The Screengrab : charles laughton

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part Two: Live Blogging TCM's Easter Sunday Line-Up--"The Green Pastures", "Salome", "Solomon and Sheba", "Ben-Hur"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

6:30 AM: The 1936 The Green Pastures is a musical adaptation of several Bible stories, based on a Broadway show that Marc Connelly adapted from Roark Bradford's book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun; it features an all-African American cast, led by Rex Ingram as "De Lawd." I know what you're thinking, but it's actually a terrific movie, so I don't have a lot to say about it. Except that it's interesting to compare its staging of the journey out of Egypt and, especially, the Golden Calf period to the way DeMille handled them in The Ten Commandments. For one thing, in Pastures, the decadence that breaks out while De Lawd is otherwise occupied actually looks like something that a rational adult might be tempted to join in on. DeMille's looks like interpretive dance night at Burning Man, and DeMille's voice on the soundtrack explaining how awful it all is doesn't help. (For one thing, he starts out by complaining that the people started expressing their sinful nature by putting on gaudy clothes, and then he starts complaining that they began to take off their gaudy clothes. You just can't win with some people.)

8:15 A.M.: Watching the 1953 Salome soon after seeing The Ten Commandments, one of the first things you're likely to notice is that a lot of the same people tend to turn up over and over in these kinds of pictures. Clearly, if you ran a studio and discovered which actors looked more plausible than not wearing a bedsheet, you didn't want to take too many chances. Here, Cedric Hardwicke is the Roman emperor Tiberius, who fans of I, Claudius will remember as having been quite the dirty fucker, and who plants a mine by giving Pontius Pilate (Basil Sidney) a government job, and Judith Anderson is Queen Herodius, who is always giving King Herod a hard time for his reluctance to have the trash-talking prophet John the Baptist (Alan Badel). Herod is played by Charles Laughton, twenty years after first grabbing Hollywood's attention as Nero in C. B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross; in that movie, he played a powerful monster who enjoyed his work, but here he's troubled and bent out of shape because he doesn't know how to handle this John the Baptist business. Herod is plagued by father issues: he is the son of the earlier King Herod, who, in a similar situation many years earlier, ordered the murder of all male children in the city of Bethlehem, a move that was judged by most observers of the day as a gross over-reaction. Laughton's Herod, who remembers his father's piteous and agonized screams, especially when he read Maureen Dowd's latest column, is plagued by the thought that he might err in the same way his father did, and also by the suspicion that his father always thought his brother Jeb was really the smart one.

Where does Salome enter into this, you ask? It's a good question, and one that seems to have been judged by the screenwriters as not entirely within their powers to answer. Salome is played by Rita Hayworth, which sounds like a good deal at first. But Hayworth, whose production company was responsible for the movie, seems to have been going through one of those periods of a yearning for respect that sometimes befall screen goddesses, sometimes at the oddest of times. In some scenes, Hayworth tries to act seriously by slipping into a bogus British accent, so she'll fit in with her illustrious co-stars (and with her less illustrious ones, chiefly Stewart Granger as a Roman soldier she has the hots for); in others, she tries to convey heavy emotion by breathing so hard between her lines that it's as if she were trying to invent the obscene phone call centuries before some invents the telephone. In the version of this story that we all know and love, Salome dirty dances for the king in order to persuade him to have the Baptist executed for her pleasure. In this one. Rita's Salome takes to the dance floor in a gilded blue robe and modified kaiser helmet in hopes of steaming up Herod's glasses so badly that the old boy can be persuaded to spare the Baptist, but her ploy backfires: seeing her husband watching the evening's entertainment with his tongue in his lap, Herodius leans over and whispers that if he'll have the Baptist beheaded by the time Rita executes her last shimmy shake, she'll put in a good word for him with Rita about what a terrific personality he has. Things wrap up quickly and badly. Rita's reaction to the sight of John's head on a salver makes Herod realize that he'll be sleeping on the couch, and as the people outside bang on the gates, Stewart Granger lectures the royal couple: "Live! Live in torture. May the blood of the man you've murdered rise in your throats to choke you." All that remains is a quick twist ending: Herod and his queen feared John the Baptist as a threat to their power because they thought he might be the messiah, but a final shot of Rita and Stewart Granger standing in a crowd listening to some guy deliver the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that it is in fact this guy who is the real Keyser Soze. The movie ends with the words "This is the beginning" appearing on screen.

