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[October 14, 1969] News Bulletin/No Separate Beds (Review of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice")

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by Victoria Lucas

Good news!

Remember when last year (December 12, 1968) I reported that the submersible Alvin had sunk at around 5,000 feet in the Atlantic Ocean, with bad weather curtailing the search for it?

The Alvin

With money provided by the US Navy, whose vehicle the Alvin is, and who expected to learn whether and how such retrievals might be done, Alvin's caretakers sailed out armed with imaging tools and images, along with equipment and engineers to find and raise the submersible. They succeeded on their Labor Day cruise!

Fortunately for its seekers, the Alvin had landed on the ocean floor right side up, gaping open, so a special tool was lowered into it and remotely sprung open to hold it while it was slowly raised and then towed close to the surface back to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Great care was taken not to disturb the ocean life that had inhabited it, and that was removed and taken to labs for observation, etc.

There was one funny incident: an engineer who had been on the Alvin's host ship on the last trip before its loss and was also on its Labor Day tow ship came back (like most crew) hungry. He accepted a seafood sandwich from the welcoming spouse of a crew member, and while he was eating it a picture was snapped of him with the sandwich. Coincidentally the lunchbox left behind when the Alvin had slipped into the ocean was in the picture.

And someone interpreted that to mean that the engineer was eating the sandwich that had been in the lunchbox (along with an apple) while the submersible was beneath the waves for 9 months. Immediately there sprang up a certainty that the ocean had hitherto unknown powers of preservation. The last I knew someone was talking government grants.

Now for the main event!

No Separate Beds (Review of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice")


Poster showing Gould, Wood, Culp & Cannon as the eponymous characters

Well, I'll be! Someone up and wrote a film script about upper middle-class couples behaving like unsupervised teenagers. (I would have said "well-to-do couples," but that's a bit old-fashioned of me.)

If you've seen the latest Mad Magazine (and I know some of you have) you've essentially seen the above poster for "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"–Robert Culp of "I Spy" resting apparently naked against the headboard of a bed with Dyan Cannon, Elliott Gould, and Natalie Wood, all covered by strategic bits of bedding. (The same artist did both the parody and the original poster.)


The MAD version of the movie poster

At the beginning of the movie, there are Bob & Carol in his sports car driving through beautiful countryside to an expensive retreat they call "The Institute" (a stand-in for Esalen, a school at the vanguard of the "Human Potential Movement"). After a dramatic group therapy "marathon" session we see them and their friends Ted and Alice, back home eating out at a fancy restaurant, living in beautiful masonry shelters (no doubt in nice neighborhoods), consulting an expensive psychoanalyst (the writer/director/producer's real psychoanalyst by all accounts), and experiencing great angst.

Is the angst political, about how many resources they're using up and how they should be giving back? Is the angst medical, cares about health, death and life? No. It's highly personal and laced with guilt. Guilt about political or family matters? No–politics are never discussed, and each couple has one child who is not the center or even (it seems) an important focus of their lives. Like them, each child is privileged and loved and free, even if spending many evenings and weekends with Spanish-speaking help rather than their parents, "extended" families such as grandparents (who probably live far away), or other children.

So why the angst? The joy in the opening music (Handel's "Hallalujah Chorus") comes in anticipation of received wisdom, which appears to them in group therapy to be the practice of honesty, and in some of those honest moments they realize that . . .

They aren't having enough sex.

But I shouldn't make fun of them. They just want what every teenager wants: the privacy and the time to explore–him- or herself as a psychological being, and him- or herself as a sexual being.

Perhaps I should be asking why it took them so long. I think we all know the answer to that: because they weren't allowed to explore when they were teenagers (although a minority of this generation did manage to be either secretive or untruthful enough to get away with it). Think of the kids you know who got married while in high school–or were you one of those youngsters yourself?

I think these wealthy adults (all four starring actors in their 30s, fitting the characters they play) were waiting for the sexual revolution now in progress. They were waiting for permission. Now they have it.


Just in case the movie isn't enough for you

So we have gone from Ricky and Lucy Ricardo sleeping in separate beds while a married couple, never showing Doris Day in bed with anyone but a voice on a telephone, and generally strict rules about how sexual behavior is suggested in non-pornographic films, to: wham! two couples in bed together—albeit just sitting there after a brief bout of playing hide and tickle.

In their innocence they call their foursome an "orgy." I wonder what the scriptwriters, Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker would have done with the group hosting weekly orgies whose members I'm now interviewing for my book. Probably discarded us as an extreme manifestation of the sexual revolution and gone back to using improvisation (by writers only) as a tool for generating dialog (a rumored way of writing the scene with Ted and Alice in which he is horny but she is not).

The film ends with the Burt Bacharach song "What the World Needs Now." As it plays, a crowd of people practice a tool for freedom they can exercise while fully clothed, whatever they mean by it, "love." But wait! There's still the book!

This is a comedy without very much laughing out loud. If you are not offended by the very premise of it, I think it might amuse you. I give it a 4 out of 5 mainly for excellent comedic acting and witty writing.




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[October 10, 1969] Everybody's Talkin' At Me: Midnight Cowboy and Urban Tragedy

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Science Fiction Theater Episode #7

Tonight (Oct. 10), tune in at 7pm (Pacific) to see what terrific, sciencefictional goodie the Traveler has got in store for you. A hint: it was made by a real Pal…

 


by Jason Sacks

My friends know I'm a big fan of the emerging "New Hollywood" films which has been mushrooming over the last few years. The new film Midnight Cowboy is an outstanding exemplar of that movement, and I'd like to tell you why this film is so great — and why this film movement is so exciting.

"New Hollywood" has emerged as a term over the last few years for a specific type of film. Coming out of the dual filmic earthquakes of the end of the hated Hays Code and the crumbling of the studio system, New Hollywood films are differentated from their more traditional studio counterparts for a few reasons: New Hollywood films tend to prpesent a narrative focus on the lives of ordinary people, tend to use location shooting to heighten their reality, and tend to present an anti-establishment view of the world.

You might remeber the article from late 1967 by influential Time critic Steven Kanfer which praised that year's Bonnie and Clyde as "a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend."  Kanfer continued, "The most important fact about the screen in 1967 is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema calls 'the furious springtime of world cinema."" That "new trend" has evolved into the New Hollywood movement.

Bonnie and Clyde was the cover story in Time in late 1967, with an accompanying article which described a new cinema which was evolving quickly.

In fact, Bonnie and Clyde was a kind of  siren song of this movement — though other bold new films preceded it (notably the work of John Cassavettes and Robert Downey), this was the first sophisticated feature film which really broke through and really embraced youth culture (to be sure, the films of Roger Corman, among others, embraced youthful rebellion but never with the panache or breakthrough success of Bonnie and Clyde). It also helps that Clyde is also a damn good – and very funny – film.

Since '67, we've seen a plethora of remarkable new films which fall into this new trend, including The Graduate, Targets, Head, the outrageous Putney Swope and the terrifying Night of the Living Dead. Last year's Rosemary's Baby can be called a New Hollywood film. And of course, the most ubiquitous film of 1969 is Easy Rider, a film which seems to be on the lips of everybody under the age of 25. Each of those movies seems to represent a new approach to filmmaking and even to narrative. Head is shockingly surreal. Easy Rider uses innovative editing techniques. Rosemary's Baby explicity satirizes the patriarchy. And Targets literalizes the generation gap between traditional and modern entertainment – and finds terror on both sides.

