Dracula (1931), Tod Browning.

Ladies, you are each worth 33% of my value and your stock is falling.

I haven't looked at Bram Stoker's novel Dracula since I was in high school, but a vivid passage has always stuck in my mind:

"With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast.  When blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck  and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the...Oh, my God!  My God!  What have I done?"  ... Then she began to rub her lips as though to cleanse them from pollution. -Chapter 21.

I pictured his finger nail as jagged, running across the white unliving skin -- the whole passage left me nauseated.  By contrast, the biggest threat Bela Lugosi's Dracula poses is that he's on the prowl for your woman!  The first we hear of Dracula, we are told he has wives, plural, and is up to no good.  Why does Dracula want to lease Carfax Abbey in England anyway?  Is it because it is conveniently located next to the Seward Sanitarium, run by a physician who just happens to have a fetching daughter?   And that this daughter Mina has little Jazz Age slumber parties with her pretty pal Lucy?

"I dunno, the accent - it's so dreamy!"  "Oh, Lucy, you have the weirdest crushes!"  

Dracula delegates almost all unpleasantness offscreen, which has a bit of a disjointed effect:  Lucy died?  When did that happen?  You never see him actually walk out of his coffin (how undignified); the camera politely averts its gaze and only returns once he is standing.  I am told Lugosi's moans during his staking have been restored to the 75th anniversary edition version I watched but were never originally heard in theatres.  It's interesting to observe that this landmark vampire film doesn't contain all the elements we consider to be part of the "canon."  Most troublingly, Dracula seems never to need an invitation.  In fact, the film's climax has the entire household attempt to keep Lucy in her own bedroom and Dracula out.  Oh, this heart-breaker Dracula -- someone get the shotgun!

As they are in the Swedish "coming-of-age" vampire film Let the Right One In (2008), the more disturbing themes found in the source material are downplayed. The freakish, the revolting are smoothed over.  In Let the Right One In, the vampire is a friend and secret weapon to a bullied boy more than a predator looking for her next human servant.

I told [Harker] exactly what had happened and he listened with seeming impassiveness, but his nostrils twitched and his eyes blazed as I told how the ruthless hands of the Count had held his wife in that terrible and horrid position. -Chapter 21.

Jonathan Harker's response to the description of his wife's forced interaction with Dracula is that of one whose wife has been, well -- the blood drinking ceremony is basically a Victorian metaphor for rape, right?  Mina's horror at having been made impure becomes a regrettable wayward crush onscreen.  Lugosi is elegant - hypnotic -- something all young wives and fiancees might be forgiven for falling for.  He's like a Carnegie Hall Mormon - who wants to be #4, girls?

No, Eliza Doolittle - NoooOOOOoooo!

Counsellor-at-Law (1933), William Wyler.

 

Secretary walks by...

It's booty appreciation time!

John Barrymore is a lawyer who, having arrived in New York "by steerage" many years before, has a soft heart for penniless immigrant clients but charges the Mayflower sons and daughters a little more to get them out of their scrapes.  Counsellor-at-Law is a fascinating film that makes explicit statements about the clash between the well-heeled WASPS and those still climbing the ladder to prosperity.  Issues like ethnicity and money are pretty much laid on the table as is, there's more than a little sexual innuendo.  Barrymore even slams a door to muffle a cuss word.  How fun!  True or not, these less censored films make us feel closer to the time and place they came from.  Sure, I know it's all scripted (and based on a successful stage play) but it's just refreshing to witness an honest reaction (and to wonder if the receptionist is knocked up)!  A contemporary review of the screen version pointed out that some bits were cut in order to be suitable for moviegoers, but that "where this occurs, Mr [Elmer] Rice [the screenwriter and original playwright] and the director, William Wyler, leave nothing in doubt."  Guess I'll have to dig the script up to verify all my hunches!

