1942: Across The Pacific

Across The Pacific (Huston/Sherman, 1942) 3/10

By the early 1940's, audiences associated Warner Brothers with its trademark qualities of grit, toughness and bluntness. Stars such as James Cagney, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart detailed these embodiments with their flavourful, often brutal performances.

Another trademark of the studio in the early part of the decade was in its infatiguable attempts to recapture the magic of previous successes such as John Huston's 1941 Noir The Maltese Falcon and Michael Curtiz's 1942 wartime romance Casablanca.

Huston's 1942 film Across The Pacific tries to earnestly and cognizantly recall the brooding sensibilities, fraudulent personalities and deceptive humour of his début The Maltese Falcon. Reuniting three of the four prinicpal cast members (Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet) along with director John Huston, the studio desired to reclaim the accomplishments of the latter project, coupled with a wartime tint. They failed.

Ejected from the U.S. army for stealing money, Rick Leland (Humphrey Bogart) wanders north to Canada in order to exercise his skills.Yet, due to his earlier disgrace the Royal Canadian Forces in Halifax are unwilling to utilize his services either. Dejected, he stumbles into a travel agency, where he notices an attractive Canadian woman Alberta Marlow (Mary Astor) procuring a ticket on a Japanese steamship in order to return to Medicine Hat, Alberta via Vancouver.

Intrigued and lacking in domestic opportunities, Rick hopes to either find love or employment under Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese nationalist forces by the end of his voyage. On board, Rick meets few passengers. Among the few travellers, there is a British sociologist Dr. Lorenz (Sydney Greenstreet) returning to lecture in the Philippines with a curious infatuation with Japanese society and a talkative second generation Japanese-American, Joe Totsuiko (Victor Sen Yung) returning to his ancesteral homeland to work in his family's businesses.

Despite the potent casting, Huston's film is a mess: a jumble of genres, tones and atmospheric moods. Starting with Bogart's dismissal from his post in Panama, the director creates a sense of anticipation, awaiting Bogart's abilities to correct both his personal demons and the errors of the state. What ensues is a convoluted pastiche part action film, part Thin Man sleuth comedy. Bogart and Astor become less the tawdry, virulent couple shown in The Maltese Falcon as their characters become more inclined to replicate the bubbly hijinks equated with William Powell and Myrna Loy. Arguably, one should not assume Huston would desire to continue the personalities of his earlier film, yet the setting and tone of Across The Pacific is chiefly suited to such poisonous methods.

Despite its title, the film fails to even sail into the Pacific. Prior to filming, the studio opted to change the setting from pre-war Hawaii to the more isolated southern locale of Panama, yet keep the original title. Given the sentiments of Huston's film, it is easy to assume why. The director's emphasis on the forced humour between Astor and Bogart on the one hand, and the sinister relationship between Bogart and Greenstreet on the other, would be ill-fitted to a Hawaiian setting in 1941. The director's over-indulgence in the banter between the sexes, rather than one man's quest to protect his nation would certainly be at odds with the spectre of heroism and patriotism necessary within a film set on the politically sensitive shores of Hawaii.

For a wartime product, Huston's film is strangely more indebted to its queasy romantic-comedy storyline than the necessity to protect American soil. One of the film's most interesting facets is Bogart's muted patriotism. Utilizing a skilled plot twist after more than half an hour of sugary romance, Huston offers Bogart's character a sense of national duty. Yet, there is little pride that Bogart carries with his newfound occupation. Flag-waving and hyperbolic patriotism are almost non-existent throughout Across The Pacific. Cultural ignorance however remains at the forefront.

Racist attitudes via stereotypes and malignant cartoonish appropriations of Japanese culture permeate Across The Pacific. Almost all of the Japanese characters are short, male and stone-faced. Their emotionless expressions are evident in their stereotypical wire moustaches, thick Coke bottle glasses and heavily accented broken English. Joe Totsuiko is an exception in that he is garralous and overly friendly: a trait one assumes is related to his perceived Americanized upbringing. Yet, in the film's language and tone, these All-American traits are worn as a costume designed to mask the hidden malicious characteristics the film duly associates purely with Oriental characters and their admirers.

Greenstreet's rotund Lorenz is one of those followers. His cultured appreciation for haikus, judo and his fluency in Japanese is not a sign of worldly education, but as with other films of the era this signifies his deceptive baseness. In contrast, the film's North American characters are often hostile and suspicious of their Asian crew and fellow passengers. Both Astor and Bogart embarassingly claim the Japanese are purely homogenous in their facial features. Upon hearing a delicate haiku translated by Lorenz, Astor's character woefully responds in front of two Japanese men that she believes the Japanese do have "emotions like us."

Bogart's mistrust of Joe Totsuiko is evident in his avoidance and snappy rhetoric toward his fellow passenger. Upon arriving in Panama, it should be noted that Bogart's closest colleague on the thinly composed Central American country is an Asian hotel clerk named Sam. Furthermore, Bogart frequently works with Asian coworkers in Panama in order to expose a chilling secret about the ship's passengers and crew. Yet, Huston's film tends to tar all Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens with the same close-minded brush: assuming all are willing participants in the development of a war mongering Imperial Japan. Attitudes which resulted in the abbhorent seizure of thousands of citizens of Asian descent throughout the United States and Canada during this period.

Across The Pacific serves as an interesting mid-point between Bogart's work in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Donning the similar trenchcoat and hat as in the former, Bogart's character in Across the Pacific adds a greater sense of romance to the proceedings. Furthermore, the backstory of a jilted American turned isolationist with a friend named Sam complies the characteristics of Bogart's character- also named Rick- in Curtiz's masterful film released the same year.

Yet, despite its slick performance by Sydney Greenstreet and Bogart's patented irascible lead, Across The Pacific drifts in a dull fashion along its filmic ocean. Astor's character is flat and uninspired, while Victor Sen Yung achieves a decent effort in another of his continually marginalized and stereotyped performances during the decade.

While Vincent Sherman took over the reins for the film's action-packed finale after Huston was called up for military service, the responsibility for this slow, turgid mess does not fall into his hands. This guilt falls squarely onto John Huston's palms in a picture that ultimately seems ill-suited to his propensity for demonstrating the heart of darkness, rather than fluffy romantic escapades and comedic timing.

* Across The Pacific is available in Warner Brothers' Humphrey Bogart Signature Collection Vol 2.

Other John Huston Films Reviewed:
The Unforgiven (1960) 7/10
The Night of the Iguana (1964) 9/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1946: A Matter Of Life And Death

A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger, 1946) 8/10

In their 1979 song "Heaven," New York quartet The Talking Heads cheekily summized that "Heaven, Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens." Thirty-three years earlier in their film A Matter of Life and Death, the imaginative British duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger thought otherwise.

Flying across the English Channel in his damaged Lancaster Bomber, English pilot, poet and European historian Peter Carter (David Niven) realizes he is about to die. With his parachute destroyed and the rest of his crew either deceased or previously ejected, Carter eccentrically mutters his final words to June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator stationed in England. As she weeps upon his hearing his words, Carter jumps into the icy waters below.

Arriving washed-up on a sandy shore manned by a naked boy herding goats, Carter assumes he is in heaven, only for the boy to remark that he is actually in England. Seeing June cycling across the beach, Peter runs to her and the pair begin to fall in love. But in Heaven, there is a problem. Conductor 71 (Powell and Pressburger regular Marius Goring) a French Revolutionary-cum-Angel was supposed to collect Carter upon his fall, but became bewilderingly lost in the thick wafts of English fog.

Appearing in a rose garden, Conductor 71 informs Peter of the rare mistake. Madly in love with June, the former pilot refuses to accept death and pleads for a trial to determine his fate; while June's friend Dr. Reeves (Powell and Pressburger alumni Roger Livesey) tries to diagnose Peter's plight through more scientific and rational terms.

Released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven, A Matter of Life and Death was concocted at the behest of the Ministry of Information. With Anglo-American relations straining after the war, the Ministry was keen to have a film that spoke of the "special friendship" the two nations have symbolically shared. Thus, Powell and Pressburger, who had created such notable wartime films as A Canterbury Tale and The 49th Parallel devised a story based upon a newspaper clipping of a pilot who had survived an escape from his downed plane sans parachute.

Ironically, the film product was criticized by reviewers and audiences of the time for being anti-British: a charge that was regularly utilized in reviews of Powell and Pressburger's wartime fare. Yet, what critics of the time mistook for lack of patriotism, today translates into a lack of jingoism. There are no images of the brave, heroic Briton. Instead, A Matter of Life and Death finds Powell and Pressburger pondering their familiar topical concerns about rationality, mental stability and exotic worlds.

Despite the film's emphasis on a world beyond, Heaven itself is often subjected to scrutiny. While the pair do not openly dismiss the existence of Heaven, they do call into question the omnipotent nature of Heaven. The afterlife in the film is imbued with Calvanist notions of predestination as a receptionist holds a list featuring the names and dates of each of the deceased. Conductor 71's mistake may have been the first in over a millenium, but his inability to find Peter hints at the possibility of Heaven as an imperfect world. Certainly there is a degree of truth to this delienation; after all Heaven's membership is compiled of flawed human beings.

Upon first entering Heaven, the receptionist notes that hierarchical barriers such as rank, sex and race are nullified here: all are equal. But as noted by Peter's trial, it is interesting to see how prejudice still exists in Powell and Pressburger's view of Heaven. The prosecutor in Peter's case is Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey): the first American to be killed during the Revolutionary War. Farlan despises the British and composes a jury of individuals from supposedly similarly minded societies: colonial India, Boer War-era South Africa and early 20th century Ireland. Farlan's case is mostly constructed not from judicial arguments, but through cultural prejudices: arguing that a woman of "good American stock" would be culturally unable to love a whimsical Englishman.

Yet, the trial brings into question the rationality of the natural laws binding the two worlds. In Farlan's estimation, love is irrational and thus he is unable to support Carter's claim for a prolonged life. But, Carter and his attorney argue differently. Conductor 71's mistake allowed Carter to rationally fall in love with a woman, whom previously he would not have met under any other circumstances.

