Park Row: Samuel Fuller

“Every newspaperman is a potential filmmaker. All he or she has to do is transfer real emotion to reel emotion and sprinkle with imagination.” - Samuel Fuller

In a smoky, sticky pub off Park Row, New York City, close-up on Phineas Mitchell as he nurses a drink and pours over a newspaper. Tracking shot across the crowded bar where exhausted newspapermen squeeze side-by-side for a tall mugs of beer. Back to Mitchell. Close-up on newspaper: CHARLES MOTT EXECUTED: FIRST HANGING IN NEW-YORK IN THREE YEARS: DESERVES FATE HE GOT. Close-up on Mitchell and another newspaperman. “The story really bothers you, doesn’t it?” “Yeah.” “What are you gonna do about it?”

Scene change to later that night. Medium shot of Mitchell, Davenport, and two other newspapermen. Gotta squeeze them together so they all fit in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio. “It’s no good writing anything if you haven’t got a paper to put it in.” “Know what I’d do if I had a paper?” Slowly zoom in on Mitchell. “First thing I’d do is christen it. I’d call it the Globe. I’d make it the best newspaper on Park Row, that’s what I’d do.” Tracking shot across the bar to all of the newspaper men staring at Mitchell in awe. Close-up on Mitchell and the elderly Charles A. Leach. “Mr. Mitchell, for three years every night I’ve been listening to what you’d do if you had a newspaper...I like it very much...All my life I’ve wanted to be what you are: a newspaperman. What you can do, I can’t. What you need, I’ve got...I’ve got a good steam press...I want to go into partnership, Mr. Mitchell. You’d be editor and publisher of the newspaper...I’ll handle the business end.” “You mean a paper of my own?” “You run the paper the way you want to run it and answer to no one...Is it a deal?” “Yup.” “You’ve got yourself a newspaper.”

Scene change to medium long-shot as Mitchell leaves the bar. Tracking shot as he walks along a 4 story replica of Park Row, dodging horse-and-carriage, ending on statue of Benjamin Franklin in right foreground, Mitchell in left background. Medium-close up on another nearby statue. Vertical pan down to plaque at base of statue: HORACE GREELEY: FOUNDER OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE. Cut to medium long-shot with Greeley in foreground, Mitchell in background. To the statue, “We’re in business.”

These scenes from the first fifteen minutes of Park Row set the tone of what would be director Samuel Fuller’s most personal film. A love letter to the birth of modern American journalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, Park Row is perhaps the purest crystallization of Fuller’s bombastic, hard-boiled style.  The film, shot in only sixteen days, was produced, written, directed, and totally self-financed by Fuller. Though destined to be a complete flop, Park Row demonstrated Fuller at the height of his skill and irrepressible energy. Fuller would later comment, “Goddamnit, Park Row was me!”

Before becoming a director, Fuller had been a newspaperman similar to the ones he immortalized in Park Row. He went from selling newspapers on sidewalks to working the beat as a crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic. It was during these years that Fuller’s skills as a storyteller began to take shape and form. He developed a knack for exaggerating scenes and moments to display earth-shattering emotions while not going over the deep-end into self-parody. He learned to keep a story lean, mean, and simple while not totally abandoning its crucial human element. When he began to write screenplays, he wanted “to use the screen as a newspaper.” And so arose Fuller’s ultra-kinetic, to-the-point visual style.

Take, for instance, a phenomenal scene later on in Park Row. Having set up his newspaper, The Globe, Mitchell was quickly gaining new readers and powerful enemies. One such enemy was Charity Hackett, the rich, beautiful, and unscrupulous publisher of a rival newspaper that Mitchell used to work for. After several attempts at subtly sabotaging Mitchell’s newspaper, she finally instructs one of her henchmen to close him down. And so, late one night, Mitchell is called from his office by employees claiming that men are tearing apart their newsstands. In one long, expert tracking shot, Mitchell runs down the street and savagely attacks the goons tearing them apart. The use of the tracking shot highlights and intensifies the emotion and human drama of the scene.

Another part of Fuller’s use of “creative exaggeration” involves interweaving different, seemingly unrelated historical moments into his narrative. One of Mitchell’s employees invents a steam-powered printing press. The erection of the Statue of Liberty becomes The Globe’s cause célèbre. All of these are mixed with smaller scenes detailing various aspects of the newspaper production process. This involves a scene with a lightning-fast illiterate type-setter which produces one of the film’s best lines, “The day you learn how to read, you’re fired.” Fuller turns The Globe into a living, breathing microcosm.

Park Row may not be the most historically accurate or streamlined film, but like a great newspaper story, it’s engaging, entertaining, and even informative. It’s an ode to the tireless search for journalistic truth. But Fuller is wary of yellow journalism. One of the film’s maxims is “the press is good or evil according to the character of those who direct it.” A year before Park Row was released, Billy Wilder directed another drama about journalism entitled Ace in the Hole. The film was about a vicious reporter who turns a mining accident into a media circus for his benefit. It is a cynical look into the dark side of American journalism. In the past few decades, Ace in the Hole has become a classic. After all, in this age of 24-hour news cycles and punditry it is easy to identify with pessimistic outlooks concerning the press.  But perhaps critics and audiences should take another look at Park Row. Perhaps we should remember that not all journalists and news editors are jackals or political puppets. After all, the freedom of the press is one of the cornerstones of America. We should glorify stories about the people who defend it with their lives, not the ones who pervert it.

9/10

28 Days Later: Danny Boyle

Considering my love for the horror genre, I'm a little ashamed that it's taken me a decade to finally watch Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. The film is renowned for having revitalized the zombie sub-genre of horror with the introduction of "rage zombies." While for decades zombie cinema had been dominated by slow-shuffling, mindless George A. Romero zombies, Boyle re-envisioned the classic horror villains as lightning-fast, quasi-intelligent hunters. Set in a post-apocalyptic Great Britain, a bicycle courier named Jim awakens from a month-long coma in a hospital to discover that these "rage zombies" have completely eliminated the British population. After getting chased by a few of these deadly creatures, he is saved by a pair of survivors. They tell him that the virus has escaped from Great Britain and has annihilated the world. From there, Jim and a rag-tag group of other survivors trek to an Army blockade near Manchester that supposedly has a cure for the "rage virus." When they arrive they find that the blockade is really a group of soldiers who have set up camp in a giant mansion. And, of course, they are corrupt. This is all fairly standard stuff for the zombie sub-genre. But Boyle pours so much passion and energy into 28 Days Later that these reliable archetypes seem fresh and new. The opening scenes where Jim traverses a completely empty London remain some of the most striking and awe-inspiring moments in Boyle's career.  But after the chilling majesty of these scenes, much of the film devolves into shaky-cam delirium. We almost never get a good look at the "rage zombies." Whenever they appear onscreen the camera begins to have a seizure. I know that this technique was new, fresh, and innovative back in 2002, but it hasn't aged well. What was once stylistically daring now seems amateurish. It's unfair of me to say so, I know. But despite my complaints, 28 Days Later is still a great and effective horror film.

8/10

Prince of Space: Eijirô Wakabayashi

A good villain can make or break an otherwise unremarkable film. After all, everyone loves a great villain. But what if the villain in question was a spandex-wearing, cackling idiot with a chicken-like nose, a voice that sounds like nails scraping a chalkboard, and a proclivity to not wear underpants? Then you'd have the evil Phantom from the planet Krankor from Eijirô Wakabayashi's Prince of Space. Truly, the Phantom is one of the most obnoxious sci-fi villains that I have ever encountered. He arrives on earth announcing that he is conquering the planet. But he is constantly defeated at every turn by a bizarre superhero named the Prince of Space who is impervious to their weapons. This doesn't stop the Phantom and his men from trying to use those weapons on the Prince every time they meet, of course. It just seems like the villains in Prince of Space have the collective memory of a bowl of goldfish. Maybe this is due to the fact that Prince of Space is actually a hybrid of two Japanese tokusatsu films: Planet Prince (1959) and Planet Prince - The Terrifying Spaceship (1959). It certainly explains why Prince of Space seems so jumbled and randomly thrown together. The special effects are a joke (one of the main spaceships literally looks like a giant flying roast chicken), the acting is atrocious, and the narrative is slapdash and disconcerting. And then, of course, there is the evil Phantom of Krankor. If you remember three things about Prince of Space, it will be the Phantom's laugh, his chicken nose, and his disturbingly tight pants. Well...I guess that not all sci-fi villains can be Darth Vader...

