Maurice Jarre, Film Composer (1924-2009)

Everybody knows the music Maurice Jarre wrote for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago ("Lara's Theme"). Much less well known are the scores he wrote before Lawrence - including one of Alain Resnais's first short subjects (Toute la Memoire du Monde, 1956), and the short films and, later, features of French poetic surrealist, Georges Franju.

The best of these is the score Jarre wrote for Franju's Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage, 1960*), a masterpiece of Cocteau-esque horror/poetry about a scientist and his mistress who murder several young women in order to obtain skin grafts for the scientist's disfigured daughter (Edith Scob, wearing a mask, above). This is the first and greatest of Jarre's suspense scores, characterized by a tinkly harpsichord that Jarre later reused in The Night of the Generals (Anatole Litvak 1967) and Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz (1969). The film is unimaginable without it.

Jarre's collaborations with Franju - including also Therese Desqueyroux (1962) and Judex (1963) - are at least as significant from an artistic point of view as his long-time creative partnership with David Lean (he scored every one of Lean's films from Lawrence of Arabia through Ryan's Daughter and A Passage to India). The IMDB credits Jarre as the composer of more than 160 film scores, including The Longest Day (1962), The Train (John Frankenheimer 1964), The Collector (William Wyler 1965), Is Paris Burning (Rene Clement 1966), Grand Prix (Frankenheimer 1966), Isadora (Karel Reisz 1968), The Damned (Luchino Visconti 1969), The MacKintosh Man (John Huston 1975), Mandingo (Richard Fleischer 1975), The Man Who Would Be King (Huston 1975), The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan 1976), Witness (Peter Weir 1985), Gorillas in the Mist (Michael Apted 1988), Dead Poets Society (Weir 1989), and Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne 1990).

He was a consummate professional.

* Yes, Billy Idol stole the title.

Against Interpretation: Synecdoche

Having recently bid a fond adieu to the post-DVD-release critical interest resurgence for Synecdoche, New York, it seems a ripe enough time for us to forget this dauntingly nebulous film until, say, maybe someone like Criterion comes along in 20 years and revives it via whatever the popular media might be at that point (movies shot directly into the brain via Janus Film electrode? Charlie Kaufman would no doubt speculate far more creatively). In any case, I’m a late comer to this gem and still soaking up the blogger butter Kaufman’s sure hand managed to churn (check out C Jerry Kutner’s superlative responses here and here from BLAD), so everyone will excuse the tardy analysis.

Synecdoche might have been 2008’s Mulholland Drive in that it inspired a diverse panoply of heady interpretations, most of which negate rather than complement each other. The film has been called yet another bloated excursion into Kaufman’s self-loathing, a Zen “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man” meditation, a Delillo-esque satire on the pop culture of death, and (as is the case with any formally or philosophically daring film) a cerebral wankfest. It might be all of those things, but our own C Jerry Kutner made a rather instructive comparison between Kaufman and Alain Resnais, and I think it’s appropriate in as far as Synecdoche – like Hiroshima, Mon Amour or Last Year at Marienbad, among others – seems formed from the amorphous meta-pulp of human memory, and offers an uneasy, mind-bending, Robbe-Grillet-like puzzle wherein the audience cannot readily decipher what did or did not happen, or when, or why.

The narrative structure of typical films appeal to us because our own minds are constantly rewriting and organizing perceived stimuli – the raw data of “events” – into orderly arcs of information. Actions are assigned consequences. Shapeless moments are sliced and squeezed into beginnings, middles, and endings. We’ve been trained – and there is surely some anthropological value to doing this – to remember our lives as though we’re the protagonists of our own stories. And thus stories with crucial elements that are missing, or even out of order, are bewildering -- they seem to undermine the very cleanliness of our existence. Interpretations of “avant-garde” literature and cinema (including the aforementioned Mulholland Drive) too often view the books or films in question as somehow purposefully “broken”; criticism reassembles them for linear consumption, while praising the artist’s reasoning for fracturing his/her work and the curious sensations that result within the viewer.

