Federico Fellini is unquestionably one of the most beloved filmmakers in the so-called international arthouse circuit. Despite shooting Italian productions, working well outside the Hollywood system, Fellini has already garnered a back-breaking eight Oscar nominations. I won't be surprised if his latest, Fellini Satyricon (which henceforth I'll simply refer to as Satyricon), nabs him another nomination, despite its immense strangeness. United Artists, responsible for distributing Satyricon here in the States, have been shrewd in their marketing, seemingly aiming at the overlap between those who frequent arthouse theaters (people like me) and those who watch B-movies at the drive-in (also people like me).
Fellini Satyricon
Normally, when writing about a film, or really any narrative, I try to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot; however, in the case of Satyricon, I don't think this would be feasible or desirable. This film is the latest effort from Fellini as both a fantasist and a storyteller who, at least since La Dolce Vita a decade ago, has clearly become disillusioned with traditional narrative. Satyricon is so loose in plot and yet so rich in imagery that to go over the plot would be doing it a disservice. I can at least give you the setup, though.
When reading my morning paper, it can feel like the whole world is determined to blow itself up.
Vietnamese peace talks are going nowhere, with American “help” possibly reaching its nadir when a US helicopter killed friendly South Vietnamese forces by mistake. Israel is once again fighting its Arab neighbours with both Communists and Capitalist countries pouring in military aid to their favoured sides. There is not even goodwill within their respective camps, with the Soviets and Communist China continuing to sabre rattle over the border. And this doesn’t even count the civil wars going on in places like Rhodesia.
Closer to home, British troops in Northern Ireland’s attempts to keep the peace so far seem to be counter-productive. Whilst we are also learning more of the atrocities committed by British troops during the so-called “Malayan Emergency” from the official enquiry.
With all this violence going on, it makes you wonder if there could be another way. Well Peter Watkins has come up with one, albeit not necessarily the most pleasant option:
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is an hour-long film in which four Edgar Allan Poe stories are recited by Vincent Price. Originally made as a television play (and in a way which suggests it was based on a theatrical production, albeit with the addition of some new visual effects), it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas segment, and I was recently asked to view it as a possible acquisition as a teaching tool by my university’s English Literature department.
The Cask of Amontillado
The programme is split into four segments, in each of which Price recites a different Poe short story. Fairly predictably, these are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Each segment is performed with Price in character as the narrator of each story, with appropriate costuming and sets. Although Price does show a decent range in playing different characters, they’re all very much within Price’s repertoire as an actor, so, although none of the performances are bad, there are no real surprises to be had here.
The Sphinx
I felt the best segment was “The Cask of Amontillado”. Price really seems to relish the role of Montressor and plays him with a wicked twinkle in his eye, surrounded by luxurious draperies and furniture and a banquet-table of food. The weakest for me was “The Sphinx,” which struggled to hold my attention, though it did have an effective use of special effects when we briefly see a skull overlaid over Price’s face at a crucial moment.
The Pit and the Pendulum
By contrast, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was a good enough dramatization of an exciting story, but the problem was that the producer seemed to feel it needed jazzing up with effects shots of Price falling into the pit, Price helpless before the pendulum, Price faced with colour separation overlay ("chroma-key" to yanks) flames, and so forth. The rats were far too cute, with inquisitive little faces and glossy fur, for me to find them horrific.
Finally, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a good choice as the opening story, told simply with the set a bare garret, with Price steadily ramping up the hysteria as the narrator follows his path into murder and madness.
The Tell-Tale Heart
One great benefit I can see from this production is a chance to show audiences who may just know Poe from the cinematic productions loosely based on his work, just how skilled a horror writer Poe was in real life. The issue with something like “The Pit and the Pendulum” is that one can’t really get an entire 90-minute film out of it without adding a lot of material, which, while it can work as a movie, means you lose the terrifying economy of the original story (although if anyone wants to adapt “The Cask of Amontillado”, I think one could spend at least 90 minutes exploring the buildup of resentment in the two characters’ relationships that led up to the final murder). For this reason, I’m recommending that the English Literature department acquires a copy, and would also say that, if it turns up on TV in your region, it’s worth a watch.
