"Myra Breckinridge was born with a scalpel and don't you ever forget it motherfuckers, as the kids all say," Raquel Welch--as post-op woman Myra-- narrates, and you feel that something is definitely being cut off--it's the 60s and the last vestige of hetero-studliness associated with the counterculture's orgy mentality. MYRA B. is generally considered one awful film but it's pretty hot as an anti-Hollywood, anti-acting school, anti-cowboy rant, something Valerie Solanis might dream up in prison after too much pruno. "My purpose in coming to Hollywood," Myra announces. "is to destroy the American male in all its forms." As long as the film focuses on this aspect, draws heavily from old film clips, and lets Raquel Welch spout pro-40s camp Hollywood doctrine, it's pretty badass --if you love old movies. But Michael Sarne, a Brit actor! And singer! A flashy gent, was given the directorial reins. A mistake, because only an American could really understand Hollywood and its twisted sexuality. The Brits are way different and Sarne's camera is almost too polite; he forgets to leer down Raquel Welch's dress, and up it; he cuts away right when a tirade is getting interesting.


But first, historical Hollywood context: in 1970, MYRA's parent company Fox also released BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. And both had film critics either as actors or writers and directors unused to big budgets. But it was a time in Hollywood where anyone outside the system could get a major studio movie made, as the older guns were clueless in the face of the psychedelic / feminist / black power / anti-Vietnam revolution generation-- and by 1970 were able to admit it. If the producers hadn't done drugs they either hired someone who had or just threw some breasts, loud music, and strobe lights on the screen and let the clock run out. Damned hippies wouldn't even notice, they reasoned. And the older crowd wouldn't know it wasn't authentic as long as there were hot hippie chicks. But even the older crowd knew flop sweat when they smelled it it, and lo, stayed hom to watch LAUGH-IN.


Within a brief time period, starting around 1966 and ending with the saving of the studio system by GODFATHER, STAR WARS and JAWS, there was a ton of such youth trend-aping films: over-priced, star-studded, psychedelic imagery-and-song-filled counterculture-satirizing (and aping) bids for mainstream success, from established directors from both Europe and the US: CANDY (dir. Christian Marquand)l BOOM! (dir. Joseph Losey), CASINO ROYALE (dir. Ken Hughes); BLUEBEARD (dir. Edward Dmytryk); SKIDOO (dir. Otto Preminger); I LOVE YOU ALICE B. TOLKAS and THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP (both w/ Peter Sellers); HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE (w/ Bob Hope), BARBARELLA (dir. Roger Vadim), PETULIA (dir. Richard Lester), to name a few.

Some of these went perhaps too far into the freedoms wrought by the psychedelic era, and grew careless with them as if they were merely the next wave of crappy symbols for sexual intercourse and perversion. The idea that LSD had created a kind of post-modern melt-down was lost on a generation for whom the notion of 'freedom' began and ended with scoring some of the hippie love they'd read about. They just masked their one-track minds in what we call 'terminal quirkiness' and made movies where men in gray flannel suits and nagging wives met Goldie Hawn at a hippie bar in the midst of their mid-life crises.

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We're not a big fan of 'eaters' here at Acidemic

But the youth didn't want old comedians leering over their cleavage; they had endured the safe 50s conformity as children and so naturally didn't want it. Thrusting themselves into the modern world and making it up as they went, they were goal-free, it wasn't about the orgasm, man. Hollywood reared back on its haunches like a spooked lion at that idea, lashing out at the very things the youth thought important, baring its fangs and ready to burn down the studio and laugh maniacally like Lionel Atwill or Joan Crawford rather than surrender the reins to some young turk who didn't appreciate a dirty Billy Wilder-esque punch line. Hollywood had labored too long in the system that was now under satiric attack to understand there was no way out but to feign death gracelessly. Trying to be anti-establishment, they ended up only anti-youth, the way older men like me feel a mix of prurience, bitter jealousy, and concern when we hear (and propagate) stories of bracelets for oral sex with today's youth.


Which brings us to MYRA, the talked-about adaptation of Gore Vidal's seminal, fluid novel. Raquel Welch was on board mainly, as she puts it in the DVD commentary, because she was originally to play both Myron and his post-op female counterpart Myra --kind of how Ed Wood played both Glen and Glenda. She considered it an acting challenge. And if the filmmakers had stuck with that idea it would have been a great film. Sulky Rex Reed was cast instead as Myron, and his air of defensive snootiness sabotages what little chance the film had.


What made MYRA a hopeful buzz generator was the sex change angle, coupled to the idea that it could be a dizzy countercultural farce, but it was only the Raquel Welch as a sex change dominatrix part which had real appeal. She had been made an international star before her breakout film ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1967) had even been released, just from the poster! And while sometimes strident she had two great assets: a body that redefined 'smokin'' and--the less renowned one--an air of take-no-prisoners imperiousness that made her perfect for roles like Myra.


The fatal flaw of the film is right there in the opening, with John Carradine as a mumbling doctor performing the gender reassignment in what is presumably a psychedelic dream sequence "You realize once we cut if off it won't grow back," Carradine says, trying to talk Myron out of it. "How about circumcision? It's cheaper."

Now, that's in itself hilarious and Carradine rocks, but if you start a story already in a dream sequence and never really come out of it then there's nothing ventured, no risk, no reason to care what happens through the whole rest of the film, unless it contrasts at some point with a recognizable reality. Carradine's warning "it won't grow back" has no weight since Myron can change his mind, which he does, as soon as Farrah Fawcett hints she'd sleep with her is she was a him again. This is intended to be very clever, but it only reflects cinema's still-unresolved castration anxiety, an anxiety which clouds its vision--if not Welch's. No way Farrah would sleep with a pisher like Rex Reed, but Myra is awesome.


But I'm going to go out on an already severed limb and defend MYRA anyway despite the bitter flaw of deciding to bring in Rex instead of letting Raquel play Myron, because it's one of the few truly misandric films ever to come out of Hollywood. Misandry is of course the hatred of men, an understandable feeling for anyone who loves movie stars and hates the cigar-chomping little men-the pimps of the ephemeral--who molded the their leading ladies from virgin clay into sexually assailed golems of gorgeosity-made-flesh. In the context of MYRA, misandry is the desire to punk out, or "facilitate the destruction of the last vestige or trace of the traditional man in order to realign the sexes in order to decrease the population thus increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage." So it's really only misandric by design, which how can any free-thinker not approve?


The problem is, while some of the dialogue does attain a dizzying height of cinematic savvy it also has a very short attention span. In parts it seems like Sarne checked his watch, realized the film had played long enough that it could stop and still be considered a feature, and so made a 'wrap it up' gesture and departed for rehab, leaving MRYA caught between the zipper of gender studies phenomena and just another hard place. Feints at validating the lifestyles of queers, commies, nymphos, hippies, and the all-rightness of punking out of dumb "I'm straight!"-pleading studs (ala SCORE!) add up to zilch if the jab is a sucker punch-wearin'-a-wire vindication of establishment, the old 'we had a lot of fun here tonight boys and girls but remember, gender straitjackets are there for your protection!' shuffle.


But what MYRA fears isn't rejection of its taboo-breaking but the future of Hollywood without censorship, because it can't break walls if there's no walls left, and its terribly afraid it has nothing else to offer, and so it knocks a few holes in the wall then quick patches them up for the next customer. Or another metaphor: the little boy dancing on the top of the dam, screaming that its about to burst, and kicking at it with his little churchy shoe, and then whipping out his dick when no one pays attention and, when no one pays attention even then, pretending to cut it off. Rex Reed's hatred of the film is telling it that sense. In his little three minute film reviews on TV, Reed's snootiness was droll, but this is a real movie, and no snootiness stays droll longer than three minutes.


Sadly, for all that, Rex might have been right. As with so many movies with 'queer' characters in that less-enlightened era, sensationalism, the 'ick' factor is exploited, camped to the point of gauchery, and all that's left is Myra's knowing but bizarre love of 40s musicals. She's horrified that the dumb acting student hunk she aims to deflower never heard of the Andrews sisters, and Welch is superbly authoritarian and uber-confident explaining with just a touch of mock wistfulness that the Andrew Sisters "really did roll out that barrel... And no one ever really rolled it back." Old movie footage of giggling Richard Widmark from KISS OF DEATH and Marlene is Navy drag in SEVEN SINNERS comes like a welcome reprieve and apt commentary. When she clocks John Huston during class she explains that she's using the style of Patricia Collinges in THE LITTLE FOXES. And TARZAN AND THE AMAZONS (1945, below) is, she adds, a masterpiece. Myra also explains that, "The real Christ can't compare with either actor in King of Kings," and the only one now to compare is James Bond "who inevitably ends up with a blow-torch aimed at his crotch." All this is very, very welcome and taken, no doubt, straight from Vidal's lips to hers, where it belongs... as it says in the bible.

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Tarzan, w/ Amazons

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Bacchantes

Continuing the more-is-less-but-what-the-hell philosophy and upping the camp level through the roof are scenes involving the geriatric bacchant Mae West. Her sultry comic timing with double entendres such as, "Ah, the pizza man! When do you deliver?" and the ultra-subtle, "I don't care about your credits as long as your oversexed" helps them come off clever, especially when interspersed with gay-themed musical numbers ("Hard to Handle!") vagina dentata Busby banana circles (from "the Gang's all Here"), but as a bonus deva, West's presence never really pays off after a strong start. She provides the haughty Myra with an equal and they share some properly jovial and queenly laments about the states of their men, but then she fades away. Still, if you think she's an embarrassment, being so old and still stuck on vibrate, well fuck you! She's an intrinsic part of the film's value as a phallic rhinestone time tunnel ramming up Hollywood's golden age, right past the barriers set up by the angry Catholic censors, for whom West's whole schtick was once the direst threat facing America.


And then, the main reason to see the film: the awesome Raquel Welch taking a stud's anal virginity, and it's here where Welch's dominatrix acting style really finds its ultimate expression of howling vengeance. She seems to come alive even though wearing, finally, a stars and stripes bikini and (unseen) strap-on. Myra explained her validation for the approaching act in an earlier scene, declaring to her class that "every American woman secretly longs to be raped." We may not agree, but you have to admire her brazen insanity-- and then, before she invades Rusty with a strap-on she consoles him by saying "Your manhood's already been taken by Clark Gable and Errol Flyn, I'm merely supplying the finishing touches." Her touches are intercut with footage of a bucking bronco "who's never been rode before" desperately trying to escape his stall, and Clark Gable leering down from his poster. If nothing else, Hollywood devotees will find whole new ways of reading their favorite MGM stars' enigmatic grins.


But the pictures leering doesn't end there. As Myra starts whooping it up while Rusty bears it, old movies bear shocked witness in intercut shots, alongside the spooked horse in a virtuoso spree of Eisensteinian montage editing. The old films become like living windows wherein old movies stars peer in at the current action as if through an interdimensional window. Welch's orgasm is simulated via a damn breaking; a scan of photos of Jayne Mansfield; 30s dancers cavorting in a studio rain, waving umbrellas as jump ropes; Welch on a flower swing ala the opening of SCARLET EMPRESS; a roller coaster; a mushroom cloud; rich 30s socialites laughing from their swanky balcony; a ballet dancer in a split bowing forward, and tinted silent footage from MACISTE IN HELL (the same footage used in Dwayne Esper's MANIAC and my own 2007 film that climaxes with a Kali-esque goddess anally assaulting a helpless hetero-bro --QUEEN OF DICKS). The cumulative effect (even if the Shirley Temple milking the cow footage was excised on her request), is a rupturing of the historical fabric of film history -- like this strap-on represents the the return of everything 40s Hollywood repressed and coded into abstraction. Best of all, Welch whoops it up with great style - the only other actors to match her for America-encapsulated yee-hawing in that era's cinema are Slim Pickens on his H-bomb in STRANGELOVE. Yeeeee-Haw!


It's a great moment even so, but its not long after that we're burdened with sulky Rex Reed again and his eyeliner-ed Richard Benjamin mystique, sneering his way nostrilly through party scenes where actors barely notice him, either because he doesn't really exist, or because he's so busy masking his self-consciousness with an air of haughty disdain that he plum forgets to notice anything around him, including that he's making people very uncomfortable. You know, that guy who spends the evening looking at your bookshelf and not talking? And when someone does try to be nice to him he suddenly won't shut up about Wally Lamb?



And it gets worse! OnceMyra has Farrah on the third base line she says, "Oh, if only you were a man!" So Myra decides to switch his merry gender back. Turns out it was all a dream. Aww - this is where we came in. So Farrah Fawcett is just his nurse, and Raquel is on the cover of some gossip magazine and did he have a car accident like in the book or is he just recovering from a vasectomy?  I'm sure our flaky, second-guessing director would say he meant this cop-out as a challenge to preconceived notions of sexual hierarchy, i.e. that masturbation fantasy is somehow just as relevant as actual fornication within the fantasy of a film. In the book, apparently, Myra's sex change is never completed and after she gets in a car accident she winds up in the hospital, and that may have been the original reason for ending the film there, but any hep person knows that when you try to make it real compared to what, you have to show some balls and stick to your gun. We come away with a bad taste in our mouths even though there were times in this film where the level of madness made it hum like electricity, like the best part of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, only with intellectual gender discourse instead of giant breasts. Some day, maybe we shall have both. 

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To avoid the seeming cop-out end, stop watching here

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has--ever since the Soon-Yi thing came to light in the early 90s--gone into a deep WASP-y freeze, it's easy to forget his 60s pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking trickster behind his neurotic fussing.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL, is much less mired in guilt and the need to be artsy. His Humbert-ish yens and ectomorph satyriasis provided an exhilarating freshness that was part of the sexual revolution. His nebbishy persona doesn't exclude him from the in-crowd so he's not as threatened by the competition for the WASP chicks that he might feel for an O'Toole a few successes down the road. But in PUSSYCAT he's not competing against O'Toole, he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, who finds the winking trickster behind Allen's neurotic sexual lunacy. Together the three hit the jackpot, and a swath of talented, sexy comic actresses climb aboard and the ship rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it.



But British directors Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together and a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off, before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, lobbing rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" O'Toole's louche bachelor launches into drunken recitations from Hamlet, tossed off to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them. And Sellers' ridiculous black wig makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence. I love O'Toole here even more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in the Allen worked alongside folks like Mel Brooks in the pool of Borscht Belt gag writers on Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel, from an era smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex wa relegated to foul-mouthed 17 year-olds.

MY FAVORITE YEAR was fun and O'Toole played a drunken old buccaneer well, but it has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and 'oh how zany' old saws like stealing the police horse in Central Park at dawn.  But in PUSSYCAT there's real madness at play and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man who's been laughing a lot in between takes. You can feel he's grateful to be having such a relaxed shoot and such clever lines, and so many pretty girls to woo, and he shows his gratitude by bringing a cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting. It feels like he's sharing something with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all month.


O'Toole plays a charmer so irresistible to women and so unable to resist them that his life has been one long series of one-night stands with one of his more insistent conquests, played by Schneider, demanding he marry her. He loves her so he goes to see a psychiatrist, Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction, and we'd now be compelled to say, "There's nothing funny about it!" in case a sanctimonious but cute girl is listening. Meanwhile, Woody shows up as Victor, a nervous stripper's aid who somehow winds up taking Romy Schneider home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.


PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle apparently which makes sense, but it would have been a completely different film --we'd just hate Beatty for managing to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed. We can't hate O'Toole because his pallor is that of a man depleted by too much sex. He's so pale that if the film wasn't from the sixties we'd all just think he was taking a lot of Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seemed critical to Beatty's self conception in a way it doesn't for O'Toole. Each broad takes just a bit of his bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention that each time is like the first.  As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?


That's the joy of it all, we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like to go drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton.

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, via a image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty Catholic to really go for it--like me he probably just 'thought about it' a lot and then went home hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they go home with someone else and suddenly no one wants you and you're suddenly tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or the cake out in the rain. O'Toole has that weakened look of a man who's been fought over enough that he barely notices. e

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from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts when his wife protests) has seldom been more alluring as a mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster on the way to Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping boudoir farce merry-go-round. Paula Prentiss is aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did, you rat!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward later presents her with a special plaque). Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphotic repression and I love her to death so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up --all but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975)
 

Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen live large, the sex is fun and easy and breezy here, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual-renting prostitutes and passive aggressively sabotaging of later decades. Aside from his own cranky weird character, a kind of intensified version of his usual, everyone is pretty hip and jubilant. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permisison to do things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. Allen's pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while and his own back yard and love is where you left it and so forth, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!


That's fine because marriage-minded women or no there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas, even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it, for it is pre-PC, and  therefore innocent! And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're having a blast, and why not?


So instead of getting upset just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be "The Joyless Sex" - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms, and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down to turn off even a moralistic craft behemoth like the old MGM. But with PUSSYCAT we don't have to worry about that. Here, everything is always 1965 and no woman runs who doesn't secretly want to be chased, and even the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.


PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francoise Hardy. Now there's a French actress I'd have given up my low-down tomcat ways for, and all she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile."

The final frontier. Do we have anything, really, to fear from it? As the kids all say just before being Rube Goldbergianly sliced to ribbons in the FINAL DESTINATION movies, 'it's a part of life, so so what - if it happens it happens - it's not an intelligent force - that's ridiculous!' And then, of course, that intelligent force dices them real pretty. But Death has always been personified in films, plays, novels.

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Destiny - 1921 - dir. Fritz Lang

PS - this is the second time I've written this list. Last time it deleted itself and I had a nervous breakdown. Then again, nervous breakdowns are the fertilizer of the soul, but fuck you for saying so. The breaking, the destruction of old mores and self-conceptions, allowing genuine change to occur, it may be true but get stuffed. That's what tarot card readers will tell you should you draw the death card. But are they just kidding you? When death comes in his/her figurative onscreen representation it's a little trite unless you manage to harness both the 'significant change is scary but there's nothing to fear' aspect and the 'from which no traveler returns' aspect. Death is not cruel or unkind, but merciful! Yet also, terrifying. Without the latter, the former has no function -  there can't be mercy without suffering - and once one is no longer afraid, death is beautiful.  Because, in the end, what is death in film? Unless you're talking about a snuff film, cinematic death is hardly permanent.  The passage past the credits from which no character returns, from the 'reality' of the film to the future memory of the viewer as he sets about looking for his car keys in the mall-tiplex parking lot, heedless of the tiny whirlwind at his feet, and the unmanned tractor trailer rolling ominously a-toward.


1. Jessica Lange as Death - All that Jazz (1977)
One "Bye Bye Life" finale later and I, a small alienated lad of 15, was death's true champion. Factor Ben Vereen strutting his stuff, glittery glam creatures cavorting and chain-smoking choreographer Jake Gideon (Roy Scheider) dying on one level of reality while belting out his smooth sure-am-blueness to the glittering ceiling of the next, and by the third climactic chorus the hairs stood on my neck's rough back as the sleeping cock towards apollo's electric morning womb.

Leading up to this, Gideoon (Roy Scheider) shares mostly one way conversations with his personal angel of death, played by a teasingly Mona Lisa-esque Jessica Lange. I love how relaxed, even flirty, Gideon is in these scenes, and I love his nonstop momentum; even when he's heart attacking his way along empty hospital corridors he's not going to stop reaching towards his own silver-lined black cloud future, mortality's crossing guard--the hospital staff and surgeons-- ignored like some needlessly nervous mom at a carless corner. And since Jake's psychopomp is such a glowing, white-clad hottie, what's to fear? The last shot may be painfully abrupt, throwing us out the door to the far-less sexy Ethel Mermen's belting "There's No Business (Like Show Business)" while Gideon's pale husk is zippered up into a body bag, but at least Jake went out to a pinnacle Bob Fosse moment. When I die, it's "Bye Bye Life" I want as the last thing burnt on my retina.


2. Frederic March as Death in Death Takes a Holiday (1933)


4. Bengt Ekerot as Death - The Seventh Seal (1957)
When it comes to personifications of the big D, no one plays it like Ekerot in Bergman's most recognized and satirized of gloomfests. With his skull-tight cowl, pale face and big reptilian eyes, Ekerot is both scary and civilized, sexless yet charismatic. He relishes the chance to hang with a cool dude like this weary knight Max von Sydow, before the inevitable reaping. A true nobleman is hard to find in amidst Death's daily haul.

We can't even imagine now, all smug in our finery, that once upon a time there was 'the arthouse' and titans like Kurosawa and Bergman were dropping genius groundbreakers all up in there, and something like Seventh Seal was gobbled up, digested, and then transformed into Woody Allen homages, Carol Burnett pastiches before it could even leave the theater. Now indies and imports are neo-realist downers or twee quirkfests, and lofty art draws chuckles proportionate only to its reach. This Death chess game alone lives to tell the tale.


