Ahead of the Curve

For once, I have a few spare moments to write about movies I am planning on seeing.

First up is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival running July 11 to 13 at the Castro Theater. I bought my festival pass yesterday. I believe this is the first year the pass is good for the opening night film (but not the opening night party). They are showing 12 programs and few caught my attention. I have to see ~10 films to make the pass cost effective. I'm not sure if I'll make that many but I'll try my best.

The most interesting film is Tod Browning's The Unknown (1927). This snippet from the program guide says it all - Lon Chaney stars as Alonzo the Armless, who performs a knife-throwing act with his feet, and Joan Crawford is Nanon, who has a pathological fear of a man's touch. It's one of the most brazenly bizarre films ever made... hands down! Browning is best known for directing Dracula (1931) which is the first time Bela Lugosi donned the cape and fangs. He also made a cult horror classic called Freaks (1932) which I have heard much about but never seen. That film was set in a circus and the lost footage supposedly includes a castration scene.

Another interesting film on the festival calendar is Jujiro (1928). This film has a two aspects that are interesting to me. First, if the film is silent, is the appeal universal? Having seen most (I dozed off for parts of it) of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I think the answer is no. There are cultural customs and aesthetics that show up on the screen which imprint the film with the origin of its director or its intended audience. It'll be interesting to see a Japanese film from this period. That leads to the second interesting point. I have a personal interest in Japanese culture and for the past 60 years, Japanese culture has been largely shaped by the Allied occupation after WWII and subsequent influence on the Japanese constitution and society. I'm very curious to see how pre-war Japanese society is depicted even though this film is described as avante-garde which is usually code for no discernible plot.

The closing night film is The Patsy (1928) directed by King Vidor and starring Marion Davies. As anyone who has been to Hearst Castle knows, Davies was William Randoph Heart's long-time mistress. I don't recall ever seeing a Davies film so it will be interesting to see Davies at the height of her beauty.

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As I mentioned, I purchased membership to the Pacific Film Archive. I saw their July/August calendar yesterday and there were some interesting programs. Sidebar - the paper copies of the BAM/PFA calendar is huge; I think it is the size of a broadsheet newspaper except much thicker stock.

PFA has some programs coming up that caught my attention.

Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis running August 1 to 23.

I had never heard of David Goodis until reading the program notes. He was a pulp fiction writer whose best known film adaptation was Dark Passage (1947) with Bogie and Bacall. That's the one where Bogie gets plastic surgery and spends most of the movie with bandages around his face.

Looking through the program which includes a couple of films introduced by local Czar of Noir Eddie Muller, founder and director of the Noir City Film Festival, I see a few diamonds in the rough.

The Burglar (1957) - Never one to fuss over a plot, Goodis is more interested in the queasy connection between [Dan] Duryea, his “adopted” sister, and their long-dead dad, a veteran burglar. An incestuous fog seems to permeate the proceedings as Duryea dotes on his mollish sis, played by Jayne Mansfield.

The Burglars (1971) - French remake of The Burglar steals nothing from its predecessor. Shifting the focus from incest to archrivalry, this Morricone-driven thriller pits a loopy Jean-Paul Belmondo as Azad, a crook, against dodgy cop Zacharia (Omar Sharif)—everything from A to Z. The caper consists of the theft of a fortune in emeralds from an Athens industrialist. But it’s the aftermath of the crime that counts, and according to Zacharia’s math he, not the thieves, should get all the green goodies.

Descent into Hell (1986) - Haiti stands in for hell, a place of steamy beaches, quaint cocktails, and death. Trying to salvage their frosty marriage, Alan (Claude Brasseur) and Lola (Sophie Marceau) head for the tropics, where the chill between them might thaw under the intense sun. Alan is a blocked mystery writer and a boozehound doggedly in descent; Lola, many years younger, is dogged by her own dire descent, an attempted rape that has left her iced over. In the throes of a bender, Alan wanders into the seamy side of Port-au-Prince looking for trouble, and trouble is more than happy to find him. Goodis’s sense that the past is inescapable is everywhere present in this slightly smarmy sojourn. And Lola’s body, like the desired manifestation of a mania, is everywhere to be seen, svelte, sweaty, and stripped.