3 out of 5 stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
There's A Signpost Up Ahead . . .
Two films I caught recently reminded me of Rod Serling's late, lamented television series Twilight Zone. Let's take a look.
The Moebius Flip
Less than half an hour long, this skiing film is the sort of thing that might be shown at a college campus, before the main feature in a movie theater, or to fill up time on television in the wee hours of the morning. The brief running time isn't the only thing that reminds me of Serling's creation.
We begin with scenes of people skiing, edited in a jumpy way. Jazz, rock, and folk music fill up the soundtrack. The skiers also fool around in the snow, eat some fruit, and so forth.
Suddenly, we see a news announcer. He tells us that scientists have determined that every subatomic particle in the universe has reversed polarity. I'm not sure what that means, but let's see what happens.
Somehow, this is supposed to change the way people perceive things. That means the film turns into a negative of itself.
This goes on for a while, then the movie goes back to normal. Once in a while, it turns back into a negative. I guess that's a Moebius Flip. Along with more skiing, we get folks at an amusement park and eating in a restaurant. This part of the film features some pretty impressive and scary scenes of dangerous winter sports. People ski over huge crevasses, wind up on top of a tower of snow, and hang from cliffs.
Is it worth twenty-odd minutes of your time? Well, if you like psychedelic images or are a big fan of skiing, it could be. The science fiction premise is just an excuse to reverse the colors of the film, and there's no real plot at all. I've never been on a pair of skis, so I can only appreciate the athleticism on display here as an outsider.
Two stars.
Sole Survivor
This is a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS stations in the USA earlier this month. It begins with five men in World War Two uniforms standing around a wrecked American bomber of the time. They seem to be in pretty good shape, given that they're in a desert wasteland. Things get weird when we find out they've been waiting to be rescued for seventeen years.
The crew of the Home Run.
It quickly becomes clear that they are ghosts, waiting for their bodies to be found so they can stop haunting the wreck.
I should note here that the premise is inspired by the case of the Lady Be Good, a bomber that crashed in the Libyan desert in 1943 and was not discovered until 1958.
The real wreck.
Fans of Twilight Zone will remember the episode King Nine Will Not Return, which was also inspired by the fate of the Lady Be Good. That tale goes in a different direction, however.
Two men in an airplane discover the wreck. (By the way, the fact that the ghosts have been waiting for seventeen years means that the movie takes place in 1960 or so. There's no other indication that it's set a decade ago.)
The discoverers, who look more 1970 to me.
This leads to an official investigation by the United States Army. (Remember that the Air Force was part of the Army, and not a separate branch of the service, until a few years after World War Two.) Two officers are in charge of the mission.
William Shatner, fresh from Star Trek, as Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke and Vince Edwards, best known as Ben Casey, as Major Michael Devlin.
They pay a visit to the sole survivor of the Home Run. This fellow parachuted out of the plane and landed in the Mediterranean Sea, managing to make it out alive to continue his military career. (More details of what happened later.)
Brigadier General Russell Hamner, as played by Richard Basehart, recently the star of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Hamner agrees to accompany the two officers to the North African desert. He claims that all of the crew of the Home Run bailed out into the ocean, so the plane must have continued without them for several hundred miles before it crashed. Unlikely, but possible. Flashbacks tell us the real story.
Hamner as the navigator of the Home Run during the war.
The bomber was damaged in an attack by the enemy. The captain ordered Hamner to plot a course back to base, but he panicked and bailed out against orders. Without a navigator, the crew went off course and the plane crashed.
Tension builds as Devlin casts doubt on Hamner's story, and Gronke tells him not to make waves, lest he ruin his career. Both officers have their own concerns about their pasts, adding depth of character. Without giving too much away, let's just say that the truth comes out because of a harmonica, a rubber raft, and Hamner's guilty conscience. There's a powerful and poignant conclusion.
The last ghost faces an eternity playing baseball alone.
This is quite a good movie, particularly for one made for TV. I like the fact that the ghosts appear as ordinary men, rather than being transparent or something. The actors all do a good job. You'll never hear the song Take Me Out To The Ball Game again without having an eerie feeling.
