The Roundup: October 2-8

Lots of rehearsals this week, so I've even included one from the archives I was embarrassed to put on my Facebook page. And be warned, next week will be very different. It's different now, because Blogger has clearly developed sentience and is formatting this thing on its own.

Siege

Tom Nardini looks particularly hot when taking out fascists.

Paul Donovan and Maura O’Connell’s SIEGE (1983, Shudder) played in its native Canada as SELF-DEFENSE, and both titles fit. It was the first producing effort for Donovan and its shoe-string budget shows in poor print quality, limited special effects (which might be a blessing as it cuts down on the gore) and some amateurish performances. But it has a visceral energy that’s hard to resist and the main setting, Donovan’s own apartment, is a fascinating collection of junk and strange architecture. During the 1981 Halifax police strike, a neo-Nazi group terrorizes the patrons at a gay bar. When they accidentally kill the bartender (Stratford regular Joseph Rutten) their leader executes the witnesses. The sole escapee (Terry-David Depres) seeks refuge in a ramshackle apartment building, where one man (Tom Nardini) leads his friends in holding off the killers with their few actual weapons and some makeshift devices. Yes, it’s STRAW DOGS (1971) with a social justice slant. The film moves well, and there’s some dark wit in making one of the neo-Nazis more effeminate than the men in the bar. It’s also very satisfying that the thugs, however lethal, are rather stupid. The film probably has more resonance now than it had 40 years ago, particularly with its final freeze frame (no spoilers here). But it’s also very much a product of the 1980s. Nardini is being visited by two blind friends, which means he has the benefit of their super-developed blind hearing. And the script gives Nardini a girlfriend (Brenda Bazinet), so we know he and his best friend are just friends. I’d love to see a contemporary version where the man on the run is taken in by a righteous gay couple. I can see Luke Evans and Cheyenne Jackson in the roles, and I’d like it even better if they played long stretches of the film with their clothes off.

Beautiful Darling

I watched this 2010 documentary about Candy Darling on Netflix years ago and found it very moving. The interviews were particularly strong, with chances to see people like Penny Arcade, Helen Hanft, Taylor Mead and my friend Paul Ambrose. They even had archival footage of a play in which Darling and Paul appeared together. With its combination of archival footage and contemporary interviews, it becomes as much a meditation on time as anything else -- what time does to people and the time it takes for a boy from New Jersey to re-create himself as a glamorous star and flame brightly before burning out.

Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald turn middle-class family life into an expressionistic nightmare. 

Nicholas Ray explodes the patriarchal 1950s dream of middle-class perfection in BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956), a Jekyll-Hyde story in which he replaces the unbridled sexual appetites of most cinematic Hydes with a nightmare version of masculine aggression. James Mason, who also produced, plays a grade-school teacher who can barely make ends meet. He’s even taken a part-time job as a taxi dispatcher (imagine hearing those cultured tones when you call for a ride) without telling his wife (Barbara Rush). When he collapses from an arterial condition, the doctors prescribe cortisone. The rush he feels from being pain-free leads him to abuse the medication, pushing him into megalomania and even psychosis. As a result, he becomes a martinet in his home, tormenting his young son with his demands for perfection and eventually telling his wife he’s outgrown her. Interestingly, one of the figures combatting and helping overcome his most violent impulses is a possibly gay gym teacher (Walter Matthau, in only his third film, so the idea of his playing a gay man isn’t that off the wall). Ray and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald have a field day heightening shadows to an expressionistic level as Mason’s psychosis grows more severe, and David Raksin follows suit with the film’s score. Rush starts out delivering the kind of creamy non-acting second-string studio leading ladies like Alexis Smith used to fall back on but gets more convincing as her world deteriorates. At the end, she has a powerful scene telling off the doctors for not letting her know everything going on in her husband’s case because they’re depriving her of the one role society has allowed her, caregiver. Mason is simply masterful as he goes from everybody’s friend to tin-pot Fascist, because he plays his mad scenes as if he thought every outlandish thing he said and did was perfectly logical. In his moments of clarity, he demonstrates that he’s one of the screen’s best purveyors of self-loathing. The script went through several hands, including Ray’s and Mason’s, and the amazing speech Mason delivers coming out of sedation was written by Clifford Odets.

Untamed Youth

Mamie Van Doren puts her assets on display in UNTAMED YOUTH.

Calypso Go Go

Mamie Van Doren helped bring rock and roll to the movies and burlesque to rock and roll. When she performs “Obala Baby” in Howard W. Koch’s UNTAMED YOUTH (1957, TCM, YouTube), the camera dwells on her posterior as she shakes in rhythm to the song. She’s not a bad singer, but in most numbers she’s more contralto than belter, which puts her a step or two away from Mrs. Miller (look it up, you young whippersnappers!). Of course, nobody came to hear her sing. They came to watch her wriggle through her numbers, most of her steps, according to her, improvised. She performs four of the film’s five songs, with the other done by Eddie Cochran, who would go on to become an acclaimed rocker but here seems like a bad Elvis Presley imitator. Most of the songs are extemporaneous performances while the untamed youth of the title relax after a hard day’s work on a cotton farm. They’ve been sentenced there by a local judge (Lurene Tuttle) who provides unpaid labor to farmer John Russell in return for certain, shall we say, intimacies. They’re not all that intimate — this is the 1950s, after all — and she has trouble even getting him to share a drink with her since he’s also using his position to extort sex out of the female inmates. At one point he says, “I don’t like tramps — male or female,” which might suggest he’s not limiting his attentions to the women, but this being a 1950s movie we’d never know if he were. It’s all pretty flatly written and directed except for the dance scenes and an opening escape attempt played under the credits. Some of the dancers are quite good, and Jered Barclay has a funny bit as an inmate who refuses to give in to the rock and roll magic. There’s some good photography of the Bakersfield locations, and cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie gets some nice noir effects in the night scenes. Van Doren plays the young innocent here, which doesn’t quite go with her dancing style, and Tuttle has horrible material with which to work, but Lori Nelson, as Van Doren’s sister, has some good tough girl moments that show she could be more than a perpetual ingenue. The closing number, “Go, Go Calypso” is such an arrant piece of cultural appropriation — with lines like “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a…rum cake” and “Me talkie funny. I take de money. I get de jiggles. Everything wiggles!” — it could be considered an act of international aggression.

