The Mummy Movie Season kicks off inauspiciously with Time Walker (1982). I watched this in snatched moments over four days, probably not the ideal way to watch a movie but I don’t think it would be improved at all by a continuous viewing.
The premise has promise – a mummy taken from an Egyptian tomb turns out to be an alien - but the promising premise is sadly squandered in this badly bungled, bargain basement, bandaged baddie bilge.
The first problem is the star, Ben ‘Alias Smith And Jones’ Murphy in the role of ProfessorDouglas McCadden. He’s either a.) wishing he were doing something else or b.) not a very good actor or c.) both. In any case he’s as wooden as a cricket bat but with less charisma.
The script (perhaps ‘teleplay’ would be nearer the mark) was obviously written to comply with the overriding directive – make it cheap! Thus the entire opening sequence comprises stock footage of the Pyramids and the entrance to a temple (supposedly the façade of Tutenkhamun’s tomb). Inside are McCadden and some other archeologist fellow. There’s an earthquake which causes a secret wall to collapse and inside is a sarcophagus (along the skeletal remains of a pharoahonic cortege).
So it is shipped to the Professor’s college in California, to be opened by….his students! This is a common set up in countless mummy (and ‘cursed artefact’ movies in general). You would expect a discovery of this magnitude to be handled by the world’s leading archeological specialists, in a strictly controlled environment and with the necessary security arrangements, not by a bunch of inept, horny, beer swilling teens in a modest laboratory which anyone can enter, on the science faculty of a minor college. But I could be out of touch, maybe it really does happen like that. They also seem to have their own on-site nuclear reactor…
The incompetence of the students in charge of X-Raying the contents of the sarcophogus leads to the Mummy being exposed to an overdose of radiation and we all know what that means. On the day that the press reporters (seemingly from the local rag) are convened to witness the grand opening, surprise, surprise! The Mummy’s not at home.
But his coffin does contain a green mould that turns out to be a flesh eating fungus. As it’s also all over his bandages, anyone he touches will be infected. And the theft of five crystals from a very obvious secret compartment in the base of the sarcophogus (which had been overlooked by everyone except the thieving bellend student) means that he’ll be ‘touching’ quite a few people in his quest to recover the glowing gems which somehow enable him to teleport back to his own planet. And at the end that’s what he does, vanishing in a blue glare and taking the willing McCadden with him.
Although there seems to be a lot going on, nothing really happens, we’re left with a lot of talking, endless Mummy POV shots (tinted green), some very brief ‘attacks’ and some more talking. There’s a crappy, Ancient Egypt themed ‘Frat party’ and a listless police investigation (conducted by the Campus Cop). Direction is pedestrian, acting just adequate, SFX cheap, and the whole perfunctory thing is as bleak as the moon and equally lacking in atmosphere and gravity. Instead of ‘The End’, the final caption warns the audience ‘To be continued….’ Luckily we never saw the return of this monster from the Id….stupid and insipid.
Paddington/Paddington 2. Just what this awful time calls for; two perfectly sunny and charming instant classics of British cinema.
Carry On Up The Jungle/Carry On Loving. If 1970 could be described as Hammer's annus horribilis it's pretty evident that the Carry On team were having bother with their annus too. Jungle is a huge misfire that feels like it was thrown together without a proper story and little more than a series of crude, rather than clever, double entendres to offer. The writing is much more like the feeble stuff that the Carry On TV series consisted of than the often brilliant movies. Terry Scott is awfully weak in the cod Tarzan role that was surely intended for Jim Dale. Valerie Leon turns up as a sort of African Amazon in a bit that might have been intended as a parody of Hammer's exotics, such as Slave Girls. Watching it tonight I realised that this was probably the film that Queen Kong aspired to be. Loving is a little better in that there's a bit more to the characters but, like most of the series entries that followed, it's mostly uninspired. One plus is that poor Imogen Hassall has a reasonably big role and shows a knack for comedy, particularly when her character is in dowdy mode.
The Villain Still Pursued Her, an oddball movie from 1940 that spoofs Victorian melodramas, although it seems uncertain whether its target is stage productions or silent movies. I don't know of an earlier example of the sort of movie that Mel Brooks and the ZAZ team would do much better later on so it's interesting from that point of view, although very few of its gags actually land and Buster Keaton is wasted in a supporting role. There are a couple of chuckles along the way and it somehow managed to smuggle through what is probably the filthiest joke of the 1940s: "I have not fallen. I am standing in the full force of my manhood. Erect!"
Child's Play (1972), in which malevolent forces are at work in a Catholic boys' boarding school. Sidney Lumet directs powerfully and James Mason is terrific as a strict Latin teacher. There's a palpable sense of evil at work and a horror movie score so this is at least a borderline horror movie. File alongside Unman, Wittering & Zigo and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I liked it a lot.
