The Name of Ligeia, or, I Think Too Much

 

It's been on my mind today that the name Ligeia may be mispronounced in Roger Corman's THE TOMB OF LIGEIA. The lightning bolt came from seeing in print the name of Walerian Borowczyk's wife (who played one of the Future People in Chris Marker's La Jetée) Ligia, pronounced (like Lydia) with the accent on the first syllable; this would seem to be the (or a) more contemporary spelling of the name. The spelling of a name may be modified over time but this isn't usually done unless its familiar, traditional pronunciation remains consistent. I love THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, and its "Lie-jee-ah" is a pronunciation I've grown up with and never questioned; I do wish this hadn't occurred to me. If I'm right, it's going to stand out in future viewings like "Don/Doña Medina" stands out in PIT AND THE PENDULUM.

Franco's Farewell Film

I had been saving it for the right night, but this evening I finally said goodbye to Jess Franco by watching his last movie, AL PEREIRA VS. THE ALLIGATOR LADIES. I have no idea how this film would look to a newcomer, but if you've seen them all or are well on your way, I don't see how anyone could deny that it's the most accomplished, enjoyable and surreal movie of Jess's final phase. It's beautifully shot, scored with freshly recorded music that spans back 50 years over countless movies, and it manages to comment on his entire career, the fantasies that have fueled a lifetime, the changing image of Lina, his long association with Antonio Mayans (pictured) and also the realities of growing older and facing death as the cackling temptations of life dance on. It is entertainment, essay and autopsy all in one, the one film of his video period that I can unhesitatingly call inspired. Who knows? It might be his 8½.

Longer, Redder Nights

I recently came into possession of a copy of Georges Franju's L'homme sans visage (1974), the original eight-part miniseries from which the feature version known as Nuits rouges (US: SHADOWMAN) was distilled. I am currently two hour-long episodes into it, only doing one per night. It has no subtitles, but the language of cinema is present throughout.

I've always heard that the feature version is the better one, tighter, better paced, etc. -- but from what I have seen so far, I doubt this. This version has all the breathing room the feature doesn't, and the best parts are almost always the slow scenes in which evil or magical deeds are made to seem mundane -- or vice versa. The opening night shot of a car's headlights as the vehicle slowly inches down a slope to idle under a bridge while two silhouetted figures dump a lifeless body in the river; bookcases opening to reveal secret passages; or a man in a red helmet and black leather jumpsuit thundering a motorcycle through subterranean tunnels hundreds of years old. This stuff goes straight into my veins; it's why I love movies.

I've heard this miniseries is under consideration for release in France as part of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel's DVD issues of classic French fantasy television, but even if this does come to pass, it won't be subtitled. In the meantime, if the language barrier is no obstacle to you, consult your local torrent provider.

Once Upon A Time on a Lemon Farm

Tonight's viewing included "The Old Man Picked A Lemon" - Episode 29 of Season 2 of THE FUGITIVE, from 1965. It yielded something of interest.

The setting is a California lemon farm where David Janssen's Dr. Richard Kimble has found work supervising Mexican farm hands. When the beloved owner of the farm dies in a car accident, his wife Flo (Celeste Holm) is placed in temporary charge, but his errant and evil son Blaine (Ben Piazza, giving a fine performance) returns from his banishment -- he was sent away after being involved in a car wreck that claimed the life of the chief worker's daughter -- with the intention of selling the place out from under his stepmother. When Flo reveals recent codicils to the will, unknown to the son, which place her in majority ownership, Blaine hires a private investigator to research her and learns that used to work in Miami as a prostitute until eight years earlier, when the father, rich and prosperous, met her, got her phone number ("it was available"), hired her for a week of companionship and, before departing, asked her to marry him -- a story she relates to the sympathetic ear of Kimble. Blaine intends to expose her backstory unless she sells out to him for far less than her interests are worth... and, after much drama, things ultimately go the other way. The story ends with the farm's faithful Mexican workers assembling around Flo at the front porch of the family home, where she warmly invites them all inside for coffee.

If the story sounds familiar, it may be because the backstory and finale of this Jack Turley teleplay are nearly identical to Claudia Cardinale's backstory in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969) -- and her participation in that epic film's finale, when she is encouraged by Jason Robards' Cheyenne to take some water out to the workers who are building the train station on her land. I had seen this episode before but never made the connection till now.

THE FUGITIVE: My 50 Year Eureka

I'm now nearly halfway through my umpteenth viewing of THE FUGITIVE (the original, not the redo), courtesy of Paramount/CBS Television's MOST WANTED EDITION box set of the complete series. I have been watching this show for about 50 years, since it was first broadcast, but only now am I beginning to take notice of what may be its most important sociological subtext.

I am coming around to the view that what is most appealing about the show is not David Janssen (who gives what is still perhaps the most consistently believable performance of a continuous character in television), nor is it Kimble's plight at having to prove his innocence. It's not that at all... but rather that the show (inadvertently?) depicts an ultimate male fantasy of escape.

Think about it: Kimble breaks away from his domesticity in Stafford, Indiana (he didn't "kill" his wife), has numerous encounters and amorous adventures on the road, all while being doggedly pursued by a representative of the very law that tied him to that woman. William Conrad's opening narration ("... reprieved by fate when a train wreck FREED HIM en route to the death house ... FREED HIM to hide in lonely desperation, to change his identity, to toil at many jobs ... FREED HIM to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime ... FREED HIM to run before the relentless pursuit of the police lieutenant obsessed with his capture") keeps hammering those words "freed him" till they sound like serial temptations of the word "freedom." He blames a one-armed man - a metaphor you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out. And at what sort of jobs does he toil? Construction worker, truck driver, road builder, bouncer - the sort of jobs that put hair on a man's chest.

