migrate to the old west when his employer loses a card game (to Charlie Ruggles, no less!). I'll always cherish Ruggles predominantly for its denouement, wherein the protagonist recites the Gettysburg Address in an effort to poeticize Americana in the midst of some tense savagery. Laughton was a consummate recitationist (I still hold close to the vest my LP copy of his "Storyteller" album, wherein he intimately reads from the Bible and The Dharma Bums while on a book tour), which may also serve to get at his élan; to him, performance was a gesture of entertainment, a means of sharing some crucial piece of personal information with an audience but also, in a more crude sense, simply having fun with a crowd. Exchanges like the iconic one in Henry wherein he plays cards in bed with Anne of Cleves on their wedding night (played raucously by Laughton's wife Elsa Lanchester) contain such joviality (not to mention sublimated innuendo) that one can't help but smile, enraptured.

Charles Laughton himself said it best when responding to the Marlon Brando's and such of the world in the wake of the Stanislavski generation: "A method actor gives you a photograph. A traditional actor gives you an oil painting." I think he meant this to be vindictive, but it's a remarkably astute observation about how the relationship between artifice and verisimilitude has shifted over the years, in film as well as many other performing arts (it's also ironic, since Laughton portrayed Rembrandt himself in a biopic that will also be included on the Eclipse set). Think of how many times you've read a critic browbeating an actor for seeming inauthentic. And yet authenticity was never a priority for Laughton; he seemed more concerned with pressing the pen of his star power to a film's center and gracefully marking his signature. To draw a clumsy contrast, we marvel at how an actor like Sean Penn brings Harvey Milk back to life: but we delight in how Rembrandt's story enlivens the power coil of Laughton.

It's hard for a guy like me to choose. Marlon Brando's photography (or, for that matter, Dustin Hoffman's, etc) is filled with such ferocious energy and cerebral angst that it makes one want to become a card-carrying methodist. But occasionally the pictures feel over-exposed, painfully visceral -- they rub the senses raw. In moments like those, I know what to do. I get comfortable on the couch, stash a couple bags of fruit snacks in my pocket (another childhood addiction) and go home to the fluidity and dexterity of Uncle Charles' inimitable brushstrokes.

Women in Wonderland, Part 5 - Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)

Every one of Henry Selick's four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a hole in a tree that leads him, Alice-style, from his own reality, Halloween Town, to the very different alt-reality of Christmas Town. In James and the Giant Peach (1996), young James, shrinking like Alice, abandons human reality for a bug's reality and travels across the ocean in the company of a grasshopper, a centipede, a spider, a ladybug, and an earthworm. Selick's mostly live-action Monkeybone (2001) leans heavily on the Orpheus model, with artist-hero Brendan Fraser journeying to the Land of the Dead, and Whoopi Goldberg playing a variation on the same role (Death) that Maria Casarès played in the Orpheus of Jean Cocteau. Coraline (2009) represents a return to the Alice model, with a little girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who crosses over into a strange looking-glass world.

Looked at from the perspective of stop motion animation, alone, Coraline is a masterpiece. And the 3-D only makes it better. (WARNING - If, like me, you are a fan of both stop motion and 3-D, you owe it to yourself to see this film ASAP. There has never been anything quite like it, and as of this Friday, February 27th, most, if not all, of the theaters presently showing Coraline in 3-D will be dumping it to make room for the Jonas Brothers 3-D concert film.) Certain sequences, such as a circus act featuring what looks like 50 individually animated white mice wearing uniforms and performing in synchronized motion, must be seen in 3-D to be fully appreciated. Stop motion, unlike CGI, gives a film a hand-made quality, and the fact that Selick not only wrote and directed (from a novella by Neil Gaiman) but designed this production in his own distinctive style - free from the influence of Tim Burton - makes it the most personal of his features to date.

Unlike McKean & Gaiman's MirrorMask, Selick's Coraline takes pains to ground its story in the real and familiar before plunging into the singular and surreal. The character designs of Coraline, her mother, and her father reminded me of Art Clokey's soothing Davey and Goliath. Coraline's problem - her work-at-home writer parents are too busy at their jobs to give her all the attention she needs - is one that a lot of kids can identify with.

So one day Coraline follows a white mouse (her White Rabbit) through the wall of her Psycho-like house to Other World. There she meets "Other Mother," a more attentive version of her real mother (both voiced by Teri Hatcher), who has created this world and populated it with looking glass versions of Coraline's father ("Other Father," with Coraline, above) and neighbors, all of whom seem at first to be much-improved versions of their real-world counterparts. Best of all, everyone in Other World seems to have no purpose other than to entertain and cater to Coraline. Only a stray cat (Keith David) who has the ability to travel between worlds is there to warn Coraline that things in Other World may not be as wonderful as they first appear.

The devolution of Other World from something bright and wondrous into something dark and scary is paralleled by the changes in Other Mother herself. At first, the only physical difference between Coraline's real-world mother and Other Mother is the buttons she has sewn on for eyes (above). As the story progresses, and Other World turns out to be a trap for children as dangerous as the Gingerbread House (or Pleasure Island in Pinocchio), the appearance of Other Mother becomes increasingly spider-like and monstrous (below). Why is Other Mother so interested in Coraline? As the cat says, "She wants something to love. Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well."

The film is so rich in archetypal imagery and situations that it's open to a multitude of interpretations. The first and most obvious is the one highlighted in advertisements for the film, "Be careful what you wish for." Another is, "Don't always trust appearances. When something seems too good to be true, it probably is." Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Coraline learns that her real-life caregivers aren't as bad as she thought they were.

Other World seems so much more colorful and fun than the real world to begin with, but it eventually turns creepy, dark, and life-threatening. Here, one might see a parallel to certain drugs, and in Coraline a not-so-subliminal warning re the dangers of substance abuse.

But, deeper than that, Coraline points to the danger of retreating completely from a shared reality (koinos kosmos) into a private reality (idios kosmos). It's the same subject as Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, in which an artist (Max von Sydow) is tempted by his personal demons to retreat from the real world into a horrific alternate reality. His primary temptation, typically for stories of this type, is a doppleganger of someone who abandoned him in the real world, a mistress (Ingrid Thulin) who the film suggests committed suicide. Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is yet another variation on this theme (artist tempted into alt-reality by ghost princess).