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Over the past several years, AIP has adapted stories by H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen—or at least the drive-in. The results have been mixed, but they could certainly be much worse. The first and still the best of these was The Haunted Palace (adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) back in '63, directed by Roger Corman, with a script by the late Charles Beaumont, and starring an especially tormented Vincent Price. It was a very fine picture. Now we have the latest entry in this "series," The Dunwich Horror, taken from the Lovecraft story of the same name, although it's a pretty loose adaptation.
The Dunwich Horror
One warning I want to give about this movie, one which has nothing to do with sex or violence, is that, aside from being generally a pretty strange film, there are several scenes featuring flashing lights, or a color filter changing rapidly to give one the impression of a strobing light. Some people (thankfully not many) are susceptible to epileptic fits if subjected to such stimuli.
Now, as for the film itself, once we get past what I was surprised to find is an animated (as in a cartoon) opening credits sequence, we start with what seems to be a flashback of a woman giving birth, surrounded by two elderly sisters and an old man. We then flash forward to Miskatonic University, that college of the occult and Lovecraft's making, in Arkham. Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) is a student who, in the college's library, meets a good-looking but unusual young man named Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who is terribly interested in the Necronomicon. I'm sure his interest in the accursed book and his strange deadpan way of talking are perfectly innocuous. A certain professor at Miskatonic, Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), gets a bit of a hunch that Wilbur is up to no good, but for now does nothing about it.
The Necronomicon, kept in a cozy glass case.
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's most celebrated stories, but it's also one of his trickiest. As with "the Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft wrote "The Dunwich Horror" as if it were a report or an essay, a work of journalism or academia, rather than a fiction narrative. There's no protagonist, properly speaking, although Wilbur is certainly the story's nucleus. This remains sort of the case with the film, although Nancy and Armitage now serve as our eyes and ears, or rather as normal people in what becomes an extraordinary situation. However, it's not Sandra Dee or Ed Begley who caught my attention, but Dean Stockwell as Wilbur, who gives almost what could be considered a star-making role (to my knowledge his most high-profile roles up to now were film adaptations of Sons and Lovers and Long Day's Journey into Night), if not for the movie that surrounds him. Unlike his short story counterpart Wilbur here is not physically deformed, but instead talks in a strangely deadened tone, as if human emotions are foreign to him. Stockwell as Wilbur manages to be uncanny simply through how he talks and acts, which is a major point of praise.
Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley and Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner.
Director Daniel Haller and his team of screenwriters have opted to streamline Lovecraft's story while giving it a sort of romance plot, as well as a dose of sex and violence. Sex and Lovecraft have always been uneasy bedfellows, even in something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which explicitly involves sex in its plot. Wilbur is one of two twins, the other having supposedly died in childbirth, with the father being unknown, and his mother having been kept in an asylum for the past two decades. Wilbur lives with his grandfather, Old Man Whateley (Sam Jaffe, who some may recognize as that one scientist in the now-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still), who seems convinced his grandson is also up to no good, but arbitrarily (the film does nothing to explain this) does nothing about Wilbur being a scoundrel. For his part, Wilbur sees Nancy as a pretty fine girl—for a dark ritual, that is. The idea is that if he can steal the Necronomicon and impregnate Nancy (the implication, via a mind-bending scene, is that he rapes her), he can bring one of "the Old Ones" into the human world.
Sam Jaffe as Old Man Whateley and Ed Begley as Professor Henry Armitage.
As this point the plot splits in two, with one half focusing on Wilbur and Nancy's "romance" while the other sees Armitage tracking down the mystery of Wilbur's birth, since it becomes apparent the young man and the Necronomicon are somehow connected. One of the strangest (sorry, "far-out") scenes in the whole movie is when Armitage goes to see Wilbur's mother (Joanne Moore Jordan), who apparently had lost her mind many years ago upon giving birth to Wilbur and his dead twin. When it comes to this movie, there are two types of strange: that of the unnerving sort, and that of the cheesy sort. There are parts (sometimes moments within a single scene) of this movie that do a good job of spooking the audience, and others where it's rather silly. With that said, the nightmarish effect of Jordan's performance combined with the changing color tints in this scene make it one of the most effective. This is a movie that generally shines brightest when it focuses on Stockwell's performance and/or the Gothic cliches (including a creepy old house) that clearly also influenced Lovecraft's writing. Maybe it's because they didn't have the budget for it, but the lack of an on-screen monster for the vast majority of the film's runtime also works in its favor.