This new filmic philosophy is an explicit rejection of the dictates of the Hays Code and of the overtly conformist morality of the 1950s. The newer generation of filmmakers feel the freedom to delve into subjects which previously would have been explicitly off-limits. And that makes the film-goers’ life thrilling as we move into a new decade.

Now we get Midnight Cowboy, a film which elevates the New American school, throwing down a new gauntlet for realism, for tragedy and comedy, and for character. I went into this film with high expectations due to strong reviews from critics I appreciate. But it's funny—  Midnight Cowboy both was a lot like what I was expecting and a profoundly different experience.

I was expecting a sad, smart, outsiderly story of two desperate and pathetic souls living on the edge of gay hustler culture in a version of New York that seems teetering on the edge of malaise but hasn't quite tipped over the edge. I was expecting great performances from leads Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, a deep portrayal of what it means to be an outsider in a world that just doesn't care about you, and to see an interesting portrait of a New York suspended between outsider culture and Nixon's silent majority, desperate to flee an urban wasteland.

I got all that, and Midnight Cowboy was poweful as expected; moving and thoughtful and crazily weird at times and often plotless seeming and a particularly intense movie experience.

But I also got a lot of stuff I didn't expect. The first maybe half hour of the film lingers on Voight playing Joe Buck as Buck slowly ambles out of his small Texas town to begin the journey to New York City. That segment of the film takes its time, with long, languid but suffocating shots which make the town feel claustrophobic. His old home town is poised on the edge of an all-encompassing landscape but the human space in that landscape is proscribed.

And yet, and yet: people are friendly; they smile and greet each other and seem to welcome the company of others. The Southwest might be desolate, but the human capacity there seems strong.

So Buck leaves town, but we see elliptical, dreamlike flashbacks which reveal Joe's past life, his obsessions, and his deep sadness. Some of those dreams are representational, some are allusional, but they all take the film to a different level, an unexpected level which sets Midnight Cowboy clearly in that same milieu of modern angst as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider.

Buck isn't just leaving Texas because the big city is beckoning him. He has a traumatic secret connected to his old home town, something which truly tortures him emotionally and pushes him to jump on a Greyhound for the long, lonely journey to the big city.

All the while, the film's now-ubiquitous (in the film and on our radios) theme song keeps playing, illustrating Buck's inner life. True freedom, Nilsson is singing is inside our own heads:

Everybody's talking at me
I don't hear a word they're saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Buck lands in New York, and as you can see from that evocative still posted above, he literally towers above all the people around him. Joe Buck is a big man, with big dreams.

In a more traditional movie, Buck would aspire to be an actor, or strike it rich on Wall Street, or hobnob with the rich and famous. But those dreams would be unrealistic for a man of Joe Buck's means.

Instead. those big dreams lead him to a life where he tries to make some cash by hustling, offering sexual favors to older women who find his cowboy personality a massive turn-on. Joe seems to like the life for a while, as he tries it on, but he has no idea how to actually live such a life, and he ends up living on or near the streets. Desperate for cash, Buck falls in with a loose amalgamation of hookers, hustlers and runaways who inhabit the alleyways and avenues of a fading New York City.

it is in this world that Midnight Cowboy confronts its most surprising element and the aspect of the film which moves it away most from the era of 1950s morality. The Hays Code explicitly forbade even a glancing mention of homosexuality (which didn’t prevent clever filmmakers from depicting homosexual characters onscreen, albeit using winks and nods to the audience). But here gay culture is explicitly shown onscreen, with even a touch of respect and affection for the kinds of struggles Buck has to go through. In the wake of July’s riots around New York’s Stonewall Tavern, this depiction of homosexuality couldn’t feel more contemporary.

Director John Schlesinger tells Buck’s story with angst and grace, but also with a remarkable amount of humor which keeps the proceedings from getting too heavy.

While hustling men and women, Joe Buck meets Hoffman, who plays the unforgettable Ratso Rizzo, a man of pure id and ansgt, a TB-ridden conman who takes Buck under his broken wing and shares an apartment in an abandoned, desolate tenement which seems like it's been waiting for a Robert Moses wrecking ball for decades.

Dustin Hoffman is absolutely astonishing as the motormouthed, self-delusional Rizzo, a man who both seems unique in film history and utterly familiar. Rizzo is every New Yorker who talks nonstop, with an accent and an attitude which embodies his city. But Rizzo has a beguiling tenderness and prickliness, a sort of personal pride and complex inner life that causes the character to pop off the screen.

Rizzo couldn't be further away from Hoffman's character in The Graduate, Ben Braddock. But just as Hoffman seemed to embody our generation of aimless, privileged young men in the earlier film, here he embodies an aimless man utterly without privilege or power, a man swallowed up by the desolate New York streets and his own disease. And where Ben Braddock is driven by a sex drive stuck on his odd relationship with Mrs Robinson, here Hoffman’s Rizzo seems completely uninterested in sex, even bemused by Buck’s bizarre life which centers around sex.

That odd state of bemusement gives a lot of energy to this film. The fast-talking Ratso can’t help but babble in and on about how strange Buck’s life is. It’s as if Rizzo  simply doesn’t understand why people need to have sex and why they make decisions based in that sex drive. And yet, he grows a deep fraternal love for Buck.

it’s often hilarious, often heartbreaking how tight the bond is between these two men who are so very different from each other.

At the heart of the film is the deep friendship between Buck and Rizzo, a frankly shocking level of intimacy these men develop for each other. This relationship inspires empathy in viewers, too, so that when this movie reaches its inevitable ending, we are left adrift like the movie's characters are.

So yeah, Midnight Cowboy is kind of a tragedy, and the ending left people in my theatre sobbing, and it earns its X rating with its story of hustlers and unsensationalized view of sex and its general feeling of grime.

But still: this movie is not a bummer. It's not a bad acid trip. There are many moments which illuminated life with empathy and intelligence and humor. Heck, in fact, the acid trip in this film (at a place similar to Andy Warhol's famous Factory) is a lot of fun as well as a brilliant conceptual counterweight to the rest of the story: some hustlers were able to find kinship and a sense of family with freaks like themselves. And for others a glimpse into that life helps deliver a small sense of grace.

Brit John Schlesinger came over to America to direct this film, and it's easy to sense his comfort in every scene. Best known for his 1965 film Darling, which introduced Julie Christie to worldwide audiences as a headstrong girl in swinging London, Schlesinger seems to be attracted to stories about people who can't quite find their footing in society but remain resolutely themselves: Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd and Billy in Billy Liar are rebels without a clue.

But Schlesinger has never helmed a film like Midnight Cowboy, which seems to reject the very concept of a middle-class life, which seems devoted to its New York-in-decline setting and that city’s bottomless underclass of weirdos, drug addicts and hustlers. Adam Holender's cinematography adds to the beautiful despair, a lovely widescreen tragedy of urban decay.

Ultimately, Midnight Cowboy is suffused with the dream of freedom, which comes into conflict with the deep ennui of our late '60s reality.  We're living in the shadows of the tragedies of '68 and the dimming of the post-War consensus. Yeah, director Schlesinger seems to say, you can be free, you can live outside the law, but the gravity of middle-class normative Americana will always pull you either into death or into conformance no matter how hard you try to resist.  The deeply moving ending of this film reinforces that sense that it’s unbelievably hard to stay an outsider in our modern world, that the lessons of ‘68 show the optimism of ‘67 has given way to a massive societal bummer.