5. The Red Death -The Masque of the Red Death.(1964)
One of the sillier aspects of this film is that not only is there a guy in a red robe to be the 'red death' but there's a whole rainbow of robed figures at the end, sewing plague like Skittles throughout the Middle Ages. And our main red robed figure doesn't play chess with Prospero (Vincent Price) the Satanic figure who locks up his gates in a futile attempt to keep the plague at bay, he plays cards with a little peasant girl from the village Price has--half out of sadistic whim out of plague-times necessity--burned to the ground. Poe would never be so populist in rooting against such a charismatic monster and usually screenwriter Charles Beaumont likes him too, but it doesn't matter, for when this weird death in his robe with a mask that makes him look like a fuller brush come to life gets to deliver the comeuppance Price's Prospero has been secretly longing for all along, the now dripping red paint Prospero leads the cast in a wild interpretive dance! No harm, no foul.





6.  María Casares as the Princess / Death - Orpheus (1950)
Jean Cocteau's dreamy allegory finds a brooding cafe poet Orpheus (Jean Marais) haunted by regal Spanish actress María Casares, who reaches out to him from the reflective pool / mirror and lures him into the other world. Meanwhile, Orpheus' clueless wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa) would prefer her husband stop listening to his muse's sweet words, which are coming over his car radio like a ghost transmission from WW2, the days when broadcasts regularly included code words meant to confuse the eavesdropping Nazis. I had a strong yen for Cesares seeing this the first time as she reminded me a lot of my then wife, an Argentine socialist intellectual filmmaker. Now I think avoid her and the film like the plague.


7. Death - Black Orpheus (1959)
A spurned lover gone homicidal puts on a theatrical skeleton mask and stalks his ex through carnivale in this entrancing, uber-rhtyhmic festival of color, movement, and amour. The film electrified art house crowds and put bossa nova on the map, making a world class star of Joachim Gilberto. Peeking around shadowy corners, it's amazing just how scary this dancing Death actually is. We know what's going to happen, Eurydice will die, Orpheus will make his deal (here with some voodoo practitioners hanging out in an empty theater) and so forth, but knowing what's going to happen just makes it that much more tragic, as if death was an inexorable magnetic force that all the dancing in the world can't keep at bay for long. Sooner or later, every song ends.


8. Robert Redford as Harold Belden -Twilight Zone(1962 - "Nothing in the Dark")
There are certain TZ episodes we all remember - Burgess with his glasses, Shatner with his gremlin, and Robert Redford as a wounded cop who's really death personified, come to claim some old broad scared to go, who's been locking her door to all visitors for she knows old death is coming for her. Redford was just coming up in the world at the time, but he's perfectly cast - who could resist his gentle beauty? When he comes for you, a feeling of flattered grace subsumes all dread. Look at him, that unwrinkled brow and eyes used to charming girls of all ages without strain; why, he wouldn't even hurt a fly.


 9. The Rube Goldberg Variations - Final Destination (series)

What makes these films fascinating as artifacts of modern horror cinema is the personification of death isn't anthropomorphic but rather the entire environment: electrical current, turning wheels, weather patterns, freight, jobs, airplanes, roller coasters, horses, and even a multiplex theater itself. The concept that somehow a premonition of death 'shouldn't' have happened, forcing death to work overtime in claiming the lives of those who escaped their scheduled demise suggests, in a sense, that certain agents inherent in our DNA are at war with the inescapable force of mortality, that death has a regimented schedule which our premonitory powers are forever trying to disrupt. What makes these films effective as 'fun' stems from the very easy way we can personify random chains of events; we can recognize death's movements in random events. There is no single figure of malice, but just as we as viewers effectively occupy a 'no space' omnipresence in the films we watch (we can identify with many different characters all at once, and can jump back and forth through cause and effect chains with ease) we have no trouble recognizing the work of this invisible Goldberg coincidence time-space serpent.

We're there, after all, to see it 'perform' its repossessions. The temporary escape from fate provided by the protagonist's vision might even be a 'head start' kind of approach on death's part. Giving 'the Most Dangerous Game' a head start. And, in a sense, by making Death appear vulnerable to being even temporarily escaped, and making it resemble us as invisible, omniscient viewers, the Final Destination films ally us with it, making us feel immortal.  As long as we see what death sees, as long as we remain invisible within the narrative frame, we're safe from being seen, and therefore 'taken'.






10. Death as a bank of TV monitors - Scrooged (1997)

As the maker of the medium (the executive producer of a major network), Bill Murray's Scrooge is a new kind of miser, hogging the time his employees would spend with their families to force them into making a live Xmas eve broadcast. When the Ghost of Xmas Future finally arrives it's ingeniously through the one place this Scrooge feels safe - the TV, ala Samara in THE RING, trashing all sense of immortality, which a life spent as a free-floating ghost inside the televisual image tends to instill. There's no arguing for mercy with a TV monitor showing a metallic skull shouting down at you in a howl of white noise. The program has begun. When it turns its eyeless sockets towards thee... oh man, there's no off button that can save you. You've grown so used to the simulacrum there's no way out; it's like the very air you swim in suddenly becomes cognizant of your presence, and hunts you down. Turns out you were never a friendly invited ghost - just a mouse that once discovered warrants immediate extermination.


11. Charlotte Rampling - Vanishing Point (1971)


12. Marius Goring as Conductor 71 - A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
He "lost his head in the second germinal of the so-called French revolution." and so, being French, is secretly on the side of the British WW2 bombardier (David Niven) he was supposed to collect as he plummeted sans parachute into the Channel. Damn that British fog! Since then the mortal has survived and fallen in love with radio operator Kim Hunter, a Yank, thus the three of them form a kind of allied front in arguing against the necessity of Niven's going at his appointed time. The French may be many things, but when it comes to love they are always on its side - prizing it even above death, apparently. Inversing the usual WIZARD OF OZ split, Earth here--rather, Britain-- is awash in glorious Technicolor; each scene of British wartime life along the shore is so beautiful it seems like heaven, while the Other World is in black and white, and overly clerical, mirroring the endless lines servicemen had to stand in, for chow, uniforms, assignments, etc. So Conductor 71, while embarrassed by his failure to bring Niven in on schedule, secretly appreciates being compelled to linger in the Technicolor splendor. He even jokes "Do you play chess? We could play.... every day," as if riffing on a film still eleven years from being made.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Bonus! Death as PCP hallucination, Disco Godfather

The animators at Buck made this long-form, award-winning, lovely and deeply hallucinatory riff on Hunter S. Thompson for an all-for-charity online book outlet called Goodbooks.com. One of the best things about it is the way it breaks free from the Ralph Steadman aesthetic - there's almost no ink splotches and chaotic shattered charkas; instead it digs deep into the heady peak mushroom moments where everything is always in the middle of turning into everything else and tea made from bong water is always a 'good' idea.

One of my favorite movies is the Paramount musical-comedy from 1933, International House,a giddy sort of Grand Hotel-meets-Asian Exotica--meets WC Fields comedy. It was lightning in a 'hic'' bottle (my review here) and in its haunted way, Wonder Bar (1934) works as a sad, slightly melancholy and twistedly haunted version of International House, like if the quarantine on the hotel was legit and everyone died of yellow fever and now once a year they all come back from the grave and party in its long-closed spaces.

Occurring almost in real time over one evening at the Parisian nightspot, Wonder Bar, owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the film leaves many of its entwined stories unresolved in a manner quite realistic with real bar attendance, wherein the night ends before you've even begun to figure out what mischief you're up for. So murders go unpunished, trysts are planned but never executed; it all leaves the film with afleeting, transitory feel, like a midnight car accident between a drunk entry in Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish horror film as they were racing for the last train out of town before the Joseph Breen jackboots arrived (Wonder Bar was one of the last pre-code films before the 'real' code took effect).

The 'wrong' elements include:

1. The chilling exhilaration of the Russian gambler who lost his shirt gambling the night before, so he's going to kill himself after the bar closes, and the finality of it in his mind has made him giddy--though he's clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about it and serious suicides keep it on the DL. Still, his courage in the face of being broke recalls Dostoevsky's famous line "A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about." As he gives away his watch and remaining moneys to the scantily-clad chorus girls they don't seem too troubled about it either. If they took his suicide babble seriously, after all, they might have to give his stuff back.

2. The love quintanglement between the stars of the show-within-a-show, the ballroom dancing pair of 'the Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him, as if there's one in every bar in Paris) played by Ricardo Cortez, and his partner, Dolores Del Rio, and a whole slew of lovers, ex, present, and would-be future: Rich married woman Kay Francis is after Cortez; smitten songwriter Dick Powell, and the club owner Al Wonder are both in Del Rio (Powell 'knew' her first); the way these people crawl and scrape after each other is a little worrisome, but realistic and way too adult for the code to come. 


3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert play randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two party girls, but their matronly spouses are in tow ("There out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris"). But the ladies too find their matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos. It's the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the whole thing, aside from the amusingly smashed interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, and the way the wives slowly get in on the game with their own rentboy interests.

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round, forced to rely heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. God knows what kind of dizzy vertigo Busby put these girls through to get such precision on a constantly rotating turntable stage, but what's amazing is the way his patterns are still so formally flawless they trick the eye into seeing it all as animation, abstract patterns ala Fantasia rather than people all struggling to not have to do another take. Berkeley's invisible hand mirrors that of the unseen puppet master, the robot girls in his thrall.. there's also whips, knives, and double entendres but what lingers most is how Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism and its inverse - our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns a people and then as abstract patterns, back and forth in a way that's truly relevant to a dialogue about abjectification; for that is what's going on with the cast too - their freak otherness is played up even as they are meant to be human, identifiable. There's no sense of connection or belonging here, just humanity slipping in and out abstraction, which in and of itself, is sublime.... but...


There are fewer things that now in our modern age seem quite as horrifying, as wrongly abject, as Jolson in blackface, grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through these offensive stereotype settings; he more than overdoes it, cavorting and twisting his face into hideous leering grimaces. One wonders how this was ever popular, though Jolson does grow on you in a trainwreck nostalgia kind of way, through his sheer exuberance. Notes the Museum of Family History site:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

  In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the weird ogre king of early sound film, the golem who segued between the handsome, effeminate lovers of the silents and the fast-talking toughs that took over in the wake of the gangster boom. Jolson was neither lover nor tough; he was insecure and caught in a narcissistic spiral, as if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious yet tickled to a childlike fit of jouissance over the attention: "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He was, at heart, "a borscht belt Pagliachi"  and "a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, most self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

The salient feature of the film, finally, is its ultimate musical number, the notorious "Going To Heaven On A Mule." A few scenes prior to this, the heady ethnic stew from which Jolson concocted his varied performing personae is underscored in a bit where he exchanged patter with "Russian count" Michael Dalmatoff before launching into a quite credible (that is, suitably schmaltzy) rendition of "Ochi chyornye" ("Dark Eyes"). For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward.

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of the Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.I like the comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. On some level I can't agree, though of course she's right; we don't have an adequate grasp of contextual objection. However, for my money the Parisian context helps - for Paris became home to expat black jazz musicians for a reason: racism was largely absent there -- no Jim Crow-- and yet the spectacle of blackness, of difference, seemed heightened for an avant garde shock value. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up, or the exotica of Josephine Baker (left), particularly during the Nazi occupation where the Zionists were suspected as being underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notees:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.


In an excellent piece on Django Reinhart in the 1940s, From the Barrelhouse quotes a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing mistrustfully at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons likeCoal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television. Racist and ethnic jokes were common and accepted in the school yard, and no one thought twice about any of it, that is until Roots came out. Perhaps abjectification precedes awareness, but it forgives nothing. More than anything now, minstrelry is our shame, the white man, no one else should feel anything by it except disgusted pity for the White-Christian compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent in so much Fox News rhetoric.



A word on Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested gigolo Ricardo Cortez, who always makes even the most reprehensible womanizing swine sympathetic--something about her beautiful but weirdly taut face creeps me out: the sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones. She's like death incarnate.


In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer sacrifices himself so the plasticine dish can run away with the spoon shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft (he arranges to cover up her crimes and the Gigolo's, but backs off his proposal the minute she mentions she's going out with Dick --not a word of thanks on her part or outrage on his). This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and/or bad teeth is so hard to imagine in today's light, where we've seen the end game of racial and religious intolerance writ so foul and bloody on the firing squad wall in the 40s-60s, then been subject to the firing squad wall ourselves if we act racist or religiously intolerant in the 80s-present, that we're constantly vigilant now, intolerant of even self-hate crimes... even and especially in comedy.


Thus we need to watch the veiled racial hierarchy of whiteness with a grain of tolerance here in 1934, a decade or so before the founding of the State of Israel and 30 odd years before the death of Martin Luther King. Here we have whiter-than-white Dick Powell winning the Mexican beauty while the best Jolson's Russian Jewishness can do is eliminate Cortez's Latin lover and then step nobly aside, just as Del Rio would do with a convenient volcano at the end of her 1932 break-out, Bird of Paradise (so Joel McRae could go back home to his white fiancee and his family fortune), Jolson dives in one so she can go off with Dick Powell.

And the freak otherness doesn't begin to end there, for in addition to Del Rio's oddly skeletal features there's Kay Francis at her most soft-with-baby-fat; her alabaster skin, weirdly pointy mouth and round fleshy head making her seem like nightmare cigarette ad cartoon. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre melange, trying to nail down the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door, makes me long for a familiar face, and hers here is not. What the hell is going on? What kind of weird shit were they smoking? She looks like the baby sister of the girl who starred in one of my favorite pre-codes, Mandalay, which came out the same year (bottom), or a Max Fleischer cartoon.


But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for aberration that might not have been okay if Wonder Bar was set in the states. For example we see a pair of men dancing, with Jolson making a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise which again like so much of Jolson's schtick seems to mock the very act of mocking. His little pucker of an expression is almost a bow to any lingering need to be exhibitionist on the part of the gay dancers, as if to say 'oh you kid!' the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it, so she could giggle and blush and leave him a nice tip. Jolson is, above all, a caricature of his own self, running around from table to table his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a nerf ball through the deep end. A user review on imdb, sums his character up best, as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Nazis with Joseph Breen and his Catholic Legions of Decency, and viola!


Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but for tonight, all these things that the code would put an end to are here at the Wonder Bar, assembled here as if by a mysterious blackmail letter, to get them out of someone's system. The most glaring even to the novice will be how Jolson gets away with covering up a crime by letting another man make good on his suicide threats, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so slippery it's shocking even for a pre-code. Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be abe to play for almost 30 years? That sense of it being the last day before the end is really omnipresent; even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow an end to what used to be mere innocent decadence, the Weimar era and the jazz age, and the arrival of the forces of pure evil, ala Cabaret.  Here for one more movie, one more night, these freaks live free of fascist intolerance. See them grab at the pins of taboo like an opium addict, filling his veins to the limit before being hauled off to his lengthy stint in the cooler.

But even in a prohibition-and-racism-free city like Paris, subversion and excess will only get you so far... there's still always a tomorrow morning yet to face, alone, hung-over, shivering from withdrawal, paranoid, melancholy, and craving the warmth of narcotic spotlight like it's the everlovin' arms... of Mammy, Mammy, don't ya know me? 

She doesn't.

The turbulent, tragic events in Boston this past week created a curious time ripple in our 24 hour news channels, and they may never recover. The internet has taken the lead now, and by the time CNN catches up, it's already old news. Watching TV at home now is like being a grandpa; your iPad's telling you some serious shit is going down and you turn to CNN, presuming they'll have up-to-the-minute details. You trust them to be on the ball, and they're still playing regularly scheduled programming, still playing the stuff they fill in time with while waiting for real news to break.


Some of this reticence might be explained by the ribbing they were getting by John Stewart, who pointed out how many times CNN had announced the terrorists had been identified and/or arrested, and so on, leading to boy who cried wolf confusion. For what it's worth, at least one CNN source who spoke with Business Insider seems to agree with Stewart. "As I think everyone knows, we really fucked up," the source is quoted as saying. "No way around it. "




I mean this as no disrespect to the survivors and victims and heroes of the hour, please believe me. This is a criticism solely of the newscasters, for whom babbling about the (very real) courage of Boston with a gleam in your eye and sad music in the background was the new black, to the point they couldn't stop doing it even when real shit was breaking.

Here's some REDDIT thread compilations from the same time period the TV newscasters were busy babbling and re-playing past moments of triumph and sadness and horror in Texas and Boston:




Being afraid of jumping the gun and confirming faulty information on air isn't really an excuse to let yourself be scooped by social media, CNN. I don't think it's the whole story, either, though they made it seem that way once they finally switched over to live coverage and immediately set about rationalizing their tardiness as concern for the facts, and not the false rumors and misdirection that the police can sometimes put out to convince the criminals to let down their guard, and so on.


What was most mind-boggling is at the same time all this was happening, TCM's was showing one of my all-time favorite movies, HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940), introduced by Robert Osborne and Cher. The tale of two reporters going all-out to scoop the other papers on an escaped prisoner, meek homeless killer Earle Williams, in a high profile capital punishment case. So we were wataching my girls' choice, CNN, then flipping back to mine while "Hallelujah" kept playing and seeing Rosalind Russell hiding Williams in a roll-top desk and keeping him quiet so they can get an exclusive extra out exposing the current sheriff and mayor as self-serving imbeciles was a perfect analog synchronistic mirror to what was going on over on mainstream news channels right that very second, which was enough to make any newscaster a star (the way Wolf Blitzer got famous being stationed in Kuwait during the missile attacks of the Gulf War), but once they finally woke back up these reporters didn't snap into the spirit of the thing, but rather resumed treading water with a nonstop freestyle extemporaneous blather.


Of course there are major differences in the film and the coverage, but synchronicity is God's way of showing you that things bear scrutiny. Take this HIS GIRL FRIDAY moment of overlapping contradictory reports from the reporters all gathered in the press room, phones to their ears, watching the drama unfold as cops surround the rolltop desk with drawn guns. In the real event, the roll top is rolled up and Earl Williams weakly shouts "Go ahead, shoot me!" and he's hauled, exhausted and half-dragging his feet, from the room.
 This all happens so fast it takes several viewings to soak all the way in, but I mention it to point out the remarkable way ain't a damn thing changed. I have to point it out, why else was I confronted with such a monstrous coincidence as the film playing on TCM at the exact same time all this was breaking? What's awesome is that if the TV news couldn't wise up to the power of social media, the cops could. The following day, the chief of police had announced at a press conference that they would be pulling out of the Watertown neighborhood the killer was last seen in, knowing the media would leak it back to the suspect, from every possible direction, over and over again. It was instrumental, perhaps, in cornering him.

The most effective teen horror films, like HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, know that closed-down gold mines or prom trains or the moon or other weird settings don't scare kids; you need to get them where they live--suburbia. The FINAL DESTINATION series gets that, and attacks us where we live, in the minutiae of modern life via quick cutaways to the million little things that add up to huge accidents. There are enough innocuous-in-themselves-but-they-all-add-up safety hazards in this five films (so far) to line the walls of a dozen nurse's offices, a gold mine of anxiety that no other horror franchise has bothered with. All those tiny moments every day where we almost die, or suddenly realize how easily we could, like nearly getting plowed into by a bus, and those sudden panicky urges to get off the plane after the door's already sealed or to jump off the roller coaster car right at the top of the first big incline. Most of us just take a deep breath and let the mood pass, but what if we didn't?

The stories all start the same, a group of teens or young adults at an event or on a journey to some other destination that ends with one of them having a grisly premonition, freaking out, and saving his or her immediate cronies, plus some random others, from their meant-for death. But this premonition has upset the natural order, so death has to run around claiming the survivors in the exact order they 'should' have died. Sometimes death is more clever than others, but always death shows a flair for Rube Goldbergian coincidence chains, and since most of the blood is CGI and glows a dark shiny red, there's no sick in the gut feeling over the gore, just what Pauline Kael would call a 'dirty kick' - a remembrance to being a very young child and alert to all the tiny things that might add up to kill you, and to being an older child, drawing nasty decapitation contraptions instead of concentrating in algebra class.


I would love to see a version where some super shy kid has one of the premonitions and is afraid to raise his hand. and so just quietly sits there, trying to hide his shakes, as everything he saw go wrong goes wrong. That would have been me, during the early 80s slasher boom. I was way too cool to pretend I wasn't terrified, so I just stayed frozen with a sunglassed smirk and waited for death to chopper me out of the ring. It never did, so hey, Death, "thank you," I guess?

I've lectured to enough stone-quiet college kids to know my brand of morose teenagerdom is endemic to America, and that's just one reason why the Final Destination series wouldn't work as well if set outside the USA, where we're embarrassed about dying, like it's dandruff or an STD. And if it's inevitable, then we still have to fight it! Death is wrong! Evil! This is, of course, unfair to death. It's nothing less than old-fashioned Puritan dread, as is obvious in the first few films especially, wherein the 'precog' of the group is treated like a monster by the saved and their parents, which may sound like the opposite of the 'death is evil' mentality but not really. The type of American who is afraid of--and embarrassed by--death is also equally drawn to it, and because true bravery is an accusatory affront to the cowardly (unless they can admit they're cowards, but they seldom can, as their heads are buried too deep in the gun-nutty sand of patriotism and intolerance-disguised-as-freedom), they hate the person whose foresight saves them just like they vote for war but against aid to returning veterans, and for more anti-terrorist legislation but against health-care for 9/11 first responders.


