It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Harry Lachman.

Fay Wray in It Happened in Hollywood.  She's broke, so she wears it constantly, but I love love love this outfit.

Many films, especially Hollywood products, allow viewers to escape their drab lives and immerse themselves in another (often more glamorous) reality. It Happened in Hollywood, on the other hand, shows you the underside of the movie biz right at the peak of the studio era.  Richard Dix plays a cowboy hero on the silver screen who can't make the leap into talking pictures and Fay Wray is his leading woman whose career is slowly fizzling into oblivion.  Morally opposed to playing gangsters (the studio's remaining offer), Dix decides to pack it in but his transition back to ordinary life is interrupted when a hero-worshiping kid appears on his doorstep.  Dix attempts one last hurrah by hosting a big blow-out party for the kid, Billy, at the ranch he used to own during his heyday.  In an effort to impress the child on a limited budget, Dix invites a host of impersonators of famous Hollywood stars, who manage to fool Billy into believing he's dining with the crème de la crème of the movie industry.

Now, impersonators.  I have not yet been able to locate much biographical information about the impersonators in It Happened in Hollywood (I'm very curious about Carol Dietrich!), but some sites have indicated that the actors filling these roles were in fact the industry doubles or stand-ins for the stars.  What a wonderful, weird, underbelly that's not often talked about yet alone depicted onscreen.  Stars need fill-ins?  Even today they don't often admit they need them, as if it's embarrassing to admit that there might be someone else out there that physically resembles you but is worth less and can be paid to stand on a mark for hours, or maybe jump out of a plane for you, because it's cheaper.  I remember one distinct description of a double and that is of Bruce Willis' (an apparent life-long colleague to Willis); he is discussed in Julie Salomon's The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood.  To imitate someone whose entire self is a brand, to dress like them, affect their mannerisms, to use their catch-phrases -- can there be any profession more debasing than to completely sink one's own identity and adopt another's?  Even when delightful and impressive, there's always something just slightly off, even off-putting, about observing an impersonator.  We scrutinize them for flaws and inaccuracies.  Failing pretty badly at 1930s movie trivia, I couldn't identify half of the impersonators in It Happened in Hollywood.  The May West double (she even gets a bit of dialogue) was terrible but I couldn't take my eyes off the Chaplin one because he was just spot-on.  Anyway, happy whatever, Billy - here's a pile of second-rate imitations!  Luckily Billy gets conked out in a subsequent scene and seems to have been impressed enough and polite enough a child not to ask for anything in addition to the single, "star"-filled lunch.

This is from The Samuel Fuller Collection box set which contains quite a number of films where he contributed to the script (as in It Happened in Hollywood) however, if you're looking for films he may have directed (you know, like sitting in a director's chair, like in the cover art on this box set)  and upon which he made a firm stamp, watch out because this collection does not include many of those.

Just look at that imitation Joe E Brown wolf down ice cream! 

The Hand (1981), Oliver Stone.

This is a majestic sequence where cartoonist Jonathan Landsdale loses his hand in a car accident, streaking the entire side of a tractor trailer with blood and continuing to play blood fountain all over his macrobiotic,  loft-lovin' New York wife!  Enjoy!  Because that's as good as it gets.  

Once upon a time, A&E was a fancy new cable channel --- and yet, it played The Hand constantly.   But really, The Hand is one of the lesser "murderous hands on the loose" films.  The characters are all quite static, and there's no tension - we know he's a mental case that blames his severed hand for all his problems.  Having lost his source of income to the guy who later played the voice of Roger Rabbit, Caine escapes to California, which is depicted as a dreary place where it pours rain constantly and is populated entirely by country music loving rednecks!  The scene between Oscar winning Caine and Bruce McGill (below, left) who starts every sentence with "Ah reckon" is quite the thing.  Just off him already!  This disk had commentary by the director, Oliver Stone, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.  This isn't as bad as "Manos" Hands of Fate in the hand-related B-movies but next time you're hankering for something of quality from this specific genre, I'd highly recommend The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) instead.  

