the ongoing christopher lee film festival

Pirates of Blood River: (1962. dir: John Gilling) How did I go so long without knowing that Hammer made pirate films? Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed are very stylish buccaneers, complete vis ze Frahnch ax-ahnt. The guy who played Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek (he invented the warp drive; you remember, in "Metamorphosis") is here, and so very tree-like that he makes Kerwin Matthews look downright dynamic. You can tell this village beset by wicked pirates is a Hammer Village because the puritanical Huguenot women in it wear delicious dresses showing off their tasty flesh. It's got Michael Ripper and other favorites from the Hammer stable, as well as all manner of nasty behaviour you'd expect from salty scalawags. It has a nicely doubled message about tyranny and the uprising of the downtrodden (a mirrored theme in a Hammer film! such complexity), and the piranha alone are worth the price of admission.




Horror Express: (1972. dir: Eugenio Martin) An ancient and deadly alien life-form thaws from a hunk of Manchurian ice on a train across the frozen steppes of Russia, and in the end there are zombies! Although this sports the ever-delightful team of Lee and Peter Cushing, it's Telly Savalas who steals the show with his late entry as an arrogant Russian soldier, roaring, "What the devil fears is a single honest cossack." And how about this exchange?

Savalas: Shoot whatever moves at that doorway.
Cushing: What if the monk's innocent?
Savalas: We got lots of innocent monks.

Cushing gets my favorite laugh, though. When the police investigator observes that since the alien can shape-shift he might be anyone, Cushing says, "Surely you know we're British!"

And that's not all. There's a groovy mad Russian starets and plenty of gruesome murders, and the scientists find images of dinosaurs and the earth from space recorded in the tissue of the alien's eyeballs. Try and resist THAT.




the Terror of the Tongs: (1961. dir: Anthony Bushell) Watching Lee in interviews, it becomes quickly apparent that he's proud (justifiably) of his dexterity with accents, and that he very much enjoys taking on characters of varying ethnicities. Now, of course, we blink and look away, embarrassed, when a white-skinned anglo darkens up, gets the eyes and moustache done up Fu Manchu (dons the "Yellow Peril drag", as Gary Giddins puts it in Warning Shadows), but 1961 was another galaxy, far, far away. Although this is not one of his Fu Manchu films (he made several), it's in the ballpark.

Hong Kong, 1910. The Tongs are an organization of killers ruled by Lee, who manages to invest even the cheesiest dialogue with importance. I have to say it: the older I get, the more I appreciate that (see review of Wrath of Khan). Any damn fool can make, say, Viola's "make me a willow cabin" speech in Twelfth Night sound wistfully lovely because it was written that way by a genius. It's committing successfully to those "I DRINK your milkshake!" tirades that might convince me to walk barefoot to Daniel Day-Lewis' house in Ireland just to leave his Oscar on his doorstep. And although Lee claims he once did an entire Dracula film without speaking a line because the dialogue as written was so awful, when he does commit, he commits all the way, and no holds are barred.





Hound of the Baskervilles: (1959. dir: Terence Fisher) Peter Cushing was brilliant. It's easy to forget because his choices were always clean and direct. I can remember being so enthralled by a line reading of Grand Moff Tarkin's ("Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?") that I used to mimic it in private, trying to figure out what it was that made it great. (I still don't know, but it is.) Right now he is my favorite Sherlock Holmes, although I have not yet seen Lee's or, to be fair, Robert Downey's. Cushing doesn't forego the rudeness and superiority of Holmes but is himself so personally likable that all is easily forgiven (as opposed to the insufferable pretentiousness of Jeremy Brett in the PBS series).

I consider this a Hammer masterpiece. It's got that richness of colour and atmosphere but they never overwhelm the telling of the story. It's got that mysterious Hammer flesh appeal, somehow seeming almost pornographic but when you go back and try to figure why you can't put your finger on it. The story is altered, but for the better. One of its great flaws has always been that Watson is required to carry too much of it, and, let's be frank: no one goes to Baker Street to spend time with Dr. Watson. In this version, Lee's Henry Baskerville is emphasized during that period of time when Holmes has absented himself, and Lee has the strength of presence to fill the lacuna. The other flaw is Holmes' ridiculous disguise, which has to fool even Watson, and never works on film; Fisher has cut it out, and it is not necessary to the plot. The other major change is in the rewriting of Miss Stapleton as a passionate major player, an alteration that might not work elsewhere but is absolutely perfect for a Hammer outing, and allows for Lee to get some macking in on a gorgeous woman, which he rarely gets to do on film.