The underlying point is surprisingly stark once you notice it. As dark and challenging as Kimble's fugitive existence may be, it FREES HIM. Once he's exonerated, it will mean a return to a regular existence, to a job and a home and a schedule, and clang clang go the jail guitar doors.

Revisiting Paul and Michelle

Because I am acquainting myself with the work of the late French actress Anicée Alvina in preparation to record an audio commentary for the BFI's forthcoming Blu-ray release of Alain Robbe-Grillet's SUCCESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE, tonight I watched her two best-known American releases, FRIENDS (1971) and PAUL & MICHELLE (1974), both directed by Lewis Gilbert.

The first, best remembered due to its Elton John score, is about a couple of mature-before-their-time 15 year olds who run away from their unhappy homes, cohabitate, and end up having a child together. The sequel (made the same year as the Robbe-Grillet film, which is hard to believe - and the same year I got married, which is still harder to wrap my brain around) picks up their story three years further on, heaping some of life's difficulties on the reunited, but still-young couple. I last saw these movies when I was 17 and single, yet already a working critic; at the time, they seemed simplistic, soapy and wishy-washy to me, but seeing them again took me back with remarkable clarity to what it felt like to be a married teenager with a small apartment and a working wife. This detail alone made them feel unexpectedly moving at times.

Anicée and her co-star Sean Bury (one of the kids in Lindsay Anderson's IF... and Joseph Cotten's son in THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES) meet the challenge of their bilingual roles capably and it seemed to me that it could be argued that these movies -- to be frank, mostly forgotten now -- were the more innocent prototypes of Richard Linklater's BEFORE movies. This series might have continued, but the sequel flopped at the box office. Sean Bury has been retired from acting for some time, and Anicée died in 2006 at age 53, so we can only wonder if this couple ever met again or let each other go. To my surprise, the act of watching the two films again back-to-back made me feel an emotional investment in this young family's future so, regardless of the films' respective weaknesses, I can't exactly write them off as failures.

Neither film is presently available on DVD. FRIENDS is available via Amazon Instant; to see PAUL AND MICHELLE, you'll need to be more resourceful. 

FRIDAY THE 13TH - WHY?

I never understood what shot FRIDAY THE 13TH into the stratosphere. Back in 1980, I saw it opening day with a friend in a cattleplex with only one other person in attendance. There were some very talented people associated with the production (like Adrienne King, pictured, and Kevin Bacon, who is not), but even then, at the outset of their careers, though grateful for the work, they must have felt they were slumming; it was nothing the world had never seen before, done better. All of Tom Savini's superbly devised gore effects faded to white before you could appreciate what went into them -- imagine having to do that with all the funny stuff in a comedy!

I wrote a grumpy, sarcastic review for CINEFANTASTIQUE but the world paid no heed. The movie, though robbed of all its gunpowder by the MPAA, somehow wowed eager-to-be-scared youngsters with fake IDs and went on to become a hit, a franchise, a phenomenon. Some people have written books about it, others have made documentaries about it, like it somehow fried their brain and changed their lives. I'm glad they had some kind of seismic encounter with art, if that's as close as they got, but I sure wish someone with the goods (like George Romero) had caught half the breaks Sean Cunningham did. But he refused to work with the majors (like Paramount), knowing his white lightning would have to kneel and be homogenized.

Anyway, Happy Friday the 13th. If you're looking for a good movie to celebrate with, there is always the wickedly clever seed that inspired this leaden but fruitful franchise: Mario Bava's 1971 thriller BAY OF BLOOD -- now out on Kino Lorber Blu-ray and DVD, with my audio commentary and, for the first time in this country, the alternate Italian cut with different dialogue scenes.

Postscript: Script supervisor Martin Kitrosser (who now works with Quentin Tarantino) told me himself that the "original" FRIDAY THE 13TH was made in direct response to the Bava film; he even proposed dedicating the film to him but that idea was shot down by Sean Cunningham. The Bava film was not perceived at that time as esoteric or even Italian; it played under a variety of titles (like CARNAGE and TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE) under the stars in every other drive-in theater in the country, and it ran in first-run and in support of other grisly features for years and years. You probably could have found it playing somewhere just a few years before FRIDAY THE 13TH opened... but a few years is a lifetime's distance to those people attending indoor showings of FRIDAY THE 13TH when they were 12 or even 17 years old. Those people had likely not seen the Bava film, of course; what matters is that the filmmakers had. Clearly what happened is that some kind of generational leap took place, positioning a new generational wave and F13 at the same cultural Ground Zero; it was the first movie that a large number of young people saw that showed them more than they were used to seeing in terms of violence and sexual candor. Mind you, this was right on the cusp of home video being introduced into people's homes. Had FRIDAY THE 13TH been made a few years earlier and released to drive-ins by a minor distributor, it would have been indistinguishable from any number of other pictures. By the same token, had it opened later in the 1980s, by then, the young people who made it a hit would have seen so much more at home that they would have grown inured to its expurgated charms. However, because FRIDAY THE 13TH was released by a major distributor, because it got a wide release in indoor theaters, and perhaps too because its censorship left some things to fertile young imaginations, FRIDAY THE 13TH had an impact on a lot of impressionable minds. Which may indicate that, in any lucky juncture of the right thing at the right place and the right time, the thing can sit back and let the place and time do most of the heavy lifting.  

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.