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The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part One: Live Blogging "The Ten Commandments"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:43:00 GMT

7:00 P.M., Saturday:: It's Easter Eve, which means it's time to kick things off with ABC's umpteenth broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille's career-capping whopper of a religious epic, The Ten Commandments (1956). Back when this was a good, God-fearing nation and it was easier to think of members of this movie's cast who were still alive, it was customary for ABC to run this movie on Sunday, as the cherry on top of the Easter festivities. But now it's been relegated to Saturday evenings, which nowadays are known as the night when the commercial networks don't even bother trying. Back in the days when ABC ran The Ten Commandments in prime time on the theory that someone would watch it, the network would have confronted the issue of the movie's exceptional length by spreading it out over two nights or letting it play past eleven o'clock, forcing local affiliates to try to keep their late-night news anchors up past their bedtimes. Now, eager to just get the august programming tradition the hell over with, ABC starts the movie an hour before prime time, daring moms across the land to call their kids in from soccer practice lest they miss Moses's thrilling origin story.

As it happens, Moses (Charlton Heston) has a pretty bang-up back story. Turned loose as an infant to float down the Nile by his humble Hebrew mother (Martha Scott), Mose is claimed by the barren and widowed princess Bithiah (Nina Foch), who raises him to be the Egyptian Howard Roarke. The mature Moses, working with thousands of slaves and the combined budget of all three Lord of the Rings films at his command, erects giant, phallic obelisks and dramatically throws back curtains to reveal expensive-looking matte paintings, all of which he has done in the name of the old Pharaoh (Cedric Hardwicke), who is suitably impressed. When he's not supervising feats of construction so dazzling that Erich von Daniken will someday make a pretty penny assuring people that they must have been completed using extraterrestrial technology, Moses swaggers about the city followed by a bunch of dudes whose only mission in life is to throw back their heads and guffaw whenever he gets off a good one, usually at the expense of Vincent Price, whose performance here really puts the "super" in "supercilious." (I had a bunch of guys like this following me around during my last two years in high school. Since Vincent Price has already graduated, I used to keep them entertained them by bouncing zingers off the forehead of Jeff Faggard, who I had no role in naming. Poor Jeff later died while standing on his roof adjusting his TV antennae during an electrical storm.)

Moses's chief rival for Cedric Hardwicke's job is Rameses (Yul Brynner), whose only reaction to seeing this eagle-profiled pretender to the throne rise through the ranks is to pout, glare, and seethe, though that has to have been pretty much what DeMille had in mind when he cast the role, since pouting, glaring, and seething would have remained Yul Brynner's default approach to whatever role he was playing even if he'd been cast as Willy Wonka. As if Rameses needed another reason to drop Moses from his Christmas card list, it turns out that the first prize in the "I Want to Be Pharoah" sweepstakes is the hand of the fair Nefretiri, played by Anne Baxter in a dark-bangs-and-bangles ensemble that brings a welcome touch of Bettie Page to the proceedings even before Moses, his Hebrew parentage having come to light, is brought before Pharaoh modeling the latest in jangly bondage gear. Nefretiri makes no pretense of not having a favorite horse in the running for her favors. "You will rule Egypt," she tells Moses, "and I will be your footstool!" "A man stupid enough to use you for a footstool would not be capable of ruling Egypt," Moses replies, showing that he is so pure-hearted a good Jewish boy that her kinkier suggestions are lost on him. When a slave (Judith Anderson) hints that she knows the Terrible Secret about Moses's past, Nefretiri tells her, "Old frog, be careful what you croak about Moses," then solves the problem by throwing Anderson's sandals off the balcony while Anderson is still wearing them.

Of course, the truth has to come out, and it isn't long before Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) has traded the crucial information to Rameses in exchange for a wheelbarrow full of money, Vincent Price's house, and Debra Paget, who looks at him beseechingly and says, "If you fear God, let me go!"--I line that I've heard myself often enough to recognize it as an unfailing sign that the first date isn't going well. Moses is stripped of his royal rank and key to the Playboy Club and sent alone into the desert, where he is cleansed and prepared to do God's work with an ordeal signified by having Heston make with the clenched-jaw grimness while a lucky stagehand sprinkles sand in front of the wind machine pointed in his direction. Finally, he meets a bevy of cuties in brightly colored clothes who seem to rehearsing for a production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It turns out that they are the daughters of Jethro, sheik of Medium, sophisticated international playboy and double-naught spy. When a bunch of Malchites, who seem to be what they had in the days before motorcycle gangs, show up to steal the girls' water and tease their sheep, Moses leaps out of the bushes, brandishing his staff, and demonstrates the Old Testament practice known by religious scholars as kicking ass and taking names. The next thing you know, the girls, having deemed him seriously worthy of their giggly attentions, are competing for the honor of using their precious water to wash his feet. De Mille's research for this picture must have convinced him that the footstool-fetish thing among women crossed all ethnic and class lines in those days.

