JonathanRosenbaum.com

Excremental Visionary (on John Waters’ SHOCK VALUE)

From The Soho News (September 22, 1981). I persist in believing that America would be a better place to live if John Waters were hosting the Tonight show.–J.R.

Shock Value:
A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste
By John Waters
Delta, $9.95

If conventional means wedded to conventions, then John Waters, amiable sleaze director of Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Polyester. is as conventional as you or I, maybe even more so. The not-so-surprising thing about Shock Value, a “tasteful” (meaning cautious) memoir about his special brand of bad taste, is that it proves him to be literary, too — at least in a minor Mark Twain vein. Pithy aphorisms rub shoulders with sly asides and wry homilies. Here are a few jewels among gritty jewels:

All people look better under arrest.

*

I never watch television because it’s an ugly piece of furniture, gives off a hideous light, and, besides, I’m against free entertainment.

*

Since the character [in Female Trouble] turns from teenage delinquent to mugger, prostitute, unwed mother, child abuser, fashion model, nightclub entertainer, murderess, and jailbird, I felt at last Divine had a role she could sink her teeth into.

*

Sometimes I just sit on the street and wait for something awful to happen.

*

The more obscure a town I visit, the greater appeal it has for me, since I figure there’s an audience for anything in New York, but if you can get a following in, say, Mobile, Alabama, you really must be doing something right.

*

Since [the Hanafi Muslim sect] had given the ultimate bad movie reviews by killing people to protest the showing of Mohammad, Messenger of God, one could only tremble at the thought of what they might have pulled had they seen, say, The Deep.

*

I think it’s healthy to see your parents often (sort of a tune-up), but I think it’s neurotic to actually hang around with them.

A Grove Press freak around the same time that he was getting expelled from NYU for a pot bust, Waters has a flaky imagination that is often furnished by the conceits of Genet  and Burroughs. The former is undoubtedly responsible for both the moniker of Divine (his principal star, a larger-than-life drag queen — described as a she or he according to context) and the equally passionate “crime is beauty” poetics of Waters’ masterpiece and concerto for Divine, Female Trouble. It was Genet, after all, who once defined art as the capacity to make you eat shit and like it — which is just what Divine visibly does with dog crap in the celebrated and climacrtic showstopper of Pink Flamingos.

William S. Burroughs, on the other hand, who offers a blurb on the back of Shock Value, can easily be detected in a passage like the following, which describes a Baltimore dusk-to-dawn kung-fu grindhouse so scuzzy and violent that even Waters stays away:

I’ve always imagined huge crowds inside, some shooting up, others guzzling from brown paper bags. Hopped-up ushers patrol with nightsticks instead of flashlights and break up popcorn-snatchings, switchblade fights, and gang bangs. The audience pelts the screen with leftovers from the day’s robberies and breaks into karate fights whenever Bruce Lee appears on the screen. Driven to hysteria by all the gore, they take audience participation to new heights by stabbing and shooting one another, all in the name of entertainment.

Unlike Genet or Burroughs,Waters can’t really be considered a tough customer. There is nothing at all in Shock Value about his sex life and sexual preferences, for instance, or the charming ten-minute exploitation spinoff he shot in 1970 called The Diane Linklater Story. But you can learn all you want to about how the uglier shock effects in his low-budget movies are achieved. As it happens, the shit-eating in Pink Flamingos is real, while the shit-stain on Divine’s underpants when (through the miracle of the medium) he fucks himself in Female Trouble is fake. Yet one suspects that if the reverse were true, no essential facet of Waters’ aesthetics would be violated.

Regarding vomit, he freely admits that after prolonged efforts to get Divine to barf for real in his movies, he finally had to simulate the desired act with a can of creamed corn, some catsup, and a little water. (Can we possibly find it in our hearts to forgive him?) After commenting rather eruditely on the importance of vomit in Swedish films of the 60s, he roundly condemns “films such as An Unmarried Woman for including vomit scenes that are patently unauthentic.”

***

Despite these and other fixations, it’s pretty evident throughout that Waters cares more about people than he does about either puke or pimples. ASnd, grotesque as it may seem, the other film director’s autobiography that Shock Value most reminds me of is Jean Renoir’s My Life and My Films — in part because of its rich and diverse enjoyment of human nature. Renoir often appreciates friends for their animal natures; Waters is thrilled by a mean, toothless hillbilly woman glaring at Perrier bottles in a supermarket, “unable to contain her rage that somebody was stupid enough to buy water.”

“Look at those disgusting trees stealing my oxygen!” shreiks Mink Stole as she speeds down the highway in Desperate Living — the only major Waters movie without Divine, hence missing what F.R. Leavis would call a moral center. But look at all the other Waters regulars congregating around the edges — from the hideously made-up Susan Lowe (whose physical transformation is illustrated here in photos) to the batty and babbly Edith Massey to the 400-pound Jean Hill — and they embody a moral universe of some ferocity, one that Waters ultimately backs to the hilt.

