MACABRE

“Ladies and gentlemen, for the next hour and fifteen minutes you will be shown things so terrifying that the management of this theatre is deeply concerned for your welfare…”

In the quiet but surprisingly busy small town of Thornton, local doctor Rodney Barrett races against time to save his daughter, who has been kidnapped and buried alive by a deranged killer. His frantic search coincides with the approach of midnight, when a bizarre funeral will take place. Back stories are revealed, suspects are ruled out, and Death itself seems to hover patiently on the sidelines, ready to claim more than one of the players as the thriller moves implacably toward its denouement.

Perfect viewing for November, this, the first of producer/director/impresario William Castle’s notorious gimmick movies. The film was ballyhooed with the announcement a $1,000 insurance policy taken out to cover any member of MACABRE’s audience who died of fright. Some audiences also saw nurses and hearses at the theatres where the picture was playing. Even without such elements physically present in the room with the viewer today they seem to hold a presence.

Based on a novel by at least a dozen authors, the movie's plot is all over the place, with a number of digressions into the past informing the story of the present. These flashbacks gives us relief from the race-against-time narrative, but each time we return to the present there's that damn funeral parlor clock again to remind us where we are. But Castle isn't simply jerking his audience around, and he quickly shows that he's smart enough not to depend solely on gimmicks for his movie's effects. His touch with his cast is surprisingly strong; the actors all make several chapters of exposition go down smoothly, and sweat and struggle admirably as the vise of the story tightens. (William Prince is solid as Barrett, mired in both a small town's gossip mill and a psycho's demented kidnap plot; Jacqueline Scott is particularly strong as the lovelorn but determined nurse who follows him deep into the dark.)

The late-50s meat-and-potatoes acting keep it all grounded, but Castle expertly entwines some semi-Brechtian devices that only enhance the prevailing mood of cinematic dread; the thing often feels like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents directed by Lars von Trier. But even though Castle on occasion goes deep into the dark aspects of the human psyche – greed, jealousy, lust, envy – he turns out to be too much of a good-natured showman to kick us into the dark and leave us there. There’s a genuine sense of grateful release when the clock is finally stopped on this tale, and we’re rewarded with a spookily charming end credits sequence that gives the living, the dead, and the movie’s creative team a well-earned curtain call.

Here in the House the whole thing provided an excellent Halloween hangover, a spooky thriller loaded with atmosphere, a perfectly chilly entertainment for the deepening autumn. Out of respect for the filmmakers' wishes, your proprietor will keep the secret of the story's ending to himself. Also per their wishes, though, I'm here for you if the fright turns out to be too much. See you in the dark.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Revisited Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) last weekend and even on the House's less-than-stellar video it captivated me yet again. It's a movie I've returned to many times in the three decades it's been in my life. Made by Hitchcock during his peak period (and coming on the heels of VERTIGO, a psychologically complex and hugely personal statement), it could have been a throwaway comedy-thriller. But Hitchcock and many of his key collaborators were in too powerful a groove to just throw a project off. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman joined Team Hitchcock with this picture, with the declared goal of writing the ULTIMATE Hitchcock thriller - the script takes in many of Hitchcock's favorite themes (the wrongly-accused protagonist chief among them), and gives everyone involved a chance to take their game to another level: Cary Grant, in his final film for Hitchcock, carries the lead thru sheer charm; Bernard Herrmann follows up his operatic music for VERTIGO with a score more than suitable to accompany the dance Grant must make across half the US; and cinematographer Robert Burks continues to expand his palette across urban landscapes, desolate cornfields and (thrillingly) the faces of Mount Rushmore.

But I wanna talk about Eva, and Eve.

Eve Kendall is the protagonist of her own picture: the story of a party girl at a crossroads, pressured by the government into an undercover assignment. (Another recurring Hitchcock type: Eve would have an interesting conversation with NOTORIOUS' Alicia Huberman.) She seems close enough to Philip Vandamm to know the trouble that George Kaplan is causing him, and must have raised an eyebrow when George Kaplan suddenly had a face, splashed over the newspapers. Perhaps she puts on the same face she always wore for Vandamm when she runs into Roger Thornhill on the train. She's seductive but icy, intimate but not easy to know. Roger doesn't understand quite why this incredible woman is helping him. And Eve's poker face is so strong that he doesn't realize how hard she's working to keep him alive.