10:00 AM: King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba (1959) has many points of distinction. For one thing, it stands as a lasting reminder that the birth of the state of Israel once seemed like something that Hollywood could stand to cash in on. The story involves a power struggle for the throne of Israeli between the sons of David, Solomon (Yul Brynner) and Adonijah, played by my man George Sanders, with the Queen of Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) plotting with the Egyptians to destroy the Jewish state. As part of the production design, the Israelis' shields, home furnishings, and maybe their underwear are emblazoned with the Star of David. I'm pretty sure this is anachronistic, but it's not like I was there or have a piece of the copyright action, so what the hey. Perhaps harder to account for is what will strike many people as the central stroke of miscasting that has George Sanders playing the Sonny Corleone role of the fiery-tempered, violent brother while Yul Brynner handles the Michael role as the bookish Solomon who, somebody reminds us every three minutes, is a legend in his own time for being just as wise as shit. (There is no third brother to serve as the Fredo figure, and he is missed.) This is also one of those very special movies in which Yul has hair, perhaps because Solomon's precious brains need all the protection they can get. (Brynner was a late addition to the cast, stepping in for Tyrone Power after Power keeled over from a fatal heart attack as a consequence of doing a fight scene with George Sanders, which, for those of you who don't know, tells you just how bad George Sanders was.)

The movie, which is a long sumbitch, is padded out with some of Solomon's greatest hits scenes, such as the time he pulled the old let's-cut-the-kid-in-two-and-give-each-of-youse-half gag. This is to keep you alerted to the fact that he is, once again, wise. It might have been a nice touch if he could have indicated the depths of wisdom in some simpler fashion, such as dressing sensibly, but that ship had sailed by the time that the costume designer persuaded Yul Brynner to swan about in what looks like a Confederate army leisure suit with a big-ass Star of David medallion that looks like what Bob Guccione might break out for the high holidays. (Brynner's beard and toupee also serve to heighten a previously unsuspected resemblance to Hector Elizaondo.) He may be wise, but he's mortal, and certain things cut off the flow of blood to his brain just as fast as they do with the rest of us, so Sheba Lollobrigida goes to work on him, bewitching him with her ultry-sultry wiles, until God can't take it anymore and starts caving roofs in just to distract Solomon's attention away from his new friend's exposed midsection. After a big battle, Solomon kills George Sanders accidentally on purpose, and then carries Sheba's bruised and broken body into the temple so that God can demonstrate his own unquestioned superiority to Sam the Eagle when it comes to resurrections: he not only restores her to full health but scrubs her face and throws in some Botox. It would be easy to say that King Vidor has done better work, since most of us have. What's a little embarrassing is that one of the occasions when he did better work was Duel in the Sun.

12:30 PM: And now, it's time for the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room of Easter television: Ben-Hur, the 1959 Oscar-festooned super-epic that arguably announced the end of the era of the '50s religious epic, a genre that did not surpass itself so much as max out all its credit cards in this one last wallow. I'll confess right now that I have never fully understood this movie's qualfications as a religious epic. To my eyes, it's a "prestige" (i.e., bloated) version of a Roman sword-and-sandal action movie with brief but strategically placed cameos by a pair of feet and a hand or two that, we are to understand, are connected to the great unseeable presence that is Him. But you go trying to argue with fifty years of conventional wisdom and see where it gets you.

The plot is basically one of those Horatio Alger success stories, as contemporary culture critics understand the Alger books as tributes to the knack for picking out the right rich, powerful man to brown nose. Having had his life destroyed when he doesn't have sense enough to cross the street rather than run into his old school chum Messala--played by Stephen Boyd, an actor so habitually over-intense that I like to imagine he didn't die so much as supernova--our hero, Mr. Hur (Charlton Heston), climbs back to society's upper rungs while showing an unerring instinct for who to save from drowning when pirates attack the ship where he's manning the oars as a galley slave and whose reins to hold during the big chariot race. At the end of that race, you do get to hear the greatest line anybody ever wrote for somebody to say to Charlton Heston, when Pontius Pilate--played by Frank Thring this time--crowns him the winner and says, "Permit us to worship you."