Another program at PFA is The Long View: A Celebration of Widescreen - July 16 to August 30. 20th Century Fox introduced CinemaScope in 1953. Extending the movie screen to twice its previous width...CinemaScope was soon followed by other widescreen formats, including VistaVision, Superscope, Cinemiracle, and Panavision, most of which used anamorphic lenses to compress the visual information during filming and then re-expand it during projection.

Violent Saturday (1955) with Lee Marvin. Three stickup men posing as salesmen (it doesn’t get more ’50s) pull in for ‘business’; casing things out over a day and a night, they get acquainted with the population of Sherwood Anderson small-towners awash in hotel-bar cocktails, dreamy voyeurism, and infidelity..

Point Blank (1967) with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Lee Marvin is Walker, left for dead in an Alcatraz heist and now out to find the $93,000 he has coming. No more, no less, unless you count revenge. If the plot sounds familiar, it's because Mel Gibson made an enjoyable remake titled Payback in 1999.

Other widescreen classics that need no synopsis include Lawrence of Arabia, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, 2001: A Space Odyssey, La Dolce Vita, and Yojimbo. You can't go wrong with David Lean, Francois Truffaut, Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa.

The other program at PFA is United Artists: 90 Years - July 5 to August 31. I've seen a lot of films in this program but there are always old films that I haven't caught and this program provides a lot of opportunities. Most people don't know the story of the founding of UA. I always forget the founders except Chaplin. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Charles Chaplin had founded their own company, United Artists, in 1919. The idea of a 'studio without a studio'—a company that functioned primarily as a distributor, without the enormous overhead of a conventional Hollywood production/distribution/exhibition conglomerate—might have been crazy, but it stuck, and by the mid-fifties, UA was one of the most important forces in American cinema

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) with Buster Keaton and filmed on the Sacramento Delta.

The Shanghai Gesture (1941) directed by Josef von Sternberg.

The Killing (1956) directed by Stanley Kubrick with Sterling Hayden.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924) directed by Raoul Walsh with Douglas Fairbanks and Anna May Wong.

Broken Blossoms (1919) directed by D.W. Griffith with Lillian Gish.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) directed by Charles Laughton with Robert Mitchum; I have never seen this film.

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There are several other worthwhile screening this summer.

The Castro Theater is holding its annual 70 MM Film Festival with perennials Lawrence of Arabia, The Wild Bunch, and Tron. The festival runs July 1-9.

I've been to one screening a few years ago. For some reason I don't get their email updates. Despite this, I am intrigued by The 1st Annual Charlie McGraw Film Festival sponsored by The Danger and Despair Knitting Circle. DDKC is a local group that shows 16 MM noir films in vacant office spaces in Downtown SF. The location changes and you need to email an RSVP but its something different. No dates on the Charlie McGraw festival.

I am also a member of The Mechanics' Institute. They sponsor a CinemaLit series on Friday nights. I haven't made any of the showings. Earlier in the year, they were showing films every Friday but it seems like they drop to every other Friday through August. Mick LaSalle at the SF Chronicle recommended a Maurice Chevalier film called The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) with Claudette Colbert and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It's showing on July 25.

If you miss the July 25 showing of The Smiling Lieutenant at The Mechanics' Institute, you can catch it at The Stanford Theater on July 9. Their summer series is heavy on old films including three Marx Brothers films and silent films every Wednesday night.

If that wasn't enough, there is one more festival where I want to catch at least one film. From July 24 to August 11, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival plays at various locations around the Bay Area. A few months ago, I was listening to NPR (which makes me sound much more liberal than I really am) and heard a segment about Stalag novels which were popular in Israel in the 1960's. If you are not familiar with a Stalag novel, it was a fiction genre popular in the aforementioned time and place. The plot typically involved a Allied flyers during WWII. Their planes are shot down over German territory and they are captured. They are "interrogated" by female SS/Gestapo guards who just happen to be stunningly beautiful. Tortured and humiliated by these freaky fräuleins, the flyers turn the tables on their captors and escape but not before raping and murdering their Aryan captors and thus settling the score. That sounds like a porno film or teenage boy's fantasy...actually, if you throw in werewolves, I think it also describes the plot of one of the fake previews in Grindhouse. I would like to see a legitimate film adaptation of a Stalag novel or just to read one of them (I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch sounds thought provoking). I guess I'll have to settle for a documentary on the phenomenon called Stalags - Holocaust and Pornography in Israel.