As breezily as the whole thing moves, it takes a few viewings to really grasp the depth of Eve's story. And keeping all of the above in mind, it's clear that Eva Marie Saint has internalized it all, and behind her fully composed masque she's calculating all the steps she's going to have to take to keep this idiot from being murdered. She starts to crack in the auction house sequence, clearly hurt when Roger expresses his bitterness over what he believes to be her betrayal (and probably frustrated and angry) and trying to keep her emotions at bay. (She's keeping it inside, but she's dancing every bit as hard as Roger.)

There's a relief that comes when Roger and Eve meet face-to-face in some Keystone forest, at last on the same page and at the same point in time. Though surrounded by thick trees they finally, truly see each other. They're still beset by an incredibly hostile and dangerous world, reflected in the increasingly distorted and disturbed faces of Mount Rushmore they must scale during the movie's climax, but even in this moment, maybe the most traumatized expression by Hitchcock of a world in chaos and uproar, Roger and Eve are finally dancing together.

INFERNO

My first great moviegoing experience of the year came courtesy of Noir City, from your friends at the Film Noir Foundation. The screening of a new DCP of a respected but little seen 3-D noir was always going to be an intriguing event; this particular presentation, the result not of corporate repackaging but some insane curatorial diligence (including a lucky find at an estate sale by the late 3-D producer Ray Zone), was nothing short of a goddamn miracle. Eddie Muller and co. have presented the fruit of their efforts back to 20th Century Fox (who had no idea this work was even being done on the film), and I'm hoping that digital rep offerings will include other left-field projects like this (or the lovely fan-made DCP of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE that made the rounds last year). The screening offered real excitement that at least this moviegoer usually doesn't feel in the face of digital cinema. And as a nice little bonus, the movie was pretty damn terrific, too.

INFERNO is a gritty and involving piece of work, with Robert Ryan battling for survival in the Mojave Desert (even as he contemplates how he'll dispatch the cheating wife and lover who marooned him there, if he survives). Director Roy Ward Baker, a perversely prolific journeyman whose filmography includes as diverse offerings as A NIGHT TO REMEMBER and THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, patiently creates a tense and involving film blanc, trading up noir's customary shadows for an ever-beating sun. The roughness of the digital transfer was evident in many of the more brightly lit scenes, but even the crystalline points of pixelation added a nice, somewhat psychedelic edge to the proceedings, endowing the screening with some of the character that an occasional scratch lends to a 35mm print. And though the film came out of Hollywood's initial 3-D craze, Baker's handling of 3-D is more subtle, putting the audience among the story's environments rather than constantly throwing things in our faces. Even if Baker does fling a snake or a rock at the camera from time to time, the effect is more startling given the involvement he's already made us feel. And the cast just brings it home: Robert Ryan is compelling as a man who just won't quit (unless he does), and Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan are just as strong as the lovers dealing with the consequences of their plan.

(Image from They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To, who's just as high on the movie as I am.)

PARK ROW

1884-ish. Fed up with the lack of ethics and deleterious effects on the public of New York's Star newspaper, pissed-off reporter Phinneas Mitchell (Gene Evans) takes a tiny sum of money, some generous donations, and some of the scrappiest newsmen on NYC's fabled Park Row and builds himself a goddamn NEWSPAPER. Mitchell's Globe dedicates itself to printing quality news, preferably at the expense of the Star, and no matter what Park Row throws at him (and it throws an awful lot), Mitchell just KEEPS. ON. COMING.