Midnight Cowboy is a remarkable film which represents the great promise of the New Hollywood movement: John Schlesinger’s film is explicitly in dialog with our current era. Yeah, everybody’s talkin’ at us, but we don’t hear a word they’re saying’.

5 stars.

 




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[September 24, 1969] Murder, Madness, and Middle Age (What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice? And Its Predecessors)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

For the past few years, there's been a cycle of psychological horror films starring famous actresses who are no longer young enough to be ingenues.  One producer/director is mostly responsible for this trend, as we'll see.  However, I believe its roots begin in a classic film nearly two decades old.

Sunset Boulevard (1950) stars Gloria Swanson, a major star in silent films and early talkies.  She plays Norma Desmond, who was — guess what? — a major star in silent films.  (Apparently not in early talkies.) She is also as mad as a hatter. 

The film is something of a satire of Hollywood and a dark comedy (it's narrated by a dead man) but it also has elements of horror.  Desmond is a grotesque caricature of a fading star who lives in a Gothic mansion that would suit the Addams Family.  The final scene is as creepy as heck.

Sunset Blvd (as the title actually shows up on the screen) is a great film, but it wasn't until a dozen years later that a fellow named Robert Aldrich took the idea of casting famous actresses who were no longer young in psychological shockers and made it a fad.

1962 saw the release of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Henry Farrell.  It stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as sisters.  Davis plays Baby Jane Hudson, a former child star.  Crawford plays Blanche Hudson, whose own movie career was cut short when she was paralyzed from the waist down in an automobile accident. 

The siblings now live together.  Baby Jane is completely insane, dressing like a little girl and wearing outrageously heavy makeup.  This unhealthy situation leads to psychological torture and, of course, murder.

The two stars play against each other very well.  Hollywood gossip says they loathe each other, which may help.  Davis has much the meatier role.  The scene in which she sings I've Written a Letter to Daddy (His Address is Heaven Above), a sentimental number from her days as a child star, may give you nightmares.

The film was a success.  Aldrich decided that there was no reason to mess around with a winning formula.  He produced and directed Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, released in 1964, with the same screenwriter (Lukas Heller, this time assisted by novelist Farrell) and one of the same stars.  Bette Davis is back, and Joan Crawford was supposed to return also, but she was eventually replaced by Olivia de Havilland.

Davis plays Charlotte, whose lover was brutally murdered in 1927 (in an extremely gruesome and bloody scene).  Decades later she's a recluse.  She's blamed for the killing, but it was never officially solved.  Suffice to say that de Havilland plays a cousin who shows up to help Charlotte; or does she?

Other film makers jumped on the bandwagon.  William Castle, famous for his gimmicky shockers, brought us Strait-Jacket the same year.  Crawford (and not Davis) returns, this time as a woman who murdered her husband and his lover with an axe. Her three-year-old daughter witnesses the crime.  A shocking scene opens the film, so know what you're in for.

Crawford spends twenty years in an institution for the criminally insane.  When she gets out . . . Let's just say that heads will (literally) roll.

Not to be outdone by Yanks, British production company Hammer offered Fanatic (known as Die! Die! My Darling! on this side of the pond) in 1965.  This time the actress of mature years is Tallulah Bankhead, who terrorizes the woman who was going to marry her recently deceased son. 

Is there murder on the way?  You betcha.

This trend has become so obvious that Mad magazine came up with a spoof of it.

It's in the January 1966 issue.  Track down a copy of the issue and enjoy the full parody.

Let's take a look at the latest example.

What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?

Aldrich is back, but only as producer.  The director is Lee H. Katzin, and the screenplay is by Theodore Apstein.  It's based on the 1962 novel The Forbidden Garden by Ursula Curtiss.

Obviously, Aldrich is alluding to the title of his biggest success in this genre.  The trailer for the film makes this clear.  It's also misleading, implying that it's a whodunit.  We know who the killer is right at the start.


We don't even get the opening titles until after the first murder.

Geraldine Page, who has been nominated for four Oscars, a Tony, and who has won an Emmy, has the lead role.  (Not Aunt Alice; we'll get to her later.) The film begins with her discovery that her recently deceased husband left her nearly penniless.


The new widow.

She doesn't even own her palatial home, so she moves to an isolated house in the American Southwest.  (The film is unusual in having a sunny desert setting instead of the usual dark and spooky one.)

We find out right away that she has a habit of hiring housekeepers, convincing them to let her invest their savings, murdering them, burying them in her garden, keeping the loot, and making up some story about how the servants left.


Not the first victim, but the one that gets the plot going.

Some time after this latest killing, Ruth Gordon, fresh from her Oscar-winning performance in Rosemary's Baby, shows up and applies for the job.  (She's Aunt Alice, but we don't find out who she's the aunt of for a while.)


Aunt Alice and the desert landscape.

Aunt Alice has her own secret, but let's not give too much away.  Suffice to say that events threaten to unravel Page's little scheme.  The arrival of a young widow and her pre-teen nephew in the abandoned house nearby, the only one for miles around, adds complications.


There's also a dog that's very interested in the Forbidden Garden.

Aunt Alice snoops around, for a reason we'll discover later.  She finds evidence of Page's crimes.


A letter written to the victim we saw above.

Not quite as gruesome as some others of its kind — it almost looks like a made-for-TV movie at times — this is an enjoyable thriller.  There are a lot of other characters I haven't mentioned yet, and even a love story.

But Page and Gordon are the whole show.  The interaction between these two gifted actresses is a joy to behold.  Page is imperious, haughty, sarcastic, and ruthless.  Gordon is down-to-earth but brave and clever.

The plot creates a great deal of suspense.  It's not obvious whether or not Page will get away with it, or whether Gordon will expose her.  There's a nifty bit of irony at the very end.

Four stars.

I hope you enjoyed this journey through what has become a bonafide subgenre.  Who knows when the next film of this type will come out—but you can bet it'll make a killing…




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[September 20, 1969] Cinemascope: Stitched from the past; schemed from the future (Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and The Italian Job)

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by Fiona Moore

1969 continues to disappoint on the genre cinema front, at least in the UK. So here we have a middling horror picture, and a very good picture which is sort of SF, if you squint at it right.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed Poster
Poster for Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

After too long an absence from Hammer, it’s good to see Terence Fisher back at the helm of another Peter Cushing Frankenstein movie. This one sees the eponymous Baron on the trail of his former assistant Brandt (George Pravda), who has been confined to a lunatic asylum somewhere in Mitteleuropa. Frankenstein plans to extract from Brandt the secret of preserving brains on ice, in a homage to Frankenstein’s conviction in the first movie that he could use his technology to indefinitely prolong the lifespans of geniuses by transferring their brains from body to body. Frankenstein inveigles his way into the lives of a young doctor at the asylum, Holst (Simon Ward), and his fiancée, Anna (Veronica Carlson), using a combination of blackmail and psychological manipulation to gain their assistance. However, Brandt suffers a heart attack, meaning his brain must of course be transferred into another person’s body (Freddie Jones), and further violence and chaos ensues.

Hammer have clearly been taking notes from the recent success of Witchfinder General (1968), as the movie’s main strength is the psychological horror of the way Frankenstein encourages his victims on to more and more awful crimes. Frankenstein’s hold over Holst is that the latter has been secretly dealing narcotics in order to pay for medical treatment for Anna’s mother, a development which speaks to contemporary concerns about the ready availability of drugs and the moral questions surrounding their use. I should also warn viewers about a graphic rape scene which just about manages to stay within the bounds of being played for horror and not titillation, but is still rather disturbing.