Joanne Moore Jordan as Wilbur's mother, who's spent the past two decades as a mental patient.
When Old Man Whateley finally decides to take action, Wilbur kills him for his troubles, along with imprisoning one of Nancy's friends and turning her into some kind of abomination. Meanwhile Wilbur gives his grandfather a heathen burial and in so doing provokes the wrath of the Dunwich townspeople, who never liked the Whateleys anyway. It's revealed, or rather speculated, that Wilbur's twin may not have died after all, but instead gone to the realm of the Old Ones while Wilbur got stuck on Earth as a human. Armitage and the townsfolk succeed in stopping Wilbur from completing his ritual with the unconscious Nancy, Armitage being well-versed enough in the Necronomicon to use the book against Wilbur, killing him with a blast of lightning. So the last of the Whateley men is dead. Unfortunately, the final shot, eerily showing a fetus growing inside Nancy (which is odd, because she's probably only been pregnant a day or two), implying an Old One may be born after all.
Dean Stockwell at his most devilish.
Lovecraft purists will surely be much disappointed with this movie, and even as someone who is not exactly a Lovecraft fan, I have to admit it's by no means perfect. Even at 90 minutes it feels a bit overlong, and it tries desperately to contort one of Lovecraft's more unconventional stories into having a three-act structure. I also get the impression that the addition of blood and breasts was to appease those (people my age and younger) who are suckers for AIP schlock. Not too long ago we had Roger Corman's so-called Poe cycle, which for the most part did Edgar Allan Poe's (and in one case Lovecraft's) fiction justice on modest budgets. I would say The Dunwich Horror is on par with one of the lesser of Corman's Poe movies.
A high three stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, also known as Doppelgänger in England, is a British science fiction film directed by Robert Parrish and produced by marionette/miniature wizards Gerry and Sylvia Anderson (Stingray, Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5, Supercar, etc.).
As a movie, it is both visually appealing and tonally complex, with layered characterizations from its cast. The film gets off to a decent start, featuring beautifully realized sets and model effects, as well as intriguing characters with backstories I wanted to know more about. It sets up an epic quest that seems exciting and full of potential. Sadly, by the end of the film, everything (and I do mean everything) falls apart, leaving me feeling cheated.
The Beginning: A Futuristic Start
The movie opens quietly at Eurosec headquarters (the European Space Exploration Council). Two men enter a guarded, futuristic, secure complex to review some documents. To access the document room, an X-ray scan is performed, displaying the men’s bones in motion and detecting a metal pen that triggers an alarm. From the start, the film showcases its advanced technology.
The Exciting Mission
The discovery of the century is at hand: scientists have determined that on the far side of the Sun lies another planet, identical in size to Earth (stop me if you've heard this one before.) Jason Webb, the Eurosec director (played by Patrick Wymark), collaborates with other nations to finance a manned mission to this planet. American astronaut Colonel Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes—"David Vincent" from The Invaders) is selected for the mission, accompanied by astrophysicist Dr. John Kane (Ian Hendry).
The Beautiful People
Ross arrives at Eurosec with his beautiful but emotionally detached wife, Sharon (played by Lynn Loring). It quickly becomes evident that Glenn and Sharon’s marriage is in serious trouble, and they are barely holding it together as a couple. The other prominent female character, Lisa Hartmann (Loni von Friedl), is a strikingly beautiful woman whose role in the plot is never clearly defined, making her presence feel more ornamental than essential to the story.
The Creative Technology
As the mission preparation begins, the audience is treated to exquisitely designed rocket ships and futuristic sets. Even the cars and homes the characters live in reflect a near-future aesthetic. This is where the movie truly excels—transporting viewers from the mundane to a world of speculative technology. While the spaceships are clearly models, the craftsmanship is exceptional, maintaining credulity far better than the poorly constructed props often seen in other films of our era. Like some of the films from the Orient, for example.