Stolen Assignment, in which journalists investigate an artist who is accused of murdering his wife. Practically the dictionary definition of "run-of-the-mill", the most interesting thing about this one is that it was directed by Terence Fisher, at Bray, with a few Hammer personnel involved.
Inferior remake, given a period makeover (set in Victorian / Edwardian England). It lacks the light hearted first half of the ’37 version and the antagonists are pretty bland. The serial wifekiller looks somewhat like John Travolta and the attempts to build suspense come to nothing. Admittedly, Basil Rathbone's edgy, twitching, shell shocked madman was a hard act to follow, but this comes nowhere near.
The title is a bit of a misnomer, but it’s snappier than “Charlie Chan In Retfordshire”, the fictional English county where the action mainly takes place. This time Charlie is asked to clear an innocent man due to be hanged for the murder of a friend among the huntin’fishin’shootin’ set. The film is peppered with offensive racial stereotypes - the English are portrayed as a race of either superficial, privileged, hedonistic, heavy drinking toffs, or dimwitted, headscratching, inarticulate Cockneys – including the local police inspector! It’s outrageous!
Another constant of the series initiated in this film is the “mystery arm through the window” weilding pistol, knife or other lethal weapon and a narrow escape for Charlie. There’s footage of an actual fox hunt and some neat stunt riding, and this is also the one which introduces the hereafter customary revelation that the culprit is always the one nobody suspects. Ray(mond) Milland has a supporting role and Madge (White Zombie) Bellamy is among the socialites.
The second film in Fox’s Charlie Chan series (the first is lost) gives us our first sight of Warner Oland in the role. Bela Lugosi co-stars as a phoney astrologer and Dwight Frye plays a butler as if he were Renfield. The plot is adapted from Earl Derr Biggers’ homonymous novel whose title supposedly comes from an old saying: "Death is a black camel that kneels unbidden at every gate."
It establishes the format which would continue throughout the series – contrived and convoluted plot, plethora of suspects, perfunctory romance, countless red herrings, the trap to make the killer give the game away, numerous cod-Chinese aphorisms (“Can cut off monkey's tail, but he is still monkey”) and witty ripostes ("Inspector, you need a lie-detector...an invention that detects instantly when anyone is telling a lie." “Oh, I see. You mean a wife. I have one”), plus the inevitable comedy relief character, in this case Kashimo, the bumbling Japanese assistant assigned to Charlie by the Honolulu Police Department - in the original Chan novels, Charlie has an almost xenophobic disdain for the citizens of the Land Of The Rising Sun.
The location filming in Hawaii adds local colour, but the cumbersome equipment of the time means these scenes are rather static and the rhythm sedate, while the interior/studio scenes seem to flow better, notwithstanding a few awkward pauses and an occasional abrupt edit.
The Assassination Bureau, in which journalist Diana Rigg engages the head of an assassin-for-hire organisation (Oliver Reed) to kill ... himself. The two stars shine in this period romp and there's a fun supporting cast. It lacks the directorial touch of a Richard Lester or maybe a Blake Edwards to turn it into a classic but it's well worth a look.
The Seventh Survivor, in which the survivors of a U-Boat attack are taken in by lighthouse keepers. Among the group are a British agent and a German agent. All the right ingredients then for a wartime comedy thriller and this one passes the time nicely enough that I'm not going to nitpick the plot. The capable cast includes Martita Hunt who always seems to be the same age in everything.
One of the most enjoyable of the early Fox produced Charlie Chan films, but definitely not one for the PC crowd – this film contains ‘yellowface’, wild animals in cages, circus ‘freaks’ including a giant and a pair of midgets, fur coats galore, male chauvinism and copious cigar smoking - mainly by one of the midgets.
For those who like to take restrospective offence on behalf of others, it should be noted that Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan provided a positive reversal of the customary Hollywood casting of Oriental characters as Fu-Manchu style, ‘Yellow Peril’ villains or stereotypical coolies and laundrymen. Oland’s portrayal of the cultivated and wily Chinese detective from Honolulu proved highly popular with both contemporary American Asians and the films were likewise very successful in China – to the extent that when Oland made a promotional trip to Shanghai he was greeted as a national hero.
As for the diminutive circus performers, they were played by successful sibling Vaudeville singers/dancers Olive and George Brasno. Their film appearances were few – they turned down an offer to appear in The Wizard Of Oz because they were making more money on the Vaudeville circuit. Olive appears here quite accomplished as an amateur actress, her brother less so. In spite of puffing his way through an endless stream of (full sized) cigars -(even when he’s disguised as a baby in a pram!) - with the evident relish of the serious smoker, the little man lived to be seventy years old, while his sister passed away at eighty, just two days after her husband, to whom she was married for thirty seven years. Their parts in aiding Chan are central to the narrative, leaving Number One Son (played by Keye Luke, later of Kung-Fu fame) free to pursue a romance with Su Toy, a pretty Chinese contortionist.