Even the dog looks pretty demonic in his little mask. I give it four stars, easy.

morituri: those about to die

{According to Suetonius, MORITURI TE SALUTANT, "those about to die salute you," was the traditional greeting the troops gave Caesar.}

Hollywood loves war. War slips easily between those comfy old Hollywood sheets: good guys vs bad guys, lovers separated by circumstance, the tragedy of death intruding on youth, and, best of all, it lends itself to overblown visual displays. Then came the '60s, and a demand for the anti-war statement. Mostly Hollywood dealt with it by making its war films more cynical, or murking up the endings. Morituri, then, which emerged in 1965 from the hand of German actor and director Bernhard Wicki, goes a step further. One might have expected it out of Europe, but with big stars speaking English, it comes as a shock.

It begins squarely as a recognizable anti-Nazi movie. Brando is Robert Crain, a wealthy German sitting out the war comfortably in India with nothing but scorn for both sides, a cynical pacifist. Trevor Howard, in his inimitible role as Most British of the Brits (my favorite part of Inglorious Basterds was the Trevor Howard character, and that damned Quentin went and killed him off in the basement alongside my two OTHER favorite characters. But I digress), blackmails Brando into disguising himself as SS to infiltrate a Nazi freighter, his mission to disarm the scuttling charges so the precious rubber cargo can be salvaged by the Allies. Yul Brynner plays the ship's Captain Mueller, the Good Soldier Serving the Corrupt Master. He is a man whose reputation has come under a cloud because his conscience has been driving him to drink, and he assumes Brando is there to keep an eye on him.

It's the kind of role I love for Brando, a man who has to think on his feet, strong on purpose and forward movement, keeping him focused, keeping at bay that howlingly annoying tendency he's got to meander. Had he been young today, he'd have made a bundle in action films. He's got that action-hero je-ne-sais-quoi: graceful in motion, eye-catching in stillness. Brynner is at the peak of his powers, giving us a fearless leader of men whose compass has been sent spinning by a world gone mad. He's got a lovely, weary speech about "you young men who make the world breathless," by trying to rule it with brutality divorced from mercy.

So far, so good. In its first hour, it's rollicking good and filled with suspense and strong character development, shaping up to be my favorite Outsmart-the-Nazis film ever. And then, a little past halfway through, it opens up its trenchcoat, as it were, to display its true purpose.

The MacGuffin arrives in the shapely form of Janet Margolin as a young Jewess, transported on board with a group of captured Yanks. The first sign of trouble comes when she is used to make apparent the Captain's heart-of-gold cred, a completely unnecessary gesture, since we're already quite certain of his good, moral heart through a combination of his very fine performance and a more than adequate script. But here it is: Captain Mueller recognizes her as a Jewess when others have not (although the name on her passport is Esther Levy; not very bright Nazis, those), gives her a private cabin and a pledge of protection, perhaps even an opportunity to lose herself once they reach Bordeaux. But that is just the first sign of trouble.

>SPOILER ALERT<

Later on we learn that she has been gang-raped by Gestapo, and, later still, that in our own story she will offer herself up in a disturbing, Peckinpah-coy-eyed-victim way, for gang-rape by the cowardly Yanks in order to convince them to join Crain in his attempt to take over the ship. After that, she's brutally murdered by the Nazi second-in-command to make us hate him even more, but she has to die, because she is not a character, just an animated and doomed plot-device. I have a friend who boycotts movies that use rape as a plot-device, and this one takes some kind of hideous cake in that realm. The point is made: the Yanks are as bad as the Gestapo; no side is better than the other; in war, everyone sucks, reaching for a lowest common denominator. Still, in a script that has been as good as this one, the episode comes off as clumsy and leering and it is a relief, frankly, when she is dead and we can stop worrying about her.

It's such a disturbing interlude, and changes the tone so completely, that one has to reorient oneself entirely for the final battles, which are satisfyingly well-done as long as one is craning one's neck from the proper darkly cynical angle. It's so disturbing that it shed a star in my Netflix rating, even as it made the movie more twisted and complex. I have to admire its boldness, and far be it from me to deny that rapine happens fierce and frequent in wartime, but this one rang devilishly false. Why would sexually brutalizing a girl make soldiers change their minds, which had been firmly made up, about staying out of a battle which would risk their lives? Easy enough to have her then keep safe in their little dungeon. The logic is absurd, and because the crime is so awful, it points to some lurking evil in the heart of the filmmaker. Brrrr. I still shudder from its coldness, thinking on it.

