st trinian's: wicked and often well-armed

Removed from its context as a long-lived British cultural phenomenon, it's possible that Oliver Parker's 2007 St Trinian's makes little sense. This hellish girls' school began life in the comics of Ronald Searle just before WWII, and when he resumed them after the war (and his incarceration in a Japanese camp), the atmosphere darkened considerably. Five books of cartoons were followed by four films in the fifties and sixties arising from the Ealing tradition of comedy which drew heavily on panto and music-hall conventions. These were followed by a remake in 1980 (the Wildcats of St Trinian's), and, in 2007, this more recent addition to the ouevre. It stars Rupert Everett, stepping into the formidable heels of Alastair Sim as both the headmistress and her wastrel brother.



Wikipedia says of St. Trinian's, "Its pupils are wicked and often well-armed." As a general rule, the smaller the girl, the more dangerous she is; it is a pair of ten-year-old twins who are the school's weapons experts, or, as they are introduced, its "answer to the Sopranos." Older girls wrangle their schoolgirl costumes into slatternly streetwalker-wear. Gambling, drinking, smoking and drugs run rampant among all ages. (During a heist, one of the younger girls pulls out a fag and the head girl says, "You're only ten! Plus you're loaded down with volatile explosives.") Blinding and sometimes fatal bootleg vodka and other black-market wares are transported from the basement into the world by intermediary crook Flash Harry (here played by West Ham fan Russell Brand). Any amble through the halls will reveal girls being dropped from upper stairwells or immersed in fishtanks. The biology lab houses deadly biting ants and dangerous reptiles; the Spanish instructor teaches useful phrases like, "But these are not my suitcases. I have never seen this contraband before." As in any girls' school, there are cliques: first-years, emos, geeks, Posh Totties, Chavs. In the end, they all must work together to pull off an art-heist to save the school from bankruptcy.



Even for the uninitiated yank, there is an enjoyable ride here if you can relax into the bouncing spirit of the anarchy. The script is jam-packed full of inside jokes directed at Colin Firth (who plays the Minister of Education determined to make an example of the school), including an ill-fated dog called Mr. Darcy who loves to hump his leg. Although the girls indulge almost constantly in murderous games, nobody really dies (other than poor, doomed Mr. Darcy). The actors had a downright exorbitant amount of fun making this film, so much so that they all returned for a 2009 sequel, St Trinian's II: the Legend of Fritton's Gold, which adds David Tennant to the cast and has yet to swim the Atlantic and reach these shores.

And, in the end, there is something wonderfully satisfying about hearing a little towhead girl roar, "On my command, unleash hell!"

last night's double feature: tenderness and spirit of the beehive

Sometimes one stumbles upon synchronicity. I was loading the Spirit of the Beehive DVD when Tenderness fired up on Sundance and distracted me. In one movie, a girl witnesses a killer gently kissing his victim and becomes fixated upon the moment; in the other, a younger girl sees Frankenstein and fixates on the scene in which the monster kills a little girl, as if it holds the secret to finding her way into adulthood.



Tenderness: (2009. dir: John Polson) It's an atmospheric thriller: the suspense starts building straightaway and never lets up despite an unhurried pace. A killer is being released; a teenaged girl with a messed-up life seeks him out, associating him with the possibility of tenderness.

The tenderness of the title refers most obviously to a description of the killer's motive by Russell Crowe's police detective, a man determined to keep the boy from killing again. Having made a long study of it, he thinks the boy is addicted to the tenderness of the kill, the intimacy of sharing that last moment of breath. The siren call of tenderness, though, reaches far and wide beneath everything in this film, a thick vein of ore running just under the dirt.

In bookend narrations at the beginning and end, Crowe's character says (I paraphrase): "My wife always says there are two kinds of people: the ones who are looking for pleasure, and the ones who are running from pain." With two possible exceptions (the abusive stepfather-to-be, and Laura Dern as the boy's aunt, who seems healthier than everyone else but still lost and amazed at the anguish around her), even the characters who just duck on for a moment are all running from pain and, as a constant adjunct, seeking tenderness. Securing an ongoing source for-- not even love, which seems an impossible thing,-- just some tenderness, is the chthonic force behind nearly every decision made. There's a moment when a boy awkwardly approaches Sophie Traub's Lori at a carnival and offers to escort her around so that other boys don't hit on her. She cuts him coldly, but we recognize it as an echo of her own recent, heart-rending plea to the killer, with whom she is travelling: "Use me for whatever you want. Think of it as practice for when you find someone important." In fact, the movie is jam-packed full of moments of proferred tenderness, intimately captured by Tom Stern's unhurried camera, but I can't think of one which is experienced as such by two people simultaneously. Always the offer is either consciously rebuffed or goes unrecognized. Even Lori's boss, who we watch masturbating behind his desk while she expressionlessly lifts her shirt, looks on with a sort of melancholy longing as he lets her steal a CD.