 The Europeans shake their head sadly at this weird counter-intuitive behavior, but of course they've all already been bombed. The American who live in unbombed states secretly long for death (like Francis Macomber) and resent not having a chance to prove themselves, they resent in fact even being put in the position of feeling resentful. They fear having to prove they're not afraid, and blame those who 'made' them feel that way.

Another unwritten American fear underwriting the Final Destination Nation is the melting-pot burn. We know that by being dragged off the ride or out of the audience before the big crash we now have to meet our fellow survivors and fight off death with them, so against our will we cease being a passive spectator of our own lives and become the viewed, the object of death's gaze. We pay good money to be able to avoid our neighbors, in the darkened rows of theater seats and tract homes, and now that our lives are saved, the lights are on and these gays and minorities want us to talk to them. Instead of being afraid of a monster we're expected to embrace all living things as part of our collective experience. Instead of living in our constrictive view of what it means to be Americans, we're forced to becomecontinental and existential, even compassionate. 


But what makes these films 'fun' is the way the idea of preconception and paranoia makes us psychic (as viewers) in ways we're normally not; we learn to recognize death's movements in random events, and that it has a sense of humor, loves to fake us out and surprise us. It's doesn't traumatize in its devious design. No single figure of malice presents itself; there is no bogeyman who can be barricaded out. This invisible Rube Goldberg coincidence time-space serpent instead occupies the same 'no space' omnipresence of ourselves as viewers. In a sense, to paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita via Robert Oppenheimer, through the FD series now we are become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Here they are in order:.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
FINAL DESTINATION (2000) - **1/2
The plane crash opener is solid, but this film falls off from there. Devon Sawa is too solemn and sweaty and it makes no sense why he would still go out of his way to save the life of the main dick who torments him all the time, for no real reason (either for the saving or the tormenting), or why the dopey fed who suspects him of foul play regardless of the facts doesn't bother to Fox Mulder for past premonition cases. And Sawa does himself no favors, racing into the houses of those he reckons are about to die, indirectly causing their deaths, getting their blood all over him and leaving fingerprints and shoe prints in the blood before running off. I've known dumb kids like this in real life, and one of the reasons I've never been arrested is because I always just walk away when they start acting like this, so why should I stick around now?

The love interest, a girl with the great character name of Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) exudes fresh odd final girl Wednesday Adams-style resilience which makes up for Sawa's glum posturing. The other highlights include a visit to a mysterious undertaker (Tony "Candyman" Todd) who dispenses cryptic advice, and a great middle section with Devon alone in a cabin, 'death-proofing' every last corner and jagged edge, helps us through the dumber moments. Overall this gets by more on chutzpah than ingenuity. The series got a lot better once it limited death's palette to the freaky but possible, requiring much more Rube Goldbergian ingenuity on behalf of the writers, and scaled back the unlikely associations of total douche bags with the heroes and heroines.

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Clik here to view.
FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003) - ***1/2
A big step up from the first one, with a great catastrophic highway accident opener. This time the teen gifted with grisly premonitions is female (A.J. Cook), and the return of Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) in full final girl glory (the scenes in her padded cell are hilarious) means two final girls. And there's far less teenagers involved and more a random assembly of highway mergers. Some of the more obnoxious characters are a cokehead biker and a douchey tool who just won the lottery. Your money's no good here, douche! Death works pro bono. I like when they all decide they have to move in together and start death-proofing one of their numbers' studio loft, as if preparing for an MTV Reality show season, where death acts like Heidi Klum. And here death operates with a Rube Goldbergian plausibility factor several notches up from the predecessor.



Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.FINAL DESTINATION 3 - (2006) ****
The Citizen Kane of FD movies, this is the one that got me into the series because it's always on IFC. Mumblecore goddess Mary Elizabeth Winstead is ideal as the survivor-psychic; when she freaks out at the roller coaster we realize we've never seen her so undone, even in THE THING!  She has a hot younger sister, a decently repentant boyfriend (of her dead friend) and an unusually witty group of cliché stock teen peers. Deaths are foretold in photos she took while waiting in line for the coaster, which is guarded at the front by a giant red demon statue (Tony Todd supplied the voice).  It adds up to a particularly wry entry, with tons of loving horror fan in-jokes (characters have last names like Romero, Freund, Dreyer, Ulmer, Wise, Halperin). The deaths are, as always, spectacular, leading up to a clumsy but amusing fairground fireworks finale with a runaway white horse, and an anticlimax at the hippest of all locales, la NYC subway.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.THE FINAL DESTINATION (4) - 2009  -**
I have no idea why the powers that be decided to call this 'The Final Destination' -- is four a bad luck number in junk sequels? It would be forgivable if it didn't use 3-D as a crutch. And the climax, set in a 3-D theater showing a movie with a big explosion that will happen literally at the same time unless the hero stops it blah blah, isn't nearly as meta if you're seeing it at home in 2-D. Nice idea though. And occasionally there's a nice child's eye view sense of the dangers all around to which adults are oblivious and there's a great but under-explored side bit with a security guard in AA who tries to off himself, and all the while has a glass of brandy poured-- which every good AA-er always harbors secret fantasies of immanent death as an excuse to relapse (see my review of 2012 - Day of a Million Relapses!) - it would have been great if he did relapse, instead of just forgetting all about that brandy. Yo, finish your drink! Instead this installment is a little too heavy on the X-ray bone breaking animation (and unrealistic CGI blood) which only recalls that cable TV show 1000 WAYS TO DIE. 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.FINAL DESTINATION 5 (2011) - ***1/2
This go-round we're on a suspension bridge with a busload of employees bound for a corporate retreat. The craziness that ensues looks good even in 2-D, and the nasty stressing of gore over fun in the previous installment is gone and, while less casual than the third, it's still got a nice hint of indie hipness about it, like a big budget Roger Corman production directed by Joe Dante or Lewis Teague. This time it's discerned that if you kill someone while on your borrowed time they can take your place, so the ubiquitous distraught douchebag buddy decides it's only fair he kills the hero's girlfriend, etc. The ending brings us all the way back around to the first film in a nice surprise loop-de-loop, showing death's wicked sense of humor and whole raison d'etre for starting this whole catch-and-release mess to begin with.

 Special mention to the hottest girl in maybe the whole series, Olivia (Jaqueline MacInnes Wood) who is killed while strapped into a Lasik eye surgery machine, thus ensuring I will never get that operation. I predict big things for this tall, lanky, at-ease-in-her-own-skin Elizabeth Hurley-Megan Fox-Sophie Marceau-ish beauty. I hear from Wikipedia she's already a 'fan favorite.' Count me in, except I once dated a girl who looked like her, but she wanted a whole me, not just a half. And she wore no glasses, and is now old and looks like Anna Magnani.


What, is that off-topic? WRONG! Only true, jaw-dropping, youthful beauty--the kind its possessor can radiate casually and without the poison of disdain--can allay the terror of mortality. We cling to such loveliness like we might hold onto a slowly deflating helium balloon over a shark-infested sea. Soon age, and show biz, and unworthy Svengalis will siphon the air out of Woods' loveliness and in a mere half-century or less, she'll be old, in another, turned to dust. Oh, Paula! Oh, Lenore! Oh, Annabel Lee! Oh, To stop time
for just a second,
those precious minutes of Woods' radiance
like grains of sand
I hold in the waves...

how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? (- Poe)

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was very advanced artistically but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS, which is based on the diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia. The film begins constrasting the flower-encrusted but regimented life of a young Austrian noble woman whose married to Russian Prince Peter the Half-Wit --via long distance courier, the handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge. The beginning scenes in Prussia are so unbearably stuffy with 17th century decor and pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies that an air of claustrophobia hangs over everything, there's one unbearable matriarch after another as Dietrich is poked and prodded like a piece of meat at the butcher's; by the time Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow he's in love with her and she with him, and we're in love with all the richly photographed sable wraps. The reigning queen in Russia is played by perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser), and her no-good nephew Peter a bug-eyed Sam Jaffe, who dislikes his new wife and returns to prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland. 


Things are even more oppressive in Russia, at least at first. The dowager doesn't give a damn about what Catherine wants, so long as there's an heir to the throne. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras") and the intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit") and nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, lengthy songs in churches and ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, nonrepresentational and boring, IVAN THE TERRIBLE-prefiguring film ever made. That said, John Lodge inhabits the bright, drearily cheery Austrian parlor in the beginning like a tall dark shadow, glistening with sexy sable collars, and if you're in the right half-asleep, stressed frame of mind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin, then Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and the urge of Peter to drill holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky,  then you should have no trouble sponging up any aesthetic gloom overkill, and just lean back and watch Dietrich age 20 years over the course of the film. Based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry, that's kind of what happened, thanks to his slowly mounting hatred of his icy star.


LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigarillo-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed lover of Garbo (and possibly Babs), Mercedes De Acosta. It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives Barbara Stanwyck after she proves herself tough enough to get along, but knowing what we know about Stanwyck's private life (though she never came out of the closet, so it might not be 100% true) it's interesting to find her character semi-mocking a fellow sewing circle sister onscreen; then again, at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, especially at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors (such as one taking Cagney's measurements for a new suit in PUBLIC ENEMY, only recently restored after being cut for re-release) were made fun of, but never sneered at or hate crime targets. They existed, in some form, only in the pre-code era. After 1934 (and LADIES was never re-released since they'd have to cut too much), lesbians simply ceased to exist.


The bulk of the rest of the film deals with an on-off love affair between gang moll Babs and a moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster). After he gets her off, she takes a risk and confesses she was really guilty, and he does what's right and betrays her into the joint. She gets even by tearing up all his pleas to see her; then when she relents it would be right around the same time she's aiding two men from across the prison in an escape. Dan's a sap all the way, and his terminal earnestness all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters. Stanwyck tears up the screen as well as those letters, with her toughness and casual wit set to kill and stun and then kick your twitching corpse. The huge gaggle of women, with a few exceptions, are all great friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave. This women's jail seem almost like Vassar except, as when Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.


FRIENDS AND LOVERS
1931 - **
Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as a betrayed buddy in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga. The best parts are in the beginning, with Erich Von Stroheim as nymphomaniac Lilly Damita's porcelain collector aesthete husband. He's so deliciously degenerate, lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort at having his lame inner tube alibi slowly deflated (Erich teases them over their inconsistent guesses at which opera they supposedly saw), and it turns out he's quite pleased at catching Menjou because he blackmails her many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence; either way, she has to shoot him not because he whips her, but because she really does love Menjou, presumably, though it seems more like she's just really hung over, and her hair is a mess. Nice legs, though. Too bad that later best buddy and fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier trying to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings). This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps us on the curb, since everyone's weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh what, his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips.


THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US
1932 - **1/2
Divorce was enough of a subject for a film back in 1932, even at Warner Brothers. Here the action revolves around novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage - she wants to have a little fun in Paris first, where she goes to get a divorce. While she's off her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis falls all over Julian, but in Midge kind of way. Brent flies escapes on some assignment in the Carpathians, but stops in Paris to pitch woo, then sulks and stomps off when she rebuffs his proposals, and decides to go bail out her husband, a broker losing his clients since he re-married a ditzy Paris Hilton-esque gold-digger and spending his nights trying to look alert and interested at night clubs. Sappy and sacharine as Brent's little 'purr-voiced' style, and the lame chemistry with Chatterton is (highlight of bad lines being, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette") Davis' dialogue is smart, the issues of marriage and divorce rather adult, and it's got Warner Brothers punch from director Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE), but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. Martyrdom on the altar of marriage is old hat, but here it's very modern, since the divorced couple stay in touch and remain friends, to the chagrin of both their new mates. The bitchy new young wife especially is out to get Chatterton, thinks she's pregnant, then again she doesn't want to have a baby "and ruin this figure? For some squawling brat?" Bam she's killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

From top: Betty Garrett, Celeste Holm, Vivian Blaine

In musicals On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame (both 1949), Frank got clubbed over the head and dragged back to the cave (or at least carried over the shoulders) of rootin-tooin' Garrett. The relationship was perhaps best summed up by Garrett's song (as she chases Frank around the bleachers at the stadium), "It's Fate, Baby it's Fate," hurting his hand with her grip and carrying him over her shoulders. In On the Town she's a randy cabbie who sings "Come up to My Place," and in a move very bold for the 1949, carries Frank up to her apartment, getting rid of her sniffling roommate, and presumably engaging in some "afternoon delight" before meeting back up with the other sailors atop the Empire State Building.  For some reason, perhaps because he's only got a 24 hour pass and she's older and independent, the censors apparently didn't squawk about it. Class has a lot to do with it too. Sinatra was the boy from Brooklyn, naive and too scrawny for heavy lifting (you wouldn't see him carrying Garrett, for example). He snuck past the moral chaperones like a slender ghost.


The war was long over, but the mother instinct remained all through the next decade. He had a marriage-minded broad in the nasal-belting Adelaide (Vivian Blaine) in 1955's Guys and Dolls, though here he was playing a Runyan version of his budding Vegas self.  By the next year he had matured and so did this 'type.' Enter the staid, supportive, witty, and patient Celeste Holm. Frank still had to give up the prettiest belle at the ball, an ethereal Grace Kelly, always hypnotic to watch, in High Society (1956), before 'settling' for Holm, but now he had the film's most magnetic charm and outpaced the designated stealth fiancee, Bing Crosby. What was just a dizzy moment between Jimmy Stewart and Hepburn in Philadelphia Story becomes in Society truly smoldering. A lot of the film is pretty slow, stagey going, with Bing on autopilot and lots of business with Grace Kelly being 'cold' but like the magic upstairs music room in Holiday, there's an escape from all the swank, a hidden bar that slides out from behind a false front of books, in neighboring Uncle Louis Calhern's study, and then by the Apollonian infinite dressing room swimming pool.


Kelly and Sinatra do a weird variation on the Cukor film's public library where Stewart's book is located, thus establishing him as an immortal soul, and instead the books conceal a hidden bar, where Sinatra's immortal soul is revealed in drinking and singing (it's clear that Sinatra really takes command when given a chance to pour drinks). The way Kelly opens up and starts following Sinatra's lips around like a mouth to a flame is truly, as they say, hot. But their attraction is supposed to evaporate in the light of hungover day. Play around with gamins though he may, Sinatra belongs to the staid if sassy Celeste Holm.


It's hard to get a nail on Holm, who also in 1956 played a reverse of her role in Society, by being the girl that  Sinatra proposes to, but then gives up because he's in love with marriage-obsessed Debbie Reynolds in The Tender Trap. A swinging New York wooer of single career girls, Sinatra has a constant stream of dames, presumably, but he does most of his dating with Holm, whose classy carriage (she's an orchestra violinist) and Broadway wit belies the de rigeur longing for marriage and stability. She and Sinatra originally make fun of Reynolds, whose obsession with marriage and three kids in the country seems placed in her mind by a telepathic censor, but for all her culture and love of a wild party (she shows up early the next mornings at Frank's blow-outs to help clean up), Holm's just a plain old-fashioned girl wanting the ring. We need, for some reason, to hear how desirable Holm is over and over again, that she's attractive and hip, and good, too good for Frank, all this from David Wayne's butch mix of condemnation and envy over Frank's loucbe lifestyle. So we don't feel he's throwing her over for being too big for him, or too dowdy, she finds love on the elevator going downstairs, with Sinatra's neighbor (and an orchestra lover) Tom Helmore.


Now with spunky Reynolds roping him into marriage despite his Don Draper levels of babes, this was a Frank in transition. He was now drawing the A-list stars, but the stars on the virgin side of the old dichotomy--Doris Day and Reynolds--and on the other, rat pack stalwart Shirley MacLaine, whose 'party girl' make-up and a solid range of acting chops (she could carry starring roles with ease, playing many variations of eternal women- as in Women Times Seven and What a Way to Go!), didn't preclude her willingness to play the doormat, adopting some Vivian Blaine-shrillness as the girl who won't stop chasing Sinatra even into his hometown where he goes to make plays for a frigid English teacher in Some Came Running (1958). He marries her in a fit of pique and she happily take her pimp's bullet to save his life and open him up for more mutual love relationships. Were any of them coming? Or just some more mothering broads and frigid career girl virgins?

Pal Joey (1957) was another 'mothered' by the babes (here he calls them "mice") role for Frank, playing a delusional singer / emcee who thinks no woman can resist his stated method of seduction, to: "treat a tramp like a lady and a lady like a tramp." Joey gets the showgirls to do his laundry for him and serve him bagels, services he winkingly implies are for services rendered, but just like all these ring-a-dings in Tender Trap, there there but not there. None of them get jealous as he woos a confused Kim Novak, an 'innocent' buxom girl who'd nurture a similarly scrawny Jimmy Stewart (in Vertigo and Bell, Book, and Candle) the following year. The size difference was okay for Sinatra in Man with the Golden Arm, because he was a junkie, but in Joey he's got no excuse. He shows he's got the seductive power via a sterling late-night rendition of "The Lady is a Tramp" for rich widow Rita Hayworth, earning him a place on her private yacht, silk pajamas, and his own club, but still gets mocked indirectly via the songs the girls sing about him: in "My Funny Valentine," Novak sings of his less-than-Greek figure and unsmart dialogue; he's also the "half-pint imitation" of a man in the song "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" as sung by Hayworth the morning after he pleasures her on her private yacht. Now you know who those songs are about! They make sense now, don't they?


Sinatra's Joey is, indeed, not too smart. Hayworth is wisely jealous of Novak and wants her gone from the club, and  when Frank stands up to her, the club is canceled, right before opening night. But Frank suddenly has principles. Principles! We liked him better lolling around in silk pajamas in his private yacht stateroom, even if Hayworth looks a little old by this point, and made to wear a lot of gray, and her hair in the final musical dream number (below) is almost 80s Philly girl shaggy.  Poor Frank, getting the dames but plain bad at dame juggling, unless at least one of them was as patient and in it for the long con like Celeste Holm.


By 1960 his matron thing had receded even farther. In 1960's Ocean's Eleven he was married (and estranged by) Angie Dickinson, a 'broad' with some maternal class but enough MacLaine good-time sharpie about her that she was wise to all Danny Ocean's tricks. An ironic mention of the old mother instinct is found in a snatch of dialogue between Dean Martin and Dickinson upon their meeting up:

DM - What made you come back? I've come to the conclusion it must be love. Mother love
AG: I'll consider many things: mistress, plaything, toy for a night, but I refuse to be a mother, that's out.
DM - Don't get me wrong, I'm the mother....

But by the early 60s it was like Frank was in the process of graduating, until one final matron came to his rescue when he played a rattled ex-GI in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Here her arrival to his rescue is most peculiar, she drops everything to be with this twitchy mess of a man, for no real reason. Is she a spy? Or is the mothering instinct here gone rogue, gone red, found its way into the cold nether regions of intrigue? She's sexy and smart, and her love is so total and so unearned, its like a suffocating ice cold embrace. Frank can't escape her if she wanted to. She sees a gaping wound in his soul and slides her knife of presence right on in.


Do I have a purpose here, in following this 'mother instinct' thread? You tell me. It's late and I'm tired and my girl is gone to Scranton PA for the Office wrap party. And my kitchen sink is busted and the super won't answer and I'm all alone. My steel shutters don't work. I am perhaps too close to the problem, twisting in the wind by my own stunted development. I'm an alcoholic, an ex-rock band member, a writer, a tripper, a freak, a Pacific Northwest railroad grain car banger, a voiceover guy, an underground filmmaker, a children's television workshop writer, a blogger on film, a reviewer of New Age music, and a guru, going for the nurturing broads, divorced by an Argentine socialist film professor, and never at home in any of those roles. So where am I in my quest to be liberated from appealing largely to a girls' mother instinct? Can Frank tell me?


Probably, but he's unavailable for comment. He's flown, off to the next seedy marquee and the next microphone. Maybe this time around he won't let MGM bill him as a little runt being chased by unmarried older women with amok mother instincts. Maybe then he won't have to spend the rest of his film career transitioning, trying vainly to escape the tender trap, the high society dames gone slumming, the brass blonde matrons and sassy molls, the gum-cracking showgirls who all went to feed him so he gains a little weight. Maybe those of us who follow in his wake won't confuse maturity and womanizing, and won't try to escape the hyrda's many-stringed apron the way we do now, by finding a different apron, settling for the one that ties us up faster than the rest, like we're some prize package just waiting for the easiest bow.

For the average auteurist critic, deconstructing an opaque work like Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (2012) tends to involve making connections to the topographical 'conscious' of the artists' life, while the geological 'unconscious' -- the subtextual kernel to which the artist himself is usually blind by definition -- tends to be ignored. And yet it's this exact lower strata where underpinnings are made clear, a strata linked inextricably not to the artist but to his parents. In other words, to understand THE MASTER don't look at at Paul Thomas Anderson, look at his father, Ghoulardi.

I just re-watched THE MASTER (2012) today, and while the first time it mainly left me irritable (too stuffy in the theater), this time, on the safety of my own couch, paying only marginal attention, I thought of my own late father, Jim Kuersten, and of Paul Thomas Anderson's late father, Ernie Anderson, aka Ghoulardi, a Cleveland horror movie host of some legendary renown from the mid-60s. I knew the name, but figured he was just a Vaudeville schtick-jiving Mockula ala mein own Dr. Shock (with daughter Bubbles, below) on Channel 17, my favorite as a child in Wilmington, Philadelphia.


