Fifties Science Fiction: The Indestructible Man (1956)

This was a classic science fiction film made back in the fifties.  (The movie is in the public domain and you can watch it the whole of it online at the end of this review.)   While certainly not in the same league as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" it is worth a look.  It stars Lon Chaney, Jr. as the title character.   His character is a criminal named "Butcher" Benton, who is on death row. 

Benton swears vengeance

  His accomplices turned states evidence against him and his sleazy lawyer double crossed him, which leads to them being freed and Benton sentenced to death.  From his jail cell Benton swears he will kill them, in spite of the inconvenient fact that he's locked up and he's to be executed the next day.   There is also a large sum of money hidden away in the sewer system of Los Angeles. 

And from such contradictions a strange tale is born.  After his execution a scientist trying to find a "cure for cancer" needs a body to test his hypotheses. The scientist pays off the morgue attendant and receives Benton's body in his laboratory.  Once there he puts close to 300,000 volts of electricity through his body.   Interestingly the lab assistant in this part of the movie is Joe Flynn, who later went on to star in the popular 1960s TV show "McHale's Navy" as Captain Binghamton. 

Cheney (left), Flynn (middle)

 

The procedure, as might be expected by anyone who had seen Frankenstein, brought the man back to life, which surprises the scientist and his assistant.  They use a fluoroscope on his chest, and notice that his heart is beginning to beat.  Benton gets up and starts to move around.   For some reason the electricity "burned out his vocal cords" but left his mind intact.   It also made him incredibly strong and with bulletproof skin which when the doctor goes to take a blood sample is unable to penetrate with a needle.   Then about the time the scientist and his assistant decide that a blood sample will have to be obtained surgically, they are strangled by Benton, catching each in one hand.    The 300 kv may have destroyed his vocal cords, but they have left his evil mind bent on vengeance intact and super strength on top of that.  He steals a car and finds his way back to Los Angeles.  

The rest of it is a police procedural.  Police Lieutenant Dick Chasen (Max Showalter) who has been on the case before the execution is still working on where the money is hidden.  Apparently Benton had a girlfriend in a burlesque house who on instructions from Benton was to open a letter in the event of his death.  This contained the map of the sewer system saying where the money was hidden.    Visited by both Chasen and then Lowe, Lowe steals the contents of the letter and replaces it with $50.    

Now about that rampaging lunatic mute bent on revenge.  Leaving a string of murders in his wake Benton tracks down his erstwhile accomplices "Squeamy" Ellis and Joe Varcelli with predictable results.   Then he turns his attention on that rat attorney, Paul Lowe.  Lowe is desperate that the police take him into custody, but the only way to do it is to assault a policeman right there with the boss and Lt. Chasen looking on.  However when Chasen talks over strategy with his boss, it is clear that the place that Lowe doesn't want to be is on the street with that monster looking for him.

  So they make a deal with him and persuade him to help them find the money, since the monster presumably is after the money as well as Lowe.    Chasen rightly guesses that Lowe knows where the money is and that Benton is using the sewer system of the city in which to hide and travel around.    By this time the police also know that bullets alone will not subdue their man.  I will not spoil the movie beyond this point except to say that it turns out that the "indestructible man" is not as indestructible as originally supposed. 

It's too bad about that scientist and his assistant.  They should be more careful about where they get fresh bodies.

Classic Silent Film: FW Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922)

Bram Stoker started it all.  He was an Anglo-Irish writer and theater manager who met a Hungarian writer, Armin Vambery, and through him started researching Eastern European folklore.  From that experience came his most famous novel,   "Dracula" which he published in 1897.   Stoker died in 1912.   As such he completely missed out on the first world war. 

He had married Florence Balcombe in 1878, having bested Oscar Wilde, a rival suitor for Florence's hand.  Now in the early 1920s, as the executor of Stoker's estate, when she was informed in 1922 that the German director FW Murnau had  without permission made a film which was derived from the Dracula novel, she sued.  I wonder if she might also have had some left over animus against the Germans from the late war.    It took a couple of years, but she successfully litigated against the film and obtained a judgment that not only won her damages but stipulated that all prints of the film be destroyed, which they were.  Fortunately, however, not ALL the prints were destroyed.  The film survived in various corners of the civilized world, including America.  For this, I for one am grateful, because Nosferatu is a great silent film.  Here is summarize the story.  If there is even one person on the planet who does not know the basic plot of the Dracula story, they should stop reading now. 