About the only thing else I can think of to say about the movie is that, if you watch it after you've been gorging on films like Salome and Solomon and Sheba, it's impossible not to respect, even with one eye at half-mast and half your brain switched to autopilot, just what a tremendous professional job the director William Wyler did. You might think that someone gainfully employed by a major studio and entrusted with the job of bringing a big epic in on schedule would be able, at a bare minimum of competence, to direct the extras in a crowd scene so that they looked like human beings with some independent life, and to make the sets look as if somebody had lived in them for more than five minutes and as if they were still going to be standing five minutes after the director yelled "Cut!" But whether or not this stuff was worth doing at all, to see if done completely badly is to give you a fresh appreciation for how hard Wyler has to have worked to get it done half-right.

Set Your DVR!: January 26 - 30, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Greetings, Screengrab readers! I've had to scale this column back to something a little more manageable, so I'm going to only be recommending a few movies a week. I hope y'all still find this useful. As always, let me know in comments if there's something that should be added to this post.

This week, I have three recommendations between Monday and Friday: a semi-obscure Altman movie, a documentary about the hardships of the labor movement, and the greatest (disregarding the simple fact that it's an anomaly) noir-horror-fairytale ever set on celluloid.

First off, IFC is showing Robert Altman's 1990 movie Vincent and Theo on Monday night. This is Altman's return to cinematic narrative after a string of films based on plays during the 80s (excepting O.C. and Stiggs and Tanner '88, of course). The movie stars Tim Roth and Paul Rhys and Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo, an art dealer. Not the greatest Altman film, but certainly a good one. Playing on IFC 1/26 at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and later that night at 12:45 am central/1:45 am eastern.

On Wednesday, IFC has Harlan County, USA, the scalding 1976 documentary about striking coal miners in the 70s. Guaranteed to turn the mildest viewer into a card-carrying member of the IWW. Playing on IFC 1/28 at 6:15 am central/7:15 am eastern and again at 11:35 am central/12:35 pm eastern.

On Friday, TCM is showing The Night Of The Hunter from 1955. I'm guessing most Screengrab readers are familiar with this movie, but it's so good that there's rarely an adequate reason to miss it. As you may know, it is the only film directed by noted actor Charles "Quasimodo" Laughton. The screenplay was written by James Agee, whose very name should be cause for most readers and writers of movie criticism to genuflect. And it's near impossible to classify. Some call it film noir, but it's also equal measures horror movie and fairytale. I've had it on my mind recently since my iPod served up an excellent version of the music in the movie by the band Young People (who may or may not be defunct now, but the song is on their album War Prayers, which also has a song called "Stagecoach," that seems to be similarly inspired by the movie). The clip above is a long chunk of the movie, but I hope it will whet your appetite. It has whetted mine. Playing on TCM 1/30 at 11:45 pm central/12:45 am eastern.

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954)

Harold Brighouse's 1916 comedy was a staple of Northern English comedy, which made everyone nervous when David Lean — "in every fibre a Southerner," notes Kevin Brownlow's biography — took it on. Fortunately, his cast — scenery-chewing Charles Laughton, John Mills (saving his career from impending disaster) and bitchy Brenda de Banzie — carry things nicely. Lean was never much good at comedy, but Hobson's Choice isn't much of a knee-slapper in the first place, so — unlike his awful, rhythmless Blithe Spirit, a mean-spirited, clunky travesty of Noel Coward's play (who responded "You've just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote") — it works. Lean's main contribution comes between dialogue, as in the clip above — continually grounding the mild, leisurely jokes in Manchester's real industrial sprawl. Co-writer Norman Spencer recalls Brighouse never really cared: "He was an old man who was a bit deaf and rather stunned by the whole thing. He said, 'I hope it'll be a nice film,' lost interest and went back up North again."