At just seventy minutes, the pace never flags and the Big Top setting and scenes on a train carrying the circus from town to town provide a welcome change from the customary mystery film milieux of old dark houses or mean city streets. It’s also one of the few Chan films to include scenes with Charlie’s wife and all twelve (later thirteen) of their offspring – when they enter the circus in single file, the ticket collector quips ‘that guy’s brought his own sideshow’.
The mystery itself centres around the murder of the unpopular co-owner of the "Kinney and Gaines Combined Circus" As usual, just about every character has a motive for wishing the man dead and, equally as usual, the audience don’t get all the gen until Charlie has had the killer give him/herself away via an ingenious trap, when he explains everything to the conveniently assembled cast of characters. In short, a treat for Chan fans, general mystery movie addicts, circus historians and connoisseurs of tatty gorilla suits.
A revisit to this, the twenty third film in the Fox series and Sidney Toley’s seventh portrayal of the Honolulu detective.
The Charlie Chan films are well known for convoluted plots, but this one surely takes the prawn cracker. Lead antagonist Doctor Cream is not only a world class plastic surgeon, but also an expert sculptor of waxworks, which he displays in his educational Wax Museum Of Crime where he has, among tableaux of historical and contemporary murders, exhibits of the Guillotine, the gallows, the headsman’s block and a working(!) Electric Chair, ex-property of Sing Sing Penitentiary. Amusingly, his macabre Museum is endorsed by the Civic Authorities for proving to the citizenry that ‘Crime never pays’. Another of the doctor’s talents appears to be engineering, as he has fashioned a larger than life mechanical automaton with which he plays chess!
But beneath the museum he maintains a fully equipped operating theatre – or as Chan puts it, “Surgical birthplace of new faces. Evidence betrays Museum to be hideout for hunted criminals who change faces to cheat Law”. As if this weren’t far fetched enough, the Museum also hosts a weekly live radio broadcast of ‘The Crime League’ where famous criminologists re-examine celebrated criminal cases. Chan is lured to participate in one such broadcast so that one of Cream’s current clients, escaped killer Steve McBirney can get revenge on Charlie, whose testimony was key in his conviction.
Of course, the attempt to murder the detctive goes awry and another participant, who was coincidentally just about to reveal McBirney’s involvement in framing an innocent man for a murder he committed ten years before, is killed instead.
While awaiting the arrival of the police, Chan is helped and (mainly) hindered by Number Two Son as he attempts to determine the identity of the murderer from among all those present – the doctor, his lady assistant, the broadcasting staff, a female reporter, a lawyer, the gatecrashing avenging widow and the suspiciously screwy janitor.
Apart from the hilariously over-contrived plot, this entry in the Chan series is great fun for being set in the atmospheric, storm bound museum populated by creepy effigies and gruesome devices of torture and execution, along with the swift succesion of sinister comings and goings through various concealed exits, secret stairways, hidden rooms and characters hiding in plain sight by posing as waxwork figures. And no Chan feature would be complete without Charlie’s catch phrases “Thank you – so much”, “Contradiction, please”, cod-Oriental aphorisms - here we get, among others, “Only very foolish mouse make nest in cat's ear”, “Every bird seek its own tree, never tree the bird” and pithy quips “Will imitate woman and change mind”. But I will not imitate woman – I enjoyed this second viewing just as much as the first.
A return visit to 1988's Ghost Town last night, no overlooked classic but a solid and respectable entry in the too-small sub-genre of horror westerns.One of the last films from Charles Band's Empire Pictures, it loses points for a bit of a muddled script and for showing too much of its main villain, but compensates with a decent atmosphere and a lot of musical stings culled from, I believe, the likes of Re-animator and Prison.
The Day of the Locust, a criminally long, unfocused drama set in 1930s Hollywood. I don't know why I'm supposed to be interested in the characters, who are as dull as they are unconvincing, or what passes for a story. Donald Sutherland plays a character called Homer Simpson. Karen Black was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as a hooker/actress. Black is an acclaimed actress with multiple awards to her name but I've mostly found her to be absolutely atrocious. I don't know if this is because her severe squint is so distracting or whether she really is that bad. For no apparent reason, the film ends on gruesome scenes of mob violence that might well have influenced Romero's Dawn of the Dead. These scenes are so pretentiously directed by John Schlesinger that I laughed out loud. Dreadful, self-important crap.
The Big Short, the funny, angry, thrillingly-made masterpiece about the 2007 banking collapse. It's cathartic viewing, then you realise that, instead of doing something about the system, we just rolled over, lubed up and let ourselves be fucked over by ever greedier and stupider criminals.
