A nous la liberté (1931)

Finally found this (rather expensively) the other day after a hitherto fruitless search… René Clair’s third big early sound film. I was a bit unsure of this one, cos you may recall I wasn’t overly thrilled by his first one, Sous les toits de Paris, whereas I’d loved Le million (his second) when I saw it years ago… so I was wondering which side of that chasm I’d land on with this. And, as I perhaps should’ve expected, I landed somewhere in the middle, liking it more than the first though perhaps less than the second (which I really need to rewatch sometime and see how I find it now). I got the Criterion DVD, whose accompaying essay is a bit snide towards Chaplin (infamously accused, to Clair’s own horror, of having plagiarised this film in Modern Times), sniping at him for being afraid to make a real talkie. But Clair’s film is hardly a gabfest itself; indeed, although there are a number of dialogue scenes, I kept thinking that the film really could have been released as a silent (as much of the film seems to have been shot that way) with music & effects track like Modern Times, just cut intertitles into the bits with actual spoken dialogue… Anyway, unlike Sous les toits, this one had no evident tonal problems, it’s an unambiguous comedy, a bromance indeed; a tale of two convicts, one of whom escapes jail and becomes a successful industrialist, the other eventually becoming a worker at one of his factories. Through various incidents the two are reunited as the film progresses; by the end of the film both of them have become tramps, lost the women they loved (well, one of them loved anyway) and ultimately found their real true loves, i.e. each other, as they walk off down a rural road (looks like Chaplin “borrowed” that bit for Modern Times as well). A nous la liberté did feel kind of slight—I’m not sure I can easily dismiss the later criticisms about him being kind of lightweight—but also quite charming; there’s a lot of supposedly “weighty” films that I’d rather watch this again instead of any of them…

Georges Méliès: Encore—New Discoveries (1896-1911)

So I finally got my hands on the supplemental volume to Flicker Alley’s five-disc Méliès set, which I reviewed oh so long ago… this disc brings together no fewer than 25* shorts made between 1896 and 1911 that have been rediscovered since that big box first came out; I wish the DVD came with some information as to how these ones actually turned up and were identified. It’s a mixed bag of stuff, obviously, as was Méliès’ whole career, of course; we get news re-enactments, comedy, melodrama, and the expected assortment of trick films. Print quality is obviously variable as well; Under the Sea is only just watchable (being an umptieth-generation dupe that’s so contrasty and poorly defined the image borders on the abstract at times), while others look like they almost might have just been struck. And the films vary themselves; I didn’t like The Christmas Angel at all, which was like sub-par proto-Griffith (comedy and trickery were his fortes much more than serious melodrama seems to have been, if this and a few of the films on the big box are indicative), but Robert Macaire and Bertrand was great, a lovely little chase film. Some, like Off to Bloomingdale Asylum, with its literally black and white minstrels, are best described as bizarre. There is a lot of joy to be had here, and it’s delightful to see some of them in colour as well.

Interestingly, though the disc is otherwise without supplements, the Encore set includes a couple of Segundo de Chomon films as well, Magic Roses and Excursion to the Moon, that were apparently misattributed to Méliès for a long time. There’s still controversy in some quarters as to whether or not de Chomon was merely a Méliès copyist with better resources; certainly that was pretty much what Pathé wanted from him. I don’t know for sure, and these two shorts don’t clarify the issue; funnily enough, although Excursion is obviously a direct remake/knock-off of a certain Méliès film, neither of them actually felt like “Méliès” somehow. After watching a hundred-odd minutes of actual Méliès, these two felt very much like someone else’s work. Magic Roses in particular struck me as closer to the Pathé stencil colour films I’ve seen by Gaston Velle from the same period. Curious that they should’ve been mistaken for Méliès.

* 26, according to the packaging, but someone on IMDB notes that the film identified here as The Hallucinated Alchemist from 1897 is actually a shortened coloured print of The Mysterious Retort from 1906. Which struck me as odd, cos I’d have thought Lobster/FA would’ve noticed before releasing this set, but no, a quick comparison revealed this fellow is right. Still, maybe it’s the sort of thing that’s inevitable when dealing with a filmmaker who made so many films; imagine how hard it’d be to keep track of and distinguish them if they’d all survived…

Night of the Hunted (1980)