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)

It's nearly impossible to imagine Rock Hunter as a play — Frank Tashlin's movie is so aggressively cinematic, and its satirical points on celebrity's corrosive effects and so on kind of uninteresting. But it pops with Looney Tunes energy, mostly courtesy of Tony Randall: he's occasionally overrun with unexplained evil spirits that take over his body, lower his voice, and make him act as rudely as possible, an effect closer to the cartoons Tashlin started out in than any play. In the clip above (0:53 in), Randall interrupts the movie's action to address the audience directly while the screen loses its Cinemascope boundaries for all manner of TV-simulation; it's the cinematic equivalent of Todd Rundgren's sarcastic diatribe of in-house problems, "Sounds From The Studio," which showcased clipping, weird pitch-shifting and every other '70s analog problem in great detail. Here we get static, snow, and V-hold problems. It's the film's most exhilarating moment, and utterly irrelevant to theater.

THE HOMECOMING (1973)

"Didn't you hear what I said, dad?" sneers Ian Holm in the clip above. Pinter's clipped menace has translated to the screen better and more often than most, but The Homecoming is probably the best attempt to translate a play to screen with as little flash or changing as possible (including, at a mere 111 minutes, an intermission). Aside from one memorable handheld POV shot for the first act's climax — a nervous charge attempted by both character and camera — Peter Hall finds angles that sometimes find visual equivalents for what's being said, but mostly do the one thing that can't be accomplished in theater: have everything happen in a realistically crappy suburban house, without otherwise changing the tempo or performances one bit.

HAMLET ('96 Branagh/'00 Almereyda)

Five years apart, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda offered near-definitive, completely opposed takes on Hamlet. Branagh has the whole text uncut; to get through everything in a relatively speedy four hours, whole monologues are delivered in breathless rushes. Out of either necessity or bravado (or both), Branagh overplays wildly at times, rendering his every intonation explicitly theatrical; it's a big help for the novice viewer though: arguably the most instantly comprehensible on-screen Hamlet, making everything clear. Updated to the 19th century, it seems, purely to enable lusher visual overkill, Hamlet is both intelligent Shakesperean interpretation and grand Hollywood entertainment. That Branagh stocks all the main parts with theatrically trained actors with basically no marquee value and all the minor parts with way out-of-their-depth Hollywood players (Billy Crystal! Jack Lemmon!) creates an inadvertant but fascinating form of tension and comic relief. Almereyda's version, on the other hand, goes fin de siecle, slashes the text remorselessly and spends a lot of time amusing itself with its updates (the ghost first appears in front of a vending machine on a security camera) and punnish ways to change things by implication without changing the words (Denmark is no longer a country but a corporation avoiding takeover). Within all the jokes, Ethan Hawke's slacker prince is convincingly callow, moody and self-absorbed, but Almereyda knows the text is strong enough to make even this young idiot's plight finally empathetically comprehensible.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

GANDHI (1982)

After watching this 188-minute biographical epic (possibly the only first-run film I ever saw in a theater that featured an intermission), it was years before I was able to see Ben Kingsley without thinking of his most iconic role. Now, almost three decades later, I’m so familiar with Kingsley’s onscreen persona (thanks to films like Bugsy, Sexy Beast and The Wackness) that it’s amazing to look back on Gandhi and consider how deeply the British-Indian actor submerged himself into the role of this lawyer-turned-freedom fighter, spiritual leader and all-around Great Soul. Richard Attenborough’s production was an old school event, featuring 300,000 extras (a Guiness World Record!) and racking up eight Academy Awards (including the trifecta of Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director) for its depiction of the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, through his early days as an activist for Indian rights in South Africa and his leadership in the struggle for Indian independence from England to his ultimate martyrdom at the hands of a radical Hindu assassin. This kind of large canvas storytelling frequently collapses under the weight of pretension, slack pacing and scattered focus (see: Australia), but Attenborough pulled off this cinematic monument with a clear-eyed discipline worthy of his extraordinary subject.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933) & REMBRANDT (1936)

Here's why Charles Laughton was a movie star. (You could be excused for not always being clear on that.) With Henry VIII, a real warhorse of a classic early talkie, Laughton did as much as anyone to create the modern image of that much-married royal as a tantrummy spoiled child who did nothing but indulge his whims and send his clothes back to the tailor to be let out again, and he did it at such a generous comic pitch that he made the fellow seem lovable, even cuddly, like an Ewok with a weakness for having his ex-girlfriends beheaded. For a full taste of the big boy's range, it ought to be sampled alongside the much quieter Rembrandt, a surprisingly sensitive and engaging portrait of the Dutch master. For that cozy family feeling, both films feature charming appearances by the off-screen Mrs. Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, who was also the on-screen Bride of Frankenstein.