Peter Cushing as the Baron in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
Peter Cushing terrifies as the sinister Baron Frankenstein

Cushing is genuinely and credibly terrifying in the title role, giving the Baron a more physical performance while retaining the psychopathic coldness and inhumanity of the previous films. Fisher retains his fondness for startling but appropriate juxtapositions, for instance following Anna’s remark to the Baron “you’ll find it very quiet here” with a cut to a screaming madwoman in the asylum. There’s a nice bait-and-switch early on regarding the Baron’s identity (and one which seems like a callback to the familiar saw about the Baron really being the monster), and we also get a suitably comic morgue attendant at one point. Production values are high for a Hammer film, with some very good creature makeup and a pyrotechnic ending.

The Creature in Frankenstein Must Be DestroyedFreddie Jones as The Creature cuts a pathetic figure

Nonetheless, the movie suffers from some annoying plot holes and character contrivances, as well as an opening scene which goes nowhere and adds nothing to the plot, and a resolution which I found lacking in credibility and, indeed, closure. There are also a number of Dickensian coincidences (a doctor at the very lunatic asylum the Baron wants to get into having a fiancée who runs a boarding house, for instance), which might be forgiveable as an element of the genre but do tend to grate. I would place this as the third best of the franchise, after Curse of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Created Woman: however, in a year where decent horror movies have been thin on the ground, it’s a welcome relief. Three and a half stars.

The Italian Job


Poster for The Italian Job

The Italian Job is a joyous heist comedy and a welcome counter to some of the divisive language finding its way into British social and political discourse. Britons from all walks of life—Cockneys, aristocrats, homosexuals, immigrants, professors and others—come together to pull off a clever theft and raise the proverbial two fingers to rivals on the Continent.

When his Italian partner in crime meets a surreal end on a mountain road courtesy of the Mafia, Charlie Coker (Michael Caine) enlists the help of Bridger (Noel Coward), a mastermind who doesn’t let a long-term prison sentence stop him from running a criminal empire, by appealing to his patriotism. Coker and a diverse variety of colorful associates plan and carry out a daring raid on a secure convoy carrying $4 million in gold, under cover of a traffic jam and an England v Italy football game. After a delightful set-piece involving red, white and blue Mini Coopers racing through, above and below the streets of Turin, the criminals seem to have gotten away with it—but have they?

Coker (Michael Caine) briefing his diverse band of criminals.Criminals from all walks of British life, in a planning meeting

The movie is technically SF, in that it contains a scene showing the way in which a computer might be compromised using a piece of malicious software on a magnetic tape—which, when introduced into the Turin traffic system, interferes with the cameras and allows our protagonists to conduct their raid. Happily this seems to be only a theoretical possibility at this point, but it’s an intriguing idea. The movie also draws liberally on the surreal comedy of recent television series like The Prisoner and The Avengers, which are often considered at least nominally science fiction.

The movie’s strengths lie in its pace, its spectacular driving set-pieces and its humour, which manages to be simultaneously proud and self-deprecating. Coker’s motley crew are variously dim-witted, incompetent, oversexed and lacking in foresight, and yet they manage to pull off a daring raid against the clearly much more organised Italian Mafia. The movie also makes satirical comments on the connections between crime and the Establishment in both Britain and Italy, and there’s a suggestion of Tati’s playful anti-technology message in the way in which the traffic system is brought to a standstill and joyous chaos erupts in its wake.

Mini Coopers driving through an Italian palazzo.The Minis! They're amazing! They go everywhere!

It's a little sad, though, that all this joy and unity comes at the expense of disliking our neighbours. Given that the current political situation suggests we need to join the Common Market, the jocular but nonetheless pointed sense of Britain isolated, fighting against Europe and, indeed, the world, could strike a worrying note. I also observe that Coker’s crew contains no one from the Celtic Fringe of this country (relatedly, women also seem to be excluded from the merry band, except as sex objects). However, to be fair, Coker’s raid is initially planned as a joint Italian-British enterprise, the money is coming in to Fiat from China, and there’s a long speech about the relevance of the Italian immigrant community in Britain. So perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

I suspect joining Europe is an inevitability for the United Kingdom. If so, it’s good that we’re coming in with a clear sense of common identity and national pride, showing everyone that we can laugh at ourselves and drive our tiny cars alongside the best of them.

Four stars.




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[September 10, 1969] Once Upon a Time in the West: Best Film of the 1960s?

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by Jason Sacks

1967’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was an unforgettable experience for anyone who saw the film in the theatres. Sergio Leone’s towering Western adventure was one of the most thrilling experiences imaginable, with an astonishing level of craft in cinematography, score, acting, and, of course, the brilliant use of the wide screen.

Under Leone’s towering craftsmanship, Good Bad Ugly was an operatic exploration of betrayal, greed, and anger while also playing with the classic motifs of the tradition of the Western film, with its explorations of frontier justice, the impacts of the Civil War, and – perhaps most famously – with the idea of the lonely man without a name as a key protagonist.

Yes, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been one of my all-time favorite films since I first saw it.

Sergio Leoone’s new film, Once Upon a Time in the West, is even better. This might just be my favorite film of the entire 1960s.

I was able to catch West on a quick second run at a local Seattle theatre after a limited release in 1968. And I’m happy to report that everything I loved about Good Bad Ugly is even better in West. The watch was an overwhelming experience for me, one which exists perfectly as both its own work of art and a smart postmodern take on the Western genre itself.

Let’s start with the acting here, because Ugly was the movie which really catapulted the old TV star Clint Eastwood into real stardom. West doesn’t feature Eastwood. But just as Ugly included luminary Western actors Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in roles which emphasized their strongest qualities, West does so with some even more well-known actors.

Perhaps you know the work of some of the leads in this film. It stars leading men like Henry Fonda and Jason Robards in key roles. Charles Bronson, star of so many action films these days, is a brilliant antihero in this film. Three actors appear in the opening sequence who you probably know from classic Westerns: Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock.

10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Once Upon A Time In The West

These actors all add a real heft and energy to the film and help to add to the themes Leone develops here.

But the most important character in the film isn’t one of the male characters. The most important character is a woman: Claudia Cardinale, playing Jill, is the character who truly evolves the most in the film and who drives the societal changes which are so much of what Leone and team are delivering.

Jill is a former New Orleans prostitute, now a wife and mother who moves to the small Arizona town of Sweetwater in the late 1800s. We first meet Jill as she steps off a crowded train (full of farm animals, Native Americans, and sundry other men and women in a characteristic Leone crowd shot). She looks around for her new family to meet her. But nobody is there for her. Jill steps into the station, and as she arranges her transportation, Leone’s camera majestically swoops over the top of the station house as Ennio Morricone’s score majestically swells and we get a widescreen view of a town in the middle of intensive construction, a frontier village in the middle of its boomtown days.

101 Movies: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

It’s an incredible moment, the equal of anything Leone has ever committed to screen – and yet, he almost tops that scene a moment later as Jill rides in a carriage through Monument Valley and right through a massive crowd scene of the railroad built through the sandy wilderness. Again the music swells, again Leone shows his intensive attention to detail, and again we get a moment which feels like a perfect realization of something we’ve only seen in old photographs.