This trunk is roomy, Ah Reckon.

Baby Doll (1956), Elia Kazan.

"I don't eat a nut that's been cracked by a man's mouth."

Technically, this is a "he walked out of the room" movie, not a "movie he made me turn off."  It's just a shade over the top, ridiculous, out there, nose-wrinkling.  I guess there's a reason the Catholic Church had it banned.  I reveled in it.  It's got genuinely good acting, a bafflingly grotesque depiction of southerners and the awesomeness of awesomeness: Eli Wallach (El Cattivo!) cast as a seductive Sicilian in trimly belted trousers, holding a fly-whip and breathing all close and heavy like on our titular Baby Doll (played by Carroll Baker), the 19-year old icy virgin wife of Karl Malden.  

Baby Doll is very stagey and, in parts, shouty.  I do sometimes find that a photographed play can sometimes be a mis-use of film - it's by no means an interpretation of a written work for film, it's simply capturing a stage performance.  But there is something to savour there, and it's the acting style and the general approach towards Tennessee Williams from when his material made it big.  Karl Malden gets the low marks for doing nothing but yelling.  He's very monotone.  But to see him sweat and struggle and pull on his sad, diamond-shaped thatch of what passes for hair in extreme frustration allows a few gems like, "WHAT IS THIS, GRASS?" to pass by.  Malden's character is the ultimate loser, perhaps the biggest loser ever encountered onscreen.  He fails at everything.  His crime is even discovered in the first act, and is even obvious to his thumb-sucking bride with her fourth-grade education.  He can't even yell at Aunt Rose (who looks like Harpo in a tea towel) very effectively.  Yes, the black farm-hands and Chinese workers constantly giggling at him from the edges of every scene do make a slightly distasteful margin illustration, but again, it also just echoes what we in the audience are doing.

I loved the greasy details and for a purely visual medium like film, Baby Doll just about has a stink.  The floors are rotting and slippery with melted icebox trays.  There's a pigpen in the front yard (how scenic) and  all they eat for breakfast is a Coke.  Sure, today, Baby Doll looks kinda hokey but I bet you if anyone made such a bluntly rude picture about the lack of sophistication in rural Quebec, or Alberta bible-thumpers, well, sign me up because I would be laughing all the way through that one, too.  

The Naked City (1948), Jules Dassin.

The Naked City takes deep focus to another level:  every face in the background is part of the story and worth following, if only for half a moment.  The film is deeply detailed, filled with hats, hand-lettered shop windows, subtle gestures.  This is a vanished time and place where kids amble along unchaperoned holding corn dogs and jump ropes.  The Naked City comes alive in street scenes.  When leads exchange dialogue, it's a little less captivating except for the final quarter when our young detective Halloran finally finds his main suspect Willie Garzah (above).  Interrupted from his prison-style exercise routine, Garzah struts in his crummy apartment, sweaty and arrogant.  Halloran, played by Don Taylor, is so perfectly vulnerable and unsure, a thin kid in an grown-up's fedora and baggy suit.  

Older detective Dan Muldoon (played by Barry Fitzgerald) shows Halloran the ropes as they struggle to piece together why a young model was murdered.  Everything from Dragnet to Law & Order is a bit of an echo of The Naked City which makes it feel somewhat dated rather than groundbreaking, as it surely once was.  The original cliche!

Mexican poster for Invisible Ghost

   

Cleansed of Leeches!

The Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures, 1934.

You'd think working in Hollywood in the 30s might be pretty cool, but apparently for Ed Kuykendall, it the last two years were a NIGHTMARE!

Maniac Cop (1988), William Lustig.

You got the wrong guy!  The mighty Bruce Campbell is stuck in a lame duck B-movie.

This movie is under arrest for boring the crap out of me.  Yes, this film is basically as stale as that joke.  Maniac Cop isn't a bad premise: someone in New York is on a killing spree dressed in police uniform -- is it an angry, rogue cop?  But it ambles along at a codger's pace.  It was written by Larry Cohen, who also wrote Black Caesar, and it features Richard Roundtree (Shaft) as a police commissioner.  Hey, this film is blaxploitation offspring!  Weirdest shower fight scene until Eastern Promises and keystone cops that say "ewwwwww" at the sight of a dead body.  I can't believe they made this in 1988!  