3/10

Secret Agent Super Dragon: Giorgio Ferroni

It's never a good sign when two-thirds of the way through a movie you stop and think to yourself, "How in the hell did we end up here?" In Giorgio Ferroni's Secret Agent Super Dragon, that moment came when I realized that I was watching an American secret agent use yoga to conserve oxygen after being thrown into the ocean in a sealed coffin.  It was a kind of out-of-body experience for me. I knew that I was watching a cheap Italian James Bond knock-off, but I couldn't process how we got from a series of murders in Michigan to the bottom of the sea off the coast of Amsterdam. Well, I know that the eponymous Secret Agent Super Dragon was called to Amsterdam to investigate a crime ring peddling drugs in the form of sticks of chewing gum which somehow ended up killing one of his colleagues. Then there are a number of bizarre scenes where Super Dragon breaks into different apartments, kills a few assassins, goes to Europe...and repeats the whole process. Oh, and somehow he uncovers that the criminals he was searching for were actually part of a bigger crime ring involved in smuggling drugs in phony Ming vases. Throughout this entire ordeal a number of beautiful women cross the agents path. Some of them want to kill him. Some want to see the Secret Agent's Super Dragon, if you know what I mean. But one thing that Secret Agent Super Dragon lacks is a sense of fun and adventure. Everyone is so stoic. There aren't any thrills, any chills, or even any great actions scenes. It's a lifeless, joyless spy thriller.

4/10

Illusion Travels by Streetcar: Luis Buñuel

The illustrious career of cinematic surrealist Luis Buñuel seems to be divided into three sections. The first was his early years where he shocked the world with such abstract masterpieces as Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) and occasional trysts with Neorealist cinema such as Land Without Bread (1933) and Los Olvidados (1950). The third section of his career saw his prominence as an art-house European director reach legendary proportions with classics like Belle de Jour (1967), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). But the second section of his career has been largely ignored by fans, critics, and historians. The reason is that the second section of Buñuel's career was dominated by ultra low-budget B-movies that lacked the same avant-garde artistic merit that made him popular in the first place. But that doesn't mean that the films he made during this section of his career were bad. In fact, several of them were quite good. Illusion Travels by Streetcar is one such example of a good film that has been overlooked because of when Buñuel made it instead of how he made it. The film follows two Municipal Transit workers in Mexico City who get drunk and decide to take their favorite streetcar, #133, for a joy ride after discovering that it's going to be decommissioned. In a development that seems to predict the central conflict of The Exterminating Angel (1962), no matter how they try, the two workers are unable to return the streetcar after they begin their joy ride. Oh, they try. But through a series of unfortunate circumstances, they are forced to keep the streetcar going. First they pick up a group of day laborers. Then they are shanghaied by a group of schoolchildren going on a field trip. It seems as if the very cosmos are conspiring against them. Illusion Travels by Streetcar may seem unusual as an entry in Buñuel's filmography. It is much more sympathetic to the common people and their plights. The film is packed with a Felliniesque mass of eclectic characters. Some of Buñuel's trademark cynicism seeps through, particularly in how the streetcar workers abandon the schoolchildren in the countryside. But Illusion Travels by Streetcar is one of Buñuel's warmest and most endearing films.

8/10

Monster a Go-Go: Herschell Gordon Lewis, Bill Rebane

There are a lot of things that I can tolerate in a bad film. Bad acting? Well, not every director can accidentally stumble upon Robert De Niro living down the street. Bad special effects? Hey man, those can be expensive. And, besides, great camera angles and cinematography can do wonders with even the cheapest effects. Bad writing? Well...that is pretty unforgivable.  But my point is that I can suffer through quite a bit when it comes to schlocky cinema. I said in my review of The Creeping Terror (1964) that the worst sin that a bad movie can commit is to be boring. But I have discovered a second unforgivable bad movie sin in Monster A Go-Go: utilizing an ending that proves your movie has been a giant waste of time. I won't reveal it here, but Monster A Go-Go has an ending that will enrage any sapient being who watches it. The film supposedly follows the chaos that ensues when an American astronaut named Frank Douglas crashes to earth after being transformed into a radioactive monster. Of course, most of the movie involves random extras milling around offices, fields, and construction sites. There is almost no narrative cohesion whatsoever. The acting is atrocious, the special effects nonexistent, the filming completely incompetent, and the ending is insulting. A pox on this film and everyone who worked on it. When you make Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon's monster movies look like the work of Orson Welles, then you should never EVER make movies again.

0/10

Frankenstein Conquers the World: Ishirō Honda

When I first heard of Frankenstein Conquers the World, I believed that it was an entry into the Hammer Horror Frankenstein franchise. The opening scenes set in the last few days of World War Two in Europe seemed to confirm my suspicion. But then the movie switched locations to Japan and my heart sank. But imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ishirō Honda's Frankenstein Conquers the World is one of the rare tokusatsu films that manages to maintain a gripping, convincing atmosphere and tone while portraying giant monsters beating each other up. Most tokusatsu either have terrible special/monster effects, overbearing and unnecessary comedic relief, and a general lack of focus beyond the necessity of getting 2+ monsters together so they can fight. But Frankenstein Conquers the World manages to feel like a pulpy sci-fi adventure with just the right balance of seriousness and camp.  It starts with the literally heart of the Frankenstein monster arriving in Japan and getting lost during the Hiroshima nuclear attack. The heart is apparently immortal and capable of regenerating if given enough exposure to a source of protein. So, after the Hiroshima attack, the heart regenerates into a boy which terrorizes small animals on the coast of Japan. After it is discovered by scientists, it grows larger and larger until it is a giant that has to be fed from a helicopter. At around the same time, a monster called Baragon arises from the depths near Akita and begins to wreak havoc. And so, Frankenstein and Baragon fight. The fight scenes between the two men in rubber suits are surprisingly well done, particularly one in which they battle amidst a forest fire.  Frankenstein Conquers the World is a fun film and one that should be shown to people who turn their noses to the genre.

7/10

The Creeping Terror: Vic Savage

There are many ways to make a bad film. You could hire terrible actors. You could rely on terrible special effects. And you can even get technicians who are completely incompetent to actually make the film. Vic Savage's The Creeping Terror is one of those very special bad films that literally gets everything, and I do mean everything, wrong. The film, which is about two giant rug-monsters that terrorize Angel County, California, is one of the most incompetent, ill-conceived, and horrendous movies that I have ever seen. The monsters are laughably bad. The cinematography is poor and frequently over-exposed. The human victims deserve to be eaten because they all seem to freeze in place when the monsters approach them instead of, y'know, running away. A large sequence involves one of the monsters attacking a local dance party. What follows is a nauseatingly boring exercise in how not to choreograph, film, and edit horror movies. The film was shot without audio and dubbed at the last second by a local news radio reader. The result is a film with overbearing narration that seems to come and go at random. In many scenes, the narration is actually used to recount what should have been dialogue. Every single scene and take in The Creeping Terror has something irrevocably wrong with it. Many bad movies can still be enjoyed in an ironic kind of way. But there is no redeeming, no saving The Creeping Terror. It breaks one of the most sacrosanct rules of great bad movies: no matter how terrible you are, at the very least don't be boring. That's the best way to summarize The Creeping Terror: boring, boring, BORING.