In Murnau's version the hero, Hutter,  is an estate agent in Bremen and he is sent by his boss Renfield to negotiate the purchase of a home in that town for one Count Orlok of Transylvania (aka Nosferatu).  Renfield is not quite all there and is seen reading a letter which is in a strange pictographic type of writing.     Orlok was looking for fresh blood, and figured a city like Bremen would provide it.    Once there Hutter concludes the real estate contract but realizes also that there is a lot that is really strange about Orlok. 

None of the locals want to have anything to do with him, and the animals and livestock are on edge.  He is served a fine meal at Orlok's castle, but when he cuts himself Orlok seems unusually interested in his blood.  He also happens upon some bedtime reading which describes the legend of the undead, but he isn't buying any of it. 

In the morning he wakes to discover some bite marks in his neck but he shrugs it off as some kind of spider bite.  However when he finally investigates his host by coming upon his daytime sleeping arrangements, he becomes alarmed and endeavors to escape, which he does by tying sheets together and climbing out a window.  Eventually he makes his way back to Bremen.

    Meanwhile that night Count Orlok books passage on a ship bound for Bremen.  He takes a sleeper, just him in a box, like freight, and some extra rats.  This turns out to be disastrous for the captain and crew of his ship, as they die one by one from the plague.

By the time they reach Bremen, all of the crew is dead, yet in spite of this, the ship moves as though by remote control to its destination.  

The stevedores puzzle over this turn of events,  the corpse of the captain at the wheel,  and the rats and dirt in boxes below deck.   Meanwhile Renfield, the boss of the real estate office that sent Hutter on his ill-fated trip,  has lost his mind, and is locked up where he catches flies and tries to escape.  Under cover of darkness Nosferatu is shown emerging from the hold of the ship, and calmly if deliberately walking with his box to his house across the street from the Hutters.  

 At this point plague breaks out in Bremen and a drummer goes from street to street alerting the population and reading aloud the proclamation that they are to stay in their houses and not bring their sick to the hospitals, because this will spread the disease. 

In spite of his bites, Hutter returns overland from Transylvania, but it is his wife that pieces together the awful truth about Nosferatu.  

Although directed by her husband not to read the book he brought back with him, titled "The Book of the Vampires"  his wife reads it, and discovers that only a woman pure of heart can defeat him, by keeping him by her side until the cock crows and the sun comes up.  This she does, in a sequence of images which is unforgettable as the bizarre fanged creature, staring hungrily at her from across the street comes over for a drink.  

A word about silent films and about this venerable masterpiece: 

what we are seeing is only through a glass darkly.    You have to bear in mind the technology and the nature of preservation through which the film has come down to us.  Film used to be made of cellulose acetate and before that a clear plastic that was chemically identical to guncotton, which is explosive.  As such the films carried the seeds of their own destruction.  Nor were the film studios much concerned with historic preservation or the temporary nature of their art.  Cellulose acetate breaks down releasing acetic acid over time and leads to what is known now as the "vinegar syndrome".  Thus prints of a film, even if they don't catch fire, slowly degrade and become brittle with age.    Thus it is, without periodic copying or the happy accident of optimal storage, they would no longer exist.  

It also takes some getting used to the monochromatic limitations of film and the somewhat different nature of screen acting and storytelling in the silent era.  The "night" scenes in the film where Nosferatu is walking outdoors about are obviously filmed in broad daylight.  The illusion of night was accomplished by a blue filter on the projection, but in the DVD version of the film I have, this is not seen.  Also the exaggerated gestures and expressions of the actors compensates somewhat from the absence of sound and the subtleties of acting which did not occur in the sound era.  