A line from the synopsis of Female Trouble oddly evokes the tortured world of A Confederacy of Dunces: “Taffy grows into a severely maladjusted young lady, tracks down her father and kills him, and in one final act of rebellion turns Hare Krishna to get on her mother’s nerves.” Perhaps more significant is the fact that for Waters, “the most chic and glamorous” opening of the film was in the Baltimore City Hall Jail, which had previously allowed him to shoot on the premises, and that the response of the prisoners to the movie “would mean a lot more to me than the New York Times review.”

“Multiple Maniacs really helped me to flush catholicism out of my system, but I don’t think you ever can lose it completely,” begins one paragraph, which ends, “Being Catholic always makes you more theatrical.” In a way, Waters seems about as socially well-adjusted as Salvador Dali and the late Flannery O’Connor, two other excremental Catholic visionaries and gifted, gabby self-publicists with a taste for violent splash.

He almost gives the whole game away when he describes shooting a scene in Female Trouble in which Divine, Cookie Mueller, and Susan Walsh cut their fingers with a razor to pledge their “sisterhood”. One of the actresses, he reports, got too carried away, cut too deeply, and passed out as soon as the take was over; but this scene was cut out of the final film because the shadow of the mike was visible. In other words, blood runs deep, but illusionism in a Waters movie runs still deeper. He’s still assuring readers in the last paragraph of the book that he only thinks terrible thoughts, he doesn’t live them — an American transcendentalist through and through.

In spite of the author’s cheerful morbidity about following and aesthetically relishing trials and violent crimes (he boasts ordering tapes of the mass suicides in Guyana through a New York Times ad, and playing them at his parties when he wants his guests to leave), he turns out to be an old-fashioned humanist, too. Significantly, in my favorite chapter, “Baltimore, Maryland — Hairdo Capital of the World,” which clarifies his vision of the world as much as anything does, he allots roughly equal space to Mrs. Mac, the Rat Lady — a black woman who goes out every day in her Ratmobile to hunt down and exterminate slum rodents — and William Donald Schaeffer, the mayor, both of whom he clearly reveres.

He’s never more American — at least in the home-grown, naïve sense — than when he claims to be apolitical. At the Berlin Film Festival, he tells us, the “buffs are unbelievably serious and went crazy when I told them my films aren’t political. ‘Yes they ARE!!’ they screamed, and I backed off a little; I guess you can read anything you want into a screenplay.”

Nonsense. The anarchist delirium of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble – more relevant to life, I would think, than to art — is as wide as Waters’ aesthetic range as a filmmaker is narrow. As a writer, though, he belongs strictly to the mainstream. The truth of the matter is that Waters is a fellow who picks up the same sort of maladjusted strays that a Reaganite would quickly consign to the incinerator — a moralist with some wit who not only protects and nurtures these strays but also organizes them (see Desperate Living), respects them, and trains them, allows them to grow teeth, and enables them to fight back. John Waters not political? Give me a break.

–The Soho News, September 22, 1981

Roeg’s Gallery

From The Movie no. 85, 1981.– J.R.

It is surely more than just a coincidence that director Nicolas Roeg has used leading pop stars and rock personalities in three of his five features to date. The sheer satanic presences of Mick Jagger in Performance (1970), of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) and, to a lesser extent, Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing (1980), all have something slightly magical about them — as if they held the implicit promise that unusual and outsized events were going to take place around and, in large measure, because of them. Boldly delineated in each case like the demonic princes of dark impulses, they are offered as guides and portals into the decadent fantasies which these films often traffic in. As Roeg told critic Harlan Kennedy in an interview:

What I find interesting about singers is that they all have the qualities of performers but they’re untouched in terms of acting. They’re not from the New York school of this or that: they’re not from the London theatre….So many actors have lost their intent, their beginnings. They’re not this travelling group of players that one evening is a king, another evening is a beggar. What I love about the other actors — the non-actors, the singers — is that they don’t know who they are yet. And actors shouldn’t know.”

Walt Disney plus blood [MADE IN USA]

From The Soho News (September 15, 1981). -– J.R.

Made in USA

By Jean-Luc Godard

Thalia, September 11 and 12

WHAT could be more timely than a Godard movie that repeatedly returns to the slogan, “The Left, Year Zero”? In point of fact, the beautiful, goofy, and explosive Made in USA was made in France in 1966. But for dispirited moviegoers, having to choose between Blow Out and Prince of the City (or the bossy rival senior critics pushing them) is like having to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 50s (with bland Eisenhower and jocular Khrushchev at the respective helms). All things considered, Made in USA may well be the funniest and punchiest “new” movie around.

It’s the last feature that Godard ever shot with Anna Karina, who was never lovelier and never more made-up to seem at once Japanese and doll-like — in dazzling color and Scope. (Most of the close-ups of her in the movie are the kind of bold compositions you could hang on your wall.) In her off-screen film noir narration, she more or less accurately describes the formal and moral profile of the movie she’s in as ”a film by Walt Disney, but played by Humphrey Bogart — therefore a political film. ” Even in a wobbly 16mm print, the New York theatrical premiere of Godard’s ultimate statement about his love/hatred for the aesthetics/politics of American movies/life is an event to be savored and celebrated, at the very least, not ignored.