1/10

Prizzi’s Honor: John Huston

Prizzi's Honor falls somewhere in-between a tongue-and-cheek mafia spoof and the hard-boiled film noir that director John Huston helped pioneer with such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941).  To keep things simple, the film follows two hit-men who fall in love, get married, and are eventually ordered to kill each other.  The first is Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson), a hit-man for the Prizzis, one of the most powerful crime syndicates in America. The second is Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner), a freelance hit-(wo)man from out-of-state who was brought in the kill a double-crosser while the Prizzis were all at a wedding, thereby giving them an alibi. Despite them being completely different people, they fall madly in love and get married. Unfortunately, there are two (big) problems. First, Charley discovers that Irene was involved in a scam that ripped off the Prizzi family before they met. Second, before he could marry Irene, Charley had to break up with his girlfriend Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston). And Maerose is not one to take all of this sitting down. The plot twists and turns through a kidnapping, the murder of a police chief's wife, and the intricate machinations of internal politics within the Prizzi family. At times the film is funny. At times it is sinister. And, like most great movies that feature Italians and/or people of Italian descent, at times it is bitterly tragic. I usually judge movies first and foremost by their tone. Therefore, I had a difficult time acclimating myself to Prizzi's Honor. But once I got the hang of Huston's darkly humorous tone, I found myself enjoying this strange, strange little film.

7/10

El Dorado: Howard Hawks

This may be one of the most blasphemous things I've ever written as a film critic: I enjoyed El Dorado more than Rio Bravo (1959). I know, I know...El Dorado is a transparent remake of Rio Bravo. Rio Bravo is a more groundbreaking and historically significant Western. I know. But I don't care. If Rio Bravo did it first, El Dorado did it better.  The film follows a group of gunmen who fight back against Bart Jason, a corrupt rancher engaged in a range war with the McDonald family. J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) is a heart-broken sheriff who assumes Dean Martin's role as the repentant drunk. Ricky Nelson's role is taken over by James Caan who plays Mississippi, a fledgling gunfighter. And John Wayne is still John Wayne. Only in this movie Wayne plays a character named Cole Thornton. There are several reasons why I enjoyed El Dorado more than Rio Bravo. First, I think the acting is better. Dean Martin had an undeniable charm, but Mitchum blows him out of the water. One particularly devastating scene follows Mitchum as he goes to a saloon to buy a bottle of whiskey. When he arrives, he is viciously mocked and insulted by everyone there. When he returns to the jailhouse, he chokes "They laughed at me...They LAUGHED at me!" I love how this is one of the only Westerns I've ever seen where the characters actually suffer battle damage. In most Westerns if one of the good guys gets hurt he either a) stays out of the final confrontation, or b) miraculously shrugs it off when the bullets start to fly. By the final confrontation in El Dorado, the good guys are bleeding, covered in bandages, and even supporting themselves on crutches. The gunfights are magnificent, particularly one where a couple of bandits hole up in a church steeple. Hawks demonstrates a much more skilled and nuanced comprehension of spatial awareness than in Rio Bravo.  Now, don't get me wrong. I enjoyed Rio Bravo. But if I had to watch either it or El Dorado a second time, I'd go with the latter.

8/10

Agent for H.A.R.M.: Gerd Oswald

There's only one thing that I believe is worthy of praise in Agent for H.A.R.M. I can't think of another Cold War spy movie in which the top secret military/political/scientific whatchamacallit at the center of the action was designed for biological warfare and not nuclear proliferation. The things secret agents and spies seem to fight over in these films are launch codes, missile blueprints, atomic formula, etc, etc. In Agent for H.A.R.M. the U.S. must protect a Soviet defector named Dr. Jan Steffanic who designed a gun that fired spores which eat away human skin.  The problem is that this admittedly fascinating idea is stuck in the middle of a terrible James Bond knock-off.  The "Bond" character in this film is Adam Chance, an agent for the bizarrely named American agency H.A.R.M. (Human Aetiological Relations Machine). Chance is ordered to protect Steffanic and his niece Ava Vestok as they try and find an antidote for the spores. It's a race against time as Steffanic reveals that the Soviets plan on using the spores to dust America's crops, thereby causing widespread famine. Of course, instead of doing the logical thing and sending Steffanic to a remote facility guarded by the military, they force him to work in a run-down shack on a beach. Did I mention that Chance lives with him in that shack? And that Ava is revealed to be a Communist spy? Well, I hardly think it matters seeing as Agent for H.A.R.M. is a dreary, lackluster, and altogether unimpressive spy film. Peter Mark Richman is a joke as Adam Chance. He is too old, too clumsy, and too rigid to be convincing as a secret agent. The few action scenes are a joke and usually end with Chance sneaking up on the bad guys and killing them like a coward. Agent for H.A.R.M. is a spy film For No Eyes Only.

4/10

Stranger on the Third Floor: Boris Ingster

The true soul of film noir isn’t found in shadowy offices, tough private eyes, and deadly femme fatales. Many have made the mistake of believing that film noir is simply a style. It is true that as film noir became popularized overseas by European critics a certain aesthetic became associated with the genre. But the reason why these critics began to associate certain movies as film noir has to do with their plots and focus on the psychological status of their characters. Film noir isn’t the detective walking lonely streets, but the internal monologue bouncing around his head as he tries to separate friend from foe. Film noir isn’t the dark alleyways, but the deviants and crooks who hide in them. And finally, film noir isn’t about amorality, but about moral people trying to make sense of an amoral world. For instance, Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor focuses on two happy, law-biding citizens who are trying to build a life together. But these two citizens find themselves caught up in the middle of a horrific situation that twists their minds to the breaking point. It is from this simple story that one of the first truly great film noir is borne. 

The film begins in a lively diner where a young reported named Michael Ward meets his long-time girlfriend Jane for breakfast. Ward happens to be a key witness in a murder trial for a small time criminal named Joe Briggs who was accused of killing a cafe owner named Nick Giuseppe. His eyewitness testimony is instrumental in Briggs’ conviction and sentencing to the electric chair. Ward thinks little of helping send a man to the electric chair. Because of this break, he was awarded a $12 a month raise and a byline for his newspaper. Ward sees this as the perfect opportunity to get married to Jane and to buy a house. However, Jane is extremely uncomfortable with how he managed to get ahead by helping someone convicted of murder. After he was sentenced, Briggs screeched out that he was innocent over and over again. Jane was mortified by what she saw and consumed by anxieties over the possibility of his innocence. So she badgers Ward about her fears. At first he is dismissive. But then thoughts of wrongful persecution, conviction, and execution begin to haunt his thoughts and dreams.

In one of the film’s most magnificent sequences, Ward has a nightmare where he is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. We witness a dazzling collage of hyper-stylized vignettes: reporters obfuscated by giant newspapers declaring his guilt, Jane committing suicide, a trial where Briggs mocks him when he is declared guilty, and a choreographed escort to the electric chair. This sequence was shot by German expressionist cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca who would later go on to film such masterpieces as Out of the Past (1947) and Clash by Night (1952). In fact, the cinematography in this scene encapsulates Stranger on the Third Floor’s breath-taking visual style. Unlike many other film noir which tended towards naturalistic cinematography enhanced by hard lighting and striking shadows, Stranger on the Third Floor features an astonishing inventory of expressionist filming techniques. There are oblique camera positions, dutch angles, dissolves, voice-overs, extreme shadows, and even exaggerated props.