Written, produced, and directed by Samuel Fuller, who bankrolled the thing himself and later named it his favorite of his films. It is cliche to call a movie a love letter to anything, but PARK ROW declares its love for the fourth estate so explicitly that it'd make Aaron Sorkin blush. Fuller's reverence toward his subject rivals that of Sorkin (the scene in which the linotype machine is invented is endowed with the holiness that usually attends the birth of Christ on screen), but Fuller backs up his loving words with ACTION, much of which is so over-the-top and brutal that it may surprise contemporary action fans (indeed, a glorious unbroken shot that follows Mitchell along Park Row while he basically BEATS UP THE ENTIRE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY anticipates the corridor fight in OLD BOY, and rivals it for righteous thrills). It's one of the most tactile movies about words I've ever seen; we grow to share these people's love for the painstakingly organized pieces of type they set, for the beer they drink, for the editions they print page by page. The press becomes the holiest congregation imaginable, and Fuller's saved a pew for each of us. Fuller's passion for his subject alone would be enough to win us over to his cause, even if his hero hadn't been so thrilling, his story so engaging, his world so exciting.



Damn right.

DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST

D: Why're we the youngest people here?

Me: Because young people aren't being taught that Bresson matters.

D: (pause) Bresson's all that matters.

IT'S A FUCKING DINOSAUR.

Today's entry in the annual 31 Screams series at Arbogast on Film enshrines a fabulous reaction shot from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, wherein a lady on the street has a completely understandable reaction to the rampaging creature that has suddenly arrived on the scene:


My favorite moment in any of the Jurassic Park films comes near the end of The Lost World, when a Tyrannosaurus Rex is just kicking around suburban San Diego. It happens before the carnage and the chase, and Spielberg takes a quiet moment to just let us take in the sight of, as Arbo would say, A FUCKING DINOSAUR WALKING DOWN THE STREET. It gives us just enough time to project the creature onto our own hometown, and though it offers enough frisson to juice the chaos of the final reel, it's this minute that lingers.


In describing the end of this film some critics mentioned allusions to Godzilla or even BF20KF, but this moment was more like Dali. For all our CGI and jadedness, a dinosaur walking down the street just isn't something we see every day. It's not the huge, effects-laden climactic moments of these movies that really resonate; it's the quiet ones where the makers take a second to let us reflect that yes, if this were actually happening, it'd truly flip our shit.

JOHNNY STACCATO: Evil

"Evil attacks you through your television sets."

This is the suitably ballsy first line of this television episode, and it's delivered by this man:



Brother Max (Alexander Scourby) is addressing the congregation of an inner-city mission on the dangers of Evil, and the threat it poses to us in our daily lives. His spiel is caught in a bracing, uncut 2-minute take:



"You say 'Hallelujah', you say 'Amen'...but what you say and what you do, my friends, they can be very different." And Brother Max should know, as we find someone special waiting for him after the service...



Our hero saunters into the frame, captured, unsurprisingly, in a stolen shot from a handheld camera, in the true Cassavetes manner:



In VO, Johnny tells him that he's been asked to check out a mission to which the girlfriend of a pal has given all her savings. Johnny asks around, eventually winds up in the orbit of the VERY drunk Brother Conrad (Elisha Cook):



Johnny is taken to the congregation of Brother Max, seen holding forth against Evil:



Brother Conrad stands to testify, but finds his repeated drunkenness too many lapses into Evil, and he is cruelly ejected by Brother Max:



Johnny takes the stage to do some testifying of his own, insisting that "nobody was ever that far gone that he couldn't be forgiven." And when he directly charges Brother Max with lying to and exploiting his flock, the faithful descend upon him, knock him unconscious, and leave him in the alley outside:



Brother Max briefly steps outside and cheerfully comes clean to Johnny: he is, indeed, a fraud, who has taken these good people for every penny he could get.



Ironically, this hipster detective's moral compass is more functional than that of the false man of God, and Johnny knows Max is right when he says that to expose him would be to shatter the faith of the parishioners. At the moment, only Johnny and we see Brother Max for who he is.



But their conversation has been observed:



This is Brother Thomas (Lloyd Corrigan), the original founder of this modest church. After 20 years of little success in attracting much of a parish, Thomas found his ministry taken over by Max. And though Max has filled the pews with the devout in a way that Thomas never could, Thomas has always suspected that Max wasn't completely on the level. The shame of these new revelations shatter him.

Johnny knows that if Max is going to be exposed, and if the faith of the parish is to be preserved, Brother Thomas is going to have to be the man to do it. Max is too weak, too ashamed to fight. "You don't have the faith in those people that you expect them to give to you," chides Johnny. "All we can do is try."