The existence of Heaven is established through the dichotomy between scientific rationalism and psychological irrationalism. The negating of time during his confrontations with Conductor 71 prevents individuals other than Carter in seeing these meetings occur. Due to Carter's previous history of head trauma, Dr. Reeves assumes that these visions could easily be hallucinations. Through surgery the doctor aims to correct this mental imbalance, while still involving his curiousity by inquiring to the nature of Carter's conversations with the Frenchman. Furthermore, Powell and Pressburger employ the same actor to play the Judge presiding over Carter's case and his brain surgeon.

Like other Powell and Pressburgers films like I Know Where I'm Going!, The Red Shoes, Tales of Hoffman and Black Narcissus, the notion of mental instability is progressed. In each of the latter films, this disproportion is the product of human emotions in a strange or foreign place. In I Know Where I'm Going! Wendy Hiller tries to marry a wealthy man on the Scottish island of Mull, but is surrounded by a group of colourful eccentrics, who along with Mother Nature persuade her to take an alternative route in life; both The Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes feature characters driven to the edge through romance in a foreign land; while Black Narcissus sees a group of nuns become fractured and instable in the Himalayas when their true sentiments and lusts are revealed.

The foreign nature of Heaven is related through Alfred Junge's modernist sets and Jack Cardiff's cinematography. Featuring open ampitheatres, white walls and an escalator, Heaven is a place detached from the warm colourful landscapes of Earth captured in Jack Cardiff's visuals. This is primarily acheived by Cardiff's utilization of both black and white and colour cinematography. Like in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, two colour techniques are utilized to distinguish two different worlds. Using harsh black and white to capture Heaven, the afterlife is filled with the type of cold and mechanical imagery later to be seen in 1950's Sci-Fi cinema; Earth on the otherhand is not as regimented and thus is filled with surreal imagery and hyperactive colour. Earth thus belongs to the cinematic spirit of Cocteau in its portrayal of the fantastic.

Featuring a strong cast including David Niven, Kim Hunter, Marius Goring and Roger Livesey, A Matter of Life and Death, A Matter Of Life and Death is one of the most interesting and complex British films of its ever. Utilizing fantastic sets by Alfred Junge and images by master cinematographer Jack Cardiff, Powell and Pressburger created one of the most memorable films of its era.

Although Hunter's performance is often annoying in its context as one of the duo's dependent female characters, her role is minimal. Additionally, the picture's Anglo-American legal duel during the film's last twenty minutes is often tedious and overwrought in its construction.Viewed a critical and commercial failure at the time of its release, A Matter Of Life and Death has emerged as one of the most important films of the 1940's: a magical and charming romantic-fantasy filled with delightful comic touches.

* A Matter of Life and Death is available on R2 DVD through Carlton Home Video.

Other Powell and Pressburger Films Reviewed:
Black Narcissus (1947) 10/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1991: Delicatessen

Delicatessen (Jeunet and Caro, 1991) 8/10

Before the worldwide success of his colourful romantic comedic fantasy Amélie, inventive French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was perhaps most well-known for his ill-fated entry in the Alien franchise with 1997's Alien Resurrection. Six years earlier however, Jeunet along with his then directorial co-partner Marc Caro, created a film that would signal the rise of arguably France's most well-known contemporary director.

Set in a yellow-hued post-apocalyptic France, Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen is a bizarre, dark comedy. Situating its action around a decrepit apartment block, the film focuses on the cannibalistic activities emanating from the apartment's connecting bucher shop. Despite the unsanitary conditions, the apartment is a popular locale due to Clapet the building's owner and resident butcher's (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) ability to supply his tenants with juicy cuts of meat. Due to the sparsity of food, lentils and corn seed are viable bartering tools and meat is a virtual unknown. Inventors are forced to create machines to replicate animal sounds in the hope of luring rats and other animals from their lairs. Yet, through his unethical business practices, Clapet routinely manages to utilize the notable resource of meat around: humans.

To counter the paucity of edible susistenence, the butcher places ritually want ads in a local newspaper: requiring a new building superintendant seemingly every fortnight. Clapet's latest gullible victim is Louison (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon): a downhearted ex-clown still mourning the death of his partner Dr. Livingstone. Despite his small stature, Clapet hires him due to the rising discontent amongst his starved lodgers. Yet, when Louison falls in love with Clapet's equally quirky daughter Julie (Marie-Laurie Dougnac), the butcher carves up a plan to cut up his latest occupant.

Inspired by Jeunet's time living over a butcher's shop with his fiancée, Delicatessen is a gloriously original and dark creation. Featuring a typically Jeunetian wide-eyed innocent for a protagonist in Louison, Jeunet outlines the thematic approaches he would later explore in films such as Amélie and A Very Long Engagement. In the film Louison falls in love with the butcher's myopic-sighted daughter. Despite her impaired eyesight, Louison is perhaps the only character who truly loves her for who she is. With humanity and society engaging in caustic destruction, Louison's naive optimism shines throughout the film.

He truly believes there is good in every individual and that evil is something humans are directed towards due to unfortunate circumstances. Yet, in the cynical society in which Louison inhabits, his brand of cheerfulness is resented and viewed with suspicion. While the socially awkward Julie truly sees Louison for his genuinely warm heart, her authoritative father believes he is a threat: undermining the influence has upon in his daughter's life.

Like in his later productions 2001's Amélie and 2004's A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet instills warmth and pathos into his unfortunate eccentric characters without over-sentimentalizing his surreal vision. His protagonists see the world in a myriad of colours. They are eternal optimists: the proponents of fate, destiny, soulmates and so forth. Yet, as Jeunet often notes they are rarities in life. Thus, the other renters represent a view antithetical to Jeunet's protagonists.

These individuals are bitter, manipulative and suicidal. From the cigarette smoking children who steal parcels and panties to the man housing frogs and snails in his flooded apartment, they represent a selfish opponent to the benevolence of Louison and Julie. It is these people who are often the film's most arduous consumers of human flesh. Their parsimonious values hinder their social and ethical development throughout the film. This is notable in the routine visual inspections of a bespectacled woman who repeatedly engages in labryinthine failed suicide attempts due to the voices she hears in her head that her husband rejects as nonsense. Often it is through Louison's indirect handiwork that she is spared from calculated death.

Visually the film is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil in its view of a dystopic world of dehumanized individuals and the counteracting underground rebels who are attempting to break the nation's propensity towards conformity. Given the sub-textual allusions to cannibalism throughout Delicatessen, it is only natural that the film's sewer-based guerilla fighters known as the Troglodins, are a group of inept vegetarians whose bumbling antics are not far removed from a Monty Python film.

Shot using coloured filters, Jeunet's film houses a jaundiced vision that mirrors the social and moral ills of its eccentric oddball characters. Although this method is similar to the approach Lars Von Trier used in his post-apocalyptic debut 1986's The Element of Crime, Jeunet and Caro's utilization of filters is much more agreeable: allowing for the richness of Aline Bonetto's expressionistic set designs to be sumptumously be captured through Darius Khondji's wide-angled lens.

Featuring Jeunet mainstay Dominique Pinon in the lead role as Louison, the actor infuses his rubber-faced character with all the quintessential trappings of an orthodox Jeuentian hero or heroine: brimming with goodness, innocence and optimism in a cynical and vile world. Like Pinon's Louison, the Marie-Laure Dougnac's Julie is similarly brushed with a degree of sadness, but never in a sappy manner.

Rather through Jeunet's eclectic characterizations and the complex visual jokes, the director provides a wonderful blackened edge to the sepia-tinted romantic underpinnings of the story. The film's sex scene in which the corpulent butcher and his frail mistress pressure their springbox is masterfully filled with humorous wonder: as the director simultaneously captures other sexual puns such as two children pumping up their bicycle in unison with other suggestive actions emanating from the apartment.

Upon its initial release Delicatessen was mostly overlooked by its contemporary audiences, but has particularly since the release of Jeunet's Amélie found a subsequent cult following initially spearheaded by Brazil and 12 Monkeys director Terry Gilliam. Evidently ahead of its time, the film is remarkably timeless and fresh in its dystopic setting and romantic storyline. A delightful cult classic, Delicatessen heralded the emergence of one of France's most important visual directors in Jean-Pierre Jeunet: yielding his unique aesthetic sensibilities to an increasingly receptive audience.

* Delicatessen is available on R1 DVD through Miramax Home Video and on R2 through Momentum

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1966: Knives Of The Avenger

Knives Of The Avenger (Bava, 1966) 2/10

The "Viking Epic" is a strand of the "swords and sandals" genre popular amongst audiences in the 1950's. Finding its mainstream Hollywood roots in Richard Fleischer's 1958 Kirk Douglas vehicle The Vikings, the sub-genre spawned a variety of imitators through to the late Sixties.

Films such as famed British cinematographer Jack Cardiff's The Long Ships and Clive Donner's Alfred the Great were lesser efforts backed by major studios. And although the sub-genre made a brief comeback in the mid-1980s with Paul Verhoeven's Flesh + Blood, its most lasting popularity was found in continental Europe, particularly in Italy. Italian horror director Mario Bava produced two notable European B-Viking films starring American ex-patriate Cameron Mitchell, 1961's Erik the Conquerer and 1966's Knives of the Avenger.

Produced under the Italian title I Coltetti Del Vendicatore, Knives of the Avenger was a troubled production, which Bava attempted to rescue early on through a complete re-write and six additional days of shooting. Often referred to as an Italian version of George Stevens' Shane, Knives of the Avenger is essentially a Spaghetti Western dressed in 8th century period clothing.

Utilizing an unusually complex episodic narrative, Knives of the Avenger follows a presumably widowed Viking woman named Karin (Elissa Pechelli) who along with her son Moki (Luciano Pollentin) goes into hiding from Hagen (Fausto Tozzi): a vicious warrior lusting for Karin's hand in marriage. Believing her husband is still alive, Karin resists Hagen's wrath by hiding with her son in a rural plain. When Hagen's henchmen locate them, she is saved by a passing warrior named Rurik (Cameron Mitchell), whose path has previously interlocked with the exiled family.

More of a character study, than an action film Knives of the Avenger is ultimately a curiosty piece. Replace the film's Scandinavian characters' knives with guns and fur-lined clothing with leather and the film is essentially a western. Disputes and interactions often take place in quasi-saloons, while outlaws roam the countryside .Even Marcello Gombini's score is more fitting of the rural surroundings of the Western than the pomposity of an epic.