For starters, the movie’s dedicated “to Nick and Samuel” (Ray and Fuller), “who taught me respect for image and sound”. Students of American cinema in the 50s who are looking for the best critical treatment of the subject should head for neither bookstore nor library, but straight for this movie. Just as Alphaville conceivably has as much to say about German expressionist cinema as either Siegfried Kracauer or Lotte Eisner, Made in USA is provocative, first-rate film criticism, cunningly composed in the language of the medium, about violent Hollywood iconography of the 50s, in both the crime thriller and the animated cartoon.

As John Kriedl helpfully points out in his recent study of Godard published by Twayne, an important aspect of this critique is “the almost continuous use of ‘the Hollywood shot’ or medium shot cut off at the knees,” a shot significantly known in French as the plan américain. Godard often freezes this shot into planes of brightly colored stripes and overlapping diagonals, angles as sharply pointed as Dick Tracy’s chin, with blocks of glacial primary colors and rasping, staccato and percussive sounds that bring alternative American models of consciousness, like pinball machines and comic strips, into the act.

Then there’s the picaresque detective investigation plot – Karina as Paula Nelson in a Bogart trench coat — filched from movies like The Big Sleep and Kiss Me Deadly, and characters with names like Inspector Aldrich, David Goodis, Donald Siegel, Richard Widmark, Mark Dixon and Dr. Korvo (the latter two characters in minor Preminger thrillers, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Whirlpool), Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon. This in turn is politically contextualized by impenetrable. paranoid events like the first Kennedy assassination and The Ben Barka affair, and set in an anonymous French suburb confusingly called Atlantic City. Summoned there by a telegram from her lover Richard (whose last name is repeatedly smothered by ringing phones, jet planes, and car horns), she soon enters an absurdist labyrinth of entanglements with cops and gangsters.

There are many links to earlier New Wave films: Rivette’s Paris Belongs To Us, Godard’s Le petit soldat and Pierrot le fou, and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Jean-Pierre Léaud walks around with a forlorn expression, a pocket pinball game, and a “Kiss me, I’m Italian” button, while in place of a Jean-Paul Belmondo we get Yves Alfonso in a striped bathrobe, who sports a similarly shaped nose. Made almost simultaneously with Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Godard’s major critical statement about documentary, Made in USA echoes its companion piece in a few structural particulars: a plan américain of the heroine lighting a cigarette on the street in front of peeling posters; a long, sagging, and monotonous dialogue sequence set in a café bar. (Ever since Sartre wrote about the café waiter playing at being a café waiter in Being and Nothingness, a surprising amount of existentialism and related French thought seems to have been formulated in relation to café culture.)

“Mystery and fascination of this American cinema,” Godard wrote around the same time he was completing Made in USA, after reseeding yet another minor Preminger, Fallen Angel. “How can I hate McNamara and adore Take the High Ground, hate the John Wayne who upholds Goldwater, and love him tenderly when he abruptly takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the next-to-last reel of The Searchers?”

Reformulating this dilemma again and again in formal terms – always critically, and never reverentially or syncophantically in the Wenders or Bogdanovich manner, Godard turns Made in USA into a collage film composed almost eclusively of colliding citations and incidental vaudeville: Marianne Faithful crooning “It is the evening of the day” and a Japanese woman named Doris Mizoguchi singing in a shower; Laszlo Szabo imitating Sylvester the Cat and Tweetie Pie. Daisy Kenyon, Ruby Gentry, and director Edward Ludwig are all paged over the p.a. system in a health club out of Frank Tashlin, and abstract expressionist eruptions of red paint and other simulated gore flash by in BandAid-shaped compositions. My favorite sequence -– in which fragmented, disembodied movie-theater posters and cutouts seem to float around a garage, while Szabo and Karina discuss mise en scène as a political maneuver –- has all the electric thrill of a Rauschenberg painting in motion.

Buried Treasures

From the Toronto Festival of Festivals program (September 10-19, 1981).

To quote from my long review of Pulp Fiction and Ed Wood (which can be accessed on this site), “Fourteen years ago, when the Toronto film festival still had a sidebar called ‘Buried Treasures,’ selected each year by a guest critic, I was invited to take over that slot. I put together a program called ‘Bad Movies,’ intending to play with the ambiguity of the word ‘bad’ — the only thing these films had in common, apart from the fact that I liked them, was that each of them had been pegged with that label at some point….

“This was the theory, at any rate — that all my selections were good movies that had wrongly been considered bad. But in practice, the single smash success of the series, in terms of both attendance and audience response, was Wood’s Glen or Glenda?, a film appreciated by the audience only for its badness. And since then, the evidence increasingly provided by movie fanzines — which by now far outnumber “serious” film magazines — is that among film cultists, bad movies are immensely more popular than good ones. Or, to put it in more concrete terms, at that festival the North American premiere of the penultimate, two-part masterwork of Fritz Lang, [The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Hindu Tomb], one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, was much less popular than the latest replay of a low-budget exploitation item by an inept amateur. Both films are campy, highly personal, and characterized by endearing technical flaws, but Wood’s unintentional hilarity counted for more than Lang’s intentional sublimity.” (Fortunately, however, the Lang diptych was picked up for an extended run by New York’s Film Forum. and I was enlisted to write the program notes for this engagement — a text which I no longer seem to have.)