These techniques all help create an atmosphere of suffocating dread and torment which is only magnified when Ward finally wakes up to discover that one of his neighbors isn’t snoring anymore. See, Ward lives in a tiny apartment building with paper thin walls. One of his neighbors, an irascible old codger, has a chronic snoring problem. The man had repeatedly called the authorities to Ward’s apartment for the slightest violations of the complex’s rules, such as typing on a typewriter after dark. He had annoyed Ward so miserably that he had snapped and threatened to kill him. But it had all been hot air. But when Ward awakens to a silent apartment building, his worst fears are confirmed: the man has been murdered. One thing leads to another and Ward finds himself arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.

What sounds like a predictable plot twist is delivered quite unexpectedly. After Ward’s neighbor is found dead, it is Jane who convinces him to go to the police and explain that  he found the body. After all, Jane reasons, if Ward was the killer, why would he so readily go to the police? But when the police discover that he was the key witness in Briggs’ trial, they begin to wonder why he was the first person to discover the dead body in both instances. But still, Ingster misleads the audience by having Ward interrogated by a sympathetic police detective. And then, suddenly, Jane gets the message that he has been arrested. Ingster’s decision to not show Ward’s arrest and instead only inform the audience of it via Jane throws the entire police and justice system into question. It comes as an assault to our senses and better judgment...much like a wrongful conviction would to an innocent man.

There is only one thing that can clear Ward’s name: a strange, little man who recently moved into his apartment building. Ward swears that he saw him before...possibly the night Giuseppe was murdered. So Jane sets out to find this mystery man.  The problem is that nobody can seem to remember him. That is, at least, until she accidentally stumbles upon him muttering to himself about things best left unsaid. Peter Lorre delivers one of his career’s greatest performances as this toad-like creature. What is even more impressive is that he manages to do so with less screen-time than he did as Hans Beckert in M (1931). Lorre manages to create a character that carefully teeters on the edge of insanity without becoming outright maniacal. Watch how he delivers his monstrous lines as casually as one would discuss their dry cleaning. There is a certain intensity, a kind of hatchet-behind-the-back apprehension that engulfs him much like Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960), Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (2008). In hindsight, it is a blessing that Lorre was featured so sparingly in Stranger on the Third Floor. If they had used him more, it would have ruined his character.

Most film critics and historians point to John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) as the first authentic film noir. However, Stranger on the Third Floor should be lauded as the rightful recipient of that honor. More than any other film of its time, it zeroed in on what truly defines the genre: substance, not style.

10/10

Riding with Death: Alan J. Levi, Don McDougall

Riding with Death is a slapdash conglomeration of two episodes from the short lived NBC series Gemini Man. The central character of Gemini Man was Sam Casey, a secret agent slash big rig driver who gained the power to become invisible via an accident. His agency, INTERSECT, provided him with a wrist watch, or "DNA stabilizer," that allows him to turn his powers of invisibility on and off at will. However, there's a catch: if he is invisible for more than 15 minutes a day he will permanently stay that way. So, that's the set-up for the show. How does the movie fare? Poorly. Casey's condition is explained through an expository text dump at the very beginning. The first half of the film has Casey unwittingly transporting a highly volatile and explosive compound along the California coastline. The scene where his brakes go out and he has to enlist the help of a fellow big rig driver named Buffalo Bill to stop him was enjoyable in its own right. But once that action is over, the film hurriedly transitions to the next plot: Casey having to save Buffalo Bill (now a racecar driver) from a villain who wants to kill him. This second half isn't as focused as the first. Also, it tries to overdub an actress who played Casey's girlfriend in the first half (who had left the cast by the time the latter episode was filmed) into the second. Both halves of the film feature extremely saturated television cinematography which was popular during the 60s and 70s. This method of filming resulted in everything that appeared onscreen seem washed out. How appropriate for a clumsy movie about a washed out show.

5/10

Jack Frost: Aleksandr Rou

I have a special place in my heart for films like Aleksandr Rou's Jack Frost. The film is a re-telling of a classic Russian fairy tale about a young maiden named Nastenka who slaves under the cruel rule of her step-mother and step-sister. She is eventually cast out into the woods to die where she is rescued by Father Frost, a sprite of winter. After being rescued she touches his staff which "freezes her forever." Her story is inter-cut with the misadventures of Ivan, a brash young lad whose head is turned into that of a bear after disrespecting a forest spirit named Father Mushroom. To reverse the spell, he has to perform a good deed. After helping an old blind lady gathering firewood, he is restored. It is then up to Ivan to save Nastenka from her eternal sleep.  Now, Jack Frost has some obvious short-comings. For one, it utilizes inferior special effects. For another, the acting is occasionally very wooden and hokey. But I'm willing to forgive the film for that due to the fact that I watched an English dub. There is an inescapable charm to Jack Frost. It has rightfully been heralded as a Christmas classic in parts of Eastern Europe where it is shown on television each year around Christmas time. It may seem amateurish for Western viewers who have been spoiled for decades by Hollywood and high production values. But Jack Frost has something that many Western films lack: sincere joy and purity in the execution of a simple fairy tale.

6/10

Catalina Caper: Lee Sholem

Catalina Caper was one of the very last films of the beach party genre. And thank goodness, too. I shiver to think of where the genre could have possibly gone after this film. I guess producers realized that watching "teens" dance around in bikinis to obnoxious music for 90 minutes was getting old fast. So they decided that Catalina Caper would be half beach party and half crime-comedy thriller. The two genres mix together about as well as you might think: horribly. For one, I can't remember the name of a single character in this film. All of the people are either partying teenagers, musicians, or odd old people. As it stands, the odd old people are somehow involved in the theft of an ancient Chinese scroll from a Los Angeles museum. In between vicious pelvic gyration sessions, the teens run around trying to solve the mystery...or at least I think that's what they are doing. And the musicians, including a strange appearance by Little Richard, have this mystical ability to spontaneously materialize whenever the teens get bored.  The film was directed by Lee Sholem, a man infamous for being one of the most incessantly productive directors in Hollywood history. The man literally had over 1,000 directing credits. And his preference for speed over quality is apparent from the first few shots of the film. He uses extremely saturated cinematography that eliminates almost every single shadow. The result is that everything looks flat, lifeless, and garish. The music is also grating and annoying. Even Little Richard's number is uninspired and aggravating. Catalina Caper is one party that you're gonna want to miss.

3/10

Brave: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

Pixar's Brave is to mothers and daughters what Finding Nemo (2003) was to fathers and sons. They are touching stories about a child and parent who don't see eye-to-eye who through a series of outrageous events learn to love and cherish each other. Whereas Finding Nemo focused on two clown-fish, Brave follows two women in 10th century Scotland. Merida is a young princess with an attitude as feisty as her striking red hair. She wants to decide her own destiny in her life. This causes her to be at odds with her mother, Elinor, who wants her to follow tradition and get married to the son of one of the three clans with whom they have an alliance. So Merida runs off, makes a pact with a witch that she stumbles upon in the woods, and accidentally turns her mother into a bear. Now, the two have to figure out a way to reverse the curse in two days before it becomes permanent. Honestly, if it wasn't for the impeccable animation, I could have easily believed that this was a film by DreamWorks or any other 3D animation studio. The plot is more akin to the Disney Renaissance. Compare this to the aforementioned Finding Nemo. That film had a somewhat similar plot only with the roles reversed: the father has to rescue the son. But Finding Nemo's story was more similar to the Hero's Journey archetype. In Brave, Merida and Elinor run around the forest surrounding the castle for awhile, go back home, and run away one last time to meet their destiny. The drama is much more internalized this way. We genuinely begin to feel the love and compassion between the two. And, of course, they find a way to make amends. Several other familiar Disney archetypes make an appearance, such as a solution to Merida and Elinor's problem which turns out to be a red herring. But Brave is still a competent enough film. I just expected more from Pixar.