Despite being more or less a belated director-for-hire for Knives of the Avenger, Bava imbues the film with a strong sense of his thematic concerns about family relationships and deception. With her family disintegrated by tragedy, Karin aims to protect her son and keep the future of their isolated kinship alive. The well-being of her son and the desire to find her long presumed dead husband are the only instinctual feelings Karin is truly aware of in her maternalistic view on life. Although fearful of the mysterious Rurik's arrival, Karin learns to see him as a protector: a surrogate father figure for Moki.

It is here that the film's comparisons to Shane are most likely arrived at. Like in Shane, an enigmatic figure arrives to protect a family with limited explanation as to why. Alan Ladd's arrival and reasons for aiding a small community are less peripheral to Stevens' film than Rurik's presence in Knives of the Avenger. As with the title character in Shane, Rurik aids in the educational development of the child in the methods required to survival and operate as a man. But in Stevens' film, the mysterious figure also aids in defining the masculine roles of Van Heflin's impotent and weak masculine figure.

Rurik does not engage in such methods in Knives of the Avenger due to the father's absence. Instead he teaches the son life lessons on how to eventually fufill his father's promise. Furthermore, Rurik's motives for aiding the family are more clearly defined. Through an interesting flashback sequence, we see how Rurik's earlier lust for revenge resulted in the defilement of Karin and her former community.

Upon learning of the misinterpreted and deceived past, Rurik feels guilt for his previous actions and thus tries to redeem himself through helping the family. As noted in the flashback sequence, Hagen's earlier deception produced agonizing destruction for countless innocent parties and it is through nullfying Hagen's malevolent tactics that Rurik can compensate for his earlier sins as a rapist and mauradering pillager.

What truly distinguishes Knives of the Avenger from similar films of its era is found in Bava's peculiar cinematography and locations. Characters are often filmed in the foreground to illustrate the feelings of others in the same scene. Often filmed on rolling hills or along sandy coastlines, the director presents a stark contrast between the windswept intensity of the beach and the bucolic tranquility of the hills. Yet, Bava deceives his audience by inverting the meanings of these environments. Through a soothsayer on the beach, Karin acquires an aura of calm, which is almost erased through the aggressive methods used by Hagen's followers.

Despite its unique construction and Bava's reputation as a master visualist, Knives of the Avengers curiously suffers from static pacing and bland aesthetics. The makeshift brown tones add stagnation rather than diversity to Bava's palette, while the emphasis on character study produces a snail-like conundrum in which movement is sacrificed to address the psychological aspects of this medieval revival of the biblical epiphany story: a narrative in which good paradoxically coincides with evil.

This sense of biblical tragedy is never fully realized in Knives of the Avenger. The film's moral implications and complex psychology are weighed down by the dull language and secondary performances. There is arguably potential for a highly interesting film with ethical dilemmas similar to those proposed in Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, or even Kurosawa's Yojimbo within the material. Ultimately, Bava's inability to cohesively rein in the narrative under a more vibrant tone produces a rather dour and maudlin piece: an appealing investigation of human nature that sadly stupors into mediocrity.

* Knives of the Avenger is available in Anchor Bay's Mario Bava Collection V1.

Other Mario Bava Films Reviewed:
Black Sunday (1960) 9/10
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) 6/10
Black Sabbath (1963) 7/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1938: Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938) 8/10

For modern audiences, it is difficult to separate Cary Grant from his later suave debonair persona or Katharine Hepburn from her legendary status. Yet when Bringing Up Baby was released by RKO in 1938, Grant was better known for his comedic timing in films such as Topper and The Awful Truth than the tanned charm he would later perfect in films such as Charade or North By Northwest.

Similarly, while Hepburn is today viewed as a pioneering feminist, in the 1930's she was box-office poison. Resented for her considerable family fortune and her tendency to overact, Hepburn was seemingly destined to wither away from Hollywood by the end of the Thirties. Fortunately, 1940's Philadelphia Story to which she had the rights to resurrected her career, but not after she was forced to buy out her contract following 1938's expensive box-office disaster Bringing Up Baby.

A textbook example of a great screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby supplies the sub-genre's recognized traits of eccentric characters, absurd situations and verbal wit. Films such as His Girl Friday, My Man Godfrey and The Palm Beach Story all share the erratic sub-genre's focus on class deconstruction and the battle of the sexes within sophisticated settings.

Bringing Up Baby was the second film featuring Grant and Hepburn together- the first being in George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett in which the New England-born actress appears in drag. Like the former, Bringing Up Baby was a film that did poorly at the box-office and with critics of the period, but was revived in the 1950's by the critics at Cahiers du Cinema and in the 1960's by the New York Theatre; eventually being remade by Peter Bogdanovich in 1972 as What's Up Doc? starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.

The film concentrates on socially reserved paleontology professor David Huxley (Cary Grant). After four years of work assembling a Brontosaurus, Huxley finally receives the missing piece (an intercostal clavicle) and is set to wed to his workaholic associate. But in order to finish the Brontosaurus, Huxley must garner financial backing from an elderly philanthropist Mrs. Random, through her lawyer Mr. Peabody. Yet, along the way Huxley meets free-spirited socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) who along with pet leopard Baby appears to thwart Huxley's quest to finalize his jurassic creation and wed his dour finacée.

Revelling in typical Hawksian situations and problems, Bringing Up Baby utilizes the famed director's emphasis on speed to accelerate the tensions and turmoil between his two oddball lead characters. The Hawksian thematic approach to the intertwining turmoil between the sexes is prevalent throughout Bringing Up Baby. In the film, this concept is illustrated through the combative love/hate relationship Vance and Huxley share.

Desperate to engage in his own pursuits, Grant's inhibited Huxley is unable to shake off his open and flirtatious acquaintance in Hepburn's Susan Vance. No matter how hard he tries, she always "coincidentally" happens to be following him: stalking him with a curled romantic crush, often illustrated in her suggestive remarks regarding Grant's appearance sans his horn-rimmed glasses or her tactic that results in Grant leaving a shower with no available clothes.

Through her kleptomania and hyperactive, unfocused approach to life, Susan Vance is viewed as the necessary tonic to loosen Huxley's nice-mannered, but dull demeanour. Conversely, his straight-laced mannerisms offer her direction and purpose to her spasmodic lifestyle. Yet, this relationship is crucially built not necessarily on love, but on frustration and loneliness. Huxley often wants to strangle Vance, rather than hug her; yet as she remarks when Huxley tries to ward him home, she needs him as she is extremely lonely.

One can even find similarities in thier primal relationship with George, the dog of Vance's aunt. When George steals and buries David's intercostal clavicle, the maligned professor embarks on an amusing quest around a vast Connecticut property. To others, David's search on all fours is embarassingly neurotic; even though Susan is evidently following David in a similar manner.

By maneuvering David back to her home after tearing their clothes at a fancy restaurant, Susan is laying down a template for her sexual conquest of David and his assimilation into her family. Therefore, one of the great, often unmentioned delights of Hawks' film is the manner in which Susan's romantic neurosis is deemed acceptable by her family and others, while through her antics David becomes portrayed as a loon. By pursuing George and the leopard, the intellectualized David demeans himself. While the animalistic qualities of Hepburn's Vance erupt in her enhanced sexual desire, they result in the esteemed professor turning into a beastlike creature: stalking his prey with little care for anything but the prize.

Due to the film's budgeting issues and subsequent financial failure, both Hawks and Hepburn almost had their careers destroyed. While the former was fired from his next RKO production, Hepburn was pushed toward buying out her contract, or be subsequently placed in humilating roles as punishment for the film's failure. Ironically in the end, the critical and commercial fortunes of both parties vastly improved in the years after the film's release. Hepburn would become a noted actress and famed co-star alongside her lover Spencer Tracy, while Hawks would create another legendary screwball comedy with Grant ( His Girl Friday) before dipping into other genres.

While revisionist critics have argued the film's failure was down to its sophistication and focus on East Coast intellectuals, Hawks later asserted that perhaps his characters were not "normal" enough. Yet, evidenced by the success of madcap characters in film's such as Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey and Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, one has to believe that the perhaps the normality of the film's characters was not the problem, but perhaps the lack of analysis given toward dissecting (any of) the class differences between David and Susan.

With its settings in lavish apartments, country clubs and rural estates, Bringing Up Baby was a rarity in screwball comedy for its lack of topical social commentary. By detaching and isolating itself from the events of the Depression, Hawks flooded the film with a timeless quality, yet avoided offering any sly socio-economic insights. Other than a off-the-cuff remark regarding the shabby nature of Grant's car, there is little mentioned that demonstrates a class distinction between David and Susan. Arguably, its most interesting cultural element, is the film's famous ad-libbed line in which dressed in a woman's robe, David signficantly exclaims that he "just went gay all of a sudden:" a rare early instance of the term being used in a homosexual context.

Filled with pratfalls and visual gags, Bringing Up Baby is the rare screwball comedy to hybridize sophisticated humour with the calculated inventive comedy of Lloyd, Keaton or Chaplin. To its champions, it is a film that delights audiences, because of the rapidity and propensity of its comic timing. Each new viewing of Bringing Up Baby offers new humourous points as comedic layers are peeled back to reveal further anecdotes, quips and queries.

Utilizing a fantastic tandem in Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, director Howard Hawks fashioned one of the great American comedies: a frenzied fusion of comedic styles blended into an eccentric, screwy setting. Although the film arguably lacks a counterbalance to its an array of off-kilter individuals, this is not necessarily problematic. Rather through the film, Hawks is able to exasperate the primal nature of lust in its crazy and irrational forms. By taking this to this extreme, Hawks creates a film lined with memorable quotes and great performances. Along with his later Gentleman Prefers Blondes, this is one of his most outstanding comedic achievements.

* Bringing Up Baby is available in Warner Home Video's Classic Comedies Collection

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

2003: Big Fish

Big Fish (Burton, 2003) 9/10

" I've been nothin' but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that it's your failin', not mine" (Senior Edward Bloom)

Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is a storyteller. Correction. In his mind, Edward Bloom is a storyteller: a dispenser of wisdom, joviality and authenticity. In the opinion of his journalist son, Will (Billy Crudup), his father is less of an accurate recollecter of memories and more of a charlatan, a myth of a man: a novelty salesman engrossed by the egotistical nature of his yarns. He is the Aesop of Alabama.