Barrymore is enjoyable and surprisingly restrained as the man whose life becomes unravelled when he is threatened with being disbarred from legal practice.  Retaining a stage-like feel, all the action is limited to the glittering Art Deco waiting room and offices of the Simon and Tedesco firm, which is filled with a handful of delightful female characters.  Bebe Daniels is Barrymore's saintly secretary who quietly pines for him while gritting her teeth at the sight of his obnoxious wife (Dora Kenyon).  Isabel Jewell is the squawking receptionist who eats tongue sandwich for lunch.  Paul Muni had played the lead role successful on stage and later reprised the role for radio in 1935.  I'm still waiting for the delivery of the Muni biography I just ordered, so I don't know yet why he didn't also appear in the movie.   

Bebe Daniels the ever devoted secretary "Rexy", patiently waits for Mrs Simon (played by Dora Kenyon) to finish her telephone conversation before she can begin typing again.

Casino (1995), Martin Scorsese.

Pivotal, hugely entertaining scene.  "I know, but that's enough."

Martin Scorsese's last great movie, if you ask me.  Starring real men.  A visual feast.  With an actual female character.  And it's all fucking true!  Las Vegas is somewhere I don't need to go, even if just to make that once in a lifetime trip to cross it off some kind of (ugh) must-do list mandated by airport non-fiction.  1000 Places to See Before You Die.  Forget that self-help fascism.  The old Vegas has been bulldozed and the new corporate Vegas (sans Liberace Museum) keeps pulling in the rubes.  I guess the middle classes flock there because it's sanitized and safe but they can still pretend they're palling with the Rat Pack.  Why not just go to Orlando?

Martin Scorsese's such a big booster for film preservation, and his love of B-noirs is so genuine that I have mixed feelings about pulling him down.  But I think his failure has been to choose DiCaprio for his male muse.  I am pretty much in agreement with Erich Kuersten's thesis that movies today lack real men. (Kuersten is the author of the Acidemic blog:  http://acidemic.blogspot.com).  Kuersten observes:  "DiCaprio has never been married or had children.  He dates models.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it shows at least on the surface, a level of laddish insecurity; his women must be certified gorgeous in case someone's looking."  I am not a deep thinker but yeah, I think strong male performances must be rooted in life experience and maybe we don't have Alpha Males in films today because, well, where are they, and who wants to hire them?  Hey, I married a mensch but it doesn't mean I don't want to see male rage and sexuality onscreen.  And Scorsese's films continually explore masculinity and male relationships.  I could probably find you a half dozen real manly men but they'd be coming from up north in lumber camps and from shrimp boats on the coast.  Are these guys trying out for Hollywood parts these days?  Can you imagine an established, risk-averse Hollywood exec grooming Mr Fort McMurray these days?  I can't.  Scorsese followed Casino with Kundun, Bringing out the Dead and then settled into what would remain basically an unbroken pattern for the next decade and a half, casting DiCaprio in Gangs of New York.  Gangs to me is as baroque as Casino but structurally a mess, performance-wise hugely uneven and a disaster one inch from stumbling into becoming a Broadway musical dance sequence.  Sorry, I hated it and I think part of the problem was making a boy its central focus.

And yeah, I am a girl.  I love the costumes in Casino.  I guess I bought the DVD to watch De Niro wear cantaloupe pants.  Sharon Stone is batshit and I love that she's hung up on James Woods -- trying to figure her out is impossible and she's such dynamite next to De Niro's performance which is highly restrained until he loses his gaming license and bursts forth like a geyser of angry bitterness.  I always suffer a Pesci hangover after watching him zip up his pants in that one scene, but Casino is a great, adult film and a gutsy goodbye to the original Las Vegas.

Who else can pull off burnt orange on burnt orange with a burnt orange tie?

The Scarlet Claw (1944), Roy William Neill.

Not particularly convincing French Canadians!

A friend of mine has a great business idea:  if you are planning a boring social event, hire a French Canadian!  They can work the room, tell jokes and have a great time!  This is why it's obvious Universal clearly hired a bunch of fakes for this movie.  Holmes and Watson travel to Canada (or, more precisely, the province of Quebec) and stumble upon the trail of dead bodies left by a homicidal maniac wielding a garden implement.  Features one character who does nothing but sell plaid fabric to the town's inhabitants  (now that, I can believe).  Note: Please, Canadian men:  for the love of God, stop wearing chequed shirts.  Topped off by this Churchill quotation on Canada:  "Relations of friendly intimacy with the United States on the one hand and their unswerving fidelity to the British commonwealth and the motherland on the other."  Cripes, now I feel dirty and have to go take a bath!

Man Who Laughs (1928), Paul Leni.

Who are the comprachicos?

Comprachicos, de même que comprapequenos, est un mot espagnol composé qui signifie «les achète-petits».  
Les comprachicos faisaient le commerce des enfants.

Ils en achetaient et ils en vendaient.

Ils n'en dérobaient point. Le vol des enfants est une autre industrie.

Et que faisaient-ils de ces enfants?

Des monstres.

Pourquoi des monstres?

Pour rire.

The principle characters in The Man Who Laughs is a family not related by blood but connected by each being survivors of fate, living on the fringes of 17th century English society:  a philosopher, Ursus, a loyal wolf named Homo, the mutilated child Gwynplaine and a baby found at the snowy base of a hanging ground.  If so far this sounds a little “out there,” this may not be your kind of silent movie.  The grotesque characters in this highly stylized film are evocative of a Daumier caricature or disturbing, primitively carved statuettes (see below):  let’s get a group of dirt-caked uglies and shine harsh lights on them!  These goblins think only of themselves and live in an unjust country.  While it's the comprachicos who slit Gwynplaine's mouth into a clown's grin, our strange little family seem to be the only people with any humanity.  If it were not for Conrad Veidt's performance of the sweet natured Gwynplaine, I think this movie would be completely soulless.


I swear I saw Ronald MacDonald in one frame.  If you thought you hated clowns now then buckle up because this movie’s stuffed with them.

Black Angel (1946), Roy William Neil.

Solid thriller.   This film likely appealed to the women who were holding the fort back home during the war. When a shady two-timing husband is convicted of his girlfriend's murder, his wife (played by June Vincent) picks up where the overworked cops left off.   Vincent assumes a very male role, essentially playing the detective, in the very masculine genre of film noir.  She poses as a nightclub singer to keep an eye on suspects.  Her husband, played by John Bennett, is surprisingly a minor character and mostly unseen.  Peter Lorre appears as mystery man with the best office in LA.  What a view!

Inglourious Basterds (2009), Quentin Tarantino.

In this post: here be spoilers!

The New Yorker's David Denby calls Inglourious Basterds "ridiculous," and the AV Club's Keith Phipps says the movie is "designed to inspire mere minutes of reflection." (Yeah- that's basically all the movie criticism I read unless I drag my ass to the local Mags 'n' Fags and pick up Film Comment, which I haven't done recently). WHAT!? I'll admit, the pacing was off -- not enough scalpin' and lots of yabber. But, I loved this flick.

As Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will let you know, urban Jews were the creators of the comic book superhero and in Inglourious Basterds, they ARE the superheroes! This movie's thesis is that film is so powerful a medium it can change our perception of history - maybe even history itself - and through film, Jewish storytelling has won out over Nazi myth-making. At least, that is what I am going to maintain. In what other WWII movie is the British Lieutenant assigned to assassinate Goebbels a film critic in civilian life? Churchill asks Lt Hicox whether Goebbel's mission as Minister of Propaganda is to beat the Jews "at their own game," and asks if Goebbels sees himself as the Aryan Louis B Mayer. Churchill is told no, Goebbels is more of a David O Selznik. So it's David O. VS Goebbels, and guess who is going down!

The film's Jewish heroine is the proprietor of a Parisian cinema, inside which the staggering denouement takes place: every senior Nazi official (including Hitler) is barricaded inside the theatre watching propagandist claptrap. While a pile of cellulose nitrate ignites, setting the screen on fire, her homemade film spliced into the main feature disrupts the Nazi narrative. Her face takes up the entire screen and she announces: "I'm interrupting your Nazi propaganda horse shit, to inform you despicable German swine that you are all going to die. And I want you to look deep in the face of the Jew who's going to do it." Did you know nitrate creates its own oxygen while burning, therefore fueling its own conflagration? Yes, in addition to baseball bats, machine guns and knives, one of the murder weapons is 35mm film!

How is this movie ridiculous when every movie that has featured Nazis as its antagonist has been ridiculous? The most accessible, one-dimensional, condemnable enemy for American cinema has been Nazis. Remember Tom Cruise's anachronistic desire as a kid to Kill Hitler? Well, here's your opportunity - the Inglourious Basterds rat-a-tat-tat Hitler to de-yeath - and burn the rest to kingdom come! (I'm going to mostly skip over the truly ludicrous production that was Valkyrie... but can't help mentioning that instead of surrounding one implausible actor with Brits with stage cred, IB gives us Mike Myers in a British general's uniform putting on an accent that is just a slightly thinner slice of ham than usual!)

So sure, this deviates a bit from the official historical record that says faced with his own defeat, Hitler offed himself in a bunker. And what is WWII good for except for being perhaps one of the best documented events (colour film appears, the Nazis make blueprints of gas chambers and keep a very tidy paper trail of all their activities). Not even attempting to live in the this-is-exactly-as-it-was-past, this flick is saying sure, we know the Allies won. It's also saying, our story won and your story failed. Is this Tarantino's masterpiece? I don't know, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Flesh and Fantasy (1943), Julien Duvivier.

"It is written!" shouts a hostess of a dinner party after the evening's entertainment, a palm-reader, announces that one of her guests will soon marry. Reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia. The characters in this film waver between feeling bound by immovable circumstances and questioning whether they can willingly change their futures. Of the three stories, the best-known is the middle sequence in which Edward G Robinson is haunted by the palmist's prediction that he will commit murder. I enjoyed the third: a high-wire artist dreams he falls to his death, and he struggles to overcome the feeling that the dream was a warning.

The imagery of the masks in the first sequence (above) are wonderful - reminded me of James Ensor's work.

Intrigue, James Ensor (1911).

Son of Dracula (1943), Robert Siodmak.

Southern Gothic version of the story, with plantation owner's daughter bringing "Count Alucard" to the US in her search for immortality. Dracula, for all you anagram whizzes out there, is not referred to as the "Son of" in the movie anywhere, but who cares. He's played by Lon Chaney (Jr.), who I was always curious about but who has little effect here - he's more plot device than character. I thought he could at least put on an accent, considering the Old World/ New World contrasts even the characters are talking about. It's possible he took a completely different approach to distance himself from Bela Lugosi's portrayal as anything else would look like an effort to imitate. Plot would have entertained me even if it had none of the vampire shtick - Louise Allbriton's scheming was enough fun. Would you believe Dracula comes off as a bit of a cuckold in this one?

In this quest to understand "B's" I must confess I had no idea that all these Universal monster movies were being made as early as the 30s and through the war years - I always associated them with the 50s for some reason.

Dracula's Daughter (1936), Lambert Hillyer.

Lovely little follow up to the 1931 Dracula, this picks up right where we left off with Renfield having just fallen down the stairs and broken his neck. Kind of a weird, intriguing film - with tall, dramatic Gloria Holden as a conflicted victim of her own desires. (Tall? Or was it all the worm's eye shots?). Apparently seven years on, psychotherapy is considered a possible remedy to vampirism/lesbianism. Magic versus science! Bizarro henchman "Sandor" has American midwestern accent, making him sound a lot like Peter Graves (ok, that would make Graves 128 years old which seems a tad old even for him). Holden is costumed by Brymer, whose designs allude to original film. The tone of the film is classy and Holden and her hypnotic ring and not a bad match for Mr Lugosi and his mesmerizing performance.