7/10

The Skydivers: Coleman Francis

In many cases, a director's first film is one of their worst. Their first film is where new directors learn the ropes of film-making first hand and start to develop their own sense of style. It is with their second film that they truly begin to excel as film-makers. Coleman Francis was not one of those directors. His first feature, The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), saw Francis at the peak of his creativity, skill, and coherence as a film-maker. Two years later he made The Skydivers, a bizarre hodge-podge of different genres that only serves to baffle and bore its audience.  It's hard to really describe what goes on in The Skydivers. The narrative is so scatter-shot that it is almost impossible to grip from just one viewing. But what I could glean from the plot was that the film's action took place around a tiny California airfield where the husband and wife team Harry and Beth teach skydiving. One of Harry's old girlfriends shows up, Beth has an affair with a mechanic, and somebody at some point tries to kill...someone...by pouring acid into their chute before a jump.  All of this is interspersed with tedious dialogue scenes, a seemingly random rock 'n' roll concert that sorta materializes out of nothing, and a whole bevy of unusual characters. My favorite out-of-place character is a plump Scotsman in a kilt who dances like a maniac at the rock 'n' roll concert. The Skydivers demonstrates the decay of Francis' already incompetent "talents" from his first movie. And, incredibly, things would only get worse with Red Zone Cuba (1966), Francis' third and final motion picture.

2/10

The Beast of Yucca Flats: Coleman Francis

Coleman Francis' The Beast of Yucca Flats is one of those very special bad movies that could pass for a foreign art film if they slapped a fresh set of subtitles at the bottom. I attribute this to the fact that, as terrible as it may be, The Beast of Yucca Flats is Francis' most coherent and watchable film. That doesn't count for much, of course. But at least it has what could be vaguely interpreted as a three-act structure. The Skydivers (1963) was essentially a B-reel of people parachuting mixed with an impromptu concert and a murder sub-plot. And who could forget Red Zone Cuba (1966), a film about three escaped convicts whose search for a lost treasure is briefly sidelined by their taking part in an invasion of Cuba? The Beast of Yucca Flats is essentially a standard monster movie: a defecting Soviet scientist, Joseph Javorsky, is accidentally transformed into a murderous beast after stumbling upon an active American nuclear testing ground. As beasts borne of radiation are wont to do, Javorsky goes on a killing spree. This draws the attention of the local authorities and KGB agents who want to shut Javorsky up. However, this tried and true plot of countless B- and Z-grade movies is ruined by Francis' incompetent grasp of pacing and narrative focus. The film is constantly side-lined by seemingly random sub-plots: two boys get lost in the wilderness, their father is gunned down by a vigilante in a small plane, and the Soviets try to get Javorsky's briefcase which supposedly holds info about a Soviet moon landing. Also, Francis made the bizarre decision to shoot the entire film without a soundtrack, forcing him to re-dub everything in post-production. The result is odd line deliveries and voices that seem to come out of nowhere.  The only thing The Beast of Yucca Flats leaves you with is the question of why anyone would finance two more of Francis' films after this monotonous bore.

3/10

The Missing Juror: Budd Boetticher

I've spent the past few weeks immersing myself in Budd Boetticher's Westerns, particularly the ones he made with Randolph Scott. But before he became one of the unsung heroes of the Western genre, he spent years making low budget potboilers like The Missing Juror. The film was what critics of the day referred to as a "murder-a-reel" flick. Basically, in such features the plot would be driven forward by a constant stream of killings, thereby motivating the protagonists to pursue the villain. In this case, the killer is Harry Wharton, a crazed ex-death row inmate who was wrongly convicted for a crime he didn't commit. Before he was executed, though, the authorities discovered the real criminal and released Wharton. But the damage had already been done to Wharton's poor psyche. Claiming to have "died" every time one of his fellow inmates was executed, Wharton considers himself to be deceased. Even worse, his crazed mind believes that the only way he can come back to life is to kill the twelve members of the jury who accidentally convicted him.  Hot on his trail is Joe Keats, an ace reporter who is somehow better than the cops at doing their own job.  Keats is one of those classic, straight-shooting 40s heroes who is always ahead of the game and misogynistic in a way that must have seemed endearing back then ("Why don't you go do those files like a good little girl, huh?"). He only really starts to hunt Wharton when he discovers that one of his targets is the beautiful Alice Hill. Oh, there were other women on the jury, too. But they had frumpy haircuts and glasses. Alice Hill is a pert blonde, and therefore worth saving, know what I mean? Anyway, The Missing Juror is a competent little thriller. George Macready's performance as Wharton is especially enjoyable, particularly when a twist about his identity is revealed near the middle of the film.

7/10

The Set-Up: Robert Wise

In his autobiographical account of his childhood as a young boy growing up in Cleveland during the 50s entitled The Quitter, Harvey Pekar recounted how he fell in love with the sport of boxing. The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Pekar admired how many successful Jewish boxers were able to become superstars despite racial prejudice. But after awhile, he began to notice something about the boxers that he looked up to. He wrote, “I didn’t know much about Jewish boxers, but they got into the sport when they were recent immigrants and didn’t have much money. Then got out in the 1940s with the coming of better economic opportunities. This indicated that they weren’t in love with boxing, just wanted to use it to make a living until something better came along.” That’s part of the majesty of boxing films: the best ones aren’t about people who love to box. They are about people who have to box.

Rocky Balboa had to prove to himself that he could go the distance. Jake LaMotta used boxing as an affirmation of his own insecurities surrounding his masculinity and self-image. Maggie Fitzgerald saw boxing as a means to escape her exploitative family and her own blue-collar purgatory. But what about Stoker Thompson, the working class hero from Robert Wise’s The Set-Up? What does he want? The man has been a boxer for most of his adult life. He’s 35 years old, hasn’t won a fight in years, and is scheduled to have a match against the rising superstar Tiger Nelson. Everyone expects him to lose. In fact, there are many who want him to lose. Stoker knows that this could very well be his last fight. So why does he box when the odds are so impossibly stacked against him?

Maybe it’s to escape the world that he inhabits. Stoker’s city is a tangled mess of dark alleyways and slums. Everyone is sweaty and greasy.

Only the local mobsters seem to have clean, unstained shirts. The masses who attend the matches aren’t much better, either. Rowdy off-duty sailors, disheveled businessmen, made-up streetwalkers clutching to their latest customers, and fat louts balancing hot dogs on their enormous guts call for blood.  

The locker rooms where the various fighters prepare for their bouts reeks of desperation. Utilizing a real time narrative structure three years before it was popularized in High Noon (1952), the film keeps the audience largely contained in these lockers as they watch fighters get called up one-by-one for their fights. A young kid triumphantly rejoins his comrades after winning his very first fight in the wake of a minor nervous breakdown. 

An enthusiastic older boxer with a cracked face only a couple of matches from hitting the big-time returns so badly beaten that he is rushed to the hospital. 

Maybe it was here that Stoker found his motivation. But, maybe it was his wife, Julie. While Stoker prepares for his fight, she walks the mean, grimy streets around the boxing center. She hates that her husband has to fight. She’s tired of him being humiliated and used by the boxing industry. Stoker wants to make good so he can support them in the future. But Julie has begun to wonder if it is worth it. In a fantastic scene, she walks by a store with the radio turned on to the boxing matches. She hears that a boxer has just been brutally defeated, and her heart sinks. But then it is announced that this boxer was not Stoker and that his fight is coming up soon. Watch her relieved realization. At that moment, the spark of hope filled her heart.

Whatever Stoker’s reasons for fighting, one thing he didn’t count on was that everyone was counting on him to lose. His manager, Tiny, has made an arrangement with the mob for Stoker to take a dive. The only problem is that he never bothered to tell Stoker. He fully believed that Stoker would lose on his own. But he didn’t expect for Stoker to go for the glory one last time.

