The Screengrab : raquel welch

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 11-17, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Hey there, Screengrab readers. Joe the Plumber here. You don’t want to know the details, believe me, but there’s been an unusual toilet incident here at Screengrab headquarters and I’ve been called in to take care of the situation. It’s cool, I don’t mind helping these guys out because they pay cash under the table. No taxes! But they did ask if I wouldn’t mind handling the Highlight Reel while I’m here. I’ll admit, I don’t usually read the Screengrab – I’m more of a Modern Materialist guy – but they slipped me a few extra bucks, so what the hell. Here’s the best stuff I saw this week:

They did a decent job with the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight), although I personally would have included Raquel Welch. Always had a thing for her. And this list of the Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Parts One and Two) is all right, but where’s For Your Eyes Only? That Sheena Easton had some pipes – and I know from pipes!

I don’t get out to the pictures much, so I probably won’t see W. and What Just Happened, but I am looking forward to that new Star Trek. Does anyone know if it has tribbles in it? I never saw Cockfighter, My Neighbor Totoro, Swept Away or Boiler Room – but I’ve seen my share of boiler rooms, let me tell you!

Aw, jeez, this toilet is bad news. What is that green stuff? Anyway, I gotta wrap this up, but if you’re interested in Tony Curtis’s book, Oliver Stone movies, the Saw amusement park ride or Jabba the portly Irish gent, go read about ‘em.

Oh, and this isn’t funny. These are tools, not weapons.

Film Poetry: Joseph Moncure March and the Roots of "The Set-Up"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Writing in The Hudson Review (sixty years young this year, hey guys, happy birthday!), Jefferson Hunter examines the poet Joseph Moncure March and his 1928 book-length narrative poem The Set-Up, which in 1949 would become a classic minor noir of the same name, directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan as a washed-up boxer with one last fight left in him. Not a lot of tense urban melodramas include the on-screen credit "based on the poem by..." But as Hunter makes clear, March was a peculiar kind of specialist, an ambitious writer who appreciated the qualities of movies and, trying to raise those qualities to literature, decided that the best way to go about it was through stories told in extended verse. He was wrong, and is now remembered only as a pop culture oddity, a relic of 1920s culture from the moment when it became self-referential, and one who tried to point writing and the movies down a path that they, not unreasonably, choose not to follow. (The writers who really had an impact on movies, and who brought the impact of the movies into writing in an influential way at that time, were Hemingway and the hard-boiled toughs who were boiling everything down to action and dialogue.)

March got so excited about his mission to wring art from the movies that, after The Set-Up landed on the best seller list and was bought by Hollywood, he actually lit out for the West Coast and took a screenwriting job. But as Robert E. Lee Pruitt used to say, just cause a man loves a thing don't mean it's got to love him back, and after jobs on James Whale's Journey's End and Howard Hawks's Hell's Angels, his career petered out in a string of justly forgotten movies. (Some of these show him trying to elevate the masses by watering down high culture, as with the 1932 Madame Butterfly, starring Sylvia Sidney and a young Cary Grant in a non-musical version of the opera, so that you can really concentrate on the soppy plot.) March was not invited to work on the movie version of The Set-Up, which didn't happen until after his career at the big studios was effectively over. By the time the movie was made (with Art Cohn credited with the script), he might have had trouble recognizing his baby anyway. The poem is a modern tragedy about an aging black boxer named Pansy, who has some problems. For starters, he's an aging black boxer, and his name is "Pansy." March intended the poem as an indictment of racism, making it clear ("Pansy had the stuff/ But his skin was brown") that, because of it, his hero would never be given the break that his talent should have earned him. (Unfortunately, March seems to have been one of those white liberal artists who are scornful of racism in others but seek to mythologize African-Americans as something other than human: trying to convey Pansy's physical dangerousness, he likens him to a "missing link", "something to catch and cage...that belonged to a Jungle Age.") The poem ends with this "savage cat" of a man fighting a gangster in a subway tunnel. Pansy goes over the edge of the platform and, March writes, "The train screeched/And struck. THE END." As Michael O'Donoghue once wrote in National Lampoon, there are no situations that the writer in search of an ending can't resolve with a variant on the sentence, "And then suddenly he was run over by a truck."