You know from the beginning that not everyone is going to make it through to the end credits, but the story unfolds with gentle surprises, and the editing (by Lisa Zeno Churgin and Andrew Marcus) is spot-on, encouraging the space for introspection without letting the story lag. Even after having followed it with a classic like Beehive, this is the film I can't keep out of my head today.




The Spirit of the Beehive: (1973. dir: Victor Erice) This is what they call a visual "tone poem". It's gorgeous and filled with space and has no interest in spelling things out. Most commentaries will tell you that there are oblique, underground critiques here of Franco's regime, most prominently in the image of the family patriarch's experiment with a round beehive, which seems to inspire a mad chaos of fruitless activity amongst his bees.

All that is not the thrust, though, not the important part: Erice shows us his world through the eyes of two sisters, both very young. It is 1940. They live in a somewhat decrepit mansion in a tiny, isolated village in Spain with their mother, a remote and aging beauty who keeps for the most part aloof from her family and spends her time writing letters to a lover who is away at war, and their father, a keeper of bees and hunter of mushrooms, a man interested in the natural world around him but seemingly divorced from the larger world of humans.

There is a special showing of Frankenstein in town and Ana, the younger of the two girls, becomes obsessed with knowing why the monster killed the little girl. Her older sister says it's a trick: the monster did not kill the girl and the monster himself is not dead. She knows this because she has spoken to its spirit and knows where it lives. This knowledge unleashes something in Ana and she begins pursuing an intimacy with the monster's spirit. There is a strong suggestion that the pull toward understanding the monster is the evolutionary force which pulls us all out of childhood toward adulthood, particularly after she watches from the sidelines while her older sister's friends leap over a fire in a coming-of-age pagan May Day ritual.

The climactic episode with the meeting of the monster is a gorgeous, timeless thing, and the easy denouement is ambiguous but in a good way, in the way that childhood becoming prepubescence is an ambiguous process.

last night's double feature: dominique is dead and valerie and her week of wonders

Dominique is Dead: (1980. dir: Michael Anderson) A few years after they collaborated on the laughable but nonetheless good-time Logan's Run, Michael Anderson teamed up again with Jenny Agutter, she of the ludicrously wooden acting style (to be fair, she's really at her worst in Logan's Run, as if she's just a teensy bit embarrassed). Dominique is a twisty-turny thriller from the "Is It Supernatural or Human Connivance?" realm, and it's packed full of cracking good British actors with little to do, alongside Cliff Robertson in the lead, whose natural stoicism works effectively against a hyperventilating script.

Jean Simmons is the eponymous Dominique. Her husband may or may not be trying to drive her to suicide, and her ghost may or may not later be trying to pay him back in kind. I stuck around to the end to find out, but Anderson really seems much more interested in playing around with Dario Argento's lighting kit than he is in telling a story, filling each night-time room with great splashes of primary colours through which the actors move as through a dream. I'm glad he had fun with that, and it's pretty to watch, -- although the film quality is so degraded that sometimes it looks like those Kodachrome snapshots from the sixties, where everything has bled into a mud of muted olives and oranges and very little else, and that's a shame, since it was mostly what this movie had to offer. Instead of growing tension, we get folks going up and down a shadowy staircase and back and forth through color-splashed hallways. In the end, although the writers did what they could to tie up all the ends, it still seems far-fetched in the way that Vast Government Conspiracies do (they can't keep a personal email bad-mouthing a foreign dignitary private, but the alien-dissecting lab under Roswell employing multiple scientists over the decades is still indeterminate?)




Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: (1970. dir: Jaromil Jires) Now travel with me back in time one decade further, hop with me across the pond then trek inland a spell where we happen upon one fabulously weird surrealist piece of Czech hippie-vision. It's not your typical flower-power kind of hippie, though; it's the sallow-faced long-hair at the party who doses you with Purple Owsley then mindfucks you into taking your clothes off. You wouldn't call it a horror film; rather, it's a girl's coming-of-age story, complete with the darkness, horror and cursed foreboding which balance the promise of sensual joy. I don't know where this director came from or went, but this movie, crazy as it is, moves with a firm hand at its rudder, as if he knows exactly where it's going all the time, even when we-the-spectators don't know exactly where we are or have just been. Valerie herself moves like Alice or Red Riding Hood with trusting ease through the high strangeness that is her onslaught of pubescence: a world of vampires, a Were-Weasel who may or may not be her father, incest, lustful priests, repressed grandmothers, virgins cursed with marriage, marriage likened to the vampiric bond, and a chicken plague. It's got the groovy sensuality of hippie times, but the interwoven darkness saves it from feeling outdated and tired like most flower-child memorabilia from stateside.

some films from the thirties

Son of Frankenstein: (1939. dir: Rowland V. Lee) This is a wonderful sequel! Why am I surprised? It's got Rathbone, Karloff and Lugosi: Rathbone is the titular, westernized son facing the infamy of returning to the spooky east to claim his inheritance, and inevitably succumbing to his dead father's obsession. Karloff is always superb, and Lugosi is in top form as the catalytic Ygor, looking like a sort of mutant son of Rasputin and the Wolfman, sporting pointy teeth and a broken neck. The tune he plays on his odd, homemade oboe to call the monster to do his bidding is mournfully eerie and the silence surrounding it is wonderful. There are big, strange, angular, Caligari-esque sets and extremes of chiaroscuro, and an inexplicable, boiling sulfur pit in the laboratory floor, always handy when you suspect there'll be monsters to destroy at some point.


Baby Face: (1933. dir: Alfred E. Green) It's one of the poster-children for Pre-Code Naughtiness: a young girl sleeps her way out of small-town poverty and across the country then into the upper echelons of big-city life. In her fifth year of speaking roles, Stanwyck is already a full-blown colossus. Look at the way she strolls down a street in Manhattan, straight off the boxcar floor and penniless, looking for all the world like royalty inspecting property she's about to buy. Already she can pull off even the most awful lines with aplomb. And a full eleven years before Double Indemnity, there's a lingering shot of her face while she listens to one of her lovers killing another in the next room, a shot every bit as magnificently enigmatic as the later, more celebrated one. This is also your chance to see John Wayne moping around as a lovesick office flunky wearing the boy-lipstick actors had to wear back then and looking pretty doggone silly. (If you want to see Gary Cooper looking silly in the boy-lipstick, check out his uncredited bit as a reporter in the 1927 Clara Bow monster-hit It.)


Night Nurse: (1931. dir: William Wellman) Another notorious pre-coder, this one is less concerned with telling a story than with letting us watch Stanwyck and Joan Blondell strip down to garters and slips multiple times as they climb in and out of their nursing gear. It's also got Gable from his pre-hero days as an SS-looking, black-clad, clean-shaven baddie who thinks nothing of socking Stanwyck across the jaw, although she's barely half his size. There's some simplistic suspense and unrealistic plot involving vulnerable kids and their nefarious parental figures, interesting because of the extreme depravity in which these rich no-gooders apparently live while their children quake fearfully in the arms of their nurse.


Night Must Fall: (1937. dir: Richard Thorpe) It's a great idea, but without the follow-through. According to IMDB, this was Thorpe's 107th full-length feature, including a disturbing number which had "g"s omitted from the titles (the Interferin' Gent, Roarin' Broncs, Trumpin' Trouble, to name just a few). The crucial thing he omitted from Night Must Fall was the sexual tension. Robert Montgomery is riveting, as he always is, as the smoothly ill-intentioned trickster who inveigles his way into the good graces of a clueless old lady (annoyingly written and annoyingly played by Dame May Whitty), but must somehow charm her more practical niece, played without her characteristic warmth and charm by Rosalind Russell. Smart as a whip, the niece at once suspects the intruder of being the sexual predator on the loose in the area, but can't bring herself to rat him out entirely. We assume this is because she's attracted to him, but since there is no chemistry between the two, her choices make little sense. Montgomery has summoned up a completely believable psychopath, a young man with charm and smarts who is constantly performing, constantly attentive to the reactions of others and adjusting his performance to suit. His sexual magnetism is not in question, although it is mired in that strange, impish androgyny which dead-ended Puers wield so consistently.

Suffering the back-drag of having been adapted from a play, the film never takes flight as it should, and Montgomery's performance is really the only thing to recommend it. It was remade in the swingin' sixties by Karel Reisz with the eternally un-charming Albert Finney as the psychopath, and I haven't brought myself to watch that one yet, although I'm certain that he's scary as hell, all subtlety has gone out the window, and there's sado-masochism a-plenty oozing up from beneath the tea-cozies.