The Set-Up is a glorious film and one of the very best examples of the boxing sub-genre of film noir.  This isn’t a film about boxing, per say. The Set-Up is a lyrical poem about broken dreams and impossible goals. Stoker is played by that reliable stand-by of B-grade film noir, Robert Ryan. This film was made just five years after he had been a drill instructor in the United States Marine Corps. So not only is Ryan’s performance filled with emotional and psychological pathos, he looks like a man who has been battered, beaten, and abused for years. 

I mentioned that The Set-Up isn’t as much a boxing film as a psychological character study. But that doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t contain some of the best fighting footage ever featured in the genre. Ryan fight scenes are particularly authentic, probably in no small part to his being a boxing champion while studying at Dartmouth college. But more importantly, the fights aren’t just random flurries of punches and jabs. There’s a rhyme and rhythm to the fighting like a ballet. Each round of Stoker’s fight becomes symbolic of him overcoming his personal demons and doubts.

A word about the ending. Few times have I ever seen a film have an ending that was sad and uplifting at the same time. Don’t mistake that with an ending being bitter-sweet. The Set-Up ends with triumph and loss, punishment and salvation, humiliation and acceptance. This is a story about a man, after all...a man with everything to lose and nothing to win, except his own dignity.

9/10

The Bamboo Blonde: Anthony Mann

Well, this was an interesting experience. I had always been aware that Anthony Mann had directed musicals, but I had never seen one of them. The Bamboo Blonde isn't so much a musical as it is a film with a lot of musical numbers, if you catch my drift. But it still was fascinating to see a director that I have always associated with gritty Westerns and hard-boiled film noir directing such an upbeat film. It follows a love triangle involving Captain Patrick Ransom, Jr., a pilot of a B-29 bomber from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, his fiancée Eileen Sawyer, and a blonde nightclub singer that he meets on his last night before shipping out to the Pacific named Louise Anderson. Unfortunately, he never actually learns Louise's name, but he does spend an evening with her after Eileen stood him up. He gets her picture taken and carries it with him to the Pacific where it is discovered by his crew and painted onto their fuselage. She becomes known as the "Bamboo Blonde" and is deemed responsible for the plane's incredible luck in surviving several dangerous missions. The "Bamboo Blonde" becomes a hero to the war effort. Meanwhile, Louise's manager has taken advantage of the situation by turning her into an overnight star, billing her as the original "Bamboo Blonde." When Ransom and his crew return home from their tour of duty, the press leaps at the reunion of the "two lovers." The military uses the opportunity to make Ransom and Louise public speakers at war bond rallies. Of course, the two fall in love. But Ransom was previously engaged to Eileen, a gold-digger who will move hell and high water to keep her man. The Bamboo Blonde is a charming film with some great musical numbers provided by Frances Langford who played Louise. There isn't much to the film, really. But The Bamboo Blonde is a decent way to spend an extra hour.

6/10

Parts: The Clonus Horror: Robert S. Fiveson

Now here's a film with ideas and aspirations too big for its budget and too complex for its talent. Robert S. Fiveson's Parts: The Clonus Horror has an astoundingly intriguing premise: in an isolated compound in the middle of the desert a race of clones are bred and raised to have their organs harvested for rich clients. But one of the clones begins to doubt his existence and manages to escape from the compound to a nearby city. He discovers that one of the compound's main clients is Jeffrey Knight, a man who is favored to win the presidency. Even worse, Knight is willing to kill to keep the compound's secret. Like I said, this film has some amazing ideas. There are genuinely fascinating questions raised concerning free will, the morality of science, and the nature of man's existence. Also, the film does a surprisingly adequate job of transforming the compound into a sinister utopia. One of my favorite scenes takes place at a race held for the clones. The protagonist deliberately loses the race, leading to one of his handlers asking if he is okay. He responds by asking if winning a race really matters. The handler sternly rebukes him by saying, "I'll have to report this." The protagonist responds by inquiring why he is being reported. He is answered with "I'll have to report that, too." It's a shame that the film's execution of these ideas is slipshod and uninspired. The screenplay is tedious, the acting sub-par, and the few special effects laughable. Still, I admire Fiveson's ambition. I wish that other directors were as willing to take as many chances as he did. So, I tip my hat to you, Mr. Fiveson.

5/10

The Man Who Loved Women: François Truffaut

Barely five minutes into François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women I joked on twitter that I could turn it into a horror film with a few well-placed orchestra stings. Hear me out. One of the first scenes has the titular character, Bertrand Morane, observe a woman with a perfect set of legs while shopping. He writes down her license plate number and tries to manipulate the police into giving him the car's owner and address. When the police refuse to do so, he deliberately crashes his own car and blames the mystery woman. Even then the insurance people won't tell him the woman's identity. When he is denied again, I could almost hear the Bernard Herrmann in the background. But amazingly, these are scenes from what Truffaut clearly intended to be a light-hearted comedy. Morane spends the entire film collecting women. Oh, he claims that he loves women, but his drawer literally brimming with sad letters from his various conquests and one-night stands speaks differently. In 1977 Morane's hobby could be viewed as a harmless idiosyncrasy. But today, Morane would be swiftly diagnosed with a pathological disorder and condemned by legions of feminists. Do I doubt that such people exist? Not at all. But The Man Who Loved Women paints Morane as a melancholy hero who validates other women's existence with his "affection." Literally almost every woman he meets throws herself at him. Morane almost seems bored and resigned to his fate of sleeping with every woman in France.  He eventually writes an autobiography entitled "The Man Who Loved Women" where he seems to mourn a life of seducing hundreds of women. But I'm not buying it. Bertrand Morane is a sick, sick man. This film is a deluded fantasy. Shh! Do you hear that? It's the Bernard Herrmann, again...

5/10

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies: Ray Dennis Steckler

Ray Dennis Steckler's infamous cult classic The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is an unpleasant amusement park advertisement layered with an even more unpleasant supernatural sub-plot. I honestly believe that if it wasn't for the film's insanely specific (albeit misleading) title, it would have been forgotten a long, long time ago. I'm not kidding when I say that the film is basically an advertisement for amusement parks. A massive part of the film is devoted to shots of various attractions, first-person footage of roller coaster rides, and queasy, unappealing "burlesque" performances. Interspersed between these are scenes involving a fortune-teller named Estrella who kidnaps patrons and turns them into "zombies" with acid...or was it with the giant spiraling wheel? Anyhow, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is sickening to look at. It literally looks like the entire film was shot with a camera that had an urine lens filter. Everything has this yellowish, jaundice color scheme that makes the audience wonder if the film is suffering from acute hepatic failure. The makeup effects on the zombies and Estrella's henchman, Ortega, are so poor and cheap that they almost approach the trash aesthetic championed by John Waters. The acting performances are laughable and the stuff of schlock legend. The film ends on such a bizarre and sudden climax that it leaves you with two important questions: What did I just watch and what the hell happened? There are some bad films that I like to return to every now and then just so I can revel in the hilarity brought on by their complete incompetence. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is NOT one of them. All I want to do is forget that this movie was ever made. And yet, with that ridiculous title, that might not ever be possible.

4/10

Westbound: Budd Boetticher

The 1959 film Westbound has never been considered to be part of the famous Ranown cycle of Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott.  It is reported that Boetticher only made the film with Scott because of their friendship and a contractual obligation with Warner Bros. Pictures. It doesn't have the bleak purity and existential cynicism of their other collaborations, but it remains a competent and entertaining film in its own right. Scott plays Union army officer Capt. John Hayes who is tasked with managing the Overland stagecoach line which delivers gold from the Union treasury in California to the East. He returns to his hometown of Julesburg, Colorado where the Overland headquarters are located. While there, he meets a one-armed Union soldier named Rod Miller and his wife Jeannie. They help him fight back against Clay Putnam, the ex-commander of Overland who switched sides to the Confederacy. Putnam now controls the Confederate efforts to sabotage the Overland system and steal their precious cargo of gold. He has hired many gunmen to help destroy way-stations. The worst is the delightfully psychotic Mace who acts like a happier version of Klaus Kinski in The Great Silence (1968). The film flirts with many of the story beats that dominated Boetticher's Westerns: the honorable supporting character getting gunned down, the homicidal supporting villain stealing the show from the main antagonist, and the stalwart protagonist who has lived too long and seen too much romancing a committed woman. But Boetticher manages to keep this formula fresh and engaging.

