The White Elephant Film Blogathon, pt. 2

I wish I had the raggedy poncho concession in the mythic Old West where all the spaghetti Westerns take place. I'd be a very rich man. But as The Strangers Gundown illustrates, wealth is no protection when you've got a vengeance-seeking Django on your ass!

According to IMDB, the original title of The Strangers Gundown, my White Elephant Blogathon movie—and thanks again to Ben & Co. at Lucid Screening for letting me join the fun—is Django il bastardo, so I'm going to call it that. While The Strangers Gundown is a not-inaccurate description of what goes on, I can't figure it out grammatically, since the verb gundown isn't in Webster's, and shouldn't Strangers have an apostrophe? And Django, he is a bastardo.

Since my experience with spaghetti Westerns doesn't go much deeper than Sergio Leone's classic trilogy, I don't really know much about the Django character, who's been played by many different actors. I get the sense that there are a lot of Djangos, and that they don't really have anything to do with each other—kind of the way that every muscleman in a loincloth in Italian peplum sword-and-sandals movies became "Hercules" in the dubbed versions. Or maybe Django's just a really popular name among the cheroot-chewing gunfighter set.

In the beginning of the movie our particular Django (Anthony Steffen) is seeking some unspecified revenge, and he has a pretty baroque way of going about it: he has a grave marker made with his victim's name on it and that day's date, then provokes the guy into a gunfight (or, well, a gundown). Ultimately he's after a pair of brothers, mastermind Rod Murdok (Paolo Gozlino) and loose cannon Luke (Luciano Rossi, who lays on the crazy with a trowel). Along the way he wastes a small army of killers that Murdock hires in a futile attempt to protect himself. Murdok was Django's superior officer in the Confederate army—when Murdok sold out his company, Django and his comrades were set up to be slaughtered.

Back in the present, Murdok has his men evacuate the prosaically named Desert City, the better to hunt down Django, and the last act of the movie plays out as an extended game of cat and mouse. Django's not a character so much as a gimmick, but as far as gimmicks go, it's a good one: he's like the Shadow, appearing suddenly and lethally out of the darkness, showing up in impossible places and vanishing just as mysteriously, standing silently in the background until time to strike. Director Sergio Garrone is endlessly inventive in terms of contriving ways for Django to show up in the frame, with nobody—including we the audience—realizing he was there all along! In the movie's wittiest moment, he sits in the saloon playing solitaire while Murdok's killers plan to go out and hunt him down. I was pretty sure he was a ghost, a la High Plains Drifter, until Luke Murdok gets the drop on him, and he turns out to be very much flesh and blood.

There was no question how Django il bastardo was going to end, but it was still more entertaining than I expected it to be, getting to that point where he and Rod Murdok square off, Murdok's grave marker standing between them.

The White Elephant Film Blogathon, pt. 1

Welcome back to the Athens Film Festival after a bit of a hiatus! Today Athens and I are playing host, we hope, to visitors from the White Elephant Film Blogathon, an annual smorgasbord of movie blog reviews we're honored to be participating in. (I hope that dip will be OK sitting out all day....) More details about the blogathon can be found by following the link to Lucid Screening on the right. If you're visiting as part of the blogathon, welcome, have a look around, and come back often!

The first AFF blogathon post today actually comes from a guest programmer, friend of the festival Tasha, who offers her take on her blogathon-approved selection Les Chansons d'amour. It was Tasha who introduced us to the blogathon in the first place. Thanks, T.!

Les Chansons d’amour is a musical, the bittersweet story of a ménage a trios that ends prematurely.

“The mystery of your weary gaze,
A mystery that keeps you in a haze.
The secret of this daze,
Secrets are my true craze.”

The primary relationship in the film is between Ismael (Louis Garrel) and Julie (Ludivine Sagnier); but Julie, not entirely satisfied with the way things are going, invites Alice (Clotilde Hesme) to join in. There is one rather ambiguous scene with the three of them in bed, and then the film cuts back to Ismael and Julie as a couple. As the viewer is left pondering the rather doubtful future of this threesome, Julie abruptly drops dead, and thus the threesome ends. The rest of the film follows Ismael, singing, moping, drinking, walking the streets despondently, and finally discovering a new love.