Rising Damp, the feature film of ITV's best sitcom which is included in the series' complete boxset (a warning for anyone planning to watch that set - series 4 is presented out of continuity sequence which is a little annoying as there is some plot progression). The film is very much a "damp" squib as it lazily rehashes plots and jokes from the series and most of the new material (a brief Grease parody, for instance) is terrible. There is one nice, touching scene between Rigsby and Philip where we learn a truth about the latter that always seemed like a bit of unspoken subtext in the series. Otherwise, and despite a few decent performances, it's terrible. Made by Roy Skeggs' company and with a few Hammer alumni behind the scenes.
ETA: One of the worst things about the film is the set which replaces the sitcom's wonderfully grotty rooms (including a poster for a Tarzan movie) with much blander interiors.
Another José Larraz effort, this is one of those ambiguous affairs where what happens may be down to machinations, madness or manifestations of the supernatural.
The setting is a plantation in India in 1930. Lots of stock footage (as in lots), decent interior sets but so slow and lacking in incident, with an excess of expositionary dialogues and no mystery, suspense or surprises it soon outstays its welcome, and eventually peters out into an unconclusive ending.
Genre regular Rosalba Neri is in it for the first five minutes and the female lead is Mary Maude in her second Spanish picture, having appeared the same year in Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s La Residencia.
It didn’t help that I saw an old and damaged VHS rip in which all the colours had faded to pinky red, but I suspect even a pristine restored edition wouldn’t bring this one to life.
This is another film I’d never heard of and whose existence I discovered by chance after watching a video of an old British comedy show (At Last, The 1948 Show)….just two hours after I first heard of it I’d watched it. The wonders of technology – I remember the ‘good old days’ when the time between first reading about a film and actually getting to see it could be measured in years, depending mainly on TV programme planners.
La Familia Vourdalak de Alexie Tolstoi, one of the thirteen episodes of Televisión Española's El Quinto Jinete (The Fifth Horseman, 1975-6). Contemporay sex-symbol (also a fine actress) Charo López starred as a sexy vampire in an otherwise unremarkable and lacklustre adaptation of the story done so much better by Mario Bava.
Directed in occupied France by Maurice Tourneur (while his son Jacques was directing I Walked With A Zombie in Hollywood), The Devil’s Hand is an intriguing and visually arresting fantasy satire version of the oft-adapted Faustian legend.
The beginning, with the societal cross section of guests at an Alpine hotel, gathered in the lounge and engaged in reading, knitting, playing cards, moaning and idle banter vividly brings to mind Les Vacances De Monsieur Hulot, and the tone of Tourneur’s tale of struggling artist Roland Brissot (Pierre Fresnay)’s ill advised pact with the Devil is not far removed from the later whimsy of Gallic compatriot Jacques Tati’s films.
Of course, the basic concept of eternal damnation also requires that there be a certain amount of disturbing supernatural manifestations and existential terror once the protagonist cottons on to the fact that you can’t bluff your way out once you’ve sold you soul to Satan (in this case represented by a meek, ‘provincial looking’ chap in a black suit, tie and bowler).
At eighty minutes, the film moves at a brisk pace and touches a lot of stylistic and generic bases along the way, from the ‘policier’type opening, through Hollywood pattern romantic comedy, film noir, Expressionism, comedy of manners, fairy tale, mystery thiller…but the overriding sensation is one of light hearted playfulness, the director evidently enjoying the opportunity to string together a series of tonally and visually disparate pastiche tableaux to (re)tell an old, familiar story.
There’s no dwelling on (nor attempt to exploit) the sinister (in fact, it’s remarked that the titular appendage is a left hand) and horrific, even when they do make an appearance (the living, moving hand trapped inside a box, the ghastly, demonic artworks Brissot is compelled to create, the brutal murder of his lover, the grotesquely masked phantoms of the past – even the ‘tragic’final scene is rendered less traumatic by the preceding reconciliation and the contrivedly neat ‘closing the cycle’finale.
Although the narrative and dramatic aspects are effective but rather ‘lightweight’, the film as a whole is a celebration of the visual potential of the ‘classic age’ motion picture, and a masterclass in framing, compostion and elegant but unobtrusive camera movement, as well as lighting and set design and even simple animation effects. Well worth a look.
I, Tonya, a semi drama-documentary depiction of figure skater Tonya Harding and the "incident" in which her rival was assaulted. This is lovely stuff that knows that it's true story is almost unbelievable and has fun with the idea, We even get some footage of the real people in the closing credits to prove that they really were absurdly cartoonish people. Script, direction, performances, music are all first rate. Highly recommended.
The Mummy Movie Season kicks off inauspiciously with Time Walker (1982). I watched this in snatched moments over four days, probably not the ideal way to watch a movie but I don’t think it would be improved at all by a continuous viewing.