But as I researched Ghoulardi on Wiki, my eyes started widening and the pieces of the MASTER plan puzzle popped into place. He was beyond any mere horror-host pigeonholing, apparently. Ghoulardi was a maniacal anarchist, blowing up models and toys the kids sent in, live on air. He used a lot of free-associative beatnik slang of his own invention, like 'stay sick!'  He played his own surf rock intros (he was a direct inspiration for the look and sound of The Cramps), and ranted against suburban towns like Parma (Par-ma) with its polka music fetish. He had a pet raven named Oxnard. He smoked on air. He aroused the ire of the higher-ups. It was all broadcast live, and he said whatever the hell popped into his head. Not a lot of it survives. But the T-shirts live on. 


Watching THE MASTER this second time I could see some of Ghoulardi in the Satanic twists of Freddie Quell's forehead and in the cult-building improv 'making it up as he goes along' prowess of Lancaster Dodd. Anderson's cult might have been of young, crazy Cleveland mid-60s proto-punks rather than serious-minded adult proto-Scientologists, but it was a cult nonetheless. As Cleveland.com remembers: "Ghoulardi came before all the things we identify with the 1960s: the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, Vietnam, civil unrest... Ghoulardi was the last Beatnik from the '50s and had this wisecracking irreverent attitude..." Check out this, one of the few surviving clips of the great Ghoulardi in action:



Listen to that deep, resonant Charles Middleton-ish voice! Do you hear a touch of Lancaster Dodd's deep croak? Most interesting is the knowledge that he had trouble memorizing his lines so just made it all up as he went, live on air, which is how Dodd's son describes his dad's methodology. And Ghoulardi was a chronic challenger to authority, standing up to the big wigs at his local TV station, and regularly doing crazy things like driving a motorcycle through the offices.


 Here's what Paul Thomas Anderson said about his dad in an interview, as reported in WIKI

"He was in the Navy stationed mainly in Guam. I don't think he did any fighting. I think he was trying - he was fixing airplanes and knew just where the beer was stashed and played the saxophone in bands and stuff like that. You know, every picture I have of him [shows] a beer in his hand. Every single picture from the war he's got - so he was pretty good about probably finding ways to get out of fighting. But again, you know, we never really talked that much about it."

In other words, Ernie Anderson was a wild man, a ballsy, deep-voiced iconoclast, a trickster, the father as wild man. He later became the announcer for most of ABC's programming and promos. And some of that fine work can be heard here. 


I know it's weird to write about a father on mother's day, but I was just on the phone with my mom to wish her a happy one, with THE MASTER paused on the first big 'session' between Dodd and Freddie. My own dad died of cancer a year and a half ago, and I never got to visit him in the hospital; he never would have wanted me to, either. He despised soap operatics. Our true good-bye was watching and rhapsodizing over Lumet's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962), the highballs making him merry and open, and both of us enraptured by the pure ballsy artistry of every aspect of the film. I'm sure I'll think of him whenever I next see it again, which I hope is soon. I don't have any recordings of my dad, but he lives on in whispered pro-golf announcers, and old horror movies for me, which we used to make fun of together in a ritual of wit-honing.


My dad was fierce, tall and with a booming Wellesian voice, a drinker. He was larger than life, and he drank right up until the end, like a superstar. The doctors were amazed his metastasized cancer hadn't killed him years earlier, they theorized the booze was keeping him alive.  He fell and broke his ankle mixing a drink and had to be hospitalized, since his bones were shot because of chemo. And of course being in the hospital meant no booze. He was dead in a matter of days. I've hated doctors ever since, worse than Kate Hepburn in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY.  I still smoke, because fuck living forever like my 107 year-old granny, and when I feel my big Wellesian dad's archetypal energy alive in a film I tend to love that film as if it were my father's ghost. I want to avenge it against the Claudius critics and shout it from this blog's parapets. 


Ernie Anderson died of cancer in 1997, the year BOOGIE NIGHTS came out, the year I was first struggling to get sober. Paul Thomas was there for it all, sitting beside his dad's bed ala Phillip Seymour Hoffman in his 1999 film MAGNOLIA (see here for an analysis of this in context with Edward G. Robinson's death scene in SOYLENT GREEN).  Anderson wasn't around for his dad's Ghoulardi thing, as it was over by the time he was born. He did get to see it on the VHS tapes that are around in circulation and pieces of which are on youtube (and above): "What I do and what he did is so different, but he hated authority and he wanted to stir things up. And I hope my work always has that kind of spirit."

It does. Tell your parents to turn blue, he'd say. "Stay sick and turn blue." That must be a weird thing for PT to hear on a tape made by his own late father, but it's a weirdness the same late father left him equipped to handle. As a result PTA's films fly past the maudlin sand traps and safety-first Clyde-hopping of most films about flawed or dying fathers, and into modern myth. There's no stern moral or tsk-tsking in a PTA film, no matter how vile some figures are (such as the incestuous talk show host in MAGNOLIA), Paul just shows them love, not for their humanity but for their thrilling wild man energy. It's pretty clear in studying the Ernie Anderson story just where PT's love of wild man Screamin' Jay Hawkins-esque energy comes from.


There's also the sense Ernie was a partier, like my own dad, like me, like Jason Robards and his dad in LONG DAY'S, and of course Freddie Quell, who always has a drink in his navy hand, and knows alcohol for what it is, the last true line of defense against the void, and the void itself, the mirror through which the artist may behold the Medusa Muse of Mortality without turning to stone. If, in the end, it stones you just the same, at least you get to pick your frozen pose. 

---
One last coincidence, my dad always joked he was going to retire... to Oxnard. I forget why. He loved that name. It wasn't related to Ghoulardi's use of it, to my knowledge. We never lived anywhere near Cleveland, but he too loved its crazy name. Oxnard. He joked he wanted to retire there, and I needed to make money to pay for it. "You gotta earn a lot of money so I can retire in Oxnard," he'd say. I didn't. Oxnard exists now only in my memory.

(See also Great Dads of the 70s: Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights)

(and my initial post on The Master - Butler of Orbs 
and the TheMaster's Questions Answered by the I Ching)

Much as I love Orson Welles, I've never quite forgiven him for his Cahiers du Cinema interview when he was asked about his three favorite American directors and answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." How dare he exclude our greatest director, Howard Hawks? Of course it should be Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges. Ford was brilliant visually and emotionally but easily mired in his misty-eyed Irish sentiment. When he tried to do comedy he got lost in children's choirs and rolicking brawls. None of that for Hawksian men there's never any religion, or children. What these men do instead of all the stuff the Ford men do is to face danger on a daily basis, and make music together, and drink and smoke, and when they die, they die like men, or they survive like men; either way, without speeches. And if they meet a woman, it's ten times faster and more disorienting than a Maginot line charge. There's no chaperone, no parson beaming, no dance, no time for blarney. The whole fabric of the John Ford fort, the small town unity that extends in generations for centuries back, is sublimely shrunk down to a gummy old cripple, a drunk, and a limping sheriff, holed up in a jail and visited daily by attractive women who seem more modern and free of phony glamor than even Ford's dirty-faced tomboys. There's no mutually consenting nonmarital sex in a Ford film, and nothing but in a Hawks.


Needless to say, John Ford John Ford John Ford has won the history, he's got dozens of boxed sets in his name, Hawks none (aside from R2) and part of that may be that Hawks films are still very modern. There are very few misses in his canon but also nothing of superficial importance like GRAPES OF WRATH. The closest Hawks gets is maybe his most unHawkslike, SGT. YORK. Usually, instead of emotion, race, and historical accuracy, Hawks' films are fun, archetypal, witty, engaging, resonant more on a Jungian than Freudian level. In some ways it's as if Hawks films take place in the universe that Ford has set up, the same towns and valleys, but then hides out from all the boring town functions. While the Ford characters are square dancing, speechifying, voiting, learning to read and write, and eating big breakfasts, Hawks' characters quietly grab a bottle of whiskey off the table, sneak out back, roll cigarettes and skateboard around. Fords films are about obeying the rules, worshipping tradition, joining the social order with a deep Catholic devotion, and letting Victor McLagen ham it up; Hawks films are about breaking rules, sidestepping tradition, letting Dean Martin suffer through the shakes and PTSD brought on by past films enduring Jerry Lewis. "In case you haven't figured it out yet," John Wayne explains to his prisoner; "the minute your brother starts somethin' you're liable to get accidentally shot." The way Wayne says 'shot' is a chilling reminder of death's finality. In some films guns are just toys and marksmanship almost irrelevant - the heroes never miss and the villains never hit- but in Hawks it's about being a dead shot even with a pistol fired from the hip, or else staying the hell out of the way. The rules in most westerns seem very arbitrary and inconsistent. Hawks' films it's always perfectly clear. It's not that all good guys are great shots, it's that only great shots are welcome.

In the 30s, though, Hawks was still figuring himself out. He had some great writers, many of whom had also witnessed a lot of death, like William Faulkner, a fellow WW1 pilot who took very clear-eyed looks at buddies in danger. BUT Hawks had yet to find his signature action movie style, the male bonding-in-isolation, the querencia mentality, wherein courageous, noble, chivalrous marksmen, pilots, or hunters band together against great odds in an enclosed space. He had some masterpieces like SCARFACE, but in some of these early films he's bound by love triangles and other odd choices. Anyway, maybe examining these five early films (in order of release) will help. They're all rather obscure so I mention how to locate each film, be it available only on VHS, DVD-R, or TCM--which is a crime considering nearly every John Ford movie ever made is remastered out there on disc, and my own ratings.


THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931)
Avail. on VHS and Region 2 DVD
***
Walter Huston is a tough but fair warden who, as DA, sends a naive kid (Phillip Holmes) up the river for ten years after he whacks a masher with a bottle in a notorious speakeasy.  "An eye for an eye - that's the foundation of the criminal code!" snaps Huston, waving a black book like a blackjack. But there's also a different criminal code, which means don't rat out your fellow inmates. And there's a climax wherein if Holmes rats out a killer of a squealer he'll walk out a free man, but he won't violate the code. He won't! He won't he won't! he won't! Huston gets in some intense acting, grabbing the boy by the lapels and demanding to know who did it. WHO DID IT!??


There's some good press room overlapping dialogue introducing the action, but this doesn't feel particularly like a real Hawks film. Once he becomes warden, Walter Huston gets some chances to be super tough, like walking unarmed into a throng of hateful prisoners, or getting a shave from a guy in for life for cutting another man's throat, and there's a great silent build-up to the whacking of a squealer, with Karloff looming around like a white tunic-sporting Frankenstein, but otherwise characters are trapped in situations clearly contrived for Big Moral Issues, and an air of existential gloom hangs; there's not much room for Hawksian heroics in such a clamped-down situation (like if the whole of RIO BRAVO was told from the point of view of the imprisoned Joe Burdett).  In TARGETS (discussed here) it's the film Peter Bogdanovich and Karloff watch on TV while getting drunk in Karloff's hotel suite. The VHS is pretty solid, made back in the day when they built them to last.


TIGER SHARK (1932)
Occasional TCM airings, Warner Archive DVD
***
When Hawks focuses documentary-style on a tuna fishing off the coast of Steinbeckain California, going into the heart of tuna schools and pulling them up one after the other, throwing them all into a big trough where they flip and flop trying to escape, slicing each other up with their razor fins, you get an idea this was what John Huston was trying for with his mustang hunt in THE MISFITS. When one man fishes for himself, it's the natural order; when a crew fishes for half a state, it's mortifying. The good part here is that man's not strictly the apex predator, because where there's fish there's tiger sharks, and they love Portuguese commercial a-fisherman for dinner. Edward G. Robinson's jovial capatin loses his hand to one, and so wears a shiny hook (he gets it polished on his wedding day). Another guy loses his legs, dies, and leaves his daughter (Zita Johann) powerless against Eddie's boastful charms. Johann's weird pallor worked in THE MUMMY but she doesn't have the inner fortitude of, say, Greta Garbo's Anna Christie, and so when she falls for Eddie's partner, two-handed hunk Richard Arlen there's only the sense that he might have access to some benzos that would make the overacting of Robinson's angler bearable. Wrote Andrew Sarris, "Hawks remorselessly applies the laws of nature to sex.The man who is flawed by age, mutilation, or unpleasing appearance to even the slightest degree invariably loses the woman to his flawless rival." There's some good scenes and no bad ones in TIGER SHARK, but the problem is all this remorseless law applying and less natural danger. Robinson seems miscast, his constant chatter and Portuguese accent seem unduly weak for such a great actor. When he shoots at sharks from the safety of the crow's nest it only makes you sick, not inspired.
 

CEILING ZERO (1936)
VHS
****
Here's the first film where Hawks shows the rapid fire overlapping dialogue style that would become his trademark. A chronicle of the early days of Newark airport, wherein stray pilots are nursed through heavy fogs by a radio operator or two and Pat O'Brien, who try to deal with crises while old friends and a snoopy aviation bureau rep (Barton MacLane) try to interfere and/or say hello. We come to admire the way O'Brien can refrain from snapping people's heads off while he's engaged in life-or-death radio contact and some oblivious person walks through and starts joking around. Then, enter (tumbling) daredevil pilot James Cagney who served with O'Brien in the WW1 in the Signal Corp (where Howard Hawks served with William Faulkner). It's a bit similar to DAWN PATROL, in that O'Brien doesn't fly the planes, and has to send men up in bad conditions (ceiling zero means the fog is so low and so high even the sea gulls are grounded) and he doesn't like it.


A highlight is when they're all trying to help a lost in the fog Stu Erwin land after his honing beam goes out, and he can't get their radio signal but they can hear him shouting in panic and rage, presuming everyone on the ground is off playing poker and they're all shouting into different phone lines all along the flight plan to various listening posts and police stations, and the girl in the room cries and shouts "Why don't you do something?" and they all bark at once "SHADDUP!!!!" We see a slight strain in Hawks not misogynist per se, but his Hawksian woman was still being formed, and while the girls are of varying degres of toughness here, they are shown to crack up in a crisis, throwing little tantrums. There's also some surprising sexual frankness: June Travis offers herself to Cagney for succor after he loses Stu Erwin, who took the doomed flight so Cagney could have a date with her in a shadowy prefiguring of Joe's death in the early section of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.

The ending is one of those bits where everyone's noble self-sacrifice has to constantly trump one another's, but it's almost beside the point. What counts is that here is that Hawks has found his thing, the zippy overlapping dialogue of a bunch of professional men united in a common cause, against a common foe, and the weather, and the (notably Irish blarney-free) velocity of the Pat and Jimmy chemistry at full manly throttle. The VHS I got is blurry.


BARBARY COAST (1935)
(available on a solid DVD from MGM)
***
It's a rarity for a Hawks film to follow the leading lady around. Usually it's the leading man, the hero. He may not start the film but as soon as he comes on we never leave his side. But here it's Miriam Hopkins as the first white woman in San Francisco, back in the gold rush boom town days, when a ship from New York had to travel all the way around South America and took the better part of a year to get there, only to find a city of unpaved mud roads so nasty they can suck you under like quicksand, a dense fog filled with scammers, pickpockets, and ruffians, and inside nothing but crooked roulette wheels, shady murdering bouncers, and that pint-sized unlucky-in-love big shot Eddie G. Robinson.


There's a few elements that lets you know Hawks isn't fully himself in this, one of the films he made for MGM; he was a hired gun of Goldwyn's, and delivered the goods on time, end of story. He's not particularly enamored with his leading man, Joel McCrea, is a foolish poet-type who loses his hard-earned sacks of gold in one turn of Hopkins' fixed roulette wheel, a "cheap price for such an education." This after they fell in love as strangers both seeking shelter from a rainstorm at an old deserted cabin, the oldest excuse in the book, as Edward G. Robinson knows, myeah. Notes Cinephile:

"There’s little sexual tension, chemistry, or even the vaguest hint of innuendo between the two leads, it would seem a sign attached to one of the gambling tables in Robinson’s casino which reads “No vulgarity allowed at this table” is a rule disappointingly applied to the rest of the film as well. It has little visual identity beyond Ray June’s atmospherically foggy night-time photography (which does some fine work with shadows towards the end) and little of the cynicism or edge which marked out other collaborations with screenwriter Ben Hecht, instead opting for flowery, pretentious dialogue many of the cast clearly struggle with."

Gambling is a hard trick to do right by in film and Hawks isn't a great one for making money cinematic. The idea of everyone having to lug around sacks of gold through throngs of thieves, leaving us to worry about how easily they could be robbed is as far from the Hawksian sense of groups solidarity as you can get. Saving it all is Walter Brennan as a shell of his future self, Old Atrocity, he alone seems to achieve some sort of noble 3-D savagery. His survival in this place, his being welcome even in his disheveled form in the glossy casino (he lures strangers off the docks over the roulette wheel, perhaps for a cut of their trimmings) makes him one of those rare figures (like C3PO or Dennis Hopper) who can wander back and forth between classes, enemy camps, nature and civilization, because he really fits in neither.  Add some throw-away lines like "it's hard rowing when I'm so emotional" and it still adds up to a formulaic but well-detailed socio-historic romantic thriller that's no SAN FRANCISCO (1936), nor even, when all is said and done, a TIGER SHARK.


THE ROAD TO GLORY (1936)
(Portugese DVD - Region 1)
***1/2
William Faulkner co-wrote this one, a name-only remake to a 1926 Hawks silent. It's hard to imagine this was made a year after BARBARY COAST as it looks straight from 1930. Hope Lang prefigures the later Hawks heroines as a dreamy WW1 Parisian combat nurse with a beautiful black velvet choker-wrapped neck, bangs, pale skin, bangs, a sexy Red Cross on her cape, and a lower-registered speaking voice. She has the air of Lauren Bacall on the cover of the March 1943 Harper's Bazaar that won her a Hawks protege-ship.  You can see it in Lang's face, that same petulant weariness, just determined to do her part and her empathy for the boys' suffering never so haughty as to preclude sex.


The plot to ROAD is an uneasy mixture of the auld love triangle - new officer Frederic March meets Lang when they take shelter together in a bombed out saloon. He plays some tunes, and puts his coat over her as the Huns bomb the street above. Next day he's stalking her, bothering her at the hospital while she tries to bandage the wounded, unaware she's the mistress of shaky drunk Warner Baxter, his new C.O. Once Baxter finds out, of course, it's suicide mission time for March, a bit like the situation in Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY or Von Sternberg's MOROCCO, or any of a dozen other films (like FRIENDS AND LOVERS, reviewed a few posts ago). Adding to the trouble is Baxter's father showing up and being played by Lionel Barrymore, who wants to get into the young man's game to prove his worth. He ends up hogging screen time with his usual business before grenading his own team. March puts up with it all stoically, and there's no guess how it ends --he winds up in command, DAWN PATROL-style, winning by default, and indulging in the pills and booze regimen that made Baxter able to send brave men to their deaths.


A memorable segment of the film involves Germans digging underneath the allied trenches. The soldiers know they can't abandon the trench, or the Germans will march right in. So they have to stay... and wait, as the Germans scrape away below, knowing that as soon as the scraping stops the bombs are likely to off beneath them. That's where the true courage is tested, the painful, prolonged waiting... and smoking. And there's a rousing charge across no-man's land, as well as sneaky night time flank maneuvers! It's great in its way, but its way isn't full Hawks, there's still the love triangle, the ignominy of war, the sense of being pawns in the grip of a story teller with a theme and message, rather than being characters gripping a director for no reason other than instilling a sense of pride in being human.


See also, the 1932 Hawks film THE CROWD ROARS, which I capsuled earlier. 

As John Carpenter ages into his RED LINE 7000 phase, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the new Hawksian Drive-in fuzzy horror guru. What is fuzzy horror? I can only tell you it encompasses all of Coscarelli's films, the early Sam Raimi, Cronenberg, and John Carpenter til he started doing cable TV, Quentin Tarantino --if he ever made a horror movie. It's a loosey goosey termite art digging and goofing around - simultaneously mind-expanding and brain-addling. It never has to rely on vicious sexual violence, in fact when there's sex at all it tends to be fairly chaste. Who loves fuzzy horror? Any one who suddenly found themselves cheering watching BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA just because it happened to be  the 80s and never looked back, and has seen both THINGs more than a dozen times each. Why is it Hawksian? Because it's still scary even though it tends towards humor; it transcends genre and is based on character interaction, a droll shared language, the gallow's wit of RIO BRAVO, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE THING, THE BIG SLEEP, and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. And having interesting things to say and do because there's so much less pointless twisting and random acts of shock designed solely to get bad (better than no) publicity and it understands the two bros being cool language of deadpan calm and running jokes. Why fuzzy? Because it can get pretty sloppy, best to watch late at night, feeling good. Fuzzy horror rewards fuzzy viewing... and the films only get better with each new view, cuz the fuzzy has made you forget most of it anyway.


I won't go too much into JOHN DIES plot - you can just mosey over to Netflix streaming and watch it, and then come back to this scintillating post. But let's just say this - that dude up in that picture with the sunglasses and mysterious device? He played the infantry trainer ("Medic!") in STARSHIP TROOPERS, another fuzzy horror masterpiece.