And yet, three days on, the film is still lingering in my head. It's gorgeous in black and white. All those big brown eyes, of Brando and Brynner and Margolin, they're doubly arresting in black-and-white. It's beautifully shot by Conrad Hall with graceful, unobtrusive cameras which serve the story faithfully and make the most of that sometimes cramped shipboard world. The ending is written well and played well, and I think, God help me, that in spite of everything I may have to watch it again.

...and a christopher lee double feature

the Whip and the Body: (1965. dir: Mario Bava) Ah, those Italian horror-meisters! The intoxicating use of color, and of shadow as both color and pace-setting device! Absolutely mesmerizing. Since most of the film involves voluptuous Italian women creeping in nightgowns down gloomy castle hallways and skulking in tombs, you could set it to a Pink Floyd record and call it a slow-moving light-show. Somewhere I read that Christopher Lee considered this the best of his Italian films, and he's got to be right about that. Certainly he is at his bad-assed sexiest as the whip-wielding Heathcliff in this giallo-flavored Wuthering Heights set at the sensuous Italian seaside, with the beautiful Daliah Lavi as his fruitcake-nutty Catherine. People keep getting offed with daggers through the throat, there may or may not be muddy footprints leading up from the tomb, and a sadistic ghost may or may not be taking a horsewhip to the lovely Italian lady on a semi-regular basis. Too tame to be a true giallo, it's still one of the most sensuous horror films I've seen. If I had a dungeon, this would be showing in widescreen on continual rotation.


Horror Hotel: (1961. dir: John Llewellyn Moxey) In Europe, it was called City of the Dead, more dignified but misleading. Really it's a city of Satan-worshippers who've traded their souls for immortality, obviously a whole different thing. It's got no pretentions at all, this little b&w classic, and atmosphere to spare. The town is constantly swathed in thick blankets of fog; the Satanists need beautiful outsiders for their human sacrifices, and there you have your jumping-off point. Lee plays a college professor who feels rather keenly about the history of witchcraft, so much so that he sends his star pupil to do research in the old hometown. I wouldn't show it opposite Curse of the Demon, but I'd feel comfortable pairing it with Night of the Eagle or Carnival of Souls, and that's high praise for me.

psychomania: the frog in the chapel perilous

In the parlance of the film, my mind is blown.

It's 1973, and Australian director Don Sharp, Hammer veteran and helmsman of such mediocre childhood favorites as the remakes of 39 Steps and Four Feathers (why Beau Bridges? of all the actors in the world?), has given the world an undead biker gang which terrorizes the poor old English countryside.

We open with the groovy psychedelia (and I'm not saying that derogatorily: picture me saying all of the following with absolutely sincere appreciation) of mist over an English henge. A gang of leather-clad bikers in clumsy death's-head masks weaves amongst its liths to the strains of John Cameron's perfect electric soundtrack. In spite of names like Hatchet, Chopped Meat and Gash, we find as we get to know them that there's something naive about these miscreants. Yes, they get kicks by causing motoring accidents, but they also sing hippie songs and weave floral wreaths and their main idea of mayhem involves kicking over parking cones and knocking down grocery trolleys.

Their leader, Tom Latham (Nicky Henson), is the handsome scion of a wealthy family who also happen to be worshippers of Satan in the form of a frog. (Although, granted, they never say it's Satan. One assumes. It might just be a frog.) He lives with his old mum, played by the adorable Beryl Reid, who's about as scary as the tea-lady at Selfridge's or the Queen Mum. In the flashback where she's selling baby Tom to the frog-god, she even looks like the Queen Mum, with the doughy, delighted smile and even the little hat. Also in residence is George Sanders as the unflappable and ever-present butler who seems to be some sort of emissary between this world and the froggish.

Tom is obsessed with the idea of returning from the dead, and, as luck would have it, built into the grounds of the family mansion is a Secret Room, a sort of Chapel Perilous into which one ventures only when one is ready to Face One's True Self, and it is ominously suggested that this room had something to do with the disappearance of Tom's father many years prior. In fact, one of the film's early moments of brilliance is the pivotal scene of high camp strangeness in which Tom ventures into the room. Once he emerges, we're ready to bring on the zombies.

But is it a zombie movie? Not exactly. Whether the old-school, limb-dragging and moaning variety or the newfangled superfast and snarling type, zombies are generally understood to be revivified shells, with little or none of the human personality remaining. These revenants look, move, think, talk and dress exactly as they did before death, minus only the fear of reprisals for their mischiefs. I'd call it a "necromancy" film, except these undead are not revived by an outside source, but by their own unshakable will to return.