Fortunately - especially for the children in the audience - Coraline has a happy ending that is appropriate, moving, and earned. If the imaginative Mr. Selick never makes another film in his life, his reputation as a master is secured.

Subtextual Oscar Highlights

The Oscars are over, and we can all go back to brooding. The big moments last night were the smallest, most notably the MILK money shots inserted so casually into the big "romantic moments of Oscar" montage; no trumpets or banners celebrating Oscar's boldness for this move, and that's just the point. Subliminal steps have the biggest eventual effect and this one should prove a serious crack in the iceberg.

And having been married to an Argentine and seen the Oscars down in Buenos Aires once, I can vouch for how happy Cruz's winning and subsequent speaking in Spanish will make much of the "rest" of the world; again, it's the little details that matter.

Other big highlights: Penn's hitting the church ladies where it hurts, right in their grandchildren! Winslet calling out for her dad, and that great shot of him hiding way in the back, slumped underneath his hat with an impish grin looking just like Jack Nicholson! So that's where she gets it.

Bad points: Bollywood merging with neo-American Idol-style r&b in that big "Jai Ho" number. I'm already cringing at the thought of Bollywood's colorful otherness and joyful music being co-opted, mulched down and Super-Sized in the American media machinery. Garth Brooks sings R.D. Burman? You know it's coming.

Bride of the Joker: Thoughts on Jolie

As we prepare for Oscar once again, we see Angelina Jolie nominated for being in Clint's "craftsmanship" film, CHANGELING. I heartily admire Jolie but, for my money, she's never found a part worthy of her since her Oscar winning character Lisa in GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999).

The equivalent of that live wire performance this year isn't CHANGELING but rather THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: Heath Ledger as the Joker. Consider the similarities: Both films feature lead protagonists choked by the duty of being the "moral hero" while the supporting "heavy" not only steals the show, they actually mutate and bend the very picture around them. Both films have directors who got their names making edgy one-word title indies (Chris Nolan for MEMENTO, James Mangold for HEAVY) and have since gone mainstream. In each instance they let their supporting star run with the ball, or carry the edginess torch--while the rest of the cast work on satisfying the mundane moral expectations of the general admission masses. Without Jolie, GIRL would be little more than a Lifetime movie of the week; and without Ledger, DARK KNIGHT would be just a lot of "poor little rich kid" Bruce Wayne showing off his expensive toys while glumly rasping about civil justice.

Kim Morgan has a great tribute to Jolie up on her Sunset Gun site, imagining how much better Jolie would have been in that role Anne Hathaway beat her out for in the People's Choice Awards (RACHEL GETTING MARRIED):

It also occurred to me later that Hathaway's self-absorbed, drug-addicted, younger-sister character in Rachel Getting Married (for which she is also nominated for an Oscar this year) was such a perfect Jolie role, it's a shame she didn't take Anne's place. Jolie is such an expert at chewing up the scenery like a hungry lioness -- think of her small part in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, in which the very sight of her wry smile, androgynous sexuality and eye patch caused star Gwyneth Paltrow to almost vanish into thin air -- that to have seen her tripping around that wedding, crashing into trees, tearing into her mother, sexing it up in the basement, and hollering at the musicians to shut the hell up would have been a thing of rage-fueled, self-consumed beauty. And that toast. Think of how uncomfortable and yet, strangely turned on the wedding party would have been by this girl who spouts about re-hab (it's all about her!) but might possibly burn the house down if you don't fucking listen!

Right on baby! If there's ever another Catwoman in the Batman franchise, there's only one woman who can play it. The question is, will she? Will she stop pursuing the Oscar baited period martyr parts and big budget action walk-ons and start really messing up our minds, picking up where INTERRUPTED left off? Will she resume burning/widening the big blazing hole in the celluloid mirror? Or is there too much at stake now that she's matriarch to a huge international goodwill cabal? Can't she do both?

Yes. Yes she can... beyond the petty duality of Oscar's "admiration" for prestige pictures and secret love of genuine hole-burning bad girl authenticity lies the plum... the Catwoman that will finally and forever defeat the caped crusader and destroy Gotham. The time has come for Angelina Jolie to stop saving the world and resume burning it, for keeps!

(read a similar rant from July 2008)

OMF Godard There's a Hitch in my stitch

Over time it becomes more and more obvious that as a species humans really aren’t much more than a bunch of monkeys. And our monkey brains, motivated with banana dreams of sex and dominance, exist presently in the weird position of having to submit our furry natures to cool white plastic and wires and perfectly measured sheets of metal; that is, the sophisticated process of technoligized civilization. Only since it hasn’t actually ironed out all the wrinkles in our messy monkey brains the arbiters of civilization wind up obsessing over how things should be, ought to be; they hope that by talking about things in sparkling, cleansed terms everything will eventually become wonderful: i.e. the mindset of “appropriateness”, which of course eventually just turns into another pernicious form of passive monkey dominance. The best movies often bring this tension between civilization and crude desire directly to the surface due to an explicit, and, one often learns, illicit combination of technology and flesh. From Kubrick to Peckinpa to Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard, the icky socio-zoological primate facts are right there for us to watch, shaped and edited into dreams of light. And it is fun knowing these directors often actually had the problems thematically inherent in their films happening right on the sets, with squirmy results.

