The Cameraman's Revenge

Douglas Sirk is one of those filmmakers who I know are widely admired by critics and all that, but who I’ve somehow never really been able to summon up enough interest to actually explore, and my one prior attempt to engage with him (Written on the Wind) was not a particularly happy one. Still, I’ve got some of his films from the library, and I thought I’d start with what is arguably his most atypical film (albeit the film he once claimed was his favourite), i.e. his only western… a 3D western at that. Obviously the DVD I watched tonight was flat, but it was easy enough to imagine in 3D, I could see quite easily what the gimmick shots were (though they’re not too offensively “out there”). As for the story, well, Cochise had a son called Taza and that’s where the film’s historical accuracy seems to end; in the film Taza pursues his late old man’s policy of peace with the white man, to the extent of wearing the white army’s uniform as part of his “reservation police” duties, but faces resistance from his brother Naiche (who’s still all about fighting the power) and the mistrust of some of his white “superiors”. When the infamous Geronimo is captured and left on the Apache reservation, it can only mean further trouble, which it does in short order. Curious film, which I wouldn’t call “reactionary” like one IMDB commenter does, it’s not really anti-Indian, yet its sympathies for the latter do seem limited to Taza, who is, after all, on “our” side. The DVD transfer was also fairly middling, which didn’t help it much; obviously it’s atypical Sirk, like I said, but it could’ve been an interesting look at how he used all-natural locations and colour rather than studio artifice if only you could’ve seen them better. A pretty ho-hum experience, all things considered.

For years I’ve suspected the Cannes Film Festival is hardly the shining showcase of the best in world cinema it’d like us to think it is, and Maniac—which made its world debut there in May 1980—is surely sufficient evidence of this by itself. I was watching Mark Gatiss’ excellent History of Horror series the other day (thank you YouTube, no thank you Australian TV), and he talks in that about how the success of Halloween opened the door to loads of other cheap and nasty films about people getting killed, and Maniac is the exact sort of film he meant… Except that, on some level, there’s a kind of perverse sincerity underlying the thing; star Joe Spinell wrote the script and seems to have believed in it strongly as a serious product (it was Spinell who insisted the film played Cannes, according to the commentary). And I think on this repeat viewing I did actually sense something in it I didn’t get from it first time round some years ago, i.e. a feeling that this actually could have been a good, interesting piece of work. Unfortunately what we got instead was, well, Maniac. At this remove, I don’t know that it still has the power to provoke the excoriation it had poured upon it back in the day (the DVD reproduces a magnificent letter from the Philippines film censor amongst other outbursts of moral outrage); it’s a film that’s still hugely unpleasant in various ways (mind you, though the charges of misogyny are hard to deny, I’m not sure it’s any worse in that respect than most other examples of the slasher), but not really well made enough to merit the sort of passionate opposition to it that it scored way back when. Spinell is, I will admit, the chief reason to watch Maniac (other than Tom Savini’s gore effects); as for director Bill Lustig, he’s made a far greater contribution to the cinematic world as chief of Blue Underground than he did with this film…

When I watched The Quatermass Xperiment yesterday, it was for the first time in probably nearly a decade, but I’d never seen the sequel at all before tonight. Happy to report the wait was worth it. Obviously the success of the first film meant a follow-up was evidently desirable, to which end a film called X the Unknown was written as a sequel, but Nigel Kneale objected to his character being used in it, so Hammer rewrote that film and got the screen rights for Kneale’s actual second Quatermass story instead. At least this time Kneale also got to write the early version of the film script, though again he was unhappy with the casting of Brian Donlevy as Quatermass. Which is a little sad, cos Donlevy’s markedly better here than in Xperiment; the character is a bit less abrasive here, and rather more sorely beset by the situation he’s now in (aliens invading Earth, taking over village, etc), perhaps not as in command, but at the same time he seems like a more active participant in this film than he did in the first. Looking at it now, it’s a goddamn shame the film was apparently so hard to get hold of for so long, cos its profile should be a lot higher; if not quite a classic, it’s damn close to one. Val Guest thunders through proceedings at quite some speed, resulting in a film that’s tighter than the first one (and that wasn’t exactly slack) and somewhat heavier on the action (there’s still something startling about the scene where Quatermass runs down a “possessed” guard); I’ve said often enough about the comparative economy of storytelling in older films compared with more recent ones, and Guest rather proves my point here. Another terrific example of this sort of film; I look forward to revisiting Quatermass and the Pit…

