Baba Yaga

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Catgeory: gialli / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 25 of 100

Corrado Farina’s ‘Baba Yaga’ is one of those films I’d been vaguely aware of without knowing anything much about it. I came across it having fed “giallo” into the search facility while updating my rental list recently. But is it a giallo? The first time I ever wrote about gialli on this blog, I prefaced the review with a brief checklist: a guide to recognising your giallo. It tapped out at ten items:

1. Black gloves. The must-have fashion accessory for the killer-about-town.

2. An amateur sleuth, in the wrong place at the wrong time, who decides to launch their own investigation after witnessing a murder or attempted murder.

3. Totally ineffectual police officers.

4. Extended, operatic death scenes which present as a hybrid of the traditional whodunit and the visceral stalk ‘n’ slash flick.

5. Staircases, often spiral. Likewise, killers and victims alike tend to plunge from high places or down elevator shafts.

6. J&B. Product placement as blatant as Aston Martins in Bond movies.

7. Famous mainstream actors at the start or later on in their careers.

8. Gratuitous nudity. (Well, black gloves and bottles of J&B can only generate so many ticket sales.)

9. Edwige Fenech.

10. Distinctive titles, often featuring an animal (‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’), a colour (‘Deep Red’), a number (‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’), or sometimes a combination of all three (‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’).

Add to this an occasional tendency to incorporate supernatural elements, and let’s run ‘Baba Yaga’ against the checklist. It scores a big fat no on points 1, 5, 9 and 10. Point 2 is a maybe – the main character, adrift in a welter of weird shit, latches onto a hitherto overlooked detail (a quintessential giallo trope) which helps her unravel things. Likewise point 3 – some cops turn up at the end and do precisely fuck all, but their abortive attempts at sleuthing are never established in counterpoint to the amateur detective’s efforts as in the best gialli.

Point 4, half and half – there are some extended, operative (hell, positively grand guignol) dream sequences that presage a couple of swiftly portrayed, almost throwaway death scenes.

As for the rest of them: point 6 (didn’t notice, and the supremely authoritative Atrocity Nights J&B in the movies page doesn’t list ‘Baba Yaga’, so I’m guessing not); point 7 (check: Carroll Baker); and point 8 (very little nudity per se, but sleaze aplenty).

So it’s a very shallow case for ‘Baba Yaga’ as a giallo. But fuck it, it’s my blog and I’ve still got 75 movies to get through to finish this Operation 101010 project so I’m taking the minority view and deciding to allow it.

The film centres around photographer Valentina (Isabelle de Funes). When we first meet her she’s attending some kind of weird performance theatre piece in a graveyard. The police break it up and she adjourns to a society party. Later she hangs out with some sexy Marxists who talk up revolution. In the course of the film she gets involved with director Arno Treves (George Eastman); one moment he’s making a documentary attacking capitalists, the next he’s shooting a commercial for washing powder. The politics of ‘Baba Yaga’ are, to put it mildly, slightly confused.

Treves’s washing powder commercial, incidentally, is horribly racist. It anthropomorphosises a black man in a black suit as a stain and a white man in a white suit as the detergent. Whether Farina meant this ironically, I’m not sure. But it’s something of a slap in the face to the viewer. It doesn’t help, either, that an air of homophobia permeates ‘Baba Yaga’, in the shape of its eponymous anti-heroine.

Baba Yaga is a witch and a lesbian. Farina seems to have less of an issue with the whole witch aspect. Long story short: B.Y. almost runs Valentina over as she walks home from the society party, offers her a lift, and tells her they were destined to meet. She takes a clip from Valentina’s garter and promises to drop by to see her the next day. Valentina flees to her apartment where she has the first of several surreal dreams that, depending on how your look at it, (a) tap into her sexual repression, (b) feature fetishistic use of German uniforms (from both wars), (c) make no fucking sense, or (d) all of the above.

B.Y. comes calling, as promised, the next day and puts a spell on Valentina’s camera. Doing an erotic shoot with a model dressed in a revealing cowgirl outfit, the poor unfortunate collapses as if shot by the very replica pistol she’s holding.

Later, Valentina photographs a protestor at a demonstration and the guy drops dead. Valentina hits upon a self-evident solution: use a different camera. This doesn’t, however, stop her from visiting B.Y. on the pretext of using her decrepit old house as a backdrop to a photoshoot. B.Y. gives her a doll called Annette. The doll is done up in bondage gear.

At another erotic shoot, the model is stabbed during a power cut and later dies. Valentina and Treves develop the film from the possessed camera and the resultant pictures indicate that Annette (Ely Galleani) has come to life and offed said model.

(I am not making this up.)

Annette appears to Valentina, almost seduces her, then departs.

A phone call summons her to chez B.Y. Now completely under the witch’s spell, she goes. After ten minutes’ worth of kink (bondage, whipping and a quick grope), Treves turns up to save her from the proverbial fate worse than death.