In this age of film where even the relatively primitive special effects (circa 1977) of the first Star Wars film are sneered at by a subsequent generation raised on increasingly sophistocated computer-generated special effects, a film like the 1922 Nosferatu is not well appreciated.  Today in big budget film, nothing is left to the imagination, and the films as a result are often quite boring and predictable.   What too often is forgotten is that imagination is the driver all entertainment, and without it, it is just a lot of 1's and 0's. 

French Film Noir: Le Doulos by Jean-Pierre Melville (1962)

Belmondo and Reggiani

This is a classic French crime flick, and while it is clearly set in France, it is clearly a homage to American gangster films from way back.  The title of the film translates as "The Hat" which is a term in French underworld slang which means "The informer".     In the opening to the film one of the main characters in the film, Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani) walks through a bleak industrial landscape under shadowy railroad viaducts and arrives at a lonely house where upstairs is Gilbert, an older man  at a desk working to separate the jewels from their settings, as the fences will not accept the two together. 

Gilbert and Maurice

He seems to take a friendly interest in Maurice which makes what happens next all the more shocking.  He turns around from his labors and is promptly shot dead by Maurice.    Maurice takes the gun, the money, and the jewels Gilbert was working on and buries them near a lamppost in a park that night.  These events are just the first of many plot twists that for clarification one must wait a while.  

The women do not fare well in this tale.  The blonde, Fabienne, is slapped around and tied up by Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and ends with half a bottle of whiskey poured on her head.    The other one, the Brunette, Anita, is the possession of a well heeled owner of the Cotton Club and yearns to move on as Silien endeavors daringly to get her back.   The police detectives are almost on a first name basis with the criminals, hauling them in for a friendly chat from time to

Police detectives

time.    Maurice, just trying to pursue his trade, plans another heist at a rich man's home but things go wrong, someone tipped off the police,  and he ends up shooting one of the policemen while leaving his comrade dead on the pavement.  He strongly suspects Silien and wants him dead. 

Fabienne and Silien

I don't want to spoil the film so I will leave it at that.  One must, in watching this film be content with not understanding at first the motivations of the protagonists.  The payoff is at the end, to which the Hays office would not have objected.  

As with all film noir, the lighting is stark with profiles and shadows galore.  Atmosphere is all, with rainstorms, shadows and mist.  It is a great film. 

French Cinema: The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER) (2009)

This story was taken from real life, so it isn't tied together in a neat bundle either at the beginning or at the end.  Somehow I can't really get a handle on this film except to describe it from beginning to end.  Maybe you should see the film first before you read my review.

Jeanne is a young woman, out of school but at loose ends, still living with her mother.  She kind of drifts through life without much purpose.  She tries to get a job as a legal secretary but she doesn't get the job, and it's really her fault she fails, since she prepared a bad resume, and lied during the interview and is not even a very good liar. 

In the meantime she wears her music headphones and roller blades here and there, taking a commuter train from her suburban home where here mother runs a kind of day care center.  The mother is pushing her gently to get up and do something with her life, which isn't really working.  Her mother persuades her to go for the legal secretary job with a prominent Jewish lawyer named Bleistein which fell through.  

Meanwhile she is hit upon by another rollerblader, a young man named Franck. 

He is serious about his career as a wrestler, and sports a colorful sleeve tattoo over his right arm.  After a couple of dates she moves in with him and is living happily, unsuspecting that the computer shop he is looking after is actually a front for dealing drugs.  Then things go wrong.  While washing his car, he is confronted by a drug buyer who will not take no for an answer and in the midst of the struggle he is stabbed and the buyer takes off with the drugs. 

She is oblivious about this illegal activity, comes home, discovers him bleeding on the floor and calls the police.  He is taken to the hospital, but it is clear to the police that he has been dealing drugs.  He realizes he will be in prison for a long time and breaks off the relationship, as he is pretty depressed about the prospect.

Her response to these reverses is pathological and makes no sense on the face of it.  She decides for some reason to make up a story about herself being a victim of an attack on the train, saying she was the victim of an anti-semitic attack by several youths since they found a card in her purse with "Bleistein" on it.  She is not herself Jewish.  She duly reports this to the police, and it causes a sensation.  Even the President of France calls to offer his sympathy. However there is a problem of course.  It never happened, and in the search for the perpetrators and reviewing the security tapes on the trains, it becomes clear that she is lying.