Another North American premiere included in this program -– in this case, unwittingly – was Elaine May’s final cut of Mikey and Nicky, which I’d previously seen in the version alluded to here, edited by her “in radical disregard for conventional cutting continuity” (and, as I later discovered, released without her consent). To the best of my knowledge, the more conventionally edited picture that she finally put together, which I hadn’t known about until I saw it, was first shown in my Buried Treasures program.

On the whole, apart from the disproportionate popularity of Glen or Glenda?, I was quite gratified by the responses to this series. The only serious mishap was an accidental substitution of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1935 version of An Actor’s Revenge (that is, the original) rather than Ichikawa’s 1963 remake. (This might have come closer to being a happy accident if the print in question had been a decent and complete one.) -– J.R.

Buried Treasures (The “Bad Movie”)

Paradoxically, that ambiguous, pulpy object known as “the bad movie” has been assuming a position of increasing importance in our culture and society. This has been happening not only recently, through the services of directors like De Palma, Lucas and Spielberg, but also, more generally, through that Anglo-American tendency to shun most work that smacks of “artiness”, often including art itself.

“The bad movie,” in other words, partakes of a climate in which aesthetic and social eccentricity is more often buried than confronted. Repression of this kind can sometimes help to create a curious garden where strange and singular flowers bloom, none of them wholly acceptable or dismissable according to ordinary habits of taste. In an extreme case such as Glen or Glenda?, it is uncharacteristically able to proliferate and fill the lowest reaches of exploitation cinema with all the markings of an inimitable personal vision.

In the selection of films that I’ve made for this year’s Buried Treasures, I’ve been guided in part by personal tastes and predilections, erotic as well as intellectual, ranging from Debra Paget in the fifties (Bird of Paradise and the two Fritz Lang films ) to relatively abstract notions about the mysteries of representation (in An Actor’s Revenge, Some Call it Loving, Glen or Glenda? and Track of the Cat). But I’ve also reflected, after the fact, on the coincidence that virtually all these movies, at one time or another, have been rejected or dismissed from the can0ns of art and/or labeled, “bad” because of particular transgressions they commit in relation to traditional expectations.

This can mean belonging to a non-prestigious genre, working 0n an impoverished budget, taking up an unfashionable theme or approach, departing from certain textbook notions of correctness or slickness or coherence, or sometimes simply being unlucky enough to have been made in the wrong place or period.

There’s definitely a certain backhanded advantage to being considered a “bad movie”, just as people defined as mad have the freedom to behave like mad people — but none of the movies I’ve selected are really bad movies to me, at least not in the sense of being boring or uninteresting or untalented or anonymous. 0n one level or another — sometimes on many at once — they’re all somewhat daring and outrageous. Whether their transgressions exist through chance or design is perhaps less important that the forms of creative work and play that they can perform on - and elicit from — us.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

***

Lumière d’été

(Summer Light)

France 1943

Director Jean Grémillon

Principal Cast Pierre Brasseur, Paul Bernard,

Madeleine Benaud, Madeleine Robinson, Georges Marchal

90 minutes

Ignored in North America over the years for a variety of reasons — the fact that it was made during the French 0ccupation, by a relatively unknown French filmmaker, and was not much of a commercial success — Lumière d’été is a good example of the kind of neglected work that cries out for re-evaluation. According to French critic Bernard Eisenschitz, the filmmaker Jean Grémillon, whose career “embraces several great periods of French cinema,” directed films “not much resembling each other thanks to production problems as well as a desire to repeat nothing and to refuse nothing, whether routine melodrama or an entry in the Encyclopedie Filmée.”

The movie is remarkable on many counts — as a complex portrayal of Vichy decadence juxtaposed with the workers in a nearby coal mine; as a series of remarkable sound innovations and an intricately composed mise en scène of social interactions, suggesting the work of Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker; and as the deft execution of an ambitious Jacques Prévert script by such actors as Madeleine Renaud, Pierre Brasseut Paul Bernard, Madeleine Robinson and Marcel Levesque.

Friday 11 Sept. l1:00 a.m. Festival

***

Bird of Paradise

U.S.A. 1951

Director Delmer Daves

Production Company Twentieth Century-Fax

Producer Harmon Jones

Screenplay Delmer Daves

Cinematography Winton C. Hoch

Editor James B. Clark

Music Daniele Amfitheatrof

Principal Cast Louis Jourdan, Debra Paget, Jeff Chandler

100 minutes

Of all the Buried Treasures that I’ve selected, this 1951 color version of Bird of Paradise, directed for Fox by Delmer Daves — a remake of a 1932 South Sea tale directed by King Vidor — is the one that has the most personal resonance for me. Indeed, it helped to precipitate a full-scale religious crisis, 3 years after I saw it at the ripe old age of 8 — a process recounted in some detail in my book Moving Places, an experimental critical memoir about movies, where the film’s rediscovery serves as a kind 0f “0pen, Sesame” for myself and readers alike.

