Out of the Past: The Week in Film

Guilty Pleasure Cinema:

1. Dragonwyck (1946) Dir. Joseph Mankiewicz - US

Astounding Cinema:

9. Arch of Triumph (1948) Dir. Lewis Milestone - US

8. Dracula (1931) Dir. Tod Browning - US

7. Frenzy (1972) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock - US

6. Darkman (1990) Dir. Sam Raimi - US

5. Inland Empire (2006) Dir. David Lynch - US

4. Martha (1974) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder - West Germany

3. Christine (1983) Dir. John Carpenter - US

2. Kansas City (1996) Dir. Robert Altman - US

1. Leave Her to Heaven (1945) Dir. John M. Stahl - US

Theatrical Releases:

2. The Canyon (2009) Dir. Richard Harrah - US 7/10

1. An Education (2009) Dir. Lone Scherfig - UK 10/10

All in all, a pretty solid week of cinema, with one guilty pleasure pic from 1946, the directorial debut of one of my favorite directors, Joseph Mankiewicz (who helmed one of my favorite films ever made, Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959), the Gene Tierney/Vincent Price headliner, Dragonwyck, a gothic romance based on the novel by Anya Seton (an author who specialized in historical romance pieces---her modern day counterparts would be authors like Tracy Chevalier and Philippa Gregory). Dragonwyck is indeed a 1940’s Hollywood picture—it’s very restrained and attempts to be rather epic in scope. The usual over the top Vincent Price is somber and serious, while Tierney, though breathtaking, is saddled with playing a simple country girl seduced and controlled by the landowner of Dragonwyck (much of the dynamics of the plot center around vague, though apparent, Marxist beliefs concerning ownership of land). Price is obsessed with having a son, and when Tierney gives birth to a boy with a bad heart (oh, he disposed of his older first wife since she couldn’t have babies), all hell breaks loose. The most intriguing part of the whole production is a young Jessica Tandy, playing Tierney’s crippled, Irish hand maid. Yes, she is blatantly crippled and blatantly Irish. Price, it seems, is very disturbed at this, uttering the best lines of the film over the crippled Tandy: “Deformed bodies depress me.” And when his son dies, he bemoans the fact that a disgusting cripple like Tandy was allowed to live while his own, “healthy looking” son was allowed to die. That’s some good shit. Otherwise, the film veers off into inconsequentiality by the end, while we’re left to believe the flaccid, Marxist doctor (Glenn Langan) that has pined for Tierney throughout, is going to chase after her. And Tierney’s parents are played by the severe looking Anne Revere (she won an Oscar for Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947) and Walter Huston. Both religious zealots, if Huston annoyed you at all as Joan Crawford’s enemy in Rain (1932), he’ll do the same here.

Speaking of Lewis Milestone’s Rain (1932), I caught Milestone’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph (1948), an epic love story amongst the cafes and cobblestones of Paris, reuniting Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer after the highly successful Gaslight (1944). Boyer stars as a German doctor, terrorized and forced to flee Germany due to an antagonistic and cruel Nazi officer (played by Charles Laughton) who kills the woman Boyer loves. Living as an illegal immigrant in Paris, Boyer stumbles upon Bergman, desperate and attempting to kill herself. Bringing her to his apartment, the two eventually fall in love. However, unlike similar war time romance epics, Arch of Triumph is a curious beast---we watch them fall out of love and into bitter turpitude. And of course, the film ends before WWII actually begins, making this one of the most nihilistic 1940’s Hollywood films I’ve yet to experience. And when the last 3/4 becomes a revenge thriller as Boyer satisfies his blood lust for Laughton, you won’t be able to predict the degree of 40’s nihilism you’re about to experience.

