The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Akira Kurosawa.

Another exploration by Kurosawa of the rotten, self-serving (yet surprisingly resilient) hierarchies men set up ostensibly for public benefit.  A public property organization is in bed with a local developing company, with both sides making out like bandits.  But someone somewhere knows something about the rotten dealings and initiates a series of pranks, which grow more and more audacious.  This sets the guilty men, already under intense pressure from media scrutiny, at each others' throats.  A fascinating premise and, unfortunately, a still relevant subject.  I found The Bad Sleep Well a little uneven:  there's some well-conceived scenes and shots (the slow wheeling of the ominous wedding cake towards the guilty is great) but felt there was a little too much exposition and explanation towards the end.   Nevertheless, it's a much more relevant and mature approach to Hamlet.  The daddy issues still nag, but because of Kurosawa's emphasis on the bureaucratic system, Nishi doesn't seem overgrown for the role.  This one asks if it's really possible to take down an entire corrupt system with your bare hands without being taking on the stink of your opponent at the same time.  Hey, that's a little Macbeth in there too, for ya.

The Dark Eyes of London / The Human Monster (1940), Walter Summers.

Lugosi uses the old-inside-out-coat-plus-a-couple-of-belts trick on Greta Grynt.

Yes, I am on some kind of Lugosi kick.  I am the kind of person that listens to that one album looped over and over and over until I get it, tire of it, what can I say.  Dark Eyes of London is one creepy, weird film.  No Monogram campiness here!  It surprisingly approaches a modern tone in spots for the simple reason that it's disturbingly plausible.  Lugosi runs an insurance scam, using a charity home for the destitute blind as a cover.   Poor saps have to basket weave in an abandoned warehouse while someone plays a meandering, sanctimonious organ tune (hey, at least they thanked a bunch of blind guys in the credits).  Two cops are on the case, an American detective from Chicago and an inspector from Scotland Yard.  They push blonde beauty Greta Grynt into taking a position as a secretary at the home for the blind so they can gather enough evidence to convict Lugosi.  Nice guys, these two!  Interesting throughout and has a tense scene in which Grynt is pursued by a blind thug who keeps turning off the lights and running after her.

Is it just me, or does Lugosi have to haul around a limp (dead, fainted) body in every film?   And how did he manage to do this well into his fifties, I ask you!?

Night of the Living Dead Live at the Mayfair

Claps to the Mayfair Theatre, our local antidote to everything dull.  Last year, at its grand re-opening in January, the theatre had to turn close to a hundred people away (including me I might add, I was too cold and under-dressed to keep waiting) from its inaugural show: a screening of Fritz Lang's Metropolis accompanied by a live local band.  Last night, just over a year later, a full house was treated not only to live music but voice-actors and Foley artists providing all sound needed for Night of the Living Dead - an interesting experience (don't think I have ever heard an English film dubbed into English before)!   Local microbrewery Beau's Lugtread beer was flowing.  Finally! I have been praying for the Mayfair's liquor license to pass for months - let's hope they add wine and whatever elses to this list soon.  This theatre hitting it right on the head by heightening the social experience of movie watching by encouraging a fun and sometimes raucous environment.  I could have done without the sophomoric racist comments thanks to a d-bag sitting behind me but also didn't feel like going Irish on his ass and risking getting hauled out of the place (how did this caveman find a date to bring to this is my question)!  A personalized video greeting from George Romero hisself was a nice touch.  Keep it coming, Lee Demarbre, Mike Dubue and friends - my favourite way to hear live music is sitting on my lazy ass with a glass of Beau's!   Love the anti-snob attitude and totally willing to pay the $20 for a non-Silver City night out.

Dragonwyck (1946) Joseph L Mankiewicz.

 Fig 1. Scruffed up, possibly hopped up.

Personal favourite for unintentional hilarity.  Mustaches:  on some men it looks like they chose a peel-off from an East German disguise kit and for other men it is an indisputable part of their entire physical and psychic being.  The latter:  Vincent Price, who I contend is borderline unrecognizable without his.  Luckily, by the end of this movie, he is scruffed up enough (see fig. 1) to start to look familiar.  Price marries "farm-bred" dutifully religious Gene Tierney -- wait, sorry... I don't buy it.  Gene Tierney?  The gorgeous, urbane brunette of Laura?  Anywhat, she marries Price who has a phobia of the handicapped stemming from a tragedy experienced earlier in his life.  He's an elitist atheist landowner (check out the size of that crest on his smoking jacket!) harbouring general disgust for average folks.  In his own words: "I will not live by ordinary standards!  I will not run with the pack!  I will not be chained into a routine of living that is the same for others!  I will not look to the ground and move on the ground as the rest.  So long as there are mountaintops and clouds and limitless space."  OK, I guess that sounds a little Nietzschean although at least he has a vision.  Tierney does lacework, gossiping with Peggy her crip Irish maid about what is WITH this guy (her own husband) until she gets enough nerve up to see just what he is up to, keeping himself occupied in a small room in a tower of his (castle?).  When she breaks in, he confesses he has turned into "a DRUG ADDICT!" (As elitist atheism is prone to induce).  Well, instead of Tierney doing the Christian thing and perhaps trying to redeem her husband, she chastizes him.  The movie implies that there are just some dirtbags who are not worth it but luckily she has another potential love interest, tastes-like-cardboard Dr Jeff Turner, played by Glenn Langan.  You know, sometimes I throw my dog a piece of slimy grey deli meat that's been in the fridge too long and this is kind of similar.  We both love the rotten ham! 