The premise has promise – a mummy taken from an Egyptian tomb turns out to be an alien - but the promising premise is sadly squandered in this badly bungled, bargain basement, bandaged baddie bilge.
The first problem is the star, Ben ‘Alias Smith And Jones’ Murphy in the role of ProfessorDouglas McCadden. He’s either a.) wishing he were doing something else or b.) not a very good actor or c.) both. In any case he’s as wooden as a cricket bat but with less charisma.
The script (perhaps ‘teleplay’ would be nearer the mark) was obviously written to comply with the overriding directive – make it cheap! Thus the entire opening sequence comprises stock footage of the Pyramids and the entrance to a temple (supposedly the façade of Tutenkhamun’s tomb). Inside are McCadden and some other archeologist fellow. There’s an earthquake which causes a secret wall to collapse and inside is a sarcophagus (along the skeletal remains of a pharoahonic cortege).
So it is shipped to the Professor’s college in California, to be opened by….his students! This is a common set up in countless mummy (and ‘cursed artefact’ movies in general). You would expect a discovery of this magnitude to be handled by the world’s leading archeological specialists, in a strictly controlled environment and with the necessary security arrangements, not by a bunch of inept, horny, beer swilling teens in a modest laboratory which anyone can enter, on the science faculty of a minor college. But I could be out of touch, maybe it really does happen like that. They also seem to have their own on-site nuclear reactor…
The incompetence of the students in charge of X-Raying the contents of the sarcophogus leads to the Mummy being exposed to an overdose of radiation and we all know what that means. On the day that the press reporters (seemingly from the local rag) are convened to witness the grand opening, surprise, surprise! The Mummy’s not at home.
But his coffin does contain a green mould that turns out to be a flesh eating fungus. As it’s also all over his bandages, anyone he touches will be infected. And the theft of five crystals from a very obvious secret compartment in the base of the sarcophogus (which had been overlooked by everyone except the thieving bellend student) means that he’ll be ‘touching’ quite a few people in his quest to recover the glowing gems which somehow enable him to teleport back to his own planet. And at the end that’s what he does, vanishing in a blue glare and taking the willing McCadden with him.
Although there seems to be a lot going on, nothing really happens, we’re left with a lot of talking, endless Mummy POV shots (tinted green), some very brief ‘attacks’ and some more talking. There’s a crappy, Ancient Egypt themed ‘Frat party’ and a listless police investigation (conducted by the Campus Cop). Direction is pedestrian, acting just adequate, SFX cheap, and the whole perfunctory thing is as bleak as the moon and equally lacking in atmosphere and gravity. Instead of ‘The End’, the final caption warns the audience ‘To be continued….’ Luckily we never saw the return of this monster from the Id….stupid and insipid.
Paddington/Paddington 2. Just what this awful time calls for; two perfectly sunny and charming instant classics of British cinema.
Carry On Up The Jungle/Carry On Loving. If 1970 could be described as Hammer's annus horribilis it's pretty evident that the Carry On team were having bother with their annus too. Jungle is a huge misfire that feels like it was thrown together without a proper story and little more than a series of crude, rather than clever, double entendres to offer. The writing is much more like the feeble stuff that the Carry On TV series consisted of than the often brilliant movies. Terry Scott is awfully weak in the cod Tarzan role that was surely intended for Jim Dale. Valerie Leon turns up as a sort of African Amazon in a bit that might have been intended as a parody of Hammer's exotics, such as Slave Girls. Watching it tonight I realised that this was probably the film that Queen Kong aspired to be. Loving is a little better in that there's a bit more to the characters but, like most of the series entries that followed, it's mostly uninspired. One plus is that poor Imogen Hassall has a reasonably big role and shows a knack for comedy, particularly when her character is in dowdy mode.
The Villain Still Pursued Her, an oddball movie from 1940 that spoofs Victorian melodramas, although it seems uncertain whether its target is stage productions or silent movies. I don't know of an earlier example of the sort of movie that Mel Brooks and the ZAZ team would do much better later on so it's interesting from that point of view, although very few of its gags actually land and Buster Keaton is wasted in a supporting role. There are a couple of chuckles along the way and it somehow managed to smuggle through what is probably the filthiest joke of the 1940s: "I have not fallen. I am standing in the full force of my manhood. Erect!"
Child's Play (1972), in which malevolent forces are at work in a Catholic boys' boarding school. Sidney Lumet directs powerfully and James Mason is terrific as a strict Latin teacher. There's a palpable sense of evil at work and a horror movie score so this is at least a borderline horror movie. File alongside Unman, Wittering & Zigo and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I liked it a lot.
Stolen Assignment, in which journalists investigate an artist who is accused of murdering his wife. Practically the dictionary definition of "run-of-the-mill", the most interesting thing about this one is that it was directed by Terence Fisher, at Bray, with a few Hammer personnel involved.
