Queens

  

 Three queens — Barrow (Robert James-Collier) in Downton Abbey, John du Pont (Steve Carell) in Foxcatcher and Hubert (Xavier Dolan) in I Killed My Mother —

 the good, the bad and the much, much better

When the first season of Downton Abbey originally aired, I told a friend how hot I thought Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the gay footman, was. “But he’s evil,” my friend protested. True, during the series’ first few seasons, Barrow was notorious for scheming to get at anybody he thought threatened to surpass his position in the household. At times — as when he tried to embarrass the new valet, Bates (Brendan Coyle), who limped because of a wound sustained in the Boer War — he was downright vile.

But writer Julian Fellowes contextualized Barrow’s plotting early on. The revelation of his homosexuality came in a particularly painful scene, when he was rejected by the Duke of Crowborough (Charlie Cox), with whom he had enjoyed a sexual relationship until the Duke started courting the upstairs family’s eldest daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery). It was one incident, but it set the stage for the depiction of Barrow's sexuality during the repressive years of the early 20^th Century. Although hardly enough to let Barrow off the hook for his worst misdeeds, it at least explained his excessive concern with his place in the household. As a social outcast, it was all he had, particularly since for the series’ six-season run he never had a love interest.

In the new feature film version of Downton Abbey, Barrow is back. He's risen to the post of butler with the retirement of family standby Carson (Jim Carter) at the series' end. Although the film's principal focus is the turmoil wreaked by the announcement that King George V and Queen Mary will be visiting the Abbey, writer Julian Fellowes has given Barrow a subplot. When Lady Mary asks Carson back to help with preparations, the younger butler decides to take the weekend off and accompanies one of the king's valets, Richard Ellis (Max Brown), on a trip to York. There he's picked up in a bar and taken to an underground gay party. It could be a scene out of a gay pulp novel as he walks in on a large room filled with men dancing and making out, but there's nothing smarmy or exploitative about it. Rather, this is Fellowes’ presentation of what life was like for gay men outside the big cities in the period between the wars. The scene offers the character a rare release and, once again, suggests that he's been more than just the stereotypical soap opera spoiler. There’s a liberated feel to the sequence, particularly in the shots of Barrow dancing joyously with another man, but there’s also a sadness at the shabby surroundings where gay men were forced to hide their desires.

Like the series on which it is based, Downton Abbey the film is a curious paradox. It upholds, even exalts in the notion of class distinctions with its nostalgic depiction of the upper-class Crawleys, living with style and grace on their palatial estate while served by a large staff led by champions of tradition like Carson, Barrow and the housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan). Yet the series itself, with its strong ensemble and the equal disposition of drama between upper- and lower-class characters, dissolves those class differences on a meta-theatrical level. When it comes to playing their roles, suffering nobly or dashing off humorous lines, all good actors are created equal.

This also seems to extend to the film’s (and series') handling of social issues. Fellowes does not flinch from depicting the negative side to the treatment of women, LGBTQ peoples and racial minorities during the early 20^th century. In the film, the Crawleys' younger daughter, Edith (Laura Carmichael), bemoans the fact that marriage to a marquess has meant giving up her career as a magazine publisher. As a married noblewoman, her only acceptable job is serving on committees. A Crawley relative serving the royal family reveals that her personal maid is actually her illegitimate daughter. It's probably stretching credibility a bit that the Crawleys, even the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), accept the fact that the illegitimate child will be their cousin's legal heir, just as they accepted Edith's adoption of her own illegitimate daughter. Through the series, the family was also amazingly open to Barrows' sexuality. Only some of the servants were less trusting. Had it not been for the support of the two lady’s maids, tolerance would have seemed a class-based virtue.

In a sense, Downton Abbey is a fantasy, a look at a world that no longer exists and probably never really did. It's a very entertaining fantasy. Any opportunity to see Smith is to be treasured, particularly when she's matched with a wonderful sidekick-cum-sparring partner like Penelope Wilton, who plays the mother of Mary's late husband. The entire cast is a joy to watch, and James-Collier should be commended for his commitment to his character — homosexuality, rough edges and all. Although the actor has complained about being typecast, he still gives the performance his all, and the film would be far weaker without his presence.

Though some have complained that the film version is just an expanded episode of the original series, that’s not entirely true. There’s a broader sweep to some of the filmmaking that makes big events like the reception for the king and queen and a royal ball suitably impressive. And even without those expanded production values, a return to the series’ virtues is hardly a bad thing. There should always be room in the movies for grace and the delicate playing of expert actors.

Yet, there's also something a little unsettling about the fantasy, particularly in a world where we're seeing the ravages of inherited wealth and where labor has become just another means of exploitation. I wonder how generous we'd be toward the series if it were set on a Victorian estate in Africa or an antebellum plantation in the American South, where the genteel white ruling family would treat their slaves with dignity, help those outside the family estate when they could and weep picturesquely for those beyond the range of their largesse.

Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and all that makeup in Foxcatcher

Bennett Miller’s 2014 Foxcatcher offers a far more jaundiced view of inherited wealth. The film purports to depict the real-life events leading to John du Pont’s murder of David Schultz, the coach of a wrestling team he sponsored. I say “purports” because the film takes a very liberal approach to facts that ultimately makes it less than satisfying.

The du Pont case is a perfect vehicle for an attack on the privileges of wealth. The man had exhibited signs of mental decay for years. In his 2014 memoirs, David’s brother, Mark, said that du Pont seemed off from the moment he first met him before accepting a job as assistant coach to a team du Pont was sponsoring  at Villanova University. Even before that, du Pont’s one marriage had ended when he physically attacked his wife. In the months leading up to David Schultz’ 1996 murder, du Pont’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. He believed CIA agents were lurking in his mansion’s walls and that David was part of an international conspiracy to murder him. All of this took place eight years after Mark had left du Pont’s employ following the 1988 Olympics.

Understandably, many of the events in the case were streamlined for storytelling purposes. Mark’s various telephone conversations and an earlier meeting with du Pont in a hotel are compressed into a single meeting at du Pont’s mansion. His living arrangements — first at an apartment he rented near Villanova and then in a room in the chalet on the estate’s grounds — became a single stay at the estate, where he has free run of the chalet. In addition, David’s murder seems to take place shortly after Mark’s departure.

All of this could be written off as dramatic license, a necessary tightening of events for dramatic effect. But events are also arranged to create the distinct impression that du Pont’s mental problems spring from repressed homosexuality. As Mark and du Pont become friends, du Pont asks the younger man to wrestle with him in a late-night session during which the film clearly implies that du Pont sexually molests him (Mark Schultz vehemently denies anything of the sort happened). After that, Mark’s behavior begins to deteriorate as he starts drinking, snorting cocaine and overeating so badly that he initially fails to qualify in his weight class at the pre-Olympic trials. His friendship with du Pont disintegrates, and his departure from the estate after the Olympics seems to result from that. With the compression of time between his leaving and David’s murder, it’s almost impossible to see the crime as motivated by anything other than sexual rejection. Du Pont, then, joins a long line of cinematic killer queens, some presented sympathetically, some as two-dimensional plot devices.