Yes, I’d actually never seen the original Dracula (1931), directed by one of my favorite American directors ever, Tod Browning, who directed excellent films like The Unknown (1927), Freaks (1932) and The Devil Doll (1936). Browning had his share of films I didn’t love either, such as Outside the Law (1930) and especially the awful, Mark of the Vampire (1935), with which Browning was shamelessly trying to capitalize on the success of Dracula (both films star Bela Lugosi as a vampire). Though obviously different from Stoker’s novel, the film will always be best known for it’s gorgeous cinematography and creepy performance by Lugosi, who would never really do anything better (it didn’t really help his career when he refused to learn English for many years). Strangely, many films using Lugosi imagery to reference Dracula tend to use close up shots of Lugosi from White Zombie (1932). While Dracula doesn’t manage to be my favorite Browning production, it is undoubtedly an important film, and truly is the first of its kind.

On my way through Hitchcock’s works, I watched his second to last feature, Frenzy (1972), which is notable for several reasons---it is the first Hitchcock film to be rated R and also his first film to be made in his native Britain in over 20 years (Hitch was reportedly bitter that Michael Caine turned down the role that would go to Barry Foster). Frenzy plays like a ghoulish re-hash of Jack the Ripper, a serial killer tale about a killer known as the “neck-tie” murderer, a man who rapes and then strangles women with a neck tie. Jon Finch is our lead, accused of the crimes due to his ex-wife’s secretary (a mousy Jean Marsh) spying him leaving his strangled ex-wife’s body in her office. The rape and murder of Finch’s ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is the most graphic and infamous scene of the film. Another notable actress is Billie Whitelaw, whom audience will always remember as Mrs. Baylock, Damien’s Satanic nanny in The Omen (1976). Altogether, a very Hitchcockian production, but far from my favorite.

Speaking of Hitchcockian flairs, I can’t believe I neglected to realize how much fun Sam Raimi’s Darkman (1990) was. Having seen snippets of it as a child, I had always reduced it to a hammy, inconsequential film. Upon sitting down to watch it as an adult, I loved it’s B-super hero quality, with a score by Danny Elfman making it seem more like a rip off of Batman (1989) than it really is. Liam Neeson is entertaining as a burnt up scientist attempting to exact revenge on the vague mobster-like madmen that are responsible for his disfigurement, and Frances McDormand is his girlfriend. Of course highly illogical, Darkman was around before the comic book adaptation had become old hat. And Neeson was always good at kicking ass. And every time he bellows his girlfriend’s name like an angry bull charging the matador, we had to rewind it and watch it over again. “Julie!”

Immediately after watching David Lynch’s grand opus, Inland Empire (2006), I was almost certain that I didn’t like it---but it’s grown on me. It’s the type of film that takes a patient cinephile to sit through and mull over. If it was a straightforward film, it would probably be described as terrifying. And though I do admit there’s some brilliance tucked in, folded over, stretched out and broken into Inland Empire, I still want to ask Lynch to hire a ruthless editor---there’s really no need for the film to be 3 hours long. Laura Dern does give an exceptional performance, and the film may indeed be saying something about the treatment of actresses in Hollywood. The threadbare plot centers around Dern as an actress, scoring a major part in a new film directed by Kinglsey (Jeremy Irons) and co-starring Justin Theroux as the male lead. But after one script read through, the film heads into pure Lynch territory, where indeed we have a “woman in trouble” but we can’t tell if Dern is the actress, the character, another character, a victim of a cruel joke, or maybe even Dern herself. This is a film that requires more viewings than Mulholland Drive (2001). It’s just too bad that I don’t want to take the time to give it those viewings.

One of my favorite Fassbinder muses is Margit Carstensen---I do believe I like her more than Hanna Schygulla, most likely because of her brilliant performance in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972)---which they both star in---so needless to say, I have been extremely excited to sit down and watch Fassbinder’s television film Martha (1974) with Carstenen and Karlheinz Bohm (that creepy man from Peeping Tom, 1960). Basically, Martha is familiar uncomfortable Fassbinder territory about a woman that’s kind of a masochist---who happens to find a man to replace her dead father, rather a sadist, whom we get to see use and abuse her throughout the film’s two hour running time. We can never really tell if this is a nightmare for Martha, the abused housewife, or just what she was looking for. Irritating, horrific, depressing, and overall Fassbinder, Martha delivers with a straight face. You’ll either cry or cheer at the end, or maybe you’ll be as unsure of how to react as Martha is.