That reminds a unique San Francisco bookstore called Kayo Books that I have visited in the past. I think I'll stop by there to see if they carry stalag novels.

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If that plethora of films is not enough to get you excited I don't know what can...except maybe these two Nazis questioning a POW. You may wonder why the swastika is inverted. After thinking about it, I believe it is because displaying the swastika was/is illegal in Israel.

Taking Inventory as of May 5 & More

I started a new job in March and it's been more hectic than I imagined. I haven't had time to see many movies much less blog about them.

Since the last post, I've only seen seven films.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her; directed by Jean-Luc Godard; French with subtitles; (1967)
Grindhouse; directed by Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino; (2007)
Sacco & Vanzetti; documentary; (2006)

Dead Channels Sleazy Sundays:
The Crimson Cult with Boris Karloff & Christopher Lee; (1968)
Maniac; (1934)
Preacherman; (1971)
The Black Gestapo; (1975)

Dead Channels is a film festival that hasn't launched yet. Their inaugural festival is August 9 to 16. It put on a program at the Victoria Theater - triple features on four consecutive Sundays in April. From what I can tell, Dead Channels is a joint effort by Bruce Fletcher (formerly of IndieFest) and Cosmic Hex.

The April program was a Grindhouse homage featuring mainly exploitation films from the 1970's - schlock & maw as I sometimes refer to the films. I was too young to actually go to a grindhouse and see films like these but I had something better. We had cable TV when I was a teenager & I was an avid fan of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. For those who may not remember or know, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) was originally a horror movie hostess on a cable TV channel in Los Angeles. Movie Macabre showed classic Grindhouse-style films - Count Yorga, Vampire, Blacula, a lot of stuff with William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Joan Collins, and English Gothic films. During the commercial breaks, she would do skits or lay on a chaise longue in that familiar black dress and tell corny, double entendres. The Sleazy Sunday films could very well have been shown on Movie Macabre.

Of the four I saw, the best was The Black Gestapo featuring Mac (Charles Robinson) from the 1980's television show Night Court. The plot is secondary in a film like The Black Gestapo. There a few moments that stand out in a film like this. First, the "bad" guys are supposed to be Italian Mafia but to me they look like California blond models. For some reason, every blond guy with a mustache from the 70's looks like a porn star to me. The main enforcer of the gang was a tall blond guy and two extremely violent acts in the film made me laugh. He rapes a black woman in the front seat of his car - the front seat was bench-style. While he is raping the woman in the middle seat, his henchman is sitting in the passenger looking on. That doesn't sound funny but there was something surreal about it and the look on the henchman's face is priceless - this detached, slightly interested gaze while he is sitting 6 inches from a woman getting raped. The rapist gets his comeuppance later when he takes a bath. There is something feminine about a bath and if I recall correctly this was a bubble bath. I laughed out loud at that as well. The big, tall, rapist taking a bubble bath. In retaliation, the Black Gestapo castrate the man in his bathtub. Grisly indeed but if you can't laugh at a rapist getting castrated, your sense of humor is warped. Come to think of it, the rapist uttered the best line of the film. The Black Gestapo is getting uppity so the Mafia sends out its enforcers to mete out discipline. The rapist goes to a hooker's apartment to find out where her pimp is. She is laying naked in bed and they pull off the sheets. After staring at her, he says "Nice bush." That line by itself was worth the price of admission but at the end of the film while reading the credits, I noticed that role was credited as "White Whore."

One more note - the Balboa had a Boris Karloff retrospective in 2006. The Crimson Cult is not one of his best. However, there is a film from this period that I have wanted to see for some time. It showed at the Balboa & I was unable to attend that day. It's called The Wurdalak (1963) - released in the US as Black Sabbath. Mario Bava directed it or part of it. Like Grindhouse, it is multiple (three) films in one.