I will say also that time looping is involved but I liked this film way way better than LOOPER. And I believe in time travel, if only via one's third eye. And when a movie makes the third eye hallucinations real it works, because it's a movie and so exists totally on the hallucinatory level. Unfuzzy directors feel compelled to separate the two - what is just a dream and what is real - like we'll upend the apple cart if not brought safely back to the grind. An example of this unfuzziness is AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, wherein the wolf must come out of David through grand physical agony or it won't be 'believable' --and if you want to have a pack of Nazi werewolves with machine guns, then you must make that part a dream. If John Landis made the dream the real and focused on those Nazi werewolves for the whole film, than hot damn, that would be hardcore fuzzy, and also a bit like the opening of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME.


Because what mainstream science still can't quite admit, but which leading edge scientists are realizing to their amazement, is that the universe is subjective (see books like The Subjective Bioverse) and if we can move past notions of size, perspective, relation, and spatial relativity, then space/time travel is possible regardless of the distances between solar systems. As humans with limited to no ESP ability we can't imagine space travel any other way except by carting our bodies from point A to point B, in a vessel relative to own size. The closest we have to ESP now is the cell phone and wireless router, but while we take those things for granted - sound waves that beam all over the globe constantly, billions of voices soaring up and down like ping pong balls between humans across their orbiting satellite nets and we take it for granted while scoffing at alien abductions. Perhaps this is why what was absurd fiction a mere century ago is taken for granted today and yet no one dares broach the subject of dimensional travel's validity as a scientific fact based on the subjective experience of hardcore psychedelic drug trippers. In other words, if you can imagine it, it will be. It's on its way. At least in the movies. Even back in the day, Lovecraft was tapping into some really groovy shit, man. He knew the tentacles from the fifth dimensional rift were ever pulling that gate open. But the only way he could express it is through fiction.

All of which serves as a flawed introduction to my praise of Don Coscarelli, a man who I've written of in the past as being suspiciously like myself in extrasensory speculation, to the point that one of my pet intervention metaphors, self-performed eye surgery. Check out this exchange in the film after Dave calls a priest because John seems possessed.

Dave: What do you think it's like, Father?
Father Shellnut: What's what like?
Dave: Being crazy, mentally ill.
Father Shellnut: Well, they never know they're ill, do they? I mean, you can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. I suppose you just feel regular, and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.

Now check this from an old post of mine in the C-Influence:

Eyewitness testimony can be considered “fact” in a court of law but means nothing to science, which cripples itself through its dismissal of everything “subjective” as if there was something that wasn’t (...) Our collective disbelief about things beyond our comprehension is itself beyond comprehension, revealing the fundamental impossibility of trying to think about nature objectively from inside an organic brain (sort of like trying to perform eye surgery on yourself without a mirror) (5/27/11)

I have no choice, therefore--considering the film's avalanche of uncanny coincidence-- to believe the film was written by me in the future.


I mean this as no disrespect to JOHN DIES' creators, Coscarelli and author James Wong (a pseudonym so they say). But I'd know my handiwork anywhere. Of course all three of us are clearly inspired by Lovecraft, William S. (and Edgar Rice) Burroughs, Alan Moore, and maybe even Hunter S. Thompson, so who knows who I really am? I always hoped Lovecraft might read my work one day in a time travel loop and be inspired to write the Chthulu mythos based on my own August Derleth-based fiction. That's probably not in our immediate 'future' but one thing I do know: if time is elastic and we are all one, then we are all one right now, connected through an elastic time tentacle, everyone of us, back and forth through time in order to play not just many parts ala Shakespeare but every part, right down to Vishnu's former Indra ants in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. In other words, if you weren't me before, you are now, just reading these words binds you to me. This is how we become our own great-grandmothers, and why karma never fails, nor Ramboona.


Such weird collapse-of-time distortions in JOHN DIES AT THE END are only one of the great side effects of a black ooze-style drug dubbed 'soy sauce,' a mix of the black ooze from the X-FILES and the black centipede meat of the NAKED LUNCH, and the Black Sheep Dip from my own unpublished novel... and of course, probably, some real naturally amazing drugs like psilocybe mushrooms and Salvia Divinorum. Aside from time dilation, this soy sauce allows one a Zen-like calm as well as the ability to read minds and to astral travel, which includes visiting an Interzone-style alternate reality that imagines if we had gone on to invest in biotech that was a literal fusion of biological material into technology, to have computers and Lovecraftian mutli-tentacled horrors fused into one entity that sucks and intellect and experience of the entire world through its crab-claw-tentacles, ala Corman's ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (or David Cross in FUTURAMA: BEAST WITH A MILLION BACKS - see my 08 post, and More Tentacles from the  5th dimensional Rift). Or if SKYNET was a giant octopus. That's not even forgetting the tiny nanobyte brainputating spores that take over bodies ala the manipulatin' monsters in THE THING (1982), GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), and the ones that just dissolve humans from the inside out, like those pinpricks in THE FLESH EATERS (1968), all super fuzzy.


There's great intertextuality and meta asides in all Coscarelli's films but JOHN DIES is particuarly clever: the 3-D glasses Fabianne Therese wears is a nice touch; she has phantom limb syndrome, and the ghost of her hand turns a magic key in a secret door in the abandoned mall, which is one of my more memorable dreams (in my version Marcia Brady was waiting in a hospital bed through the door, to hold my hand and confess her love and ask me to get her a coke - I went to get it and never found the door again!). She can only see her phantom hand with the 3-D glasses! That they would work in a 2-D film, for a 2-D character to see beyond the limits of their known virtual 3-D perceptions, is just one of the stunning choices that puts Don's film way out in front of the cult-contending pack - up past even BUCKAROO BANZAI (1982), which for all its archness never could quite commit to its interstellar overdrive psychotronic roots, as if REPO MAN came up to it at a party and BUCKAROO got scared of getting high in the back room and left early.


More similarities with my own work to solidify my case that I am the future author of this work: Pay close attention to the banners hanging on either side of the church pulpit in the above still, as I get ready to lay down more of the massive flood of similarities to my own work that will bear out the theory I shall become John Wong. Note that the phone Dave uses in the scene depicted on the far left banner is a hot dog, similar to the banana and Marlboro phones in my QUEEN OF DISKS! (2007)

What's that you say? Everyone does the old banana phone gag? Well not when addressing psychedelic transdimensional time slippage! Another similarity is that the 'Mall of the Dead' where some the ghost door to another dimension dwells is most similar to my 'Mall of Time' from an old unpublished short story about a guy looking for a special cigarette that gives the user and out of body experience (based on a time when I briefly lived in the head of a Chinese baker) at a conceptual mall . Here's an excerpt:

The mall of time had been designed to appeal to the tactile senses to lure the net-dazed shopper back in. The theme was an evolution of history with spacey gadgets on one end and gradually decades receding as you walked down the aisles until you past the dawn of man and into some weird cannabalistic pagan wordlessness. Eighties clothes and jewelry down to seventies retro, flapper prom tuxedo shops, Cowboy Dan's, and then farther back still… through pre-Columbian dining room sets, a series of moving sidewalk exhibitions with tinsel rain and roaring plastic volcanoes and the voice of Christian Bale narrating your trip through time. The roar of a dinosaur as we reach the kid's robot dinosaur displays, and, if you are a tripper, looking for the special cigarettes, back farther still...

... and as we took the escalators down and down and ran giddy but full of dread along the black tiles, our shoes echoing amid the cacophony of music and the crowd thinning down to only us, and Bale’s voice on the loudspeaker as it discussed the mating habits of the terandadon, that flying dinosaur that was the missing link between birds and reptiles. Down where we were heading the music got quieter and the lights got lower, and the animatronic dinosaurs became lower to the ground, hiding in the shadows and in the coin fountain now bubbling with fake moss and plastic sludge. Blood and mud filled the air, like a slaughterhouse zoo. 

Right? Coscarelli's film is a little different, but the idea of a mall being associated with interdimensional time travel is the same, and and I dig the writing of James Wong, who also writes really bizarre, perceptive stuff for Cracked. Am I totally comfortable in saying that Wong is me in the distant future? Yes. Do I 100% believe it? Well, that can best be described in a line from the film, espoused by the Arkham University-style detective in the film:

Detective Lawrence 'Morgan Freeman' Appleton: I'm an old school Catholic. I believe in hell. I believe it's more than just murderers and rapists down there. I believe in demons and worms, and vile shit in the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it's not just some place down there. Oh no, that it's right here with us. We just can't perceive it. It's kinda like the country music radio station. It's out there in the air, even if you don't tune into it.

So what does that tell you? That Don Coscarelli is amazingly prescient about the realities of post-death alternate dimensional enslavement, forging a direct link with theories espoused by everything from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the writings of Nigel Kerner, Nick Redfern, and David Icke. He understands the collapse of reality that comes from opening up past mainstream science and Christianity's tight-ass gates and out into the land where just entertaining crazy ideas becomes better than either fiction or reality, i.e. mythic.

So much written about something that most of us, in our limited ideas of heaven and hell can even admit has happening. That's the only way to describe it, in a mix of past, present, and future tenses. The heaven and hells of the bibles is all around us; the future, present, and past exists simultaneously. The heaven and hell we create for ourselves is created with each breath. Karma is so instant that the retribution may precede the crime, and this also explains the lucky in love unlucky at cards truth, which I have experienced firsthand. It's real, son! And if this time travel is possible than people from the future have already manipulated our past to suit their own ends. The Hassidic Jewish community has mastered this which is why they continue to dress the same as they did before the stock market crash, to as not draw attention to themselves. Do I believe that? Not really, yet it was revealed to me by the alien intelligence from whom I get all my secondhand news!

Right, now you want to talk to your own alien intelligence. Well, I know of two, one is legal. One alien intelligence is found in psilocybe cubensis space spore, the other Salvia Divinorum. One is like a strict Catholic gardening teacher, who regularly skins you alive in a slow, circular orbit, like clockwork de la Kubrick of dragon's teeth. And if you can sufficiently let go (of self, time, duality) and identify with the nature of the universe, with the floor beneath your meditation cushion, then you can just let the teeth strip away your crappy egoic shell and 'pop' you are suddenly free in awash of one love no sense of time or space --the bright yellow cosmos, where any question the remainder of your psyche can think to ask is answered, in a way wherein you remember being told this answer in the distant past.

The psilocybe intelligence on the other hand feels a little younger, a less austere -- the cool hippie teacher instead of the stern egocidal gardener; not quite as carefree as the marijuana spirit, but like a space jockey from 1967 who moves into your body with you like a fun out of town visitor you loved from high school, but after awhile he starts to get on your nerves, but it takes hours and hours for him pack up his duffel (stealing your watch as well) and you're like it was great having you around but now you're getting on my nerves, bro.

So as you can see, these 'poison path' pen pals do take a bite before they go. Your mileage and enlightenment may vary - as set and setting is all important. Only fools, madmen, and artists would ever go it alone. But how else will you get writing done?


If this rambling 'review' has been more about me than JOHN DIES AT THE END then I apologize. All you really need to know is its kinfolk, where it exists in the family tree of midnight cult goofball fuzzy, alongside THE EVIL DEAD, TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL and REPO MAN and right up the street from Don's PHANTASMs, and sitting at the same table as Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, BUCKAROO BANZAI, NIGHT OF THE COMET, and HAUSU. With even maybe a smattering of HELLBOY and CONSTANTINE waiting in the corner. It's ANTS IN YOUR PLANTS OF 1939 meets 80s John Carpenter. That should be enough for you, or indeed any man, woman, Indra, or ant. As long as you're fuzzy you're gonna be all right.

If you want to deep into the real ambiguity of war, the heart of darkness, look no further than the pre-code 1930s WWI flying ace movies written by John Monk Saunders. With dogfights and aerial maneuvers performed with rickety biplanes, sometimes shot at through rear projection and destroyed in stock footage explosions, there's a nice metatextual collage effect at work, adding to a sense of existential aloneness 'up there' in the deadly skies, contrasting with the human-on-human interaction of the barracks. It makes the combat colder, more abstract, like real war can never be properly depicted and so unspools with Kabuki modern anonymity (everyone wears the same evil-looking goggles, making it hard to tell whom from whom unless the actor playing the pilot--and no one else--has a strong, manly jaw. Before the Hitler, Joseph Breen, and Hirohito necessitated a cinematic puscht of anti-war sentiment, the conscience-stricken flying ace films of Saunders were topical stuff, reflecting the forgotten man's deep disillusionment. Looking back from our 21st century high, Saunders' films still loom high overhead as a dark, compelling chronicle of the roots of modernist disillusion and the industrial destruction of man.

An aviator and trainer of WWI fighter pilots during the war, John Monk Saunders was a good-looking, intelligent, heavy-drinking depressive. After the war his stories of WWI aces he knew and trained provided perfect short story and Hollywood script material. He became a hot commodity in Hollywood and married Fay Wray! The beauty that killed the beast! Was he flying the bi-plane that got Kong? Was it Saunders killed the beast? No, but work like his powerful, alcoholic thousand yard stare modernist anti-war existentialism may have slowed our participation in WWII.

As I've written before, I take a strong stance on the importance of death and drugs / alcohol abuse in being able to screen the existential horror of the void and, more importantly, live to tell the tale, and be poetic enough to make it count. Death opens the door to the screaming Lovecraftian horror of the void; the booze allows you to stare right into its gleaming, rotten yellow eye, and gives you the courage to wink back, even as the sheer benumbing horror of it all sinks even deeper into your soul than it would ever sink into the souls of the merely dead. Without booze this grim bargain, which all sensitive poet hunters and fisherman must make every time they watch the light fade from their prey's terrified eye, would be unendurable. Where would Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, or John Monk Saunders be without the booze to help them see the horror? And without them, would not our generation, too, be lost, falling in a downward spiral like King and Major Kong? You may argue that it is in such a spiral, and you'd be right, but man do we know how to plummet!


Saunders' first filmed story was WINGS (above) in 1927. It was perhaps a turning point in aerial combat war realism onscreen, and underneath it all he provided a probably accurate recording of the bloody birth of the modern man and the nerves of steel that allow him to soar into machine gun fire astride a hunk of balsa wood at 3,000 feet. Audiences loved the aerial stunt photography, and thanks to Saunders they also caught a whiff of the full-on madness of trying to land a flaming coffin into a soft cloud of cartoon champagne bubbles and vampiric courtesans.


But it is later, in the sound era, with series of four magnificent pictures that work almost like an unofficial WWI quadrilogy, where Saunders finds his true lysergic thousand yard naked lunch how to keep your cool even when the walls are trying to eat you calling. The early 30s pre-code era was itself naturally existential. Remember my Forgotten Man?  He hurled his lunch across the land, and how a totally ineffectual censorship board made it possible, if only for four years, to get away with actually telling and showing the truth about his widespread poverty, horror, disillusionment, sexual double standards, war-related post-traumatic stress before there was such a word, and the seething resentment over prohibition that the forgotten man was faced with. And Saunders was the right man for the job, giving us a little aerial action in the process via: THE DAWN PATROL (1930), THE LAST FLIGHT (1931), and THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933) and ACE OF ACES (1933). Let's examine!
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.THE DAWN PATROL (1930)
Directed by Howard Hawks (Warner Bros.)
Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Neil Hamilton

Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon from the 1960s Batman TV show) rants on and on about the cold idiocy up the chain of command in this early Hawks sound film, but from then on it gets better. A tale of the men of the dawn patrol, it was remade by Edmund Goulding in 1938 as a vehicle for Errol Flynn and David Niven. Basil Rathbone took Hamilton's role in that one, and his pointed fey affect made thee idiocy rants as great as they deserived at last. As with great Hawks films, there's a querencia, an enclosed shelter within which our brave group waits, drinks, and smokes, sings, and passes out.  And like all the best Hawks, we're made aware of every drink poured and cigarette lit, and no one leaves a drink behind half-full. As inHawks' other early sound films like SCARFACE, there are abundant deep, spidery shadows that both isolate and insulate a group of men in a multifunction building, like the HQ/bar/bungalow system in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS. We come to know the layout of the place very well, like a second home. The bunks are upstairs, the bar is downstairs, and the CO's office opens out onto the bar, making it easy to hear your orders, get drunk, and then carry the lightweights up to bed all without going outside in the rain.


I was a big fan of the Errol Flynn remake (which I deemed a piece of great acid cinema here) but that film borrowed, it turns out, heavily from the combat scenes in Hawks' original, and as such should take a knee and heed the older film's wisdom. Richard Barthelmess as Capt. Courtney isn't quite as dashing as Flynn, but he's more believable, more method; when he gets out of his plane after a mission his legs wobble, like mine used to after mowing the grass. His Courtney doesn't come off as dashing, just a guy who survived, and provided what was required, even in the face of daily death. He's far less boisterous than Flynn, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is less jolly but more authentically inside a war than David Niven. Sometimes it may be hard to understand why Barthelmess was considered such a star, he's so stocky and low key, peering under hooded, wounded eyes, but there's a lot of acting going on in them while the rest of Barthelmess remains almost motionless, such as the flickering warm light when he sees Scotty come back alive (with bottles). All in all and remake aside, Hawks' 1930 version is the CITIZEN KANE of WWI ace pics, and balances the anti-war sentiment with a more stoic existential acceptance of duty, which is where it comes in as a great acid film, since part of tripping involves keeping your cool and shrugging it off even when the walls are melting and the handrails down the stairs are like two pincers and the steps the tongue of some throbbing scarab beetle, and everyone you see seems to be bleeding even when they're not and you can see the blood pulsing through their translucent skin. Oh my god, so much blood. Maybe it's not the same as 'really' being in a war, but then again, maybe only schizophrenics, war vets, and survivors of 12 hour-long nightmare STP trips truly understand one another. BANG!


But in THE LAST FLIGHT (1931)
Director: Williem Dieterle (for Warners)
Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Helen Chandler, David Manners

Cary (Barthlemess) and Shep (David Manners) are too shattered from a 600 foot death spiral to fly anymore. They're discharged from the hospital after the war but don't go home, preferring to bum around Paris and pick up a strange girl played by Helen Chandler from DRACULA (1931). They are, as their doctor describes them, "heading out to face life, when all their whole training was in preparation for death." It was the preparation for death that was, of course, Saunder's job in the war. "I'm afraid they they're like projectiles, shaped for war... hurled at the enemy, they described a beautiful high-arching trajectory, and now they've fallen back to earth... spent... cooled off... useless." He notes that they fell 600 feet and though they survived, it was "like dropping a fine Swiss watch on the pavement - it shattered both of them."



An unsolvable problem with THE LAST FLIGHT is that, aside from Barthelmess and Manners, the crew of fellow drunk aviators aren't very hip. It's really only Richard Barthelmess and David Manners that Nikki likes, and we like. The others are all fairly unbearable, especially the creepy masher they can never get rid of (Walter Byron), and the loud Texan played by Johnny Mack Brown, who tackles horses in the street to prove he's still got the old college football elan, and rocks the stagiest of Texas accents. Luckily for us Mr. Manners, despite his affectless line readings, comes off especially well in his scenes with Chandler, much better than he did in DRACULA, where he was always trying to boss her around: "We're going to think of something cheerful - aren't we?" You just wanted to slap him and open the window. But as a tippling pal, Manners' dreamypoeticism finds a great natural outlet and when he dies at the end in a taxi cab and claims that "in a way this is the best thing that ever happened to me" I believed him. And it's understandable that both he and Helen Chandler would be so drawn, feel so protected by, the quiet strength of Barthelmess' scarred pilot, he's rooted, planted, and they seem to float when standing still, their eyes following wisps around the room only the two of them can see, almost a feypre-war version of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.


And the similarities of DRACULA and FLIGHT don't end there: Chandler's character Nikki is much more like the Mina in Stoker's novel of DRACULA than her Mina was in Todd Browning's adaptation. In the novel she becomes a kind of revered icon-mascot for Van Helsing, Harker, Dr. Seward and Lucy's three grief-stricken suitors, including the Texan. If Walter Byron's sleazy masher was Dracula, it would all be set, but in a way, the war already is, making it really like Dracula part 2, wherein Manners, Chandler, Van Barthelmess and co. all try to drink away the awful memories of and wounds from battling the ranks of the undead. In real life Chandler would experience kinship with monsters horrified by their lack of recognizable mirror reflection, and boozing, as Wiki notes that "she ironically fell victim to alcoholism later in life and was badly disfigured in a fire caused by falling asleep while smoking." And of course vampirism is a great metaphor for addiction, alcohol, morphine, or the horrors of war. Addiction and war are actually the keys for understanding true existential terror, the two keys which opens the lock of greatness in art and literature. In addition to DRACULA it makes a great imagined sequel to THE DAWN PATROL, and a perfect distillation of how Saunders imagined the post-war Paris blues, of trying to escape one's broken watch status via the icy abstraction of martinis and a beautiful, hard-drinking girl. 