Yet I wouldn’t have included the movie here if the testimony of several friends and colleagues hadn’t persuaded me that this grim, colorful romance about miscegenation and tribal sacrifice, all set in spectacular locations, didn’t carry a distinct charge and interest of its own, quite independently of what it did to me in the early 50’s. Jeff Chandler, Louis Jourdan and Debra Paget all effectively conspire in this haunting, collective dream of a movie to evoke a carnal paradise that never was.

Saturday 12 Sept. ll:00 a.m. Festival

***

Glen or Glenda?

U.S.A. 1953

Director Edward D. Wood Jr.

Production Company Paramount Pictures

Producer George G.. Weiss

Screenplay Edward D. Wood Jr.

Cinematography William C. Thompson

Editor Bud Schelling

Principal Cast Bela Lugosi, Lyle Talbot, Daniel Davis,

Dolores Fuller, “Tommy” Haynes, Timothy Farrell

65 minutes

The only film in this selection 0f “Buried Treasures” that answers to virtually every definition of what a “bad movie” is (or can be), Glen or Glenda? is a cheap exploitati0n quickie about transvestism, made by Edward D. Wood Jr. (1922-78), an alcoholic and transvestite who also plays the title role. Reissued on a limited basis by Paramount Pictures in the U.S. last spring, it has already prompted reappraisals of Wood as a cult director with avant-garde trimmings — unquestionably one of the looniest of all low-budget auteurs, with a crazed manner inspiring affection rather than contempt.

As J. Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice, “Wood’s narrative is based on two case histories, which are recounted (with Foucaltian aptness) by a shrink to a cop. In the first, the tormented Glenn — forever ogling the lingerie displays on Hollywood Boulevard — gets married and lives happily ever after with his wife’s wardrobe. In the second, a disgruntled GI goes all the way and gets a sex-change operation. Formally, the entire film is structured to resemble an anterior parody of Mon 0ncle d’Amérique, with Bela Lugosi in the role of Professor Henri Laborit.”

Sunday 13 Sept. 11:00 a.m. Festival

***

Track of the Cat

U.S.A. 1954

Director William A. Wellman

Production Company Warner Brothers

Producer Wayne-Fellows Production

Screenplay A.I. Bezzerides from the novel by William van Tilberg Clark

Cinematography William H. Clothier

Editor Fred MacDowell

Music Roy Webb

Principal Cast Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Diana Lynn, Tab Hunter, Beulah Bondi

102 minutes

Despite the effective presence of Robert Mitchum in the leading role of this movie (along with serious, often powerful work from Teresa Wright, Tab Hunter, Diana Lynn, Beulah Bondi and others), this curious experimental “Western” — adapted from a symbolic novel by William van Tilberg Clark about a cougar hunt, and directed by William Wellman — attracted relatively little notice when it was originally released in the mid-fifties. Since that time, its limited career has been even more subterranean — to a large extent, one suspects, because critics haven’t been able to figure out how to classify it. (According to David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, “the rigid color scheme” — admittedly, one of the most striking aspects of the film — “overwhelms a good subject and excellent actors.”)

Not having seen this film in years, I feel reluctant to make too many advance pronouncements regarding a work that I recall with pleasure mainly for its intricate and concentrated grasp of family tensions and its handsomely designed and integral uses of architecture in the Cinemascope frame.

Monday 14 Sept. 11:00 a.m. Festival

***

An Affair to Remember

U.S.A. 1957

Director Leo McCarey

Production Company 20th Century - Fox

Producer Jerry Wald

Screenplay Delmer Daves, McCarey from original story by Mildred Gram and McCarey

Cinematography Milton Krasner

Editor James B. Clark

Music Harry Warren, lyrics by Harold Adamson and McCarey

Principal Cast Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Cathleen Nesbitt, Neva Patterson, Richard Denning

115 minutes

What is it about this late film of Leo McCarey that confounds so many notions of what serious art is supposed to be? Chock full of tacky visual details, hackneyed handkerchief-wringing dramaturgy and outlandish plot improbabilities (Cary Grant

painting fruit in a garret in order to Realize His Potentialities), An Affair to Remember (which remakes McCarey’s 1939 Love Affair) achieves and then explores an emotional and spiritual depth that one might ordinarily find only in a film by Mizoguchi, Ozu or Bresson.

A firm grasp of certain primitive emotions that is comparable to D. W. Griffith’s (combined with an acute sense of ellipsis and delicate tact at certain climactic junctures) makes McCarey a master of the mode in which laughter and tears freely intermingle. And as Richard Corliss has noted, the film’s denouement “may mark the last time a writer (Delmer Daves), a director (McCarey), and a pair of actors (Grant and Deborah Kerr) dared to plumb the ludicrous shallows of the weepie and emerged deliriously triumphant — and the last time Hollywood had the strength to believe in the stuff that made it great.”