Love From A Stranger (1947)
Inferior remake, given a period makeover (set in Victorian / Edwardian England). It lacks the light hearted first half of the ’37 version and the antagonists are pretty bland. The serial wifekiller looks somewhat like John Travolta and the attempts to build suspense come to nothing. Admittedly, Basil Rathbone's edgy, twitching, shell shocked madman was a hard act to follow, but this comes nowhere near.
Charlie Chan In Transylvania (2011)
Fifteen minute fan made sho(r)t on video oddity. Waste of time.
Charlie Chan In London (1934)
The title is a bit of a misnomer, but it’s snappier than “Charlie Chan In Retfordshire”, the fictional English county where the action mainly takes place. This time Charlie is asked to clear an innocent man due to be hanged for the murder of a friend among the huntin’fishin’shootin’ set. The film is peppered with offensive racial stereotypes - the English are portrayed as a race of either superficial, privileged, hedonistic, heavy drinking toffs, or dimwitted, headscratching, inarticulate Cockneys – including the local police inspector! It’s outrageous!
Another constant of the series initiated in this film is the “mystery arm through the window” weilding pistol, knife or other lethal weapon and a narrow escape for Charlie. There’s footage of an actual fox hunt and some neat stunt riding, and this is also the one which introduces the hereafter customary revelation that the culprit is always the one nobody suspects. Ray(mond) Milland has a supporting role and Madge (White Zombie) Bellamy is among the socialites.
The Black Camel (1931)
The second film in Fox’s Charlie Chan series (the first is lost) gives us our first sight of Warner Oland in the role. Bela Lugosi co-stars as a phoney astrologer and Dwight Frye plays a butler as if he were Renfield. The plot is adapted from Earl Derr Biggers’ homonymous novel whose title supposedly comes from an old saying: "Death is a black camel that kneels unbidden at every gate."
It establishes the format which would continue throughout the series – contrived and convoluted plot, plethora of suspects, perfunctory romance, countless red herrings, the trap to make the killer give the game away, numerous cod-Chinese aphorisms (“Can cut off monkey's tail, but he is still monkey”) and witty ripostes ("Inspector, you need a lie-detector...an invention that detects instantly when anyone is telling a lie." “Oh, I see. You mean a wife. I have one”), plus the inevitable comedy relief character, in this case Kashimo, the bumbling Japanese assistant assigned to Charlie by the Honolulu Police Department - in the original Chan novels, Charlie has an almost xenophobic disdain for the citizens of the Land Of The Rising Sun.
The location filming in Hawaii adds local colour, but the cumbersome equipment of the time means these scenes are rather static and the rhythm sedate, while the interior/studio scenes seem to flow better, notwithstanding a few awkward pauses and an occasional abrupt edit.
The Assassination Bureau, in which journalist Diana Rigg engages the head of an assassin-for-hire organisation (Oliver Reed) to kill ... himself. The two stars shine in this period romp and there's a fun supporting cast. It lacks the directorial touch of a Richard Lester or maybe a Blake Edwards to turn it into a classic but it's well worth a look.
The Seventh Survivor, in which the survivors of a U-Boat attack are taken in by lighthouse keepers. Among the group are a British agent and a German agent. All the right ingredients then for a wartime comedy thriller and this one passes the time nicely enough that I'm not going to nitpick the plot. The capable cast includes Martita Hunt who always seems to be the same age in everything.
Charlie Chan At The Circus (1936)
One of the most enjoyable of the early Fox produced Charlie Chan films, but definitely not one for the PC crowd – this film contains ‘yellowface’, wild animals in cages, circus ‘freaks’ including a giant and a pair of midgets, fur coats galore, male chauvinism and copious cigar smoking - mainly by one of the midgets.
For those who like to take restrospective offence on behalf of others, it should be noted that Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan provided a positive reversal of the customary Hollywood casting of Oriental characters as Fu-Manchu style, ‘Yellow Peril’ villains or stereotypical coolies and laundrymen. Oland’s portrayal of the cultivated and wily Chinese detective from Honolulu proved highly popular with both contemporary American Asians and the films were likewise very successful in China – to the extent that when Oland made a promotional trip to Shanghai he was greeted as a national hero.
As for the diminutive circus performers, they were played by successful sibling Vaudeville singers/dancers Olive and George Brasno. Their film appearances were few – they turned down an offer to appear in The Wizard Of Oz because they were making more money on the Vaudeville circuit. Olive appears here quite accomplished as an amateur actress, her brother less so. In spite of puffing his way through an endless stream of (full sized) cigars -(even when he’s disguised as a baby in a pram!) - with the evident relish of the serious smoker, the little man lived to be seventy years old, while his sister passed away at eighty, just two days after her husband, to whom she was married for thirty seven years. Their parts in aiding Chan are central to the narrative, leaving Number One Son (played by Keye Luke, later of Kung-Fu fame) free to pursue a romance with Su Toy, a pretty Chinese contortionist.