Synecdoche appeals to me because I don’t think there’s an answer to the subjective riddle in the same way there was with, say, Jacob’s Ladder, or the bland Vanilla Sky, or any other film where we follow the protagonist down a mindfuck rodent hole only to find an illuminating pot o gold at the very bottom (arguably even Mulholland Drive). You can intellectualize a method for understanding the bizarre sequence of events in the film (as I’ll try to do in this blog post, paradoxically) but you don’t get the impression that the story was intended to be understood this way. Not that Kaufman has made the “uninterpretable” holy grail of films, impervious to all brain-fart criticism. Quite the contrary. Synecdoche is a stylized Humpty Dumpty, and all the King’s horses and men (Rex Reed is probably in the former category) can try with all their might to reassemble its shattered shell: all efforts will likely be in vain. But Kaufman may internally note with an impish grin that Synecdoche came to life as a disassembled husk; there was never any whole egg (or other metaphorical body) to destroy. This is because, quite singularly, the film’s very concept seems rooted in destruction; we are dealing with a protagonist whose narrative-forming mechanism is irreparably damaged, and may have been that way since birth (this reminds one of the subpar Science of Sleep, where Gondry actually attempted to legitimize his offbeat premise by giving the main character a phony neurological disorder).

While I think it would be erroneous to accept it as a literal “reading” of the film, watching the misadventures of Caden Cotard reminded me sharply of observing my great grandmother deteriorate from Alzheimer’s. The disease is most disorienting; undergoing it must be like watching your life slowly morph from a structured Frank Capra domestic tale to skewed Terry Gilliam sci-fi experiment. Your conception of time warps drastically: one minute you imagine yourself as a child, the next minute you’re being shoved before a dinner table and asked to eat with individuals (family members, of course) who you don’t recall ever meeting before. You lose control of your motor skills and become frequently frustrated with the simplest of tasks. As with Caden towards the end of the film, you wish desperately that someone would simply tell you what to do, how to behave, and most importantly who you are (some of this is educated speculation, although I heard my grandmother ask the former two questions on many occasions); but, conversely, you turn against those who would assist your sense of self with jaundice and anger. And as I would regard my grandmother so I also regarded Caden, and Kaufman in this film – they can’t help their behavior, it’s simply who they are right now.

Dementia is also – like Synecdoche – a hyperrealized illustration of the relationship between free will and determinism: it’s certain that you’re an actor in a play of sorts who can make his or her own choices, but the stage seems cluttered with the whims of such a cold, sinister director (fate? genetic predispositions?) that the very act of deciding often seems swaddled in futility.

Caden’s play – the “performance within a performance” -- is, I think, the movie’s most accomplished element. Caden literally attempts to reenact and rewrite his entire existence by directing a massive cast on a scale-metropolis soundstage that Tati would peer upon with envy. The play is never performed for the public – the actors are the public – and like life, it’s linear rather than cyclical (we often see scenes that Caden has just undergone in reality being performed on the soundstage, by actors, in a matter of relative hours). And it’s when Caden relinquishes his directorial chair to an actor ostensibly playing him that Synecdoche poses its most heartbreaking ontological inquiry. As with an individual trapped, or perhaps better put, dominated, by Alzheimer’s, Caden recognizes his powerlessness to manipulate his own destiny. But then, how much power did he have to begin with? How much power, indeed, would he, or any of us, have wanted?

Dead Lesbian Society: WATCHMEN's Dark Silhouette

(WATCHMEN SPOILER ALERT)
A week after seeing WATCHMEN I'm still disturbed about the pantextual associations behind the "hate crime" killing of Silhouette, a lesbian superhero from the first generation (the Minutemen) who lives and dies in the opening "Times they Are a Changin'" credit sequence. After wowing audiences with a great V-Day sapphic kiss she's next seen as the victim of a ritual murder; dead in the arms of her lover, bullet holes in their temples and the words "Lesbian Whores" written across the wall in blood. The incident is never mentioned again until Rorschach(Jackie Earle Haley) hazily recalls that Silhouette and her friend were "killed by their own depraved lifestyle." In other words, none of the original Minutemen felt it necessary to avenge her death; it was "deserved" somehow.

I looked around on the web to see if anyone else thought this reeked of unconscious homophobic misogyny, and found only one brave soul over on feminsiting.com:

While the film did show the dead bodies of other superheroes after their "fall", I have a hard time understanding how two superhero(in)es could be killed (and possibly raped) by what appear to be ordinary men.

I personally don't think Zach Snyder meant to be callous or hateful--the post-WW2 era was fraught with homophobia after all, and the grisly tableau was presumably meant to be another Weegee-like photo atrocity reflecting a violent and intolerant America--we're supposed to feel sad and not misogynistic but misanthropic, our opinion of the "common folk" and their barbaric Puritan mores sinking further with every passing tableau--but I wonder whether the Alan Moore original (which I haven't read) is a little more sensitive to misogyny's many subliminal tentacles: the idea that a superhero's lesbianism somehow makes her not only vulnerable to, but somehow deserving of, a bullet from some paltry human sex killer subtextually validates lesbianism as a crime against nature. Snyder may be meaning to shock us with the brutality of American conservatism, but in doing so he's also upholding the status quo, in the typical faux-subversive style of most exploitation. A violent rapist like the Comedian is mourned, his death investigated, but Silhouette's is just chalked up to Old Testament-style wrath.