SWEET DREAMS (1985)

Patsy Cline died too young, but nobody can say that the movies haven't done all right by her. Beverly D'Angelo walked off with the second act of Coal Miner's Daughter as the pampered, saucy Patsy who taught poor little country girl Loretta Lynn how to be a star, and this full-length treatment, centering on the married-folks love story between Jessica Lange's Patsy and Ed Harris as Charlie Dick (one of those guys who was born to bathe in the light of a more exciting personality generous enough to decree him worthy), is like great country music in motion. For girl talk, Lange has Ann Wedgeworth, supporting actress extraordinaire, as her mama.

LUMUMBA (2001)

Raoul Peck's film stars Eriq Ebouaney, in one of the most towering unheralded great performances of the past decade, as Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba was driven from office and assassinated two months into his term; when the movie was made, some forty years after the events it documents, the region was still such a political powder keg that locations had to be scouted far afield, and even after the film was released to theaters, a former American government advisor who felt that he'd been accused of being implicated in Lumumba's death got HBO to bleep the mention of his name from the soundtrack before the movie was broadcast on cable TV.

LUST FOR LIFE (1956) & VINCENT & THEO (1990)

In his tragically short life, Vincent Van Gogh was underappreciated, starved, mistreated, thought mad, and forced to go without his share of love and satisfaction, but he did get two pretty good movies made about him, and one of them inspired the title of an Iggy Pop song that somehow found its way into the ad campaign of Carnival Cruise Lines, so I guess it evens out. Directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas, with James Donald as Brother Theo and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, Lust For Life is in the dramatic MGM style and played to the hilt; a huge success in its day, it is clearly enough a product of its time that it may be a bit underrated today, but it remains a very moving experience crafted by intelligent, talented people at the height of their game. The latter film, which stars Tim Roth as a Van Gogh so ferociously in love with life and so passionately aware of how much of it he's missing out on that he can seem open-hearted and embittered at the same moment, was directed by Robert Altman, and is very clearly the product of his sensibility alone. It is barely rated at all, because so few people have seen it.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Honorable Mention: The Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:45:00 GMT

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)

This is the original screen version of the H. G Wells story that has more recently been filmed and re-filmed under the title The Island of Dr. Moreau. While the Brando-Val Kilmer version is to be respected for its pure freak-out quality, this early talkie is still the most effective in terms of conviction and scare power, mainly because Charles Laughton's performance as Moreau is one of the all-time great prototypes of the mad scientist: a bloated power junkie with Fu Manchu facial hair and a fondness for the whip, he inspires none of the "Gee, he meant well!" sympathetic understanding that, say, Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein earns even at his most overwrought and barking mad. It's a measure of how strong a presence Laughton has here that the shop steward of his crew of half-human mutants is played by Bela Lugosi, only two years away from his own screen triumph as Dracula. Years later, after the roles dried up and the drugs took over, Lugosi would be a sadly depleted version of his former self, but at this stage in his movie career, you had to be one convincingly satanic son of a bitch to wade into his turf and start handing him orders.

INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)

This independently produced sci-fi horror movie was directed by William Cameron Menzies, best known as an art director and production designer so imaginative and assured that even the perfectionist (i.e., anal to the nth degree) producer David O. Selznick had absolute trust in him. When Menzies directed the 1935 sci-fi movie Things to Come, from a script by H. G. Wells, the futuristic design swallowed up the story, but here, the stylized look of the film does a bang-up job of conveying the paranoid hopelessness of the hero, a little boy who looks through his bedroom window one night and sees something weird coming in for a landing, and then has the devil's own time trying to find a trustworthy and open-minded authority figure who'll listen to his complaint that his mom and dad aren't...themselves. This one sets the standard for the subgenre of the scare movie seen through the eyes of a kid, a kid much like all those pop-eyed little ragamuffins in the audience.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

This Warners film may be less well known now than the 1953 remake House of Wax, which was in 3-D and also helped launch the horror phase of Vincent Price's career. But this version is the one that really packs the goods. Lionel Atwill is the scarred-face sculptor whose waxworks sure do look realistic as all get out; Fay Wray, who had earlier teamed with Atwill in the 1932 Doctor X, gets to show off the lung power that made her the original scream queen for the first movie era when you could actually hear the screams. Also, the fact that this is a Warners movie means that it's more contemporary and lively than the Universal classics, which sometimes seemed to have been made to utilize a lot of Bavarian-villager costumes that the studio had picked up on the cheap. Like Doctor X, the representatives of the straight world here are wisecracking newspaper reporters, a constant of Warners films, because they had so many actors on the payroll who couldn't play anything else. And it's in color, but an early, unreal shade of Technicolor that adds to the sense of unease: the people look as if they've been hand-painted even before they get dipped in wax.

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)

An especially choice example of the sci-fi film as monster movie: while the 1982 John Carpenter remake earns its props for the amazing special effects work by Rob Bottin, this one is hard to beat for the old-school pleasures of watching its hyper-competent, well-oiled crew of military men and scientists, plus a babe and a lovably slap-headed, wisecracking reporter, go about determining the best way to cope with the arrival of a homicidal "intellectual carrot" from outer space. (The carrot was played by James Arness, for twenty years the star of TV's Gunsmoke, and odds are that this is the closest he ever came to getting to play an intellectual.) Special kudos to Robert Cornthwaite for taking one for the team by playing Dr. Carrington, thus creating the indispensable but hard-not-to-snicker-at prototype of the "man of science" who, in this and a million sci-fi movies to come, would rush between the monster and the guys with the tanks and the flamethrowers and deliver a speech that goes something like, "Wait! Wait! This visitor has come to us from a civilization far advanced than our own! It must have had a good reason for hollowing the president out and using him as a hand puppet!"

TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964)

This was the last of the eight movies that Roger Corman directed based on the works, or at least the titles, of Edgar Allan Poe, and while it would go against everything Roger Corman stands for to suggest that practice may have actually enabled him to get better at something, this probably is the best of them. It may have helped that then-unknown Robert Towne wrote the script, but Corman also got some wild fever that compelled him to splurge on actual outdoor locations in the English countryside, which give this film a rooted, atmospheric quality and an edge over the ones set mostly inside a cardboard castle. Elizabeth Shepherd is fine as the doomed romantic heroine, and Vincent Price, the mainstay of the Corman-Poe films, cuts a striking figure in his top hat, black cape, and John Lennon sunglasses.

TIME OF THE WOLF (2003)

Just as The Fly showed us that cinema can transform something as banal as the fear of sickness into phantasmagoric terror, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf showed us they can wreak utter horror out of something as ordinary as simple helplessness. Haneke’s nickname is “the Master of Everyday Horror”, but what is in many ways his most effective film doesn’t take place in his usual everyday setting of bourgeois comfort. That’s where it starts, as a couple find strangers occupying their cabin in the country; but it soon becomes clear that they’re fleeing something extraordinary. Haneke never tips what has caused a widespread breakdown of law and order: it could be a war, or an environmental disaster, or a plague. But one thing is clear: from this point forward, everyone is on their own. Authorities have disappeared, and people like Isabelle Huppert and her two young children find themselves at the mercy of the goodwill of others – a quality that, it soon becomes apparent, is decreasingly available. Nothing much happens in Time of the Wolf: it’s not gory, it’s not sensationalistic like many post-apocalyptic films, and most of its violence is implied rather than seen. But the more society falls apart, even in microcosm, with prejudice, sexual violence, strongarm tactics, and the specter of deprivation always increasing, the more the film creates a horrible, almost unbearable sense of unease. It may be Haneke’s most human film, as he seems to actually care about the fate of his suffering creations; but it’s also one of the bleakest, most depressing films ever made.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Phil Nugent The Ripper, Dr. Jekyll & Leonard Pierce

Set Your DVR!: October 20 - October 28, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

What a great time of year for movies! If you're a fan of vintage horror, that is. Here's the DVR-worthy flicks on cable in the upcoming week.