A Third Face (2002), Samuel Fuller.

Samuel Fuller and Don Ameche in Hollywood, 1941:  the writer-type and the actor-type.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.  The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.  The opposite of faith is not faith, it's indifference.  The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. 

- Eli Weisel, quoted by Samuel Fuller in The Third Face.  

If you told me up front that one third of Sam Fuller's autobiography was going to describe his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, I might have given this book a pass - which would have been a real shame.  Sam Fuller's understanding of war allowed him to call bullshit when he saw it.   "Heroes?  No such damned thing!  You moved your ass one way, and you didn't get hit.  You moved it another way, you were blown to bits.  When the battle was underway, experience and intuition, not heroics, were useful," Fuller writes, recounting his experience at Omaha Beach.  He later expresses his disdain for the phoney patriotism of John Wayne movies.  While reading The Third Face, it struck me that Fuller's Hollywood neighbour and friend Quentin Tarantino must have heard some of these yarns before they made it to print.  As he lays them out cinematically, Fuller's anecdotes seem hardly real.  Nazis dressed as mourners and priests, holding a fake funeral in a vacated town, praying over four empty infants' coffins as an ambush strategy?  Unbelievable!  A soldier muttering "I love action movies," mesmerized by a cowboys and Indians movie poster he spotted on the wall during a bloody shootout with Nazis in a cinema in Aachen?  This is right out of Inglorious Basterds!   

Fuller's oeuvre is one of a man who wasn't afraid to say no.  He refused to direct Patton, because he disliked the man.  He wouldn't allow the studio to cast John Wayne as his sergeant in The Big Red One, his most personal work based on his wartime experiences (luckily he was later able to go ahead with the project, with Lee Marvin in the central role).  But as Fuller himself points out, his films were never just about war -- he wrote thrillers, crime films and exotic love stories.  Fuller's inability to compromise lead to B-movie territory.   After the studio system completely dissolved, Fuller was left to drift professionally and the psychedelic 60s just seemed to puzzle (or at least depress) him.  In 1982 his film White Dog was so controversial that it was shelved, at which point Fuller and his family decamped to Paris.  Luckily, Fuller lived long enough (he died in 1997 in his 80s) to find himself well-appreciated by a new generation of directors that included Wim Wenders, Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino and others.        

Movie lovers who enjoy disappearing into the MGM fantasyland of film may find Fuller's works too gritty to enjoy.  In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thompson even goes so far as to question whether Fuller was aware of what he was doing as a director.  Fuller's autobiography makes it very clear that he was completely aware of what he is doing.  Sure, sometimes money, junior editors and cowardly studio execs made things difficult but he was very strongly propelled by a personal vision and managed to translate that into film time and again.  "People continued trying to pigeonhole me as a lefty or a righty, and my work as being liberal or conservative, projecting their own notion on me.  I wouldn't let them affect my deeply held belief system.  Peace and ethics were my beacons."  

The Naked Kiss (1964), Samuel Fuller.

Shoving dirty money into Candy the Madame's mouth.

Love.  This film swings wildly between hysterical violence (infamous opening sequence where hooker Kelly whales on her pimp until her wig flies off) and sickly sweet schmaltz (Kelly singing "The Bluebird of Happiness" to a room full of polio tots on crutches).  The tonal result is CAMP.  

"Life is sweet, tender and complete..."

Nevertheless, I loved this film's crazy mood swings.  This is one whacked out film.  Fuller has one thing right on, and that's the hypocrisy surrounding prostitution.  The town's cop Griff has a go at Kelly right off the bat -even though it's his job to keep prostitution out of his town - and then he's personally disgusted when his wealthy but oblivious buddy Grant takes a shine to her.  The women in the film are more ambiguous in their attitude towards Kelly and once her past becomes common knowledge, everyone gets the knives out.