Tuesday 15 Sept. l1:00 a.m. Festival

Wednesday l6 Sept. 7:00 p.m. Revue

***

Der Tiger von Eschnapur/Das lndische Grahmal

(The Tiger of Eschnapur/The Hindu Tomb)

Germany 1959

Director Fritz Lang

Producers Louise de Masure, Eberhard Meischner

Screenplay Fritz Lang, Werner Jörg Lüddecke based on a novel by Thea von Harbou

Cinematography Richard Angst

Editor Walter Wischniewsky

Sound Clemens Titsch

Music Michel Michelet (Tiger), Clemens Titsch (Hindu Tomb)

Principal Cast Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, Claus Holm

150 minutes

Fritz Lang’s two penultimate features (which are based on a script and story for a two-part feature that Lang prepared with his wife Thea von Harbou in 1920, but which was then directed by the producer Joe May) have never before been seen in North America in their original versions. This is an astonishing fact if one considers that these German films were commercially successful in Europe as popular entertainments. (The U.S. version, Journey to the Lost City, was dubbed, re-edited and over 100 minutes shorter.)

Jean-Marie Straub, one of Lang’s modernist disciples, has noted that the producer of this opulent double-feature asked for a golden calf, and Lang offered him a film instead. But it’s a film about a golden calf that we call cinema — made by someone who knows more about the subject that most-and a game that is played honestly. Best of all, it returns Lang at the close of his career to his origins: the serial intrigue, charged with awe and wonder.

Wednesday 16 Sept 11:00 a.m. Festival

Yukinojo Henge

(An Actor’s Revenge)

Japan 1963

Director Kon lchikawa

Production Company Daiei

Screenplay Daisuke lto, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Natto Wada, from the novel Otokichi Mikami

Cinematography Setsuo Kobayashi

Music Yasushi Akutagawa

Principal Cast Kazuo Hasegawa, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ayako Wakao, Ganjiri Nakamura, Raizo lchikawa

113 minutes

One of the boldest movies ever made about the convergence of theatre and cinema (in which, paradoxically, the stagier it gets, the more cinematic it becomes), Kon lchikawa’s highly eccentric masterpiece, shot in dazzling color, was one of the favorite films of the late Nicholas Ray. Based on a rickety melodramatic warhorse and starring an aging matinee idol, Kazuo Hasegawa, An Actor’s Revenge improbably suggests William Shakespeare as well as Walt Disney (the latter Ichikawa’s greatest single influence, by his own admission) in its brilliant pyrotechnics.

In an intriguing double role, Hasegawa plays both an oyama (female impersonator) who’s an experienced swordsman and a clever petty thief. A recurring contemporary jazz score and an almost continual shift of gears between different levels of reality and artifice make this, in the words of film theorist Noël Burch, “one of the first important instances in the Japanese cinema of the conjunction between an objective ‘Brechtianism’ of the traditional stage and the influence of the modern cinema and theatre on traditions as diverse as Brecht, Elizabethan drama and the comic strip.”

Thursday 17 Sept. 11:00 a.m. Festival

***

Some Call it Loving

U.S.A. 1973

Director James B. Harris

Production Company James B. Harris Production

Producer James B. Harris

Screenplay James B. Harris, from the story “Sleeping Beauty” by John Collier

Cinematography Mario Tossi

Editor Paul Jasiukonis

Music Richard Hazard with song by Bob Harris

Principal Cast Zalman King, Carol White, Tisa Farrow, Richard Pryor, Veronica Anderson

103 minutes

“To wake the Sleeping Beauty,” declares a lewd carnival sideshow barker. “you run the risk of being awakened yourself.” Succinctly summing up the contradictions of the Hollywood dream factory regarding desire and illusion, this haunting, off-beat feature, freely adapted from a John Collier story, found an audience in Paris eight years ago, but attracted little attention on this side of the Atlantic.

Its deliberately dreamlike plot involves a wealthy, white jazz saxophonist (Zalman King), two women (Carol White, Veronica Anderson) who willingly act out his erotic fantasies, a dying black derelict who worships him (Richard Pryor, in a brilliant early performance), and a real-live Sleeping Beauty (Tisa Farrow) whom he purchases from a carnival sideshow. The second feature directed by Kubrick’s former producer (on The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita) James B. Harris — preceded by The Bedford Incident (1965), and followed by the forthcoming Fast-Walking — Some Call it Loving isn’t for every taste. Its theme and style is one of disenchanted lyricism in relation to the solipsistic enclosures of dreams, placed on the screen with a hypnotic grace that suggests a circular musical lament.

Friday l8 Sept. 11:00 a.m. Festival

***

Mikey and Nicky

U.S.A. 1976

Director Elaine May

Production Company Paramount Studios

Producers Michael Hausman, Bud Austin

Screenplay Elaine May

Cinematography Victor J. Kemper

Editor John Carter

Sound Richard Vorisek, Christopher Newman, Larry Jost

Music John Strauss

Principal Cast Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, Rose Arrick, Carol Grace, William Hickey

118 minutes

There are few serious films quite as maudit in recent American cinema than Elaine May’s controversial third feature (and last to date), an unsettling drama about love and betrayal between a couple of Philadelphia gangsters (John Cassavetes and Peter Falk during one long, grueling and paranoid night. While at first glance this misanthropic movie seems to be extending the improvisational methods of John Cassavetes as a director in movies like Husbands, Mikey and Nicky is in fact a tightly-scripted view of hell that was edited by May in radical disregard for conventional cutting continuity.