Which is where I have issues with the film. Farina obviously revels in the faux sapphic imagery and yet comes across as puritanical in his denunciation of Baba Yaga as a manipulative and evil seductress. However, all of the dream sequences seem to indicate that Valentina is drawn to B.Y. I can’t help thinking that a more interesting (and certainly more erotic) film could have been wrought from the concept of Baba Yaga as Valentina’s liberator. Likewise, I’m also stumped as to why the supposedly omnipotent B.Y. wastes so much time and effort on the androgynous and unresponsive Valentina when she has the voluptuous and sexed-up Annette at her disposal. Without wishing to veer into the realms of chauvinism, laddishness and objectification, let me put it this way – Valentina or Annette, your choice:

Ahem. Moving swiftly on:

‘Baba Yaga’ is homophobic, racist and deeply confused in roughly equal measures. And it’s probably not even a giallo. The Shameless DVD release that I watched purports to be Farina’s final cut, restored from the butchering the erstwhile distributors enforced upon it. I’ve never seen said bastardised version, but if the director’s cut is this schizophrenic, I’d hate to imagine how fucked up the theatrical release was.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Diane Lane in 'The Big Town'

Introducing a new series on The Agitation of the Mind: an early hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning celebration of all that's sultry, sensuous and seductive in cinema. And who better to start with than the incomparable Diane Lane in 'The Big Town'?

The Oxford Murders

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 24 of 100


Why buy?

It was £3.00 (about $4.85).

And?

I’d enjoyed Guillermo Martinez’s novel – a short, highly readable and cleverly constructed mystery.

And?

A good cast, including the voluptuously appealing Leonor Watling.

The expectation

A cerebral murder mystery enlivened by a darkly European aesthetic and some classy performances.

The actuality

On paper, this had real potential: an intellectual murder mystery predicated on logic puzzles and the question of whether an absolute truth can ever be established; a shoal of red herrings; a double-bluff finale; an appealing young American actor paired up with a heavyweight British thesp; and a director (Alex de la Iglesia) who’s proved himself in diverse genres (horror, comedy, drama) and can generally be relied on to bring a touch of the macabre to the proceedings.

The end product, though, is infuriating. Nothing quite gels. Whereas Elijah Wood turns in a thoughtful, often understated performance as Martin, an earnest young student hoping to gain the mentorship of respected academic Arthur Seldom (John Hurt), and Leonor Watling proves luscious and sparky as Lorna, the nurse he gets involved with, the other acting performances are all over the place.

John Hurt lightly seasons the scenery and proceeds to chew with relish. Jim Carter, sporting a Colonel Blimp style moustache, hams it up as a police inspector so dim-witted he makes your average giallo copper look like Sherlock Holmes. A bizarrely cast Dominique Pinon seems to be in another film entirely, Anna Massey veers into Mrs Rochester territory and Burn Gorman, as a fellow student in competition with Martin, plays all his scenes as if locked into a stare-it-out contest.

Then there’s the demented cameo by Alex Cox. Yes, that Alex Cox. His character is an obsessive researcher who stumbles on a pattern of answers to logic problems given by educationally substandard test subjects. Realising upon interviewing them that their decidedly left-of-centre reasoning demonstrates an internal logic equal to that of a conventional or even intellectually brilliant response, his determination to further his studies in this area – to unearth some new and radical perspective on the human mind – leads him to the company of the insane and irreparable damage to his own capacity for reason.

It’s a powerhouse sequence: Cox gives it his all, while de la Iglesia, for the first and only time in the movie, really cuts loose in terms of imagery, immediacy and intensity. The pisser is, it turns out to be one of an inordinate number of red herrings. Granted, red herrings are part and parcel of the traditional murder mystery, but here they’re packed in like, er, sardines. Often inelegantly. Example: a scene in which a police psychologist speculates that the murderer is a repressed homosexual cuts to a scene where a minor character, drunk and with a chip on his shoulder, starts shouting, “I’m going to come out of the closet and arse-fuck the lot of you.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Indeed, with the film’s reliance on many archetypes of the genre (something the novel uses well, because it riffs on the literary form of the whodunnit in a way that’s pretty much impossible to translate to film), its pretentions to intellectualism and the Oxford setting, it’s hard not to imagine the ghost of Inspector Morse floating around in the background. And once that thought’s in your head, it’s hard to shake the notion that watching an episode of ‘Morse’ would constitute two hours better spent.

Still, ‘The Oxford Murders’ emerges as reasonably entertaining, the lovely Leonor is easy on the eye and there’s a sting in the tale that ensures the dreaming spires don’t get too dreamy. It’s average enough that there’s nothing to get excited about, yet accomplished enough that a harsher review would be bad sportsmanship.

Good buy/bad buy?

There’s probably another viewing in it, but ultimately this should have been a rental, not a purchase.

HELLRAISERS: The Three Musketeers

In an embarrassing example of Well Known Film Facts Totally Passing Me By, I had no idea, when I added Richard Lester’s ‘The Three Musketeers’ to the rental list, that its sequel (the cunningly titled ‘Four Musketeers’) actually compromised the second part of Dumas’s novel instead of being the rushed-into-production quick cash-in that I’d assumed it was.

Turns out, too, that both films were shot at the same time – indeed, the cast thought they were just making one (fairly long) film. When producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind released the thing in two halves, to not inconsiderable box office, the main cast united in apposite “all for one, one for all” stylee and brought a court action against the filmmakers.