As it turns out, Jill’s entire family has been massacred by a group of bad men (I won’t ruin any of the shock by telling you who led the massacre), so this single woman has to make her way alone in the west. As she gathers allies and enemies, and intersects with all the petty, self-centered men who cross her paths, Jill almost single-handedly gives the sense of leading the civilizing of the West.

Once Upon A Time In The West | Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

And it is in those themes that Once Upon a Time in the West becomes truly transcendent. As you can extrapolate from the title, this film is about more than mere fact and mere adventure. Oh sure, it has all that and more.

But what makes this film so special is that it is continuously in dialogue with the myth of the West. Sergio Leone is a huge fan of classic Westerns, and an attentive viewer will see visual and thematic references to classics such as Duel in the Sun, High Noon and Shane. All of that is intentional, but perhaps the most heartfelt references are to the films of John Ford.

Ford, of course, is the dean of Westerns, the director of classics such as The Searchers, My Darling Clementine and 1964’s fascinating revisionist Cheyenne Autumn. The French journals like Cahiers de Cinema venerate Ford as one of the great auteurs. Leone clearly agrees with that assessment; in fact, reports say that Leone demanded to film several segments of Once Upon a Time in Ford’s beloved Monument Valley.

Non-Bond: American spaghetti

Leone wants his film to resonate with both a physical and mythic vision of the West. Revenge is a great motivation for westerns so he gives us Bronson’s character, “Harmonica,” who has an especially vivid revenge story. He wants to give us true villains, as he does with the actor I won’t reveal. He wants to show shifting alliances, and small frontier towns, and brave heroes, and all the set pieces we want to see in a classic Western.

But Leone also wants to mourn the loss of that old West, the world of fights and revenge and pointless machismo. It’s no accident that one of the key characters of the film is Morton (played very well by Gabriele Ferzetti), a monumentally rich man whose body is crippled, who travels in a gilded rail car he can't really leave.  Morton is ambitious but limited. He can barely see past the horizons of his own vision.

As it turns out, Jill’s late husband bought Sweetwater to build a train station on their property, and as the complex characters of this film ally with and fight against Morton in turn, the film becomes a fascinating exploration of myth, of the ability to grow and transcend, of how one person can stand up to authority and yet then become an authority herself.

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Once Upon a Time in the West is ultimately about embracing the past and looking excitedly at the future, at how the myths of the past end and the hard realities of the future can begin. It’s about the hard work and the emotional and physical pain that go into civilizing a frontier, but Leone’s masterpiece is also about individual people who take on the feeling of myths. The final scene is so gorgeous and powerful, such a strikingly optimistic view of American progress, that I was brought to tears.

There is so much more to explore here, and I think one day someone can write a whole book about the themes and complexity of Leone’s tremendous film. I haven’t touched on the story arc of Cheyenne, the Robards character, nor on the majestic cinematography, or on the astonishing opening sequence.

But I think I’ve busted out the thesaurus enough to convince you to catch this film if you possibly can.

5 stars.

 




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Horror, Movies

[August 12, 1969] Cat’s Got Your Tongue: Sal-Inma (A Devilish Homicide) (1965) & Report From South Korea

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by Fiona Moore

Recently, on one of my travels to the Far East, I was invited to visit the Republic of Korea by Ewha Women’s University (the oldest women’s university in Korea, established in 1883 and therefore five years older than my own home institution, Royal Holloway College).

While there, I was able to take in a recent Korean horror movie, Sal-Inma (whose title is rendered into English variously as A Devilish Homicide and A Bloodthirsty Killer; I don’t know enough Korean to say which is the better translation).

Korean cinema is currently undergoing a strong revival, with numerous movies being produced in Korean every year and some even gaining international prominence. Sf, fantasy, and horror, which did not feature strongly in Korean popular culture before the war apart from Japanese imports, are also surging forwards, with a number of original SF novels being produced in Korean every year of this decade. However, the lack of works in translation means they are not really accessible to audiences outside the peninsula, and, similarly, the fact that the Korean film industry has made relatively few genre movies to date, means that a lot of this creativity is lost to Western audiences.

Poster for Sal-Inma (1965)
Poster for Sal-Inma (1965)

While low-budget, Sal-Inma really speaks to the creativity and abilities of Korean movie-makers and their grasp of the horror genre. The plot revolves around Lee Shi-Mak, a man with a successful business, a beautiful wife, Hye-Sook, and three children. Visiting an art exhibition, he’s astonished to see a picture of his deceased first wife, Ae-ja. Afterwards, the driver who is supposed to be taking him home, instead takes him to the house of the artist, Park Joon-Chul, who begs him to take the painting, before Ae-ja herself reappears and murders Joon-Chul. Ae-ja then collapses into inertia, seeming as if she were newly dead. Shi-Mak takes her to the family doctor, Dr Park (no relation—there are relatively few Korean surnames), who is also murdered by Ae-ja, who then disappears.

Returning home, Shi-Mak finds events continuing to unravel. Ae-ja reappears and kidnaps his older daughter. His mother is attacked by Ae-ja and subsequently starts to act like a cat; meowing, and grooming herself and her grandchildren with hands and tongue. His two younger children vanish mysteriously and a mysterious woman arrives without explanation. Ae-ja then murders Hye-Sook, and Shi-Mak, seeing that his mother’s reflection in the mirror is now that of a cat, kills her.

Ae-ja murders Joon-ChulAe-ja murders Joon-Chul

And this is where things take an even more interesting turn. Grieving and confused, Shi-Mak finds a document written by Joon-Chul, which subverts everything we have seen so far about the family, revealing, in flashback, strange and sinister things about the relationship between Ae-ja, Hye-Sook, Shi-Mak’s mother, Joon-Chul, and even Dr Park. With this information, the seemingly random events of the first two-thirds of the movie fall into place, as does the identity of the mysterious new arrival, and Shi-Mak is able to resolve the situation and lay the feline ghost to rest.

A good horror movie isn’t just about the events it portrays, though, and this one has plenty to say about contemporary Korean society, struggling with its past and the pace of modernisation. Japan plays an ambivalent background role in the story: it’s implied that Shi-Mak’s mother was widowed during the Japanese occupation; the events of the flashback take place while Shi-Mak is away in Tokyo on business, and Joon-Chul later flees to Tokyo in an attempt to escape supernatural retribution for his part in the events.

Putting it together, you can see the film as being about Korea’s need to come to terms with the occupation, and that Japan continues to be a source of trouble even as Koreans also have to work with the Japanese in order to succeed economically. In the end, the message seems to be that Koreans have to understand the traumas of the past, put them behind them, and move forward.

The old lady transforms into a catThe cat spirit manifests through Shi-Mak's mother

This ties in with the other major theme of the movie, the changes in the traditional Korean family structure since the occupation and in the postwar period. The Lee family seems very traditional on the face of it—man, wife, children and grandmother—and yet, we’re also shown that one of the reasons Shi-Mak’s mother turned against Ae-ja was her childlessness, and that Shi-Mak’s mother was herself engaged in a love affair without her son knowing. An insistence on traditional family structure thus only comes at the price of violence, and is a hypocritical position in any case. The end of the movie not only suggests that Shi-Mak’s family life will become far less traditional in the future, but also that this is approved of, even endorsed, by Buddhist religious figures.