Last year two books—Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Richard Brody, Metropolitan Books, May 2008, 720 pgs.), and Spellbound by Beauty Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (Donald Spoto, Harmony Books, Oct 2008, 352 pgs.)—gave us an intimate, sordid and creepy view of human nature on the job; the ways power can corrupt; how film directors often live on a very gray line, at an even odder remove from life than writers do. Brody’s book Everything Is Cinema is a rather dense but rewarding book about possibly the most important director of the last fifty years. I remember the first time I saw one of Godard’s movies very distinctly, a short in an omnibus collection of various directors called Aria (1987). Two women weilding knives wander around a gym filled with dark muscular men pumping iron who seem to be totally oblivious as the women mime stabbing first one weight lifter, then another. I thought, wow, this is really weirdly amazing, but I couldn’t quite say why; in fact I've never really been able say why Godard's movies are so good. In any case I soon learned the homoeroticism of the piece was something of an anomaly for Godard, since most of his famous films usually concern remote glassy whorish girls who think in terms of pulp and luxury items (with the exception of the shallow Maoist girl in La Chinoise, who is simply unreachable). Godard’s reputation over time has slumped for a lot of critics but not for me. His bizarre mix and matching of tones, poetry and gags, politics and absurd horrors, still make for some of the most exciting movie-watching I’ve ever experienced. Who cares if statements like “we’re the children of Marx and Coca-Cola” are really nothing more than shallow sixties shorthand when you get Anna Karina juking it up in the fine film Vivre Sa Vie, or Brigitte Bardot wearing the same dark wig as Karina had in the earlier one, bickering with her husband Paul in a vague passive aggressive scene that goes on for nearly twenty minutes in Contempt?



Of course we may occasionally stop to wonder why, for instance, Godard kept casting his wife Karina and every other actress he got his hands on in the roles of whores, molls, betrayers and robots. Especially since the Karina we see in the films—a slim lovely little creature—doesn’t seem so much like a brazen as she does a game girl playing for the camera. In Brody’s book we learn that Godard, frustrated by desire, generally tended to think of women as being shallow and unromantic; when women didn’t want to go to bed with him or get married this usually confirmed for him that they were politically empty and artistically corrupt. Shortly after their marriage Karina cheated on him with an actor during work on different director’s picture; Godard managed to keep her from leaving him, but started punishing her passive aggressively in the plots of his films. For instance we learn that in Vivre Sa Vie, Karina’s character, a whore who abandoned both her husband and child for unfulfilled dreams of fame, was originally supposed to live at the end; after the infidelity Godard decided to kill the character off, which, amazingly, so disturbed the young Karina she attempted suicide! His obsession was such that he tried to foist Karina onto everything around him for some time, including Bardot’s image in Contempt. By the time of their last film together, he made Karina’s working conditions as difficult as possible, no longer speaking to her directly, but using intermediaries, which often had her in tears. There are so many twists and turns to Godard’s ideology, sexuality and aesthetics (he developed a surprisingly knotty and nutty kind of anti-Semitism in the eighties and nineties for instance) that I could never do the man justice, so I highly recommend Brody’s admirable book. It’s odd knowing that the strangest most whimsical choices in Godard’s movies derived from a kind of iron-hard, ironically un-ironic seriousness.

Godard’s fixation on Anna Karina of course naturally echoes that of Alfred Hitchcock’s for the image of cool blonds, as embodied by Grace Kelly and the sleek, bird-like Tippi Hedren, the last in the line. Although at this late date most of us probably already think we know everything we ever needed to about Hitchcock’s guilty feelings toward women Donald Spoto, the best selling author of one Hitchcock bio (The Dark Side Of Genius) and an important book of criticism of the director’s work, has returned to the subject again with Spellbound by Beauty. It’s a slim book, conceptually and structurally. Each chapter discusses Hitchcock’s treatment of actresses during the production of his many films, which gives the book a spotty and episodic feel. We get speculations about whether or not Hitchcock, as he told many people, really had sex only one time in his life, resulting in his daughter Patricia, and how much this may or may not have played into the dark subject matter of the movies; his treatment of actresses as mannequins in need of careful make overs; his manner of keeping them on edge with disconcerting dirty jokes or by whispering obscene things in their ears just before the cameras started to roll. Spoto quotes so many people using the word “sadist” to describe Hitchock's attitude that at times we may find ourselves wanting to quibble with the term. The best, most interesting, most troubling things in the book, though, are the later portions involving Tippi Hedren. Htichock, to control Hedren, apparently took to spying on her, had staff follow her and keep tabs; was jealous of the attention she gave her daughter; made it clear to male costars Rod Taylor and Sean Connery that under no circumstances should they even think about touching her between takes. This developed into very explicit sexual harassment. He used his power over her career (she was bound in a seven year contract to him) as a crude way of keeping her under his thumb, trying to force her into a sexual relationship with him, whatever that would have meant for Hitchcock. Spellbound is not a great book. The insights, as Spoto sums them up, seem uncomfortably banal (“In giving form to his fantasies,” Spoto writes, “Hitchcock explored and exposed things not only in himself but also in others…” etc.) yet it's a quick entertaining read for Hitchcock geeks, if only to get at the statements he took from the actresses themselves. Through their words we spy that very recognizable type, the director as a modern version of the feudal monkey—-he doesn’t use clubs or swords or guns to make others serve him, but cameras.

Most films, I think, tend to fall into two categories: either they’re medieval fairy tales wherein ancient bromides are slicked up with the latest technological suavity or else they’re consciously arty, delicate refined trinkets which seem like little more than an attempt to efface the yuck of life through the rigors of taste and stylistic restraint. Aren’t the best films the ones that allow our ongoing battles with our enfoibled natures to play out directly on the screen? Maybe it requires being in the thick of those nasties to bring any art to them. One wouldn't think so, seems counter intuitive as they say, but literary and cinematic history is simply chock full of men who fall short of the glory of their own art. I should name names here but I’m not going to. Maybe that’s because the oppositions I’ve set up, and which emerge not fully thought out from both the books I read, simply show the blurry sliding of uncomfortability that occurs whenever you try to foist your own unconscious moral qualms on very individualized experiences.

Women in Wonderland, Part 4 - MirrorMask, Pan's Labyrinth, and the "Strangeness" Factor

Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (above) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth were released within a year of each other. Both are women-in-wonderland tales. Pan’s Labyrinth is about a little girl who flees from her evil Spanish-fascist stepfather into a woodsy fairyland. MirrorMask is about a ‘tween with a dying mom who enters a dream world in order to save her.

Pan’s Labyrinth has some exceptional fantasy sequences, but is also in many ways clichéd and trite. The evil stepfather is a one-dimensional moustache-twirling stock villain. The actress playing the little girl is not very expressive. Worst of all is the fairytale kingdom at the film’s end where the little girl becomes a princess. It looks like a Burger King commercial!