7/10

The Giant Spider Invasion: Bill Rebane

I won't lie...I kinda feel bad about giving Bill Rebane's The Giant Spider Invasion a bad rating. Some authentic ingenuity and devotion went into making this creature feature. Made on a measly budget of $300,000, director Bill Rebane relied on techniques that would earn the admiration and affection of even the most jaded directors. The film, which centers on a race of giant spiders from another dimension attacking earth after they land in Wisconsin, features a slew of has-been actors like Alan Hale Jr., Barbara Hale, and Robert Easton. It featured charming home-made special effects, most notably the eponymous "giant spider" which was created by covering a Volkswagen with black fur and utilizing seven puppeteers controlling the legs. I admire that kind of creativity and DIY spirit. It's just...well...The Giant Spider Invasion is a bad, bad, bad film. It's poorly plotted, top-heavy with pointless characters, abysmally shot, and generally unpleasant to look at. In filmmaking, it's not a sin for a movie to look cheap. In fact, in many cases, looking cheap can become a genuine aesthetic (for examples seek the early work of Abel Ferrara and John Waters). But The Giant Spider Invasion looks cheap in the worst way possible: as a symptom of directorial incompetence. That breaks my heart because it's obvious that The Giant Spider Invasion was Rebane's labor of love. But I have to call it like it is.

4/10

It Conquered the World: Roger Corman

In the realm of cheesy 50s sci-fi and B-movies, Roger Corman's It Conquered the World is revered with awe and respect. On the surface it doesn't seem to be different from any of the other creature features that Corman so diligently pumped out during the 50s like Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and The Wasp Woman (1959). But I think I might know why it is so beloved: it approaches its subject matter with deathly seriousness despite its complete absurdity. It begins with a scientist named Dr. Tom Anderson making contact with a race of Venusian aliens with his radio transmitter. He becomes a pawn in their plan to invade earth and take control of humanity with mind control devices delivered via bat-like creatures. After he unsuccessfully tries to assimilate his friend Dr. Nelson, Anderson realizes his mistake. He joins forces with Nelson and a group of soldiers who escaped assimilation to try and kill one of the Venusian aliens who came to earth. It Conquered the World is an astoundingly cheesy film with a non-existent budget, hokey acting by Peter Graves (Dr. Nelson) and Lee Van Cleef (Dr. Anderson), and one of the most ridiculous monsters in cinematic history. Frank Zappa once lovingly described the alien as an "inverted ice-cream cone head with fangs." And yet, despite all of this, the film acts with the solemness of a Shakespearean tragedy. One of my favorite parts is how the aliens manage to cut off all the earth's power, thereby forcing the principle characters to get around via bicycle. And at the very end, Peter Graves delivers one of the dourest, most overly dramatic speeches about the ultimate fate of humanity ever seen outside of the works of Ingmar Bergman. Basically, It Conquered the World is a 50s B-movie that doesn't know it's a 50s B-movie. And for millions of low-budget horror aficionados, myself included, to have it any other way would be sacrilege.

6/10

Sleuth: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Sleuth is a film with two great actors and three great performances.  It is a film of twists, crosses, and horrific realizations that leaves its audience emotionally exhausted and stunned.  Based on the Tony Award-winning play of the same name by Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth magnificently transforms its story into the language of cinema. The film clocks in at over two hours. However, I can only reveal what happens in the first 30 minutes. To disclose anything else would be to rob potential viewers from an unforgettable experience.  So, allow me to set the scene: Andrew Wyke, a rich writer of detective fiction, invites a hairdresser named Milo Tindle to his country estate. Wyke reveals that he knows that Tindle has been having an affair with his wife, Marguerite. But instead of anger, Wyke expresses relief. It turns out that Wyke has grown weary of his marriage and was looking for a way out. So he shares a plan with Tindle: he will "break" into Wyke's mansion, steal a collection of priceless jewels, and sell them through a prominent fence that he knows in Europe. Then Wyke will collect the insurance money off the jewelry. That way, Wyke gets his money and Tindle will have a substantial nest egg with which to maintain Marguerite's lavish lifestyle. So Wyke helps Tindle stage the "perfect" crime. The only problem is that Wyke actually wants to kill Tindle for stealing his wife. By helping Tindle break into his house, he can kill him in "self-defense" and not be persecuted by the police. Now, you may think that I have spoiled the movie. The truth is that this is merely the first of three major plot twists that take place in Sleuth. Each one is more startling than the last. And, incredibly, none of them seem contrived.  As I mentioned, the film only has two actors. A surprisingly energetic Laurence Olivier plays the eccentric Wyke while Michael Caine takes the role of the unfortunate hairdresser. These two actors have more than just chemistry; they have a genuine presence onscreen. To watch them is to witness two of Britain's greatest screen actors at the very top of their game. After years of icy, restrained Shakespeare performances in such films as Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948), to see Olivier with such a spark in his step testifies to his indomitable talent as an actor. And Michael Caine...well...I'll let you discover what makes his performance so powerful. Abandon all preconceptions. Sleuth is a film that you simply can't predict or expect.

10/10

The She-Creature: Edward L. Cahn

Wait...didn't I just review another film about a psychic who hypnotizes women and makes them relive their past lives? Now that I think about it, I did! It was Roger Corman's The Undead (1957), a film which, while ridiculous, was sufficiently atmospheric and compelling. Edward L. Cahn's The She -Creature, on the other hand, while ridiculous, is neither. It is a clunky, drearily boring film. I'll be fair, though. The She-Creature has a somewhat interesting plot. Evil hypnotist (and really, is there any other kind of hypnotist) Carlo Lombardi travels the country with his assistant named Andrea. He puts on shows where he makes her regress to "past lives." However, while not performing, he hypnotizes her into murdering people Lombardi despises. He joins forces with Timothy Chappel, a local rich man, to create a scheme where they gain fame and attention by "predicting" Andrea's murders before they happen. I can actually imagine Hitchcock doing something interesting with this premise, particularly in his early Hollywood years during the 40s when he would occasionally make films that featured quasi-mystical elements and mental disorders like Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945).  But Cahn ruins this premise with excruciating acting, horrific cinematography, non-existent pacing, and one of the worst monster suits this side of Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). Oh, did I mention that this was a monster movie? For whatever reason, when Lombardi hypnotizes Andrea in order for her to do his bidding, she transforms into a hideous creature. There really isn't anything redeeming about The She-Creature. At the very least Creature from the Haunted Sea was funny...intentionally...

3/10

The Sun Shines Bright: John Ford

Who was John Ford? The legendary Hollywood director was a mess of seemingly impossible contradictions.  The man who would become so closely identified with the Western genre was born in Maine as the son of Irish immigrants. While he helped redefine the depiction of Native Americans in such films as Cheyenne Autumn (1964), he rode as a Klansman in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).  The same man who directed such ground-breaking progressive masterpieces as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was instrumental in the casting of Stepin Fetchit, a very close friend, in many of his films. While he valued the institution of the family more than almost anything else in his films, in real life he was an absentee father and husband. At times staunchly conservative and at others unapologetically liberal, his political and social outlooks on life could change on a whim.  He was a kind, sensitive man who perpetuated the image of an angry perfectionist authoritarian out of fear that others would take advantage of him.  While he claimed to not give a damn about what other people thought about him and his work, his fear of being rejected would lead him to heartbreaking alcoholic breakdowns in between film productions. So I ask again, who was John Ford?