Jethro welcomes Moses into his home with open arms and offers him the choice of his seven daughters, even though it's not much of a contest, considering that six of the daughters function as a sort of Hebrew chorus to the hottest daughter, played by a pre-Lily Munster Yvonne De Carlo, here completely living up to Jamie Lee Curtis's recent description of her as the Angelina Jolie of her day, minus the proficiency with light firearms. "I shall dwell in this land," Moses announces, doing his best to make it sound as if he has a whole shitload of better options. How comes the part of the story that I could never fully make sense of in Sunday school, when Moses kicks back and lets his hair and beard grow out and turn gray, starts a family, and adopts John Derek, while the Jews are looking at their watches and wondering when they're going to be led out of bondage. I remember thinking, as a kid, that if I were in charge of the spittoon at Pharaoh's place, I'd be kind of eager for Moses to get on with it, but he's determined to wait until he gets the right sign he's waiting for from God. I'll give DeMille and his casting director this: it's a lot easier to understand Moses's measured approach to tackling his mission when he's spending the time leading up to it kicking back with Yvonne De Carlo. Ultimately, however, Moses is invited to a sit-down discussion of the slavery issue with a burning bush, which has the same motivational effect as that letter from the student loan people that first raises the subject of wage garnishment.

Moses goes unto Rameses the Pharaoh, who expresses his disdain for God's messenger by greeting him shirtless while wearing his Zippy the Pinhead hat. Moses, with his special effects wizard John Carradine at his side, tries to impress upon Pharaoh the power of God by throwing his staff upon the floor, where it turns into a cobra. But then Pharaoh orders his own CGI guys to throw their staffs onto the floor, and they turn into cobras too. But Nefreteri announces that Moses's snake was so bad that he ate the other two snakes. I don't know if DeMille decided to not actually show this because he didn't have the technology, but for whatever reason, he has my gratitude. Now comes the part of the story that everybody always looks forward to, the series of anti-miracles when God turns the Nile to cherry Kool-Aid and gets all Magnolia on lower Egypt with the rubber frogs. DeMille, whose faith in the narrative power of female perfidy was forged in the furnaces of a thousand silent movies, makes it clear that what's really keeping the men from reaching a sensible truce is the manipulative scheming of Nefretiri, who's been forced to marry and have a son with a man she can't stand and now sees her old flame roll back into town, not to reclaim her, but just to start some shit about freeing his "people." Whenever Rameses is clearly beginning to think that holding onto his slave labor force just isn't worth it, she gets a bad case of the slinkies and starts taunting him in her Mae West voice.

In the end, she overreaches, because she doesn't expect God to sink low enough to play the death-of-the-firstborn-son card. When Pharaoh sees his own weird little slaphead kid laid out on his deathbed, he orders that Moses be brought to him via "my fastest chariot", adding, "He's my only son," indicating that he'd be willing to write off the loss if he had a couple of replacements cooling in the fridge. When Moses arrives, he finds a defeated man waiting for him, slumped in a chair while the cries of grieving parents are heard rising in the streets outside. Rameses makes a little summing-up speech, telling Moses that he fucked up his relationship with his father, fucked up his chance to be happy with his queen, and has now killed his son; he can't take anymore, and because of that, "I set you free." "It is not by your word or by my hand that we are free," Moses says. "The power of God has freed us." Rameses urges him to shut up and tells him to "take your people, your cattle, your god and your pestilence, take whatever spoils of Egypt you will, but go;" all he asks in return is that they be sure and take Edward G. Robinson with them. While Rameses slumps further in his throne and Nefretiri enters with her dead son in her arms, Moses, looking up to the heavens, intones, "Oh, Lord God, with a strong hand, you lead us out of bitter bondage," and slowly, slowly, slowly exits, talking all the while. At this point, I think we can all agree that Moses, in his moment of triumph, is just being a titanic dick.