As with most of the events in the film, the lesbian murder tableaux has roots not just in American history but in cinematic history as well, most notably the double homicide of the lesbian lovers in Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (left). Much as I love the film, the coldness with which our sapphic lovers are dispatched at the film's climax seem to me needlessly brutal (especially with the phallic correctional gun in the mouth). Adding to the idea that their murders were "deserved" is the way their friends instantly forget about them once their whiny crippled manager can suddenly walk again, and the ending narration that notes: "Theirs was not an evil love, but evil came because of it." Huh? They got killed because Lance (Michael Blodgett) wouldn't put out for Z-Man. Why doesn't the narration say that "Lance's prudish heterosexuality caused the death of two innocents"? Crazy as it sounds, that's much closer to the truth.

In the sexy 1974 Euro-horror VAMPYRES, the lead vamps are a pair of women who are shot down in a similar fashion before the credits, but the idea that they deserved it never really comes across (undoubtedly the film's European pedigree means it's a bit more sophisticated) At any rate, they "live" afterwards and wreak plenty of vengeance on the dull Brit swingers who pass their way. But like the girls of BOUND (left), they're an exception. Even lesbian-produced films like GASOLINE end with the lovers dying violently, as if it's just "how it's gotta be."

Note the subtext in this Vancouver Sun headline: "Apollonia Vanova: Actress with a dark side goes darker still in Watchmen." What on earth is "darker" about being a gay superhero? Again, we're clearly in unconscious associative territory. We might be "liberal" but our deep-seated sexual repression still manifests itself in our every word... even in Vancouver!

I know moral ambiguity is part of the point and I don't mean to criticize WATCHMEN, which I found otherwise inspiring in its post-ironic fascist viciousness. Instead, I'm criticizing the subtext--wherein the straight male audience is pandered to in this hypocritical have-your-cake-and-purge-it-too manner. The lesbian V-Day kiss is for the blue states; the subsequent double murder is like the follow-up pandering to appease the red states (I can see a slavering crowd in Alabama cheering the bloody "Lesbian Whores" tableau the way my fellow New Yorkers cheered the V-day kiss when I saw it in the theater). If we're cheered up/turned on by the lipstick lesbian kiss, we're "cleansed" of association with it by the subsequent murder. Contrast this with male gay relationships in films like MILK or PHILADELPHIA, wherein the slings and arrows of homophobia are what makes our heroes stronger, and their deaths serve as inspiration for a new age of tolerance. With lipstick lesbians it's reversed: we are encouraged to leer away while congratulating ourselves on being so open-minded, at the same time confident in the inevitable "payment due" for these chicks' rejection of the Almighty Phallus.

Of course "we" don't condone these killings--we're horrified by them--but at the same time we dismiss them; what else did they expect after flaunting their "abnormality"? It's that sort unconscious association that keeps us mired to the red state dark ages whether we know it or not. Every time we use the word "slut" or "whore" in a negative context we're reinforcing our own collective sexual strait-jacketing. For all its alleged swinger hedonism, America is still a very repressed place; our puritanism runs so deep that WATCHMEN--despite its best satirical intentions--unwittingly endorses the same reactionary sexual violence it so scathingly critiques.

Tonight, on a very special episode of "Last House on the Left"

Last night I saw WATCHMEN at Union Square, a surreal and thoroughly fascist moviegoing experience, probably 4 hours from start to finish, beginning with the pre-previews: "Regal Cinema's First Look". One of the first looks is at the remake of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.

Now this is in itself a disturbing sign of the times: the horrific and sadistic exploitation "classic" that's been known to clear rooms, becomes--through the veil of time--a WB Network very special episode of This Old Last House, toned way down for the "average" audience, with only a little implied brutality, just enough to fire the engines of revenge. Wes Craven lets us know the original was a political piece about America's identity crisis in the wake of Vietnam, a low budget COMING HOME or THE DEER HUNTER, as we cut to slick MTV-in-the-rain clips and cute Greek-accented director voice-overs summing up the film's message: "It's about fighting for something you believe in." With vaguely optimistic alternative mood rock arpeggios playing overhead, we learn that the move "will grab you by throat and never let go," but Wes Craven says it in a way they might be talking about some new hyped up version of Space Mountain at Disney World. When he urges us to repeat "it's only a movie... it's only a movie" at the end of the piece, it's with this lightness of voice that makes it a mantra ala "There's no place Like Home" or "Bibbidy Bobbidy Boo."