Conversely, I think this would be a poor introduction to Jean Rollin, which it nearly was for me… I have dim memories of SBS showing a Rollin film an awfully long time ago—probably late 90s—and I’m now fairly certain this was it. At that time I must’ve knew Rollin’s name at least cos I dimly remember thinking I should watch it… for whatever reason, though, I couldn’t get into it then—just lucky, perhaps, that it made so little impression on me that it wasn’t enough to put me off Rollin in future—and frankly I had trouble getting into it again tonight. Apparently it began with a proposal to make yet another hardcore film, but Rollin (understandably sick of the hardcore ghetto he was still largely stuck in) suggested the producer should let him make a real film (albeit one that would have a certain quantity of sex; the DVD contains two deleted hardcore scenes, though not the ones the producer later added) on a porno budget instead. The end result was even less obviously “Rollin” than Grapes of Death; the usual resonances are harder to find and setting the film mostly in a large tower block deprives us of Rollin’s usual gift for locations (at least until the very end, whose staging on a railway viaduct is certainly kind of startling). But the tower is, to be sure, right for the story; it’s an incarceration point for a group of people affected by a radiation leak that’s somehow made them literally lose their minds, and they’re essentially being kept there to prevent panic breaking out (and to be quietly disposed of). Actually not a bad plot or anything (even if the science perplexes me a bit; can radiation exposure actually affect memory like that?), there’s a certain amount of 70s paranoid thriller vibe behind this one. I don’t know, though, something just doesn’t feel right about the execution and I don’t know what it is… The shoot was not entirely happy (largely thanks to the death before production of a key performer) and Rollin later remembered it as one of his worst films. Which is probably overstating it a bit, but Night of the Hunted certainly didn’t impress me like his other films have. Still, I know it has its defenders (q.v.) and maybe a second viewing later might click better.

The Grapes of Death (1978)

It’s not the most prepossessing title for a horror film, is it? And yet somehow it turned out to be that rare beast in Jean Rollin’s filmography, an actual reasonable commercial success… enough so, at least, that he was able to partly finance Fascination with some of the money this made. This found him at an interesting point in his career, finally trying to claw his way out of the porno ghetto he’d been stuck in for some years; as Tim Lucas’ booklet essay observes, those years of experience informed this production as well, in that he’d arguably learned to be a less personal filmmaker when necessity dictated. And, to be sure, Grapes is much less overtly “Rollin” than his previous works, much more straightforward and, notably, much more gory; Rollin later said he didn’t like gore, so its presence here is a significant departure (and, it should be added, predates the extreme gore boom that would come in the next few years). Lucas finds echoes of early Cronenberg and even David Durston, but I think far more obvious reference points are Romero’s The Crazies and Jorge Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie; put them together, transplant it to French wine country, and you just about have Rollin’s tale of people going berserk thanks to wine poisoned by pesticide. Which is not to say that it’s not still a “Rollin film”, mind you; it may lack some of the usual signifiers (no beach in Dieppe!), but there’s some of the same cast and crew and the same overall mood. The film’s air of greater realism is only relative, in some ways; the night-time footage definitely recalled earlier efforts for me, and though the film doesn’t lack incident (though I can see some people whining that it could’ve done with more) the overall sombre mood seems to be the greater consideration. Better budgeted than most of his films, Grapes makes good use of resources and setting and the net result is damned creepy stuff (watch with the lights off)… and it is very good, one of his best actually, but I kind of wish it had been a bit more “Rollin”. Still, being a comparatively conventional horror while still retaining at least some characteristics might make it a palatable introduction to Rollin for some people (it’s the only Rollin title on that Top 500 Horror list, which is interesting). Once they look past the title, anyway…

Upcoming: Peter Cushing centennial blogathon

This is being run later this month at the Frankensteinia blog, and I reckon I’ll add a few posts to it myself like I did the Italo-horror blogathon last year. Click the above image to go there.