MirrorMask starts slowly - you can more or less skip the first 20 minutes taking place in the "real" world - but once the girl, Helena, crosses over into McKean’s computer-animated dream world, the film becomes something genuinely rich and strange. The screenplay is by Neil Gaiman (author of the book on which Coraline is based). Gaiman’s frequent collaborator, Dave McKean not only co-wrote the story and directed it, but is responsible for the film’s production design. The originality of McKean’s imagery - part Hieronymous Bosch/part modern Surrealism - is what makes the film something to see.

Pan’s Labyrinth opened to nearly universal acclaim. Stephen King called it "the best fantasy film since The Wizard of Oz." It won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Makeup. (The cinematography and creature makeup was indeed quite good.)

But the more original MirrorMask was virtually ignored. How come?

Harold Bloom in The Western Canon points to "singularity" and "strangeness" as marks of truly great art. Artists like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, and Dante represent a distinct and disorienting break from the writers that preceded them. They teach us how to read them. Just as genuinely original film artists like Antonioni, Brakhage, Tarkovsky, Godard, or Lynch - all disorienting on a first viewing - teach us how to watch their films. Singularity and strangeness may prevail in the long term, but in the short term they can be an audience turn-off.

MirrorMask was a little too strange to be immediately popular. Its imagery is closer to Max Ernst than to Walt Disney. Instead of the usual John-Williamsesque music that accompanies most fantasy films these days, it has an abstract jazz score. Even the film’s "reality" sequences are expressionistically stylized, taking place in a sort of faux-Fellini circus world. Audiences need something familiar to hold onto before they take off into a dream world, and MirrorMask fails to provide them with that.

In the following clip, Helena has been captured by the Queen of Shadows (above left), a dark mirror version of her real-world mother. (As noted in our Psycho post, alternate realities are often inhabited by distorted mirror versions of the loved ones the protagonists leave behind.) The Shadow Queen’s clockwork handmaidens hypnotize Helena and transform her into a simulacrum of the Queen’s own dark daughter.

With a tip of the hat to Burt Bacharach and Karen Carpenter. Enjoy!

Is Cheeta an Imposter?

As reported in the Los Angeles Times - In Hollywood, "even the animals lie about their age."

Cheeta may not be 75 years old. He may not even be "Cheeta."

Hotter Younger Sister Thing #7: Gail Patrick as Cornelia Bullock in MY MAN GODFREY

I know Cornelia isn't necessarily the "younger" sister in Gregory La Cava's classic screwball comedy, MY MAN GODFREY (1936), but she was born three years earlier (than Lombard) and damn is she hot. Sometimes I lose days, weeks, of my life thinking about how hot she is, and what that means about me that I'm drawn to self-possessed sadists. Kim Morgan was the first to point out how much hotter GODFREY would be if William Powell went for cobra-like Cornelia instead of Irene. Somehow, that makes Patrick even hotter as she becomes free-associated with the seductive lure of Kim's stomping ground, Hollywood. While Lombard's blond "screwball" Irene is aggressive and "good"--but ditzy and omnipresent--Cornelia slinks to the side of the screen like a contented cat, luring and distracting, a femme fatale in search of a chump; her every appearance is marked by sinister apprehension, but the sort that carries a masochistic charge (as when she has Godfrey kneel before her to fix her shoe). Powell resists becoming the patsy, but does so without being rude or obvious, and so earns her respect.

There is a real unspoken chemistry between Godfrey and Cornelia that never gets to fully manifest because of Irene's incessant cockblocking. They would be the more adult, sophisticated couple--the sort of couple Powell embodied with the uber-classy Kay Francis in JEWEL ROBBERY and ONE-WAY TICKET, while his Godfrey and ditsy Irene are more like a father and daughter.

This choice for the Hotter Younger Sister thing would be odd for that reason alone, until we remember that precociousness is the territory of the younger daughter, who wants to act older than she is, while the older daughter is still crying and stamping her feet, trying regain the complete parental attention she lost when her sibling was born.

Thanks also to Criterion for taking the time to remaster a public domain movie and doing such a good job that you can luxuriate in the silky folds of Cornelia's sensual gowns.. (at right) And thanks to Kim Morgan, mon amor d'écriture.

Yea as I walk through the Uncanny Valley of Elah

Speaking of THE VALLEY OF ELAH, what about the Uncanny Valley, hat "misrecognition" which makes us creeped out by CGI animated humans? The proliferation of CGI has always fascinated me both as a simulacratic nightmare waiting to happen and as emblematic of humanity's death drive manifested in the Geeks of Hollywood (i.e. George Lucas) and their determination to "cross" the Uncanny Valley and thus liberate themselves from actually having to "talk" to real girl actors.

Films like THE POLAR EXPRESS, BEOWULF and FINAL FANTASY IV have tried different tricks to cross this uncanny valley, as have video games, and occasionally a gamer or graphic artist gets close (as in Max Kor's elf below) but as of "now" at any rate, there is still a border between the simulacrum and the real, some innate border patrol of revulsion sends us running when we see a human avatar's eyes. It all has to do with deep reptilian brain-stem stuff - programming so deep it goes back farther than even the most gifted programmers can reach... yet.

BUT, the scary thing is--in the parlance of the Terminator films--the CGI-frenzied Hollywood "will not... stop" trying to cross this valley, or trying to "pass" fake humans for real ones on their intended audience. So there will be more, much more of that creepy feeling of "recognition of the repressed" which is the "uncanny" part of the valley. But they... will... not... stop! They're as sure this is the future of film as Doctors Moreau and Frankenstein were sure about their monsters, or how Bush was about Iraq, or Pandora was about their being cash in that box.

With that grim fact in mind and the immanent arrival of TERMINATOR: SALVATION on the horizon (May 09), it's worth sharing this panic attack-inducing dread I had last night:

It's inevitable that the uncanny valley will be crossed. And god help us all... in the future (Criswell, p. 23).

(To continue reading this article click here)

Women in Wonderland, Part 3 - Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960)

The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run - Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and Inger Stevens in "The Hitch-Hiker" episode of The Twilight Zone - recall the most iconic of such women, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane on the run in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Attempting to flee whatever it is that haunts them, they pass from one reality into another. Their collective epitaph could be from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 1 (quoted in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim), "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday."