Bleisten, the lawyer.

At this juncture she and her mother are invited out for the weekend at the Bleistein's luxurious country home.  It is obvious to everyone in the family that she lied.  Her mother is an old friend of the Bleisteins, and this was the lawyer with whom she had originally applied for the job.    Now about the Bleistein family.   We have the grandfather who is the famous and successful lawyer.  His daughter works as his assistant in his office.  She is divorced from the father of their child, Nathan.  Nathan is turning thirteen on the brink of his bar mitzvah.  His father is some kind of filmmaker who returned from China to be present at his bar mitzvah.  Meanwhile Nathan is off exploring the bathroom and cuts himself on a razor in there.  You wonder what is going to happen to Nathan, but as it turns out nothing more than his glitzy bar mitzvah which we see eventually.  Nathan strides proudly along with phylacteries on his head, a prayer shawl and a Torah in his arms. His family and friends kiss their fingertips and touch the Torah.  Then everyone dances hand in hand.   Then the grandfather, part of this dance stops and seems short of breath at one point, and  you think maybe he is having a heart attack, but he doesn't have one, he's just out of breath.

At the Bleistein country home she is confronted and eventually agrees that she has lied. 

Mr. Bleistein helps her draft a statement of apology, and she turns herself in to the police.  She is given six months for making false statements to the police, but is detained only 48 hours while getting the rest of the time as probation, with the agreement to get some psychological counseling. 

After that she is, again seen roller blading through life, riding a train.   It seems that very little has changed in her internal landscape.  The lawyer, Bleistein, seizes the opportunity to write a book about the scandal caused.  He is seen meeting with Franck, who is serving his prison sentence, and getting background information from him.   Nathan sends Jeanne a love letter, although at 13 he's a bit young for her. 

At which I wonder at what I just saw.   It seems to be an illustration of how some people, and especially Jeanne just drift through life without giving anything much thought.    The story is unfocused, much as much of what happens to each of us in life is unfocused, with things happening to us which in the final analysis don't amount to much.  It is as though we are overhearing a conversation or events on a train, not knowing either the beginning of the end of someone else's personal drama.  

I guess it was a satisfying film in that it kept me watching it.     All these people are living their own lives and the wheels are turning in ways that maybe only they or only a small circle of people realize.  Like the moon on a cloudy night, most people are only visible in those moments when the clouds have passed, and their lives remain something of a mystery. 

Classic Musicals: Singin' in the Rain (1952)

This film is so colorful, saturated, and kinetic that it hurts.  Welcome to show biz 1952.  It is exhibit A in the case that a film doesn't have to make a lot of sense in it parts if it has the right trajectory.  Indeed the story is largely a pretext for a lot of song and dance but that is neither here nor there.   Out with the old and in with the new.  What is new in Hollywoodland is the talkie, which came in around 1927.    This catches the movie industry, smug and silent up till then, flat-footed when innovation of synchronized sound and speech hits the film world by storm.   Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lemont (Jean Hagan) are matinee idols in the silent movies.  Suddenly they have to adapt to the world of sound, which suits Lockwood fine, but Miss Lemont has a high squeaky voice just this side of Mira Sorvino.   This was all well and good when film was silent, but now that technology has moved on, Lemont has a problem, and seems unaware even that she has one.  

Not only is she oblivious of her deficiencies but she is mean and not shy about manipulating and intimidating anyone and everyone who stands in her way, even the studio head.  Not only that but she is possessed of the delusion that her frequent costar belongs to her romantically even though it is clear to any observer that he despises her.  She has in short a tragic lack of self awareness and a ton of conceit.