In the movie, the hero, who is too old and broken-down to keep his career going but too proud to take a fall, is called Stoker, and is white. This change may have cut the guts out of March's conception, but as Hunter points out, it has a major compensatory effect: it means that he gets to be played by Robert Ryan. Ryan, with his gaunt, haunted look, and the presence of a man who might have been a Roman emperor before his bookkeeper stopped returning his calls and the repo van showed up, gave a performance that ranks with one of his finest; he's the single best explanation for why the movie is so much better-remembered to day than the book. Although Hunter calls March's work "a noir poem", the movie's classification as a boxing noir may have more to do with the emotions expressed by Ryan's suffering face and body than by the grinding mechanics of the plot, which pull up short from having Stoker killed: the gangsters who maul him may have finished his career, but he still has the loving wife who is embracing him in the final shot, and who clearly regards the fact that Stoker will never get into the ring again as a happy development. Hunter reports that the film's producer, Richard Goldstone, " reasoned that if Stoker were killed, he would be 'left without any problem. Whereas if he survived, he couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything, but had vindicated his manhood, it was a triumph rather than defeat, spiritually.' ”

The same year that The Set-Up was published, March published another book-length story poem, The Wild Party, and though Hunter is kind enough not to dwell on it, that poem too has had a complicated life that includes a movie version, which came out in 1975, two years before March died. The poem is a Jazz Age blow-out describing all the seamy, sordid affairs at the titular throwdown hosted by Queenie, a sort of Jean Harlow from Hell, and his thuggish lover, Burrs. In 1994, Art Spiegelman saw to the re-publication of a new edition which featured his own illustrations and a pull quote from William S. Burroughs, who insisted that March's poem was the work that had made him want to become a writer. If you ever meet anybody who claims that the 1975 movie, which was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, made him want to become a filmmaker, do the right thing and push him off a subway platform. The film, which was made before Ivory/Merchant productions became synonymous with respectfully upholstered adaptations of classic literature, is a misguided exercise in anti-nostalgia that turns Queenie (Raquel Welch) into the petulant bedmate of a Fatty Arbuckle-like silent film star, Jolly Grimm (James Coco), who's throwing the party to grease the wheels for his comeback. (In a clip we see of his new masterpiece, Coco, wearing missionary's robes and a Moe Howard haircut, is stuffed into a cookpot by African savages despite his protesting that "You can't boil me! I'm a friar!") The movie features snippets of March's poem being read on the soundtrack by a narrator who sounds as if he's due to be shot at dawn, and there are also bits of faux-twenties songs that analyze the characters, providing such helpful insights as, "Funny man! Trying so hard to be funny! Is it because if we knew the real you, we might frown?" (Is that what it sounds like inside Jay Leno's head?) More recently, the poem actually managed to inspire two different musicals that opened near-simultaneously, one on Broadway and the other off-Broadway, in 2000. Both are said to have been better than the movie, but then the only way that they could have been any worse would have been if the chorus lines had departed the stage to repeatedly kick every single member of the audience in the crotch.