Watching ‘The Three Musketeers’ over the bank holiday weekend, I had the schizophrenic experience of finding the behind-the-scenes battle more interesting than any of the swordplay on offer (don’t get me wrong: it’s excitingly done and Oliver Reed, to use the vernacular, proper goes for it; there’s just too damn much – it’s swords drawn every five minutes or so and after the fifth or sixth bout a sense of repetition sets in) and yet, as the end credits – with their little teaser for ‘The Four Musketeers’ – rolled, I was cursing that I hadn’t added that title to the rental list while I was at it.

Schizophrenic is a good description of the film overall. Oliver Reed brings real gravitas to the role of Athos, likewise Christopher Lee to the role of Rochefort, yet the presence of comic stalwarts Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, coupled with Frank Finlay’s buffoonish portrayal of Porthos and a general tendency by Lester to play entire sequences as exercises in broad physical comedy, gives the film an air of ‘Carry On D’Artagnan’.

Speaking of D’Artagnan, the casting of Michael York (along with that of Richard Chamberlain as Aramis) turns half of the Musketeers into pretty boys, and while the shirtless York demonstrates a buffed-up muscularity, his screen presence is at odds to Reed’s brooding intensity.

Then again, the cast as a whole is something of a pick ‘n’ mix bag: where else would you find Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welsh, Charlton Heston, Joss Ackland, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simon Ward, Geraldine Chaplin, ‘Likely Lads’ star Rodney Bewes and (I kid you not!) Sybil Danning rubbing shoulders in the same movie?

Perhaps the unlikeliest candidate emerges as most appealing: Raquel Welsh’s aptitude for deadpan comedy is priceless, her portrayal of Constance de Bonacieux as a coquettish clutz both satirises her sex symbol status and turns what could have been a mere set-dressing role into a scene-stealing success. Roy Kinnear, too, deserves a ‘man of the match’ award for two bits of inspired silliness: his attack on Rochefort with an uprooted sapling, and his twatting of a court guard while dressed as a bear.

The pacing is uneven – because of the high-end frequency of the sword fights, the moment the film pauses to deal with court intrigue or flesh out a character, inertia sets in – and some of the acting is just plain wooden, but for all the tomfoolery George Macdonald Fraser’s script retains a commendable fidelity to the novel and at 103 minutes it’s an entertaining timewaster that doesn’t waste too much of your time. Damned if I haven’t added the follow-up to my rental list.

Corin Redgrave

The first film I can remember seeing Corin Redgrave in is Richard Attenborough’s poignant debut 'Oh What a Lovely War'. In a production jam-packed with famous names – Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Jack Hawkins, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Maggie Smith, Susannah York, John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth More, Edward Fox – it’s Corin Redgrave’s heartbreaking performance as doomed innocent Bertie Smith that has stayed with me.

Corin Redgrave died yesterday aged 70. To his family, my condolences. To his memory, a glass is raised at chez Agitation.


i.m. Corin Redgrave, 16 July 1939 – 6 April 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

The poll closed earlier today and the gizmo that computes the percentages tells me that Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the people’s choice with 22 votes or 33%.

The runners-up are:

Tim Burton: 14 votes (21%)
Chan-wook Park: 13 votes (20%)
Neil Jordan: 11 votes (16%)
Alex de la Igelsia: 2 votes (3%)
F Gary Gray: 2 votes (3%)
Mira Nair: 1 vote (1%)

The Jeunet retrospective will kick-off in the summer.

March was a complete no-hoper with regards to the Personal Faves, Work Sucks and Hellraisers series. Things were a little better on the Operation 101010 front:

Clint Eastwood movies
None yet. The Agitation of the Mind will focus on Eastwood’s career during May, leading up to the icon’s 80th birthday.

Werner Herzog movies
1. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
2. Wings of Hope

Anime
1. My Neighbour Totoro
2. Sky Blue
3. Ponyo

Gialli
1. All the Colours of the Dark
2. Blood Stained Shadow
3. The Black Belly of the Tarantula

Documentaries
1. The Aristocrats
2. An Inconvenient Truth
3. Anvil: The Story of Anvil
4. Iron Maiden: Flight 666

Eurovisions
1. Amarcord
2. Winter Light
3. All About My Mother


Comedies
1. Intolerable Cruelty
2. Kissing Jessica Stein
3. In the Loop

Biopics
1. Sylvia

Impulse buys
1. Rise: Blood Hunter
2. Stoned

Films with numbers in the title
1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
2. 49th Parallel

Finally, a small announcement:

I started this blog, as I started MovieBuff Redux on Platform 27 before it, as a fun thing to do in the gaps between undertaking proper writing projects (ie. chipping away at my lifetime’s ambition of making it as a novelist). With the exception of a failed attempt in late 2008/early 2009 to drag what was essentially a short story out to novel length, I’ve singularly failed to do any serious work towards this end.

Last month, as an early birthday present, my wife paid for me to attend a creative writing course at the Nottingham Contemporary, hoping it would kick-start my dormant ambitions. Good call on her part. I’ve completed two stories since the course finished mid last week, and I’m now fervently doing research and sketching out some preliminary material for what might (whisper it softly) become a novel. A friend of mine, a talented young artist, has expressed interest in working with me in developing a graphic novel version.