As he shuffles off towards the land of milk and honey, Nefretiri hands Rameses their son, uttering the line, "He's dead", in a way that strongly implies that she's been fortifying herself with the cooking sherry, and Rameses deposits the boy's corpse before a huge statue of Sam the Eagle, and promises the most noble Muppet of them all anything if he will restore his son to life. A cut to the morning after establishes that this has worked out about as well as the time I promised God that I would grow up to be a preacher if he would keep them from canceling Holmes and Yoyo. Goaded once more by the missus, Rameses leads his men on a high speed chase after the departing Hebrews and gets to watch as his entire army is decimated in the celebrated sequence depicting the parting and un-parting of the Red Sea. Having established himself as the slowest learner in the history of religious epics, he returns home to sit beside his queen, while the screen turns red to suggest that whatever remaining time this marriage has to run will be an unrelentingly bitter series of "I told you so"s and "Moses would have known how to get a better estimate from the plumber" moments.

Moses leads his people into the desert and disappears into the mountains for forty days, a stretch of time so long that most of the people assume he is dead. They have no way of knowing that God is composing the guidelines for good behavior referred to in the title, reeling them off the top of his head and inscribing them in stone, using the time-consuming dictation-by-fireball method instead of just inventing the laptop. Only when God is finished does he think to mention to Moses that the people he left down there in the valley have gone batshit and are worshiping a golden calf under Edward G. Robinson's direction. When Moses sees this sorry display with his own eyes, he hurls the tablets at the calf, which turns out to be toxic and highly flammable. As punishment, the people are forced to wander in the desert for forty years, at the end of which time Moses slips into a white wig and ascends to Heaven. Which is nice for him, but I always feel that, without wishing this movie were any longer, the period of wandering in the desert for forty years might stand some fleshing out. There could be a sitcom in there somewhere.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Dec. 6-12, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, kids. Frosty the Snowman here. I gotta say, I’m not feeling the love from the Screengrab this holiday season. I was certain this week would see their Top 10 List of Greatest Snowman Movies Ever. After all, there are so many great ones to choose from. Who doesn’t shed a tear every year during their annual viewing of Jack Frost, the heartwarming tale of Michael Keaton becoming a snowman and learning to be a better dad? And then there’s, uh, the other Jack Frost, about the mutant killer snowman, and its sequel, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.

But no, instead we get this list of The Best and Worst Stage-to Screen Adaptations of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight). What does that have to do with snowmen? And even when they do acknowledge the Christmas season, as in the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon (Bad Santa and The Star Wars Holiday Special) or Yesterday’s Hits: The Santa Clause, my brothers in snow get nary a mention.

Still, I’m willing to rise above it all and point out a few of my favorite posts of the week, if only they’ll turn up the air conditioning in here.

Other non-snowman movie reviews include Wendy and Lucy, the Unwatchables Ed and Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!, and When Good Directors Go Bad: A Life Less Ordinary.

Forrest J. Ackerman, Bettie Page and Robert Prosky were all friends of the Snowman-American community, and they will be missed.

LA Critics Go Wacky for WALL-E

OST: The Man with the Golden Arm

Roger Ebert Supersizes Top 10 of 2008

The Terrorists Win

Bettie Page, 1923-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The iconic pin-up model Bettie Page has died at age 85, after reportedly slipping into a coma following a heart attack. As an aspiring actress living in New York in the 1950s, Page attracted the eye of an amateur shutterbug and off-duty cop named Jerry Tibbs, who compiled the shots that made up her first modeling portfolio. She soon became a popular subject at "camera clubs" and in the pages of low-rent cheesecake magazines. She became best-known for the photo sessions and short films she did for Irving Klaw, a photographer who might have been named by Charles Dickens who ran a mail-order business peddling pin-up material that was largely pitched to the underground fetish market, including bondage enthusiasts. Page's most memorable work was probably shot by the model turned photographer Bunny Yeager, who photographed Page, looking tanned and happy, on the beaches of Boca Raton and, at a Florida wildlife park, wearing the leopard skin bikini that was to become to Page's image what black tie and tails was to Fred Astaire's. It was Yeager who brought Page to the attention of Hugh Hefner, resulting in her appearing as Playboy's centerfold for the issue of January 1955. She also made a few TV appearances and performed in some off-Broadway plays before abandoning New York, modeling, and show business in the late 1950s. She was in her mid-thirties, still beautiful but a ripening age for a pin-up girl, and reportedly felt moved to start a new life in the wake of a religious conversion.