The chaotic conflict between father and son produces an aeon of accepted silence. The internalized stubborness of one man, rejects the embellishments of another. But when tragedy strikes and Will is forced home, his journey is less of a desire to see his ailing father in his dying days, but rather to find the allusive pieces to the latter's puzzling and enigmatic life. The result is a Fellini-esque cauldron of visual delights in director Tim Burton's second masterpiece after 1994's Ed Wood.

Known for his eccentric Gothic style, Burton has become marginalized as a distributor of dark charms and ghoulish imagery. A former Disney cartoonist, who left animation to create some of the most ecletic visuals of the past two decades. Films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and his two dated offerings to the pre-Christopher Nolan Batman catalogue have cemented this position. Yet, Burton's best work has often been found in the films, the general public has most readily neglected such as 1994's Ed Wood. The latter, like Big Fish is a wonderful blend of gregarious enthusiasm and melancholic surroundings. Whereas Depp's portayal of the title character instilled colour into Burton's monochrome vision, the director flushes Big Fish with a hyperactive style that strangely complements its low-key emotionalism.

A diverse pastiche of cinematic flavours, Big Fish re-creates the dynamic, hyperactive tall-tales of Ed Bloom through a romanticized interpretation of his past. Several critics including Jonathan Rosenbaum have criticized Burton for creating a film set in the Deep South that negates and downplays the racist aspects of southern society in the 1950's. Yet, Rosenbaum and the majority of the film's other detractors have overlooked a key facet of Bloom's stories. In each interlocking tale, Bloom's character is the centrepiece with a revolving door of stock characters at his disposal. The characters symbolic latitude far outweighs their authentic context.

These are centerpieces in a larger metaphor: embellishments designed to sparkle mundane events. Like in many collective memories, the past becomes distorted and romanticized to the point of absurdity. Edward Bloom's tales are absurd. Nothing terrible ever occurs to Bloom in these stories, as they are merely ways to demonstrate his majestic conquering of love, destiny and life. Genuine social and personal problems are selectively overlooked, because they do not adhere to the populist positivist outlook on life Bloom has. Showing civil strife and unrest is unlikely in Bloom's memories, not necessarily because the character is not interested in them, but because the character's rememoration operates in a space of absolute harmony.

The perceived selfishness of Bloom's stories belies their selfless metaphoric qualities. This is not like Robert Zemecksis' Forrest Gump in which one ordinary simpleton achieves extraordinary feats; rather this a film in which an ordinary dreamer concocts and manifests the extraordinary out of life's everyday activities: spicing them up with peppered layers of intrigue to allow for better dissemination. Through Ewan McGregor's portrayal of the young Edward Bloom, Burton allows these stories to be grounded in an earthiness, despite their oddball nature. This is clearly due to McGregor's charming ways in being able to extract some of the Fifties charm he satirized in Peyton Reed's Down With Love and ensnare it once more into Burton's film.

At its core, Big Fish is a picture about father-son reconciliation, yet Burton's handling of the film's emotional sequences is grafted with great integrity. Big Fish never becomes sappy or corny: its sentimentality is utilized for more investigative purposes. Through his mawkish analysis, Burton pushes forth the notion of a fearless individual attempting to craft a narrative synchronized to his epic scope.

Utilizing the fish motif, Burton is able to address the elder Bloom as a human "fish out of water." This is done through repeated references to Bloom requiring water, noting the slippery qualities of his nature and his unquenchable thirst for life and adventure. The film's moving bathtub sequence between the dying Bloom and his wife Sandra (played by Jessica Lange) further re-inforces this concept in the notion that Bloom fears he "will dry out:" losing his vitality and in the process the exaggerations and half-truths that shape his version of the past.

In piecing together, his father's stories, the journalistic and investigative Will begins to realize the two separate halves to the art of storytelling. Will represents the accurate, literal tendencies of modern journalism, while his father represents an oral tradition of a bygone era: a time of contextual storytelling in which the moral of the story held greater intent than the individual words. Through his investigations, Will uncovers the true essence of his father. Yet, he begins to realize that arguably the carefully constructed memories his father has told for decades are arguably a more accurate definition of his father's character. The truth is caught between the fantastic and realistic elements of life, in which fantasy and reality intertwine.

Here, Edward Bloom is less of a liar and more of an original folk artist: a product of his culture and environment. Through his stories, we see a man readily combating prejudice, fear and doubt. The town of Spectre demonstrates Bloom's perspectives clearly. Over time his opinions and memories become altered and thus his actions reflect in due course. In saving Spectre, Bloom preserves the collective romanticized memories of an entire people from modernism.

Public heritage and private recollections are important interlocking ideas for Edward Bloom because through preservation and oral recollection, the stories of others and himself can live on beyond what French memory historian Pierre Nora would term the memory's "shelf life:" the expiration date all memories hold when all their original participants are lost through the natural effects of time and age.

And it is these morals and life lessons that Edward Bloom accrues and disperses through his stories: a collection of images, ideas and concepts true to heart. It is through their ritualized reinforcement that his purpose as a storyteller is achieved and thus by passing on his legacy to his son, Edward Bloom is able to immortalize himself. In creating a film of beautiful imagery, poignant drama and surrealist Fellini-esque ideas, Tim Burton has created a wonderfully acted celebration of life's joys, imagined or not.


* Big Fish is available through Columbia Home Video

Other Tim Burton Films Reviewed:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) 9/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

2004: Garden State

Garden State (Braff, 2004) 3/10

"I spent 26 years waiting for something else to start, so, no, I don't think it's too much to take on, because it's everything there is." (Andrew Largeman)

In the mid-Nineties, American independent cinema appeared to be on the rise. Actors such as Dustin Hoffman vowed never to appear in another mainstream project, while Miramax produced a slew of Academy Award nominated films such as The English Patient, Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love to critical and commercial acclaim. And then it happened. Rather, suddenly and abruptly, American independent cinema no longer evolved into a critical national art cinema, but instead sank into an atrophic environment of smugness and self-pity.

In this post-9/11 malaise, American cinema lost its vitality. The once fearful major studios such as Warner Brothers and Paramount set up independent branches releasing the type of fare audiences were supposed to expect from independents: self-important films dealing with domestic crises and self-loathing. In this malaise an array of blundering productions past quietly over the American cinematic landscape. Pictures like A Home At The End of The World, We Don't Live Anymore and Northfork filled in this void. The artsy inclinations these branches were supposed to attend to became transposed into outlets for quirky projects with mainstream aspirations such as Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine.

Garden State can be viewed as a synthesis of this concerning dilemma in American independent cinema: an ongoing battle between mainstream audiences and artistic intentions that supplies ideas of social abbhorance within an eccentric setting. Starring, written and directed by Scrubs star Zach Braff, Garden State is a typical generic entry in American independent cinema: operating within the formulaic visual and contextual codes the medium has consciously fostered and solidified over the past decade.

A failed actor, now working as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant, Andrew Largeman (Braff) decides to return home to New Jersey for the funeral of his paralysed mother. Bearing guilt over his mother's condition, the heavily medicated Largeman decides to jettison his daily routine of pills against the advice of his psychiatrist father Gideon (Ian Holm). Desperate to "feel" something, Andrew reconnects with his past including his former colleagues such as Mark (Peter Sarsgaard) and a new love interest in the form of Samantha (Nathalie Portman): an epileptic free-spirit and pathological liar.

Garden State captures a culture of twentysomethings unable or unwilling to take the next step into adulthood. Needing to take risks, Andrew learns in a period of four days in his home state of New Jersey, the necessity of finding purpose in his maudlin life. Through Samantha, he is able to break free from the expectations of his father and over a period of ninety-six hours come to realize the importance of creating a life distinguished from his past and his father's ambitions.

The film's three principal characters are each insulated from the outside world through recreational or prescription drugs. The theme of medication becomes particularly important for Braff's character, who through releasing himself from his prescribed narcotics can evidently absolve himself from his father's pathetic authoritarianism. For the film's New Jersey based characters, this neverending stream of parties, drugs and alcohol- a would-be relic from a high school era- typifies their inhibited goals and aims. Through drugs, they find salvation from the toil and burden of their days, yet in Braff's construction several of these characters seem happy to reside within these stilted ambitions and low life goals.

Filled with brittle characters and generational clichés, Garden State is a broken record stuck on the same worn out groove. Anointing himself as his generational spokesman, Braff concocts a film that liberally borrows and steals from about half dozen similarly themed films and re-packages it with visual quirks and a torpid acoustic soundtrack. Extracting visual ideas and generational sentiments from films like Mike Nichols' The Graduate, Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Kevin Smith's Clerks, Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, Richard Linklater's subUrbia, Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, Garden State attempts to distinguish itself from the latter films through an inherent self-righteous smugness.

The film aims to cater to a generation numbed by narcotics, materialism and lofty expectations. Yet, it never individuates the generation it aims to embolden from the alienated qualities suffered by Bud Cort's Harold or Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock three decades earlier. Instead Braff's film makes heroes out of dysfunctional also-rans: glorifying perennial shoplifters, junkies and dead-beats, while mocking the only character who has achieved any success in his life. The immaturity of youth is granted a reprieve in this East Coast suburbia. There members of "Gen-Med" are to be applauded for aiming low and failing to fulfill the promises of youth. But after viewing Garden State, one must wonder who really wants to be stuck in their hometown, collecting Desert Storm trading cards, digging (their own) graves and taking copious amount of illegal drugs?

Not I, but somehow Braff's film has become contextualized as a generational statement. Braff intended it this way when he claimed the film was "a big, life-affirming, state-of-the-union address for twentysomethings." Despite his grandiose intentions, Braff's film fails simply because it is like a State of the Union address: a collection of carefully selected words, disguising the hollow nature of the topical matter within. Garden State is all surface and no feeling.