I’m not going to say anything more for fear of jinxing myself, but I need to do a hell of a lot of reading by way of research, then I want to apply myself fully to the project. I can’t maintain the current rate of blogging at the same time, but by the same chalk I don’t want to put The Agitation of the Mind on hold. I’ve invested too much of myself in it and built up a decent readership.

So I’m going to take a fortnight’s break, then re-approach the blog mid-April with the intention of posting at least one (and hopefully two) reviews per week. At this rate, I should still complete Operation 101010 by the end of the year, even if on/off projects like the Personal Faves or Hellraisers might have to take a back seat. (In the interests of new material for Agitation, if anyone would like to submit a guest article, I’d be happy to feature your work; email me: slainte at inbox dot com.)

Likewise, if my proliferation in leaving comments on other sites lapses over the coming months, please don’t think I’m being anti-social. I’ll still be reading your sites in whatever time there may be available when I ought to be working.

Stoned

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 23 of 100

Why buy?

It was about £5 ($7.50).

And?

It received decent notices during its (brief) theatrical run.

And?

The soundtrack was guaranteed to be a belter.


The expectation

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, baby! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.


The actuality

To a degree, it delivers in all three areas.

Let’s take them one at a time:

There’s plenty of nudity and some fairly unsubtle intimations (for a 15-rated movie anyway) of BDSM, sexual violence, statutory rape, group sex and troilism. But for all of this, and despite the throat-tightening beauty of Tuva Novotny and Monet Mazur (both of whom are frequently half-naked if not wholly), there is little in the way of erotic frisson.

There’s plenty of drug use. Fuck’s sake, it’s a biopic of Brian Jones! And if this film and Stephen Davis’s Rolling Stones biog ‘Old Gods Almost Dead’ are anything to go by, the guy had a tendency to the kind of indulgences that make Keith Richards’s hoover-nosed habits look like a life of sobriety by comparison. Yet it never reaches the trippy heights or psychedelic mind-fuckery of Oliver Stone’s ‘The Doors’, Ken Russell’s ‘Tommy’ or Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s counter-culture anti-masterpiece ‘Performance’.

Rock ‘n’ roll? Hell, yeah. The Rolling Stones are represented by The Counterfeit Stones (doing a sterling job) and the soundtrack is rounded out with original cuts by Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, The Small Faces and The Bees.

The narrative focuses on the final days of Brian Jones (Leo Gregory), estranged from the Stones and whiling away his time at Cotchford Farm, his sprawling country retreat and formerly the home of children’s author A.A. Milne, as he waits for the inevitable expulsion from the band. (Jones was unable to participate in the Stones’ 1969 tour of America due to his drug convictions; moreover, his attendance at rehearsal/recording sessions had become more often than not characterised by incapacitation and inability to play.) He is attended by his latest girlfriend Anna Wohlin (Novotny) and loyal Stones chauffeur-cum-minder-cum-fixer Tom Keylock (David Morrissey). At Jones’s behest, Keylock engages local builder Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine) to do some renovation work around Cotchford Farm.

A culture clash ensues between the bullish, defiantly working-class Thorogood and the bohemian, flamboyant and sexually ambiguous Jones, the escalating tension steeped in sexual rivalry as Jones plays off the seductive Wohlin against Thorogood. Jones rubbishes the work of Thorogood and his team, calling for entire walls to be torn down before changing his mind and tasking the workmen with re-erecting them. Pay is promised then withheld, Thorogood taking his grievances to Keylock while Jones blithely shrugs off anything so piffling as monetary concerns.

And yet, somehow, a strange and increasingly unhealthy mutual dependency develops between Jones and Thorogood, events playing out at Cotchford Farm (as Jones heads inexorably towards a date with the swimming pool) in counterpoint to Jones’s recollections of the band’s history, his destructive and abusive relationship with Anita Pallenberg (Mazur) and her eventual cuckolding him with Keith Richards (Ben Wishaw).

There’s dramatic potential aplenty in all of this, but the film has two main problems (and a host of minor ones, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just stick to the biggies). The first is the absolute lack of a sympathetic, likeable or even remotely pleasant character. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some bludgeoning literal philistine who requires everything to be black and white and the good guys and the bad guys to wear hats of the requisite colour. I like to see a bristlingly nasty villain, a morally compromised anti-hero or a vituperatively cynical bastard in the lead role as much as the next man. But I also get the most out of a film or novel if I can identify, root for or moderately give a shit about at least one of the characters. ‘Stoned’ gives us Jones, a woman-beater and possibly a rapist; Thorogood, a human incendiary device with a hair-trigger; Keylock, a leech who exploits his access to the Stones’ inner sanctum in order to shag groupies; Wohlin, an alternately clingy and indifferent bit of set decoration; and Pallenberg, whom the filmmakers portray as complicit in Jones mistreatment of her. Indeed, the depiction of Wohlin and Pallenberg adds a tinge of misogyny to an already seedy and black-hearted aesthetic.