Throughout the film the idea of being 'a big success' is played with, and the competion to be the last one in the room with Nikki is part of that, and also what drives Francis to ultimately kill Walter Byron's rapist-masher journalist, requiring Francis' subsequent disappearance into the Lisbon shadows. "This is the first time he's looked truly happy," notes Nikki. Manners has been shot in the fracas, and a sense of VERTIGO / Purloined letter circular death drive-aliciousness ensues. As he slowly dies in the back of a cab, Shep reports feeling like he's falling, and falling like he and Cary did in the opening scene over the skies and screens of France. "He was ready to die once, and he was ready to die again," laments Cary. Here it is, the love affair between Barthelmess and Manners, the way men bond eternally in the field of combat, like orphans forever clinging to rafts during battles with shadowy Robert Mitchums. "Camaradeship was all we had left." And maybe that's what the real lure of war is for men at home: as an escapist grim fantasia, a place where it's just buds against the world, fire arms instead of nagging wives, the chance to prove one's mettle when it's all stripped down to just you and the guys experiencing the same hell the next seat over. And Barthelmess feels right at home nesting on the cheek of a dying Manners, his face contorting into a slow burn wide-eyed terror at being finally unable to save his gunner's life. But when it comes to pitching confessional woo to Nikki in their private train car back to Paris he seems to doing some vile burlesque of what a lipless man would think having lips is like.


Then, in 1933 Saunders wrote two movies that reflected a new, distinctly anti-war to the point almost of isolationist propaganda stance. This was just when the need to get involved in WW2 was vastly more important than most people in their bitter depression disillusionment then realized, because as Mick La Salle notes in his chapter on Barthelmess in Dangerous Men, "In the same year (1933) that The Eagle and the Hawk and Ace of Aces debuted, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany. Had the United States and its allies found the will that year to throw a net over Hitler, tens of millions of lives might have been spared." Well, anyway, they're great stuff now that they can't do any real damage to freedom.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933)
Directed by Stuart Walker (for Paramount)
Starring: Frederic March, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Jackie Oakie

The video art at left makes the film seem like some love triangle between Frederic "King of the Triangles" March, a still rising Paramount star Cary Grant (in the same year he played opposite Mae West in her two best pictures), and a vamped-to-the-point-she's-ceased-to-look-human Carole Lombard (billed only as 'the beautiful lady' she seems daemonic enough to be a bit like the bloofer lady in DRACULA). But Cary Grant and Lombard never meet in the film. Note in the art at left Lombard more resembles a wife or WAC in a WWII home front propaganda piece rather than a mysterious sympathetic ear wrapped in ermine. And Cary Grant has a righteous smolder as if about to do something truly heroic, instead of being the sociopathic if ultimately loyal gunner who acts as a shadow figure to the conscience-stricken pilot played by March, who has to get progressively drunker to keep it together, to the point a grinning French general pinning a medal on him can smell the alcohol on his breath even in the pouring rain! Death, where is thy sting?


The thingthat tears the game up more than anything for Jerry is that he can't admit how much he loves to kill. When he comes back from his first foray over the lines he's exhilarated and giddy only to find his gunner is dead behind him. From then on, he's horrified not by fear of being killed, but of being responsible somehow for the deaths of his gunners (he loses five in a matter of months) while he gets his kicks. These bi-planes have never before seemed so rickety, ready to fall to pieces at a moment's notice. When one of his gunners later simply falls out during a loop-de-loop maneuver, March's decent into alcoholism and existential guilt goes from spiral to straight downward dive-bomb, but man is it exciting, even if it is, in the end, alone, with only grim reaper Cary Grant to make sure the last stain of shame is erased, in the name of the Observer Corps.



What's less excitingis the way, just like Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY (1957), March's self-righteous anti-war stance is very convenient as long as its not going to be effective. His hatred of his job depends on making his commanding officer the bad guy as far as doing what needs to be done to win the war. March's performance modulates continually from scene to scene, his veneer never breaking, staying polite while his conscience tears him apart inside, resisting the urge to go off on his preachy horror. Then, during the big binge in his honor after he shoots down Voss, a Richtofen-like ace who's barely out of his teens, March finally snaps, interrupting his fellow flier's drunken singing with a rant of "I earn my medals for killing kids!" He then staggers off to his room and kills himself. La Salle notes that Jerry's suicide has a real-life parallel reflecting March's character as being very close to Saunders' real life booze-enhanced turmoil,"Seven years after the film was made, Saunders, age 42, hanged himself." (105)

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Saunders and wife, Fay Wray

Clearly Saunders had a depressive drunk's ability to able to handle harrowing horror of war with haughty abandon, at least for awhile. We alcoholic poets come alive in such moments, our natural feeling of disaster and paranoia finally has a proper setting! That's why Saunders' anti-war sentiment always includes pro-war relish, a mix of emotions including a paradoxical sense of brotherhood with the only other group that understands a flying ace's pain, the flying aces on the other side. If it all should boil down to the realization that the human is a terrible monster then maybe you can sniff around the edges for signs of the post-WWI American pacifism vs. WWII-American militarism, which was all the rage in 1933 via polemics like MEN MUST FIGHT and satires like DUCK SOUP and MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, all of which adds up to a feeling like PATTON pretending to be ashamed of his yen for slaughter while secretly relishing the absurdity of it all.

I'd hazard a guess too that, for one of WWI's more peerless Air Corps. fiction authors, Saunders' lack of actual combat experience equal to that of his characters reflects his guilt more than his characters' killing kids. This is perhaps the one weak aspect of his work but as far as weak aspects go, you won't find these kinds of sentiments voiced so clearly anywhere else in pre-code film but with Saunders. Other writers were either anti-war pacifists, or "over there / over there" lemmings but Saunders really explored the actuality of the grisly homicidal fish that bites the propaganda lure, with a boozer's realization that they were two sides of a same lousy nickel-plated excuse to get away with murder.

ACE OF ACES (1933)
Director: J. Walter Rubin (for RKO)
Starring: Richard Dix, Elizabeth Allan, Ralph Bellamy, Theodore Newton, Joe Sauers

It's a complete reversal, the discussion between Rocky (Richard Dix) and his fiancee, Nancy (Elizabeth Allan) of principles, lemings, and the difference between someone whose not a sucker and a coward. While the parade footage unfurls below, Dix sculpts a winged angel in his loft, oblivious to it all until Nancy's righteous salutes drives him into the next scene, walking into the barracks to meet his fellow fliers while a guitarist sings "Ten thousand dollars for the folks back home / ten thousand dollars / for the family," while they roll up the possessions of the downed flier whose bunk Rocky's taking.

It's a startlingly modern scene, as the other pilots have ghoulish hipster freedom that seems way too modern for the 1918, or even 1933: "This is tombstone Terry the Tennessee Terror, otherwise known as Dracula!" notes Rocky's tour guide, introducing one of the fliers. The man leans forward to eye Rocky's neck, "Welcome to the ranks of the undead!" Man, these cats are too cool even for 1933. They act like they would be at home scoring coffee from Walter Paisley or swindling Tony Curtis out of his sax or chasing James Dean around an abandoned swimming pool. Weirder, they all actually have a pet of the power animal emblazoned on their ships: Rocky has a lion cub and there's a chimp who drinks to cope when his owner heads off to battle, a dog, a parrot, and a pig with an iron cross tattoo. Then there's the ingenious way Rocky's artist's understanding of natural light to his advantage in dogfights. He becomes an ace, racking up his black Xs ala SCARFACE, which came out the previous year, and clearly made an impression on Saunders, to the point he borrowed Hawks' machine gunning the calendar over a montage of explosions and bullets. Rocky chokes on the trigger at first and has to get shot before he mans up, but the boys celebrate his kill, badly staged with rear projection as it may be, and he realizes that he may never make the grade as a sculptor, but slaughtering his fellow man in multimedia collage solo performance art earns him great fame. But what is the message of this art? When we see the bloody face of the enlisted man Dix smacks with an ammo belt we know we're not supposed to be buying war bonds in the lobby.

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The Lemming and the Lion

But getting back to the crux of this post, the complexity of the masculine wartime psyche as imagined via the pen of a WWI aviation instructor who wanted to but never got a chance to actually shoot down a German, and clearly felt guilty about not taking the same risks as his students, a writer who sees the lure of killing, feels it, even longs for it, like the whole 'war is a drug' angle of Kathryn Bigelow's HURT LOCKER. In his initial coward-branding by Nancy Rocky decries war as a chance to duck out on your wife, and work, and responsibility. He's right, by the logic of the film, and he gets to say I told you so when he bumps into her in Paris while on leave after she's dealt with being shelled and overrun by mud and the bloody wounded. She regrets goading him into enlisting but he'll have none of it: "This is a great war and I'm having a grand time; every minute is grand!" he declares. He's high on the cleanness of the war up where he is, the feeling of life and death so close and all that separates them the movements of his plane and firing of his guns: "Yes, it's a great war. I hope the next one is half as good!" Nancy's eyes pool with tears and she refuses to even touch her champagne, like a little bitch; his eyes look dead, reflecting DEATH DREAM somnambulism that some critics--who miss the chaser of bitter self-awareness in the deadness--dismiss as wooden. But hidden in that wooden mask lurks a savaged sensitive sculptor who has given up trying to hold onto his humanity, since he knows its a liability. And just by how thoroughly it's gone you know he at least knew where it was to begin with. When he comes brusquely onto Nancy she balks and he exclaims war is is no time for scruples: "How can you refuse whatever you have to give?!" He all but twists her earlier words back into her face, so she submits, and the moral hypocrisy of placing import on a woman's virginity dissolves in WWI almost as if that was the whole point of the war in the first place.

All in all, Rocky ends up being the more complex and interesting figure than March's Jerry in EAGLE. March endures his tenure as ace, but any joy in the sport of it falls instead to Cary Grant's sociopathic gunner. We know from DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE that March could have chilled us to the core as Rocky, but Dix is almost better for being less versatile, more stiff (in both sense of the word). Just as Cary shoots an unarmed parachutist, Rocky shoots an unarmed German cadet who was just dropping a chivalrous note.  Naturally this poor cadet also winds up in a hospital, next to a head-shot Rocky, who finally snaps out of his psychotic stupor and rediscovers his humanity. But he was already self-aware, as good artists must be, before the film began, so it's understandable he would relapse when his record is threatened by a kid known as the "Fargo Express."

Luckily there's a happy ending, albeit with a strange 'is this just a dream' quality, like the end of TAXI DRIVER or VERTIGO or LAST FLIGHT. After Dix survives one final foolish assault, he winds up back in the garden in Nancy's arms: "We'll live only for ourselves, and by ourselves," she says, in an eloquent if impossible advocations of the romantic ideal behind isolationist pacifism, that America could take all the time it wanted to lick its wounds and Europe could just sort itself out. Being an American was still in a whirlwind romance with itself, practically a teenager at 157 (that's just 18 in human years), and promised a honeymoon after its violent civil suit nearly cost them a divorce, and the war wiped out so much of its finest men and left the rest of them unemployed, shattered like watches. By 1933 it was clear that the nation would never get a chance to get comfortable with itself before being shipped off to die in some other guy's war. Rocky's last line, though meant as a joke perhaps, leaves a chilling after-effect: As he and Nancy embrace in the garden, Rocky eyes the garden gnome that bugged him in the film's first scene, noting cryptically, "I still don't like the looks of that guy."

The gnome is Hitler.

The above is a snatch of song sung by Wheeler and Woolsey, with dancing Native American maids all in rows, and while sardonic as fuckall it's rather callous, as if casting a bloody stain on America's conscience is the same as patriotism, and no one really seems to care, because now Native Americans have oil wells and gambling and educated spokespersons. But where exactly do Wheeler and Woolsey fit in? In DIPLOMANIACS (1933),  Woolsey can best be imagined by picturing a lipless George Burns aiming for Groucho Marx's arrogance and way with a cigar; Wheeler is like Nathan Lane pureed together with Frank McHugh, and slid under Charlie Chaplin hair oil. Always, always there's the sense that these guys are really stage show vaudevillians more than film stars.

Some great comics like W.C. Fields, Mae West (pre-code) and the Marx Brothers (at least pre-DAY AT THE RACES) have stood the test of time. They are eternal. Others, popular in the early dirty turn-of-sound 30s---Eddie Cantor, Jolson, Wheeler and Woolsey--have not been so lucky. They have faded into niches were only freaks like me do scrounge. But thanks to the Warner Bro. Archives, a horde of their surreal pre-codes are finally available on DVD, and man you can learn a lot about the era's social stigmas and stigmatisms and all the things the code would wipe away. I've already written about one such eye-opener, WONDER BAR (1934), and next week, Eddie Cantor's WHOOPEE! (1933). Why? How do I know? I follow my bliss: my hunger for pre-code surrealism is, however, always accompanied by my liberal PC brainwash afterburn, so I can't enjoy it unconditionally, there's always the deconstructing.


DIPLOMANIACS (1933) came out the same year as, and is very similar to, the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP, and was co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote W.C. Fields' MILLION DOLLAR LEGS the year before, and that it can be compared to them is an honor, for Wheeler and Woolsey have not aged as well as Fields or the Marxes. and unless you like both the Marx Brothers AND Laurel and Hardy you might find yourself put off by the freaky squareness of these boys, even if only in some uncanny way you can't explain. I don't care for the grotesque infantile tantrums of Laurel and Hardy. Something about them creeps me out. And there's something similarly sticky about Wheeler and Woolsy, some uncanny quality that makes their resemblance to other comedians of the day almost disturbing.

And man do they love to play dress up. Wheeler and Woolsey share the same sense of infantile queerness (they sleep in the same bed, and Wheeler is clearly 'the bottom') as Laurel and Hardy --is that why they creep me out? They lack the amok heterosexuality of the Marxes, or the singleminded pursuit of oblivion that elevates Fields to the pantheon of Acidemic greats. Woolsey does get drunk in one scene but he's really more interested in..... ugh.... soup. By the second time he asks for more soup in the first class dining room I'm feeling the polar opposite of watching Fields grab all the table service bottles on his way off the roof of INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933). Booze = funny. Soup= yuck! Why? Because food, like life, is gross. Drunkenness, divine. And as someone with near 15 years sobriety, I should know!


That said, if DIPLOMANIACS landed on the college revival circuit the way the Marx Bros. and Fields films did back in the late 60s-80s, it too might have garnered a hipster cult. The pair do, after all, embrace surrealism, as in the still above where they're sent aloft by being tossed up in a Native American blanket (from here on in I'm switching to 'Indian' for reasons that will be made clear) en route to the Lausanne peace conference or when they battle a tribble-like crawling scalp.  And fans of Broadway shows like THE PRODUCERS, or revivals like ANYTHING GOES (which I saw in London in 04) will probably feel themselves on very familiar ground. Some of the numbers have a lived-in, well-rehearsed feel, especially the scenes where Wheeler tries to shake a lovestruck vamp named Dolores (Marjorie White).  A definite scene stealer, she arrives in villain Louis Calhern's stateroom wrapped in plastic after the following bizarre and racist exchange between him and Hugh Herbert as a Fu Manchu-style villain sidekick trying to pass Yiddish off as Chinese:

Calhern: I need a vamp
Herbert: What kind?
Calhern: ...a female vamp!
Herbert: What color?
(...)
Calhern: A white one.
Herbert: White ones get dirty much too quickly
Calhern: Well, for this job she'll have to get dirty.

It's funny thanks to Calhern's robust delivery of the phrase "have to get dirty." But of course they make a mistake in presuming the boys are straight. Their resistance to cartoonish sexual come-ones is never seen as heroic or difficult, a telling sign perhaps. They have the closeted queer's malice towards straight sex, presuming brusque burlesques of hetero courtship will satisfy doubters as to their manliness. The boys sleep in the same bed, and Woosley is clearly the top, you can tell by his big erect cigar and Wheeler's BIRDCAGE-y nightgown (below). And then rather than getting their morning drink on like real men they're more concerned with mani pedis. "If we can get away with wearing these pants we can get away with anything," notes Woolsey, and when someone overhears him whispering that something's a secret, he asks "What's a secret?" and he replies "A secret is something you tell everybody, confidentially," you know he means Hollywood!


Working in the film's favor is the feeling that the filmmakers just saw the amazing LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932). The song sung in the boys' first Parisian morning clearly apes the famous opening montage of Parisian noises that ends with Chevalier saying "Paree / you are too loud / for me," and shutting his window. Here the lyrics include, "from the taxi honks/ it might be the Bronx but no / this is Paris." (not "Paree" but Wheeler sings a bar of "Isn't it Romantic" while rushing through a montage of lyrics). Another favorite moment occurs after the bulk of first class passengers leave the dining room, and the captain of the Geneva-bound ocean liner addresses the remaining gentlemen, and announces "as we are men of the world, let us consume alcohol." I knew that if I was seeing this with my fellow Fieldsian Max while splitting a 1.75 of Ten High, we'd have looked at each other in stunned delight, but he's married now with a kid, and I'm 15 years sober, and these guys are lightweights.

That all works maybe, though, in the context of the film, which I saw by myself at three AM high only on herbal tea and cigarettes, after finishing my big previous post on isolationist themes in the films of John Monk Saunders. For if nothing else this film, like MILLION DOLLAR LEGS is really about America's post-WWI, contempt for the United Nations, and the buffoonery of pols of Europe still bristling against the post-WWI border alterations.

What is being satirized in short, is the world political scene immediately prior to the Nazi's build-up in WWII, so these films provide an illuminating time capsule look at something that no longer exists, a sense of out-of-touch weakness in Europe that American comics saw as a great chance for satirization, and Hitler saw as a perfect chance to defy restrictions and commence militarization. When a bomb goes off at the Geneva conference in DIPLOMANIACS it just turns into an excuse for a crazy blackface musical number, one of the reasons maybe this doesn't get screened very often, and an insight into the idea of 'deathlessness' in comedy, ala Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, wherein blows and accidents that would kill or cripple a normal man just leave one with blackface and maybe an exploded cigar. Wishful thinking like that kept us neutral!

The second vamp is named Fifi and her kisses make men literally smoke under their collars and fall to earth a burned out mess. We're supposed to believe that one kiss from the lipless Woolsey's makes her smoke and fall to the ground, too. More believable is the concept that a mincing French attendant is considered too oafish when the boys get their hair and nails done in Paris, and overall there hangs some horror movie oddness, reminding us that an element of the grotesque was assumed in pre-code comics, for an example just dig the monstrousness of below poster, the eyes of all of them bugged maniacally or shadowed with lewd conspiracy. DUCK SOUP also satirized war, but it bombed; by then, apparently, the Nazis weren't comical. :


Then there are the other odd reminders of the pre-WWII sense of anything goes, As Dreamland Cafe (from where I lifted these images) points out:

One of the unnerving aspects of the film for a modern viewer is that there are several swastikas in the Indian costumes. Apparently swastikas were actually common in Southwest Indian design work until WWII. The Nazis had come to power in Germany by 1933, but it doesn’t appear that the film-makers were associating swastikas with them, even if the threat to world peace was on everybody’s mind.

World peace was on everyone's mind, and it's important to note that swastikas weren't just Native American (and Buddhist) symbols, but universal good luck charms (in 1931 Joan Blondell sells swastika key chains in BLONDE CRAZY).

Molly Haskell is one of those brazenly feminist cultural critics who prefer to dazzle, excite, and thrill rather than deflate, demoralize, and despair. She's from the generation of women who came to prominence in the 70s, a time when feminism did not preclude casual heterosexual intercourse in an airport bathroom, and one felt one could do without condoms (or last names) as long as one was on the pill. Haskell's grand, seminal book, From Reverence to Rape, was a first of its kind, displaying an exhaustive (but never exhausting) knowledge of film history from the 1930s up through the then current 70s, evincing--in an era before home video--she'd somehow managed to see acres of pre-code film, enough to know how the production code instilled in 1934 was a huge step back for women, who were shown in pre-code film as competent doctors, CEOs, aviators, and ambitious gold-digging social climbers, and after 1934 had to give all that up and do whatever their doltish husbands told them to. It was the cinematic equivalent of, say, taking woman's right to vote away. But of course, it didn't stay that way, and when women refused to just return to their second class citizen status after working through WWII, Hollywood was right there with them, and with a clear-eyed grasp of the whole spectrum of this struggle, Haskell's writing found the dark heart of feminist oppression and grabbed on, and began to squeeze until its black blood began to run down her arm.

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Clik here to view.Knowing the pain and despair of the post-code Handmaid's Tale-style reversal of social progress so present in her work shouldn't make Haskell so fun to read, but her irrepressible love of movies never makes her half-full glass runneth over. Her book isn't just well-written and a stunning defense of the women's film, it's a point of no return. There can be no going back to your blissful state of patriarchal ignorance once you've read it, no way to dismiss the casual misogyny that runs deep through film history. One's perceptions are eternally expanded. But Haskell never even wakes the baby as the bathwater drains away --that is her miracle.