The only substance here is found in the drugs the characters frequently engage in. Braff's film may be about wanting to "feel" something, but given the fact his characters simply care about suppressing their feelings through drugs, it begs the question what do they real want to feel? Braff's Andrew Largeman insists he wants to feel something, but does he really? In becoming an adult and growing up, Andrew must "feel" pain, disappointment, regret and so forth in order go achieve happiness and satisfaction. But like the film's other characters, he willingly holds back: preferring to remain in the safe world of childhood, rather than risk the disconcerting realities of life.

In Garden State Braff has generalized an entire generation of small-town suburban kids as being simply happy with mediocrity. Overtly symbolic characters speak in their inaccurate Generation Y tongue, walk home in Medieval Times suits of armour and collect tears in Dixie cups. Yet, through the film's messy pretentious linings, they, nor Braff make no purposeful or genuine statements about generational alienation. Instead, Braff treats his audience to an array of bizarre images that make no sense in the overall dynamic of the picture: substituting genuine emotional substance for bland sentimentality and absurd eccentricity soundtracked to an aura of anesthization mirrored in the comatose diegetic music.

Ridiculously lauded at the time of its release, Garden State will most likely wither away from our collective memories by the end of the next decade. This is due purely to the film's lack of original substance, as Braff unconsciously attempts to out-quirk his predecessors and rivals with his narcissistic self-congratulatory style. There is plenty of interesting imagery here, but it feels forced: masking the film's unsettling lack of purpose and Braff's disorganized script. Characters are introduced and jettisoned, whilst "realistic" settings bask in an inchoate surrealism. For a film so openly desiring to acheive a capsulized statement about alienation, discontent and misunderstanding, it is quite fitting that such an annoucement comes in the form of an incoherent moan.

* Garden State is available through Fox Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1940: The Letter

The Letter (Wyler, 1940) 7/10

" Strange that a man can live with a woman for ten years and not know the first thing about her " (Howard Joyce)

Baking under the hot Malayan moonlight, a group of rubber plantation workers sway in their hammocks. Only the faint dripping of latex from a tapped rubber tree breaks the tropical silence. After snaking past the workers' makeshift huts, Tony Gaudio's camera suddenly stops at the gates of the plantation's estate. The sticky stillness of the night becomes broken in an instant.

Shots are fired and a man stumbles down a set of steps. Following him through the door is Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), who throttles him with six bullets into his spine. And thus one of cinema's greatest opening sequences marks the entrance to William Wyler's 1940 film The Letter: a dark and malevolent melodrama featuring one of Bette Davis' most sinister performances.

Based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham The Letter is an exquisite tale of betrayal, deception and corruption. After gunning down Geoffrey Hammond, a mutal friend of her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall), outside her doorsteps, Leslie Crosbie tells her husband that a drunken Geoffrey attempted to rape her whilst she engaged in lace-making. Believing the crediblity of his quaint middle-class wife, Robert hires friend Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), a notable barrister amongst Southeast Asia's British population.

Believing it to be an open-shut case, Howard is not perturbed about Leslie's robotic version of the events until a letter appears that contradicts Leslie's testimony. In The Letter, director William Wyler opts to reveal the incriminating letter's contents within the first twenty-five minutes in order to deeply investigate elements of seduction, manipulation and duplicity. Thus what could have been an anti-climatic thriller based on the letter's adulterous contents, instead becomes a sultry, slow-moving journey into the darkest nooks of the human soul.

With her dour glasses and her penchant for crocheting, Leslie is an unlikely perpetrator of murder. Despite her loneliness and isolation, she repeatedly stresses a fidelity to her husband through the fabrication of a cover for their bed. By propagating this self-image throughout The Letter, Davis' character appears to enamour the film's two central male characters through her performance. In relaying her version of the events, Leslie becomes a performer: creating the image of a selfless, dutiful asexual wife. Characters consistently applaud and congratulate her for the delivery and memorized facilitation of the story. There is even an aura of theatricality about her methods including fainting, histronic swoons into her husband's arms and moments of uncustomary sharpness replaced by melodramatic tears.

Yet, this aura of calm, British strength vanishes in the film's brilliant meeting between Leslie and Hammond's Eurasian widow (Gale Sondergaard). Using a windchime as the only sound effect, Wyler creates a masterful atmosphere of smoky tension. And while on the surface the meeting serves to consolidate Howard Joyce's ethical atrophy through the corrupt acquisition of the letter, underneath this meeting between the two rivals serves as a composition of the film's sub-textual engagements.

Meeting Hammond's widow in the back of a shop in the Chinese Quarter, Leslie nurtures Howard's achilles heel. Through her expressive eyes, Leslie has seduced Howard through unspoken terms. The pair's body language and Howard's consigned sweaty grin of internal turmoil denotes this. But when the pair meet Hammond's widow, the tough interior and seductive motives of Leslie disappear. Genuine fear is smeared across her face. Wyler clevely notes the shift in power that has taken place in the room.

Wishing for their cash crops to grow in "civilized climates," Leslie and her fellow racist expatriates espouse the pre-eminence of British values in their imposed cultural hierarchy. But through this deal in a claustrophobic room in the Chinese Quarter, all of their clean cultural vigor is replaced by the notion of impotent imperial corruption and a perversion of civility. Hammond's widow and her fellow Southeast Asians have now acquired the upper hand. Through an interpreter, she controls Leslie's actions through the removal of her shawl and the proximity of their bodies: she even is filmed standing higher than Davis' character with the latter looking up at her with slavish consternation.

Yet, amongst the European classes, the tropical weather and palm-lined topography is viewed throughout the film as a possible cause of this moral diversion from authenticated imperial values. Robert Crosbie in particular believes that the region is responsible for his wife's flirtation with immoral ideas and figures. In moving her to another region with a greater European population, he believes balance and strong character traits will be restored. Yet, this inbred sense of cultural superiority masks the poison within the film's European parties. Via their isolation from Britain, these colonists have allowed their true personalities to spring forth. Subsequently, this has allowed the film's British characters to implement a system of justice constructed on their own corrupt visions of equality, honour and fairness.

The film's cyclical opening and conclusion both feature a full moon: a visual symbol of Leslie's internal savagery; allowing her to awaken the beast within her and bring it to the forefront. Behind her quiet, middle-class exterior, there lies a cold individual whose fondness toward knives and guns belies her gendered claims that her sex prevents her from knowing much about them. These fascinating contradictions, thus pull and repel characters toward her.

The unspoken sexual and cultural tension simmering throughout The Letter allows for the film's central characters to commit unethical acts. Leslie engages in an affair that is not simply a fling, but a hidden lifestyle as carefully calculated and constructed as her personal narrative of Hammond's death. Her reasons for murdering him demonstrate her superiority complex as she is aghast that he would love his Eurasian wife more than his British mistress. She even repeatedly compares Hammond's wife to a ghoulish creature wearing a "mask" rather than a face and fails to trust her indigenous house servants. Yet, these racist reactions go amiss in the jingoistic Crosbie household, in which the film's true monster resides in luxury and comfort.

Given his close friendships with the local population, Howard Joyce is possibly the only character who feels guilt over these epithets. Deceived by her shy words, Howard is secretly smitten with Leslie. Upon the arrival of the letter, this opinion develops into something more complex. Ethically, Howard contests the internal duel between his conscience and his heart. On the one hand, he realizes the letter proves Leslie's guilt, yet his friendship with her and possible amourous desire for her pushes him into a world of corruption. By purchasing the letter, Howard implicitly endorses a judicial system in which the wealthy can buy verdicts and the marginalized must service justice through alternative methods.

The second of Wyler's three collaborations with Bette Davis, The Letter is a smouldering, Noirish tale peppered with two fantastic performances by Davis and Stephenson. Usually equated with intense melodrama, Davis is particularly dazzling in an underplayed role designed to strengthen the film's notion of her as a woman without a conscience; as is John Stephenson in a role that garned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Sadly, Stephenson would die of a heart attack, a year after creating his meticulous performance as a ethically-frayed lawyer.

Yet, the real star of the film is cinematographer Tony Gaudio. With his fluid deep-focus cinematography and emphasis on dark backlighting, Gaudio creates an atmospheric tropical world in which the social boredom and sexual bite that surrounds the film's characters is clearly evident from the film's brilliant tracking-shot opening and chilling conclusion. Evidently, Wyler's pacing and Max Steiner's score are far too thick in their slow, melodramatic ingredients. But regardless of these flaws, The Letter is still one of the best melodramas of the Forties and a dark sinister gem of black and white cinematography.

* The Letter is available in Warner Brothers Bette Davis Collection Vol. 1

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1962: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava, 1962) 6/10

After the success of 1960 horror classic Black Sunday, Italian director Mario Bava decided to shift tones. Unlike his successor Dario Argento, Bava was far more versatile in his selection of projects, in order if anything to continually put food on his table. In the early Sixties, this led to Bava indulging in two costume adventures in 1961 Erik the Conquerer and Hercules in the Haunted World before later attempts at science fiction and the western.

Bava's most influential case of genre experimentation is 1962's La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo or The Girl Who Knew Too Much: the first recognized Italian giallo film. Taking their name from popular lurid, yellow paperbacks, gialli were thrillers that placed ordinary hero(ine)s in the middle of criminal investigation. Often filled with dollops of sex and violence, the cinematic variation of giallo became popular once directors such as Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci added thick layers of colour to the proceedings.

Yet this early entry into giallo is more a loving tribute to Alfred Hitchcock than an exercise in exploitation. Not to be confused with an entirely different film of the same name from 1969 starring Adam West, The Girl Who Knew Too Much infuses the light humour and amateur sleuth sensibilities of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps with the tourist "murder witness" narrative of both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Even Bava's title alludes to Hitchcock's two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much

Beginning aboard a TWA plane high aloft modern Rome, American tourist Nora Davis (Letícia Román) thumbs through her latest giallo. Visiting her sick and eldery aunt Ethel, Nora promises her mother to end this obession with murder mysteries once she has finished with her latest mystery. But when Ethel suddenly dies, a frightened Nora becomes a witness to a murder straight out of one of her favourite gialli.