The second is Stephen Wolley’s directorial approach. In the flashback sequences, he achieves an off-kilter aesthetic that evokes (sometimes through explicit plagiarism) ‘The Servant’ and ‘Performance’, both of which deal with unhealthy co-dependent relationships, power games and troilism. However, in the Cotchford Farm scenes, ie. those which define the film’s dynamic and as such could (should?) be expected to engage with the aforementioned psychosexual tropes, he seems ill at ease: the visuals are bland, the pacing uneven, the sexual tension wanting in comparison to the scenes between Jones and Pallenberg. The result is an inconsistency the film is unable to reconcile.

And yet … and yet …

‘Stoned’ is never less than watchable. The performances are searing. Paddy Considine mines a jet-black seam of intensity and coiled violence that matches his unforgettable turn in Shane Meadows’s ‘A Room for Romeo Brass’. Leo Gregory turns up the predatorial charisma, magnetism and sexual androgyny to the max. David Morrissey exudes dodgy-dudeness from every pore. Novotny and Mazur rise above the thanklessness of their roles.

Good buy/bad buy?

I’m still undecided. There are significant problems and the film, in the final analysis, leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. But performances and soundtrack are excellent. It’s too flawed to merit a recommendation, yet it contains enough that’s commendable to disallow a perfunctory writing off

Fuck it: the Scottish verdict.

49th Parallel

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 22 of 100

‘49th Parallel’ was the third of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s collaborations, and the last on which they would take separate screen credits. For their next film, ‘One of Our Aircraft is Missing’, they formed their own production company, The Archers, and bequeathed to the history of cinema that idiosyncratic and still inspirational credit “written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”.

‘49th Parallel’, in short, was the film that sealed the deal. It was epic in its conception and execution, and just a teensy bit controversial as well. And while I chose ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ to represent Powell and Pressburger on my personal faves list, ‘49th Parallel’ remains a film that I wholeheartedly love: definitely a standout even among so prestigious a body of work as theirs.

The first eight films P&P made together were all produced during the war years and were all, ostensibly, propaganda films. Each was designed to communicate a specific message and/or celebrate an aspect of Britishness (ie. to reinforce the values under threat from Nazi-ism). Thus, ‘Contraband’ warned against Fifth Columnists, ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ celebrated national values (a “why we are fighting” movie) and ‘A Canterbury Tale’ focused on Home Front activities.

‘49th Parallel’ was a plea for American involvement. Ian Christie, in his book ‘Arrows of Desire’, recounts the film’s genesis:

“Powell had read an article about how Canada had come into the war on Britain’s side despite internal French-Canadian hostility, and he understood how the forceful presentation of this issue could help win the most important propaganda battle of all: to bring America into the war quickly. With £5,000 from the Ministry of Information [this in 1940, by the way!] Powell and Pressburger embarked for Canada immediately … Back home, Treasury opposition to the idea of financing a film nearly killed the project. France was crumbling and the Luftwaffe threatened, yet ‘some bastard wants £50,000 or £60,000 to go and make a film in Canada’. But … the project proceed[ed] and within six weeks shooting had started in Canada.”

The basic plot, extrapolated by Pressburger from a scenario he and Rodney Ackland cooked up, has a German u-boat bothering shipping off the Canadian coast; when a successful aerial attack destroys it, a small group of survivors led by the borderline fanatical Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) find themselves the sole Nazi invaders of Canada. Setting out from Hudson Bay, they attempt to traverse the country and cross into still-neutral America from where they hope to gain passage back to Germany. En route they encounter a French-Canadian trapper (a bizarrely-cast but enjoying himself Laurence Olivier), a holidaying and potentially draft-dodging Englishman (Leslie Howard) who responds to Hirth’s vituperative accusations of cowardice by staging a one-man resistance campaign, and a soldier gone AWOL (Raymond Massey) who beautifully outwits one of the Germans in a finale, played out above the Niagara Falls, that undercuts its tub-thumping propagandist sentiments with the quirky humour so typical of P&P.

The idea was to film the progress of Hirth and his crew through Canada on location, then wheel in the big-name guest stars (some of them released from military service in order to appear) for some studio work. One of the many achievements of ‘49th Parallel’ is how seamlessly location shooting, studio work and stock footage are cut together. The editor was a guy called David Lean. Dude made a few movies himself.

P&P’s plan was greeted with circumspection in some quarters, their critics suggesting they were whooping it up on a tax-payer-funded lark in Canada while our boys were dying valiantly etc etc etc, but when ‘49th Parallel’ opened the response was almost unanimously positive; it was, again to quote Christie, “greeted as the first considerable fiction film of the war: good propaganda and good entertainment”.

And it’s certainly entertaining. The structure – six vignettes in which Hirth’s crew progress (or devolve, since their numbers are gradually whittled down) through Canada – accounts for a brevity of mise-en-scene that paces the two-hour film faster than most movies of the time. The star names acquit themselves generally well. Olivier chews the scenery like a starving man who’s just been seated in a restaurant and reassured that he doesn’t have to worry about the bill. Howard is lumbered with the most literal bit of proselytising in Pressburger’s otherwise well-crafted script, but his affable charisma sells it. Raymond Massey, rubbery faced and having a whale of a time, steals his last-minute section.