I must confess that at times I don’t understand straight filmmakers, particularly when they depict LGBTQ peoples. It’s not that I think only gay filmmakers can depict gay characters honestly. There have been many sensitive depictions of homosexuality by straight writers and directors (like Julian Fellowes’ in Downton Abbey). Nine years before they made Foxcatcher, director Bennett Miller and writer Dan Futterman did a terrific job with Capote (2005), about the famous author’s relationship with killer Perry Smith that led to his writing In Cold Blood. They even gave him a hot partner by casting Bruce Greenwood as Jack Dunphy, the novelist and playwright who lived with him from 1948 until Capote’s death in 1992.

Why, then, did they add a gay element to Foxcatcher that not only cheapens the story, but also obscures the issues related to du Pont’s case? There’s a slight precedent for the invention in a sexual harassment suit brought against him by another wrestling coach with whom he had worked at Villanova. But making sexuality the center of du Pont’s breakdown in Foxcatcher takes the focus off one of the most interesting aspects of the murder case, the way du Pont’s privileged position as heir to one of the U.S.’ greatest fortunes insulated him from any kind of intervention as his behavior grew increasingly erratic.

Nor does it help that two of the leading players seem insulated from the audience. As du Pont, Steve Carell wears a two-hour makeup job to capture the character’s facial contours and performs with dead eyes and a persistent head tilt to the back that creates an almost perpetual sneer. It’s the kind of one note, overly made up performance that wins people Oscar nominations but never really comes across as totally human. That’s particularly disappointing given Carell’s stronger work in comedies like Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). He was more expressive as a puppet in Welcome to Marwen (2018). Channing Tatum, who brings less to the table than Carell, plays Mark Schultz behind some extensive make-up, as well. The plugs used to give him a wrestler’s nose and plumpers that fill out his jaw make him even less expressive than usual.

Of course, extensive makeup doesn’t have to get in the way of a performance. Samantha Morton manages to bring Alpha to life each week on The Walking Dead despite playing many of her scenes behind a full-face mask. As David Schultz in Foxcatcher, Mark Ruffalo is also heavily made up while working with a new hairline, 30 extra pounds and a full beard, yet he manages to turn in a fully realized performance. Then again, he’s even done credible work acting through motion-capture technology to play The Hulk in Marvel’s superhero films. He doesn’t get all the acting honors. Vanessa Redgrave may have only three scenes as du Pont’s mother, but she easily creates a strong portrait of the powerful, demanding woman whose withheld affections contributed to her son’s mental problems. Of course, she’s been acting for so long and at such a high level of achievement it sometimes seems there isn’t a script or a director that could defeat her.

Lord knows, Miller tries hard. The filming style that worked with Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s flamboyant interpretation of Truman Capote — slow, long takes with lots of long shots and a washed-out, wintery palette — isn’t as effective when two of your leading players are doing everything they can to repress any level of humanity in their work. As Carell’s du Pont leads Tatum’s Mark Schultz into a life of privileged dissipation — introducing him to cocaine, conspicuous consumption and gay groping — the film seems less a dramatic reinterpretation of a real-life murder case than a slowed-down version of “Boys Beware” (1961), the infamous educational film warning young men about the dangers of homosexuality.

Xavier Dolan and Anne Dorval connect on an almost genetic level in the wonderful I Killed My Mother

It’s a natural rite of passage that many young people outgrow their parents. This can be particularly telling for people on the LGBTQ spectrum, whose discovery of their sexuality often means a rejection of their parents’ heteronormative worlds. That’s the twist French-Canadian writer-director-actor Xavier Dolan brings to the coming-of-age story with his first feature, I Killed My Mother (2009). Written when Dolan was 16 and filmed when he was just 20, the piece is an impressive, often shocking feature debut.

In the semi-autobiographical tale, Dolan is Hubert, a rebellious high-school student who underachieves at school despite showing promise as a writer and artist. His mother (Anne Dorval) is a middle-class drudge who can do nothing right in his eyes, while his father is largely absent, having left wife and child after seven years upon realizing that he just wasn’t cut out to be a parent. Hubert is developing tastes of his own, which makes it hard for him to deal with his mother’s bourgeoise affectations. He’s also come out to himself without bothering to tell her. She only learns he’s gay when she runs into his boyfriend Antonin’s mother at a tanning salon.

Given Dolan’s youth and the autobiographical elements of the story, you might expect this to be a one-sided condemnation of parental failings. It isn’t. One of Dolans’ great gifts as a director — in this and in later films like Heartbeats (2010), Laurence Anyways (2012) and Mommy (2014) — is an ability to capture privileged moments when characters drop their guard and reveal themselves as they really are. He’s movingly generous to his characters and his fellow actors in that. After almost an hour of showing Dorval’s Chantal at her worst, leading to her shipping her son off to a Catholic boarding school so she won’t have to deal with him, Dolan gives her a beautiful moment. Hubert tells her not to bother walking him to the school bus stop, then shoots back at her “What would you do if I died today?” As he walks off, her anger fades and she simply says, “I’d die tomorrow.” It’s a heartbreaking moment. For all their differences, there’s a tie the two can’t escape. That’s what makes their disagreements so feverish.

In early scenes, the fights between mother and son are amazing bits of psychodrama that manage to be both horrifying and very funny. Each knows how to get to the other and doesn’t hesitate to go for the jugular just to score points. Yet they also try. In one extended sequence, Dolan fixes his mother breakfast and promises to have dinner waiting for her when she gets back from the tanning salon. He even does the dishes, but by this point she’s hurt and angry at having to find out he’s gay from a virtual stranger. She invites him to ride with her to the store so he can rent some videos while she’s shopping, then gets angry when he takes too long. The fight escalates to the point that she strands him. That sets the stage for her shipping him off to boarding school.

Like the young Orson Welles, Dolan doesn’t know what you can’t do, so his framing and cutting are often surprising. When Dorval brings home a new lampshade in a ghastly animal print, he focuses the shot on Hubert sitting on the sofa. You see the lampshade in her hands, but not her face. After he forces himself to compliment her, Hubert stands and takes her hand, which suddenly becomes the shot’s focal point. With almost any other director that would be just wrong, but within the context of the scene, it’s very moving. Throughout the film Dolan cuts freely to Hubert’s dreams and memories. Initially some of those shots are confusing, but they all come together in the end. There are shots of a child running freely on a grassy beach that are finally contextualized when Hubert runs away to the same beach near the house where he spent his early childhood at a time when he and his mother always seemed to be in synch.