Shot in harsh black and white The Girl Who Knew Too Much hints at the genre's fleshy future in the film's brazen murder sequence. Draped in a long black plastic raincoat, Nora lies concussed on the wet Roman cobblestones. With her soaked hair sliding upon her brow and the absence of clothing underneath the jacket, the police officer believes her to be an insane, alcoholic prostitute. Nora protests these accusations of drunkeness and insanity: openly telling anybody- including a handsome Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) and Ethel's friend Linda Craven-Torrani (Valentina Cortese)- willing to listen about the fantastic and frightening crime she has witnessed.

When the inept Italian police are unwilling to investigate the murder, Nora takes action into her own hands: emulating the criminal methodology of her idols found in the works of Chandler, Christie and Mickey Spillane. Bava fashions Nora as an amateur sleuth: an insight into the modus operandi of an adult Nancy Drew. Even the film's storyline featuring the "Alphabet Murders" sounds like a plot lifted directly from a Nancy Drew novel. Sharing the same initials as the young heroine of Carolyn Keene's novels, Nora also hones the spunky charm of Myrna Loy's Nora Charles from The Thin Man films. And thus what appears on the surface to be a Noirish synthesis of horror and thriller contorts into an enjoyable, paranoid thriller infused with uncustomary deft humour.

In The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Bava creates a brilliant dichotomy of Rome. Almost immediately, Nora views Rome as a sinister world of criminality: starkly constrasting the notion of a tourist's paradise promoted by the film's omnipotent narrator. At the airport, Nora is witness to a drug bust and after traumatically fleeing Ethel's house, she soon becomes prey to petty theft. Ironically, the dimly-lit flight of steps she descends at night are a tourist hotspot during the day. The postcard image of Rome with its ancient ruins and modern dolce vita are propogated by Marcello, who whisks Nora to these tourist locales to ease her mind. In his opinion the Via Vento or the Colisseum is the real Rome and that crime is a rarity in the city.

Bava manages to extract subtle ironic humour from this notion, as several of the film's principal settings in which criminal acts are discussed or enacted are tourist venues. Through her perpetual engrossment in gialli, Nora however views every character and venue with suspicion. When Ethel's friend Linda Craven-Torrani offers Nora her home, whilst the former visits her husband in Switzerland, the neophyte gumshoe concocts an array of traps culled from within the yellowed paperback sleeves of her favourite authors in order to protect herself.

This self-referential deconstruction of the codes, imagery and plot narratives of mystery novels is done with playful skill by Bava. By acquiring knowledge of police procedure through fictional circumstances, Nora believes she will not only be able to solve the mystery, but also protect herself. Yet, as Bava acknowledges, Nora's schemes often are at the comic detriment of Marcello, who becomes the accidental victim of abuse. Using low angle shots, shadows and a high contrast key light in the film's initial murder sequences, Bava is able to create a swirling and often nightmarish sense of paranoia withiin the film.

Desperate to convey her story and suspicious of everyone, Bava is able to emphasize the sense of cultural dislocation Nora feels not through language (as her character is fluent in Italian), but through physical discomfort. Not even the most serene quarters of Rome are equated with safety in her eyes. Instead through her tomboy antics and utility, Letícia Román is able to fashion a strong and sympathetic female character, who is resourceful and persistent. Fearing the negative response of others, Nora engages in completely acquiring the truth in all its forms: as her need to find a sense of personal and public closure pushes Nora to find the necessary clues.

Using bubbling camera effects and limited backlight, Bava is able to create a hallucinatory world in which nothing may truly appear as it seems. Here the boundaries of meta-physics are broken as the past and the present coalesce. Through her yearning for the truth, Nora refuses to yield to police pressure. Yet via her foreign identity and concussed memories, Nora's dreamlike struggle to piece together the real events plays upon the audience's conceptions of sanity and reality. Even solid primary sources such as newspaper clippings and professional testimonies from doctors, journalists and police officers are called into question as evidence disappears. Even the finale of the Italian version of the film calls into question Nora's search for the truth under highly dubious and unintentionally amusing circumstances.

The cinematic jigsaw Bava creates often feels too clichéd in its positions. Although this allows the picture to work as a satirization and homage to Hitchcock and gialli, there are moments when the film threatens to lose its temperment. Incidentally, when released in the United States under the absurd title The Evil Eye much of the film's darkness, horrific suspense and parodic gilded linings were eliminated in favour of even further comedy.

Letícia Román's performance in The Girl Who Knew Too Much is crucial to continuing its present dark, schizophrenic convictions and she works in establishing a likeble character who veers between calcuation and irrationality. John Saxon's role as the progenitor to the film's romantic sub-plot is less astute, but still useful as is the work of Valentina Cortese; who although arguably threatening to unbalance this picture does add a further degree of impractical intrigue.

Despite the thin absurd notions of its plot, Mario Bava's 1962 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much is highly likeable and enjoyable Hitchcockian thriller. While not anywhere near a masterpiece, the film is an endearing little gem, whose cryptic visuals separate it from similarly innocuous fare. Via an emphasis on tilted aesthetics and nightmarish perceptions of Rome, Bava continues Federico Fellini's caustic appraisals of Rome as a city of sin and immorality. Although Bava would go onto make other giallo films in his career, none would have the same impact or referential filmic odes as this odd little film which sadly was the least commercially successful of his entire career.

* The Girl Who Knew Too Much is available through Anchor Bay's Mario Bava Collection Vol. 1

Other Mario Bava Films Reviewed:
Black Sunday (1960) 9/10
Black Sabbath (1963) 7/10
Knives of the Avenger (1966) 2/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1968: Barbarella

Barbarella (Vadim, 1968) 1/10

Who seduces an angel? Who strips in space? Who conveys love by hand? Who gives up the pill? Who takes sex into outer space? Who's the girl of the 21st century? Who nearly dies of pleasure? (Promotional Tagline)

In April, 1968 director Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey: an ingenious blend of celestial special effects and avant-garde narrative constructs. Planned and constructed over a number of years, the film's meticulous visuals are still some of the most remarkable and durable creations ever captured on celluloid. Time has fared well for Kubrick's creation. Six months later, another noted sci-fi film was released. Yet, unlike Kubrick's futuristic vision, time has not been kind to Roger Vadim's 1968 film Barbarella. In fact, time has been rather spiteful.

For all her successive achievements in films such as Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Alan J. Pakula's Klute and Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Jane Fonda has never been able to live down her most infamous performance as the title character in her then-husband Roger Vadim's 1968 film Barbarella. When recently asked where her head was when she agreed to play the title role of Jean Claude Forest's adult graphic novel, Fonda responded "I don't know- up my armpit."

Barbarella is arguably Jane Fonda's filmic "Hanoi Jane" moment: an error in retrospect and a blight on her career. And while her outspoken political views and notorious photograph perched upon a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun still bewilderingly anger Vietnam veterans, Barbarella has somehow shockingly become her most famous role.

Directed by French filmmaker Roger Vadim, Barbarella must have been a Sixties teenage nerd's cinematic "wet dream:" a ridiculously campy and trashy softcore sci-fi spoof filled with sexual innuendo, entendres and psychedelic imagery; essentially a sexed-up Star Trek parked outside an intergalatic bordello-cum-opium den. In the film, Jane Fonda stars as Barbarella, a 41st century century agent for the Republic of Earth asked by the President of Earth to track down missing scientist Duran Duran (Milo O' Shea) who is threatening the peaceful balance of the galaxy.

To the tune of the film's catchy psychedelic-lounge soundtrack, Barbarella begins with the film's infamous zero gravity strip. It is here that Vadim outlines the limited perspectives of Barbarella: a tongue-in-cheek film of risque images and bawdy space humour. Yet, the imagery produced in Claude Renoir's cinematography is hardly sexy or humourous. Instead the film is often offensively backward with feminist activist Fonda surprisingly playing a character that is neither strong nor rounded.

Instead Barbarella is a product of a mechanized future in which emotions and interactions are repressed through pills and robotic language. The inhabitants of other worlds are mocked for their savagery. Yet, this "living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility" is inherently sexualized, rather than fashioned through technological sources. Such is the development of the human race that intercourse is performed through narcotics, rather than intimate interaction. But while, Vadim could have suggested this as part of a larger problem of social detachment, instead he milks it for petty laughs.

After being rescued from a group of vile children, Barbarella's saviour, a man wearing a suit that appears to have once been a Wookie, asks her for sexual compensation. Yet, instead of using pills, the man pleasures sexually innocent Barbarella with genuine, "savage" intercourse. Naturally Barbarella enjoys it so much, that throughout the rest of the film, she struggles to keep the flimsy strands of her space lingerie on: exchanging pleasure for good deeds from Pygar (John Philip Law) a blind angel in a bird's nest and undressing in front of a half-brained revolutionary.

Yet, Barbarella's heterosexuality is always maintained, despite threats from Anita Pallenberg's bisexual tyrant The Black Queen. Pallenberg's repeated suggestions to sleep with Barbarella, become like the other running gags in the film, a tiresome bore. Vadim's continual attempts to illustrate the greatness of old-fashioned attitudes backfires in the film's liberalized sexuality. While espousing the rhetoric of "free love," Vadim also positions Barbarella as an ignorant nymphomaniac.

Despite being charged with a position of responsibility, Barbarella lacks intellectual acumen and personal independence. Continually throughout Barbarella, the title character spends more time wooing space creatures and emphasizing the extensiveness of wardrobe than planning a cunning operation to save the universe. Because of this, she repeatedly requires the assistance of men or masculinized women to aid her plight. In fact, the universe is saved not through her skill, but rather through male incompetence. Additionally, the film's metaphoric notion of "the pill" seems to dwell on an idea of a female character abandoning the real "pill" and returning to an atmosphere most suited to her lasvicious cartoon anti-feminism: the home.

These misogynistic attitudes continue in the routine instances of torture performed on the title character. The first involves a group of young children sending their mechanical dolls to attack her; the second has Barbarella placed in birdcage surrounded by hundreds of bloodthirsty Parakeets; and the third is a ridiculous organ-shaped erotic torture device that orgasms its victims to death. Each of these seem to place an emphasis on the persecution of women. Beginning in early childhood by learning maternal skills through dolls, women are restricted in their future social roles. The bird cage can be substituted for the domestic sphere with its minimal movement and lack of ability to roam, while the sexual torture performed by a sadistic male can be equated to notions of a woman's lack of sexual freedom.