That leads me to Grindhouse. I've been a fan of Tarantino since Reservoir Dogs. I'm a huge fan of Pulp Fiction & Kill Bill. I'm also a big fan of Rodriguez's Desperado. To a lesser degree, I enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Mexico, From Dusk to Dawn, and Sin City. The debate is which film in Grindhouse is better - Tarantino's Death Proof or Rodriguez's Planet Terror. For my money, it was Death Proof. Rodriguez certainly has a flare for horror films & Rose McGowan's peg leg is iconic but I enjoyed Death Proof immensely. I will say that Planet Terror by Rodriguez gets great performances out of McGowan & Freddy Rodriguez and has the requisite splatters and sound effects (my favorite was when Marley Shelton broke her wrist while trying to open her car door). The whole cast chews up the scenery with gusto but ultimately, this was Rodriguez channeling George Romero but I was never a zombie movie fan.

Tarantino does something extraordinary. He creates this dynamic between two sets of three women and makes them sexy & feminine but layers on a masculine appeal that I'm not sure is realistic but I can only hope that it is. Death Proof is two films within one film and the heart of each segment is the extended dialogue scenes between the women. I was riveted by the scenes in the car and bar during the first vignette featuring Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, and Sydney Tamiia Poitier. It was like a "chick flick" on crack - raunchy and hilarious. Add in Rose McGowan in blonde wig or dye job, Kurt Russell, and a letter perfect Texas Chilli Parlor - instant classic.
Tarantino tops himself by basically recreating and exceeding the same female dynamics in the second half of the film with Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thomas, and in a smaller role Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Tarantino continually references pop culture touchstones of which he himself has now become. The dialogue scenes in the car evoke Pulp Fiction. The scene in the diner is recreating Reservoir Dogs. He throws in a reference to Vanishing Point (which Dead Channels screened a preview).

Tarantino has always had an ear for dialogue. I can spout lines from all of his films. This film is no different. My favorite was when the women in the second segment were driving in a car and talking about their love lives. Dawson mentions that she is not sleeping with her boyfriend because once she sleeps with him, he will objectify her. However, her boyfriend has cheated on her by sleeping with "Darryl Hannah's body double." Two of the women express disbelief at her twisted logic which has resulted in him having sex with someone else. Tracie Thomas utters a line in retort that is one for the ages - "Nigger! You got to break off a piece and give him some!"

Another classic scene is Kurt Russell doing a John Wayne impersonation. He says "I really have a book [he pulls out a small notebook and pen] and keep track of everyone I meet. I'm going put you under 'Chickenshit'."

The other aspect that Tarantino has made his signature (especially since Kill Bill) is stunts. He eschews CGI and animatronics. In fact, I can't recall any wire work from Kill Bill. Zoe Bell was in a great documentary called Double Dare. I saw it a few years ago at the Roxie. In that film, Bell landed the job as Uma Thurman's stunt double in Kill Bill. In Double Dare and Death Proof, Bell shows a natural amiability on the screen. The fact that she does her own stunts adds greatly to the film. A friend thought the sequence was too long but I found the chase scene where Bell was draped on the hood of the car while Stuntman Mike terrorizes them to be exhilarating and one of the best stunts I can recall on film.

I was looking forward to Sacco and Vanzetti and was disappointed. The film features the voices of John Turturro & Tony Shalhoub reading the letters of the eponymous subjects. The topic is perhaps the Trial of the Century but some ham-handed reference to the present day situation at Guantanamo Bay and the glossing over of certain facts, left me luke warm about the film. Over the closing credits, Arlo Guthrie sings Red Wine - one of his father's ballad on the subject - that was treat.

I did not get a chance to attend any SF International Film Festival screenings. IndieFest's Hole in the Head festival is starting in June and the SF Silent Film Festival is in July. I hope to make some of those screenings. In addition, I've been trying to get to the Mechanics' Institute Library for their CinemaLit Film Series on Friday nights. Another organization that screens old films (noir only) is the Danger and Despair Knitting Circle. They are hosting a Charles McGraw marathon in June. McGraw had a distinctive, raspy voice & was a staple in film noir in the 40's and 50'. Perhaps he is best known as Marcellus, Kirk Douglas' gladiator trainer in Spartacus.