Alice and Orpheus

Don’t ask whether Marion Crane’s descent into Hitchcockian chaos is more like Alice’s descent into Wonderland, or Orpheus’s descent into the Land of the Dead. Alice and Orpheus are two sides of the same archetypal coin.

In stories where someone crosses over into another reality, we are more likely to think of Alice if the protagonist is female, more likely to think of Orpheus if the protagonist is male. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – about a group that journeys to a mysterious “Zone” – was most often compared to The Wizard of Oz, another archetypal protagonist-in-wonderland story. We tend to think of Alice if the protagonist is moving sideways (into a parallel or dream world) and Orpheus if the character is moving “down” (into a hellish underworld). We are more likely to think of Orpheus in connection with darker or death-related alternate reality stories. But the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Alice moves both sideways (Through the Looking Glass) and down (to Wonderland, in a book originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground). Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus reaches the Other Side by stepping, like Alice, through a mirror.

Alice stories can and occasionally do end in death (see, e.g., Pan’s Labyrinth). Hitchcock’s Psycho, Chabrol’s Alice, and Lynch’s Inland Empire invoke Alice and Orpheus in equal measure. The name of Henry Sellick’s latest protagonist-in-wonderland, Coraline, sounds like an intentional blending of Orpheus and Alice.

Marion in Batesland

For some reason, the shot above of Marion Crane’s boss (Vaughn Taylor) seen by Marion through the windshield of her car has always reminded me of the moment when Alice first sees the White Rabbit. This is the point of no return for Marion, and the moment when Bernard Herrmann’s “Flight” theme starts playing in earnest.

As Marion drives farther and farther away from home, she encounters figures of arbitrary male authority – the cop and “California Charlie” – who recall similar figures in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (the Dodo, the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare …).

A blinding thunderstorm is the magical mirror through which Marion passes to reach “the other side of the looking glass,” the Gothic nightmare world of Norman Bates. Norman is the enchanted Prince of this world, always under the spell of an archetypal Evil Sorceress (Mrs. Bates aka “Mother”) who controls him even when not physically present. In this film filled with mirrors and dopplegangers, Norman is the looking glass version of the Prince (John Gavin’s Sam Loomis) whom Marion ran away from in the “real world.”

"Off with her head!" screams the Queen of Hearts (Mrs. Bates), and Marion is swallowed down the rabbit hole forever.

Women in Wonderland, Part 2 - Alice, or the Last Flight (Claude Chabrol 1977)

Alice (Sylvia Kristel) has an argument with her husband. She drives off into the pouring rain. There is an accident. When she wakes up, the sun is shining, but something is not quite right. She comes upon a stone wall that seems to have no beginning and no end. She meets various characters who are as odd and off-beat as the characters in Lewis Carroll. Anyone who has seen Carnival of Souls or "The Hitchhiker" episode of The Twilight Zone (with Inger Stevens) can guess how this turns out.

Alice ou la Dernière Fugue is one of writer-director Claude Chabrol’s most unusual films. While most of his work falls into the category of Hitchcockian suspense or film noir, Alice is his only feature-length excursion into pure metaphysical fantasy. Which is probably why it never got distributed in the United States (couldn’t be sold as a typical Chabrol), notwithstanding some full-frontal nudity from the beautiful and compliant Ms. Kristel, whom American audiences knew well as star of the soft-core Emmanuelle series.

I saw this fascinating film - twice - at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (FILMEX) in 1976. Chabrol himself was present to introduce the film. He said it was inspired by "Shakespeare and Phillip K. Dick." Anyone watching it today might think of David Lynch. (Isn’t Inland Empire a Woman-in-Wonderland story?)

Note the use of natural countryside in the clip below, one of the film’s most memorable aspects, as well as the absence of dialogue. This is pure visual storytelling. Note also the use of mirrors and the chessboard pattern of the floor tiles, an obvious shout-out to Through the Looking Glass.



And don’t forget the upcoming Claude Chabrol Blog-a-Thon (June 21-30, 2009) hosted by Flickhead.

Deliver us from Craftsmanship

Preparing to go see Revolutionary Road tomorrow, I'm scoping out the RT and noticing the words "craftsmanship," "Oscar-bait," "meticulously crafted but emotionally empty," and so forth... Oscar bait becomes oscarbate, a verb done with shades drawn and the lighting perfectly modulated - it's Manny Farber's "white elephant" art taken to the ultimate level of pure empty shellishness. Even on the Sundance circuit you see it, where things are supposed to be less elephantine. Sundance, the name that means white elephant art on a termite budget with "craftsmanship" on the mind. The story has to be deliberately dull and pointless so that we can better concentrate on the mood lighting and burgundy tablecloths.

Craftsmanship in cinema has become synonymous with stifled - when every aspect of your production -- every crew member-- is doing everything above and beyond to get the script quite right and enable them to win awards. When it's something that's meant to be kind of spontaneous and off-the-cuff, like a two person character drama, or some fly-on-the-wall sort of minor key mood piece, like Doubt or The Valley of Elah, for example, you can see the sterility of the Sundance film school-style stress on crafstmanship vs. say, the ass-over-tit rock poetry of something like Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I think it has to do with so many people quitting smoking and doing coke instead of acid in Hollywood. It has to do with film schools churning out competent gear-heads eager to show off their expensive educations with key lighting and tracking shots instead of dropping acid and going off to Vietnam or whatever heart of darkness is in vogue this year. People are scared of themselves, and it's just not interesting after awhile watching them avoid the mirror.

I think you know what I mean - craftsmanship means films where you spend a lot of time looking around the room, noticing the light and stuff, because nobody onscreen is saying or doing anything. And you keep waiting for something interesting to happen. And then you realize these people are fucked. And it ends. And then later, after you shrug it off like a bad dream, maybe you "get it" and kind of like it. But it's really a whole lotta nothing much, the one point made is so over-highlighted and scored and cued and lit just right that it takes up the whole movie. People with a lot of money and skill and time and nothing to say, that's what "Craftsmanship" is-- it's the difference between the Bob Moss kind of art and the Jackson Pollock kind of art, the Rolling Stone Magazine, Hard Rock Cafe American Idol kind of art Vs. the fall-down piss in your pants reality of CBGBs or the drag queens on the dirty boulevard. The people admiring Iggy Pop's glass-shredded leather jacket behind glass at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are the same clowns who would recoil in horror if they saw--and smelled--him (pictured at right) in his natural environment during the time he was earning his entry.