The Tragic and Confusing Journey
The journey to the new planet is uneventful, filled with slow, ponderous shots of the spacecraft moving through space. Soon, Ross and Kane arrive at their destination and face the critical decision: should they land on the planet? Ross determines that the Earth-like planet has a breathable atmosphere and abundant plant life but sees no signs of intelligent inhabitants. They choose to land. Detaching their landing module from their main ship, they then end up crash landing on the new planet. As they complete their fiery collision with the new world, Ross is thrown clear of the ship. Despite his injuries, he manages to pull Kane, who is gravely wounded, from the burning ship before it explodes.
It is nighttime where they impact, and a strange light appears in the sky, scanning the crash site. A humanoid figure descends from an aircraft and Ross, terrified, attempts to fight it. To his shock, the figure turns out to be human, and subdues Ross.
The Ridiculous Truth
The next scene reveals Ross and Kane in Eurosec’s infirmary, under the watchful eye of a furious Jason Webb. As Ross recovers, he is interrogated by Webb and other Eurosec staff, including Lisa Hartmann, as they demand to know why he turned around and returned to Earth. Ross adamantly insists that they had not turned back and instead had landed on the new planet.
Alone due to Kane’s critical condition, Ross becomes increasingly frustrated. Upon returning home, he argues with Sharon, accusing her of reversing the layout of their furniture and even noticing that labels on her perfume bottles are printed backward. This fight leads to the collapse of their marriage but provideds Ross with a startling revelation: he is not on Earth but on the other planet, a mirror version of his world.
The Overblown Ending
Ross and the Eurosec team realize the truth: he is trapped on a doppelgänger Earth, where everything is reversed. Plans are made to send Ross back to his own Earth. He boards the alien lander (the Doppelgänger) and docks with the main spacecraft still in orbit. However, due to the mirrored nature of the ship, a systems failure occurs, causing the craft to lose power. Unable to escape, the ship and lander plummet to the surface, crash-landing directly on Eurosec and destroying the entire base in a massive explosion.
The film ends with a haunting scene: an elderly Jason Webb, crippled and defeated, reflecting on the catastrophic loss. Alone in a wheelchair, he gazes at his reflection in a mirrored window before tragically crashing through it, marking his demise.
Final Thoughts
This movie started so well, only to end so poorly. It had so much going for it: great looking sets and technology, attractive people (albeit lacking any compelling backstory), and an interesting adventure for them to embark on. For the counter-Earth to turn out to be a mirror copy just felt lazy. So many simple things had to be ignored for the story to go as long as it did. The astronauts not finding any life from orbit was the dumbest thing of all…until that was followed up by the two explosive crashes by a trained astronaut. The fact that everyone died made the story a waste of time and a missed opportunity. A real shame. I give this Doppelänger two of five stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
With so little decent science fiction and fantasy film available this year, I’m back at the second-run cinemas again, catching up on movies I missed the first time round. Bedazzled is a modern take on the legend of Faust in the inimitable style of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, accompanied by Eleanor Bron as an up-to-date Gretchen who doesn’t sit around pining at the spinning wheel. It’s got a couple of nice psychological character studies at its heart and a few wry things to say about human nature, though coming to an optimistic conclusion on the subject.
Original movie poster for "Bedazzled"
Moore plays Stanley Moon, working as a cook in a Wimpy Bar and living in a grotty London bedsit, consumed with desire for his coworker Margaret (Eleanor Bron) but unable to work up the courage to ask her out. This makes him easy prey for Satan, aka “George”, played by Peter Cook, turning up initially in a stylish black and red cloak, little sunglasses and velvet dinner jacket.
After Stanley has signed away his soul in exchange for seven wishes, the rest of the movie is mostly sketches in which Stanley’s wish comes true—he is a witty intellectual, a millionaire, a pop star, a fly on a wall, and other things—and yet he fails to win Margaret. These are interspersed with more metatextual sketches in which George goes about his business of spreading unhappiness and misery in petty but effective ways (sending pigeons out to defecate on pedestrians; issuing parking tickets; conning little old ladies; scratching LPs) while Stanley trails after him, complaining, but finding it hard to take the moral high ground. Over the course of the story Stanley gradually comes to realise some things about himself, Margaret, and George, and, without revealing the ending, it’s fair to say that he comes out of the experience a better man than he went in.