Yet, the entire Barbie doll image Barbarella conjures up negates all of these with her perfectly primmed hair, wanton clothing and Valley Girl expressions. In a galaxy supposedly so refined and balanced that weapons have become museum artefacts and social harmony has been established, the images Barbarella represents and the attitudes she espouses belong in the dark ages. One even expects Fonda's character to inform the President of Earth to not "ask me, I'm just a girl." The blend of highbrow and countercultural ambitions the film routinely alludes to also fails through this methodolgy. This infuriating mix of art and trash in Barbarella is evident in its utilization of Dali-esque surroundings and Seurat's "Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette" along with shag-carpet lined spaceships and fur lingerie.

Produced by Italian mega producer Dino de Laurentiis, the film was a huge critical and commercial failure: essentially destroying the kitschy career of Roger Vadim and cementing Fonda as a late '60's sex symbol. Barbarella is arguably the most garish and vulgar piece of filmmaking produced during the late Sixties. Featuring antiquated models, matte paintings and disingenuous sets, Barbarella breathes a rusty air: a stale oxygen encoded in its haphazard plot and tedious dialogue that seven screenwriters including Forest, Vadim and famed wordsmith Terry Southern worked on.

A wicked synthesis of pornographic gluttony and 50's sci-fi settings, Barbarella fails were Federico Fellini's equally trippy and depraved 1969 film Satyricon succeeded. In Satryicon the grotesque characters are treated with distain and the otherworldly settings are filtered through conceptions of baseness.

Unlike in Fellini's Satryicon, Vadim's camera never allows the film's absurd surrealism to feel authentic. Instead Barbarella is trapped in a sleazy farcical homage that is retrograde in its approach and loose with its intentions. Buried under its layers of misogynistic and crass humour is a thematic anti-modernist message that slips out of focus.

Earlier in his career, Vadim was noted for extracting sexually intruiging performances from a slew of internationally renowed leading ladies. In the late '50's he brought Brigitte Bardot to international prominence in ...And God Created Woman and later Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Fonda. Yet, one cannot help think that Bardot would have been far better suited to the trashy, sex-drenched atmosphere Vadim's paean to equally rickety '50's B movies.

Under its present formula, Bardot's voluptuous figure could have easily filled out the pencil thin singular dimensons of a character Fonda appears reluctant and unable to play. Instead Fonda meanders with wooden expressions in response to such servile material. Such is the nature of Vadim's sex dirge that the cool swagger David Hemmings stood for in Antonioni's Blow-Up vanishes in his portrayal of a clumsy, leather and chain clad revolutionary.

Similarly, the menacing vampiric chic of Keith Richards' ex-Anita Pallenberg evaporates in an instant through the film's sprawling lack of focus. Even famed French mime Marcel Marceau, in a rare speaking role, becomes redunant as the faunish Professor Ping: a character representative of the film's lack of depth and range.

And it is this lack of intellectual, artistic or emotional sense that ultimately destroys Barbarella. Rather than create a powerful, countercultural woman able to relate the feminist rhetoric of the Sixties into the 41st century, director Roger Vadim creates an exploitative, cheap sexpot. Although adapted from Jean-Claude Forest's adult graphic novels, one wonders why Vadim didn't infuse notions of 20th century female social struggles and empowerment into the picture instead of sexually and intellectually regressive concepts of womenhood. An ugly and tasteless embarassment that surely must have offended second-wave feminists, it is easy to see why Jane Fonda has repeatedly attempted to distance herself from the project ever since.

But then again what were '60's audiences supposed to expect? After all she's only a girl.

* Barbarella is available through Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1963: Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath (Bava, 1963) 7/10

Three years after the worldwide success of Black Sunday, Italian director Mario Bava was offered a unique project. In the deal, horror legend Boris Karloff, whose career was once again on the rise thanks to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for AIP, was signed for a package deal in which Bava could create a European anthology film similar to Corman's 1962 Edgar Allan Poe triptych, Tales of Terror.

The result was 1963's Tre Volti delle Paure ( The Three Faces of Terror): a trio of short films based on stories by Guy Du Maupassant, Alexei (not Leo) Tolstoi and Anton Chekov. Released in North America under the title Black Sabbath, the films demonstrated Bava's unique visual flair and thematic interests in deception, frayed relationships and betrayal.

One of the more interesting investigations performed by film historians centers on the film's source material. As with Black Sunday, Bava based his film from work written by a well-respected author in Nikolai Gogol's The Vij. Yet, historians have debated whether either Chekov, Tolstoy or Du Maupassant ever wrote any stories similar to those they are credited for in this picture: leading to speculation the author's names were selected for the purpose of adding further refinement to Bava's often pictureseque aesthetics.

Featuring an introduction and amusing coda by Karloff, Black Sabbath opens with The Telephone: a short film supposedly adapted from a story by Guy Du Maupassant. Set in a modish apartment, the film belongs to the uniquely Italian genre of the giallo. Originally based on German Krimis (thrillers), giallo films came into prominence in the mid-Sixties once directors such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci began to infuse heavy doses of rich colour and visual flamboyance into these tawdry crime stories. A pre-cursor to the modern "slasher film," giallo were noted for their overt eroticism and sadistic violence.

In The Telephone a woman (Michele Mercier) repeatedly receives phone calls from a caller claiming to be her now-jailed ex-boyfriend who has escaped jail to seek revenge upon her. With its detailed information from a watchful caller, the film is an obvious influence for Wes Craven's 1996 horror parody Scream. However, within its savage red telephone, one could argue that Bava is providing his own tongue-in-cheek response to the fluffy "white telephone" films that dominated Italian cinema during the reign of Mussolini.

The second film is taken from a story by Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoi entitled The Wurdulak, in which a young Russian aristocrat Vladimir (Mark Damon) comes into contact with an isolated family whose aging patriarch (Boris Karloff) has ventured off his property to kill a Wurdulak- an undead vampire similar to the characters in Bava's Black Sunday- only to become one himself. The third film entitled A Drop of Water involves a rude nurse who is summoned on a stormy night to the home of her deceased patient to prepare her body for burial. Believing she will not be paid, she steals the deceased woman's ring, only for the latter to visit her from beyond the grave.

When released by AIP in 1963, Black Sabbath was severely censored and re-arranged by AIP due to the film's explicit sub-text and graphic imagery. In the original Italian version of the film A Drop of Water featured last in the proceedings, while the AIP edit moved this story first, followed by an re-edited version of The Telephone and then the Karloff short The Wurdulak. Current editions of the film released by Anchor Bay use the superior European version with its chilling violence and explicit sub-text.

Upon its initial North American release, The Telephone in particular was scythed by editors due to is overt lesbian content. In the AIP versionm, the homosexual allusions were removed and replaced by a half-baked notion of a ghost haunting Michelle Mercier's character. While other films of the era, most notably William Wyler's 1961 film The Children's Hour and Robert Wise's 1963 film The Haunting contain sub-textual allusions to lesbianism, Bava's short film was groundbreaking in its nature. In the film, Michelle Mercier's character Rosy believes her ex-boyfriend is stalking her on the telephone, the story takes an unexpected shift as Bava reveals the speaker to be her friend Mary (Lidia Alfonsi). Muffling her voice using a cloth, Mary is able to convince Rosy she is a man.

This subversion of gender roles is interesting as it posits Mary as the masculine element in this homosexual relationship. According to Mary, the relationship was destroyed by Rosy because of her boyfriend. Thus, Rosy attempts to restore the balance through revenge on Mary. The sub-text becomes extremely interesting once Mary enters the apartment and attempts to appease Rosy's fears by offering to sleep in the same bed with her. After Mary obtains a nightgown, Bava pans to a window to demonstrate the shift in time: only to follow it with a lurid jazz soundtrack and Mary commenting on the night before.

Mary's sexuality is one of the many instances of deception in Black Sunday. As in Black Sunday deception and betrayal come from unlikely sources. Rosy expects her former boyfriend to be out for revenge, but unknowingly lures the real attacker into her apartment in the form of another former lover. Such is her comfort around Mary, Rosy even is not perturbed when the former decides to plant a knife under her pillow.

In The Wurdulak, Karloff's aging patriarch convinces his family, he has not been turned into a Wurdulak: only for him to deceive them in the night. In a scene similar to the infamous "corpse kiss" in Black Sunday, Vladimir is falsely seduced by the patriarch's daughter Sdenka (Susy Andersen) through her hypnotic eyes. In One Drop of Water, the angry nurse summizes to procure her former patient's ring as payment for arousing her services on a dreadful night. Yet, this deception fails as the deceased clairvoyant seeks her revenge through alternative methods.

This deception also brings forth ideas of destiny. As with Black Sunday, the short films in Black Sabbath feature notions of celestial fulfillment. In The Wurdulak Sdenka informs Vladimir her destiny is to suffer at the hands of her family. Like in Black Sunday, future generations are expected to fulfill the payment of the errors and misdeeds undertaken by their ancestors or elders. In One Drop of Water, the former patient seeks out her revenge through restoring the supernatural equilibrium.

Crypts and chapels are also utilized with a degree of complexity in Black Sabbath. In Black Sunday, the tattered chapel houses a crypt filled with evil. Only a monolithic stone cross is able to provide a degree of safety and sanctuary for its visitors. In the cobwebbed lair in Black Sabbath this stereotypical notion of sanctuary in a holy building is manipulated by Bava. Despite her fears, Vladimir informs Sdenka that they will be safe in the family crypt. Yet, in this dank building lacking in religious artefacts or paraphernalia, supernatural evil is allowed to subsist and thus the pureness associated with Judeo-Christian burial grounds is broken.

All three films demonstrate Bava's thematic interest in the disruption of relationships. In The Wurdulak, the patriarch's family is destroyed through his evil, yet they are re-united through a heinous sense of familial kinship. One Drop of Water illustrates the fissured trust between medic and patient, while in The Telephone a former lover seeks revenge due to the collapse of a previous relationship. In all three films, the guilty party is punished; yet there is not necessarily a restoration of earthly balance: the film even alludes to the possibility of further revenge in at least one of the stories.