The cinema of wanting and loneliness is ultimately the cinema of people who have the means but not the courage of their insane convictions; it plays on our memories of being bored and frustrated as children. We want this or that, we want to know why we're born and why we have to go to school. Craftsmanship movies are there to recreate our sense of wonder at polished wooden surfaces and orange shag carpeting as we wait, wait, wait, to get some candy or toys that never come. It's all Merchant Ivory's fault, it's the curse of Howard's End. We should go back in time and blow-up Brideshead Revisited. The show itself is good, but it gave the cowards a place to hide, it made inertia and self-doubt something the bourgeoisie could applaud and give grants too in good faith.

Church, the last refuge of a scoundrel, scourge of the easily bored... we burnt the witches instead of the priests. How I long for the witches!! Where are the wild blue boars crawling into my great x 8 grand-aunt Mary Perkins' window? we need wild blue boars crawling into the windows of pilgrim puritans, not animated CGI Disney boars making fart jokes at Ben Stiller. There is no real daring, no willingness to pull back the curtain - no one has the guts of Toto in the Wizard of Oz. Instead everyone just bows reverently to the big green head on the wall. Instead we just see Tommy Lee Jones look behind the curtain and then look back at the floor, with his hangdog face on at full hangdogginess and we're supposed to go ahead and agree it's something we're better off not seeing.

This is our drab inheritance, the curse of popular entertainment's "dumbing down" over five decades, every year a little dumber, until we're all slavering unconscious morons. People go to these craftsmanship-filled pictures and applaud politely because they don't want to be the only one who doesn't "get" it. They secretly would rather watch Shrek, but even Shrek is getting on their nerves. There's steadily less and less middle-ground between the stuffy "adult" important dramas and the insipid materialism-run-amok comedies like Bride Wars... soon there will be a complete collapse and maybe then the termites will once again rule. But at any rate - Go Kate Winslet! I fucking love Kate Winslet and Mickey Rourke and Heath Ledger. If they don't win I will burn your Oscars to the ground in effigy, and I will summon the blue boar and sic it upon thee, academy of craftsman! Someone's got to. It's for your own good anyhow. For god's sake someone, take the red pill just this once!

Women in Wonderland, Part 1 - Lost Girls

There was Alice, who journeyed to Wonderland and through the looking glass, Dorothy Gale, who was carried on a cyclone to Oz, and Wendy Darling, who accompanied lost boy Peter Pan to Neverland.

All three meet as adult women in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s X-rated graphic novel, Lost Girls (above). Moore, the genius author of Watchmen, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - the film versions of which he uniformly disowns - attempts here to explore the erotic subtexts of the aforementioned adventures. Not surprisingly, he finds them all to be metaphors for sexual awakening of one kind or another. But Moore (and Gebbie’s) ambitions are not strictly limited to the erotic. As Wikipedia notes, "The erotic adventures are set against the backdrop of cultural and historic events of the period, such as the debut of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand." The real subject of Lost Girls is revolution, sexual, political, and cultural.

And then there’s Coraline, the 3-D stop-motion film by Henry Sellick, based on a novella by Neil Gaiman, which opens this weekend. My expectations for this project couldn’t be higher, and I hope to report to you on it shortly.

In the meantime, I have a question for anyone reading this post. In the late ‘50s, approximately 1957 or 1958, there was a live-action childrens’ show broadcast on Saturday morning network television about a little girl who journeyed to Outer Space and other fantastic locales accompanied by a table. Let me repeat that - A TABLE - a magical table that flew and talked to the little girl while making gestures with its wooden legs. It was one of the most surrealistic things I have ever seen.

If anyone out there remembers the title of this program - or anything else about it - could you please let me know?

Bright Lights 63 posted

Issue 63 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.

from the editor

The march of the manly men!

features foyer

Out Of His Head: Metaphysical Escape Attempts in the Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman — "Kaufman's homunculi schema is an implicit mockery of our bottomless ignorance of the nature of consciousness."

Jerry Lewis: b. Joseph Levitch, Newark, New Jersey, 1926, res. Hollywood — "Each film is an elaborately choreographed movement around the problem of Jerry's uncertain relationship to the world around him."

articles antechamber

John Cassavetes: The First Dogme Director? "The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing."

Looking at Charlie — City Lights: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin — "If you could only see me as I really am, not as I appear but as I really am, as I am in my heart."

What Is Cheaper Than Nothing at All? Czech Dream, Culture Jamming, and Consumerism — "I jam because I am without ID."

Griffith's Great American Pastoral — Location and Meaning in Way Down East — "The air is saturated with their feelings for each other as they listen to 'the distant music of the falls,' the same falls, of course, that will threaten to kill her."

Hotels and Homelands — After Ken and Rosa — Neither will be the same

Spike Lee's "Uniquely American [Di]vision": Race and Class in 25th Hour — "Is it simply that the hero must be white for a mainstream American audience to care for him, or for the mainstream critical establishment to value Lee's work?

avant-garde atelier

Lysergic Landscapes: John Maybury's Read Only Memory — "Story, characters, and other reassuring elements are simply obliterated by what appears to be Maybury's quite elaborate private mythology."

film festival flying buttress

Deep and Wide: The 2008 American Film Institute Festival — A sampling of the best of the fest's international offerings

vale of video

Oh Mary Don't Ask: The Boys in the Bands on DVD — "In the ensuing post-Stonewall civil rights struggles, The Boys in the Band became crazy Aunt Betty locked in the attic when guests came over."

bright sights

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The General, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer, Fighters/Real Money, Lady with the Dog — An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

recent cinema roundabout

Reflections Through a Golden Nigh: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: — "Like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, or the Scott brothers Ridley and Tony, Fincher is an auteur-facile, an auteur of illusory depth."

"A Universe Inside a Universe": On Synecdoche, New York — synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is used for a whole, an individual for a class, a material for a thing, or the reverse of any of these (Ex.: bread for food, the army for a soldier, or copper for a penny) — Webster's Online Dictionary

Liverpool Lullaby: On Terence Davies' Of Time and the City — "Through cinema the past is regained."