Difficult to relate to in any ordinary fashion yet impossible to forget, May’s ferocious (and ferociously personal) assault on the middle-class is much more corrosive than anything ever dreamed up by Fassbinder. If The Heartbreak Kid were her Foolish Wives, this is surely her Greed -– and perhaps the most frightening portrait of capitalism that American cinema has given us since Eric von Stroheim’s masterpiece. (Stanley Kauffmann calls it an “odd, biting, grinning, sideways-scuttling rodent of a picture” and “the best film that I know by an American woman.”)

Saturday 19 Sept. 11:00 a.m. Festival

Take That Corn and Shuck It

From The Soho News (September 8, 1981); tweaked a little on June 6, 2010. — J.R.

Comin’ at Ya!

Written by Lloyd Battista, Wolf lowenthal, and Gene Quintano

Directed by Fernando Baldi

Take This Job and Shove It

Written by Jeff Bernini and Barry Schneider

Based on the song by David Allan Coe

Directed by Gus Trikonis

Let’s face facts. When notions of what a “good” movie is shrinks to the level of TV deepthink like Kramer vs. Kramer or Prince of the City, it may be time to bring the glories of the big-screen “bad” movie back again — at least if what we’re out for is fun and adventure. Unlike the most dutiful Oscar winners, whose notions of the good and proper usually revolve around the relatively straight and narrow, or the collected works of a Bergman or a Fellini that are even more consistent about their consistency — beating you into submission as they gradually meld into one all-purpose archetype — certain bad movies can boast range, unpredictability, and singularly distinctive tastes.

Indeed, a fascinating and suggestive literature has been accumulating for some time about bad movies, ranging from Jack Smith on Maria Montez to Myron Meisel on Edgar G. Ulmer, and from David Ehrenstein on Barbara Steele to J. Hoberman on “rancid glitz” in diverse manifestations. The recent formation of the Edward D. Wood, Jr. Film Appreciation Society in Los Angeles, which has already produced a marathon screening and monograph, seems a significant extension of this hallowed tradition. Having recently had some occasion myself to reflect on the “bad” movie as a discrete genre of its own — mainly in connection with programming “Buried Treasures” for the Toronto Film Festival this month, and trying to unify existentially such varied choices (all culturally rejected, ‘difficult’ mannerist transgressions) as Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s Glen or Glenda? (1953), Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1963), and Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) — I’m naturally something of a sucker for Comin’ at Ya!, a real-live interesting stinker in 3-D and Cinemascope.

I’m especially partial to a bad movie that’s subversive enough to jeer at the false objectivity of critics and other movie power-brokers in its witty ads. (”Warning: The Management Is Not Responsible For Where the Screen Ends and You Begin!”) And I can’t say I entirely mind one that has the kicker of turning out to be actually “good” in some of its more salient aspects (despite a nastier and trashier side that I prefer to ignore) — for perverse and semiperverse reasons which I’ll try to enumerate:

(1) Back in the ’50s, 3-D and CinemaScope developed as bitter rivals, until the latter beat the former hands down. (In terms of prestige and purchase power, there was never any real contest; Bwana Devil advertised a lion in your lap, but The Robe offered a much pricier taste of Jesus and a spiritual lump in your throat.) Comin’ at Ya! is a campy spaghetti Western that not only combines these complementary processes, but also integrally composes in them. Director Ferdinando Baldi’s multilayered use of depth and wide-screen breadth becomes the movie’s subject, as its title succinctly indicates — articulated on a shot-by-shot basis. Viscerally speaking, it often aims for the same sort of murky, cluttered Sternbergian depth that Wadleigh’s Wolfen partially achieves through the ears. And it often succeeds.

(2) At the same time that one can say that Comin’ at Ya! is composed in relation to the parameters of 3-D and Scope, one can also consider it decomposed, in relation to being a mindless copycat ripoff of a Sergio Leone /Ennio Morricone revenge extravaganza like Once Upon a Time In the West. There’s the same dreamy, wordless soprano waxing obligatory gore and mechanical revenge cruelty, the same mannered emphasis on pregnant pauses as deadly dudes stand around idiotically with their yoyos or harmonicas awaiting villent, grandstanding confrontations. The actors move like automatons in rituals that are so formalized and devoid of thought and feeling that no one — least of all characters or spectators — is supposed to be very concerned about why these things are occurring, at least in terms of narrative logic. Bats and rats emerge separately from the woodwork and torment characters at length, not for any plot reasons, but simply to keep an overall pattern of harassment going.