Stan, about to strike out with Margaret again
Like Oh! What a Lovely War, this is a movie which makes a virtue of a low budget. It’s shot around London but with a sometimes witty and surreal choice of locations: the Devil’s headquarters is a cheap nightclub, Heaven is the Glass House at Kew Gardens, George at one point takes Stanley up to the top of the Post Office Tower in a visual joke about the Devil showing Christ the kingdoms of the world. Modern takes on the Seven Deadly Sins all turn up, with Raquel Welch typecast as Lust (and we learn she’s married to Sloth), and Vanity represented by a man with a mirror physically growing out of his chest. There’s a delightful parody of pop hits programme Ready, Steady, Go!, and there are clever little touches like a record scratched by George in one sketch putting Stan off his game with Margaret in another, or a headline, “Pop Stars in Sex and Drugs Drama”, shifting by one letter to become “Pope Stars in Sex and Drugs Drama”.
Within all of this, though, there are running themes about human nature and our ability to make ourselves contented or miserable. Stan, at one point, rails at George, “you promised to make me happy!” and George counters, “no, I promised to give you wishes.” Throughout the sketches, Stan keeps screwing things up with Margaret not through George’s intervention but through his own personal failings: as an intellectual, he completely misreads her willingness to sleep with him; as a millionaire, he keeps giving Margaret expensive gifts but no personal attention. He never fights to win her away from his rivals; he never takes an interest in her as a person. He whines that freedom of choice is all a lie, citing the fact that he had no choice where he was born, or to whom, but it’s obvious the problem is less Stan’s lack of opportunities, and more his inability to take advantage of the opportunities he has. It’s only when he recognises that being himself is better than the alternatives, that he can finally escape George’s grasp.
The Top of the Pops parody is spot on.
But, as the film continues, we also get a sadder insight into Stan and George and why they are the way they are. Stan tells George that George is the only person who has ever taken an interest in him, or done anything nice for him, showing how people can fall into temptation and sin not through moral depravity, but simple loneliness. George, for his part, eventually shows his own vulnerability: he is bitterly envious of God and wishes he could once again be among the angels, but at the same time is unable to rise above petty game-playing and point-scoring and can never understand why Heaven is closed to him. There’s also a running critique of modern life, with the Devil being associated with things like parking meters and tedious slogans like “Go To Work On An Egg”. Peter Cook gets in a rant about the evil of the banality of Wimpy Bars and Tastee Freezes and advertising and concrete, whose sentiment at least recalls Tati’s visual skewering of the sameness of global cities in Playtime.
Sermon on the postbox
All that having been said, it’s not a perfect movie. The metatextual sketches tend to go on a bit too long, and, although the message of the film is in part that Stan needs to stop viewing Margaret as a prize to be won and instead let her be her own person, we don’t really get much of a sense of her except as a prize to be won. The message—appreciate what you’ve got and don’t go looking for more—also doesn’t feel very aspirational. I suspect that if you don’t happen to like the humour of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore more generally, you’ll find the movie offputting. If you do like them, though, check Bedazzled out when it shows near you.
Trek Correspondent Joe Reid has jumped from TV to film. We think you'll enjoy his take on a most mind-altering movie!
by Joe Reid
Change of Mind, directed by Robert Stevens, is a film about David Rowe (played by Raymond St. Jacques), a successful white district attorney whose brain is transplanted into the body of a terminally injured Black man, Ralph Dickson. The story operates on many layers: it’s a respectful and intelligent thought experiment on how a newly reborn Black man might engage with and find relevance in a prejudiced society. It’s also a courtroom drama about the murder of a woman and the fight to bring her killer to justice. Primarily, however, this movie explores the complexities of the relationship between David and his wife, Margaret Rowe (played by Susan Oliver of Star Trek fame), who struggles to fully accept her husband after his physical transformation.
The title, Change of Mind, is somewhat misleading, as David Rowe’s mind doesn’t really change throughout the movie. Instead, it’s the minds of those around him that David must work to change.