The Responsible Dream: On Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir — "We were the Nazis."

the empty guest room

Robert Ryan: A Moon for the Misbegotten — "I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against."

On How Things Seem: The Views of Robert Warshow "Where Warshow distinguishes himself from Kracauer and other sociological critics is his reaction to the 'absorbing immediacy' of films."

directors' dream den

Jean-Pierre Melville, Director: Notes on the French Auteur's Career — "The film was shot in what would become a blueprint for the director's production style — without authorization, studio resources, or sufficient funds."

interrogation alcove

Of Bullies and Blood Drinkers: Talking to Tomas Alfredson about Let the Right One In — "I think the most horrifying images are the ones you make yourself. Is there someone standing behind the door, or is it just two shoes standing there?"

Maps and Motels: Talking with Deepa Mehta — "I think it's really important for you, or anybody who wants to be a filmmaker, to really be honest with yourself."

pre-code parapet

Sinners' Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code — "Code? What Code?"

Dizzy from the Altitude, Pre-Code Cinema and the Post-Code-Shock Syndrome — "With so much underhanded conventionalizing, it's easy to forget that once upon a time these social mores were being challenged and disputed, not by our parents but by our grandparents . . ."

little stabs

Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old-School Cinema — "Heterosexual brides-to-be are one of the demographics that arrive by the busloads to partake of Darcelle's mad mix of risqué zingers, over-the-top musical routines, and mother-hen reassurances."

hiding in the stacks

The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, by Patricia Pisters

Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, by Geneviève Sellier

Encyclopedia Shatnerica: An A to Z Guide to the Man and His Universe, by Robert Schnakenberg

"Have You Seen . . .?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, by David Thomson

Hollywood Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M by Mark A. Vieira

When the English-Dubbed Version is Better

With regard to the whole issue of dubbing, conventional wisdom tells us that foreign films are best viewed in their original language. And I tend to agree with that.

But there are some major exceptions to that rule - most of them Italian. That’s because Italian films are (or were) generally shot without synchronized sound. If an Italian film had an international cast, each actor would speak his or her own native language during the shooting, and, more often than not, would only dub his or her own voice for the version that was released in that actor’s language. In short, virtually ALL Italian films are dubbed, and in deciding whether to view the English-dubbed version or the Italian version (also dubbed), your choice should be based on who is playing the lead, not the country of origin.

Regrettably, the folks who put out DVDs don’t always give us that choice. Here are a few examples.

La Strada (Federico Fellini 1954) - La Strada ("The Road") is a story about traveling circus performers. The three main characters are a brutish strong man (Anthony Quinn), the simpleminded waif he adopts and exploits as his clownish assistant (Guilieta Masina), and a high-wire artist (Richard Basehart) whom the strong man sees as his rival. If you watch the Italian version, you get to hear Masina voicing her role in Italian. Unfortunately, you will also miss Quinn playing his role, possibly the most iconic performance of his career, in English. Since Masina’s role is mostly mime, and the English-language version allows us to hear Quinn’s and Basehart’s roles dubbed by Quinn and Basehart themselves, the English-language version is vastly preferable.

Criterion realized this when it released La Strada on laserdisc with the option of listening to either the Italian or the English audio track. (I understand the same is true of Criterion’s first DVD version). If you are listening to the English soundtrack and you come to a section of the longer Italian cut where there is no English audio, then you will briefly hear Italian for that section. I wish that all the films discussed in this post were released that way.

Unfortunately, according to Amazon and Criterion itself, Criterion’s "Essential Art House" DVD version of La Strada, scheduled to be released this February, has only the Italian audio track. Let the buyer beware.

Fellini’s Casanova (Fellini 1976) - Fellini’s Casanova was filmed in both English and Italian with no less than Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) penning the English-language dialogue. The performance of Donald Sutherland as Casanova, one of his finest, is the heart of the film, yet the only version that plays on cable television these days is the Italian version in which we do not get to hear Sutherland’s voice. Let’s hope that if this film is ever released on DVD in the United States, the DVD makers do justice to Sutherland (and Burgess) by including the English language audio track.

Spirits of the Dead (Fellini, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle 1969) - Spirits of the Dead is a compilation film based on three stories by Edgar Allen Poe. The only version released on American DVD to date is the European version, originally titled Histoires Extraordinaires, in which everyone speaks French. With respect to the first story in the trilogy, "Metzengerstein," directed by Roger Vadim and starring his then-wife, Jane Fonda, the French version is fairly interesting, since Fonda dubs the French herself, and she speaks the language surprisingly well. With respect to the second story in the trilogy, "William Wilson," directed by Louis Malle, the French version is decidedly preferable, since you get to hear the segment’s stars, Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot, speaking their native tongue.

But the third story in the trilogy, Fellini’s "Toby Dammit," is a travesty in French. Like his Casanova, Fellini’s "Toby Dammit" is built around the performance of a single actor, Terence Stamp, who performed his role in English. In fact, the very premise of the story as conceived by Fellini is the alienation of the central character, a substance-abusing English actor promoting a film in Italy, who speaks English while everyone else around him is speaking Italian, a language he doesn’t understand. It makes no sense story-wise to hear them all speaking one language. (French, no less.) In English, this is indisputably Terence Stamp’s most memorable and essential screen performance, an acting tour-de-force. If that weren’t enough, the English language version of the trilogy, originally released by AIP, includes an intro and an outro spoken by Vincent Price. I know there are countless fans out there like me who wish someone would release AIP’s English-language version of this film.

And speaking of AIP –

Black Sabbath (Mario Bava 1963) - This is the horror trilogy that arguably inspired Spirits of the Dead. The first story "A Drop of Water" is mostly wordless. It’s terrifyingly great in any language. The second story, "The Telephone," which is also the weakest of the three, makes little sense in English. That’s because AIP re-cut the English language version drastically in order (reputedly) to eliminate some lesbianic elements. You will want to see the European version of the film (the only one presently in release on DVD) in order to appreciate this one. However, the third story, "The Wurdalak," features Boris Karloff in the title role, a Russian vampire. To hear Karloff’s voice dubbed by someone else in a foreign language ... well, it’s just not Karloff. For that reason alone, a release of the English-language version of this Bava masterwork is essential.

