Streeting September 10: DEATH FORCE (1978)

Cirio H. Santiago's DEATH FORCE (aka VENGEANCE IS MINE), available on a double bill DVD with his VAMPIRE HOOKERS. I don't know what I expected, but I wasn't expecting an epic. 110 minutes -- a running time that aspires to respect rather than the usual double billing; Arkoff would have cut it off at the knees. But this is Santiago's spear hurled at the heavens; it's his answer to THE GODFATHER, THE DEER HUNTER, HELL IN THE PACIFIC, you name it -- and it toplines James Iglehart, the guy who played the unforgettable Randy Black in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, as well as Leon Isaac Kennedy and his then-wife Jayne Kennedy (who sings). Vic Diaz turns up briefly, so briefly he doesn't make the opening credits. It's not always greatness on a budget, but sometimes it is; everybody's dialled up to 10 and giving it their all. There's a young guy playing an old guy with lousy old-age makeup and Toshiro Mifune stoicism and, by the time he exits the story, by God, you half-believe he was Mifune. Low-budget filmmaking at its most insanely ambitious -- and, I have to say, better than what a lot of Santiago's peers in the drive-in trade could turn out when they were feeling their oats.

Something I Reviewed for VW... Which We'd Already Reviewed!

THE ROOM OF CHAINS
Les Amours Particulières
1970, Something Weird, 68m 52s, $10.00, DVD-R
By Tim Lucas

"The story you are about to see is true. It was taken from the composite files of the French Civil Police." So we are informed at the outset of this enjoyably sick French S&M melodrama, which plays very much like what might have happened had Jess Franco and producer Herman Cohen ever worked together. Produced by the French distribution company Inter Ecran, who had some involvement in Franco's DR. ORLOFF'S MONSTER (1964), this became the first Euro import distributed in the US by Group 1, a company whose fairly explicit trailers promised "total nudity and sexual activity" and featured fake man-on-the-street interviews with supposedly disgruntled/turned-on theater patrons.

Written and directed by Gérard Trembasiewicz (who made only one more theatrical feature, 1974's BLOODY SUN with Chris Mitchum and Claudine Auger), the film stars Jacques Bernard as antiques dealer Georges Garais who, though married to business partner Florence (Evelyne Ker), enjoys a secret relationship with handsome young employee Marc. With emphatic homosexual collusion, if not actual activity, the two men dress in ceremonial robes to eavesdrop on the ritual whippings of various naked, chained, female abductees acquired by a lumbering subhuman gardener in Georges' employ. (Among the kidnapped is Nathalie Nort, last seen participating in an S&M stage act in Franco's SUCCUBUS.) When Marc questions what his mentor is making him do and calls their ritualistic night life crazy, Georges suavely reasons "Yes, Marc, it is crazy. But everybody's crazy─why should we pretend we're not? It's our awareness that makes us completely free."

This anarchistic spirit doesn't quite carry over to Trembasiewicz's directorial approach, which, in contrast to the subject matter, is almost gentlemanly, admiring the female form but depriving the film of any menace or urgency by refusing to depict any persuasive suffering. Indeed, though we hear whipping, we never actually see it, which becomes all the more disappointing when we later discover there's an authentic reason for that. When we're finally left holding all the cards in this poker game, Georges stands out as one of the most hapless and fatuous sickies in cinema history.

However, the film─even in this transfer from a beat-up 35mm print that clearly paid its drive-in dues─is very pretty to look at, thanks to DP Maurice Fellous (ROAD TO SALINA, FACELESS) with lustrous hot pink-to-purple lighting that recalls Rollin's THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES, and the gothic proto-prog score by Guy Skornik (only two cues, one -- which you can hear here -- repeated ad hallucinatorum) shows a pointed Keith Emerson influence. If you watch it, you'll have fun. Available from www.somethingweird.com, who shave off a penny for the $9.99 download.

Harold Lloyd, Master of Suspense

I first saw this famous photo of Harold Lloyd, from his most popular comedy SAFETY LAST! (1923), when I was a child and it connected me instantly and consciously to imagery I had experienced only in dreams. As time marched on, the still image acquired brief bursts of motion, when footage from the rarely screened antique was co-opted into commercials or comedy programming like FRACTURED FLICKERS. I got around to seeing the superb 1989 documentary HAROLD LLOYD: THE THIRD GENIUS (narrated by Lindsay Anderson) and Lloyd's own restaging of his most dizzying career highlight in Preston Sturges' THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (1947) long before my first actual viewing of SAFETY LAST! itself -- which finally took place last night, courtesy of Criterion's often breathtaking new Blu-ray disc, which sports a brand-new 2K digital restoration. It not only makes the actors' pancake makeup nearly palpable, but the powerful sharpness of the image brings us all the more into the presence of its terrors and the sheer cleverness of its meticulous execution. The bigger your home screen, the more you will feel in the pit of your stomach the awful threat of gravity.