Am I the only one who thinks that studio nostalgia is not 20/20? What's next, a colorful remake of I Spit on Your Grave replete with an emo-rock soundtrack and a Euro director waxing on about the importance of staying true to yourself? "I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is about believing in yourself; no matter what the odds."

If it's all gradually desensitizing us for a purpose (such as eventual televised executions) that's fine with me, but I think it's just that the makers of "Regal First Look" have never seen the original, nor would it matter. Even torture porn needs a family friendly mold. But Jesus Christ, stop it with the claims that HOUSE is an American classic. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1972) is a classic that reflects America's post-Nam disillusionment, LAST HOUSE is just mean, mean, mean; even many horror fans don't like it (or refuse to see it based on the disturbing content). In other words, it's a perfect monument to our time, when going to the movies feels like indoctrination into a fascist death squad. After the LAST HOUSE bit is a plug for reality TV's AXE MEN, the story of macho guys risking their necks in the brave act of commercial deforestation, followed by the ubiquitous Kid Rock 'guard shill, and there's ads for the marines, hamster wheels on the highway compared to some new car, a guy with a model smelling his under-arms and swooning with rapture and CGI-mouthed babies urging everyone to get their money up on "e-trade" -- wherein what they should have shown was not babies or hamsters, but lemmings twirling their way on a merry-go-round into the warm Arctic sea in pursuit of little gold money rings, the slightest tremor sending them all in a panic, crashing the whole merry-go-round the minute they sense what losers they still are and will always be no matter how much money they get; E-Trade!

What it is really, when all the blood is washed away, when we finally kill all the killers who killed our friends because we killed their family, is about faith, and fighting for something you believe in. As Kid Rock so aptly puts it: "Don't tell me who's wrong or right / when liberty starts slipping away." Hmmm, so wrong or right doesn't mean anything in these wars of ours, only "liberty slipping away"? Kid, just tell me where to point my cock, I mean, gun.

Good News on the DVD Front!

Looks like Warner Brothers has wised up and is offering a line of rarities from their vaults on DVD. They include such juicy titles as Boetticher's Westbound, Cukor's The Actress, Walsh's A Distant Trumpet, Minnelli's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Borzage's The Shining Hour, and even films that were believed, at least by some of us, to be lost, like the bondage & espionage Ann Dvorak classic I Was an American Spy! There's even that bizarre must-have bit of craziness from Jack Webb, The D.I. Some of the films have a link to a trailer or clip to let you check out the video quality, and they specifically mention showing them in their original theatrical format. They've got 150 titles so far either in release or pre-release.

The price is $19.99 per title. I don't see them on Amazon, at least not yet. And speaking of Amazon, this may save us from the humiliation of paying, say, $149.99 for a copy of Four Horsemen in a dubious Chinese dub (presently advertised).

Please consider supporting this effort, not just for Warners; if this is successful, it might convince other foot-dragging studios to dig into their archives and do the same thing! Then maybe we can finally get our grubby paws on Dwan's Angel in Exile and The Woman They Almost Lynched, Ulmer's Her Sister's Secret, and Sternberg's The King Steps Out.

Here's the link.

Kramer and his Bikers

Actors make creepy bikers; generally bikers are less verbose. Watching THE WILD ONE the other night, a big screen filled with creepy "juvenile" behavior, got me to thinking about our associations with bikers and random orgiastic violence. The bikers come swarming over some poor tourist couple like head-tripping egotistic actors' studio kids, taking out their aggression by licking knives while staring at the square's wife. It's the terror of not knowing the proper response. Are they "cool" if you just play along on their weird jive-talk tangents? Bikers are cinema's version of hornets; just don't make any sudden moves, just relax and they'll leave you alone, but don't let them land on you, etc. One imagines the actors in these biker roles really did smoke reefer at jazz coffee joints on the weekends, but then for the movie they play themselves filtered through the frightened imagination of the Middle-Class Suburban Family (MCSF). What did middle class America do to deserve such filth encrusted scions? Kramer wants to play both sides of the fence, like Officer Krupke.

The best biker films understand how twisted middle America's vision is in the first place: dad warps these leather clad weirdos into vile caricatures of unemployed enjoyment, his tax dollars at work that's the democrats for ya - mocking him with their speed and sex partners while he chomps at the bit. Mom sees in them meanwhile the wild boy her husband used to be, and she longs to just jump on the back of a Harley and get punked out. But "longs" is maybe not the right word: What I'm searchin' for was said best by Kim Morgan, discussing Deneuve in REPULSION as "able to act out what she is so afraid of: the dark sludge of desire." That dark sludge is the danger zone between sanity and life's ugliest truths: innate bestial Stockholm Syndrome to the victor goes the spoils duel over me boys with your mighty horns stuff, the stuff civilization seals over with concrete and yet you can always still hear the screaming (a few years with Harry here and it sounds like music).