One of the major criticisms regarding Black Sabbath is the thinness of each story's plot. None of the stories are particularly gripping on a pure narrative level. As with Black Sunday, Bava's emphasis on filmic utilities such as sound and cinematography imbue the stories with a decadent sense of accomplishment. In The Wurdulak's snow-covered Gothic forests and cobwebbed chapels, one can visualize how Black Sunday would have appeared had it been in colour.

With its lush matte paintings, twisted sets and fantastic use of colour, Bava's film anticipates the type of unsettling and atmospheric horror that Japanese director and fellow former painter Masaki Kobayashi would perfect in his 1964 Winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize entitled Kwaidan: a film which also utilizes an anthology format, but whose subject matter is told strictly within a period setting and is taken from one source in Lafcadio Hearn's collection of Japanese folk-tales .

Surprisingly Black Sabbath was the first of Bava's horror films to be shot in colour: he had already directed two low-budget Italian historical epics in colour prior to Black Sabbath. The addition of colour eliminates much of the enigmatic elements of suspense from Black Sabbath, although it is arguably used with brilliance, particularly in One Drop of Water and The Wurdulak. In The Wurdulak one can already see the seeds for Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow with its melancholy trees and rustic surroundings.

Visual imagery is paramount to Black Sabbath. The film's most memorable sequences occur through carefully plotted aesthetic approaches that unlike in Black Sunday are also able to beautifully incorporate sound for a horrific orchestration upon the senses. Although not shown on camera, Karloff's destruction of his grandson is particularly shocking for the era. The infant's phantom crying for his mother to let him from the cold is both heartbreaking and chilling in Bava's skillful abilty to blend the sound of the wind and a young boy.

In One Drop of Water, the director applies the concept of Chinese Water Torture to an aural setting in having his culprit become insane through hearing the mere sound of water. However, it is the hideous corpse which is easily the segment's most memorable device: twisted, frayed and mutilated in its own skeletal satisfaction. Despite its rigid nature, the corpse is easily one of the most spine-tingling elements of the film and could possibly be seen as an ode to Hitchcock's Psycho.

In Black Sabbath Mario Bava delievers a curious atmospheric blend of terrific visual scares. Although the stories are lacking in their narrative construction, the visuals are beautifully arranged and filmed in classic giallo and gothic style. Analyzed separately, the three films are compositions in specific styles of horror ranging from the thriller to the period piece to the realm of the supernatural. While they may not always work in terms of plot, they are astute exercise styles in style and composure. The performances, particularly from Karloff are solid, while Roberto Nicolosi's score along with Ubaldo Terzano's cinematography and Giorgio Giovanini's art direction are particularly menacing.

* Black Sabbath is available in Anchor Bay's Mario Bava Collection Vol 1

Other Mario Bava Films Reviewed:
Black Sunday (1960) 9/10
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) 6/10
Knives of the Avenger (1966) 2/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1967: The Graduate

The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) 6/10

"Are you here for an affair, sir?" (Hotel Clerk to Benjamin Braddock)

Forty years ago, the most popular summer release was not an effects-laden sequel about a super hero, but a social satire about an affair between a bumbling twenty-one year old college graduate and the wife of his father's business partner. Grossing $104 million (approximately $624 million when adjusted for inflation), The Graduate became the highest grossing film of 1967 and the fourth highest grossing film of the decade behind The Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago and 101 Dalmatians.

In the film, recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), returns home to California from his eastern school. Feted by his parents and "worried about his future," the alienated twenty-something seeks an outlet for his boredom through an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft): the sultry, alcoholic wife of his father's business partner (Murray Hamilton). Things become complicated however when Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) returns from Berkeley, only for Benjamin to fall in love with her.

Released three weeks after Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate spawned a flurry of catchphrases, popularized the music of Simon and Garfunkel and turned struggling Method actor Dustin Hoffman into a star. Yet, it could have been all so different had Simon and Garfunkel sang "Mrs. Roosevelt" instead of "Mrs. Robinson," or if Warren Beatty or Robert Redford were cast ahead in the part of the nervy and uncomfortable Benjamin Braddock. In casting the diminutive Jewish Hoffman in the lead role, no longer was physical appearance or ethnicity requisite to become a box-office draw.

Along with Bonnie and Clyde, the film became a massive hit with discontented and alienated youth audiences in Vietnam-era America. In Benjamin Braddock, audiences found a figure that they could relate to: a very ordinary young man stifled by expectations, reputations and a hollow sense of what the future holds. Yet, despite the changes The Graduate brought about in terms of casting and soundtracking, one wonders what truly was revelatory about The Graduate?

Certainly, Braddock's constant breaks with the expectations of others, beginning with his affair with Mrs. Robinson and completed by his hinging of a five foot crucifix into a church door, represented a breach with established values and mores of the era. But, time has not been kind to The Graduate. The rebellious ethos that once aerated in its California climes, now fetors with the musty scent of conformity.

Spending most of his time in his childhood room or in his parents swimming pool, Benjamin Braddock, the antithesis of rebellion, somehow managed to become a generational hero. Granted his parents do not seem to understand him, but with his nervy twitches and sweaty-palmed disposition, Benjamin is less of a hero and more of a villain: a figure who simply never grew up. Throughout The Graduate, Benjamin has no friends, no ambitions, no countercultural affiliations and no direction; yet, he manages to become the smouldering object of desire for two women in the same household.

In Benjamin Braddock, there is a true rebel without a cause. The rebellion he engages in by spending his nights with Mrs. Robinson serves as an escape: filling in the hours between drinking in his parents pool and hearing his father (William Daniels) attempt to instill some motivation in his lacklustre son. By engaging in this affair, he breaks with the decorum of his parents middle class expectations, only to in the end comply with their wishes by courting Mrs. Robinson's bland daughter Elaine.

Today, Braddock represents the bourgeois consumer, rather than a model for class noncomformance. For his graduation, his affluent parents supply him with a new Alfa Romeo convertible, which Benjamin has no qualms about accepting: proceeding to frequently wheel around town in the manner of an imbecilic adolescent. Like a model consumer, Benjamin always wants what he cannot have. In Mrs. Robinson, he acquires a lonely, broken and exotic housewife. After having taught him "the birds and the bees," Benjamin proceeds to abandon her for the one thing she requests him not to want: her daughter.

Encouraged by his parents, Benjamin dates Elaine and eventually falls for her by proclaiming only she makes him feel "real." But, like with Mrs. Robinson, when Benjamin finally is with Elaine, neither he or she have anything meaningful to say. Perhaps, his only genuine acts of emotion come in his quest to track her down, but this desire is more self-serving than altruistic. In an era in which social harmony was preached, it is ironic that Benjamin's emotional greed and spirit of doing your own thing was applauded. In Benjamin, the "Me Generation" and the nepotistic, impulsive youth of today found their idol in a self-absorbed young man simply happy to live off his parents success.

Rather than a social satire, the film is more of a social tragedy: a forewarning of the collapse of an idealistic era. Nichols' uneven direction creates two completely different halves. The first is a fantastic blend of sex and screwball comedy in which bashful Benjamin acquires sexual knowledge through an attentive teacher. Through Benjamin's empty insistence on communicating with one another, the physical relationship bears its first problems. But is also in this sequence, that the movie begins to collapse into a stereotypical conclusion to a romantic comedy.

The rampant misogyny and self-centered cruelty associated with Benjamin bleeds through onto the celluloid. He mocks Mrs. Robinson for having conceived Elaine in the back of a Ford, callously critiques their relationship and insenstively approaches topics such as her marriage and her overtly distressing choice to quit art school. Once Elaine is mentioned into the story, the film loses its tight kinetic thrust as Benjamin almost immediately tells Elaine of the affair: not before taking her to a strip club on their first date.

Mrs. Robinson rejects any proposal of a relationship between Benjamin and Elaine because they are too well suited. Evidently, mother knows best as they are both colourless, apolitical idiots who operate on impulse, rather than cold calculation. All though she does not allude to it, perhaps in Benjamin, Mrs. Robinson simply sees another future corporate stooge: acquiring a job at a plastics company through social networking, rather than individual skill or distinctiveness. Through her sexual cunning and prowess, Mrs. Robinson endears to offer Benjamin something more exotic than a life less ordinary.

Yet through Buck Henry's script and Nichols' direction, her desire to restrict Elaine from Benjamin turns Mrs. Robinson from a kind and patient woman into a histronic villain by the film's end. Despite her alcohol-sapped creativity, Mrs. Robinson evidently supplies more youthful charm and seductive wit than her bland offspring and incomplete lover.

Played with sensitivity and restraint by Anne Bancroft (who was 39 at the time and only nine years older than Hoffman), Mrs. Robinson is one of the greatest female characters in American cinema history: a rare strong female character in film who persuasively tries to procure something; only for her to be naturally end up crushed and embittered. In her character lies the spirit of thousands of other repressed women of the era, who gave up their creative university-educated livelihoods to raise children in loveless marriages: garnering comfort from vices such as alcohol and only recapturing an element of youthful affection from an intimate relationship with a cowardly local bore.

In Benjamin Braddock, Hoffman imbues the character with his now trademark quirks: filling the role early on in the picture with authentic post-graduation ennui. Katherine Ross fares less better, although Buck Henry's script is unable to create her into a fully developed woman: allowing her sexual promiscuity to overstep her lack of personality and inability to intelligently analyze situations. Mike Nichols' Nouvelle Vague inspired direction has its moments, particularly in an array of interesting shots such as Mrs. Robinson reflected in a coffee table and the edits in which Benjamin neglects the middle-class reputations of his parents for his own pleasure.

Yet, the themes of middle class malaise and stagnation Nichols attempts to infuse into his film sorely lack the sarcastic sneer of Godard or Fellini, or the visual emptiness evoked by Antonioni or Bergman in similar films during the decade. Time has sealed the breaks with conformity Benjamin once represented and fashioned him as cinema's most unlikely countercultural hero. Unrepresentative and unaware of the political and social turmoil around him, Benjamin's sheltered life under his caring parents roof is to be envied, not scorned. His sense of alienation appears to be due to a lack of incentive to abandon the closeted world of his childhood and step out into something new. In Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin is offered a way out, but instead he rejects it for a life with Elaine already filled with uneasy silence and failed motivations. And thus while Benjamin's job in plastics awaits, here's to you Mrs. Robinson...

* The Graduate is available through MGM Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque