Revolt of the Zombies (1936), Victor Halperin.

We're so lucky someone had this picture of Angkor Wat handy!  

Let's walk past it and pretend we're actually in Cambodia, again and again and again and again!

Did you know zombies come from Cambodia?

Revolt of the Zombies is so bad, it doesn't even make the cut in a book dedicated to crappy Bs, Poverty Row Horrors.  Author Tom Weaver describes it as "not only crude but an excruciating bore."  Oh sure, like The Ape Man, which gets fifteen pages, was any better?  I've sat through MUCH WORSE, my friend.

Director Victor Halperin talked a good story, and his previous effort White Zombie was well-enough received to have the press interested in his next production.  "In Asiatic Cambodia the zombies are employed as fighting creatures and indomitable soldiers they make..." said Halperin in a New York Times interview, "The ratiocinators, having been forced to admit the existence of zombies chiefly because the poor creatures have been recognized by relatives as kin folk whom they had long since buried and mourned in proper fashion, have rationalized the phenomenon to their partial satisfaction.  They have deduced that these necrogenic slaveys must have been victims of astute poisoners who have superinduced a thanatoid condition by administering some subtle mortific such as bhang, for example, or that they have been placed in a state of suspended animation perhaps by the influence of jar-poonhk, a common accomplishment of fakirs in the Far East."  I wonder whether Revolt of the Zombies might have been more entertaining if the camera had simply pointed in Halperin's direction for an hour, allowing us to be baffled by his knowledge of exotic and possibly made-up words.  Sadly Revolt did not meet anyone's expectations and to top it off, Halperin became embroiled in a lawsuit over the use of the term "zombie."

An endless process shot journey through a swamp.  It's like a Lewton walk, but less well acted.

 Gosh, I am a rather handsome looking man - why am I trapped in this awful sausage?

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1970), Robert Fuest.

Dr Phibes relentlessly executes his plan to avenge his wife's death while indulging in hedonistic pleasures with a strange young female companion.  Many scenes are aggressively splashed in colour.  Visually weird but as far as storytelling goes, methodical (like his revenge plan).  Totally fantastic!  

He Walked by Night (1948) Alfred L Werker.

Lots of stiffs in fedoras.  

He Walked by Night (which has Jack Webb in a small role as a ballistics expert) laid the groundwork for the TV show Dragnet.  It operates like a promotional film for the LAPD despite controversy about policing methods and anti-minority attitudes that existed at the time.  In my view, later period noir is as culpable of dullness as early studio B's:  both types of films lost interest in their antagonists and for different reasons championed staid middle-class values in a moralizing manner.  He Walked by Night can't even be bothered to tell us much about the person who is the focus of the whole film, the subject of an LAPD manhunt!  

Whoa, nice solid state cathode ray thing!

Richard Basehart (who looks uncannily like Ewan McGregor) makes a living stealing and re-selling unusual pieces of technology, including old military equipment.  He claims he personally refurbished the pieces, leading his unwitting fence to think he's a genius with electronics.  Basehart's big mistake is killing a cop, resulting in a city wide search that eventually leads to the sewers of Los Angeles (nicely filmed in part apparently by Anthony Mann).  

This truly is a black-and-white world, though:  these "kids" are not just kids, man - they are fearsome, gum-smacking knife wielding adopsycholescents that give the cops the chills!  Most of He Walked by Night throws dramatic shadows on the everyday - danger is lurking everywhere for cops, didn't you know?  The post-war society is a battlefield that our totally morally upstanding cops must navigate in their quest to protect regular citizens.  (Although protecting you and me seems to be an afterthought)!  

   

Altered States (1980), Ken Russell.

Oh my GOD William Hurt is a self-absorbed asshole in this!

Electra Glide in Blue (1973), James William Guerico.

The fetishization of the uniform.  Robert Blake is so excited to get into his Homicide duds that he forgets his pants!