At the beginning, Chansons d’amour reminded me a lot of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: the young lovers, Sagnier’s blonde hair and white coat, the push-pull friction of heady, romantic love. But after Sagnier’s blonde hair, cute outfits, and shimmering presence disappeared, I began to lose interest; not in the least because Ismael, as played by Garrel, is mopey without eliciting much sympathy. And the musical numbers, even with their odd and ridiculous French-to-English lyrics, become tiresome after a while. Despite the rain soaked beauty of Paris, Chansons d’amour flows uninspiredly, without the charm or immediacy of Demy or Godard’s musicals, and without enchantment.

“Burn when you sink into my bed of ice,
It melts when you hug me like a vice.”

Thanks, Tasha! Sounds like one Athens and I might skip, although we do love bad translations of French song lyrics!

Stay tuned later today, when Athens and I will be reviewing the 1969 spaghetti bloodbath The Strangers Gundown, though we prefer the original title, Django il bastardo.

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry

"Any town's a nice little town when you nail a broad." Words to live by, n'est-ce pas?

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is a movie I remember from my childhood—not that I would have gotten to see it, of course, but I remember the ads in the paper, and sensitive child that I was, I found the title vaguely alarming. If only I had known that Larry's craziness is confined almost entirely to his reckless driving, and that Mary isn't really dirty, unless you define dirty as speaking with a dubious American accent. But I guess Dubiously Accented Mary, Unsafe Larry wouldn't have put asses in seats.

What Mary (Susan George) and Larry (Peter Fonda)—along with Deke (Adam Roarke), Larry's mechanic and the brains of the outfit—are is insufferably smug, to an extent that we kind of wanted to see them get caught by the sheriff Vic Morrow. For a hard-driving gang of robbers, they don't really seem to make much progress in getting out of Sheriff Vic's jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the chases, involving the muscliest sort of muscle cars that sound impressive even to non-gearheads like Athens and myself, are kind of exciting. There's even a duel between Larry's charger and a helocopter that's pretty cool. And then, in a cautionary moment befitting Last Clear Chance... well, I don't want to spoil the jaw-dropping ending, but let's just hope what happens led to safer railroad crossings throughout this county.

Bruce Lee: His Last Days, His Last Nights

Did you know that to really understand the death of movie star, martial artist extraordinaire, and philosopher Bruce Lee, you have to know all the dreary details of wannabe actress, gambling addict, and pathological whiner Betty Ting Pei's life? Lee died in Betty's apartment in 1973, and she took a lot of flak for it, apparently, so three years later she decided to set the record straight in the terrible Lei Siu Lung yi ngo, or Bruce Lee and I—with the emphasis really on the "I." Betty tells her story to a sympathetic bartender while a gang of toughs wait for her outside the bar. In her flashbacks Lee is played by Danny Lee, who doesn't really look like Lee and totally lacks his charm and athletic prowess and catlike grace. The fight scenes are incompetently staged, and dim mak isn't even mentioned!

Here are some things Athens and I learned about Bruce Lee from His Last Days:

1. Betty Ting Pei loved movies when she was a girl and always wanted to be an actress.
2. Betty Ting Pei's gambling problem was the only thing that stood in the way of her success.
3. Betty Ting Pei only ever posed in the nude because she was drugged.
4. Bruce Lee regularly made it a point in contract negotiations to get Betty Ting Pei movie roles. (Though wouldn't you know it? She's about to get her big break when he dies on her!)

Somehow I don't imagine His Last Days really did much to rehabilitate Betty's image in Hong Kong, but I could be wrong.