Meanwhile Lockwood has problems of his own.  Principally he needs to hire a phalanx of bodyguards when he goes out in public.  Desperate to escape from crazed fans he climbs to the top of a moving streetcar and then leaps into the open convertible driven by none other than Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) who is a struggling actress

doing lowly party acts and bursting out of giant birthday cakes.  The fact that Miss Selden is studiously unimpressed by Don Lockwood attracts him.  He is smitten with her however and tracks her down and wins her over.  And she is of course that undiscovered bundle of talent that is waiting to emerge. It is hard to believe that she was only 18 years old when she made this picture.

The choreography and music are stunning.  Donald O'Connor in "Make 'em Laugh" makes me wonder when he stops to catch his breath as he does backflips after walking up the sides of walls and all the pratfalls and running into bricked up doorways.  I would think they would have had to hose him down and towel him off after each take.  And of course the eponymous sequence where Gene Kelly is singin' in the rain is marvelous.  What an athlete.  The set must have been enormously expensive with some powerful pumps recircling water from drains and dropping it in front of the camera.  

The ballet sequence "Gotta Dance" has to be seen to be believed.  This "dream sequence" with (for some reason) Cyd Charisse is a story within a story.  Here the Lockwood character is pursuing Charisse in a diaphanous white gown, is rejected by her, is thrown out of a bright red club by a couple of tuxedoed tough guys, then climbs the heights of

show biz, dances with Charisse with at least half a dozen costume changes, and one amazing number in a set that looks like some bleak landscape by Paul Klee and where Charisse is wearing a very long gown that is blown completely out to sea or something.  This is artifice at its very best.  

Where was I?  What was the story?  Oh yes, something about the new throwing out the old, about the deserving underdog overthrowing the entrenched and corrupt insider.  Was the transition to sound such a clunky and cheesy process?  I kind of doubt it.  Is it a beautiful spectacle, a pastiche, a delightful bit of happy nonsense?  Yes.  Is it the best musical of all time?  I don't know.  It's very good, but I haven't seen every musical so I couldn't say.  

A collection of satirical takes on Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"

 A group of seal hunters are confronted by Death in the unlikely guise of this aquatic mammal.  It features an all-Inuit cast.

As Death in one of the final scenes in the movie is shown leading his harvest to whereever he goes with it, this illustrates the essential difference between math and art.  Study it, please.

Wallace and Gromit as Death and Antonius Block, respectively.  Chessboard on right.

A Hip hop artist's take on this classic Swedish film. 

If Antonius Block were a woman in a Peter Pan haircut and Death was a dragon, maybe he/she would have better odds.

 This is an Anime take on the seventh seal with the main characters unicorns.

And finally Death selling watches.

Classic Cinema: The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman (1957)

I must like this film.  I've seen it about six times in my life.  The first time was at an old art house cinema in Portland, Oregon back in the 1980s.   It had to be seen on one of two nights as part of a double feature and you had to sit there in the cinema and be there when the projectionist and the machine were ready to show it (How things have changed).  They were having an Ingmar Bergman festival that week.  An absolutely stunning film, beautifully photographed in black and white and absolutely worth a repeat viewing. 

The film opens on a beach somewhere in Sweden, a knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) are returning after an absence of ten years on one of the crusades to the holy land.  It is also the middle of the 14th century when the plague is in the process of decimating approximately 1/3 to 1/2 the population of Europe.    Death is not taking a holiday but is indeed hard at work, where he is personified by a man dressed all in black with a white skull-like face (Bengt Ekerot) who introduces himself to Antonius and suddenly the sound of the surf stops.  Death gravely tells him that his time has come, but  Antonius talks him into a game of chess in return for letting him off the hook.  A chess board happens to be conveniently close by on the beach.  It is a leisurely game and in the mean time he makes his visit to his homeland, ravaged by the plague.  

He rides along and the knight asks his squire to inquire of the monk over there for directions to the village.  The squire goes over and notices that the man is a corpse.  When he returns to his mount Antonius asks him what he said and the squire says "He was a man of few words, but most eloquent".  

The stop at an apparently abandoned village and the squire catches a "seminarian", a thoroughly despicable person, stealing jewelry from the dead and attempting rape of a young survivor in the village.  He is denounced by the squire as a scoundrel whom if he meets again in the midst of such dishonorable acts he will brand him for a thief.  