Super 70s flick:  testosterone! Cops!  Hippies!  This interesting film was the only one made by James William Guerico and is a character study of short man Johnny Wintergreen (Robert Blake),  a patrolman who rides the Arizona highways on his Harley Davidson (the Electra Glide of the title).  Wintergreen's dream to escape the drudgery of highway patrol comes true when he gets the chance to solve the murder of a recluse.

The film's pacing is uneven; bursts of wild action appear intermittently while the rest of the film ambles along in typical self-indulgent 70s fashion.  Similarly, I found the acting to be all over the map.  Almost all the main actors are allowed two minutes to chew scenery, flail around and work themselves into a sobbing frenzy - all except Robert Blake who actually puts in a restrained and dignified performance.  Billy "Green" Bush is great as his patrol buddy Zipper.  He doesn't get Wintergreen's dissatisfaction and is content reading Wonder Woman comics between slow moments, drinking out of his thermos under the desert sun.  "Wonder Woman - ever read that?  Man, that is meat and potatoes.  She is built!"    

Pick up line: did you know Alan Ladd and I were the same height?

Robert Blake's notoriety later in life makes this scene unsettling in retrospect -- even though he was acquitted of the murder of his wife.   Just seems like nothing ends well for self-loathing short men.  

Awesome hippie action!  Motorbike through the diner window!  Check out the look on the guy's face! 

Ultimately, I got the feeling that the film couldn't decide how to resolve itself, with Blake's character caught in the middle between the cops and the hippies.  Rober Blake uses a poster of the movie Easy Rider as target practice, but he's no Dirty Harry, either (who had already burst onto the scene by 1971).  Nevertheless, Electra Glide was still a great missing piece from the 70s canon for me.

I'm From Arkansas (1944), Lew Landers.

Hi, friends!  Let's see what's cookin' as far as hillbilly B's go!  This is a PRC release showcasing country tunes and all other kinds of minor achievements in southern rural entertainment. In the thinnest of storylines, an all-female theatre troupe heads down south to see Esmeralda, the Jenkins' family's pig that "threw out" a record-breaking litter of 18 piglets.  Their manager thinks he can somehow develop a box-office smash out of the pig-inspired Pitchfork, Arkansas visit.  Coincidentally, staying at the Jenkins' house is an all male troupe of musicians that tease the girls, exaggerating their country roots wearing fake beards and carrying moonshine jugs.  

1, 3, 3...  that's a lot of piglets.  Well, at least I thinks it might be... I ain't never learned to count!

Yes, lodging at the Jenkins' is just an excuse to yodel, play some fiddle, get handsome Bruce Bennett and Iris Adrian together... and watch a godawful ventriloquist act!  

El Brendel, the "Swedish" boarder, likes to  force feed his dummy peanuts.

The idea of a fake Swedish accent being instantly hilarious is beyond me, and this dummy act is the worst.  But the musical numbers are not bad.  Apparently for all involved, white hicks were just simple doofuses that liked to sing.  I guess I'm looking for malice  - where's the illegal stills, the distrust of outsiders and evading the law?  Must keep searching old B's.  

Winnebago Man (2009), Ben Steinbauer.

Monumentally disappointing!

Winnebago Man sat at the #1 spot on my Zip.ca list for a month or more, as I greedily awaited its arrival.  I enjoy the pleasures and lessons of VHS trash culture - from the Everything is Terrible!  website, which sews together strangely compelling VHS clips  http://www.everythingisterrible.com/ to the Found Footage Festival, where I first heard of the "Winnebago Man" phenomenon.  Story is, working with abrasive pitch man Jack Rebney was such a chore for the guys hired by Winnebago to make a promotional video that they took every blooper, every one of Rebney's characteristic swearing sprees, and compiled it all into one epic display of  middle-aged self-loathing.  (Oh, you downtrodden salesmen of America)! Then, somehow, the tape got into other hands -- copies proliferated.  Eventually the tape was so widespread that the Rebney rants became a part of pop culture lore.  In fact, phrases from the underground tape were so well known that Rebney rants even made it into mainstream Hollywood films and TV.

For the record, I'd never heard of the mysterious, underground tape and I had never heard of Rebney but Ben Steinbauer had and became compelled to learn what happened to him and whether the tape had any impact on Rebney's professional or personal life.  His obsessive research leads him to Rebney pretty quickly (within the film's first 20 minutes).  Rebney is now in his 70s and acts as the caretaker of park area in California.  But the film sputters once contact is made.  Steinbauer tries to personally connect with the man, probe his life and interests and sympathize with a somewhat unlikeable, eccentric individual (who also happens to be going blind, not good for a man in self-imposed exile).  There's a moment in the film where Steinbauer asks himself if he's made too big a deal out of the tape and the impact it could have had.  Yes, I felt like shouting.  Because basically we had 60 more minutes of movie left and I seriously doubted much more could be said on the topic of Jack Rebney.

Just like in The Best Worst Movie, a documentary that also explores the relationship between fans and actors in cult products, Steinbauer peddles Rebney around at film festivals.  Somehow, this all feels like an effort to resolve something more for Steinbauer than for Rebney.  Compare this with some of the actors from Troll 2, likeable people who connected well with fans they never knew they had.  The Best Worst Movie is fun (hey, so is Troll 2) and there's a decent story behind the making of a cheapo horror movie that flopped but is still inexplicably beloved - but Winnebago Man doesn't recapture the same magic.   

The Roaring Twenties (1939), Raoul Walsh.

 Crazy kids, drinking hooch and crashing their jalopies!

The Roaring Twenties should be remade PRONTO, substituting the criminalization of marijuana in place of booze for its story arc.  This is a gorgeous looking film, very crisp, but I will admit to growing distracted and doing other things while it was on.  The film strikes a decent balance between acknowledging that the Volstead Act was a bad law, and chastising folks who profited from it.  I'm just not a fan of sentimentality, although it's interesting to observe that it only took about ten short years for Hollywood to become nostalgic for its glory days. 

Priscilla Lane plays the object of James Cagney's affections, but she's about as intriguing as a pan of warm milk.  And she sings constantly, those dull little sentimental ditties that white folks in the twenties liked so much.  

First, she sings on the train:

Then she auditions in a club.

What is this one, maybe "Yes, sir, that's my baby"?

Oh, another number.

The film kicks off with Cagney and Humphrey Bogart sharing a smoke in the trenches but then this sing-song romance consumes most of the film, obscuring the more interesting story of Cagney's struggle as an ex-soldier to re-integrate into society (turning instead to bootlegging).  Cagney's great as usual but the film only really comes alive when he plays off cranky, hardbitten Humphrey Bogart.

The Outlaw (1943), Howard Hughes.

"Billy the Kid, huh?"

Ecch!  Although from only 1943, The Outlaw felt like it sprang from TV, with stilted dialogue and goofy singsongy tunes playing in the background.  You know that tune, that 50s ode to consumerism with lots of happy strings skipping up and down.  Walter Huston smirks and banters with Jack Buetel, who plays smug adolescent Billy the Kid.  Then, Billy the Kid rapes Jane Russell in the hay.  What?  This movie is known for boobies, boobies, boobies, Hughes' fetish, but I didn't see any and by twenty minutes in I couldn't take no more.  Fascinating as an oddity but a strange viewing experience.

Not the Girl Next Door (2009), Charlotte Chandler.

Who is Charlotte Chandler?

Not the Girl Next Door is a biography of Joan Crawford by New York-based Charlotte Chandler.  It's a quick read, laid out essentially as a conversation between the author and various individuals she's interviewed:  Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Vincent Sherman, and of course Joan herself.  Or, is it? After finishing the book, which was only published a couple years ago, I couldn't help but be curious when the interviews were conducted - and who, if anyone, was still alive?  Crawford died thirty-three years ago; other subjects could plausibly have been alive until recently...

Chandler is the author of a series of biographies of Hollywood stars.  When her 1978 bio on Groucho Marx Hello, I Must Be Going hit the shelves, it received a middling review from the New York Times. "One of the problems," wrote Joe Flaherty, "...is that Miss Chandler, like the studio heads, seems bent on taming her subject."  A year later the Times reported that the book was so wildly popular around the world that the UCLA Film Archive was making an effort to preserve the hand-painted billboard advertising the book - which literally stopped traffic on Sunset Boulevard!

Other biographies followed:  Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini.  It is claimed in a few places online that Chandler is a pen name for Lyn Erhard (which looks amusingly like an anagram).  The publisher, Applause Theatre and Cinema, books provides us no information on the author.  The wikipedia entry on the Chandler (for whatever it matters) implies that she is a big fake: "her work often features loquacious, unfamiliar quotations by deceased celebrities whom Chandler claims to have personally interviewed, although the statements occasionally contradict those already in print."  A stronger reaction appears in a blog post on the fan-based component of the TCM website.  Titled "Charlotte Chandler's Body of Lies," author "macktheblack" completely disputes the veracity of Chandler's claim that she personally interviewed Marlene Dietrich, known to be reclusive.  This point of view is supported by quotations from another Dietrich biographer.  "I bought this book excited to learn," Mack writes, believing he was the victim of a hoax.  "I finished this book delighted to have learned.  But the aftermath of it has proven the most educational.  A smack in the face that left harsh reality ringing in my ears."

I wonder, do classic movie fans really want the truth about studio stars?  Or, are their perfectly lit and luxuriously dressed black and white bodies basically just fodder for our fantasies?  Do these biographies not just give us more details to fantasize to?  There are only so many films to watch, and others are have been lost to history since the nitrate deteriorated.

I find it mildly amusing that out there somewhere a classic movie fan is outraged (outraged!) that they were given a possibly fabricated narrative of a fabricated character, a studio creation known by a name suggested by magazine readers.  Is there anything that can eclipse (or correct) the scathing depiction of her in her adopted daughter's own book, Mommy Dearest?  Sure, some readers may want a more solidly researched biography, one drawing on properly footnoted archival papers.  But I think it is the mystery that infuriates these angry readers yet in some ways, this is what they seek onscreen in the first place from classic movies:  an idealized, constructed and heavenly glowing being.  This book is strangely silent on what it does purport, which that it is a conversation.  "Told me," and "Told us," are used frequently, but we don't know when or where.  (It begs the question whether "Chandler" is still alive, and if not, who is capitalizing).  It's strange to me that the original Groucho biography was never questioned as being untrue; at worst it was described as a bit sloppy.  My theory is that someone has Chandler's notes and tapes and is finishing the work, with or without her help.  (At worst, all this speculation would mean we are all doubting some poor older woman who has done some very interesting interviews.)  Whoever is writing is good - the book flows smoothly and small details are dropped in that characterize the subject in a memorable way.  Joan's first home is condescendingly described as having "a kind of yard-sale elegance." Now, that's just something you'd expect Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to say, isn't it?

The Girl Next Door gives readers exactly what they might want to hear.  Joan was the same girl that she was in her pictures - born into poor circumstances, she clawed her way to respectability and then some.  Joan wasn't a well-informed parent but did her best and certainly was never cruel.  It was Christopher and Christina, Joan's adopted children, who were dysfunctional and profited off the Crawford name.   For a book mainly tempered in tone, the chapter "told by" Vincent Sherman is somewhat shocking, describing Joan Crawford becoming sexually excited watching herself onscreen during a private viewing with Sherman.  Yet it all fits together nicely.  I agree with macktheblack - I had fun reading the book.  Of course I will never know what of it is "true."

I am waiting for the 2015 personal biography of Bette Davis!