The movie contains a few logic holes, but it also uses its low budget well. The effects suggesting that Shi-Mak’s mother has been possessed by a cat spirit could have been risible, but they’re sparingly and effectively used and are quite shocking in the end. Certainly if Korea is capable of this sort of genre movie-making, they’ll be a rival to the Japanese powerhouse in a few years. Four out of five stars.

The cat spirit revealed Cat spirit revelation

Korea itself is currently struggling to recover from a very difficult first half of the 20th century. Following the Japanese occupation and the devastating Korean War, the Republic has been governed by a succession of authoritarian regimes; the current leader, Park Chung-Hee, is a general who seized power following a student revolution in the early 1960s. However, despite widespread dislike of Park’s dictatorial style and his decision to bring Korea into the Vietnam War as a US ally, he is certainly bringing modernisation to the country through projects like developing transport infrastructure, and a policy of focusing on consumer exports.

And from a genre perspective, things are certainly looking up. Serialised SF by the likes of Han Nak-Won is winning over the young people, and a prestigious mystery fiction prize was recently won by a short story authored by Moon Yoon-Sung; a story which takes place in a 22nd century where only women survive. The country’s first official SF group, the Korean Sci-Fi Writers’ Club, was established by Seo Gwang-Woon just last year, and hope to publish their first collection soon. I would advise all fans of Asian SF to keep their eye on the peninsula for future developments.


The bustling capital of South Korea: Seoul




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[July 24, 1969] Bursting at the Seams (with Monsters) (Godzilla film: Destroy All Monsters)

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by Lorelei Marcus

I recently went to Japan and discovered a new obsession. I'm still a fan of the miniskirts and psychedelic patterns of Western fashion's new trends, but there's something ethereal and ancient about the Japanese woman's daily wear.

The kimono, a style of dress which has deliberately maintained a particular silhouette for centuries, commands an aura of respect and luxury. The woven and hand-painted silk is infinite in its multitude of designs and execution, and yet always recognizable in its construction as the ancient pattern of the kimono.

They are also quite an expensive garment, unless you know where to look. A friend of mine introduced me to her favorite antique store in a little town called Owari Asahi. There, stuffed in a cardboard box, was a treasure trove of previously worn kimono for a discounted price. Thus began my journey of collecting old and damaged kimonos from secondhand shops across Japan.

Occasionally, I would take breaks from my quest to enjoy other parts of Japan. Between two of my stops was a movie theater playing the newest kaijuu ("monster") movie, Destroy All Monsters. For old time's sake, and to give The Traveler a break from endless stalls of kimono accessories, we decided to give it a watch.


The Japanese title, 怪獣総進撃, better translates as "all-out monster attack"

The movie begins on Monster Island, a man-made reserve that contains and sees to the needs of all the world's monsters. I greatly appreciated the concept of Monster Island; the monsters in their movies typically don't set out to destroy humanity, instead by chance crashing through the world's most notable landmarks while trying to reach some other goal (eating, mating, what have you). They are also established as practically indestructible, so course the best solution is to create a home and care for the monsters such that they never want to leave. Brilliant!


"Morning, Frank!" "Morning, Bob."


Monster Island gets five networks!

But of course, something still goes wrong. The underground control center of the island is sabotaged, and the monsters are released to strategically attack many of the world's major capitals. After some investigation, it's discovered that the culprits are Kilaaks, an alien species from an asteroid who seek cohabitation on Earth. They threaten to continue controlling the monsters and sending them to wreak havoc until humanity yields to their demands.


Behold the Arc d'Collapse

Thankfully, the humans respond quickly and find the radio receivers the Kilaaks have hidden across the world. The Kilaaks are clever, though, and always seem to be one step ahead of the humans. They retain control of the monsters via remote bases established while humanity was busy hunting down the radio receivers.


The bad guys

Enter our hero, commander of the magical moon rocket – a miraculous vehicle that can maneuver well through both atmosphere and vacuum, and also never runs out of fuel. The captain and his crew fly to the moon, where one of the Kilaak bases is suspected to be. Sure enough, they land in a suspicious looking crater and their ship is engulfed in flame. The crew barely escapes in their moon buggy, which is conveniently both armed and effective against the Kilaaks' defenses. With a quick blast of the moon buggy laser cannon, the Kilaak base is destroyed, and the aliens' true forms are revealed: they're really creatures of pure metal which are dormant unless exposed to extremely high temperatures. With their environmental control destroyed, the aliens turned back into lumps of rocks and become harmless.


The Moon ship


The Moon crew


Pew pew!


The bad guys' true form

Despite having been thoroughly toasted, the crew's ship still works just fine, and they use it and their infinite fuel supply to fly back to Earth. Now only one Kilaak base remains, embedded in the west side of Mount Fuji, and this time the humans have help!


The magnificent nine!

Apparently scientists have managed to decipher and disable the monster control technology the Kilaaks used, and the kaijuu are now on humanity's side – not because the humans are controlling them, but because the monsters recognize the Kilaaks as their true enemy. A vanguard of monsters charge Mount Fuji, led by Godzilla, but the Kilaaks have another trick up their sleeve. Suddenly, King Gidira appears, summoned from outer space, and an epic monster versus monster battle ensues.

After five minutes of monster sound effect cacophony, with Minilla (Godzilla's adopted child) dancing in the corner until his final attack is charged, Gidira is defeated.

The monsters rush in and destroy the Kilaaks' base and revert the aliens back to their dormant forms. There's one last conflict with the remaining Kilaak ship (disguised as the "fire dragon monster") but it's quickly destroyed by our good old all-powerful moon rocket, and the day is saved.

The film ends with the monsters restored to Monster Island, coexisting happily with each other and the humans. Godzilla even waves to the control center helicopter as it flies away and the credits roll. How sweet.



"Bye, kids!"


"Bye, folks!"

I wouldn't say this is the best Toho movie I have seen, but overall it wasn't a bad experience. The miniature work was gorgeous, though as always, I would like to see more city destruction. The sheer variety of monsters was also a treat, with an appearance from every Toho monster released on film in the past decade. The monster suits did look a little odd, though. I suspect they intentionally designed them to be more cute than menacing since the monsters are meant to help the humans in the end, but the result is rather silly. The acting is decent with a surprisingly international cast, including the most British man I've ever seen.


The carnage we pay to see


The Honourable Lord Sir Nigel Colin Billingsworth-Londonthames

I dug the Ultra Q-style uniforms and the When Worlds Collide/Forbidden Planet-style effects and palette (indeed, the film feels more 1950s than '60s…except when it feels decidedly pulp era!)

The only failing point of the movie is the writing. There are too many "of course that's the solution" moments without any set up. Events just sort of happen without any kind of arc to lead them along. Still, for a ride through 1950s pulp movie nostalgia with monsters added for spice, it wasn't too bad. I suspect it also would have helped had I seen the Toho movies from 1965-1968 (and Atragon, from 1963), which included the debut of several monsters I was hitherto unfamiliar with. I did recognize (and cheer on) Godzilla, Anguirus, Rodan (pronounced Radon), and especially Mosura, but Gorgosaurus, Manda, Kumonga, Gidira, and Minilla were new to me.

Anyway, three stars. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some kimono to learn how to wear!




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[July 14, 1969] Odyssey On Two Wheels (Easy Rider)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

I've talked about my inexplicable interest in movies about motorcycle gangs a couple of times before.  Naturally, when I heard about a new biker film that's drawing a lot of attention, I had to take a look.

The fact that it won an award at the prestigious Cannes film festival gave me a hint that this wasn't going to be the usual trashy B movie about guys on choppers getting into fights.