But it’s the actors playing the Germans – and it’s worth pausing to reflect on the quirkiness of a British propaganda film made released in 1941 boasting six Nazi u-boat survivors as its protagonists – who take the honours. Particularly Eric Portman, appearing in the first of three films for P&P. Eric Portman in ‘49th Parallel’ is simply magnificent. A Yorkshireman by birth, you’d swear the man was a Prussian aristocrat. His portrayal of Hirth lays the groundwork for Paul Scofield’s von Waldheim in Frankenheimer’s ‘The Train’, Maximillan von Schell’s Stransky in Peckinpah’s ‘Cross of Iron’ and Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’.

Daringly, P&P also incorporate the idea of the “good German”, an archetype they would revisit in the character of Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played by Anton Walbrook) in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’. I won’t give anything away, but there’s an almost unbearably poignant scene, ending in a moment as chillingly inevitable as the outcome of Landa’s interrogation at the start of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, in which one of the group reveals himself as an honest and decent working man, a man of no political affiliations, a conscript purely because he was drafted, who comes close to embracing a new and gentler life in a foreign place … before the full force of brainwashed, unblinkered, hate-fuelled, jack-booted Nazi doctrine comes crashing down on him. It’s this scene that gives ‘49th Parallel’ its power, that imbues rhetoric with humanitarianism. It’s in this scene that P&P – as they would succeed in doing so many times during those first eight films – take the basest motivation for film-making (propagandism) and turn it into art.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 21 of 100

Let’s run Paolo Cavara’s 1971 opus against a quick giallo checklist:

A title featuring some combination of a colour, a number or an animal – ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’. Two out of three. Check!

A quasi-scientific conceit that gives the film its funky title (in this case, an arachnid-derived nerve serum that permits the killer to … well, I’ll you find that one out for yourselves). Check!

Equally stylish cinematography/compositions and a tendency to architecture porn. Check!

An androgynous killer whose sartorial tastes run to trenchcoat, fedora and gloves. Check!

Bottles of J&B all over the shop. Check!

A roof-top chase. Check!

A scene involving one of those old-fashioned cage-style elevators with a stairwell built around it. Check!

Hyper-stylised death scenes in locations which include a room full of tailor’s dummies and a photographer’s studio. Check!

Eye candy a-go-go. Barbara Bouchet, Claudine Auger, Rosella Falk, Annabella Incontrera, Barbara Bach and Stefania Sandrelli. Check, check, check, giggety-giggety, alriiiiiiight!

An almost arbitrary ending where the killer’s identity and motivation are explained away with a bit of psychological mumbo-jumbo. Check!

Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, all ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ lacks is a comically incompetent cop and an appearance by Edwige Fenech. On paper, you can see why the Blue Underground Region 1 DVD release is emblazoned with a quote from Horrorview declaring it “the best giallo ever made”.

A bold claim. There are plenty of contenders for the “best giallo” crown: Mario Bava’s ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’ (pretty much the original giallo), ‘A Bay of Blood’ or ‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’; Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’, ‘Tenebrae’ or ‘Opera’; any of the Sergio Martino psycho-sexual thrillers starring the aforementioned Ms Fenech; Lucio Fulci’s ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’, ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ or ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’; Pupi Avati’s ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’ … let’s face it, as a genre (hell, even a sub-genre), the giallo boasts more great examples than not. So: does ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ live up to the hype?

Hmmmmm. Not sure.

Let’s look at the two things missing from that checklist. Ladies first: Edwige Fenech. Ah, well. Can’t be helped. Besides, ‘TBBotT’ does feature – albeit briefly – the knee-weakeningly alluring Barbara Bouchet. We’ll let it slide.

Which leaves us with the absence of that giallo staple, the comically incompetent cop. While our hero Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is an officer of the law, he has more in common with Stanley Baker’s Inspector Corvin in ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ than, say, Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’. Tellini works the case, uncovering a blackmail plot and a highly imaginative cover for drug smuggling as he closes in on the killer, never mind a red herring designed to embarrass him in front of his superiors, an attempt on his life and the exposure to danger of his wife.

Also like Stanley Baker, Giannini is an actor better known for his non-giallo roles than his work within the genre. Probably best known to mainstream audiences as the ill-fated Inspector Pazzi in ‘Hannibal’ and Rene Mathis in ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Quantum of Solace’, Giannini earned a Best Actor nomination at the 1977 Oscars for his role in Lina Wertmuller’s ‘Seven Beauties’ and has won Cannes, David di Donatello, Silver Ribbon, Flaiano International and any number of other US and European festival awards.

While his performance in ‘TBBotT’ is not quite as awards-worthy as his work elsewhere (although it was only a year later that he won his first David award), Giannini delivers a restrained, understated, brooding characterisation, establishing Tellini as a man who is painfully aware that his job is beginning to define him and is disconcerted by the implications. Having said that, his self-evident conflictions between career and personal life owes as much to the casting of the lovely and effervescent Stefania Sandrelli as Signora Tellini.

And herein lies the essential dichotomy of ‘TBBotT’. For all that it ticks the majority of giallo boxes, the film is atypical in many ways. For all that it delivers some graphic murders with gleefully exploitative relish, its overall aesthetic is low-key and frequently downbeat. For all that the denouement trades on pulpy psychology, the 90 minutes that precede it are a study in slow-burn procedural narrative.