 To say Haskell is one of my literary idols isn't doing her justice; her late husband Andrew Sarris is also an idol of film critics, the man who brought the auteur concept to America, but it's to Haskell I turn to get jazzed on wanting to see movies. Sarris is spot-on in ways that either make me mad (how can a man so smart and knowing about film be so wrong about Von Sternberg?) but Haskell is, to me, more of a personal favorite, because like Camille Paglia she eschews banging her head against the patriarchal walls in favor of daring around it and going for the long pass. In other wors, she liberates herself. She was from that generation, the ones who didn't begrudge man his fiefdoms, just went and made their own, better ones. You can't even get mad at the dumb male fantasies that passed for art after reading Haskell. She deflates the Stanley Kubrick mystique within a few sentences, not because of his misogyny per se but because it's not "a visceral explosion of deep Swiftian disgust [which she has no truck with] but a fashionable and fastidious distaste," then lets him go, like a fish that's under the limit, and you find she hasn't spoiled your appreciation of his work. She's not nitpicking, she's merely pointing out how much better, how broader and more of an enduring classic a film could have been if its maker hadn't been afraid of women.

In addition to their focus on the male proprietary gaze, many academic feminist film critics seem to feel obligated to push for a democratization of cinema. They want more races and classes and most of all, more plain-looking people, so all of us can feel represented. These critics may be right from a certain standpoint, but who would wants to see those films? At the movies no one sees themselves as plain or ugly; in the dark we're all gods and goddesses, and Haskell gets that. She sees that glamor isn't a realm for females to waste valuable time looking pretty for the male gaze, but rather a tool with which to court androgyny. She points out the big female stars of the 1930s and 40s all had a certain drag queen essence. She also defends actresses you'd think she'd be against: she points out the fallacy inherent in labeling Doris Day as some icon of 1950s bland hausfrauization, as if her tomboy aura masks her fear of sex. Haskell sees way, way past that but at the same time gestures towards the insufferably phony innocence of husband 'trap,' Debbie Reynolds -- "where Marilyn was false to her sexuality in the most innocent way, Debbie Reynolds was false to her innocence in the most calculating way," notes Haskell. Reynolds was "the professional virgin, and the final retribution for the polarization of women into good girls and bad... the sweetheart as purview of the wife, the justification of misogamy before the fact." (263)

Her spirited 70s 'lib' acumen illuminates the deep misunderstanding of film's ultimate function in so many of her contemporaries, and how the 'no social group left behind' aesthetic robs everything it touches of resonant power even more so than the past moral codes. For Haskell, a film is better if its misogyny is overt, passionately-felt, instead of passive-aggressively engaging in virgin/whore dichotomies, like ax-murders turning each piece of a whole woman into separate, dysfunctional pieces until the man can feel wondrously whole by comparison. I work at art school and I've seen how over time actual free-thinking art has become more and more oppressed in favor of a 'safe' egalitarian aesthetic and I always stress to students how the 'women's lib' voice of the 70s was never about stripping sparkling surface glamor and beauty from art, lest some dull, plain person feel left out. It was about freedom, to work and have a career if that floats your boat, and the right to enjoy heterosexual pleasure, or art, even housework if you didn't, but either way, free from the suffocation of 'baby peer pressure' or feminist disgust, or the labels like 'slut' that float through modern society. Now than ever,  militant PC-ness has hardened over the landscape like a perma-frost frown. We need Haskell more than ever.

Then of course one can just bask in Haskell's brilliant sentences, her use of beautiful, strange words, as in From Reverence's chapter on "The Woman's Film," when she writes about Michael Curtiz's acclaimed soaper Mildred Pierce:

 "Mildred's ambitions are from a "higher purpose" than self-fulfillment. Her words to Pierce, her first husband, elided into one sesquipedalian word, might stand as the motto of the woman's film: "I'lldoanythingforthosekidsdoyouundersandanything," she says, packing another homemade pie into a box for delivery." (The Woman's Film)

I read the book awhile ago and forgot just how refreshingly anti-family and aware of the ickiness of Hollywood's child-worship Haskell was, even back in the 70s when the book was written (it's even worse now). I always have to take a step or two back from film bloggers (who shall be nameless) who gravitate towards the empty-headed all-white, all-straight, kid-ridden post-code style embodied by, say, MGM. Haskell sees through the veils to just how passive-aggressively anti-woman this style is, with the wife or fiancee always determined to end the male's fun, to get him to settle down and to stop risking his life. Showing the woman as buzzkill with no other idea in her head but getting her man to stop whatever he's doing and settle down "is a hoary Anglo-Saxon idea." (157):

 "Marriage becomes the heavy. The implication is clear: All the excitement of life--the passion, the risk--occurs outside of marriage rather than within it. Marriage is a deadly bore, made to play the role of spoilsport, the ugly cousin one has to dance with at the ball. " (The Woman's Film, 156)

In her follow-up to Reverence, Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists, Haskell discusses some of the female icons of the era, including Mae West:

"Her image, complete with body language and voice, lifts buoyantly out of celluloid into space, like the inflatable life preserver that was named after her in World War II. She's a pneumatic floozy presiding over an army of panting camp followers, a Catherine the Great from Brooklyn, a Salome who adds on the layers instead of subtracting them, a Cleopatra whose infinite variety is debatable. ...Looking at her now, we can't but applaud this middle-aged woman (she was forty when she made her first film), undisguisedly rotund, flaunting an unliposcuted, unsiliconed body, and demanding her sexual privileges (72-3)

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Clik here to view.Haskell's book includes the word 'Rape' which I had to blacken out on my copy as even the word has become toxic to the point I was drawing stares in the subway while reading it, as if it was some unholy primer. And of course it's anything but. Haskell's ire isn't directed against sex, or even violence but the dangers of 're-telling' and Hollywood's misreading of the romance novel 'rape fantasy', noting that :

"The minute you describe a sexual encounter to another person it is transformed by the listener or reader into something else, in accordance with his or her fantasy life. I have become aware, in the process of telling of my being "felt up" in the movie theater or rubbed against in the subway, of that person's excitement. The odor and ugliness, the hostility of the actual experience, disappear in the re-telling; the episode is filtered through the imagination of the listener and turned into a sexual fantasy. To describe a sexual act is to launch a balloon whose destiny one can't control." (130)

She also deals with an issue that's become even more problematic in our 21st century landscape of divorces and single weekend dads, the 'Mister Mom' fantasy of 'sensitive men raising children alone while their wives are bitches, missing, or dead' (Kramer Vs. Kramer, Author! Author!, Table for Five, etc.):

"Run these fantasies through the data processor and what do we get? The best woman is a dead woman, especially a dead independent woman! Next best is one who pulls a disappearing act in a manner that reflects badly on her character rather than the husband's. Third preference (where the woman is determined to hang in there and stay married) is an all-forgiving mother-wife, who looks the other way at her mate's peccadilloes and embraces the fruit of his waywardness afterward. Although the women's magazines like to tell us we can "have it all," the message of these movies is that we can't have much of anything... Presumably a great many women are paying good money to choke back tears over a doting Dudley Moore or a fumbling Al Pacino or a misty-eyed Jon Voight. We ought to instead be laughing these male mothers off the screen (126)

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Clik here to view.In the end it's not just that Molly Haskell is a genius with a staggering depth of film history at her fingertips, whose insights into the sexual politics of film are almost inhumanly free of malice, but that she creates a sense of excitement and hope as well as the usual anger at patriarchy. In reminding us that our limited ideas of sex and marriage were fostered by racist, sexist censors from the mid 1930s, Haskell vindicates actresses like Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Shirley MacLaine, and Doris Day, and shows us that film needn't have any correlation with reality, because reality is too busy trying to correlate to film as it is. If we can weed the censor's meddling out of our psyches, maybe sometime in the future sex--even one night stands--needn't be a source of shame and regret, and marriage won't need to be defined by jealousy and suffocation. Maybe if everyone read this book growing up we could be cool again, like we were in the 70s and like Europe still is, instead of being a nation bemoaning its lack of sex while persecuting 'loose' women as whores, never getting the irony. Come to Haskell, and that irony shall set you free.

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as casino sites like http://www.jackpotcity.co.uk let you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. Robbery of a casino meant as a lark is far less, somehow, evil than the actual operation of one. But Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling, to  keep your tells in check and your sense of the odds present without resorting to card counting or cheating, you must be unlucky at love. And what in the end, is a priority? The smart gambler may, Socrsese, at least subtextually, asserts, deliberately sabotage his chances at a happy love life. Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO, in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes, anyway. At any rate, he turns out to be far too stupid to succeed.

I've already covered the delights of the here-and-gone beauty that is Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here). But what about 1995's overseen CASINO? A fine metaphor for the allure of gambling, and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys in suits smoking big cigars, who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers, and glitzy lights are the height of elegance. Their Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, or life. Who wouldn't want that kind of rush? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia, then the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds, grateful to not be lucky at cards after all.

But by the home stretch of the film, the tantrums of Sharon Stone in her Big Oscar Bid bogs it all down. Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen) to come take her away. We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy, then collapsing into tantrums. De Niro wouldn't seem such an unmitigated fool then. Instead he doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she can't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start-- bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't, even after having a kid. The only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.


While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for at least a good hour of CASINO, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him to a gunfight in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.


For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and drive for petit-bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their mix of boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING (or building a helicopter pad for the presumed arrival of his 'pal,' JFK).

Sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. His house is packed with BLOW, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice), and everything by Guy Ritchie.

And that's that.

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"last time it was pink elephants..."

Why is booze funny? What makes this scourge of human civilization, Homer's "cause of, and cure for, all life's problems" so irresistibly funny even when unrepentantly horrible? Can we find out by examining the last film of W.C. Fields', the groundbreaking, surreal, meta, and bizarro masterpiece, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)? Yes. As Fields says in Poppy, "Without purple bark sarsaparilla this mundane sphere of ours would be barren, bleak, and dank."

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"Oh, Uncle Bill. But I still love him."

When I was getting sober I vowed never to lose my affinity for Fields. Booze was a big problem for him, too. And he tried sobriety, especially during a drying out period that saw the end of his Paramount days and 1938, the beginning of his Universal period, inarguably his best. When he came back, though, his boozing had become a cornerstone of his schtick. Of his earlier films, hard drinking only figured in a handful of films. He barely drank at all in It's a Gift. Drank nothing at all in The Old Fashioned Way, Poppy (in both of which he wore a ridiculous, Ziegfeld-style clown costume) and Tillie and Gus, and only had a few evening apple jack nightcaps in Man on the Flying Trapeze. Just being mean to children and never paying his boarding house tabs was enough to be a rogue apparently. But in 1939, for Universal, starting with You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, Fields had full script control, the kid gloves were off and the madness began hellish and chasherlesh.

Over the years I've grown comfortable with the idea of never being able to drink again (it's been 15 misera--I mean beautiful years). The sorrows of life are the joys of art, and all that, so if you're an artist or writer, what better than sorrow?  And as far as muses go, booze is a beautiful, wild demoness. I was just too weak in the end to keep up with her so had to let her go, but I still love her and Fields, slowly dying of alcoholism by the time of NEVER, agreed.  The eternal thirst becomes funny even at its most tragic level, the ultimate in heartbreak, through Fields' blearily-focused lens. I've used the metaphor before of climbing a rocky, snowy mountain as marriage, work, responsibility, chores, mortgages, nagging wife dogging you all the way, and then, when you're 3/4 of the way up the snowy mountain, suddenly a beautiful girl comes sledding past shouting "jump on!" You have a half a tick to decide because she's not slowing down and even though a part of you has vowed to never cheat or jeopardize your home, you just jump on, clamp your hands around her waist and down you plunge, your wife's angry cries disappearing immediately into the background winds.

Then you get to the bottom, and her boyfriend is waiting to punch you in the nose. The girl laughs, and grabs her toboggan and the next chairlift while you lie there, your blood spilling all over the snow. What do you shout to yourself? "Again!"


Booze is like that, and Fields' love for booze reflects a very clear need to escape, to vamoose, to disappear into the ether, down the mountain on booze's reckless sled and thus to let the vicious roundelay of sleeping, waking, eating, shitting, working, dying, recede like the fading cries of your outraged shrew wife.  Even if the disappearance is only temporary, just time eased from its wearying consistency for half a tick, it's worth it.

Civilization has, in it's way, never been able to shake this wild demoness either. Prohibition just made the stuff harder to get, and so more precious, a shared joke with the speakeasy passwords, watered down overpriced Canadian Club, and gold diggers three thick at the bar. Part of the charm of setting a film like International House in China was the lack of prohibition; Americans came out there to get away from the madness. Once prohibition was repealed, things went back to normal, like it does a few months after you turn 21 and the thrill of unlimited access without need of a fake license wears off. So being sober and Lacanian means understanding the reality of booze, which is that getting blotto, never measures up to the wam glow anticipation of getting blotto. The buzz is like music, ephemeral, but in actual consumption of booze comes the fallout of hangover, sloppiness, missed deadlines, illness, and amnesia, and worse, the occasional 'missed launch' wherein you can be so shitfaced you can't stand up and yet horribly sober, miserably conscious of how unenraptured you are no matter how drunk you get. (For a great description of this horror, read Kerouac's Big Sur).

People get into this loop with lovers all the time: you see a beautiful girl, meet her, click, it's magic; one booty call later and you shrink in horror just running into her on the street. Why not leave desire just as it is, desire? It sounds sad, but there's a unique freedom in it once you get over the initial sense of hopelessness. The absence of the desired object creates the longing, which is itself the reward. No romance is ever purer than when the lovers are apart. All it takes is the willingness to embrace Lacanian precepts and let them erode your delusions, like those nanobots in GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA!



Now there are people who aren't alcoholics, so they don't know the joys and terrors of addiction, the horror of convulsions and D.T.s when you quit cold turkey and can't find the half a Valium you had saved. Or the giddy ecstasy of waking up feeling like death, pouring a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice highball, pounding it down in a single gulp, repeating twice, and sitting down to watch your favorite bender movie, SPECIES or APOCALYPSE NOW, and realizing it's only six AM on a Sunday, not six PM, like you feared. You have hours left to try and taper off before work! The world is your oyster! The agony and ache of your morning hangover vanishes and is replaced by ecstasy in a matter of minutes. Suddenly it's six AM on a Monday, and you're thinking of reasons you can't come into work that are not already exhausted.  Godfrey Daniel!

The best way I've learned to explain it is on a mood count of 1-10, ten being exaltation and ecstasy, 1 being grimly depressed or suffering withdrawal. The average person stays around a 5, and drinking brings them to a 6, maybe 7, then back down to a 4 for the next morning, then up to 5 again. But the average sober rating for gamma alcoholics suffering from low affect tolerance, like W.C. Fields and me, is 3, and then drinking catapults to a perfect 10, then goes sailing downwards, arriving at 1 one way or the other, eventually. If you keep a steady buzz throughout the day, you can manage an extended wobble between 7-9, but the longer you keep that up the more harrowing, miserable, and lengthy your stay down at 1, over that toilet, beholding your skull reflection in the waters, because you're too sick to choke down the booze you need to stop you from being too sick to drink. My friends, when that happens, take a break from your six hour stint hyperventilating over the toilet bowl and lean back on the cold tiles and think, "Erich and Fields were here!" And bask in the comfort that there's literally nowhere else to go but up -- or down to zero. And zero means you're off the scale - unconscious, dead, or having a massive orgasm --there is no difference. Zero is both higher than 10 and lower than 1 --again, there is no difference. Either way, you literally cannot lose.

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Fields made it to zero, as we all must, and hasn't worked a day since, but everyone of us still bouncing up this scale and back down longs to escape it, not just to return to the dubious joy of sobriety or alcohol but to transcend the scale altogether, to die, to be really drowned in a vat of whiskey.... that must be... glorious. But since it's too hard to kill yourself, or become a vampire, drink's a fine second, a temporary respite from the abyss of addiction, which it itself engenders (to paraphrase Nicholas St. John).

"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once dear, she drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm indebted to her for," says Fields. It's one of Sucker's more indelible lines, and probably true and it's packed with Lacanian subtext: in ruining his life, this blonde set him free. She brought him down to the 1 or the 2, allowing for more velocity on the rocket up to 10. And that's what we alcoholics really love, the velocity. To shoot from a 1 to a 10 is way more awesome than going from 5-9. In fact you don't even really make 10 unless you get a good velocity going, a good bounce on the bottom spring. If you start at a 9 you'll never even notice the difference! To savor the rush of the climb you need the spring at the bottom, like the bottom of a slot for AA batteries in your remote control. This allows you a bungee-style chance to press your face against the prison glass of death, even sneer at it as it almost grabs you in its skeletal claws, and then suddenly you're bouncing off the bottom, out of its reach, and all one's minor problems--debt, bad marriages, legal troubles, unemployment, bad reviews--recede behind you like that shrew wife's wailing as you rise and rise to 10. DING! A winna! Everything but being alive and relatively uninjured is cake, minor little mosquito bites on a man running for his life (or from his life).  Such a man is Fields. In Never he even literally bounces.

Booze gets you down, and then it gets you back up, like Maxine in Night of the Iguana. She'll always get you back up. Yet at the same time it's the thing that drove you down to the depths in the first place. The technicolor joy of the first few cocktails is just a brief oasis between vast black and white stretches of inhospitable hangover and St. Vitus-dervished desert. But some of us are born to it, like Lawrence, of Arabia. So while I idealize bourbon, reaching slowly with my outstretched fingers towards the giant Knobb Creek bottle in the liquor store window while Sara McLachlan sings "I will remember you / do you remember me?" in my headphones and gentle rain falls, Lacan helps me know that the warm love I feel in my heart is itself the reward, because I have made the sacrifice ala Stella Dallas or Harry and the Hendersons. I can enjoy the feeling I get from remembering booze and yet be free from the torture of longing or the crush of expectations.  Or as they say in AA, "happiness is never experienced, only remembered." Lacan might add, "by it's very definition!"

Fields knew this intrinsically, having had a horrible childhood, having run away from home due to an abusive father. He slept on the street or in unheated pool halls while teaching himself juggling, and yet he made it to the big time. Still, he had no recourse to his messed up existence but to just try and easy does it til cocktail hour, and while he may be metatextually wasted out of his mind here and there onscreen (like the ride with the mayor in You're Telling Me) most of the time he's as nimble as a mountain goat, recycling tin can gags he's been kicking around since the old Follies days but making them fresh as newly-watered daisies, even while eyeing his own drinking through a pragmatic, honest, delightful, hilarious prism.

I have a similar, profound relationship to Never Give a Sucker and Even Break (1941), which aired at 5 AM on a local TV station one early Saturday morning in 1983, when I was 16, the morning before I had to go to my very first-ever day of work. I was tired, of course, having gotten up so early on a Saturday (our VCR timer was unreliable, so I'd get up early and sneak downstairs while my parents still slept, to edit out commercials and musical numbers), and then I had to get up a few hours later to stand and operate a creaky, noxious-fume spewing copier... nonstop for six hours, my chain-smoking boss lady leaping down my throat at the first pause in the clanking, as she stapled copies next to me. I was way too shy to ever ask for my breaks, presuming she would just give them to me at the appropriate time. She didn't.

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"couldn't stand the noise..."

It's no coincidence that my two favorite films of Fields involve copious drinking and air travel of a uniquely Fieldsian character: the autogyro (in International House) and a giant airliner with an open air rear observation compartment and berths like a sleeper car in Sucker. For being 'up in the air' offers its own unique freedom - high in the clouds, free of all responsibility. One is essentially in heaven, Eden, free to drink into oblivion while surrounded by clouds which "look just as fleecy as... clouds" and being waited on by beautiful women.



Fields sings this awesome song while still in his berth after being woken by the stewardess. we see the women in earshot smiling wistfully, with the rush of the airplane in the background it becomes a scene of bliss, a mirror to the earlier scene of Gloria Jean's gypsy folk song while reaction shots of adoring lambs and donkeys intersperse and the camera tracks slowly back to reveal the diegetic, camera-within-the-shot, and microphone and lighting guys. There's a few feints at America's embattled neutrality involving a big mustachioed Russian with huge silk pants who gets "on the head hitted" with a croquet mallet Fields borrows from an Englishman. "I'm neutral, go ahead" Fields says (we wouldn't officially join the war until the following year). Fields seems to be angling for some humor of how uncomfortable it is trying to share space with a giant in an airport bathroom, but he loses his way and winds up with a gag about shaving each other by accident ("that's a hot one!"), and things you only notice after seeing it a few dozen times, are slowly revealed, ike how Fields quietly robs the Russian giant of the contents of his bathroom kit, just in a manner so slight and steady one basically has to focus only on his hands.

This thirst for freedom, the ferocity of chasing your dreams, even if the dream is destruction, even if it pulls you from the forward movement of time into a vertical plunge, this is the definition of America. Here, Fields jumps out the window and is taking a chance, that's the point, as he tells Og Oggilby in his previous film, The Bank Dick (1940): "My uncle, a balloon ascensionist, Effingham Hoofnagle, took a chance. He was three miles and a half up in the air. He jumped out of the basket of the balloon and took a chance of alighting on a load of hay."

"Golly! Did he make it?" Oggilby asks.

"Ah, no... no he didn't, Og. Had he been a younger man he probably would have made it. That's the point. Don't wait too long in life."

The Buddha could not have said it better. Then again, instead of taking a chance you can just stay in the airplane, and write a script about jumping... that's the transubstantiation of creativity at work. Just be smart enough to hide your bottle between your feet, instead of on the open air rear observation compartment window sill.



