The Screengrab : fay wray

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)

If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)

Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.

ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)

When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.

ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)

An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.

ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)

The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.

DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.

ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

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

Remake vs. Original: Kong vs. Kong vs. Kong

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

After marveling at the remarkably rendered 1930s New York of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, I got a mad craving to go back and revisit my first Kong...not the 1933 classic, but the 1976 version I saw as part of a long-ago birthday field trip, sitting uncomfortably close to my grandmother while naked Skull Island native boobies bounced gloriously on one of the big, wide screens of the late, lamented Westgate Cinema in beautiful, balmy Brockton, Massachusetts.

Even more recently, my wife rented the original as part of her own private ongoing Netflix survey course of film history, allowing me to compare all three apes in a cinematic steel cage match. Which film is The King of Kong? Let’s check the scorecard!

THE BEAST:

It’s the eternal question: stop-motion, CGI or a guy in a monkey suit? The original Kong was groundbreaking and iconic. Peter Jackson’s ape was fearsome and expressive and goofed around on an icy pond. And, as Dino De Laurentiis promised vis-à-vis his bicentennial version: “When Jaws dies, nobody cries. When Kong dies, they all cry.” To be honest, this race is too close to call, so I’ll go with the chimp that started it all. Advantage: Original.

THE BEAUTY:

Jessica Lange, God bless her, is automatically disqualified for playing a character named “Dwan.” Naomi Watts delivered a charming, well-rounded performance as Ann Darrow, generating about a hundred times more chemistry with her simian co-star than she did with Sean Penn in 21 Grams. But as good as she was, Dr. Frank-N-Furter didn’t sing about Naomi Watts in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He sang about the one-and-only iconic Fay Wray. Advantage: Original.

THE HERO:

A little Adrian Brody goes a long way for me, and I don’t remember much about Bruce Cabot’s performance as Jack Driscoll in the original (other than it was perfectly fine). But, c’mon...Jeff Bridges on Skull Island in a crazy Amish beard? The Dude abides. Advantage: 1976.

THE SHOWMAN:

Jack Black gave a fine, relatively understated performance as Carl Denham in the 2005 version, and Robert Armstrong totally owns the classic line, “It was beauty killed the beast.” But I have to say I’m partial to Charles Grodin’s oilman turned showman for providing the classic Kong story with a truly hissable villain...plus he’s the only one who gets squashed by a giant ape foot. Advantage: 1976.

SKULL ISLAND:

The 1976 version featured the aforementioned naked breastices, and Kong’s battle with the dinosaurs in Peter Jackson’s remake was insanely exciting, but the original directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack achieved the same level of wonder and excitement with a quarter of the technology. Bonus points for Noble Johnson’s portrayal of the Skull Island chief, the only truly dignified, humane and memorable “native” character in any version of Kong. Advantage: Original.

THE SHOWDOWN:

Kong’s original battle with the biplanes atop the Empire State Building is classic movie magic, and Kong’s battle with helicopters on and around the Twin Towers now sadly packs an emotional wallop it didn’t originally possess, but I could have spent hours drinking in Peter Jackson’s obsessively detailed CGI New York, even without the breathtaking action in the foreground. Advantage: 2005.

And so, after tallying the votes, the winner is...ORIGINAL!

Stay tuned for next week’s exciting Original vs. Remake smackdown (in honor of the release of The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector's Edition DVD box set): Sinatra's Eleven vs. Clooney's Eleven!

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.