Chandu the Magician (1932), William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Varnel.

Roxor has his enemy's platinum blonde teen daughter auctioned off in an Egyptian slave market. 

This is the first film I've seen - and I'm including Bollywood features here - where both the protagonist AND the antagonist are wearing turbans!  It's turban time!  Chandu is a mystic, an American acolyte of an eastern religion that has given him powers of hypnosis.  His brother-in-law is a scientist developing a death ray and is kidnapped by acquisitive megalomaniac Roxor, played to the hilt by Bela Lugosi  (who actually looks pretty fantastic sans turban).  Lugosi has a delicious monologue near the film's end in which he imagines wiping out the great cities of western civilization.  This film was based on a popular radio program and in 1934 a film serial followed in which Lugosi actually plays the hero Chandu, rather than the villain. 

Chandu the Magician is comparable to The Most Dangerous Game (1932) or the original King Kong (1933):  adventure story with an exotic setting.  Camera use is innovative and scenes include several little meticulous miniature sets, delightful even to a contemporary eye.  I particularly enjoyed the image of Chandu swimming amongst the construction paper seaweed!

Lugosi's got the death ray trained on YOU!

Hollywood and Vine (1945), Alexis Thurn-Taxis.

 

Toooo much waltzing dog. 

Two Cary Grant Biographies: A Class Apart (1998), Graham McCann and Cary Grant: A Biography (2005), Marc Eliot.

Without realizing that biographies of Cary Grant are many and vary greatly in quality, I spent much of March making my way through two beginning with Marc Eliot's book.  Struggling to complete it, I found Eliot hyperfocused on Grant's sexuality and mean-spirited to boot.  Eliot can't wait to describe Grant as "Sister Cary" or talk about how he and Randolph Scott, whom Eliot believed (without convincing evidence) was Grant's former lover "priss[ed] and preen[ed] at each other" throughout the film My Favourite Wife.  I have no objections to an author revealing a subject's sexuality but Eliot's tone is too close to homophobia for me and left me unimpressed.  

To cleanse my palate I tried again, this time with A Class Apart by Graham McCann. McCann's book is completely unlike Eliot's:  McCann studies Grant from all angles and considers his various sources carefully (he also draws extensively on Grant's own writings).  He brilliantly discredits previous sensational biographers and provides good dissections of Grant's films (something Eliot unforgivably skips)!  McCann writes about the mystery of Cary Grant, which is in the end the very thing that fascinates us about him: how does an individual adopt a persona, and as far as most of us can see become that persona?  Many come to Hollywood to shed old identities and ethnicities and names, but it was only Archie Leach who emerged as one of the most perfect of a flawless pantheon.  Yet we see through McCann's book that Grant made wise decisions throughout his career and worked carefully to cultivate his image, beginning in the 30s when he broke free of the studio system (one of the earliest actors to do so) and when he chose to work with directors he respected (Hawks, McCarey, Stevens, Cukor and Hitchcock) who he believed could bring out the best in his acting.  "Each of those directors permitted me the release of improvisation during the rehearsing of each scene - rather in the manner that Dave Brubeck's musical group improvises on the central theme, never losing sight of the original mood, key or rhythm, no matter how far they go," wrote Grant. 

I grew up watching Hitchcock flicks but as a kid had no idea what Grant was - English?  American?  It was as though he just dropped fully formed in the streamlined designs of a late-50s film set, wearing a ventless suit.  To the great unwashed audience, me included, how Leach/Grant pulled it off so successfully is a complete mystery.  The colossal gag, I think, is that Archie Leach was probably pretty close to Cary Grant in the first place and it was me watching North by Northwest in our TV room in the basement that was about a million parsecs from either of them.

Streets of New York / Abe Lincoln of Ninth Ave (1939), William Nigh.

Juvenile delinquents on trial, including little Gimpy.

Augh!  I'm such a sucker!  I bawled through this one (how embarrassing!) which was basically a pretty standard story about po' Bowery kids who just might (sniff) get to taste Christmas turkey for the first time in their lives.  Jackie Cooper plays a young man from a tough neighbourhood (with a gambling Irish dad, and a gangster brother, living in a dive basement apartment...) who runs a newspaper stand to pay for night classes, where he's studying to become a lawyer.  Gets a little creaky here and there but there's good acting between Jackie and little Martin Spellman who plays adoptive runt Gimpy.  Darn you, Monogram! 

Ikiru (1952), Akira Kurosawa.

A bureaucrat realizes after thirty years of meaningless paper pushing that he has achieved nothing and now has terminal stomach cancer.  I didn't know if I wanted to watch this; just reading that description filled me with dread.  Yet it was incredibly rewarding.  Not wholly uplifting or unrelentingly gloomy either, it's a nuanced story of a man who is the Man, and then takes on the Man.  Living in a city that I often find dysfunctional, the municipal bureaucracy portrayed in Ikiru struck me as completely realistic.   City clerks protect their meaningless positions and do nothing of any lasting good for the city's citizens; they have completely lost sight of any sense of public service and occupy themselves with stamping papers, abiding by a maze of regulations or getting out of work by passing the buck.  This meaninglessness dawns on them slowly in the film's incredible final scene where a pile of bureaucrats get sake-wacky.