And finally, there’s –

Ludwig (Luchino Visconti 1972) - Visconti’s epic biography of Ludwig II, the so-called "Mad King of Bavaria," is arguably the closest Visconti ever came to filming a self-portrait. When I first saw this film in New York, and later when it was broadcast on L.A.’s legendary Z Channel, the three principals - Helmut Berger as Ludwig, Romy Schneider as the Empress Elizabeth, and Trevor Howard as Richard Wagner - spoke their roles in English. While neither Helmut Berger nor Romy Schneider are native English speakers, both spoke the language well, with Austrian accents that are entirely appropriate for the film. Berger’s effeminate tenor was, in fact, essential to his characterization.

I want to thank Koch Lorber for releasing a complete, carefully restored, full-length DVD version (238 minutes) of this visually stunning film. Yet, at the same time, I want to strangle them for releasing it with the Italian audio track, only. (Berger’s voice is dubbed by Giancarlo Giannini - of all people.)

Maybe someday ...

Hotter Younger Sister Effect III: Barbara Rush in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION

The recent Criterion release of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1954) makes a good--not great, but still worthy--addition to our hotter younger sister collection. This 1954 Douglas Sirk soap was a big, big hit and it put Hudson on the map as a bona fide star; he's much prettier than his co-star Jane Wyman, who looks rather puffy and unstreamlined but is in fine form, acting-wise. In his crisply ironed collared shirt or silhouetted against hospital curtains or scrubbing down shirtless before going into the ER, Hudson proves men can be objects of desire as easily as females, be they millionaire creeps or millionaire saints.

But then there is Barbara Rush as Wyman's cute sister; saving the day with the only feminine sex appeal in the film (aside from one short scene with Hudson's requisite hot blonde arm candy (Sara Shane) in one of those swanky swingers' lounges). Rush's hotness doesn't quite reach out and grab you (that would be Shane's dept.) but it's there when you need it (like Starbuck's courage in MOBY DICK) and makes me thing well of Jane Wyman as a star. Sharing billing with prettier younger actresses was not always in a diva's nature (Bette Davis didn't mind, but Joan Crawford would have torn Rush's roots out). I guess Wyman's not worried, her character is supposed to be blind and heavily martyred after all -- and martyrdom trumps sexy in the soap opera poker book. While Rush plays the adorable, angry and supportive hand, Wyman gets to lose both her saintly physician husband and her eyesight, a veritable royal flush of sudsy martyrdom --with Rock as the pot! Of course neither chick would pass muster in a feminist's eyes as having, you know, things to do with her life other than fret about men, cry, and/or move flowers from boxes to vases... but forget it Jake, it's Sirk-town, and while the Big outdoorsy American lake reflection you see may not be your own, it's better that way, isn't it?

One thing strikes me on this go-round with Sirk: the difference in time frames between guy movies and girl movies. For guys, romance runs like a day in the life of a mayfly: they have only a few hours to land the woman, plant the seed, raise the family, take out some insurance and die. Female-targeted soaps like MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION on the other hand, span decades, generations, centuries. One doesn't merely wait a week to call--one waits decades. While the actual running time that elapses may be only a few seconds of dissolves, it "feels" longer and when we next find our heroine, she's got a touch of gray, her brain injury is worse, Rock Hudson has become a physician, they're burning effigy witches in Switzerland... and even young Rush looks puffy and overcaked in make-up, like a beer-battered clown wife. (It's interesting to note that in just 3 years she went from playing gamins in sci fi films like IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE [1953]to being James Mason's denial-stricken hausfrau in BIGGER THAN LIFE [1956]).

All right, maybe not like a beer-battered clown wife, I just like that phrase. But I will always love Barbara Rush since she was in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953, pictured) as the love interest-cum-hot alien zombie. She looked great whether--pre-alien possession--buttoned up to the neck in a sexless tunic and caught in a cock blockage between visiting astronomer Carlson and the jealous townie sheriff, or sultry in a hot space girl outfit (pictured), trying to blast self-righteous the nosy Carlson to atoms with her laser. In OBSESSION, had she kept her laser, she would have easily blasted Hudson to atoms early in the film for hogging her dad's heart resuscitator right when dad needed it most. But even hating him for all the carnage he inadvertently wreaks on her family, she doesn't rat him out later when he poses as Jane's invisible suitor. Now that's cool of her. Already swept up before the credits by a hunky but square lawyer with a cool deep voice, Gregg Palmer, Rush's romance gets a few kisses and words of affection as bridges in Sirk's sublime slow tracking shots, takes a backseat to the much more "important" guilt trip-exchange of Hudson and Wyman, but that's a good thing: if you want your romance to last longer than a few happy picnics, you're much better off with Sirk peeping elsewhere; freak accidents follow his camera like the the furies of Aeschylus!

The film works so well, I think, for men, because it provides us casual playboys with a hard slap in the face about what's "really important" without being nagging about it. Otto Kruger is the key figure for this transformation in Hudson; he's like an AA sponsor or life coach, a contented vaguely Christ-like artist, the older brother figure Hudson needs to learn to "fly right." When women tell us to behave, we scoff or recoil; they're trying to castrate us! But when Otto Kruger tells us in his aerodynamically honeyed tones, we listen, hypnotized, like Mike Mazurki (pictured) in MURDER MY SWEET. It's a damned hard role to put off, without seeming Ned Flandersish, but Kruger does a hella good job. Even so, our poor Christ figure/artist winds up the film single, wandering off into the desert as his voice plays above like a one man heavenly choir. Maybe, like so many happy singles, he's got plans to die old and alone in front of his beloved radiator, but maybe, just maybe he's even one step ahead of Rush and has a lover of his own, so far to the side that even Sirk's clever camera can't sniff out a whiff of subtext in his angelic aura. To paraphrase Robert Evans: Can we call such an obsession magnificent? You bet we can!

(For more of the hotter younger sister effect, scroll below, or visit Acidemic, for Diane Baker in MARNIE; and Caroll Baker and Carolyn Craig in GIANT).