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

      Private Eye Lex Barker in South Africa      "A very special agent with a code that means He Can Go All The Way!"       Code 7, Victim 5 (1964) was shot in Cape Town, South Africa.  "That way it's ocean all the way to Antarctica," states Helga, executive secretary to German tycoon Herr Wexler (Walter Rilla, star in 1944 of the enchantingly titled, Candlelight in Algeria ,   also in a film called Hatred ), whose valet is knifed to death by three masked men during a Carnival-type event where all the Black people in the parade have white-painted faces.      As the paraders dance their ways by the camera in several set-ups during the opening credits, some of them look right at the lens, smiling and bouncing along in brilliant daylight.  Already the film is intriguing.      It was originally called, accurately, Victim 5 .  The "Code 7" part is never addressed except in the poster--a poss...

      Christopher Lee Peter Cushing in a Dracula Film      Alan Gibson, director of Dracula A.D. 1972 , made the Hammer Studios followup, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).  From his IMDB page he was mainly a TV director.  He died when he was forty-nine, made the two Dracula films in his mid-thirties.  I mention these facts about a director you've likely never heard of because in a career spanning 1964 to 1987, he worked steadily on numerous TV and feature film projects, no doubt dedicated to his career as a reliable professional.  He was Ingrid Bergman's last director; the TV movie A Woman Called Golda .      I don't remember anything about Dracula A.D. 1972  but it must've been an attempt to relocate the venerable monster from cobwebs and vaults deep beneath castles in nineteenth or early twentieth century settings to vibrant metropolitan 1970s London.  Never mind Dracula's anachronistic personality in s...

      Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me      I saw this film in the Downer Theater in Milwaukee when it came out.  I recall how stunned I was by the colors: reds, the golden blonde of Laura Palmer's hair, the blacks of shadowy scenes in the woods, the brilliant sunshine moments.  The film, too, has a 1950s look.  Moira Kelly as Laura's best friend, Donna Hayward, has liquid dark eyes showing off compassion much needed by the lost girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).      Deriving from a two season TV series created by David Lynch, Fire Walk With Me  came out a full year after the second season ended with a mystifying sense in viewers that nothing had been resolved, mainly the answer to the question, Who Killed Laura Palmer?      In Season Two we do find out that Laura's father, Leland (Ray Wise), possessed by a malign spirit, Bob (Frank Silva), killed his daughter and also her lookalike cousin (Sheryl Lee again, ...

      Tarkovsky's Italian film, Nostalghia      When I think of Andrey Tarkovsky's films ( Stalker , The Mirror , The Sacrifice , et al) I see settings undergoing atmospheric changes, his camera lingering during long shots, showing the arrival of a front in the form of a sudden onrush of wind ( The Mirror ), or in Nostalghia (1983), mist covering a rolling Italian landscape.  Such moments indicate Tarkovsky's patience at seeking and achieving visual effects of a natural character, the kind of thing manufactured by CGI in many movies nowadays.  He showed in his career what could be done with what's there .      This penultimate film of his, shot in Italy three years before his death (he was only fifty-four then in 1986), has a simple story: a Russian author, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Jankovsky), goes to Italy with an Italian interpreter, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), to do research for his biography of a Russian composer who had li...

      Fassbinder Again, One of My Favorites       Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), its striking title just one of the components making this early Rainer Werner Fassbinder film a fascinating thing to watch, deals with a German film company on the Spanish Riviera struggling due to a lack of film stock and a director, Jeff (Lou Castel) himself undergoing something like a nervous breakdown.      Most of the movie covers the period of a long delay in a beautiful sunny place.  The actors, actresses, crew, producer, all have too much time on their hands.  They hook up, argue, drink great volumes of liquor and beer, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, brood, ostracize one of the lead actors (Eddie Constantine playing Eddie Constantine), erupt into screaming matches, break glasses in the bar and lounge area of the hotel where they're staying, play Leonard Cohen endlessly on the bar's jukebox.      In the background can be seen t...

      The Sword and Sandal Drama, The Revolt of the Slaves       La Rivolta degli schiavi (1960), directed by Nunzio Malasomma, has English dialogue written by Daniel Mainwaring, author of Build My Gallows High , the novel from which the great film noir, Out of the Past (1947), is based.  I mention this only because it shows that a writer can create a great crime novel and write movie dialogue for a mediocre film and be the same person.      It's not that The Revolt of the Slaves , a widescreen Italian color semi-epic with some historical veracity, is a bad film; it's just not as moving as the filmmakers wanted it to be.  At least it didn't stir my emotions as it was meant to.  Persecutions of Christians, before Emperor Constantine legalized the religion in A.D. 313, occurred depending on who was emperor.  Some of them went after Christians fiercely enough that in the late first century A.D. the author of the Revela...