At other times the filmmaking is almost breathtaking, reminiscent of the early work of Truffaut and Godard. The boyfriend’s mother asks Hubert to paint her office in the style of Jackson Pollock. The sequence is all quick cuts, culminating in the two men making love in a rush of excitement mirrored in the editing. On his first weekend home from school, Hubert goes dancing with a new friend (Niels Schneider, who would go on to play the disruptive lust object in Heartbeats) who introduces him to speed and then kisses him. Instead of staying to make out, Dolan rushes home to share his feelings with his mother in an orgiastic rush of words. It’s a terrific acting feat that once again captures the character’s desperate need to connect with his mother. Dorval gets a similar scene later on when she tells off the principal at the boarding school. Both scenes are thrilling. You may find yourself holding your breath for fear that they won’t pull it off. But they do, and it’s wonderful.

Dolan doesn’t hold back from displaying Hubert’s faults. At times the young man is a little shit. When he goes at his mother, you can see him going too far, and after a while you may want to shake him just to get him to ease up on her. Dolan even lets the boyfriend (the coltish young Francois Arnaud, who’s much more open here than in his later television work) call Hubert out for his selfishness. As in the rest of the film, the scene is a mix of frustration and love. Antonin really cares for this kid, but at times he just can’t put up with him. The much-reviled mother tracks them down and meets Antonin for the first time. When she goes off to take care of her son, who’s wandered off to the beach, the pain in Arnaud’s face is real. For all the friction between mother and son, how can he ever compete with their connection? How can anybody?

Intertext and Out the Other

Leonardo DiCaprio prepares to take on Nazis, while Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate is about to catch one of her movies in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

At one point in Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic fairy tale, ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019), movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman/best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) drive past a movie theatre showing The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). It’s easy to miss, and most viewers who even bother to notice would dismiss it as a just a blip. But when it comes to cultural references in Quentin Tarantino’s movies there are no blips. This is a very subtle comment on the future of actors like DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton. The Night They Raided Minsky’s marked the film debut of Elliott Gould, one of a handful of actors who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would change the face of stardom in Hollywood. The strong-jawed aging pretty boys like Dalton would be out in favor of leading men who looked more like real people. It’s a small moment, almost a throwaway, but it indicates how thoroughly Tarantino’s film is grounded in Hollywood’s past. For Tarantino, film history, no matter now trivial to some, is part of his cinematic language.

This is all a form of intertextuality, the use of other texts to shape a text's meaning.  It's a practice that dates back to the earliest literary forms, though the term was not coined until 1980, when Julia Kristeva published Desire in Language: a semiotic approach to literature and art. Later scholars have suggested that every word is an intertext, having derived its meanings from appearances in other texts. This would suggest that all artistic creations are part of one ever-evolving master creation, and indeed, Tarantino's works suggest the existence of some master "film" encompassing all works in the medium.

The movies’ past has always figured heavily in Tarantino’s works and not just in references to culturally approved “masterpieces.” Rather, he exults in movies that move, the trashier action and horror films, particularly those that came along after the arrival of the ratings system and the proliferation of home video. In the case of ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD, he makes his central character a film and TV actor fighting to keep his career alive after leaving a successful Western series. Rick Dalton keeps himself going playing mostly villains in TV guest shots (Tarantino even cuts him into an episode of The FBI in place of original guest star Burt Reynolds, whose friendship with stuntman Hal Needham inspired the relationship between Dalton and his stunt double). His agent (Al Pacino, in a very funny cameo) advises him to sign for a series of Italian films, and Dalton returns from Italy the night of the Manson murders.

Running parallel to his story are the last days of Sharon Tate. Played by Margot Robbie, she’s an almost beatific figure who loves to dance and hug people. At one point, she watches one of her movies, the Matt Helm thriller The Wrecking Crew (1968), and giggles as the audience responds to her performance. Robbie’s resemblance to Tate is so strong Tarantino doesn’t have to cut her into that film. He just shows scenes from the original, and it works. Tate has a tenuous connection to the Rick Dalton plot. She and husband Roman Polanski are renting a house next to his. Of course, in the real world, their house on Cielo Drive didn’t have any close neighbors, but this isn’t reality; it’s fantasy. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just point out that Tarantino is the director who had Adolph Hitler killed in Occupied France in Inglorious Basterds (2009).

In Tarantino’s fantasy Hollywood, Rick Dalton appears in films and TV shows that originally starred not just Reynolds but actors like Joe Don Baker and Ty Hardin. It's interesting that Tarantino, a long-time champion of B- and even Z-grade movies, fills his picture with references to the cheap and ephemeral while offering relatively little screen time — and no on-screen references — to the more critically respectable works of Tate's husband, Roman Polanski. When Rick finally meets the people next door, they connect through Tate and former beau Jay Sebring's love of one of Rick's sketchier films, The 14 Fists of McClusky. Tarantino has always been a subversive filmmaker, and the focus on the Rick Daltons of the world seems his way of subverting the pantheon of “great” films, giving the movies he loves a greater place in the great master film of which Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a part.

Tarantino displays a lot of affection for marginal figures like Dalton and Booth. When Dalton films the pilot for the TV Western series Lancer, Tarantino lets the character connect with the series' star, James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant). They have a sweet scene together discussing Dalton's career, and when the shoot is over, Tarantino shows Olyphant getting on his motorcycle, a bittersweet reference to the accident that would cost Stacy his career. A more cynical director might have thrown in a reference to Stacy’s later conviction for child molestation, but Tarantino chooses to focus on him as part of a lost Western tradition the movies tried to keep alive. It’s a fantasy Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood perpetuates in its final scenes…but spoilers.

Sadly, Tarantino’s generosity doesn’t extend to everybody depicted in the film. At times, he’s a bit too much the gadfly for the picture’s own good. During a flashback to Dalton’s guest shot on The Green Hornet, he depicts a confrontation between Booth and that series’ star, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), who’s portrayed as a preening, egotistical fool. For plot purposes, its important that Booth prove to be a better fighter than Lee, but making Lee a buffoon into the bargain seems gratuitous and even racist, not to mention a little shallow. It’s a quick and easy way to get into the sparring match and keep the audience on Booth’s side.

Lee, at least, has a stalwart cult of fans to keep his memory alive. Sam Wanamaker doesn’t. Wanamaker directed the pilot episode of Lancer, and when he first turns up it’s great to see he’s played by Nicholas Hammond, the one genuinely hot Von Trapp kid in The Sound of Music (1965) and the first live-action Spiderman, a source of many a pubescent fantasy. But within a few lines, the character starts to come across as a pretentious fop. He wants to costume Dalton’s bad guy as if he were a Hell’s Angel, and gives him a line of bull to explain the choice. Wanamaker, who was a skilled actor and one of the co-founders of England’s Globe Theatre project, deserves a lot better.