And still making my way through neglected works by John Carpenter is the excellent adaptation he did of Stephen King’s Christine (1983). Anyone that loves cars should see this film. Basically it’s the tale of a nerdy high schooler (Keith Gordon) who becomes, well, evil, out of his love for his possessed 58’ Fury. Hell hath no fury like Christine. Harry Dean Stanton pops up as a cop that’s sort of on Gordon’s tale, while his best friend and estranged girlfriend figure out Christine for the bitch she is before anyone else. Kelly Preston shows up briefly as a pretty, but dull blonde, but the star of the film is undoubtedly the eponymous car. Definitely a must see if you haven’t already, and perhaps something to rewatch in appreciation of John Carpenter, who used to be an excellent director.

Also finally catching Robert Altman’s somewhat dismissed 1996 feature, Kansas City, I realized I had discovered yet another poorly received gem of a film from one of the world’s greatest auteurs. For the first 30 minutes or so of the film, I couldn’t decide why I was having such a bad reaction to the Jennifer Jason Leigh performance as she stomps around like a maniac hybrid of Gerri Blank (the Amy Sedaris character from “Stranger With Candy”) and Donald Duck. And then I realized she was playing a woman emulating Jean Harlow—at which point I found Leigh’s performance to be brilliant. The film is set in 1930’s Depression era Kansas City. Leigh’s a down and out gal named Blondie, a woman with shortly cropped auburn curls (turns out too much peroxide burned her hair off in her attempts at copying Harlow). Well, Blondie’s hoodlum boyfriend (Dermot Mulroney) got caught robbing a well to do black man named Sheepshan Red (A.C. Smith) while in black face. And Sheepshan happens to be friend with Seldom Seen, Kansas City’s most prominent black gangster (played by none other than the legendary Harry Belafonte). Miranda Richardson stars as the laudanum swilling wife of a powerful senator (Michael Murphy) whom Leigh kidnaps in order to get help for her kidnapped and endangered boyfriend. Sort of playing like a darker version of a Woody Allen film, the vicious conclusion will have you spinning, and maybe you’ll be able to realize what a powerful film it is --- oh, and if you love jazz, this is the film for you.

And my number one film this week goes out to the Technicolor noir melodrama, Leave Her To Heaven (1945), which gives breathtaking Gene Tierney her only Oscar nominated performance as one of the most heartless black holes of a femme fatale you’re likely to ever see (she lost to Joan Crawford for Mildred Pierce). Lovers of cinema should see this film, directed by John M. Stahl, who also directed the original Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935), both which would be more famously remade by Douglas Sirk in the 1950’s. Sirk left Heaven alone, and for good reason---the film is perfect on its own. Its title taken from Macbeth, Leave Her to Heaven tells the story of Ellen Harland, a rich socialite who throws over her fiancé (Vincent Price, about to become the District Attorney) for a handsome author she meets on a train, Richard Harland (played by Cornel Wilde). Except, it’s creepy and noteworthy that Tierney thinks Wilde looks just like her father, a man, it turns out, that Tierney had an uncomfortably close relationship with (as her mother points out, “she loves too much”). After they becomes married after what seems to be only knowing each other for only a few days, it becomes apparent that Tierney wants Wilde all to herself. Knowing she’s a bad seed, you’ll still gasp in shock at the shenanigans she pulls to have him all to her self. Excellent performances and breathtaking cinematography, Leave Her to Heaven is a timeless film, dark and brooding while it festers under the bright sun (that's me attempting to be all Langston Hughes).