At just seventy minutes, the pace never flags and the Big Top setting and scenes on a train carrying the circus from town to town provide a welcome change from the customary mystery film milieux of old dark houses or mean city streets. It’s also one of the few Chan films to include scenes with Charlie’s wife and all twelve (later thirteen) of their offspring – when they enter the circus in single file, the ticket collector quips ‘that guy’s brought his own sideshow’.
The mystery itself centres around the murder of the unpopular co-owner of the "Kinney and Gaines Combined Circus" As usual, just about every character has a motive for wishing the man dead and, equally as usual, the audience don’t get all the gen until Charlie has had the killer give him/herself away via an ingenious trap, when he explains everything to the conveniently assembled cast of characters. In short, a treat for Chan fans, general mystery movie addicts, circus historians and connoisseurs of tatty gorilla suits.
Charlie Chan At The Wax Museum (1940)
A revisit to this, the twenty third film in the Fox series and Sidney Toley’s seventh portrayal of the Honolulu detective.
The Charlie Chan films are well known for convoluted plots, but this one surely takes the prawn cracker. Lead antagonist Doctor Cream is not only a world class plastic surgeon, but also an expert sculptor of waxworks, which he displays in his educational Wax Museum Of Crime where he has, among tableaux of historical and contemporary murders, exhibits of the Guillotine, the gallows, the headsman’s block and a working(!) Electric Chair, ex-property of Sing Sing Penitentiary. Amusingly, his macabre Museum is endorsed by the Civic Authorities for proving to the citizenry that ‘Crime never pays’. Another of the doctor’s talents appears to be engineering, as he has fashioned a larger than life mechanical automaton with which he plays chess!
But beneath the museum he maintains a fully equipped operating theatre – or as Chan puts it, “Surgical birthplace of new faces. Evidence betrays Museum to be hideout for hunted criminals who change faces to cheat Law”. As if this weren’t far fetched enough, the Museum also hosts a weekly live radio broadcast of ‘The Crime League’ where famous criminologists re-examine celebrated criminal cases. Chan is lured to participate in one such broadcast so that one of Cream’s current clients, escaped killer Steve McBirney can get revenge on Charlie, whose testimony was key in his conviction.
Of course, the attempt to murder the detctive goes awry and another participant, who was coincidentally just about to reveal McBirney’s involvement in framing an innocent man for a murder he committed ten years before, is killed instead.
While awaiting the arrival of the police, Chan is helped and (mainly) hindered by Number Two Son as he attempts to determine the identity of the murderer from among all those present – the doctor, his lady assistant, the broadcasting staff, a female reporter, a lawyer, the gatecrashing avenging widow and the suspiciously screwy janitor.
Apart from the hilariously over-contrived plot, this entry in the Chan series is great fun for being set in the atmospheric, storm bound museum populated by creepy effigies and gruesome devices of torture and execution, along with the swift succesion of sinister comings and goings through various concealed exits, secret stairways, hidden rooms and characters hiding in plain sight by posing as waxwork figures. And no Chan feature would be complete without Charlie’s catch phrases “Thank you – so much”, “Contradiction, please”, cod-Oriental aphorisms - here we get, among others, “Only very foolish mouse make nest in cat's ear”, “Every bird seek its own tree, never tree the bird” and pithy quips “Will imitate woman and change mind”. But I will not imitate woman – I enjoyed this second viewing just as much as the first.
A return visit to 1988's Ghost Town last night, no overlooked classic but a solid and respectable entry in the too-small sub-genre of horror westerns. One of the last films from Charles Band's Empire Pictures, it loses points for a bit of a muddled script and for showing too much of its main villain, but compensates with a decent atmosphere and a lot of musical stings culled from, I believe, the likes of Re-animator and Prison.
The Day of the Locust, a criminally long, unfocused drama set in 1930s Hollywood. I don't know why I'm supposed to be interested in the characters, who are as dull as they are unconvincing, or what passes for a story. Donald Sutherland plays a character called Homer Simpson. Karen Black was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as a hooker/actress. Black is an acclaimed actress with multiple awards to her name but I've mostly found her to be absolutely atrocious. I don't know if this is because her severe squint is so distracting or whether she really is that bad. For no apparent reason, the film ends on gruesome scenes of mob violence that might well have influenced Romero's Dawn of the Dead. These scenes are so pretentiously directed by John Schlesinger that I laughed out loud. Dreadful, self-important crap.
The Big Short, the funny, angry, thrillingly-made masterpiece about the 2007 banking collapse. It's cathartic viewing, then you realise that, instead of doing something about the system, we just rolled over, lubed up and let ourselves be fucked over by ever greedier and stupider criminals.