The Devil’s Needle (1916)

This is the only film of the three in the Devil’s Needle set to have a happy (well, broadly happy) ending, and is probably the best of the three too, although that’s a fairly relative description, really… As with Inside of WST, it’s hard to give a proper appraisal of the thing, albeit for different reasons; the print is substantially intact (if quite badly decayed), only one scene apparently missing, but it’s not the film 1916 audiences saw. Instead, it’s the film 1923 audiences saw, an altered version reissued to cash in on the later stardom of Norma Talmadge and, more grotesquely, the recent death of Wallace Reid, Hollywood’s first great drug casualty. As such, it’s arguably the most genuinely “exploitation” thing here, but to what extent is that the fault of the film itself, i.e. the film as it was originally made as opposed to how it was re-released? (Also, what did 1923 audiences make of it? Did they know it wasn’t exactly fresh even then? “Hmm, this looks and moves suspiciously like a film from the last decade…”) I don’t know exactly what was done to the film to boost Talmadge’s originally smaller role, and the original 1916 version appears to be gone for good, so we’ll have to take the film as it stands. Anyway, Tully Marshall plays an artist, Talmadge his model; the latter is hooked on something thanks to the stresses of “wartime service” (an obvious attempt at updating the film, which was of course made a year *before* America’s belated entry into the adventures in Europe) and she manages to hook him on it as well. Melodrama ensues, of course, a bit more OTT than in the other two films; The Devil’s Needle struck me as being more “of its time” than them, too. Something about it felt like, well, a 1910s view of drug addiction, particularly one held by someone who didn’t know an awful lot about it (does anyone, let alone junkies, stick needles in themselves quite like that?)… It came from D.W. Griffith’s Triangle stable, and though he only produced, it still bears a certain influence from him (the last-minute rescue business especially). It’s not bad on the whole, even if I’m baffled by Marshall’s romantic appeal, but, like the set as a whole, more of a historical curiosity than anything…

Children of Eve (1915)

Making my somewhat slow way through Kino’s The Devil’s Needle and Other Tales of Vice and Redemption, this film has a bit more of the latter than the former. Children is a social message story, or so it at least would like you to think; much like the last film we saw, what really beats at the heart of this thing is melodrama rather than any real interest in seriously critiquing the shabby industrial practices it depicts. There’s a family story to be told here! Never mind the problems of capitalism… Anyway, our story begins in the tenements, young upcoming businessman begets illegitimate child on the Broadway floozy in the next apartment; dad grows up to be a successful factory owner who adopts his nephew on his brother’s death, while mum dies in the tenements, baby is brought up by someone else and has fallen in with Bad People. Meanwhile, dad is not only rich, he’s turned into a prick, and nephew grows up to kind of fight people like him and stand up for the Little People he’s exploiting. Film proceeds, boy meets girl, boy reforms girl, girl joins in the good fight, catastrophe strikes in the climax, a factory fire (based on this) which is probably the one really good thing about the film… DVD booklet notes call director John H. Collins a rising star of American cinema whose short career was abruptly terminated by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918; obviously I only have this to go on—I rather doubt that many if any of his other films even exist now—but this doesn’t give me a “rising star” impression. Certainly Collins doesn’t seem to have been terribly bothered about getting subtle performances from his actors; maximum melodrama and bluntly Christian piety instead… Still, interesting to see things culminate in another tragic ending, and it does bear out some of the things said on that Edison boxset I reviewed a long time ago about Edison gradually moving from his fairly sensational early kinetoscope shorts to more respectable fare that wouldn’t unduly trouble anyone (like censors). Which, ultimately, may be this film’s real problem, it doesn’t seem to want to try hard enough to bother the viewer beyond making them tut-tut the naughty capitalist, and the rest of the film is a bit too meh to be enough to compensate…

The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913)

It was strangely instructive to watch this today after seeing Black Love last night. Not that it’s comparable in any way, really, everyone is fully white and fully clothed in this film, but it’s amusing to see a basically exploitative product would trying to pretend it’s nothing of the sort nearly six decades before last night’s film, going out of its way to list a number of authorities to back up its probably doubtful credentials (damned if I can find anything about producer “Samuel H. London”, other than that he wrote at least one other film for Frank Beal, the director of this one). It is, of course, basically a melodrama with subject matter that would’ve been quite hot for 1913; indeed there was a small raft of “white slavery” films at that time (Traffic in Souls came out the same year), of which this was apparently the most notorious back then… unfortunately, only about half the film apparently still exists (in very rough shape, too), so it’s hard to fully appraise. Still, the extant evidence suggests the film might not actually have been as lurid as it could easily have been even for 1913 (obviously it would’ve been far more overt a few decades later). In fact, if it weren’t for the obviously American locations (and the extensive location work—which I presume came about because indie producers London and Beal just didn’t have the resources to do much otherwise—is probably the most striking thing about the film a century later; real sociologists and historians could have quite some fun with it), you could almost mistake the film for a European production… although the thing is a melodrama at heart, the overall tone of it is relatively matter-of-fact, and the eventual unhappy ending is decidedly un-American (the Russians being far more fond of that sort of thing back then). Hard to fully judge, then, cos too much of the film is lost to permit a proper judgement, but not without interest. And you can’t not like a film that includes its own glossary of trafficker code (“you too can talk like a real pimp!”)…