Her break with her past coincided with the Senate hearings, led by Estes Kefauver, one of the leading busybodies of his day, that scared the bejesus out of the smut business and effectively shut down Irving Klaw's operation. Much of the material that Page appeared in for Klaw was destroyed at that time, but enough of it survived that a Page revival began to develop, in fits and starts, some twenty years later. Starting in 1978, Belier Press, a sort of nostalgia house for old school pervs, began publishing a series of magazine-size collections of Page's photos from the camera clubs and Klaw's bondage sessions. In 1982, the late cartoonist Dave Stevens published the first installment of his glossy-looking, kitsch-drenched Rocketeer adventure comics, whose sweet-sultry heroine was named Betty and drawn as a replica of Page. And in 1987, Greg Theakson began publishing his digest-sized fanzine The Betty Pages. By the late 1980s, Page had taken on a second life as a full-blown cult heroine, a status reinforced by her popularity as a recurring image in the panels drawn by alternative comics artists such as Paul Mavrides and Spain Rodriguez.

By the 1990s, it wasn't unusual to come across semi-scholarly articles by academics and women's studies specialists, pondering the mystery of Page's continuing appeal. Actually, as mysteries go, this was never one fit to keep Encyclopedia Brown up at night. With her rounded, womanly body and Doublemint gum smile, Page wasn't just lovely and photogenic but sunny and sweet-looking; unlike most of the pictures taken by Klaw and his kind, images of sullen women in antique-looking underwear which gave off a whiff of moldy basements and looked as if they should bear the legend "Her Last Known Photograph", they seemed to hold the promise of fun and good times. Page's evident enjoyment at being the center of the camera's attention disinfected her fetish shots of any hint of shame; many feminist writers even celebrated her as a heroic example of a non-anorexic woman who radiated confidence and pleasure in her own body.

Page herself was in her late sixties and living in a group home when she started finding out that the relics of her misspent youth had made her famous, and were busily making money for other people. She began to collect royalties on her image after signing with the Curtis Management Group in the mid-1990s. (She was also sought out and befriended by Dave Stevens.) During her late-life brush with living fame, she preferred not to be photographed, saying that she wanted her fans to remember her as she was in her delectable prime. In recent years, her surviving films for Klaw have been collected on a string of DVDs, as have such artifacts as the 1953 Striporama, in which Page appears as one of several burlesque performers. More recently, her life has served as the subject of several documentaries and Mary Harron's 2006 biopic The Notorious Bettie Page, in which Page was played by Gretchen Mol.

Related Stories: Dave Stevens: 1955-2008

Take Five: HBO

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Sex and the City: The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life. There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good. One thing is for sure: it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming. They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (the Tales from the Crypt spin-off Bordello of Blood). If the long-rumored Deadwood movie ever gets made, or if the Sopranos movie doesn't turn out to be a disappointment, this may change things, but in the meantime, HBO's television shows have yet to produce a movie worth watching. Less known, however, is that HBO has a production arm that has put out a number of worthwhile films, many of which had theatrical releases prior to their run on the pay cable network; some of them, in fact, were released exclusively for theatrical release through HBO Films or their sister company, Picturehouse FIlms. With their overseeing company, New Line Cinema, dead, the future of HBO Films is uncertain, but given the quality of their past releases, they're sure to find a new home somewhere with parent company Time/Warner. Here's five fine films that were released under the HBO Film distribution banner.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original. The comparison is by no means coincidental: legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life. If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

ELEPHANT (2003)

The first of a series of collaborations between HBO Films and director Gus Van Sant, Elephant is the best of the lot -- and may in fact be one of the finest films of the decade. Inspired by the horrific mass murder at Columbine High School, the fragmented, almost dreamlike story of a pair of alienated high school students who go on a shooting rampage is a meditation on violence unlike any other in recent cinematic history. Elephant is a quiet, open, almost meditative film, breaking off to follow one character after another in order to present the day of the shooting as resolutely normal; but its greatest trick is to constantly dangle in front of us tantalizing 'clues' to the motivation of the killers, only to have every one of them lead to an unproductive, uncomfortable dead end. After the final bloodbath, we have an almost tangible need to know the whys and wherefores of the senseless killing, but the movie is wise enough to deny us an easy solution to an impossibly difficult question, and is brave enough to believe in its director's vision and leave us hanging without a quick fi or an easy scapegoat.