This is particularly aggravating given Tarantino’s generosity to DiCaprio and the rest of the cast. The writer-director has consistently rehabilitated careers, giving fresh life to actors like John Travolta, Robert Forster and David Carradine. And he’s directed one of the few performances from DiCaprio that doesn’t make me cringe. As a young man, DiCaprio had an electric presence, whether playing Johnny Depp’s intellectually disabled brother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993) or the hotshot young gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead (1996). With stardom, however, his work has seemed primarily about appearances. His Jay Gatsby was a cipher in a sea of ciphers in that strange adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2013) in which only Toby McGuire’s Nick emerged as a fully realized human being. In Revolutionary Road (2008), he spent so much time demonstrating what the character was saying he never really got into his head.

He really seems to be inside Dalton’s head however. When he shoots the Lancer pilot there’s a very funny scene in which he excoriates himself in his trailer for not being able to remember his lines. Then he goes back to the set and nails his big scene. After Wanamaker and his child scene partner (the preternaturally self-possessed Julia Butters) compliment him on his work, Tarantino keeps the camera on DiCaprio. The play of emotions on his face — relief, pride, gratitude, grief — is a thing of beauty.

There’s a different kind of beauty in Tarantino’s handling of Booth’s visit to the Spahn Ranch, where he encounters members of the Manson family. The scene starts out on a lighter level. Booth picks up one of the family members (Margaret Qualley) while she’s hitchhiking and her version of hippie freedom is played for laughs. When they arrive at the ranch, she starts introducing him to the others, and there’s the least hint of a threat. That goes deeper when he decides to pay a visit to the ranch’s owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), whom he hasn’t seen in years. Tarantino builds the tension subtly and simply as Booth has to fight his way past Squeaky Fromme (Dakota Fanning), who’s been keeping Spahn under control with sex and drugs. Pitt’s trip to the back room where the man is sleeping and their cryptic, tense encounter is like something out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, and is this blog turning into a giant intertextual reference itself?). You keep expecting something horrible to happen. Nothing really does, but the tension is palpable, expertly evoked through camera placement, editing and writing.

That sequence is very important to Tarantino’s overall conceit. It’s a reminder of the real threat hanging over Cielo Drive as the action moves toward the night of the murders. Without it, the film would be a mostly amiable goof on Hollywood history. With it, however, Tarantino has turned it into a stuff of Hollywood legend. The narration (by Kurt Russell) becomes not just a device for filling in information, but rather a way of telling the tale, and a very tall one it is. Tarantino turns the friendship of star and stuntman into the legend of Rick and Cliff, and when it’s time to face the truth, like the reporter in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1964), he prints the legend.

Joe Chrest, Annisston or Tinsley Price and Cara Buono share a portentous Ferris wheel ride, while Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo share some great comic teamwork in season three of Stranger Things.

The seventh episode of Stranger Things’ third season opens with a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. As a family rides the Ferris wheel at the county fair, Fourth of July fireworks go off. Mother and father look above to enjoy the display, while their daughter looks down, a clear reference to the tennis match watched by Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train (1951). When they ask why she isn’t watching the fireworks, the girl points to the nearby trees, which are moving unnaturally. Since these characters are outside the series’ science-fiction loop, they have no way of knowing it’s an indication that the season’s big bad, the Mind Flayer, is on the loose. Later in the episode, there’s a shoot-out in a hall of mirrors, another movie reference, this time to Orson Welles’ amazing The Lady from Shanghai (1947). That may be a bit too intertextual for some, but for movie fans references like that are just part of the thrills provided by The Duffer Brothers’ vision for the series.

Stranger Things has maintained a surprising level of achievement through its first three seasons. It centers on the relationships of a group of tweens growing up in an Indiana small town in the 1980s. All of the normal traumas of young adolescence — bullying, awakening to sexual desire, rebelling against authority — are intensified by the presence of a nearby scientific facility doing research into the paranormal. In particular, they’ve opened the door to a deadly, parallel universe called “the Upside Down,” which keeps sending a variety of nasties into the area. One escapee from the lab is more benign, however. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), an unnamed child and human test subject, bonds with the kids and serves as a frequent deus ex machina thanks to her burgeoning telekinetic and psychic powers.

Season three opens with most of the youngsters sneaking into the new multiplex to see Day of the Dead (1985). The film’s opening scene, in which Lori Cardille dreams she’s attacked by hands bursting out of the wall, is a perfect metaphor for the Duffers’ seres. It’s all about threats bursting through the fragile shell of reality. The problems start mundanely in this season. During a power outage, the refrigerator magnets at Will Byers’ home drop to the floor, which leads his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder) to an investigation that unearths a Soviet lab hidden beneath the town’s new mall.

Ryder herself is something of an intertext — a one-time star who flourished during the 1980s. In a few seasons, the kids could be sneaking in to see her in films like Beetlejuice and Heathers (both 1988). The show has been something of a renaissance for Ryder, who had trouble adjusting to older roles. During the first two seasons, her Joyce was an icon of suffering and blind determination as she tried to save her son Will (Noah Schnapp), who had been kidnapped and traumatized by a creature from the Upside Down. Her storyline is a little lighter in season three, as she tentatively embarks on a romance with the town’s sheriff, Jim Hopper (David Harbour), who’s adopted Eleven and is struggling with how to parent a girl going through puberty. Even as Joyce’s investigation starts to turn up the real threat facing her family and the town, she gets a delicious comic moment telling off a government agent over the phone. It’s the kind of breathless temper tantrum at which Rosalind Russell or Doris Day were experts, and she’s right up at their level.

Stranger Things’ third season is filled with little acting gifts like that. After Eleven breaks up with her boyfriend, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) — the result of Harbour’s bumbling attempts at parenting — she starts to connect to Max (Sadie Sink), a new member of the group. Their scenes together as they share their frustration with the opposite sex and explore the joys of shopping are a delight.

Even better is the relationship between another of the tweens, the eternally dorky Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and one-time bully Steve (Joe Keery). In season one, Steve had been the show’s resident turd in the punchbowl. He was dating Mike’s sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and standing between her and Will’s brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), a relationship only the most emotionally frozen realized was TV destiny. Somewhere in season two, he lost Nancy to Jonathan but then, in an inspired, loopy bit of plotting, started helping the tweens as they fought the big bad. By season three, he’s their unofficial den mother, using his job at the new mall to break them into the movies and eventually helping Dustin investigate a radio message in Russian he picks up on his ham radio. Keery and Matarazzo are one kick-ass comic team.  Their timing should be the envy of seasoned adult comics and calls to mind the best work of Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis.