The other day I picked up the Quatermass Double Bill DVD featuring the first two Hammer adaptations of the BBC’s Quatermass TV serials, so that’s what I’ll be looking at over the next day or two… I also have the big Hammer Collection box with Q. and the Pit, so I’ll look at that when I start going through that set. Meanwhile, here we are at the beginnings of Hammer Horror… of the three Hammer films, this is obviously the hardest to compare with the TV original, as most of the latter is lost. That said, it’s obviously quite a reduction of the original, which would’ve lasted over three hours in total compared with the eighty-odd minutes of the film, though this is true of all the Quatermass films, and we do know series creator Nigel Kneale was unhappy with some of the changes made—most notably the ending—and loathed Brian Donlevy’s performance in the title role. And yet I’m not sure I share his disappointments, Val Guest was probably right about his ending working better on film, and I actually quite like Donlevy’s bluntness and science-marches-on-regardless arrogance (having just narrowly disposed of the monster his experiment in rocketry brought to Earth, what else does he do but launch another one); it’s not the same as the TV version, but it works here. By this time Hammer had a fair track record of adapting TV and radio series to the big screen as double bill programmers, and had dabbled in science fiction before, but the horror angle here was new for them, and the money it made at the box office (remember the original series had been a major hit too, and the release of the film was nicely timed to just precede the broadcast of the second series) obviously convinced them it was a direction to pursue further. A splendid example of a basically well-made B thriller, nice to see this again.

There’s not many films I can say I’ve seen twice on the big screen, but this is one of them, which is kind of remarkable given its age… once at that shithole called the Encore that used to be on Devonshire St, the second as part of the Chauvel’s Murnau retrospective accompanying Shadow of the Vampire in 2001. Both times it was a mediocre 16mm print of the “bilingual” version, so this was the first time I’ve seen it in an actually good version, i.e. the restored German original… I recall talking to someone after the first viewing (or was it the second?), and he said something about the second half of the film not being as good as the first. Which at the time I don’t think I agreed with, but on this revisit it was hard not to; Gosta Ekman now strikes me as a comparatively colourless lead, better as the older Faust than the younger one, and the whole business with Gretchen is a bit meh. But holy hell, what goodness there is in the first half. Like Metropolis, Faust was something of a financial sinkhole, but one where all the money spent showed on the screen; as FX extravaganzas go, this is some hard-to-beat stuff, even now the “magic carpet” flight is kind of astounding, as is the giant Mephisto looming over the town early in the film (all actual model work, too, obviously no computers involved). Emil Jannings, of course, is the real star of the show as Mephisto, flamboyant and hammy but so would you be if you were the devil. And yet it’s a bit of non-casting that perhaps helped the film best; the studio wanted Lilian Gish, who refused to be filmed by Murnau’s cameraman, but Murnau insisted on retaining the latter. Whatever Faust lost in internationally appealing star casting, it surely gained in visual strength. Maybe in the end it’s only half a great film, but that half is damned impressive.

Also (and better?) known as Caged Virgins. Jean Rollin’s filmography seems to finally be getting wider release now that Redemption have signed on with Kino Lorber in the US. This is not one of the titles so far released by KL; the copy I watched is a reissue from last year of what I presume is Redemption’s earlier release of it to mark Rollin’s passing in 2010. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to see fit to upgrade their disc, which has a lovely transfer but also a non-anamorphic one, which is kind of poor these days; more irritatingly, though, the DVD packaging not only lies about the disc being 16×9 but also about the film being uncut; despite the listed 88 minute runtime, this is in fact the cut UK version with some seven minutes hacked out of it. I’m unimpressed, Mr Wingrove, I’m unimpressed… granted, this review suggests the loss of those scenes may even be an improvement, but still. Anyway, the film itself… to be honest I’ve no idea if it’s good or not, but it undeniably lives up to its reputation for grand weirdness; though not actually improvised in the way some of Rollin’s later films were, apparently the script was written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness fashion after Rollin resolves that his many detractors could get fucked, he was going to make exactly the sort of film he wanted to make, and damn logic and sense. I’m not normally a fan of the sort of so-called “surrealism” which is really just an artist wilfully refusing to make sense (I’m looking at you here, Jodorowsky), it tends towards an empty exercise, but Rollin backs up his own wilfulness with a particular vision—I have to grant him that, offhand, I can’t think of many other films quite like this one, except perhaps Luigi Batzella’s Nude for Satan—and a definite feeling for beautiful images; I’ve said before about films of this vintage often possessing remarkable colours and this is nothing if not an example of that. I can’t help but feel it loses something about halfway through, as if Rollin had decided he’d better start coming up with something that at least resembled a story, almost if he lost his nerve a bit; and yet, through all the high strangeness something kept me watching even if I’m not 100% sure I can say what it was. I’ve now got a couple of the new Kino Lorber editions and will be interested to see how they compare; hopefully KL will add this to their line at some point too so I can get a better copy…