House of Bamboo

Athens and I love it when Robert Ryan plays bad guys! (Cf. The Naked Spur, Crossfire, Act of Violence, Beware, My Lovely, Bad Day at Black Rock...) He's pretty despicable in House of Bamboo as the head of a quasi-military gang of crooks in postwar Tokyo. While you're not sympathetic to him, you always care what's going on inside his head—as when he realizes he's executed as a traitor the wrong crony (Cameron Mitchell, who dies rather spectacularly in his hot tub). Ryan's Sandy also goes out in remarkably vicious style, slinging lead into a crowd of Tokyo carnival-goers with no regard for any innocents who might get caught in the crossfire. A magnificent bastard, just like Athens (without A's lovable side, though...)!

Where Have All the People Gone?

I didn’t find any evidence that TV movie Where Have All the People Gone? was actually a failed pilot for a series, but it definitely exhibits some of the danger signs:

1. Dubious premise. In WHAPG? a really big solar flare mutates a virus that inflicts a rapidly disintegrating disease on all except those few who have a genetic resistance to it. Thus the majority of the human race has been reduced to little piles of white powder inside their clothes. It’s a really rapid disintegration. Oh yeah, and all the animals have gone crazy. Peter Graves and his son and daughter were on a remote camping trip in the mountains—which in retrospect was coincidental to their survival—and try to reunite with Graves’s wife. It’s sort of like Panic in Year Zero!, only without the jazzy score or Frankie Avalon. Or any panic. This is not a very exciting apocalypse.
2. Overly neat casting. Along the way Graves and family add a bereaved mother and an orphaned child who's handy with a gun to their entourage, becoming the model post-catastrophic blended family. (Do I need to tell you that original mom ends up blowin' in the wind?) 1974 would not have been too early for a black man to get added to the mix, Athens notes, but no dice. In the fevered imagination of Peter Graves, the end times are lily white!
3. Hopeful, open-ended narration. Daughter Kathleen Quinlan ends the movie with the sentiment I don’t know what the future holds, but whatever it is, we’ll face it together.
4. Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. Wow, what a career this guy had! Genesis II; The Strange and Deadly Occurrence (note the definite article—that was one strange and deadly occurrence!); Ebony, Ivory, and Jade; Conspiracy of Terror; The House That Would Not Die; The Death of Me Yet; and episodes of Mannix, Kung Fu, Police Story, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O… plus, he helmed the cult classic The Night Stalker with Darren McGavin as quixotic supernatural-investigating reporter Carl Kolchak—the pilot for one of my all-time favorite TV series (which still shows up on Sci-Fi once in a while).
5. Peter Graves. Around this same time Graves played a secret agent in Dead Man on the Run, a retired cryptozoological big-game hunter in Scream of the Wolf, and Lew Archer in The Underground Man. It was the post–Mission: Impossible era, and Pete needed another regular paycheck.
Where Have All the People Gone? wasn’t the first time, of course, that Peter Graves faced the end of the world from extraterrestrial sources. There was The Beginning of the End (which I always thought was called The Beginning or the End?, but maybe that’s a different movie), It Conquered the World, and Killers from Space, and that was all in a three-year period! God knows how many alien invasions he foiled in his downtime.

The TV movie… Writing this post has made me nostalgic! Once a reliable, ninety-minute delivery system for thrills and chills, as an art form it’s gone the way of scrimshaw, ships in bottles, and regurgitation on demand. But Athens and I won’t forget! Here’s to you, Killdozer! Here’s to you, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Horror at 37,000 Feet! Here’s to you, Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Summer of Fear, and Satan’s School for Girls!

The Blue Dahlia

The Blue Dahlia is a Raymond Chandler mystery without Philip Marlowe, unfolding in a corner of tawdry Los Angeles away from the watchful gaze of that tarnished knight. And that makes it kind of awesome! Athens and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the copout of an ending. Alan Ladd is heroic flyer Johnny Morrison, returning home from the war to find an unfaithful wife who, worse, confesses that she killed their son while driving drunk. Johnny decides his wife isn’t worth killing, but somebody else thinks she is. The only people who believe he’s innocent of the murder are war buddies William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont (!) and Veronica Lake, the estranged wife of nightclub owner Howard da Silva, Johnny’s wife’s lover and Johnny’s main suspect in her murder.

