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...

      I Suspect This Film Has Its Defenders, But...       Strip Nude For Your Killer from 1975 has one good suspense scene.  A model (Femi Benussi) walks naked in a house, looking for the source of strange sounds.  Her voluptuous body, pretty face, her majestic walk, add to the suspense since she's unshielded from danger.  We already know the killer has stabbed three people to death, all of them connected to a modeling agency.  It's the best scene in the film, known in its original Italian as Nude per l'assassino  ( Nude for the Killer ).      The killer wears black all the way to the top--a motorcycle helmet.  The graphic murders employ many splashings of red liquid resembling paint more than blood.  Showing dead naked women and at least one dead naked man splattered with blood appears to be a goal of the filmmaker, Andrea Bianchi, one of whose films, Commando Mengele , has this for an IMD...

      Good Night's Sleep      Every film of intrigue requires a cryptic message.  That's probably not true of all intrigue-driven films, but the motif seems to manifest often in cinema.  It's a hook, a pattern, a lure for the audience to guide them through sometimes weird plots that may be hard to believe.  In the case of a big Hollywood movie like The Da Vinci Code  the message is right there in the title.       D@bbe , a Turkish horror film from 2006, also contains the message in the title, but unless you've seen the movie, the way it's printed makes it seem like a peculiar e-mail address.  The film deals with a Koranic prophecy come to life in modern (2005) Turkey.  Since the Internet is the new communication system, the supernatural comes through technology.      A man, Tarik, has missed work for a few days.  His coworkers, worried about him, can't get ahold of him.  Hande (Ebru A...

      Yup, William Tecumseh Sherman Was Right      The War Department in World War Two was, among other things, a film production operation that sent combat cameramen "armed" with 16 and 35 millimeter handheld film machines to record behind the scenes and during the scenes actions in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Theater of War.      Hollywood film directors like George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford, and William Wyler received officer's commissions, shot films showing, in Stevens' case for example, the liberation of Paris in 1944.  What sets these short films apart from ordinary war documentaries is the artistic skill of the directors.  Their abilities as storytellers in command of their medium meant that the results wouldn't be amateurish.  Frank Capra's Why We Fight series is a masterful example of propaganda within the storyteller's art, so good that the viewer may not even realize it's propaganda.  These films, h...

      One of the Greatest Films Ever Made      Jacques Rivette, a filmmaker whose time has come, made movies that exist in their own genre.  Watching a Rivette film, always a singular experience, brings me close to a display of original genius unconnected to others' work.  Carl Theodor Dreyer, the Danish director of unique masterpieces like La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Day of Wrath , said in an interview that he rarely went to see movies because he didn't want to be influenced by other directors, so that his own work would stand out.  Rivette, in contrast, liked to watch a great variety of films.  He said also that artists are imitators; one emulates what another has done, but creates the same kind of thing differently.      If Out 1 , from 1971, has a precedent in cinema I don't know what that is.  Rivette's nearly thirteen hour long film resonates as a monumental work on the art of acting, as a meditation on...