As viewers we react nervously to these gangs because they represent our over-civilized eloi-like ambiguity about our fate as the morlocks' dinner. The eloi in these movies smile and try to be nice with the bikers but things are bound to get ugly eventually. Sooner or later someone's getting beat down, a gun goes, off, a girl gets her skirt torn, a window is broken, neglected chores, dogs on the couch, chain fights, it's all the same inevitable, so the thing becomes about initiative. Are you going to wait for them to start some shit, or are you going to swing first? How do we gauge just how dangerous a situation this is? With psychos it's impossible to tell, that's why you need to just get away from them, fast. But mama, that's where the fun is.

In THE WILD ONE, sadly, the fun never goes one way or the other. The bikers are merely buffoons who show up the bufoonery of the townspeople; all the hoopin' and hollerin' becomes just more Stanley Kramer preaching: the gangs disappear conveniently as the civilized "posse" follows poor Marlon to the cross. Where did they go? They all magically reappear on the empty set when it's time to accuse Marlon of running someone over. Phoning for state troopers should just be automatic when the thugs pull into town en masse, but that would foil Kramer's plans for big TV-style moralizing. In Kramerland the authority figure is always a powerless shaky martyr, just as the underlings of Brando's and Marvin's gangs are all craven psychos or just acting that way so they can flip it on you later; your prejudgment of my chains and denim lifestyle is what caused the violence, man, not me. Against this slump-shouldered panorama the figures of Brando and Lee Marvin loom like Blindville's one-eyed kings. Marvin especially grasps the cosmic joke, staying passed out all through his own jail-break, he's the Chosen One, the drunken trickster come at last to beat the livin' Christmas out of us. God do we need it.

Three Brilliant Performances by Natasha Richardson (1963-2009)

. . . and not one of them is presently available on U.S. DVD. Here's a box set I would happily purchase.

Patty Hearst (1988). Directed by Paul Schrader. Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan.

Richardson plays the title role. The film is seen entirely from her point of view (when she's locked in the closet, we're locked in the closet, knowing her captors only by their silhouettes and voices). A pawn caught between the Revolutionaries and the Establishment. Her Northern California accent, alone, is awesome. And who can forget her last line delivered from a jail cell? "Fuck them. Fuck them all."

The Handmaid's Tale (1990) - Directed by Volker Schlondorff. Screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Allegorical SF about a totalitarian American theocracy. Richardson plays a "handmaid" - essentially a breeder in a world where most women are sterile - hired out to a privileged couple (Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall) to conceive their child.

The Comfort of Strangers (1991) - Directed by Paul Schrader. Screenplay by Pinter.

Richardson and Rupert Everett play a "good couple" vacationing in Venice (uh-oh) who are seduced by a "bad couple" (Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren). More fundamentally disturbing than you could imagine.

None of these unabashed art films were popular successes. Nor were they meant to be. Richardson eventually found her greatest acclaim on the stage.

Charlie’s Little Sister (Shadow of a Doubt)

Erich Kuersten’s younger sister series (starting here) inspired me to think about the younger sisters in Hitchcock films, particularly Pat Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train (1951), and her bespectacled predecessor, Edna May Wonacott as Ann Newton in Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

Alfred Hitchcock’s *minor* characters are rarely throwaways. Little Ann was the co-creation of Hitchcock, and screenwriters Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock). Not surprisingly, Ann recalls the younger sisters in Wilder’s Our Town, and even more so, “Tootie” (Margaret O’Brien), the high strung – one might even say neurotic – little sister of Judy Garland’s character in Benson and Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis. She is the darkest member of the Newton family other than the psychopathic Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) himself.

Reading the recently published Britton on Film, the collected film criticism of the late Andrew Britton (worth buying for his essay on Mandingo, alone), I discovered this provocative description of the character:

A marvelous inflection of the generic type of the smart, precocious, tomboyish younger sister produces in Ann Newton, a little girl characterized by a sustained autistic withdrawal from reality into movies (her ambition is to look like Veronica Lake) and, predominantly, books—she wants to become a librarian and is introduced refusing, literally, to take her head out of Ivanhoe, the classic novel of sublimated romantic dream by an author who epitomized, for Mark Twain, the rottenness of the European character. She also has a dread of “movin’ around and changin’” (“I don’t want to get carried away”), a profound conservatism (“It’s wrong to talk against the government”), and in her love of horror stories and her repressed resentment of the family (“I broke my mother’s back three times”), anticipates by thirty years a crucial contemporary development in the horror film. [Britton is referring to “family horror” films like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and The Exorcist.]