(3) Best of all, the visual composition and narration decomposition suggested above work together hand in glove. Every link in the narrative chain is reduced (and reducible) to a fancy 3-D effect that wields aggression against the spectator, while conversely, what the 3-D ultimately does is expose every creaking bone in the genre’s skeletal structure of events by literally stretching each one out, temporally as well as spatially. The time and space needed in order to register a 3-D assault thus becomes the movie’s principal form of rhythmic accent and stylistic inflection, and the resulting narrative slowdown — often accompanied by literal slow-motion, converting the actors into sleepwalkers — assumes a musical function, turning the title 3-D effects into cadenzas or arias arising irrelevantly out of the dumb cliché plot. The result may be one of the goofiest pieces of narrative disassociation available this side of Marguerite Duras.

(4) The 3-D effects, moreover, are so steady and plentiful that they comprise a kind of catalogue of spectator abuse — much as the plot comprises a catalogue of character abuse. (Take away the abuse and effects and what’s left disintegrates into a fine powder.) In the wonderfully cornball credits sequence, practically every name and function is cutely and incongruously attached to some object in a barn that gets poked in your face — a wine bottle, a snake, a spill of beans, a coffee pot — and before long, in the story proper, a basket of fruit, a fistful of gold coins, rats, bats, ropes, sabers, spears, hands, guns of all sizes, arrows (flaming and otherwise), shucked corn, peeled potato, a yoyo, a rubber ball, lots of darts, a hatchet, a lethal board, a whip’s lash, and God knows what else are all dumped, dropped, splattered, or thrown straight into your lap. The endless procession of Biblical devastations is later reprised at the end — almost like a curtain call, or one of those rapidly edited flashback summaries associated with middle-period Godard — to emphasize its independence from narrative logic even further.

(5) Perhaps the most curious aspect of the film’s ultimately monotonous anthology of violent aggression is how successfully it seems to resist most signs of human or dramatic motivation — often reduced to the purity of the sheer tawdry effect, indulged in simply for its sown sake. An Indian with a spear in his belly totters in closeup for what feels like an eternity (an effect reprised at the end), to dramatize not a personal death but a long spear end comin’ at ya. In one of the shoot-outs, one varmint gets explicitly blasted in the balls by a rifle — as if to clarify an overall approach to camera placement that aims (and presumably locates) a surprising amount of the movie in the spectator’s genital area (giving the movie-s title an extra shade of sexual meaning). Needless to say, this being an Italian Western, a lot of the violence is directed against women — most of whom are shanghaied white-slave items, garbed in white and collectively draped around elaborate interiors, like the mad ladies in Feuillade’s Tih Minh.  To be sure, though, one fat male actor (whom 3-D makes even fatter) gets nibbled on by rats for what seems to be hours.

(6) When these rats are finally pulled off him, they’re naturally flung out at us, one by one — following a share-and-share alike principle between characters and spectators that places them/us in the virtually identical slot of the passive Hitchcockian stooge, masochistic little things meant to be harassed. I know that Sir Alfred’s Dial M for Murder is supposed to be the acme of 3-D mise en scène, but for layered compositions in depth, angled for maximum effect, Comin’ at Ya! is a lot more striking, in more ways than one. (The trouble with Hitchcock’s cautious use of the process is that it rules out the sort of grand treatment of 3-D that a Vertigo would have demanded.) At the very least, it’s the best semi-hilarious bad movie I’ve seen all week, shucking corn in the general direction of your privates with the brightest of them.

***

The second best (i.e., the worst), vaguely based on a hit song performed by Johnny Paycheck and mainly set in and around a beer factory in Dubuque, Iowa, is Take This Job and Shove It. What makes this loose, semi-incoherent movie bad in a technical sense, yet without any redeeming aesthetic implications, is it utter lack of any dogged focus or design in its overall spiritual makeup. Relaxation is one thing, but laid-back indecisiveness can be a little hard to take.

Robert Hays, who played the romantic lead in Airplane! – a pretty-boy Belmondo minus the latter’s pug nose and boorish manner — plays a junior executive in a Midwestern conglomerate sent back to his home town (Dubuque) by his boorish boss (Eddie Albert, once again in a cocky nautical cap) to improve the efficiency of a brewery there. I theory, the callow, smugly naive hero eventually learns how to warn to his employees and vice versa, but what we actually hear and see turns out to be so patchy and incomplete — whether due to omissions at the script ot editing level is not clear — that we have to accept this concept, if at all, strictly on faith.

Similarly taken for granted is the flat-footed visual style (every shot a cliché) and editing rhythm (pretty lumpy throughout), although I suppose a few dregs of some primitive well-meaning political ideas about workers’  rights are still discernible between the joints of this rickety effort. If only the movie showed a little more confidence or enthusiasm about any of what it was doing — if, for instance, it used or handled raunchiness without giving the impression of learning it through a correspondence course, or establishing an improbable (if seemingly first-rate) Nashville nightclub in the middle of Iowa — one might give it some points for trying.

Unfortunately, the movie flounders from one conceit or reflex to another without ever convincing one that any continuous vision is at stake. Apart from a couple of good country songs and a nicely nuanced performance from David Keith as a good old boy, Take That Job and Shove It has little of the decisiveness telegraphed in the title and closing moments; most of the rest is just drift. Under the circumstances, such actors as Art Carney, Barbara Hershey, Penelope Milford, Martin Mull, and Tim Thomerson perform capably but forgettably.