My overall experience watching Change of Mind was a pleasant one. However, I have three key criticisms of the film. First, the movie starts abruptly with the brain surgery, never allowing the audience to experience the white David Rowe or the original Ralph Dickson. While I understand that this approach was likely more efficient and less complicated (as it avoids the need for two actors to portray the same character), it is a missed opportunity for deeper context. Second, there were a few strange, psychedelic dream sequences—while musically scored by the great Duke Ellington, they felt somewhat out of place within the overall narrative. Lastly, the ending was too abrupt. David, through grit and integrity, overcomes numerous challenges and takes some losses, all in pursuit of the truth. He’s portrayed as a character who does everything right. But at the last minute, he makes a seemingly foolish decision, and the movie ends. The conclusion felt jarring, to say the least.
What I liked most about the movie is that it successfully delivered on its key themes. There are many scenes featuring David and Margaret navigating their new lives together. While Raymond St. Jacques’s performance was fantastic, Susan Oliver stood out, delivering a subtly nuanced portrayal of a woman who deeply loves and supports the man she married—even after the change—but struggles to fully reintegrate him into her heart. With messy and unwavering devotion, she does everything possible to fight for her husband, which is admirable to see. The movie stops just shy of delivering a payoff for all her efforts.
Along with Ms. Oliver, the beautiful and talented Janet MacLachlan (Lt. Charlene Masters from the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor") demonstrated not only her singing talent but delivered a soul stirring performance as Elizabeth Dickson, the wife of the deceased Ralph Dickson (who's body David Rowe now inhabited). At a point in the story when it seemed that David and Margaret were at their weakest, Elizabeth showed up and restored both their spirits.
Throughout the film David battles his new body. He fights for his love. He fights former friends, employees, authorities, entire communities, and even the government. These led to some powerful scenes that we are unaccustomed to seeing a black lead in a movie navigate. St. Jacques portrays David as a confident and mostly self-assured man moving through each encounter with practiced ease.
The courtroom scenes were smartly done and carried significant weight. David proved himself capable of handling every challenge the story threw at him, tackling problems with integrity and intelligence.
Despite the few drawbacks I mentioned, I would recommend Change of Mind as a story that tackles tough topics with a degree of realism and emotional depth. The situations in the movie were believable without being predictable, and the emotional gravity of the characters doesn’t come across as heavy-handed or preachy. The acting is more than adequate, and the musical score is hip.
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.
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’.
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…
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
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 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.
Freddie 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?
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.
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.
![[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (<i>Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700324cinemascope-672x372.jpg)
![[February 6, 1970] All We Are Saying Is Give The Peace Game A Chance (<i>The Peace Game, AKA The Gladiators</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/PG10.jpg)
![[January 28, 1970] Cinemascope: Just a Poe Boy (<em>An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe</em>, <em>The Moebius Flip</em>, </em>Sole Survivor</em>, and <em>The Dunwich Horror</em>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/12970-an-evening-of-edgar-allan-poe-0-460-0-690-crop-2830000383-460x372.jpg)
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
The Sphinx
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
![[November 22, 1969] Crash and Burn (the movie <i>Journey to the Far Side of the Sun</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691126sunposter-672x372.png)
![[November 4, 1969] A Dazzler (Bedazzled, 1967)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691104bedazzledposter-672x372.jpg)
Stan, about to strike out with Margaret again
The Top of the Pops parody is spot on.
Sermon on the postbox
![[October 28, 1969] Black and White (the movie <i>Change of Mind</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/691028end-504x372.jpg)
![[October 14, 1969] News Bulletin/No Separate Beds (Review of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/bobandcarol-672x372.jpg)
The Alvin
![[October 10, 1969] Everybody's Talkin' At Me: <i>Midnight Cowboy</i> and Urban Tragedy](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/691010midnightcowboyposter-1-672x372.jpeg)
![[September 24, 1969] Murder, Madness, and Middle Age (<i>What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?</i> And Its Predecessors)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690924aliceposter-600x372.jpg)
![[September 20, 1969] Cinemascope: Stitched from the past; schemed from the future (<i>Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed</i> and <i>The Italian Job</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690920posters-521x372.jpg)
Freddie Jones as The Creature cuts a pathetic figure
Criminals from all walks of British life, in a planning meeting
The Minis! They're amazing! They go everywhere!