Malignant

There's one decent effect in MALIGNANT. Now you've seen it,

so you don't have to bother with watching.

On HBO Max’s page for MALIGNANT (2021), they prompt viewers to “Come for the thrills, stay for the wild ending that has everyone talking.” They should have included “try not to drown in the cheese.” I’ve always thought James Wan was a better director than a writer. He did a good job directing THE CONJURING (2013), but the series fell apart when he started contributing to the scripts. MALIGNANT, apart from a superfluous prologue filmed in the self-consciously explosive style of a Zack Snyder, has some decently shot sequences. After being beaten by her drunken husband (Jake Abel), Madison (Annabelle Willis) starts to experience visions in which first he and then people she doesn’t even know are killed. The effect, as her environment melts into the locations of the murders, is ingenious. And later there’s a great kinetic sequence in which the killer takes out a police squad room. To get there, however, you have to wade through some medical absurdities and a sudden reversion to sentimentality that feels out of place in such a sadistic horror film. Wan worked on the story with his wife, Ingrid Bisu, and screenwriter Akela Cooper. It says a lot that the most refreshing character is a stereotyped black policewoman (Michole Briana White) because her sass keeps cutting through the improbable plot and emotional wallowing. Maddie Hasson is good as Willis’ sister, and leading man George Young sure is pretty. But the script left me crying, “Stop him before he writes again.”

Demons

If Busby Berkeley had made a horror film,

it would have had a number like the motorcyclescene in DEMONS.

Revisiting Lamberto Bava’s DEMONS (1985, Shudder) after two years so I could show it to a young friend offers some interesting perspectives. The story of a movie theatre whose patrons are turned into demons during the showing of a film about a young man turned into a demon is loopy as all hell, with stunt people flying through the air before they’re hit, others who seem to be sitting around waiting to be attacked and a young man riding a motorcycle through a demon-filled auditorium in a sequence that seems to be have been choreographed by Busby Berekeley. But it also has some very compelling elements, principally the art direction. The theatre is a modernist nightmare with saturated colors influenced by the giallo genre (Bava’s father, Mario, helped invent the field) and billowing curtains that seem to have wandered in out of a Jean Cocteau film. Bava does an expert job establishing the various characters — the innocent young lovers, the blind man whose daughter is having an affair he can’t see, the squabbling husband and wife, the pimp taking his working girls out and two music students cutting class. The latter seem to give the film its moral lesson: don’t cut class or you could help start a zombie apocalypse. And Bava keeps the action going with propulsive music from the likes of Motley Crue, Billy Idol, Accept, Saxon and Rick Springfield (!, one of these things is not like the others). There’s a great bit with the action on screen at the movie theatre mirroring events happening behind the screen. And the film-within-a-film looks pretty good without overshadowing the movie containing it.

Ivy

With William Cameron Menzies producing, IVY drips with style.

The credits for Sam Wood’s IVY (1947, Criterion Channel) play over an image of an urn containing flowers. At their end, the urn becomes a skull. That sets the tone for this gothic noir set in Edwardian England (the original novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes took place in the 1920s). It’s a visually scrumptious film, with producer William Cameron Menzies, a frequent Wood collaborator, supervising production design and even some of the camera set-ups. Joan Fontaine, often in white, looks the perfect young innocent. But she’s actually an ambitious schemer. Having run through husband Richard Ney’s fortune and tired of doctor lover Patric Knowles, she comes up with a plan to rid herself of both so she can seduce wealthy businessman Herbert Marshall. In the 1940s, her evil was so shocking it cost the film at the box office. Today, it seems like fitting revenge for saddling her with three such tepid leading men. Charles Bennett’s screenplay starts with Fontaine presented as a Gothic victim. She’s covered in shadows when she visits a fortune teller (Una O’Connor) whose spooky presence seems to terrorize her.  But when O’Connor advises her to dump her lover because she’s about to meet a man who can solve her problems, Fontaine perks up, and you realize how amoral she is. The actress looks terrific and has some fascinating flirtation scenes, though when she’s being duplicitous, she strays into the Joan Crawford school of energetic overstatement. None of the men are a match for her, but the film has some intriguing character women who more than hold their own, including Lucille Watson as Knowles’ mother, Sara Allgood as his nurse and Rosalind Ivan as Fontaine’s maid, a woman who can find the laughs in a mourning scene. Russell Metty did the moody cinematography, Orry Kelly and Travis Banton created the costumes and composer Daniele Amfitheatrof pours on the harpsichord whenever Fontaine does something particularly evil.