The normal act of the 'old reprobate' is to make moves on the young daughter, and here in this surreal 'nest' there's nowhere else to go on the mesa but down, The mother (Margaret Dumont), Mrs. Hemoglobin and her fanged rottweiler are inescapable. She might move from outraged to flattered and preparing for her own squigilum rubber, but in some ways this even more alarming. The mesa top is small and we can see the whole thing in detail (above), the round bed on which Ouilatta Hemoglobin (Susan Miller) reclines, looking up in calm astonishment. But just as there's no man around, there's no escape from her mother, "a buzzard if ever there was one," as he later explains to visiting engineers Charles Lang and Emmett Vogan (below). So down he plunges. On a subtextual level, the daughter and mother (and dog) are inescapably joined. Just as Sue Lyon in Lolita inevitably turns into Shelly Winters (see Lyon in Winters) there's no freezing Ouilatta in time, she will become a great dane-Hemoglobin hybrid. His best bet for female companionship is celibacy, to avoid the Humbert Humbert trap and stay the good uncle role with Gloria Jean. It's his one redeeming trait.


Director Cline and Fields incorporate one of Gloria Jean's Russian peasant songs via a mirculous scene in the Russian village bar. Fields is told that the buzzard who lives on the mountain top is rich, causing him to immediately have a moment of clarity about his undying love for Mrs. Hemoglobin. As the music swells slow and mysterieux in the background, he notes, eyes a-twinkle, "she has a good heart, too... in fact she seems like an awfully nice woman to me.... now that I come to think of it." The chorus of the Russian villagers grows louder and we cut back to Gloria Jean joining in the peasant song as her wagon rides up to the village ("How do I get to the Russian village?" - as if there's only one) the song and gypsies seem to coast into the town on the unearthly but achingly gorgeous vibe of their song, Gloria Jean wailing over the top in long sustained notes like a theremin, or Louis Armstrong. So the music here functions in a bizarre way: we don't often hear the music of a separate scene leak over into the other and perform an entirely seaparate function. And we're glad to see the pair re-united after Fields' sudden and strange departure.

And the setting of Russia is telling too. Universal and other patriotic studios were pouring Russian elements into all their films at the time, to create a good vibe for our still allegedly neutral country, to soothe worries about our alliance with a country with a conflicting ideology,  even though they were in some ways little better than Nazis themselves, thanks to the tyrannical purges of Stalinism.

Jongo the gorilla is also an interesting element, too, as he causes Leon Errol to pass out with fear as he's taking a swig from his goat's milk. Jongo sniffs it, freaks out and rescues Errol like he brought a wonderful new game to them. Soon two monkeys and the gorilla are putting their hands over their heads too. Romance has arrived and all the animals at the nest begin behaving like the Maori children humping the trees in THE PIANO (1993).

It all starts rather predictably: blackstronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby - way cooler than Will Smith) is the first man on the 'dark' side of the moon, where he's zapped by a Nazi unit and delivered to a giant swastika-shaped moon base, which was set up in the closing days of WW2 to await the fourth reich, and things drag a bit with loads of CGI tech. But soon enough, it kicks into its unique gear, and then it goes off in satiric riffs on America's yen for sturm und drang. Ausgezeichnete! Perfect for the Independence Day doldrums, for nothing is more patriotic than laughing at our national shadiness as seen through the eyes of the world, even if those eyes are German.

It won't be a surprise to some of us to learn the Nazis built a base on the moon during the second world war, but it might be a surprise to learn that though they've invented some spectacular steampunk devices they lack anything up to date with our cell phones --ironic since there are some paranoid philosophers out there who say cell phone technology came from aliens from the dark side of the moon! It's ironic too that the cellular battery of Washington's cell phone helps power the moon Nazi's long-dormant, gigantic Gotterdamerung device, built by the Aryan Einsten-ish monster und father of cute Aryan English teacher, Renate (Julia Dietze).


Though she loses some of her clothes when almost falling through an air lock the whole of IRON SKY is rather chaste, as behooves 'fuzzy' straight-faced sci fi of this sort. It sees far beyond mere T&A, leaning more towards genuine sociopolitical subversion and media satire. She's never objectified and though a Nazi it's only because she's been led to believe that Nazis represent a N.W.O. of peace, love, and tolerance. During a mission to earth to get more cell phones she's recruited by Vivian (Peta Sergeant) a savvy media planner and presidential campaign manager who lusts after Renate's nominal boyfriend (and the film's charismatic villain), Klaus Adler (Götz Otto) and ends up writing speeches for the current president, a Sarah Palin-type publicity hound, who sent Washington up to the moon in the first place, to promote a "Black to the Moon" catchphrase.


Perhaps only an international conglomerate of filmmakers like this (Australian, German, Finnish) could truly satirize America as deftly as IRON SKY, and since it's language appropriate (the Germans speak German most of the time, mit subtitlen), it has an even-keeled feeling, though the Nazis were the bad guys then, we're very clearly the bad guys now, laying claim to silos of Helium 3, nuking women and children, and generally underwriting global unrest at every step.


There's three ways this could go wrong: either through crappy or unimaginative scripting and fx (Read: SyFy channel original movies), shitty acting and writing (read most direct-to-video efforts), or through a thick veil of fake breasts and simulated sex (direct to pay cable). NEIN FUR ALLES! Instead the writing is clever und witty and lo! UDO KIER ist der jetztlichenfuhrer!


So if at first this seems way too-dependent on CGI to create elaborate but cold, almost-SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW-style steampunk moonbase panoramae and Metal Hurlant style weaponry, stick it out. It will take you some really bizarre places and in doing so eclipse nominal fuzzy sci fi cult-intended efforts like BUCKAROO BANZAI. This was clearly a major labor of love for all involved, and it shows! Six years in the making! Maybe it's because IRON SKY is directed by a Finnish industrial singer Tomo Vuorensola, it reminds me in a way of the Norwegian-directed prequel to THE THING (my praise here).

Indeed, I haven't felt this ducky about something I caught on Netflix since the other big fuzzy horror hit on the 'stream, JOHN DIES AT THE END (see 'Pharmageddon'). That said, it took me a couple tries to get past the long opener. But I have a plan fur dich, meine liebe filmenseher: the nice buzz and low expectations you'll have after all the puny relatives and friends who can't party as hard as you can have to bed gone will create. America, for your bravery under fire and gleeful tolerance of European satires against thee, Heil!


 PS - If you have any doubt of this film's cine-acumen, Washington (whose skin has since been albinoed up by the cray dr. so he can be Aryan, and he winds up looking like Thor) and Renate go see a revival of THE GREAT DICTATOR while in NYC, and emerge to glibly mention the film could easily have been edited down and no comedy should last 125 minutes. For Finnish filmen studentento disrespect Chaplin is to earn them my eternal acclaim.

Okay okay, forget I said anything, pretend all you heard of this film is that it's a typical blue-screen snore and let yourself be pleasantly surprised, and then amazed. Maybe we've never been great satirists of ourselves (don't forget DR. STRANGELOVE was British, as was Chaplin) but we can appreciate little cult-in-the-making gems like IRON SKY and admire how, now that the Nazis are gone more or less, America is (black prez or no) still racism capital number EINS!


UND PPS - Herzlichen Gluckwunsch zum Geburtstag, meinen Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika!

In my eleven feet of apartment, in a couch gone saggy from my restless weight, armed with a cat and a vast battlefield of diet coke and e-everything, a Revolutionary War documentary narrated by Charles Kuralt on the Military Channel over the fourth, me marveling at the mule-headed courage of our American revolutionaries, and shuddering at the hypocrisy at the same time. "All men are created equal," Jefferson writes, believing it "self-evident," yet even on his deathbed, as Karalt notes, the man could only bring himself to free five of his many slaves. The meaning of freedom is lost on those who are born free. Or something. I use my freedom from the need to socialize, the benefits of age and medication allow me to sit and be fully absorbed into what I watch. I observe no bed time, no three course meal structure. I am free, to gild my cage and wallow in the tube's captivity. The world outside the screen becomes more and more like an easily forgettable dream, a tube station, a line to Space Mountain, a place to refreshen one's palate before the next dip into the collective cable-DVD-Blu-ray-Streaming never-ending ocean of options. I am free to choose any illusion, and so restricted, owned by the dream. A slave, at last.


And over in 'real life,' what is it about owning our fellow man that is such a vile turn-on, even in the land of the free? Why are we natural enslavers of ourselves, and each other, we who revere freedom? I didn't realize my next choice, CLOUD ATLAS (2012), would perhaps explain all that and more. In addition to being pretty absorbing, even if on occasion a little didactic, it terrified me! Whippings and escapings of black slaves, SOYLENT GREEN references, incarceration, schizophrenic devil visitations, bombs on planes, cannibalism, Tom Hanks as you've never seen him before, numerous times, an ingeniously understandable futuristic neo-ebonic patois, interesting predictions, way too many Jim Broadbents, and strangely CGI looking faux-epicanthic folds.


Its source novel written originally no doubt in that page-turner potboiler manner where something bad is almost about to always happen at the end of each small chapter, each small victory coming cathartic through the door at the last possible moment, and even if we're all going to eventually be sucked under by the petty tyrannies of the Miss Fellowes-closeted dyke types, racist capitalists and homophobic Capulets, somehow we go on, and write interesting if overly familiar philosophy about our intertwined destinies through one life after another.


The fantasy here isn't reincarnation, for there are enough documented cases of past life remembrance to make that a fact for anyone willing to look at the copious research. The fantasy is that our words, art, or music will somehow endure through the ages, even if it looks for all intensive purposes like we'll die in obscurity, and even if we only get a handful of copies of our music out on CD-R, or LP, or our films are only seen by a few hundred on youtube, our our abolitionist diaries are only used to prop up piano benches, as long as we reach one other person in the future, we will have succeeded, because that person might be us, or have known a future/past version of us, and even be interested in helping this future version of us, based on what they read or heard by a past version of us. And so, each piece of art or writing is a message in a bottle, every shipboard journal or pirate broadcast a possible future bible. It's what we writers and artists and musicians tell ourselves when laboring in near-obscurity, writing sermons that no one will hear. Even if we're world famous we still have to face that blank page alone, and it's never satisfied, even long after inspiration has flown. It's a fantasy I for one cling to like a life raft! But it never keeps me afloat. Only the perfection of craft has any interest for my relentless, cursed muse (her words).

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Hugh Grant - Reloaded

Of course all writers of today dream and wonder about whether their words will live on, or disappear forever in some massive power outage that kills all internet files. We wonder if we wouldn't have been better off writing everything down in longhand and saving it all in a mysterious pouch for our future descendants to marvel over in 3-D Technicolor flashbacks, but years of typing and bad posture and impatience has made our thoughts too rapid for slow pen movements. I end up writing three sentences ahead of my previous one. My text collapses in on itself like a slowly forming whirlpool. Doesn't yours, Mr. Anderson?

CLOUD ATLAS understands all this and has some seriously twisted villains, cast against type mostly, except for Hugo Weaving who is cast as, depending on the century, the Devil, a corporate assassin for big oil interests, an old world evil enslaver of black flesh... and an evil nurse at a no-escape Dickensian old folks home, wherein s/he looks unaccountably like Matt Damon or DeXter. And then, evilest of all, Hugh Grant as a cannibal, a slaver, and an old grotty rich dude who traps his brother in said gulag rest home.

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Hugo Weaving, about to get (finally) clobbered by a Scotsman

But the siblings Wachowski and Tom Tykwer may have brought over too much baggage from THE MATRIX. For one thing, they are way too into face ornamentation and futuristic neo-pagan nonsense (who can forget the shark jump douche chill rave in RELOADED?). The many lives/many genders thing is great, though, and the vibe of impending hostility and anti-freedom crusaders breathing down your neck has never seemed so urgent, such an onscreen page-turner. Having one of your writer/directors as a trans-gender undoubtedly helped this, as who else has the chance to live two distinct but intertwined lives in one skin? But more than gender, this crazy three bask in the glory of art and letters to transcend time, without art and letters, it's all meaningless (life, not necessarily the movies). With the ability of writing to transcend time and keep flames of freedom alive it's like V FOR VENDETTA all over again, or a film they had nothing to do with, THE FOUNTAIN (see: American Grievers), wherein one letter writer gets an art exhibit and people flock to gaze at their faded penmanship of their past selves. Experiencing the full magnificent weight of ATLAS, you get the feeling they're already justifying to themselves that it's okay if this film doesn't make any money; future generations will recognize it as the defining film of our century. Hell, maybe it is.

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The Fountain

And who amongst us, late at night, alone, drunk off our asses with notebook in hand, haven't looked down upon our incoherent scrawls and felt the surging power of Wagnerian music, as if every line will one day be memorized as gospel by millions? And then one day, just used to prop up a lopsided piano bench.
But if you could feel entwined and get that old unfamilar familiar feeling listening to a dead stranger's music, or seeing their art, or reading their life story, or seeing them act in a film, does that make them you in a past life? What about a future life? (Which is how I feel about John Dies at the End). Or what about contemporaries?

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Didn't I write this....tomorrow?

See, I feel that way about Lou Reed (hear me sing "Sweet Jane" here). I felt a deep connection to him and his music even BEFORE I ever did drugs, drank, or realized we shared the same birthday, and studied the same subject at the same University. And so I feel that reincarnation can occur in a contemporary phase. If all of us are connected and time doesn't really exist, then it makes sense that not only will we live many lives along a linear historical axis, but we WILL live every life in our modern era, eventually.

Of course unlike the Wachowskis and Tykwer I'm not a big budget story teller. Rather I am a story liver-througher. I treat what I see onscreen and hear through my headphones as part of my own living heritage. As Peter Tork said (while wearing a white robe): "It is impossible for the brain to distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." Media is more meaningful to me than my own reality, too deep to extract. I can read the future in a passing synchronicity ("plate o' shrimp") on TV, and find any mood or exaltation reflected in any actorly face. God, in other words, speaks to me through the randomness of TV chance. Film is my I Ching.

There are reasons for this: I grew up in the land where color aerial TV was the height of home entertainment children had yet to win the prized alpha position in the household. No child overruled their father on what to watch, so we learned to take it all in without distinguishing what we liked or disliked.  Cartoons were on until dad came home and switched on the news, without so much as an excuse, and I regularly had to go to bed before the end of the prime time movie, forcing me to dream the rest of it. I learned to roll with the boredom, exalt in the heights, soak it all up sans filter, ride the cathode ray like a twin-stalked lobster surfer.

Anyway, my point is this:

Close our eyes and think hard enough and we can feel the feelings of being anywhere any other human has ever existed, if it can be imagined or performed, if we can hear or see our fellow man, we can feel and hear and taste that which is suggested, because our words and music and art creates instantaneous links that transcend time and distance.

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Hugo Weaving

By contrast, the evil people--the racist, classist, sexist, and intolerant-- the Hugo Weavings and Hugh Grants in their various ATLAS incarnations-- will always want to isolate, enslave, incarcerate, or annihilate a subset of humanity, the way they'd like to lance a boil, but they themselves are the boil, and this is their problem. They won't see that. They refuse to be connected in any compassionate way to the people they've deemed lower than themselves, in other words, themselves.

I have only two direct experiences with this, being a child and first learning compassion while torturing Japanese beetles, and one day just getting sick to my stomach instead of sadistically turned-on, and so walking away from the Japanese beetle-killing racket, for good. (they were a major east coast infestation of them in the 70s, and DDT had just been outlawed, and no new pesticide yet invented, and kids were paid well to collect jars of them, picking them off the bushes, masochistically luxuriating in the prickle of their hooked legs on our fingers.

The other time was in the 90s, on cocaine, which effectively wiped compassion from me with a single snort. I've never felt closer to being a criminal! I hate cocaine because it turned me into Richard III.
And this is why to oppress humanity in any of its forms is to oppress a perceived despicable aspect of oneself, which is what leaves homophobic racists on a shrinking life raft once people finally have the guts to turn on them, to wise up to hatemongering as the cover for some illusory lack in oneself. What anti-gay marriage proponents forget to mention is that up until 1968, it was illegal in most red states to marry outside your own race (see: Anti-Miscegenation Laws). Nowadays even the Rushes don't dare wish this law was reinstated, and they'll have to tow that same line in 20 years re: gay marriage. It is the law of reluctant social progress.


I pity the haters in many ways because I know the horrible feeling of powerlessness that underwrites such veiled misanthropy. These souls feel like they can only create human bonds the cheap, fast way, by demonizing a subset. "Not it!" they cry, always first, always terrified of being "it" in life's game of tag. But they know it's only a matter of time before they're next on their own chopping block, like the Duke of Buckingham (above) in Richard III, slowly realizing he's sold out for evil and shall be sold out in turn, for the crime of hesitating even a second over the idea of killing the slain king's children. Lord have mercy on evil kings for they shall get beaten by their own game, as we all will. It can be no other way, by definition. Karma is, if not always instant, certainly so intertwined with its motivating action as to be inseparable.

BUT even within the context of this, there's something downright unnerving about CLOUD ATLAS and its suggestion that evil souls can survive through many lives, rather than the common conception that after one they get ground up in the archons' furnace and have to try again. Hugh Grant and Hugo Weaving however are shits for centuries, persecuting the same souls over and over. Now, I don't believe this is 'really' how reincarnation works. Any of Weaving's characters would probably wind up re-melted in Satan's forge and caste in lower forms, or better still, would reincarnate as their own victim. BUT - it's damned scary to think that this might not happen, and some souls are just evil forever, given a license to shit on the same other soul throughout eternity. That idea is just too odious to bear, though it does make for riveting viewing.


I cooled down after ATLAS in the warmness that is RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935). In this Leo McCarey masterpiece the struggle against systematic oppression involves a third generation English butler (Charles Laughton) learning to stretch out in America's limitless potential as a Washington State restaurateur, and to stand up to both his original British earl "owner" (Roland Young) and current harridan employer, Effie, the petit-bourgeois wife of Egbert (Charlie Ruggles, in his finest hour), the laconic heir to a vast lumber fortune in Washington State. But getting there first involves the pain of being 'lost' in a poker game he wasn't even present at.


"You're going to America, Ruggles," the Earl (Roland Young) simply announces that morning as Ruggles lays out the Earl's suit and hands him the paper.

"The country of slavery, m'lord?" Ruggles warily asks his hungover employer.

"Oh that's all finished, I think", the Earl quoth. And yet Ruggles has been lost in a poker game. He later takes to drink, and starts worrying about Indians, perhaps unaware they are basically genocided out of existence. Still it's quite interesting to hear an English valet dismiss America as beneath contempt for its practice of slavery, which so contradicts the stubbornly un-class conscious country's motto. Meanwhile, a few major cities like New York and Boston hold onto 'old money families' who vainly try to bring their strict stratifications across the land like a plague of misery to the land of the free. Among other brilliant things (I cry every time), Ruggles recites the Gettysburg address, learns to have fun, and is even allowed to drink on the job because Effie is broad-minded.

Director Leo McCarey shows his humanist roo here, and I think it's his best film. His deep distrust snobby Boston in-laws like Belknap Jackson (Lucien Littlefield) who, together with the two sisters, turns the mansion into a gigantic antique shop all tacky and stuffy, and to fire Ruggles for various perceived insults (including, outside a beer-bust, Ruggles kicking him square in the arse). Bellknap and Effie are the types who used to uphold to the traditions of slavery because it was 'being done' in all the best southern families, and if it's tradition and prizes one type of person over another, i.e. enhances or upholds some brutally oppressive class system, then it must be superior to actual open-hearted friendship and the French ideal of liberte' egalite' et fraternite' which is way too populist for the rich afraid of losing their riches.

But as I learned while working in a high end art gallery through the 90s, the really classy people--Ma, Ruggles, Nell, and Egbert --avoid the bourgeois nonsense and stick to drinking and having fun. The highlight being that the Earl and Egbert sneak out of the house to avoid the guests at the dinner party Effie's giving in the Earl's honor. In other words, Effie and Belknap are dependent on people who don't give a shit about social success to achieve the social success they crave!
All Eggbert really wants to do, meanwhile, is drink and hang out with pals and cool-as-hell ma (Maude Eburne, below right), a wise woman cinemarchetype if ever there was one and there was, never getting involved in the petty squabbles amidst her family, just paying the bills and shrugging it off with a good laugh. We should be able to do the same, and thanks to Warner's Archives, RUGGLES is at last on DVD, and looking great. Don't ever not see it.


I'm about out of time so in closing, America, happy birthday again. For the most part, you rule! Just don't try to rule me, because I am not even here, psychically or spiritually. The last thing I want is for you to find that out, and come looking for me inside the screen, hunting your lost property like a relentless alarm clock, insisting as my mom used to do that I come out to work, play, and be my awful trapped-in-the-sticky-amber of linear time self along with all the other kids. It took me years to be able to let all that go and indulge my misanthropy and vanting to be alone. After all, I am not really even my own master - I belong to that remorseless muse, riding me forever deeper into the muck, heedless of fame or fortune, caring only for the next crazy turn in the untraveled yellow wood, as long as it's less traveled, and I don't really have to travel... way too many parents out there.

CLOUD ATLAS - ****
RUGGLES OF RED GAP - ****