The knight and squire proceed to a church.  The Squire has a cynical conversation with the church painter who is creating in a side chapel a tapestry portraying death, the plague, and Jesus suffering on the cross.  Meanwhile the more devout Antonius is in the sanctuary praying.  and when he notices what he thinks is a priest behind the grating, he takes confession.  In the midst of this he says that he is playing a chess game with Death and that he hopes to win through a clever set of moves which he describes.  Only then does he belatedly realize that this was no priest at all but Death.  

And so it goes.  You know that he will lose his chess game with death. We all will.    In the midst of all this gloom and doom, life goes on.  The scene shifts to a group of traveling performers. It is Jof and Mia (Joseph and Mary) and one of their fellow actors, Jonas.  Just as in a Shakespearean tragedy, the darkness has to be relieved from time to time with comedy.  Jof wakes up and greets the morning, talks to his horse, and then sees a vision, the virgin Mary teaching the Christ child to walk.  When he hurries back to the wagon and wakes up his wife and another actor, they complain bitterly, one about not getting his sleep and his wife who scoffs at the way he is always "seeing things".  

Later as they are performing before an only half interested crowd in the village, they are interrupted by a procession of flagellants, who whip themselves till they are bleeding and carry a cross with the effigy of Christ dying upon it.   Jonas goes off in the bushes with the blacksmith's wife and she takes up with him for a while. Meanwhile the blacksmith (Plog) drowns his sorrows in the local tavern.  The squire tries to humor him with cynical remarks about the transience and fickleness of love and women, but Plog is having none of it.  

There are some fine comic scenes in what is otherwise a very dark theme.  Plog finally confronts Jonas and his wife and gradually his wife switches sides.  Plog wants to do him in with his trusty sledge hammer but is dissuaded by his wife who now promising him food and denouncing Jonas too.    Jonas for his part apologises to Plog and asks him to please kill him.  When he refuses he goes off and fakes his own death with a trick knife.    A short while later he decides to climb a tree, and in a tragi-comic episode Death comes by and starts to fell the tree with a saw.  The man pleads with him, I can't die, what about my play?"  Death: " Cancelled due to death", 

There is, in the end no bacteriology and very little pathology in this film.  It is an eloquent essay on perhaps the largest issues of life and death, God and nothingness and the helplessness and uselessness of trying to find meaning in what happens, ultimately.   One of the characters asks Death "What are your secrets?" and Death replies "I have no secrets."

French Cinema: Ecoute le Temps (Fissures) by Alante Kavaite (2006)

I guess there is a school of storytelling in which one refrains from over-explaining things, and where much of the action is shown, not told.  Also sometimes the action lies in a somewhat sinister magical world which like buried chemical waste, is hinted at but never really explained.  

Charlotte is a sound engineer who is not especially on good terms with her mother, who lives in the countryside and lives as kind of a card-reader and clairvoyant, separated from her husband, Charlotte's father and as such has access to many of the shadowy goings on in the small community where she lives.   

On a visit home to her mother hits a deer and kills it, and this upsets her.  It is raining.   A short time later the mother is murdered and we see the police questioning Charlotte and the various suspects.   Gradually it comes out that the mother has a lot of liaisons and connections to the community and more than a few suspects left behind as her possible murderers.

There is the old woman and her son, who isn't quite all there who live nearby.  There is the young organic farmer and environmental activist.  There is the mayor and his accomplices who are secretly dumping toxic chemicals on her mother's land and the bearded man with spider tattoos on his arms who is his henchman.  You watch and wonder how any of this adds up.

  

In the midst of this, Charlotte makes a supernatural discovery for herself, and is able to somehow piece together the past through stringing twine through the living room and somehow recording with her rather sophistocated equipment sounds from the past, some of them going years in the past and some of them leading up to the moments of her mother's murder. 

   After she is done it begins to look a little like a complicated ballistics investigation crime scene, and of course it was a crime scene.   One does not ever learn exactly how her methods prove anything but eventually she solves the crime.

I found it an entertaining movie.  It leaves one a little mystified, but then, life is like that, and we see much more than we ever understand.