As the different groups of characters come closer to unearthing the Russian plot to access the Upside Down, the cultural references pile up. Steve and Dustin’s invasion of the Russian base could be a scene from Red Dawn (1984) played for laughs. Dustin and friend Caleb’s sister, Erica (Priah Ferguson), bond over their responses to My Little Pony. And in a moment of high delirium that leads to the season’s climax, Dustin finally manages to contact his long-distance girlfriend, Suzie (Gabriella Pizzolo), and enlists her help by joining her in a duet to the theme from The Neverending Story (1984).

This isn’t to suggest the season is all shits and giggles. There are some serious consequences to the storyline. In particular, Eleven gets into the mind of Max’s stepbrother, Billy (Dacre Montgomery), who’s been taken over by the Mind Flayer. Her digging unleashes memories of desertion and abuse that provide a context for his aggressive, often harmful behavior during the two seasons he’s been on the show. The memories are heartbreaking, and it’s to Montgomery’s credit that he unleashes the character’s vulnerability without descending into banality. It’s another little triumph in a series filled with wonderful little touches that flesh out the characters so both comedy and heartache have a solid grounding, no matter how far out the science fiction plotting may venture.

  Bette Davis hands Mary Astor a cigarette and an Oscar in The Great Lie.

The main intertexts in Edmund Goulding’s The Great Lie (1941) are classical pieces, which function as an emblem for the world of Sandra Kovak, the sophisticated concert pianist played by Mary Astor. The film doesn’t go much deeper than that. The pieces are used for their association with a more rarified life than those lived by the mass audience. Any further meaning they develop comes from their placement within the film. Paradigms take a back seat to syntax.

Madame Kovak’s signature piece is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, which provides the title music and recurs as her main theme. It’s the piece she performs in Philadelphia the night she’s supposed to be in New York getting legally married to George Brent, whom she had married before her previous divorce became final, and she plays it again at the film’s end, when she realizes she can’t use the baby from their brief, unsanctified union, to win him back. As such, the crashing chords that open the piece become a signifier for Sandra’s independence, something women weren’t supposed to aspire to in popular movies of the era.

Golden Age Hollywood tended to view classical music with a combination of awe and disdain. It was high culture, something to which the mass audience had to aspire, but it was also a signifier for snobbery and foolishness, so as not to alienate that same mass audience. The studios were constantly trying to make classical musicians, particularly singers, into stars, but they always had to temper it by having them get down and dirty with popular music. When Jeanette MacDonald did a brief jitterbug with Binnie Barnes in I Married an Angel (1942), it was one of the film’s few redeeming moments, but when pianist Jose Iturbi tried to do comedy in his MGM musicals, it was downright painful.

In The Great Lie, Astor is the other woman, the sophisticated, fast-living concert pianist who briefly steals Brent from his true love, country girl Bette Davis (playing effectively against type). When Davis goes to Philadelphia hoping to see Brent, she has to deal with Astor as the soundtrack plays Wagner’s Liebestod, which any reasonably intelligent audience member would see reflecting the death of Brent’s short-lived fling with Astor. In the opening scene in Astor’s apartment, her manager plays her character’s recording of Anton Rubinstein’s Piano Concerto No. 4, a difficult, complex piece that seems to speak to her alienation from Brent’s simpler world. Later, an unwelcome visit to Davis’ farm is heralded by the sound of Astor playing a Chopin waltz, a simpler piece that seems part of Astor’s attempt to steal Davis’ domestic bliss.

The film manages to balance being relentlessly silly with being almost irresistibly entertaining. Astor’s illegitimate, drunken marriage to Brent is a device designed to get her with child without upsetting the Production Code or local censorship boards. It also means Brent can reclaim his true love, Davis, without having to go through with what the Code viewed as “the tragedy of divorce.” Brent is a pilot who conveniently vanishes during a government mission to Brazil, leaving heartbroken new bride Davis no other option but to offer to buy Astor’s unwanted child so she can keep at least a piece of her presumed dead husband. The two adversaries go off to Arizona so Astor can have the child in private, and Davis can pass it off as her own. Three months after the blessed event, Brent returns, setting the stage for the final confrontation.

The showdowns between Davis and Astor, first in New York and then in their Arizona hideaway, are the film’s center. According to both stars, they thought the script was pure treacle, so they re-wrote their scenes together. There’s a punchiness to their dialogue, which includes lots of short, fragmented lines that resemble Noel Coward’s writing. Their scenes are a refreshing change from the rest of the film, which sometimes seems about to sink under the weight of its own sentimental improbabilities. The scenes also play well against Davis’ image (which could be seen as a different type of intertext). Knowing her lifelong predilection for Scotch and nicotine, it’s wicked fun watching her regulate Astor’s intake of cigarettes and booze. One scene of them playing cards late at night opens with Astor saying, “Who ever heard of an ounce of anything?” It’s the kind of line that captures her character perfectly, and she delivers it with just the right level of weary vitriol.

Astor always credited Davis with throwing the film to her, but the star more than holds her own. She’s more relaxed in the role than she is playing her more wicked characters (it probably helped that she did this film right after making The Letter with William Wyler in 1940; he did a great deal to help her control her energy on screen). When the doctor comes out of their Arizona cabin to inform her Astor has given birth to a son, she has a moment that shows just how sublime an actress she can be. It’s very simple, as are many of Davis’ best scenes. She just walks over to a wall and looks up at the heavens. But it’s immensely moving.

There’s one other point of interest in the film, and that’s Davis’ relationship with her housekeeper, played by Hattie McDaniel. Unlike the other black characters working on the farm, McDaniel’s Violet is portrayed as an adult. There’s an easy give and take between her Violet and Davis’ Maggie; a negotiated relationship that goes beyond race or even class. These women are colleagues in keeping the farm going, and Maggie treats her with tremendous respect. It’s interesting that McDaniel’s two best, least stereotyped roles after she won the Oscar for Gone With the Wind (1939) are in Bette Davis movies (the other is 1942’s In This Our Life).

Changing times and the actors’ futures also have an impact on the film’s meaning, particularly in the final confrontations. We’re now more than 70 years away from the values that shaped The Great Lie, so Astor’s last-ditch attempt to use the infant to win back Brent now seems more an aberration than an attempt to change her life. Maybe it’s my own prejudices as an urban gay male, but her life as a concert pianist touring the world in glamorous clothing seems pretty damned wonderful to me. It’s not something you’d want to jeopardize for someone like Brent (maybe if the leading man had been Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracy I’d feel differently). If there’s anything sad about her going off on her own, it’s the knowledge that the career resurgence Astor enjoyed as a result of this and her next film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), wouldn’t last for long. Her critical and box-office success led MGM to offer her a long-term contract with the promise of leading roles. Then they consigned her to supporting parts as the mothers of their rising young female stars. Maybe that was another result of changing times. There wasn’t much call for brittle sophistication during the World War II era. But it certainly was a loss greater than Madame Kovak’s giving up a child and husband she never really wanted in the first place.