For much of its running time, ‘TBBotT’ unfolds in a mannered and rather austere style (short of Tellini demonstrating an affinity for Wagner and real ale, you could almost mistake it for an episode of ‘Inspector Morse’). And yet the sexualised representation of violence, the intermittent lurches into expressionistic camerawork and the omnipresence of giallo touchstones seek to remind the audience what they paid for.

All of which left me confused as to whether I was watching a deliberately-slumming-it art movie or a thinking man’s exploitationer. ‘TBBofT’, entertaining as it is, never fully reconciles these polarities, and although I’d cautiously recommend the film, it falls short of greatness for precisely this reason.

Rachel Weisz at the Oliver Awards

Congratulations to Rachel Weisz on receiving the Olivier Award for her performance as Blanche du Bois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.

Terminator poster gallery

Terminator Salvation

Public service announcement: in the pub after work last night, a stressful week at the office and a few nights with minimal sleep caught up with me, and I experienced a motivational shut-down that extended to a complete incapacity for social interaction (my apologies to those I was out with) let alone watching and blogging about movies later in the evening. I dragged myself home and slept for 12 hours. Consequently, I’ve only just got round to watching ‘Terminator Salvation’ and, again, what follows is hastily written and the product of first impressions. Normal service (and normal standard of reviews) will be resumed next week.

Okay, I’m wracking my brains how to start this article. Do I get into the semantics of whether ‘Terminator Salvation’ is sequel or prequel, or – given that concept behind the franchise is essentially an ouroborus – just another stepping stone towards (although not quite) completing the circle?

Do I try to get my head around an anomaly …

SPOILER ALERT

… in the Skynet avatar (Helena Bonham Carter)’s conversation with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) where she/it tells him, “Our best machines failed time and again to complete a mission. You did what Skynet has failed to do for so many years. You killed John Connor.” The events of ‘Terminator Salvation’ play out in 2018 and culminate with John Connor (Christian Bale) meeting Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) for the first time, yet Skynet doesn’t send back the first of the cyborgs, the T-101, until 2029. WTF?!?!

SPOILERS END

Or do I just get down to the bit of business I’d rather not engage with, grit my teeth, spit blood, curse like a trooper and type the five words it fucking pains me to put into a sentence and record for all time on the internet?

Fuck it, let’s get it over with:

McG does an okay job.

Bastard!

For the record: the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ films are still crimes against celluloid and calling yourself McG is as pretentious as it is stupid. But for the most part he crafts a solid and often exciting mainstream movie. Indeed, apart from one ridiculous attempt to craft an iconic moment only to fail miserably and produce the bastard child of ‘E.T.’ and ‘The Great Escape’, McG (I hate to go on about this whole name thing, but I really don’t think the announcements read, “to Mr and Mrs McG, a son, no first name”) succeeds in making this the most un-McG-like McG film yet.

So how does ‘Terminator Salvation’ shape up to the rest of the series? Well, for the first hour or so I was beginning to wonder, with bated breath, if something of a minor miracle was in the process of being pulled off: could this be the second best entry in the cycle?

Turns out not. ‘Terminator Salvation’ gets some things absolutely right, and it’s only fair if we dwell on those things for a little while, but it drops the ball in a few places (and does so with increased regularity as it draws towards its curiously anaemic ending) and the end result is a film that doesn’t quite hang together.

Here’s what it does well. First and foremost, it gives us a John Connor who isn’t a whiny little brat or a bland twenty-something with all the leadership qualities of a particularly nervous dormouse. It gives us, instead, Christian freakin’ Bale. If there’s anyone you can imagine taking the fight to the machines and tearing their fucking lights down (sorry, couldn’t resist), it’s Christian freakin’ Bale. Secondly, it backs up Bale’s screen presence with good performances from Sam Worthington (there are no real surprises in his character arc, but the actor manages to invest Marcus with a palpable sense of enigma) and Anton Yelchin, reverse engineering Michael Biehn’s performance to give us a younger and still vulnerable, but swiftly toughening up, Kyle Reese. Thirdly, the effects piss all over ‘Rise of the Machines’, the Hunter-Killers glimpsed briefly in the earlier films tearing through the fabric of this one. Fourthly, the Mc-to-the-G keeps the aesthetic desaturated, grim and gritty; ‘Salvation’ is a colourless vision of the future shot through with the shaky visceral immediacy of a war movie, most of its battles pitched at the level of street to street combat.

Where it drops the ball is (a) the backgrounding of John Connor for much of the first half (the film’s absolute best scene – a chase featuring a Hunter-Killer, some driverless motorcycles and a wrecking truck – is a showcase for Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese); (b) the wasted opportunity to follow Connor’s development from footsoldier to leader (a title crawl suggests that some resistance fighters already see him as a prophet, others as a fraud, but the script neither establishes why nor explores the dialectic); (c) a handful of anomalies, mainly regarding timeframes (obvious example: Kate, now Connor’s wife, though played by a different actress – Bryce Dallas Howard – seems no older in 2018 than she was in 2003’s contemporarily set ‘Rise of the Machines’); and (d) the lack of a clearly defined antagonist. With Marcus Wright’s agenda kept ambiguous, it is left to actual hunks machinery rather than anthropomorphosized cyborgs to provide the actual threat to the resistance fighters. There’s nothing as memorable as the T-101, the T-1000 or the T-X and ‘Salvation’ suffers as a result.