I don’t know, I’ve tried Yevgeni Bauer a few times over the years—the BFI’s Early Russian Cinema tapes at UNSW in 1997, the Mad Love DVD about eight years ago, and this one today (which I scammed from Youtube recently)—and I still don’t really get the acclaim. Having died as he did in 1917, he obviously went into eclipse when the Revolution hit later that year along with most of the rest of the Tsarist era Russian film industry, and what remained of his films didn’t re-emerge for decades thereafter. As such, I appreciate that he’s considered to be one of the most important figures of pre-Soviet cinema (though I’ll have to accept the judgements of others regarding some of his specific achievements), although I do so without really liking his films as such, and unfortunately I’m no nearer after seeing this. This is one of his social melodramas, in which a well-to-do young man finds himself tiring of  the crop of “sophisticated” young women he seems to have cultivated, and sets out instead to rescue a bit of comparative rough trade; he saves a young girl slaving as a seamstress in a sweatshop, but unfortunately for him her life of poverty has given her dreams of riches she’s now in a position to act upon. Which she does, ruinously. Filmed in a style reminiscent of what I remember of the other Tsarist-era films I’ve seen, slow, given to deep tableau staging rather than cutting (albeit spiced with a few interesting high angles and camera movements one might not expect from this period), but the characters are really off-putting; she basically becomes a fairly horrible person the higher she rises in society (cf. the end: he shoots himself on her doorstep, she steps over his body quite casually en route to a restaurant), but there’s something so silly about him and his enterprise that it’s hard to feel too sorry for him when she fucks him over.

These days, of course, we’d probably have to frown upon the orientalism of the whole thing if we considered ourselves politically correct, but since I don’t I’ll just have to settle for enjoying the film. I was delighted to find the BFI edition of the film recently, and delighted to watch it again tonight; first saw it eight or nine years ago courtesy of the estimable Jan Willis, who used to supply me with masses of stuff taped off Turner Classic Movies, including this… The prize for creator of the animated feature film seems to be that Cristiani fellow from Argentina (the DVD’s liner notes ludicrously assign credit to Winsor McCay’s Lusitania film, which is not a feature), but since his films vanished decades ago Lotte Reiniger certainly has the earliest surviving example, and a singular one at that thanks to the silhouette technique involved. Achmed is an extraordinary achievement in many ways, not least because Reiniger made it with such a small crew (husband Carl Koch and a handful of assistants like Walter Ruttmann—interesting to see this again having seen Ruttmann’s own animations, now I can spot the things he must’ve done in this), and constructed all the silhouette models herself. Little wonder it took three years to make. It was sufficiently out there stylistically that its first German audiences didn’t get it, but it was well received by the French; Jean Renoir was such a fan he became friends with Reiniger and Koch, working with the latter on various films during the 30s (Reiniger also did a shadow theatre scene for La marseillaise), while they took over his unfinished Tosca when he fled to the US. It’s literal Arabian nights stuff that packs a remarkable amount of narrative into a running time of just over an hour, but the animation itself, the artwork, is what really matters. Pioneering but not primitive at all, and still quite splendid 85 years later; now I want the other BFI disc of her short films…

Caligula is one of film history’s greatest follies, colossal trash of a truly epic kind, and the further away we get from it in time, the more batshit mad the whole enterprise looks; I don’t suppose it could ever have been made except at that particular time. So much about it is just jaw-dropping, including the fact that Roberto Rossellini, of all people, wrote the very first treatment for it, the fact that seemingly no one knew producer Bob Guccione intended it to be hardcore XXX, and the fact that it was released at all in whichever of its many versions, given the, well, difficulties of its making, the clash of sensibilities at work, and the welter of lawsuits that attended the process. The production was out of control and so was the “finished” product, if such a thing exists when you’re talking about Caligula. But most bizarre is the fact that, you know, it looks incredible. Amidst all the reams of pornography (sorry), you can’t deny that it looks every cent of the $17m or so it apparently cost (this being when $17m was still worth something, of course). Indeed, I only discovered tonight that the film’s art director Danilo Donati was one of Fellini’s regular collaborators, their first film together having been Satyricon, which makes weirdly perfect sense somehow. It may be a fucked-up mess, but what a bizarrely handsome one. I like Caligula far more than I probably should, but then again I don’t think I’ve ever professed to have impeccable taste in films; if I ever did, be assured I was lying. As extravagant as the recent “imperial edition” release is, I don’t think it exactly reveals an unheralded masterpiece as such,  and I’d always hesitate to actually recommend the film (I don’t think the DVD will exactly make converts of the previously unconvinced). Still, I remain somewhat in awe of its very existence, as a relic of a time that—perhaps mercifully—may never quite come again…