Mon, Oct 20:

1:30/2:30 pm: The Haunting on TCM. Again, this is the 1963 Robert Wise version.

Tues, Oct 21:

11/12 am: Rio Grande on TCM. Classic John Wayne/John Ford Western.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Public Enemy on TCM. Buncha dirty rats doin' low-down dirty-rat bidness.

Wed Oct 22:

6:45/7:45 am: Batman on AMC. The 1966 version. Shark repellent, my friends. Need I say more?

8:20/9:20 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). I'm not always going to repeat prior recommendations, but man, I like this movie.

3:30/4:30 pm: The Enchanted Cottage on TCM. I've never seen this, but it is apparently a much-loved, hard-to-see romance between an injured soldier and a lady who isn't much to look at. Unreleased on DVD.

6:15/7:15 pm: Last Days on IFC (repeat 10/23 at 2:00 am).

7/8 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the one with Charles Laughton.

Thur, Oct 23:

Start the day (or previous night) with a Val Lewton film festival on TCM!

12:45/1:45 am: Cat People on TCM. The first collaboration between director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton (the king of no-budget atmospheric eerieness). Not exactly horror, but not exactly anything else.

2/3 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Not just a killer Roky Erickson song, this is another Tourneur/Lewton collaboration.

3:15/4:15 am: Isle of the Dead on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff.

4:30/5:30 am: The Body Snatcher on TCM. Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff AND Bela Lugosi, directed by Robert Wise, and based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, of all things.

5:45/6:45 am: Shattered Glass on IFC. Some people missed this 2003 film in which Hayden Christiansen plays a character who is - get this - supposed to be wooden. Based on the true events around the fantasist Stephen Glass's deception of The New Republic

7:35/8:35 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat at 1:35/2:35 pm). Lars von Trier's follow-up to Dogville is about a Southern plantation in the 1930s that has never freed its slaves. Do you like von Trier? Then you'll probably like this.

2:15/3:15 pm: D.O.A. on TCM. Film noir classic.

UPDATE: 8 pm (not sure of the time zone): Red Sun on Retroplex (free on Comcast Digital). This is a Western starring Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Alain Delon, and Toshiro Mifune. Whoa! Thanks to Janet for the hat tip.

Fri, Oct 24:

4:15/5:15 am: Manderlay on IFC (repeat).

Sat, Oct 25:

2:45/3:45 am: 200 Motels on TCM. Frank Zappa's wacky movie. Are you a fan of Zappa? No? Then you'll hate it. Unreleased on DVD.

5:15/6:15 am: The Curse of Frankenstein on AMC. Classic Frankenstein movie starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

7/8 am: Kiru on IFC (repeat at 1:50/2:50 pm). Samurai comedy! Yep.

8/9 am: Night of the Living Dead on SCIFI. Oh, you know this one already? You must have brains. Braaaaaaains.

11:30 pm/12:30 am: Catwoman on OXYGEN. Perhaps the scariest movie of the Halloween season. This movie has Halle Berry in the lead! (BWA-HA-HA!) And she’s trying to be sexy/sultry/non-robotic! (AAAAAAAH!) Actually, this is far too scary for anyone to view.

Sun, Oct 26:

12:45/1:45 am: The Honeymoon Killers on TCM. Brilliant and utterly repellent movie based on the true story of the Lonely Hearts Killers, who preyed on divorced women in the late 40s. Between this and Mad Men, you get the feeling that the mid-20th century wasn't such a great time to be an independent women.

7/8 am: The Ghost of Yotsuya on IFC. Ghosts! Samurais! Spurned Wives! Revenge!

10:00/11:00 am: The Flower of Evil on IFC. Directed by the Hitchcock-influenced Claude Chabrol. I haven't seen this one, but I run hot and cold on Chabrol movies.