Small Wonders, Big Missteps

Carol Kane in THE DEAD DON’T DIE (they just get wasted)

When you cut the zombies in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (2019), puffs of red dust explode from the wound. It’s a nifty effect that, sadly, stands as the film’s main addition to walking dead lore. For a movie that wears its affection for the genre on its sleeve, this deadpan spoof is sadly lacking in all the elements that make films like Night of the Living Dead (1968), Zombie (1979) and 28 Days Later (2002) such delirious delights.

The picture seems to be an arrangement of comedy sketches, using pauses and repetition for comic effect. That requires a great deal of discipline and control on the part of the performers. It’s a natural tendency to want to speed up to get laughs. But Jarmusch’s cast—including such solid comic actors as Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Steve Buscemi—keeps the pace down through the funnier bits, so the film starts off well.

The plot involves the reanimation of the dead after a series of fracking exercises at the North and South Poles—the kind of crazy causality you find in everything from Night of the Living Dead to Return of the Dead (1985). Before long, corpses are popping out of graves and rising from slabs at the local mortuary. As in Dawn of the Dead (1978), in addition to eating the living, they're preoccupied with their main interests in life. That's a joke with a rather short shelf life. Once you've seen them going for coffee or nicotine or booze, the bit doesn't go anywhere. Jarmusch has also cast a few name performers as zombies, and it seems rather a waste to put Carol King into a film where all she does is say "Chardonnay" before being dispatched.

But then, after the first few scenes establishing the film's comic rhythms, Jarmusch doesn't make particularly good use of anybody in the cast.  Tilda Swinton, who usually can steal a film with the lift of an eyebrow, appears as the town's new mortician, a mysterious Scot who carries a katana. She's great at offing zombies, but she's been given next to nothing to work with. Bits like repeatedly addressing everybody by their full names just don't go anywhere.

At least her character gets something of an arc. Others, like a group of teens headed by Selena Gomez, get lost in the parade of shambling corpses. The kids arrive in the same type of car driven by Johnny and Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, and everybody thinks they're from Pittsburgh (where George Romero's film was shot). Then they vanish until they turn up dead with no explanation. A trio of youngsters in a home for delinquent youth (and we never learn why they're there; there's hardly anything delinquent about them) run off to hide, and that's the last we see of them.

By that time, the film has worn out its welcome. The final scenes are almost an anthology of all the stupid things people do in horror movies -- locking themselves up in buildings and forgetting to secure the back door; driving into the cemetery from which the dead are rising, etc, At that point, the deliberate pace that was funny in earlier scenes, when nobody can figure out what's going on, works against the film. The improbabilities move the film into the realm of farce, which needs to move quickly so you don't have time to question all the craziness going on. The picture dies on the vine, its conclusion met with a collective "Huh?" (that's not exaggeration; I actually heard that from several seats while I was watching the film). It’s almost as if the film were made by the living dead, which makes it a rather typical Hollywood production.

 

An animated Steve Carell and his surprisingly hot shoulders in WELCOME TO MARWEN

The computer-animated scenes in Robert Zemcikis' Welcome to Marwen (2018) are a subversive treat. They’re inspired by a true story. After a hate-inspired attack left artist Mark Hogencamp unable to draw, he turned his home into an artistic installation, a miniature World War II Belgian village called Marwencol (reduced to Marwen for most of the movie). He filled it with dolls he transformed into a female fighting force lead by a U.S. military captain. Since the attack was triggered by Hogencamp's drunken revelation that he liked to wear women's shoes, the captain wears high heels while fighting Nazis, a queer image if ever there was one.

In Zemickis' film these images come to life, with motion-capture technology turning Steve Carell, Merritt Weaver, Janelle Monae, Gwendoline Brooks and others into the stars of a computer-animated war film. The figures have the stiff-legged gait of dolls, and when Carel's Cap'n Hogie takes his shirt off, it reveals the shoulder armature, which is oddly sexy. Best of all is a scene in which he not only wears heels while fighting the enemy but also uses them as weapons. As long as the animated scenes dominate the action, the picture is liberatingly subversive, dismantling essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity.

Unfortunately, Welcome to Marwen is not an entirely animated film. After the first war scene, in which Cap'n Hogie's female protectors save him from a Nazi squad, the picture transitions into live action. It follows Hogencamp (Carell) as he deals with memory loss and PTSD and tries to work up the courage to deliver a victim-impact statement at the trial of his assailants and attend a gallery opening for his photos of Marwen. Were these scenes treated in a realistic manner, they'd provide a fascinating counterpoint to the animated fantasy. But they're not. Rather, they're a throwback to the romanticism of Hollywood at its height. The plot materials are contemporary, but the treatment is glossy and artificial.

You can't blame the actors for this. They're doing what the script requires of them. Carel, whose first successes were in the American version of The Office and a series of surprisingly intelligent sex comedies, immerses himself in Hogencamp's emotional state. He doesn't rely on any of his comic tricks to wink at the audience and reassure them he's not really as tortured or eccentric as the character seems. Then again, he doesn't have to. The film keeps doing that for him.

For some reason, Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson's script creates a love interest for Hogencamp (the real Hogencamp has had no romantic involvements since his attack). Leslie Mann plays Nicol, a woman who's just moved across the street. As his fascination with her grows, Hogencamp even adds her character to the Marwen installation and changes its name to Marwencol. Mann is a perfectly capable actress, but she's saddled with a barely defined role. Nicol is some kind of eternal innocent, a figure right out of Victorian literature and Golden Age Hollywood. She works with sick animals, and though she's trying to get away from an abusive ex-boyfriend, his mistreatment doesn’t seem to have affected her character. She's just an inexplicable ray of sunshine, a male dream of what a good woman should be.

She's not the only actress consigned to some kind of dreamlike role. All of the women in Marwen are reflections of the women in Hogencamp's life, and they have a lot to do in the animated sequences. Except for Buttrick, who plays a faithful friend nursing a crush on Carel, however, they have precious little to do in the real world scenes. Christie, the wonderful Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, has one scene as Hogencamp's Russian-born caregiver. It's basically a series of dialect jokes, and she pulls them off well, but you know she could contribute a lot more to the film if given a chance. Monae, the unsung heroine of Hidden Figures and Moonlight (both 2016), has even less to do, a brief flashback as a fellow physical therapy patient encouraging Hogencamp to walk.

After a while, it becomes clear that the live-action scenes are undermining everything that's wonderful about the animated sequences. Whenever Cap'n Hogie gets close to a woman in Marwen, he's thwarted by Deja Thoris, the witch of Marwen, who has no real-world equivalent in Hogencamp's life. As the plot develops, she seems to represent some emotional conflict the artist can't acknowledge. Could it be some latent sexual issue that prevents his becoming truly intimate with women? Who knows? In the end it's hard to tell why she's in the picture except to generate conflict.