Note Ann’s placement in the portrait of the Newton family, above. She is positioned between the two Charlies, “normal” Charlie (Teresa Wright) and “crazy” Charlie (Cotten), without physically relating to (touching) either one. The fact that she is the only member of the Newtons who is standing shows clearly her alienation from the rest of the family. While everyone in the group is looking at Mother (Patricia Collinge), Ann is the only one who isn’t smiling. Her expression could easily be interpreted as a glare of hatred.

Looking at this frame, I can’t help thinking of the last shot of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). Repulsion, obviously influenced by Hitchcock’s Psycho, is the story of a cosmetologist, played by Catherine Deneuve, who grows increasingly alienated and psychotic over the course of the film. The last shot is a zoom or track into a family photo showing the Deneuve character as a little girl. She is staring directly at the camera, the scared rabbit look in her young eyes revealing that she was quite mad, even then.

Carla Gugino is No. 1! Also No. 2!

Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain was the highest grossing film of the weekend. It starred Carla Gugino, among others. The second highest grossing film of the weekend was Zach Snyder’s Watchmen, also starring Gugino. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer gal. (At least, she seems that way on camera.)

I first noticed Gugino in Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) co-starring Nicholas Cage - not one of De Palma’s most memorable works, but Gugino was outstanding as a corporate whistleblower involved in an assassination conspiracy. In the years that followed, Gugino never achieved the same level of fame as some of De Palma’s other “discoveries” (Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, Melanie Griffith, et al.), but she kept working, notably in four films by Robert Rodriguez. In Spy Kids 1, 2, and 3-D, Rodriguez cast her as the spy kids’ former-OSS mother. In Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City, she plays a lesbian parole officer tough enough to handle Mickey Rourke.

Gugino plays a mom again in Watchmen, typecasting to be sure, but this is an unusually interesting mom. As part of Watchmen’s elaborate backstory, Gugino plays Sally Jupiter aka Silk Spectre (above), part of a 1940s superhero crimefighting group known as The Minutemen. In the film’s present (an alternate history version of 1986), Sally Jupiter is the 67-year-old mother of Laurie Jupiter aka Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), a member of the titular Watchmen. Gugino’s performance as the aging superheroine, along with Jackie Earle Hayley’s as “Rorschach,” is one of the film’s highlights.

The photo above (click to enlarge) is a mock publicity still, showing Silk Spectre I in her crimefighting prime. Note how the frame is art-directed to the max, crammed with details that reflect various aspects of Silk Spectre’s career. This piling on of detail is, in turn, reflective of both the film and the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel on which it is based. The accretion of details is meant to suggest a complete alternate universe – what we see is supposed to be only the tip of the imaginary iceberg.

Taking the neurotic superheroes of Stan “Spiderman” Lee a couple steps further, the dysfunctional superheroes of Watchmen display a wide range of personality disorders and political attitudes, encompassing everything from right wing über-patriotism and vigilantism to quasi-socialist utopianism, with Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl as the poor liberal caught in the middle. In the flashback illustrated below, Silk Spectre is nearly raped by one of her team members, the sociopathic Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). These are not your parents’ superheroes.

Scenes From an Idiot’s Marriage

This is my all-time favorite SCTV sketch – a pastiche of Ingmar Bergman and Jerry Lewis, with Andrea Martin as Harriet Andersson and Martin Short (brilliant) as Lewis.

Clearly, whoever wrote and directed this sketch studied both Bergman and Lewis in great detail. Bergman aficionados will note the barren landscape accompanied by mournful cello music from Cries and Whispers, the marital discord of Scenes from a Marriage, the sinister dinner table conversation from Hour of the Wolf.

Lewis fans will note the pantomime to Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter” from Who’s Minding the Store? (directed by Frank Tashlin), the cigarette bit from Cinderfella (Tashlin), and the ejaculating seltzer bottle from The Errand Boy (directed by Lewis). We also get a healthy dose of what my late friend Risty used to call “Serious Jerry” (the non-funny persona occasionally employed by Lewis for talk shows and telethons).

Should appeal to viewers who love Bergman and hate Lewis, viewers who hate Bergman and love Lewis, those who love them both, and those who hate them both. If Bergman and Lewis leave you indifferent, you probably won’t get much out of this sketch.

Happy 83rd Birthday, JL!