1/2 pm: Kiss of Death on FMC. Fantastic film noir.

2:30/3:30 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. This isn't a great movie, but it has a few great - I'd go as far as "iconic" - scenes, most notably David Naughton's transformation into the title monster. Does AMC cut for content? I often skip movies showing on AMC because I hate watching commercials during films. And I don't know if the movies are running uncut with commercials or cut down for size. Let me know in comments if you have a better idea about what AMC is doing.

Mon, Oct 27 (ze spillover from Sunday):

1:30/2:30 am: Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Grey on TCM. Now this is a great movie, Dreyer’s 1932 vampire epic. One of the greatest vampire movies ever made, in fact, up there with Nosferatu. I don't know how it will look in this cut, but I believe that time and neglect have left all existing prints somewhat faded.

3/4 am: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte on AMC. Horror film starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Agnes Moorehead. Sounds like a recipe for overheated Southern goth to me, but it's pretty highly rated, so what do I know?

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.

Rose McGowan: TCM's Latest Essential

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

The Osborne-McGowan team has also torn through The Music Box and The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie that McGowan should probably remake, just so we can see her name on the posters next to that title. Of the selections coming up, McGowan is especially high on Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a hallucinatory masterpiece starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher. “It’s heavy-handed, sure, I get it. It’s just so smart. It’s very much a classic metaphor for the big person to proclaim for all to hear how Christian he is, and then there’s Lillian Gish, who probably only weighs about 90 pounds. … And she’s the quiet Christian, and it’s her behavior that speaks for her about her Christian belief.” Of the TCM gig itself, McGowan says, “I had no idea that they were even going to pay me. Seriously, a job where I get to sit and discuss these movies? Are you kidding me? I’ve been boring my friends for years!” One can't help but wonder how any lost soul could become so miserably jaded as to ever be bored by the sight of Rose McGowan rhapsodizing about Laurel and Hardy, but perhaps she has better tastes in movies than in friends. Rose, call us! We'll introduce you to some really cool new people at Trivia Night.

Vanishing Act: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.

For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation. Unknown filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez hit upon an ingenious plan for making the most of their microscopic budget, using the mockumentary format to not only justify their jittery digital images but to amp up the "you are there" horror of three amateur filmmakers encountering evil in the woods. The Blair Witch Project was also a pioneer in the realm of viral marketing, using the web to generate underground buzz over whether or not the film was "real." Its influence can be seen in two movies releasing this week: Teeth explicitly mentions Blair Witch in its TV ads, while Cloverfield appropriates both the shakycam immediacy and the viral approach.

When Blair Witch grossed an astonishing $140 million at the box office, it seemed that Myrick and Sanchez were sitting pretty. They had the good sense to steer clear of the stinkeroo sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, except as nominal executive producers. Their next announced collaboration, Heart of Love, was to be a complete change of pace, a screwball comedy described by Myrick in several interviews as "the most politically incorrect movie imaginable." Several web sites (now long defunct) were launched in hopes of recapturing the viral magic of their first collaboration, but the movie’s production was delayed over and over while the directors squabbled with distributor Artisan over Blair Witch profits and the project died quietly.

Despite their tiff with Artisan and mutual antipathy toward the failed Book of Shadows, Myrick and Sanchez toyed with making a Blair Witch prequel before finally going their separate ways. So what have they been up to lately?

This 2005 profile of Sanchez from the Baltimore City Paper finds him in pre-production on Probed, an “alien sci-fi horror monster movie” that was released straight to DVD as Altered in 2006. In a three-skull review (I think that’s a good thing), Fangoria.com notes that the effects-based set pieces are “a far cry from the psychological terrors of Blair Witch,” but that “Sanchez’s work on Altered shares with that previous film a keen sense of downward-spiral pacing.”

Myrick directed The Strand, which originally appeared as a series of webisodes about oddball characters on Venice Beach, CA, and Believers, a straight-to-video thriller about a dangerous cult. In this recent interview, Myrick discusses his new project The Objective, as well as the possibility of working with Sanchez again and maybe even reviving that Blair Witch prequel.