DEATH IN GAZA (2004)

One of the least partisan -- and most tragically unbearable -- documentaries about the Israeli-Palestine conflict was the 2004 film Death in Gaza, which concentrated largely on the impact the war had on children in the area. Focusing on a quartet of Palestinian kids, all in their early teens or younger, who take up arms against their occupiers, Death in Gaza neither exculpates the bad behavior of the kids (their anti-Semitism is extremely uncomfortable, especially from children so young) or glosses over why they might be so driven to militancy and violence (we are constantly exposed to the insufferable living conditions into which they are born and raised, and every one of them has a jaw-dropping horror story about the death of a friend or relative). What makes the move especially harrowing is that its 34-year-old British director, James Miller, was himself killed by the Israeli Defense Forces while filming in Gaza at night, a typically stupid, futile, and enraging event that is captured on film and shown matter-of-factly during the course of the documentary. Powerful and sad.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (2004)

Joshua Marston's feature about a young Colombian teenager who becomes a drug mule in order to raise money for her impoverished family is filmed in such an effective, simple neorealist style -- and manages to so effectively encapsulate one of the most degrading yet banal aspects of the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism -- that it's hard to avoid comparisons to De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. And while it's not even remotely in that film's league, it's still very much a movie worth watching, updating De Sica's themes for a post-socialist age, and it does at least have one advantage over its spiritual forebear: the presense of the heartbreaking, compelling, fascinating lead actress, Catalino Sandino Moreno. The then-17-year-old Moreno turns in one of the most watchable yet tragic performances in recent memory as a headstrong, intelligent girl who has nonetheless begun to move in circles who will shape her into something she cannot control; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off her from the beginning of the movie to the end.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)

The Notorious Bettie Page, a serviceable if never stunning biography of the legendary 1950s pin-up queen, was brought to us by the writer/director team of Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron. The duo also was responsible for the highly problematic American Psycho, and Harron also directed the truly discomfiting I Shot Andy Warhol. While its problems are different (a lack of depth and a somewhat flat visual style, neither of which were the difficulties with Harron's other movies), it does reflect the curate's egg nature of all three films. Clearly, it wasn't a movie made to do nothing more than titillate, but by the same token, we walk out of the theater knowing precious little more about the notorious Bettie Page than we did when we came in. That said, it shares with the other films a great deal of energy and feeling, and is supported by the sort of tremendous central performance Harron seems to coax so easily out of her stars -- Gretchen Mol is easily the equal of Christian Bale or Lili Taylor, and it's her charm and control in the role that makes this a movie worth watching.

Dave Stevens (1955-2008)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The illustrator and comic book artist Dave Stevens died earlier this week at the age of 52 after a long struggle with leukemia. Stevens was best known as the creator of the Rocketeer, an adventure character that first appeared in various titles published by Pacific, a short-lived independent comics company in the early 1980s. (After Pacific went out of business, he jumped to other now-defunct "independent" comics publishers--Eclipse, Comico--before winding up at Dark Horse.) Set in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, the comics centered on Cliff Secord, a scrappy young stunt pilot who battles Nazis and performs other acts of derring-do after stumbling across a portable jet pack that turns him into a two-fisted flying fool. The comics inspired a 1991 movie, directed by Joe Johnston, that worked hard to capture the look of Stevens's comics, and with a cast that included Bill Campbell in the lead, Jennifer Connelly as his girl Betty, and Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton (in a role modeled on Errol Flynn), and Terry O'Quinn, of Lost, as Howard Hughes.

The movie was okay, but Stevens had essentially already made his own Rocketeer movie; he just did it on paper. He didn't turn out many pages of Cliff Secord's adventures, because he put so much painstaking work into them that there were long, long lulls between the appearance of each new short chapter, an effect that was amplified by the fact that his publishing companies kept dying on him. It was worth the effort he put into them. (The film critic Charles Taylor described them as "little pieces of kitsch heaven.") Stevens was really crazy about the pop culture of a certain place and time, and part of what set his work apart was that he was driven to lavish his loving eye and craftsmanship on some very tacky, and even sleazy, love objects. Secord was a carny hanger-on making a buck any way he could, and his beloved Betty was explicitly modeled on the pin-up icon Bettie Page, whose image Stevens did a hell of a lot to resurrect and immortalize. (He also rediscovered, and befriended, the actual Ms. Page, who probably never expected to outlive him.) The "Rocketeer" comics also incorporated a lot of period Hollywood lore, as well as nods to such iconic ephemera as the masked image of the Saturday-matinee hero Commander Cody, Rondo Hatton, and the Doc Savage sidekick Monk Mayfair. Stevens earned his right to slap all this stuff together by giving it a unifying visual dazzle and afectionate spirit. His masterwork is probably one of the best marriages of movies and comics ever brought off.