The Blue Dahlia came out in 1946, the same year as The Best Years of Our Lives, and it’s the Chandleresque dark mirror to that classic. Like Dana Andrews in Best Years, Ladd’s Johnny also comes home to a crumbling marriage; and like multiple amputee Harold Russell, William Bendix’s Buzz comes back an irrevocably changed man—in Buzz’s case, with a plate in his head that leaves him prone to fits of rage, particularly when there’s “monkey music” (that crazy big-band swing!) playing on the jukebox. Athens and I are reminded, as with others of the movies we watch here at the Athens Film Festival, that the war and its aftermath is always a subtext of film noir’s morally askew, fatalistic, violent vision of the world.

I mentioned a copout, and without giving away too much, I’ll just observe that The Blue Dahlia goes to absurd lengths to exonerate poor, demented Buzz of the murder, despite clearly heading in that direction. Somewhere I read that Chandler had intended him to be the killer but that it was decided that a disabled returning vet couldn’t have done it. (By the 1960s, of course, the crazy-returning-vet-killer would be a cliché.) Instead, the murder has more venal, but in context slightly less plausible, origins than the madness of war.

Still and all, The Blue Dahlia is one of the highlights of the AFF so far, with nice chemistry between Ladd and the doll-like Veronica Lake, great villainous turns from da Silva and Don Costello, and pungent LA atmosphere. Athens and I would be remiss not to mention Will Wright, Scroogey old Ben Weaver from The Andy Griffith Show’s Christmas episode, who’s been in several other AFF features: All the King’s Men, as the crooked sheriff and Willie Stark’s first political rival, and Act of Violence, another fine thriller that engages the moral morass of the postwar era, in which he has a small (but memorable) part as “Boat Rental Man at Redwood Lake.” The Blue Dahlia has to be one of the standouts of his movie career, as corrupt, passive-aggressive house detective “Dad” Newell. House detectives—this is such a hard-boiled concept to me. With all due respect to the honest, hard-working house detectives out there, what possible function could this person have other than to cover up crimes that occur in a hotel, and then blackmail the guests involved?

The Dark Past

Today Athens and I watched a sort of Freudian take on
The Desperate Hours, with Lee J. Cobb as a psychology professor and William Holden as the fugitive convict holding Cobb, his family, and their weekend guests hostage. Cobb comes to realize that if he can just unlock the secret of Holden's recurring nightmares, then--then--well, it's unclear what he hopes to accomplish, actually. But they spend several not particularly desperate hours free associating, playing chess, and throwing darts before solving the riddle. Holden has his breakthrough as the cops arrive to surround the house--he finds he doesn't have it in him to shoot his way to freedom anymore. "Al Walker never killed anyone again," Prof. Cobb relates to the cop who's been listening to his story. I should hope not! Presumably he went to the chair.

Since Al Walker and his gang don't turn out to be that threatening, and Walker's neuroses are pretty thin stuff, The Dark Past is mostly devoid of dramatic interest. It's 75 mins long but still feels slack--a subplot about Cobbs's visitng friends, a married couple and the wife's lover, that goes nowhere. It kind of reminded me and Athens of a training film for forensic psychologists: Cobb is ostensibly telling the story to explain how he came to work for the police, but the movie doesn't bother to stick to his point of view. Our favorite part has Walker's moll, played by Nina Foch, describe Walker's recurring nightmare, which we the audience get to see in a sort of expressionistic, reverse negative style. So we get to see a dream described by somebody who didn't have it, in a story being told by a third person.

One other moment I'd like to mention: early on we see a night's arrests being lined up in front of an entire police squad, and one by one the crooks (which of course they are--nobody innocent is going to get hauled in) stand in front of a microphone and our interviewed about their crime, record, etc. Another movie in the Athens film series, The Sniper (dir. Edward Dmytryk), had a similar scene, where some usual-suspect sex offenders were paraded before a detective squadron and grilled embarrassingly. I think if I were a policeman, this would probably be the best part of my day, and I'd be as proud as a parent at a Christmas pagaent when my collar stepped up to the mic. I'm guessing that some unfortunate Supreme Court challenge put an end to this showy procedure.