Brother Thomas takes the stage to make a last, desperate plea for the souls of his flock...



...and the last we see of Johnny before this final conflict makes us wonder if even he's saying a little prayer:



The seventh episode of Johnny Staccato, starring John Cassavetes in the title role, might as well have been filmed last week. It's a powerful piece of filmmaking, and its portrait of religion abused and faith exploited for the benefit of charlatans is, sadly, as timely as ever. And it's an insanely well-crafted episode, completely jettisoning Johnny's jazz milieu (which had framed the series thus far) to enter some downright Rod Serling territory. Richard Carr's script stays safely off the side of polemic, letting the episode's two main characters remain human even as they embody Good and Evil.

I'd been bothered by the tendency of the show to background its leading man, a tendency that Cassavetes himself seems to acknowledge with the funny framing of this shot:



Johnny emerges here as a conscience, observing the conflict (like us) from the sidelines but still wholly invested. And there's a downright utopian confluence in this episode, as Johnny's moral hipster and Corrigan's meek but resolute man of God find common ground. It's a powerful moment that resonates in these fractious times, and though greed hides behind a number of faces (including a few of those who were debating last night), there's more than one kind of faith, too.

Take a bow, Johnny. And tag it:

TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA

The Disney adaptation of the Jules Verne classic remains lively and exciting. One wishes that they hadn't had to make it kid friendly - the jigs and songs (and the adorable seal) distract somewhat from some surprisingly deep moral questions addressed throughout (the darkness is unsurprising, considering director Richard Fleischer's previous work on various films noir). That said, James Mason's a fine and driven Nemo, Kirk Douglas' energy is infectious, and the underwater scenes still play beautifully on the big screen. I'm kinda surprised that none of San Francisco's sizable steampunk contingent came to the screening - one'd think they'd be all over it.

NOIR CITY rundown

The wrap-up of the annual Noir City festival leaves this writer with mixed emotions. The festival's customary gaudy, self-aggrandizing showmanship continued unabated, which may be an inducement to a number of the festival's loyal, diehard fans, but has always left me cold. I have no interest in winning prizes, in the stale jokes surrounding this (or any) year's Miss Noir City, or in the tired, TIRED wisecracks of the hosts. As dire as a more po-faced presentation would be, I can't help but feel that the irreverence with which Eddie Muller and co. continue to approach the films they purport to love so much only diminishes them, and stokes the unfortunate tendency of the Castro Theatre audience to regard the films in a campier light than necessary (though it seems I'm not alone in feeling so - one patron, during a screening of SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR... made my day by yelling in response to the titters that were steadily streaming through the audience, as did the woman who meekly offered: "I concur.")

That said, my consternation with the Film Noir Foundation's self-congratulation (and the same they cultivate in their audience) doesn't blind me to the nobility of their mission, or the quality of the films they present. There is a thrill that comes with these particular films unrolling during the usually cold month of January (among other things, it's nice to see Anita Monga, ousted years ago from her position as the Castro's programmer, bringing her curatorial intelligence back to its screen). The festival's balancing of classic noir (such as Otto Preminger's ANGEL FACE) with recently restored classics (like festival-closer THE HUNTED, starring actor/ice skater Belita) is as knowing and strong as ever, and the chance to catch up with favorite films and take in new films to the canon is, indeed, precious.

What I saw, briefly:

GASLIGHT - less a noir film than a murky period drama, the film of Patrick Hamilton's play benefits from solid characterizations, including one of my favorite performances from Joseph Cotten, believably smitten and, unlike Holly Martins, able to do right by the film's embattled heroine. I'm probably alone in wanting to see James Wan remake it.

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT - cheap but credible Republic Gothic, with a returning WWII soldier tracking down his lady pen pal only to become enmeshed in the increasingly insane schemes of her mother (a gloriously unhinged Helen Thimig). Beautifully paced and packed into 56 suspenseful minutes by director Anthony Mann, but where similar stories would end with a house on fire, the danger of this one culminates with a painting falling on somebody. Beautiful.

THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS - For reasons I don't understand, Muller apologized for this one in advance. But Humphrey Bogart is completely believable as a conflicted, artist-blocked painter, as is Barbara Stanwyck as his increasingly concerned and endangered spouse. The reveal of the portrait is a truly unsettling show-stopper - I wonder what became of the actual painting.



MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS - made the name of director Joseph H. Lewis, and it's easy to see why. If it's too similar to GASLIGHT (the setting of the "madness" theme for the festival resulted in a few cases of deja vu), its inversion of the amnesia storyline makes for some powerful suspense.

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR... - sorry to hear of the backstage conflicts between Fritz Lang and his creative team. If it's less visually ambitious than even the weirdest of his Hollywood films, it remains an assured and creepy take on the Bluebeard myth, with a lovely, dreamy Joan Bennett confronting the inner demons of perfect stranger Michael Redgrave. This one ends in flames. Muller and crew's insistence that the film is "incomprehensible" demeans it and them - the psychological throughline is completely credible, and its mirror to actual events in architectural history is fascinating (and I hope D., my fellow fancier of fetish and film, will sound off on these elements in the comments).

BLIND ALLEY - a very intriguing early Hollywood foray into the Freudian realm, with hostage psychologist Ralph Bellamy probing the psyche of desperate gangster Chester Morris.

ANGEL FACE - attractive but innocent fall guy: Robert Mitchum. Alluring but deadly femme fatale: Jean Simmons. Obsessed and overbearing filmmaker: Otto Preminger. Feeling that Mitchum is just utterly, completely fucked: Check. In some ways a by-the-numbers noir, but each of the tropes is so beautifully, even realistically realized that it just carries you down its spiral. The unhappy ending so often promised by Muller finally, gloriously manifests here.

THE HUNTED - there's something charming about how, in Monogram's grab for respectability after its rebirth as Allied Artists, the studio put so much faith in ice skater Belita as an A-lister. She's paired here with Preston Foster as the tough but smitten cop who sent her to prison. Though I couldn't really buy Foster in this role (he's fine as a cop, but too old and too grizzled to carry a torch for anyone for quite that long), there's something about Belita's not-quite-A-list looks, something real about her charms that carried me along. And the obligatory ice-skating sequence is just charming.

On balance, I'm pleased that Noir City continues, and I'm glad I got to see a third of the festival's total offerings. And yet for the first time we saw signs that the future is catching up to the venerable fest. The night he introduced THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS Muller mused that in addition to being the first time many of the audience had seen the film theatrically, it will more than likely be their last. Whatever my issues with Mr. Muller, I happily acknowledge that he's closer to aspect of the film exhibition game than I, and to hear such an enthusiastic proponent of film preservation and exhibition so tentative about the future of the festival in particular and exhibition in general does give one pause.

But hey, as long as the Film Noir Foundation continues to fight the good fight in keeping these films in the public eye and up on screen, I'll happily go see them.

two by Hitchcock

I CONFESS - had never seen Hitchcock's tale of a priest (Montgomery Clift) forced to keep mum about a murder confessed to him - a lovely series of lesser-seen Hitchcock films unfurling at the Castro Theatre's helping me fill in some blanks. I liked this film - was pleasantly surprised at the ensemble nature of the film, less centered on our conflicted hero than taking in all of the people in his orbit, including the authorities brought in to investigate the case and the surrounding community. Strong though it often is (and unusually serious for a Hitchcock film), one does long for more contemporary characterization. In the mid-50s it was enough to simply show Clift as a priest, but we need more details these days to really understand WHY he doesn't just divulge what he knows. There's very little insight into why Clift became a priest, thus little tactile understanding of what he'd lose by breaking the seal of the confessional. A remake penned by George Pelecanos (or even Richard Price), an author with a knack for that much character detail and grounding in both religious and crime stories, would not be remiss.


ROPE - the problem of characterization continues here. It's just impossible to buy James Stewart as a professor who espouses belief in murder as a right of the superior being. But the mechanics of storytelling in the movie, presenting the action as in a single, mostly-unbroken take (save for a truly high-impact close-up) move the thing along beautifully, making for a dense and entertaining 80 minutes, the last three of which are absolutely stunning.