Let's meet our two main characters.  I hesitate to call them heroes, because the first thing we see them do is buy cocaine in Mexico, then sell it to a rich guy in a limousine.  They hide the cash in a plastic tube inside the gas tank of one of the motorcycles.

Peter Fonda, who produced and co-wrote the film, plays Wyatt, often known as Captain America.  He usually plays it cool, not saying much, keeping a calm demeanor most of the time.

Dennis Hopper, who directed and co-wrote the movie, plays Billy.  He's much more emotional, often giggling and playing the clown, sometimes nervous and jumpy.

Once these two have their grub stake, they head out on a journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.  Along the way they meet all kinds of people. 

The first encounter is with a friendly rancher and his family.  So far, everything seems just fine.  You can almost forget that these two are drug dealers.

After riding through some really gorgeous scenery in the American West, often accompanied by groovy rock music, they pick up a hitchhiker.  He's on his way to a hippie commune in the desert.

The place is full of young adults who have dropped out of society.  There are also lots of little kids.  To add to the chaos, there's also a troupe of mimes and other performers.

We see folks sow seeds of grain in what looks like bare ground.  Billy predicts that the commune is doomed to fail, while Wyatt is more optimistic.  After skinny dipping with a couple of young women, they move on.

In some little town they join a parade in progress, just for fun.  That gets them in trouble with the cops.  Thrown in jail for parading without a license, they meet the film's most memorable character.

Jack Nicholson plays the town lawyer, who's in the drunk tank.  You may remember him as the masochistic dental patient in The Little Shop Of Horrors.  He was hilarious in that low budget comedy, and he's as much of a hoot in this role.  I predict he'll continue to steal every film in which he appears as a fine comic actor.

After Nicholson gets the two bikers out of jail, he joins them on their trip to the Big Easy.  It seems he's heard about a fancy bordello in New Orleans and would like to visit the place.  Along the way they try to get a bite to eat at a little diner in some other small town.

The young women present admire them.  They dare each other to ask them for a ride on their bikes.

The men in the diner aren't so friendly.  They openly insult the trio.  Wisely, the three quickly head out the door, refusing to take the women along.  Despite their caution, things don't work out well.  Let's just say that Nicholson won't make it to New Orleans.

Wyatt and Billy wind up at the brothel, where they engage the services of two prostitutes.  As far as I can tell, they don't actually have sex with them.  Instead, they go outside to join the Mardi Gras celebration, then head out to the famous above ground cemetery of the Big Easy.

Among the tombs, the four share a dose of LSD Wyatt picked up from the hitchhiker.  This leads to our mandatory acid trip sequence, making use of all kinds of special effects in an attempt to portray the psychedelic experience.

Those of you who are like me, and rush out to see movies about today's longhaired, drug-using nonconformists (hipsploitation?), may be reminded of The Trip from a couple of years ago.  That one also starred Fonda and Hopper, and has a screenplay credited to Nicholson.  Like Easy Rider, The Trip uses visual distortion to convey the experience of dropping acid.  (Taking LSD, for you squares.)

The film ends in a melodramatic fashion.  Suffice to say that trouble arrives in the form of two guys in a pickup truck.

I said that Fonda and Hopper wrote the film, along with Terry Southern (best known for his work on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) but I doubt there was much of a script at all.  Much of the action and dialogue seems improvised.  The mood varies, seemingly at random, from peaceful to comic to tragic.

There's not a lot of plot.  Much of the running time consists of the characters riding on their motorcycles with loud music on the soundtrack.  (In particular, the rousing number Born to Be Wild is destined to be played at full volume by lots of people on fast bikes or in fast cars.)

The cinematography, whether it be of desert wilderness, small towns, or the Big Easy, is excellent.  Some may consider Easy Rider to be shapeless, but I found it to be an intriguing portrait of the counterculture in opposition to the mainstream of society.  (See the recent article by my esteemed colleague Kris Vyas-Myall for a more profound discussion of the theme.)

Head out on the highway.

Five stars.




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[June 18, 1969] Sleazy Riders (The Sidehackers and Satan's Sadists)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

I've spoken before about my inexplicable interest in cheap, trashy movies about motorcycle gangs.  Two more films in this genre arrived this month.  Hop on the back of my chopper and let's take a ride into the wild world of weirdos on wheels.

The Sidehackers

The opening credits are odd.  The image is reduced to a tiny part of the screen, surrounded by black.


So is it The Sidehackers or The Side Hackers?

My sources in the movie biz tell me that this thing was originally called Five the Hard Way, which is also the name of the song we hear during the credits.  My guess is that they had to chop up the opening to squeeze in the new title.

Anyway, we soon meet a pair of young lovers as they frolic in the woods and fields.  Boy pushing girl in a swing, both of them running through flowers in slow motion, etc.  Corny stuff.


Diane McBain as Rita.  She was in The Mini-skirt Mob, too.


Ross Hagen as Rommell.  He was in The Hellcats AND The Mini-Skirt Mob!

We meet Rommell's married buddy, who tells him all about the wonders of matrimonial bliss.  This romantic domestic drama is interrupted by the arrival of a guy who makes a living by performing stunts on a motorcycle.  (We never actually see this.) He's accompanied by his girlfriend and his gang.


Claire Polan as Paisley and Michael Pataki as J. C.

Fans of Star Trek may recognize Pataki. (Hint: It should be hauled away AS garbage!)

Then we get some sidehacking.  Oh, you don't what that is?  Well, it's a sort of motorcycle racing in which a guy is hanging off the side of the bike on something like an open metal cage.  Don't worry, this has nothing at all to do with the plot, and we'll never see it again.


Sidehacking!

The plot gets going when the sadistic J. C. beats up Paisley, who then tries to seduce Rommell.  He's a one-woman kind of guy, so he rebuffs her.  In retaliation, she tears her clothes and tells J. C. that Rommell attacked her.

This sudden change in mood from romance and racing to violence is jarring.  Believe me, it gets worse.

J. C. and his goons beat Rommell savagely.  Much more shocking, they rape and kill Rita.  After some time goes by, Rommell assembles a crew and sets out for revenge.  Don't expect a happy ending.

Fans of action movies will be disappointed by how the film slows down to a crawl until we get to the final battle.  Pataki chews the scenery as the psychotic J. C., and everybody else is pretty bland.  (One of Rommell's army — that's probably why he's named for an infamous Nazi general, even though he's supposed to be, more or less, the good guy — is named Crapout.  He's our wildly inappropriate comedy relief, has a thick Southern accent, and is really annoying.)

One star for an odd combination of boredom and nastiness.  Cut out the most disturbing scenes and you might have something worth mocking with some buddies.

Satan's Sadists

This one jumps right into the vile stuff.  Before the opening credits, a motorcycle gang comes across a man and woman.  They rape the woman, then kill both of them.  This is just a hint of what's to follow.


The opening credits feature some interesting abstract animation, and may be the best thing in the film.

A married couple picks up a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere.  He just got out of the Marine Corps after serving in Vietnam.  They wind up at a little restaurant/gas station in the desert.


From left to right, the waitress who is our heroine; the ex-Marine who is our hero; and the married couple.  Not shown is the owner of the place.

The motorcycle gang shows up and immediately starts making trouble.  The leader is a guy named Anchor.  His girlfriend (whom he abuses as much as J. C. did Paisley) is Gina. 