That muddy bit of symbolism, coupled with the real-life scenes' failure to fully embody the female characters, makes the picture seem to be rejecting all the tantalizing queerness of the animated scenes. We're constantly reassured that there's nothing really different about Hogencamp. Sure, he likes to wear women's shoes, but he can still fall for a beautiful dream girl, and it's all going to come out fine when he learns to believe in himself. If he's a little eccentric, well, what can you expect from an artist.  It's the kind of thinking you’d expect from a Steven Spielberg adaptation of Glen or Glenda (1953).

Ayn Ruymen navigates corridors of kink in PRIVATE PARTS.

By contrast, an older film, Paul Bartel's debut feature Private Parts (1972), is a minor miracle. The film doesn't set out to achieve anything earth shattering. It's just trying to unsettle us a bit with its combination of horror film tropes and sexual perversity. But it accomplishes that with style. Young, not-so-innocent Cheryl (Ayn Ruymen) has robbed her parents to escape Ohio for the joys of the West Coast. After a falling out with her best friend (Ann Gibbs), she tracks down her aunt (Lucille Benson), who runs a seedy hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The aunt takes her in on condition that Cheryl not go exploring.

Naturally as soon as the aunt has left (she likes to attend funerals for people she doesn't know), Cheryl goes looking for trouble, turning up kinks in the hotel that overshadow her petty larceny. There's an old lady (Roger Corman regular Dorothy Neumann) who wanders the halls cleaning her false teeth and looking for Alice, a tenant who seems to have vanished (three guesses what happened to her; first two don't count). The Reverend Moon (Laurie Main) has a swarthy young handyman come to his room on a regular basis and later turns up in full leather regalia. Most mysterious is George (John Ventantonio), a reclusive photographer who spies on Cheryl when she bathes, sells pictures of couples he catches making out in the park and sleeps with an inflatable doll filled with water and some of his blood.

This would all degenerate into just so much smarm were it not done with a high level of skill. Bartel and cinematographer Andrew Davis create a strong sense of atmosphere, shooting on location at Los Angeles' King Edward Hotel. As Cheryl roams the halls and discovers strange, secluded rooms, the place becomes another character in the film. It's almost as if the ramshackle building were driving its denizen's crazy.

There's also a lot of good work from the cast. Benson, who seems to have been born old and eccentric, has one of those wonderful Southern accents that renders everything she says faintly absurd. She keeps adding extra syllables to words, drawing them out in a way that almost deprives them of meaning. Her presence makes Aunt Martha's preachments on the importance of traditional values feel hollow. They’re less family values than just another form of decadence.

Ruymen, who seems to have vanished from the business sometime in the 1990s, was one of the hot young actresses of her day. She held her own opposite Maureen Stapleton on stage in Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady and on TV in the early feminist movie-of-the-week Tell Me Where It Hurts (1974). Here she's a demented Alice down the rabbit hole.  She does a skillful job of limning her character's gradual seduction by the hotel's world. She has a particularly fine scene when she's out on a date with a normal boy (played by Barry Livingtone, taking a break from his decade-plus wallow in the mediocrity of My Three Sons). She can't let go of what she's seen at the hotel and eventually walks out on him in pursuit of more dangerous pastimes.

The film isn't completely flawless. Gibbs has been directed to play the former roommate on a single shrill note; it's a relief when she disappears into the hotel's basement. Hugo Friedhofer's wall-to-wall score is very much of its period, but now seems one of the film's most dated elements as he Mickey Mouses everything the characters are going through. And the ending is the kind of self-conscious dark moment you should have stopped finding deep and meaningful by the time you graduated high school. Until then, however, the film is a pretty delicious walk on the wild side, a celebration of the queer little kinks people try in vain to hide behind closed doors.

Landscapes of Horror

Tilda Swinton, perfectly cast as a dancer-choreographer, leads her troupe to hell in a g-string in Suspiria.

Luca Guadagnino sets his remake of Suspiria (2018) in a wintry world. Almost until the end, the palette is dominated by cool colors and muted pastels. It's a powerful contrast to the passions lurking beneath the surface in this tale of a dance company that's actually a front for a coven of witches. The women running the school glide through Berlin, with occasional outbursts of laughter, some of it sororal, some of it taunting, particularly when dealing with dancers who can't get with the program or men who, in their view, can't get with anything. The major burst of color is leading lady Dakota Johnson's red hair, which is a bit of foreshadowing.

At the center of all this is the relationship between choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and new dancer Susie (Johnson). Johnson is a fantasy figure out of Fame (1982) or Flashdance (1983) — an untrained dancer who's all explosive instincts. It's a conceit that plays well with slackers, like the musical numbers that come together out of nowhere on Glee. You can sit and watch while telling yourself that you could do just as well if you wanted to. Fortunately, Johnson has enough energy and openness to pull it off. Guadagnino shoots most of the dances like music videos, so his percussive editing convinces you that she's a better dancer than she is. The result is a performance that pulls you in. Despite the tired trope, you find yourself caring about this young woman. That's important since the main tension in the plot is the growing awareness that the coven has chosen her as a sacrifice to restore the vitality of their ancient leader, Mother Markos (also Swinton).

In the 33 years since she made her film debut in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986), Swinton has established herself as one of the most powerful presences on film. Playing four roles in Suspiria (or rather, three and a half, since one is barely defined) she shows that there's a lot of skill backing up that presence. As Madame Blanc, she effortlessly dominates a dance company run by eccentric types. She doesn't overstate anything. You can tell from her eyes and the set of her body that she sees something of herself in Susie, which helps get across the film's central conflict — the battle between factions of the coven over Susie's fate — without pounding the audience over the head. Even more impressive is her work as Dr. Klemperer, a male psychiatrist who's been treating a young dancer who sees through the dance company's façade. She doesn't just rely on the makeup (which is very good) to put the character across. She moves with the considered delicacy of the very old and speaks with a slight rasp. It takes a moment to recognize the voice as hers, and you can only spot the physical resemblance when she's in profile.

Guadagnino wanted Swinton to play the male psychoanalyst to reinforce the film's heavy focus on women. Apart from two police detectives who have only a few scenes, all of the major players are women. This helps clarify the film's central conflict, the battle between destructive and nurturing approaches to power. As the film starts, the coven has just elected Mother Markos as leader over Madame Blanc. The Markos faction views Susie as a sacrifice and urges Madame Blanc to get her ready quickly. Blanc wants to hold off the sacrifice to see Susie's full potential. This echoes the political turmoil of Germany in 1977. News reports about the Baader-Meinhof Group's hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 play in the background of several scenes. Klemperer is haunted by the loss of his wife when they attempted to flee the Third Reich near the end of World War II. This historical perspective underlines the film's focus on the abuse of power. It will take a cataclysm to wrest power from the patriarchal forces that traditionally hold it, and that's what the film moves toward at the end.