El Ulmer del Mexico: Bunuel's SUSANA (1951)

I've only seen a few Bunuel's cheap Mexican productions, but as a fan of Ulmer and 1930s-1940s Poverty Row, they really do something for me. SUSANA is no exception, despite the drubbing some fans give it. What's not to like, here? Hmm, some folks is particular. In his Film Epidemic blog, for example, Joel Harmon says SUSANA's "purpose is muddled and the film's narrative is not compelling enough to pick up the slack. A fairly insignificant effort from a great filmmaker." Purpose? Muddled? Insignificant? This may be the least muddled of any Bunuel movie, and that's the whole purpose; the sledgehammer symbolism via which the "pro-family" message is subverted; its significance is in championing the chaos of casual sex over the family. It makes sense that, in the long run, even Bunuel's fellow closet Catholic Andre Bazin hated it, and yet found things to like. And even without all that, Bunuel is never less than engaging, and here the narrative zips along on well-traveled rails so smoothly that it's like a rollercoaster at the femme fatale amusement park. We know the arc, so we can kick back and enjoy la spitfire sizzle! Del fuego de la escupida!

Much more Mexican horror than the weirdness of SPANISH DRACULA, SUSANA is a subtextually resplendent sister to the Dracula legend, with Reform School's rat and spider-filled basement substituting for Transylvania... and dollops of escaped maniac Renfield, and the nymphomaniac hospital patients in LA NOTTE and SHOCK CORRIDOR wrapped into Susana's excellent character. Her ambitious gold-digging makes Barbara Stanwyck and Lady MacBeth seem wishy-washy by contrast; she does everything but hiss at the camera like a snake; it's amazing Bunuel even grants her a shadow or a reflection. American bourgeois audiences should make sure to note the fine rapport between family members--the respect they have for one another around the dinner table--before Susana commences her homewrecking in earnest. As for her mysterious reform school crimes (we never know why she's there), the "muddle" is a dead giveaway if you can read code: nymphomania!

What fever mirage of "the ideal upper class Mexican ranch family with strong ties to the earth and to the Virgin Mary. Mother of God" can survive against the hot beating heart of the hussy? She's as inviting and alluring as can be, but as the abject outcast of this sun-bleached unit, she's the bad guy. Even though of course we root for her to break out of her dungeon during the height of a Satanic storm and openly share in her lascivious victories. Meanwhile, papa's favorite mare is stuck in a painful twilight after ghosting a stillborn; more symbolism. Is papa's love for the mare supposed to make up for the fact that he breeds her and rides her like an animal?

For all that, Bunuel shows innate respect for the power of the patriarchal family, its productivity and community; Papa tries his damndest to resist Susana's wiles--he does far better than I would have--and when the son kisses his ring, you feel the electric charge of patriarchal power like it's zapping out of a Strickfadden Frankenstein whirligig. The old maid who is wise to Susana's goldigging tricks runs around like Maria Ouspenskaya crossed with Chuz Lampreave (1940s Universal horror by way of Almodovar), warning of the viper in the house; but at the same time this old maid is kind of patient and almost amused as the whole tragedy play itself out. It's just too bad Susana doesn't have an old Nietszchean professor writing her encouraging letters, as Stanwyck had in the much glitzier BABY FACE.

With its cheap indoor sets and backdrops (and I always love poverty row style rain and lightning), SUSANA is very reminiscent of the PRC output of Edgar G. Ulmer, specifically desert-themed work like DETOUR and TOMORROW WE LIVE. And as befits Mexico's reputation for steaminess, the amount of leg shown and implied sex behind closed doors is off a the chain. Each of the hombres is granted one good trespass with Susana, the before and aftermaths of which we witness through Bunuel's openly fetishistic camera. The most fetishistic part involves the father oiling his long rifle with manly strokes of his cloth while Susana scrubs scrubs scrubs a nearby spot (pictured at right).

Man, those Catholics they invented the sexual loophole (it's not a sin if we use symbols) and the fiery surrealist Bunuel sure knows how to sublimate and symbolize, like the proverbial dickens. When she gets egg all over her skirt after wrestling with a caballero in the chicken coop, you can stop worrying and bask in the sledgehammer sunshine of it all; Bunuel will supply the goop, all you have to do is rub your nose in it and the answer will appear: Viva la Muertita!