Rising Damp, the feature film of ITV's best sitcom which is included in the series' complete boxset (a warning for anyone planning to watch that set - series 4 is presented out of continuity sequence which is a little annoying as there is some plot progression). The film is very much a "damp" squib as it lazily rehashes plots and jokes from the series and most of the new material (a brief Grease parody, for instance) is terrible. There is one nice, touching scene between Rigsby and Philip where we learn a truth about the latter that always seemed like a bit of unspoken subtext in the series. Otherwise, and despite a few decent performances, it's terrible. Made by Roy Skeggs' company and with a few Hammer alumni behind the scenes.
ETA: One of the worst things about the film is the set which replaces the sitcom's wonderfully grotty rooms (including a poster for a Tarzan movie) with much blander interiors.
La Muerte Incierta (1971)
Another José Larraz effort, this is one of those ambiguous affairs where what happens may be down to machinations, madness or manifestations of the supernatural.
The setting is a plantation in India in 1930. Lots of stock footage (as in lots), decent interior sets but so slow and lacking in incident, with an excess of expositionary dialogues and no mystery, suspense or surprises it soon outstays its welcome, and eventually peters out into an unconclusive ending.
Genre regular Rosalba Neri is in it for the first five minutes and the female lead is Mary Maude in her second Spanish picture, having appeared the same year in Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s La Residencia.
It didn’t help that I saw an old and damaged VHS rip in which all the colours had faded to pinky red, but I suspect even a pristine restored edition wouldn’t bring this one to life.
This is another film I’d never heard of and whose existence I discovered by chance after watching a video of an old British comedy show (At Last, The 1948 Show)….just two hours after I first heard of it I’d watched it. The wonders of technology – I remember the ‘good old days’ when the time between first reading about a film and actually getting to see it could be measured in years, depending mainly on TV programme planners.
La Familia Vourdalak de Alexie Tolstoi, one of the thirteen episodes of Televisión Española's El Quinto Jinete (The Fifth Horseman, 1975-6). Contemporay sex-symbol (also a fine actress) Charo López starred as a sexy vampire in an otherwise unremarkable and lacklustre adaptation of the story done so much better by Mario Bava.
La Main du Diable (1943)
Directed in occupied France by Maurice Tourneur (while his son Jacques was directing I Walked With A Zombie in Hollywood), The Devil’s Hand is an intriguing and visually arresting fantasy satire version of the oft-adapted Faustian legend.
The beginning, with the societal cross section of guests at an Alpine hotel, gathered in the lounge and engaged in reading, knitting, playing cards, moaning and idle banter vividly brings to mind Les Vacances De Monsieur Hulot, and the tone of Tourneur’s tale of struggling artist Roland Brissot (Pierre Fresnay)’s ill advised pact with the Devil is not far removed from the later whimsy of Gallic compatriot Jacques Tati’s films.
Of course, the basic concept of eternal damnation also requires that there be a certain amount of disturbing supernatural manifestations and existential terror once the protagonist cottons on to the fact that you can’t bluff your way out once you’ve sold you soul to Satan (in this case represented by a meek, ‘provincial looking’ chap in a black suit, tie and bowler).
At eighty minutes, the film moves at a brisk pace and touches a lot of stylistic and generic bases along the way, from the ‘policier’type opening, through Hollywood pattern romantic comedy, film noir, Expressionism, comedy of manners, fairy tale, mystery thiller…but the overriding sensation is one of light hearted playfulness, the director evidently enjoying the opportunity to string together a series of tonally and visually disparate pastiche tableaux to (re)tell an old, familiar story.
There’s no dwelling on (nor attempt to exploit) the sinister (in fact, it’s remarked that the titular appendage is a left hand) and horrific, even when they do make an appearance (the living, moving hand trapped inside a box, the ghastly, demonic artworks Brissot is compelled to create, the brutal murder of his lover, the grotesquely masked phantoms of the past – even the ‘tragic’final scene is rendered less traumatic by the preceding reconciliation and the contrivedly neat ‘closing the cycle’finale.
Although the narrative and dramatic aspects are effective but rather ‘lightweight’, the film as a whole is a celebration of the visual potential of the ‘classic age’ motion picture, and a masterclass in framing, compostion and elegant but unobtrusive camera movement, as well as lighting and set design and even simple animation effects. Well worth a look.
I, Tonya, a semi drama-documentary depiction of figure skater Tonya Harding and the "incident" in which her rival was assaulted. This is lovely stuff that knows that it's true story is almost unbelievable and has fun with the idea, We even get some footage of the real people in the closing credits to prove that they really were absurdly cartoonish people. Script, direction, performances, music are all first rate. Highly recommended.