In any case, Tom suicides and returns from the dead then convinces most of his gang to do the same, all in the name of kicks! And considering this movie's ample body count, it retains a very posh British innocence. It has no blood at all, and the deaths are mostly suggested. If it sounds like I'm mocking, I'm not: its earnestness is self-mocking, its humour earnestly underplayed but certainly intended. As evidence, I submit the scene where the undead Tom and his sidekick Jane burst into the police station on their bikes and the copper behind the desk pauses in his outrage long enough to politely ask a girl if she'll shut the door behind her; also the various gleeful suicides the gang-members devise; and, let's face it, any bit involving a frog.

On the other hand, it's not glib. It has compelling set-pieces -- you might even say haunting: the hippie funeral in which the gang buries Tom sitting upright on his bike like a warrior of old on his steed, or Tom waltzing easily with his mum in their groovy (I'm sorry; there's no other word for it) parlor. Or the ending, which I could not describe, even if I wanted to, not and still do it justice.

The acting has got short shrift in various (may I say) short-sighted reviews over the years. Granted, some come off better than others. Sanders applies himself with ardent seriousness, and playing a convincing devil has always come easy as lying to him. Robert Hardy (who one day will give an irresistible turn as Sir John in the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility) has a harder time in the thankless role of the investigating Chief Inspector, who mostly shows up as a foil for the mischievous undead. But the real attraction is Nicky Henson. He looks like one of those gorgeous, snaggletoothed, shaggy-headed footballers that England unloosed on the world in the late '60s, and nobody has ever looked better in leather pants. Also (bonus!), he's both well cast and theatrically trained.

masterclass in oaters: the big trail and wagon master

the Big Trail: (1930. dir: Raoul Walsh) This was going to be John Wayne's big breakout role; after four years of trying, he finally bagged the big lead in an important Western. But because John Ford had been grooming him for his own stable, the two were estranged over it and it would be another nine years before Ford teleported Wayne effortlessly into superstardom with that gorgeous introductory zoom-in shot in Stagecoach.

Wayne is just a kid in 1930, and so are the talkies. I got that same pleasant shudder watching the Big Trail that I got watching the Front Page, a sense that movie-making hasn't settled yet into its comfortable tropes, that the river is still shifting, the rules are still being written. It's closer to silent films than it is to, say, Gone With the Wind, complete with title cards and actors with woefully untrained voices. Somewhere in the middle of the thirties, some genius kid in some back room at a major studio developed some fabulous audio techniques, but not yet. "They're still using ribbon-mics," my very knowledgable boyfriend says, and whatever a ribbon-mic is, it's not particularly effective. Wayne's voice sounds high and strained, Marguerite Churchill in the female lead is all whining, and Tyrone Power Sr. (!) as the bad guy is so gruff as to be unintelligible much of the time.

Still, there's much upside. The hallmarks of Dukedom are already there in Wayne: the big, graceful walk, the drawl, the charm; he just hasn't relaxed into them yet. A handsome young Ward Bond is here, too, lurking in the background of the wagon-train. The wagons themselves are huge conestogas, realistic but probably too ungainly to suit Hollywood's purposes for long, and the Indians are real Indians! None of the painted Brooklyn Italians they'll start using in future years.

Much of the photography is downright stunning, like the quiet, breath-taking end-battle among the giant redwoods. Walsh shoots the film almost entirely in long or medium-long shot, giving it a solid ensemble feel, but leaving one yearning in the end for that greatest of all cinematic powers: the intimacy of the lingering close-up.






Wagon Master: (1950. dir: John Ford) Ford had a peculiar sense of humor. The old woman with the horn, for instance. Was that funny, ever, to anyone? It must've been to Ford because he keeps the gag going. Personally, I'd spend any amount of time with Ben Johnson and Ward Bond on the smallest pretext, but I'll tell you what I love best about this movie, reportedly Ford's favorite of his own works: the scene in the Navajo encampment, when the rapist is stripped and tied to the wagon wheel and lashed,-- the way he expresses the mounting tension through still shots of faces, silently, without background music. It may be the biggest reason I love him, that love he's got for interesting faces. That he lets his story get sidetracked sometimes just to explore a character who seems promising to him, or one he just flat-out likes spending time looking at. John Ford never had to discover the close-up; it's his truest medium of expression.