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The new release 10,000 B.C. revives a genre that some of us thought was long past reviving, the dawn-of-man cave people melodrama. The new movie's director, Roland Emmerich, is a technophile size freak who probably thinks that the latest developments in computer animation and other special effects make it a great time to visualize a chaotic, untamed planet overrun with strange forms of wildlife threatening actors who are modeling proposed hair styles for Rob Zombie — though my recollection is that, in the past, the whole point of these movies was to showcase a rising performer (such as Victor Mature, star of the 1940 One Million B.C., or Raquel Welch, star of its 1966 remake) who seems made to be photographed wearing a loincloth. Anyway, this genre received its knockout blow more than twenty-five years ago, in Caveman, filmed in Mexico by the director Carl Gottlieb, who also co-wrote the script with Rudy DeLuca. Gottlieb is a well-travelled show business jack-of-all-trades whose career includes a stint with the '60s improv-comedy troupe the Committee, various acting gigs, and partial authorship of the script of Jaws (as well as full authorship of its making-of book). Gottlieb made his film directing debut with the 1977 Steve Martin short The Absent-Minded Waiter, but Caveman was his first time behind the camera on a feature film. It remains his only feature, maybe because he's yet to find a project that might count as a worthy follow-up to directing a cast, all speaking "prehistoric" gibberish, that included Ringo Starr, John Matuszak, and a stoned Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ringo plays Atouk, the sad-sack misfit of a tribe of cave folk led by — or, rather, bullied and pushed around by — Tonda, played by the towering, fiercely bearded Matuszak. Atouk graduates from loser to outcast when he enrages Tonda by lusting after the big guy's lady, Barbara Bach. (This was the movie where Ringo and Bach met. They were married before it was released to theaters, and in a month they'll be celebrating their twenty-seventh anniversary. Tip your hats, people.) The resourceful Ringo takes advantage of his new freedom to assemble his own rival tribe, which includes Dennis Quaid, Carl Lumbly, the great Jack Gilford and, as Gilford's daughter and Ringo's eventual love interest, a very charming, pre-Cheers Shelley Long. He also discovers fire, music, advanced weaponry, and the pleasures of standing upright. (He proceeds to convert his friends, grabbing them from behind as if administering the Heimlich maneuver and yanking their spines straight to the accompaniment of a terrific cracking noise.) The whole thing has a playful, friendly quality, and the good guys are pretty close to irresistable. The bad guys are no slouches themselves; the late Matuszak gets to demonstrate an all-out slapstick aplomb that Hollywood seldom bothered to tap during his acting career, and Bach, strutting about in her fur bikini, was accurately described by one reviewer, Michael Sragow, as looking like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life. Mixed in among the people are a quartet of stop-motion dinosaurs, including the aforementioned T-rex, who are very ready for their close-ups. Will 10,000 B.C. reveal that its makers have learned anything from Ringo and company? It remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that if Roland Emmerich understood anything about the appeal of stop-motion dinosaurs, he never would have made Godzilla.

Video of the Day: We'll See Your Ten Thousand And Raise You a Million

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Roland Emmerich's new movie, 10,000 B.C., opens wide this Friday, and advance reports are... well, advance reports are that it stinks on ice age. Maybe it's because of the script and production problems Emmerich has been complaining about to anyone who will listen, or maybe it's the no-name cast, or maybe it's that Roland Emmerich is a giant hack who can't figure out how to make a movie where he can't blow things up with a fighter jet. But whatever the case, the only interesting thing about the movie so far is the hilariously overwrought internet message board debates it's spawned between atheists offended by the use of the term "B.C." and Christians offended by the portrayal of human evolution.

However, even if the movie turns out to be a colossal dud, it likely won't be as rotten as its spiritual forebear, 1966's epically stupid One Million Years B.C. In cast you've never seen it, we've thoughtfully provided you with the trailer, below. Thrill as caveman Tumak defeats a giant box turtle! Scream as the cave tribes are threatened by stock footage of a volcano and a barrage of styrofoam boulders! Ogle as Raquel Welch, already squandering her superstar status, stomps around in a leather bikini! The fact that Emmerich is rehashing this trash is pretty suggestive proof that maybe evolution really is a big sham after all.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)

The title character, played by George Segal, is a brilliant computer programmer who suffers from epileptic seizures and Acute Disinhibitory Lesion (ADL) syndrome. He has begun experiencing blackouts, and he's gotten in trouble with the law because of violent beatings he's inflicted on people while his cerebral cortex was out to lunch. Looking to help the poor guy out, doctors implant electrodes in his brain and hook them up to a miniature computer implanted in his neck. All this is meant to control his seizures and help prevent him from behaving violently, but Segal goes off his meds, the computer malfunctions, and the next thing you know, he's a misfiring killing machine, lurching about the city laying waste to people and waterbeds, and driven even crazier by his "delusion" that computers are taking over the world and waging war on the human race, a species of paranoia for which he himself could now serve as Exhibit A. After The Terminal Man was released, its message about the dangers of computers was taken to heart by everyone who saw it, the U.S. government banned any further development of computer technology, and Steve Jobs became a street musician. You are reading this on one of those new-fangled text-messaging abacuses.

SSSSSSS (1973)

Back in the early 1970s, when concern about global climate change was such an obscure topic that Al Gore was still jacking up the air conditioner to "frosty" and demanding to know "When the hell does it warm up around here?", Dr. Carl Stoner was on the case. Doc Stoner, played by the much-loved and deeply untrustworthy character actor Strother Martin, suspects that a new Ice Age might be coming, and he has his own radical plan for helping the human race to adjust to changing circumstances: he's working on a serum that will turn us all into king cobras. Unfortunately, the good doctor leaves himself open to charges that he lets his personal feelings guide his scientific process: he selects as his first test subject Dirk Benedict (later known as Face on The A-Team), who just happens to have been sniffing around the doctor's young daughter, played by Heather Menzies, who's beautiful when she takes off her glasses. (This being an early-70s exploitation movie, she ends up taking off a lot more than her glasses.) Soon Benedict is stumbling around the lab with a greenish complexion, scaly flaking skin, and his hair falling out, which in my experience would be enough to ensure that Heather Menzies would cut him off even if he didn't wind up turning into a snake.

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Generally speaking, sexually transformative surgery has gotten a bad rap in the movies; Ed Wood did very little to glamorize the field with his 1953 first feature, Glen or Glenda (A.K.A. I Changed My Sex), where the whole point seemed to be to transform a repressive society to make it acceptable for men with pencil-line moustaches to indulge their passion for Angora sweaters. Things hadn't gotten much better by the early seventies, when the writer-director Michael Sarne (compared by one of his colleagues to "a wolf with rabies") committed this blasphemous version of Gore Vidal's classic Pop novel. In Sarne's telling, Myron, played by film writer and Gong Show staple Rex Reed, goes under the knife and comes out as Myra, played by Raquel Welch. It would take a special commission composed of cooler heads than my own to decide whether, for the patient, that amounts to a step forward, a step back, or a lateral move. Incidentally, the surgeon is played by the venerable John Carradine, who must have felt comfortable in the role, because two years later, he played the medical sex researcher in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, who was engaged in such nefarious pursuits as "taking the brain from the head of a lesbian and putting it in the body of a man who works for the telephone company."

RABID (1977)

No list of movie medical mishaps would be complete without a bow to the work of David Cronenberg. In his debut feature, the 1975 Shivers (A.K.A. They Came from Within), a doctor working with parasitic transplants that he hopes will liberate an overly straitlaced society succeeds so well that he turns a Montreal apartment complex into a mindless rolling orgy that sets out, at the end of the movie, to infect the larger world. In his 1979 The Brood, a maverick psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) coaches his prize pupil into channeling her unresolved anger until she begins literally giving birth to murderous creatures who are pure products of her rage. Rabid is sort of the worst of both worlds, plus maybe a few more worlds you never would have thought of without David's kind help. Porn actress Marilyn Chambers plays an accident victim who winds up in the hands of a plastic surgeon looking to try out an experimental skin grafting technique. It somehow causes her to grow a phallus-like organ beneath her armpit, which she uses to impale people and feed, vampire-like, on their blood. Her victims in turn become frothing, murderous lunatics, who run amok like the infected people in Shivers, except not as friendly. If there's a common theme running through Cronenberg's early work, it may be the message, "Even if you don't like his movies, you can at least take heart that, thank God, he didn't become a doctor!"

SPECIAL BONUS BEST-- BEST PROGRAM OF MEDICAL REFORM:

THE HOSPITAL (1971)

This black comedy, written by Paddy Chayefsky, is set in a beleaguered Manhattan teaching hospital that's going to the dogs. The Chief of Medicine, Dr. Herbert Beck (George C. Scott), has to deal not only with the "radiant" bungling of his staff (exemplified by a pompous, strutting quack named Welbeck) but with a mysterious string of deaths among his staff members, whose bodies keep turning up in hospital beds and sprawled across chairs in the emergency waiting room. It's all right, though: it turns out that the staff members are being picked off by a saintly madman (Bernard Hughes) who, having suffered as a patient in the hospital, has been sort-of-murdering the doctors by putting them in situations where they'd be all right if they were subjected to timely care and basic competence, which he recognizes as supremely unlikely. Learning the truth, Dr. Beck points this reformer in the direction of Dr. Welbeck and wishes him godspeed.

Click here for Part 1.