Seeing the film at last brought something unexpectedly elemental into focus for me -- not about silent comedy but about what came after. I haven't done any reading about Harold Lloyd, so I have no way of knowing if what I'm about to say is original thinking, but it's original to me and I'm fascinated by it. Lloyd made a few of these so-called "thrill" pictures (as they are called in the THIRD GENIUS documentary, included as a gratifying extra on this disc) and I suspect the reason why motion picture comedy regards him as "the third genius" (after Chaplin and Keaton) is that he was more importantly one of the principal architects of the thriller and, in my opinion at least, the greatest of all influences on the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

This "department store stunt" sequence pictured above essentially takes the archetypal slip on the banana peel to its most terrifying extremes, and it makes us laugh the way rollercoasters make us laugh, by bringing us face-to-eyeteeth with the colossal maw of Death and allowing us to survive that encounter with grace, style and humor. The Hitchcock element looms large in this very photograph: it resonates with the British Museum sequence of BLACKMAIL, the Statue of Liberty sequence of SABOTEUR, with Scottie's fall in REAR WINDOW, with the Mt. Rushmore sequence of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and perhaps most resonantly with VERTIGO. The scene is most challenging in its depiction of a single man attempting to conquer one of collective Man's most towering achievements, and most terrifying in its exposure of the individual to the forces of the world around him. At one point, as Lloyd ascends the face of the building and comes to a ledge, he comes under attack by a group of pigeons in a moment every bit as traumatic as Tippi Hedren's assault in THE BIRDS. The Hitchcock connection must have been noticed by composer Carl Davis who, in his 1989 score, accompanies Lloyd's desperate attempts to swat them away with stabbing strings that recall Bernard Herrmann's shower music for PSYCHO. It is commonly labelled a classic comedy sketch, but it is much more importantly one of the screen's most elaborate suspense set pieces and a masterpiece of sustained anxiety.

Before seeing SAFETY LAST!, I always looked to Germany for the antecedents of Hitchcock's cinema: Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, the expressionists. That has always been the common wisdom. But no... The real Hitchcock -- the American Hitchcock, if you will -- is far more vividly foreseen here in Lloyd's white-knucked grip on the hands of that clockface. It's also there in the closing shot, a disarmingly and charmingly contrived shot of our now-carefree hero walking blithely through a sticky tar spill that pulls him out of his shoes and then his socks, in the way Lloyd seems to say, "When you can't be terrifying, be elegant."

In fact, everything I know about the thriller can be glimpsed here, even when Lloyd's feet are soundly placed on terra firma. His character, The Boy, signs Lloyd's own name on the dotted line, so the identification of actor and director is complete. He moves to the Big City, leaving his trusting girl behind with promises of inevitable success, which lead to deceptions by mail as his metropolitan ship fails to come in, aside from a menial job as a salesman at a fabrics counter in a department store. He lies to his lady love, painting himself into corners that require more lies, and he fetishizes her memory into the gift of a pendant, incomplete as he cannot yet afford a chain for it. When he finally gets the chain, which he can afford only by forgoing a week of meals, Lloyd turns the screws of every last dime of the price tag by showing the components of a window displayed fifty-cent meal disappearing into thin air, piece by piece. (As another master of the thriller, Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, wrote in his own memorable "Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot": "Is the hero getting it in the neck?") Even then, he must have the chain delivered with a handwritten explanation that the "Tiffany" chain is being forwarded by the downmarket Jewish merchant's shop where he actually acquired it on sale. The only way to obliterate the lies accumulated through the hero's best intentions is to force him into a place of mortal peril, fully exposed to the elements, to a jury of his peers, and to a gasping audience. Lloyd compels "Lloyd"'s pretended ascent to success with a literal ascent to success, prodded upwards floor by floor by the perpetual threat of arrest.

Another aspect of the Hitchcockian thriller found here is in Lloyd's sense of America and Americana, the disparity between the wholesome American dream and money-driven Big City reality. It's not hard to see a parallel between this film's Harold and Mildred (Mildred Davis) and, say, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) and his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright) in SHADOW OF A DOUBT; in both cases, a citified cynic finds himself representing a myth of worldly success and adventure to the untravelled small town souls who are least inclined to sit in judgment of him. Harold isn't a murderer of widows in his most brazen reality, but he does turn the crime of an acquaintance into a sanctioned publicity stunt for profit. Many Hitchcock heroes are men who are not who they seem to be: John Robie in TO CATCH A THIEF, Manny Balestrero in THE WRONG MAN, Norman Bates in PSYCHO. 
 
Of course it was from Lang and Hitchcock, not to mention the Edgar Wallace krimis, that the James Bond films also arose. Lloyd's gasp-inducing stunt work, however augmented it may have been with forced perspective trickery, just as surely played a role in predicating those "audacity of Bond" pre-credit sequences which have been thrilling audiences since the heart-stopping ski jump that opened THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and established these as a series must in 1977.  

To see SAFETY LAST! -- a film now approaching its 100th anniversary -- is to see at least 50 other classic movies, unreeling at high speed through your senses in a free-falling rush of recognition. It is to recognize a living tissue sample which shares precious arteries with films playing in theaters today. When one considers that its achievement followed the Lumière Brothers' first documentary uses of their cinematograph by less than thirty years, it puts the supposed technological advances of cinema's last thirty years into comparatively tepid perspective.