This week (3/6-3/12) at the Film Forum in NYC: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Today starts a Film Forum revival of John Stahl's 1945 "nature noir," LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, as creepy a subtextual indictment of post-code Americana as I've ever seen. Gene Tierney stars as Ellen Berent who makes the mistake of giving her obsessive insane "pre-code" love to post-code American family man dork Cornell Wilde; his idea of a honeymoon is to drag his hot and willing bride off to some remote lodge in the mountains, not for a week of amorous lovemaking, but rather for tedious and corny sing-a-longs with the extended family. Not one of his relations can understand why she would possibly want to spend some time alone with her new husband on their honeymoon, this being a HANDMAID'S TALE-style nightmare alternative universe where the edicts of Joseph Breen and the code are no longer even challenged, merely rotely obeyed until everyone falls into a genderless state of perpetual sexless cheer and Norman Rockwell gentleness.

Wilde's got a straight-edge kid brother and he gets killed first, after he decides to hang around like a third wheel albatross on Ellen's neck. The way Stahl frames this event in the peace and quiet of the lake makes a great ironic comment on the code and the craze for "discovering the great national parks" that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse's yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing though, compared to the glorious moment of Gene throwing herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage. Inevitably, old Corny Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one, in order to hobble her via child, rather than worrying about whether maybe if he'd bothered to pay attention to her in bed and give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary. Thus we see the slippery con job our genes pull on us time and time again.

If we, living as relatively free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code Americana hell hole like this would we act any different than Tierney's character? Or would we just quietly disappear--like Lea Massari in L'AVENTURA (1960)-- before the bores could catch us and smother us back into the fold? Maybe I'm just unusually squirrely when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme "redefines mauve." Man, I hate mauve. At least Tierney's character, whom Anderson calls "one of cinema's most chilling psychopaths" grew up in a situation outside the claustrophobic, chipmunk cheeked tedium of the "sanitized" American family. For some of us, growing up right in the mauve thicket of it all, not even throwing ourselves down the stairs could get us out of soccer practice. Lord knows I tried; it's a very difficult thing to pull off, actually. Have you tried it? I'm not saying you should, but try it some time, it's hard to do. To me, this girl's a hero for that alone.

Where I'm going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema's phony morals; the "as long as you feel bad about it, it's okay to kill" sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in the bookends to Winona Ryder's career thus far: HEATHERS and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in an earlier post, which each use the killing of dumb jock frat guys as a fake out). The fact is, our stale society needs more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with Disney-fied prefab beige rusticity. We had THELMA AND LOUISE but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of gourmet shopping swept over the fire, But they're dupes, man. The whole stylish shoe fetish thing is a scam. These people need shocking; art as shock therapy to jolt them from their carbohydrated stupor. Ellen is an artist, in that sense, a frustrated panther godess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman's pre-presentation nightmare. It's just too bad she couldn't take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her.

Happy Belated Birthday, Jessica Biel!

It was yesterday and I completely forgot! I know it's coming every year, since it's the day after mine, or one day and a decade or so. She was born March 3, 1982.

Why do I love Jessica Biel? Because she's a hot chameleon, able to assume a wide range of babe disguises. I almost said "little" in there, hot little chameleon, but that would be wrong, she's not little, and that's part of what makes her so hot, she's large! Not phat, but biggish, and that's and a rarity in the starlit menagerie of Hollywood. She's tall, she's curvy, she's not thin. At times she's almost zaftig, other times statuesque, she changes scene to scene, moment to moment, but is always present, accounted for, and--in one way or another--ravishing. Dressed in combat fatigues and a girl-next door 'do, she looks like she could believably kick some ass, then throw her into some makeup and a form-fitting gown and she'll floor you with supermodel stun power.

And if you doubt her acting skills, just compare her to Raquel Welch, Scarlett Johansson, or the other Jessica, Alba--whom I've got nothing against and who is a decent actress as far as her stunted roles go-- they all have the curves but they all lack Biel's pelvic gravitas. Biel walks and moves from the hips; when she walks she knocks over buildings with her sashay. She's centered in the diaphragm, not the head like the coltish starlets in her ranking. She moves like a prize fighter. She's not just "pretending" the way some women pretend to be sexy, Biel is woman; she doesn't even have to roar.

She holds her own in a wide range of genres: horror, action, drama; she even sports a good British accent in L'ILLUSIONISTE! It's true. So don't be a hater, please, and join me in wishing my fellow Piscean a happy birthday and continued success in the land of overpriced tinsel and inevitably broken dreams!

Read my piece in BL #50 on her performance as "American Kali" in the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake.

Young Alfred

I had no idea there was anything like this out there. But here we are - and the year could not be any later than 1930, maybe as early as 1929 - and here’s young Alfred Hitchcock, certainly no more than 30 in this clip, hectoring one of his leading actresses (Anny Ondra of Blackmail) into submission with humorous sexual innuendo, just like his nasty-minded biographers accuse him of doing.

Eternal gratitude to David Cairns of Shadowplay for discovering this clip.