Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      Extra!      I like writing about obscure films.  I'm drawn to them because I think it's instructive to bring attention to unknown work by forgotten filmmakers, crews, and performers.  Extensive regard of the famous films of yesteryear by critics looking at the "Golden Age of Hollywood" with, in my opinion, too narrow a focus, as if the only significant movies starring Humphrey Bogart are The Maltese Falcon , Casablanca , and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , suck air away from considering lesser known but interesting motion pictures like, carrying through with Bogart, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse , Dead Reckoning , or The Left Hand of God .      This essay doesn't concern Bogart, but I watched a little film from 1932 called The Famous Ferguson Case , starring Joan Blondell, Tom Brown, Kenneth Thomson, Vivienne Osborne, Grant Mitchell, Adrienne Dore, Leon Ames, and Leslie Fenton.  Who were these people?   ...

      The Erotomaniacs      George Romero, in Night of the Living Dead (1968), created the image of mobs of crazed people (zombies in that film) swarming at remaining normals yet unaffected by the film's central problem: the dead returning to life, hungry for human flesh.      In David Cronenberg's early (1975) horror film, Shivers , the afflicted are tenants of an enclosed community on an island near Montreal.  Having no need to leave the island except to work in the city,  the tenants shop on site, receive medical and dental treatment there, enjoy recreational activities there--everything they need to survive in the modern world is provided, including a pharmacy and large underground car park.  J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise , published also in 1975, is eerily similar to Cronenberg's film, all the more so since the two works most likely didn't influence the other.  Could there have been in the minds of both artists th...

     Bath      In 1971, Hammer Studios put out Countess Dracula , starring Ingrid Pitt as an old aristocrat who accidentally discovers an age-reversing technique after pummeling a servant girl.  Blood from a cut on the girl's face gets onto Countess Elisabeth's cheek.  The cheek takes on a rosy hue.  She has the girl brought to her, kills her, drains the blood out and emerges young and beautiful.  This begins a twisted health craze, urged along by her attraction to a young nobleman who, like most others, believes she is the Countess's daughter (played by a young Leslie Anne Down).  The daughter, on her mother's orders, has been kidnapped and held captive by a mute idiot.  The Countess goes so far as to convince everyone not in the know that her daughter was killed in a flood while on her way for a visit with her mother.  That she's willing to treat her daughter like this indicates the degree of her immorality, something...