Black Love (1971)

This is the one uncle Herschell wanted to stay lost, and, in fairness, I can kind of understand why. Having been lost for decades, there were apparently mixed reports of what the film actually was—Lewis goes blaxploitation?—and, lo and behold, it’s hardcore! Despite Lewis saying he never did hardcore and left filmmaking so he wouldn’t have to, well, he did this one at least… he’s not actually credited as director, but neither is he on a number of his other films, including the other two in the “lost films” set, so I don’t think that means anything. Still, his lack of enthusiasm for hardcore can be divined from the film even so; other reviews I’ve read of this set think the other two films show him unhappy even just doing softcore, and he doesn’t seem any more excited by doing the hard stuff. No wonder he’s tried to deny directing it. Anyway, the film itself proves to be what they used to call a “white coater”, or a (pseudo-)documentary about sex trying to pretend its scenes of people fucking have educational or sociological value. The opening narration is at pains to deny that Black Love is just the hardcore sex film that it is; what lessons, then, are we to take from it? Well, apparently a black man puts his penis in a black woman’s vagina. Black people do it doggystyle. Black people like fellatio. Black people like foreplay. Black people like changing position during sex. Black people like dancing naked. Black people like fucking in cars. Black people learn how to do it when they’re young by watching other adult black people do it (really, if the other two films in this set have their morally grey bits, this one goes WAY beyond either of them at a couple of points). I don’t know about anyone else, but the cumulative effect of all this information was to make me wonder how white people do it by comparison. Needless to say, it’s not only as exploitative as all hell, there’s a whiff of racism to the whole thing, though the latter aspect of the film is possibly complicated by the fact that Lewis’ producer, the R.L. Smith whose name Lewis apparently took to hide his own directorial (dis)credit, was himself black. Yet again, a film you can hardly call “good” as such, yet it’s hard to actively dislike somehow, possibly because it’s so transparently absurd. I don’t suppose anyone actually ever watched this for its educational value; I just kind of hope they didn’t watch it to get off, either…

Linda and Abilene (1969)

OK, so I had a bit of a go at Herschell Gordon Lewis in the last review for the, er, slapdash character of his films. Conversely, this second film from the “lost films” set almost looks as if actual care was taken with it; maybe it’s because Lewis apparently had slightly more money than usual to spend on it, but for some reason the trademark long master shots in this film look like a deliberate attempt at being “artistic” rather than just crummy technique like they do in his other films… or maybe it’s the grindingly slow pace and wispy, minimal narrative… or maybe it’s the incest angle, which I can imagine being given this sort of languorous treatment in an actual European arthouse film of the period. Or maybe I’m just misreading it, cos the film was otherwise essentially exploitative in its origins, part of an end of 60s trend combining the western with the sex film that Lewis’ producer wanted to cash in on. Here, Abilene and Tod(d) are two nice young people in the old west whose parents have just died and left the two siblings all alone, and, well, I did mention the “i” word just then, didn’t I… Tod(d) witnesses Abilene bathing nude in the creek, and before you can say “taboo” both of them are having dirty thoughts about each other. Then acting on them. Yikes. Once again, the actual sex business (when the film finally gets around to same) is softcore as such—if Harry kept his underpants on in the last film, Tod(d) keeps his jeans on in this one—but, well, yikes anyway. Then Tod(d) suddenly realises they shouldn’t be doing this and goes to town, where he meets local floozy Linda (and thereby finally renders the film’s title actually relevant to its contents)… and Abilene meets local rapist Rawhide. We’re set for the traditional western showdown and the less traditional western lesbian clinch when the two girls finally meet… I don’t know, this is kind of an odd one. Like I said, it almost gives the impression that Lewis was trying to actually take something like care with the film, to create something a bit more serious than the average sexploiter (there’s a distinct unpleasantness to the whole affair in marked contrast with the casual jokiness of Ecstasies). Still, as I also said, maybe I’m reading too much into the thing; although the film gave me that impression, this is Herschell Gordon Lewis we’re dealing with, and not even I would be foolish enough to ascribe actual artistic intentions to anything he did…