I must admit that I am not a fan of Dario Argento's original Suspiria (1977). I've given the film numerous viewings, trying to find something to justify the high esteem in which others hold it, but I just don't get it. There are other films of his I love — The Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975), Opera (1987), the "Black Cat" segment of Two Evil Eyes (1990), Mother of Tears (2007) and particularly Phenomena (1985). In his best work, there's a kind of delirium that defies logic. They're like being caught in a fever dream that won't let you wake up. For me, his Suspiria starts high and has nowhere to go. You can't exactly build on the super-saturated colors or the gruesome murder of Patricia, the young dancer who attempts to escape the company at the film's start. Nor is there any real sense of environment. The film's set in a dance academy where nobody ever seems to dance, and it's next to impossible to imagine Joan Bennett's Madame Blanc was ever a dancer. She's just a stately set piece, used more for her association with Dark Shadows than anything she might contribute as an actress.

By contrast, Gaudagnino's Suspiria is all about dance. Swinton moves with a dancer's grace. The one truly gruesome scene in the film's first part is the torture of Olga (Elena Fokina), another rebellious dancer who tries to leave the company. Some unseen force pulls her into a mirrored rehearsal room she can't escape. As Susie takes over her leading role in the company's signature piece, Guadagnino cuts so that Susie’s moves seem to be twisting Olga's body until she's left a quivering ball of pain. It's a great, upsetting scene that maintains the picture's identity as a horror film and keeps you viewing as Guadagnino moves through the plot and intensifies his themes.

It's not all smooth sailing. Guadagnino sometimes thinks too much like a novelist rather than a director. The film is divided into six acts and an epilogue, with each segment announced by a cryptic title. Only the story doesn't really break conveniently into six parts. And the titles are rather a distraction, particularly in the epilogue, which is called "A Sliced-Up Pear." If you look closely, you can find the pear on a character's breakfast tray, but what exactly is that supposed to mean? There also are strange cut-ins of a farm-house somewhere that aren't properly contextualized until more than halfway through the film (it's the Mennonite family Susie left to join the dance company). It just seems to be getting in the way of the rest of the narrative until Guadagnino finally uses it to drop a kernel of information. It's also a little disconcerting that though the dance in the film is inspired by the work of female choreographers like Pina Bausch (who was the model for Swinton's Madame Blanc) and Mary Wigman, the film's admittedly effective choreography is the work of a man, Damien Jalet. Were all the female choreographers in Europe sick or busy when they were putting the film together or could only a man explain feminist dance to the audience?

For all that, the film still has a powerful effect. Guadignino has filled the picture with strong female presences, most notably Chloe Grace Moritz as the first student to rebel, Angela Winkler, Alek Wek, Renee Soutendijk and, from the first film, Jessica Harper. There's a sense of dread that builds persuasively, and the finale effectively ties together Guadagnino's ideas. It certainly deserved a better fate at the box office. Hopefully, it will make up for that in ancillary markets, where the slackers who can believe an untrained dancer could end up as good as Susie will be more likely to see it.

Zohra Lampert serves up exquisite horror in Let's Scare Jessica to Death.

Director John Hancock and cinematographer Robert M. Baldwin turn the beauties of the Connecticut countryside into a nightmare world in their independent horror film Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971). It's the kind of trick — finding horror in the everyday —Alfred Hitchcock honed to perfection. With its subtle questioning of reality, however, the film is closer to the literate, low budget psychological horror films Val Lewton produced at RKO in the 1940s.

Jessica (Zohra Lampert) has recently been released from a mental hospital. To help with her recovery, her husband (Barton Heyman) has left his position as a symphony bassist and sunk all of their savings into an isolated Connecticut farm. Before they even arrive, Jessica starts seeing strange things, but she can't tell if they're real or mark the return of her mental problems. When she finally does share what's she's seen, Heyman’s not sure he can believe her because of her past. Nor is her mood helped by the hostility of the locals, who view them as invading hippies. Eventually, she comes to believe a young woman (Mariclare Costello) whom they take in after finding her squatting in the farmhouse is a vampire who has taken control of all the men around her.

Hancock pulls off a terrific balancing act. You're never sure if what you're seeing is real or Jessica's delusions. Even when we see things she couldn't see, as when an antique dealer they've befriended is haunted by a strange underwater figure or Costello seduces Heyman, there's the suspicion that we're just seeing more of her fantasies. By the end, when Jessica has either succumbed to madness or seen her world destroyed by the vampire, we're left wondering, like her, "Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? I don't know which is which."

Let's Scare Jessica To Death was made just as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its imitators were bringing the commodification of gore to the horror genre. With its low budget and disreputable genre, it wasn't taken very seriously on its initial release, though it has achieved some measured status as a cult film and is highly respected by filmmakers. Were a film of comparable quality made today, it could easily be in line for major awards consideration, something that would have been unheard of in 1971. Of course, if it were made today, it would be missing its best element, Lampert.

Lampert's Jessica isn't just one of the most fully rounded characters in the horror genre. Her performance is one of the best you're going to find anywhere. From her first scene, when she almost dances with delight as her husband stops their hearse (it's the cheapest vehicle they could find) at a rural cemetery so she can make a headstone tracing, she has the character down to the smallest gesture. Jessica is brimming with a childlike energy and openness that leaves her vulnerable to everything happening around her, and Lampert registers all of it in her face and body. Throughout the film, we hear her thoughts on the soundtrack. It's a tricky device that could sink a less talented actor. If you've ever suffered through the film version of Strange Interlude (1932), you know just how bad a bad voiceover can be, like the worst radio drama played over actors mugging painfully. But Lampert delivers her stream-of-consciousness monologues simply, trusting herself and the audience to follow the character's inner life at the speed of thought. It's an intelligent, deeply empathic performance that makes the film unforgettable.

The whole picture reeks of that kind of intelligence. This isn't the anything-for-an-effect world of Poltergeist (1982), where magic and the supernatural are used as an excuse for lack of logic. Hancock and screenwriter Lee Kalcheim have created a very specific type of vampire and don’t need to spell it out for the audience. Like good playwrights, they leave all the clues for the audience to assemble. These vampires are day walkers, and you can recognize them by the scars the original bloodsucker leaves on her victims. It isn’t long before the mere sight of a healed wound on someone is enough to send a chill through the audience. It’s reminiscent of the way Val Lewton’s directors (Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson) could use a well-placed shadow or a simple sound effect to send audiences round the bend without upstaging the underlying Stoicism of the films. In the same way, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is certainly frightening enough, but its real goal isn’t just cheap scares. It’s aimed more at creating an overwhelming sense of dread about a world that can never be completely known. Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? What does it matter when you’re poor Jessica caught up in the moment?