For a man who tried so hard to make an enigma of himself, the clearest picture of who Ford truly was can be partially glimpsed in his beloved films. But which film best represents Ford? I would answer a little known film from 1953 entitled The Sun Shines Bright. Ford described later in his life that it was “really my favorite, the only one I like to see over and over again.” Made following the tide of studio goodwill borne from the unexpected success of The Quiet Man (1952), the film is essentially a morality play about an elderly judge in a tiny Kentucky town in the twilight years of the 19th century. Based on three short stories by Irvin S. Cobb, the film revisits the character of Judge Priest, previously portrayed by Will Rogers in Ford’s film of the same name from 1934. Though Ford re-adapted some of the same material from his earlier film in The Sun Shines Bright, he was given a much wider berth of creative freedom.  The result was perhaps Ford’s most emotional and personal film.

It begins with a series of vignettes that form a picture of the town of Fairfield, Kentucky. We watch Judge Priest and his servant Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit) preside over a trial involving U.S. Grant Woodford, a black teenager who won’t work to support his relatives, that ends with a grimace-inducing impromptu performance of “Dixie.”  A meeting of Confederate veterans is held where they give a solemn and heart-felt eulogy to a Rebel Jack after dutifully saluting the Union flag. When a nearby gathering of Union veterans asks them to return the Union flag that they borrowed for their ceremony, Priest serves as an honorary color guard. Of course, once in the presence of the Union veterans he wastes no time to remind them that he is coming up for re-election.  Soon certain class and racial divisions are established: the well-to-do white folk, the Temperance League and their 200 votes (i.e. husbands), the subservient blacks, and the Tornado Boys, a large informal gang of backwoods hunters and trappers. But everything is pleasantly idealized. This is the South as envisioned by wistful romantics.

But the film’s early comedic tones soon take a turn for the worse. An old prostitute shows up, collapses, and dies in a local bordello. She is soon revealed to be the disgraced and disowned daughter of General Fairfield, the much revered and beloved local Confederate leader.  Meanwhile, Woodford has been arrested and wrongfully accused of raping a local girl. The enraged Tornado Boys begin to gather near the prison in order to lynch him. And finally, Priest’s chances to win the election become severely challenged by Horace K. Maydew, the “son of a carpet-bagger from Boston,” who seeks to destroy Fairfield’s idyllic community by forcing it into the future. 

With the town of Fairfield ready to rip itself asunder, the ailing Judge Priest must step in one last time to try and maintain the peace. Priest represents one of Ford’s favorite character archetypes: the reluctant patriarch. Just like in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Quiet Man, The Sun Shines Bright revolves around an aging male authority figure who finds himself drawn one last time into a terrible conflict to preserve peace. These men are presented as relics of a bygone age who nevertheless must serve as a moral compass for younger generations. And, indeed, Judge Priest is considerably worse for wear. Despite Stepin Fetchit’s painfully hokum performance as Jeff, it is clear that Priest relies on him, and not the other way around. Priest is a rampant alcoholic who regularly uses the excuse “Jeff, I gotta take my medicine - I gotta get my heart started” to sneak off and take a massive drink from a hidden cask. He projects an aura of strength and vitality while courting voters...but it’s a sham. Priest is a tired, tired old man.

And yet Priest will not stand idly by and watch his beloved Fairfield destroy itself. He grabs a gun and single-handedly prevents the Tornado Boys from lynching Woodford (Ford had previously tried to incorporate this scene in Judge Priest, but it was cut by the studio). Afterwards, he shames the entire town by marching behind the white hearse holding General Fairfield’s daughter. This scene is easily one of the most powerful in Ford’s entire career. The town of Fairfield had tried to ignore the poor woman’s fate due to her lowly social status. But Priest marches right behind her fellow prostitutes in her funeral procession. Then, slowly, the rest of the town follows suit until over a hundred march with Priest. The procession leads to a black church where Priest delivers an earth-shaking sermon. And then, finally, in the middle of the service, General Fairfield enters the church to see his daughter one last time.

To say that Priest’s actions were controversial would be to criminally understate it.  His prevention of the lynching may have further endeared him to the black community, but it potentially lost him hundreds of vital votes from the Tornado Boys.  Respecting General Fairfield’s daughter may have been the righteous thing to do, but it disgraced him in the eyes of the community’s more unforgiving sectors. As Jeff mournfully notes, “Me ‘n’ the judge sho’ ain’t gonna get elected now.”

But then a miracle occurs.

On the day of the election, when Maydew seems guaranteed to win, the Tornado boys rally en masse and vote for Priest, securing his victory. Later that night, the entire town passes Priest’s front porch in review. Every social group is represented: Confederate veterans, Union veterans, Temperance League, Tornado Boys (holding a banner reading “He Saved Us from Ourselves”), and finally the blacks who are given a position of honor by marching at the very end in the opposite direction.  The film’s final shot has Jeff playing “My Old Kentucky Home” on the harmonica on Priest’s front porch. The 20th century and progress may soon arrive, but for tonight peace and balance has been restored to the town of Fairfield.

Of course, as any modern viewer will tell you, everything is not alright in Fairfield. Segregation remains the unwritten rule. The few blacks who have any screen-time are of the “yessuh” and “nossuh” variety.  The Confederacy is romanticized and fiercely defended by primary characters. Fairfield is quite obviously a white-washed charade. But look a little deeper. Ford isn’t romanticizing segregation or social inequality. He is obsessed with the idea of an ordered society founded on principles of justice and honor led by men who aren’t afraid of shattering taboos. Quite simply, Ford is Judge Priest and the cinema is Fairfield. By the time he shot The Sun Shines Bright, Ford was already tiring of the Hollywood establishment. As he stated in a 1953 interview, “I don't want to make the kind of junk the screen is offering today, because we made those pictures better thirty-five years ago.” The cinema that Ford loved was disintegrating right before his eyes. And so Ford endeavored to make intensely personal films like The Sun Shines Bright to help restore Hollywood to its former glory. One can almost imagine John Ford standing in Judge Priest’s shoes in the final scene with a legion of producers, screenwriters, actors, and directors holding a banner reading “He Saved Us from Ourselves.” And that is why The Sun Shines Bright is one of the best explorations into Ford’s mind. For just a moment we see the man that Ford truly wanted to be: venerated, respected, and loved by everyone. What he was too scared to achieve in real life he replicated on screen.

9/10

The Undead: Roger Corman

Every now and then, I'll discover a film by Roger Corman that legitimately surprises me with its quality.  These include such low-budget "classics" as Carnival Rock (1957), A Bucket of Blood (1959), and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), three films that I thoroughly enjoyed.  Now I can add another film to that list: The Undead.  Made during one of Corman's greatest bursts of creative energy, The Undead was the fifth of nine films that he would direct and release in 1957.  Like many of Corman's films, The Undead was made solely to cash in on a popular cultural trend. This time around the trend was reincarnation. It was originally going to focus on a prostitute named Diana Love who would relive one of her past lives as a "witch" in the Middle Ages via hypnosis. But when the film actually began production, Corman began to believe that the trend was dying down. So he decided to spice the plot up a bit by throwing in an element of time travel.  So after Diana goes back in time, the psychic responsible for the experiment named Quintus Ratcliff realizes that if she changes past events in her flashback they will alter the course of time in real life.  So Quintus also goes back in time to try and convince Diana's past life, a young woman named Helene, to allow herself to be wrongfully executed for witchcraft in order to save the future. This is a surprisingly compelling plot that more than makes up for its obvious budget limitations. And let me tell you...there were quite a few limitations. The film was shot in a "converted supermarket" in only six days.  But despite all of this, the acting is solid, there's a spooky atmosphere, and a clever storyline.  It's no masterpiece. But then again, Corman never set out to make them. And you know what? That's okay in my book.

6/10