The other hoodlums each have some kind of gimmick.  One wears a hearing aid, one takes LSD all the time, one has only one eye, one is big and strong, and one is an Indian.  (The last is nicknamed Firewater, and is probably the least evil of the gang.  Naturally, he's played by a non-Indian, John "Bud" Cardos, a pretty well-known stuntman of Greek ancestry.)


Russ Tamblyn as Anchor.  You may remember him from lots of movies, such as West Side Story and The Haunting.

[Are you sure that's not Arte Johnson? He looks 'very interesting'. (Ed.)]


Regina Carrol as Gina.  She's married to Al Adamson, the director.  He also recently gave us Blood of Dracula's Castle.

The gang takes everybody prisoner.  All but two of them haul the married couple and the guy who owns the diner outside.  They rape the woman then kill all three of them.

Inside the place, the ex-Marine manages to overpower the two gang members left to guard them, killing both.  He and the waitress escape via dune buggy, but the vehicle soon breaks down.  It all leads up to a battle in the desert.

(As if this weren't horrible enough, the big chase scene is interrupted when the gang finds three young women on a geology field trip.  Of course, they torment, rape, and kill them.  This is when Firewater objects to the murders, proving that he's still got a tiny bit of decency hidden deep inside.  His disagreement with Anchor leads to a big fight scene, made more effective by the experience of stuntman Cardos.)

Boy, this is nasty stuff.  It definitely delivers all the shocks it promises, unlike the occasionally tepid The Sidehackers.  It's a lot more coherent than Blood of Dracula's Castle, or Blood of Ghastly Horror, another offering from Al Adamson.  For those reasons, I have to give it two stars.

After this double feature, it's time to take a long, hot shower.  Let's hope future motorcycle movies won't be quite so slimy.


Coming soon!  As the poster indicates, it's already been shown at the famous Cannes film festival.  Let's hope it's better than these two films.




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[May 24, 1969] Cinemascope: The [NOUN] of [PROPER NAME]’s [NOUN]: Blood of Dracula's Castle and Nightmare in Wax

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by Fiona Moore

It’s exam time here at Royal Holloway College, and there’s nothing better than a bad movie to burn off the stress whether you’re studying or marking. As a break from examining sociology papers, I’ve taken in a double bill of new American movies to check out the state of the low-budget horror world in, well, the States.

Poster for Blood of Dracula's Castle
Poster for Blood of Dracula's Castle

A young couple (Gene O’Shane and Barbara Bishop) inherit a castle somewhere in Arizona (yes, really). Upon arrival, they find out that the tenants are Dracula (Alexander D’Arcy), his wife (Paula Raymond), his pagan priest butler (John Carradine and probably the best thing in the movie), a shambling moronic manservant named, for some reason, Mango (Ray Young), and a werewolf (Robert Dix). At this point the viewer should be wondering if this is, in fact, a spoof along the lines of The Addams Family or Carry on Screaming, but no, apparently it’s being done straight. It continues on in the same grab-bag-of-horror-cliches vein (pun intended), echoing the Mad Libs feel of the title, up to an ending which I think is a cargo-cult version of the climax of Witchfinder General.

A still from Blood of Dracula's Castle depicting four people chatting in the hall of a castle.
The Draculas: they're just regular folks.

Which is a pity, because I think there could be genuine satirical potential in a modern-day Dracula. He and his wife are living an affluent and luxurious Southwestern socialite lifestyle; rather than biting their victims to death, they have a cellar full of young women whose blood they periodically extract and drink from wine-glasses. It’s not too far a stretch to view this as a metaphor for the movie world, where the old and established prey on the young and naïve, and get away with it thanks to a permissive social environment. Their relationship with the werewolf, Johnny, is also one that could have been more interestingly explored, as they use him to do their dirty work so as to maintain plausible deniability. But this isn’t that movie.

I never like to be totally negative about a film, so I will say that the landscape is beautiful and is shot to its best advantage. The castle scenes were filmed at the real-life Shea’s Castle, a 1920s folly in the California (not Arizona) desert, and I’d like to see more of it. The opening features a groovy theme tune that really ought to make it into the charts.

A still from Blood of Dracula's Castle depicting a human sacrifice ritual.
There's also a human sacrifice scene, because you have to have one of those for some reason.

However, the acting is wooden, the script appears to be a first draft, there are a lot of time-wasting filler sequences and inexplicable character actions. For instance, the girls that the Draculas have chained up in the cellar apparently just hang there, not bothering to attempt escape or even conversation. A human sacrifice to the god (sic) Luna takes place right in front of our protagonists and neither of them do anything to stop it or even raise an objection. The horror is surprisingly chaste and bloodless (particularly given the movie’s title) so there isn’t even the benefit of titillation or a good cathartic wallow in gore. The opening section is a long and seemingly pointless advertisement for an aquatic theme park named Marineland.

One star, mostly for the castle.

Poster for Nightmare in Wax
Poster for Nightmare in Wax

Vincent Renard (Cameron Mitchell), a brilliant Hollywood makeup artist and lover of the beautiful actress Marie Morgan (Anne Helm), is disfigured when the studio head Max Block (Berry Kroeger), who has designs on Marie himself, throws a glass of wine at Renard just as the latter lights a cigarette. Some time later, Vincent is working at a Hollywood-themed wax museum; Marie’s boyfriends seem to have a habit of disappearing, and tribute mannequins of them winding up in Vincent’s wax museum. You can see where this is going, particularly as one can assume his revenge plan for Max is a bit more complicated than simple murder, though there’s a twist at the end which could have been better handled.

A still from Nightmare in Wax depicting a man working on a wax head.
How to get a head in Hollywood.

The performances are at least better than in Blood of Dracula’s Castle, with two weary policemen (Scott Brady and Johnny Cardos) trying their best to investigate the goings-on and Victoria Carroll providing some humour as Theresa, a mercenary blonde trying to get onto Max’s casting couch. There’s some knowing humour about Hollywood and its incestuous, venal culture, and, once again, there’s a groovy psychedelic dance number, albeit in the middle of the movie rather than the start.

We get a little more motivation for the main character than in the previous movie, through the interesting, if not terribly original, idea which comes in towards the end of the story, that Vincent is convinced everyone else is laughing at him and yet we also see that the other characters, in fact, respect his genius as an artist even if they think he’s a bit weird as a person. His turn towards misogyny is also credibly introduced, as his experiences with Hollywood cause him to believe that all women are simply interested in trading sex for career advancement.

A still from Nightmare in Wax depicting Vincent's laboratory.
I hope I wasn't the only one who shouted "Frying tonight!" at the sight of the boiling vat of wax.

Again, though, it’s all a bit tedious and bloodless, and the cliché of the bitter, scarred artist has been done, well, to death. This is another movie where the script could definitely have done with another draft: plot threads are left hanging, and the motivations of secondary characters left unexplained. The idea that Vincent is deeply insecure really ought to have been brought into the story earlier than it is. A movie director who is something of a Hitchcock figure, but young and handsome, is introduced with great fanfare, leading one to assume that he will be Marie’s new love interest and the one who saves her from Vincent’s twisted affections, but then he vanishes from the story with no explanation.

Two stars.

One conclusion I’m drawing from this slate of films is that the traditional horror genre is, for the moment at least, played out. Vampires, werewolves, twisted scarred genisues and imperiled ingenues don’t have much to offer these days. The future, on both sides of the Atlantic, is clearly with the folk horror movement.




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