And then there’s the ending. I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about the ending yet. I have a strong suspicion that something narratively redundant and thematically pointless has been passed off as a moment of great emotional import. I might need to watch the film again. And that’s something I never thought I’d say about a McG flick.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Public service announcement: I was at Waterstone’s for Joe Hill’s talk/signing session for his new novel ‘Horns’ this evening (the dude is cool, btw). Consequently, I only got finished watching ‘Terminator 3’ half an hour ago. What follows is hastily written and entirely the product of first impressions.

Notwithstanding the obvious aesthetic consideration of whether you’d prefer a cyborg sent from the future with the express purpose of killing you to appear naked in the form of a pectoral-ridden middle-aged Austrian gentleman or a lissom and well-toned Scandinavian lady, ‘Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines’ doesn’t seem (on paper at least) to offer all that much.

A journeyman director (Jonathan Mostow), an uncharismatic leading man (Nick Stahl), the non-involvement of James Cameron, and the complete absence of Linda Hamilton in her signature role. Throw in seven years of everyone slating it since its theatrical release and I settled down to watch ‘Rise of the Machines’ with no expectations. Whatsoever.

I was quite surprised.

It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, either. Not a patch on the original, and without the broad scope of the sequel. But it wasn’t bad. And it has a couple of advantages on the sequel: it’s shorter and unpretentious, and Arnie’s T-101 (while still ostensibly the protector) is a lot more brutally pragmatic than his ‘Judgement Day’ incarnation (he doesn’t give a crap about bonding with the now adult John Connor in this one). Plus, it has a fuck-off great chase sequence involving sexy new Terminator the T-X (Kristanna Loken) commandeering a truck crane, its jib taking out entire swathes of buildings, as the T-101 engages her in combat.

It also has an intriguing set-up: Judgement Day has been averted and the listless John Connor (Stahl) holds down a succession of menial jobs as he drifts from town to town, living anonymously and off the grid. The T-X shows up and starts targeting random individuals. It turns out these are Connor’s future “lieutenants”, those who will form his first wave of recruits when he leads the rebellion against the machines. But even Connor himself believes that there is no longer a threat.

Mostow’s film, from a script by John D. Bracanto, Michael Ferris and Tedi Sarafian (writers new to the franchise), posits a reasonably convincing alternative to the development of Skynet and its disastrous achievement of self-awareness. The key is Connor’s high school sweetheart Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), with whom he is thrown together when the T-X tries to assassinate her.

Unfortunately, the film also does a lot of things wrong. The T-101’s arrival replays the biker bar brawl of part two but substitutes a bunch of rowdy women on a hen night and a gay stripper. The result is almost parody, but the humour borders on homophobic. Likewise, Loken is iconic as the T-X but the big finale between her and the T-101 plays out as ridiculously OTT, the two cyborgs demolishing a restroom as they twat each other with sinks and toilet bowls. The production design of the military facility Kate’s top brass father commands is bland in comparison to the Cyberdyne offices in part two, and the design of the machines themselves (which go renegade in the finale) is uninspired and realised with fairly shoddy effects work. That aforementioned fuck-off great chase scene? It happens at around the 30-minute mark; the movie shoots its wad less than a third of the way in.

Stahl’s performance is just bland. There’s nothing to suggest that this guy has it in him to lead the fight against the machines. Claire Danes, often a luminous and highly likeable actress (‘Stage Beauty’, ‘Stardust’), is saddled with a nothing role which requires her to do little more than look bemused for long periods and intermittently screech like a harpy. A pointless scene with franchise stalwart Dr Silberman (Earl Boen) serves to remind the viewer how sorely missed Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton are.

I’m still not sure what to make of the graveyard scene, except to wonder if the first draft of the screenplay had the working title ‘Terminator 3: Django Strikes Again’.

What ‘Rise of the Machines’ does have going for it can be counted on three fingers: (i) Kristanna Loken; (ii) a race-against-time ending that resolves in doom-laden quietus; and (iii) a running time, marginally shorter than even the original instalment, that doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Q. Does ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ represent:

(a) the last high point the franchise achieved?

(b) the moment the rot set in?

(c) both of the above?

Hands up if you answered (c).

Now, I’ve not watched ‘Rise of the Machines’ or ‘Terminator Salvation’ yet, so there may be some big surprises in store … but I kind of doubt it. These are works of cinema that have, after all, the respective talents of Jonathan Mostow and McG at their helm. ‘Judgement Day’ at least has James Cameron calling the shots and therefore preserves a continuity of vision. It also has Linda Hamilton taking the vulnerable but resilient Sarah Connor of the first movie and turning her into a hard-core bee-yatch, the spillage of whose pint is assuredly not recommended.

In the absence of Michael Biehn’s haunted personification of Kyle Reese (he appears briefly in a flashback/dream sequence), it is left to Linda Hamilton to give the movie a degree of substance and an emotional cachet beyond Cameron’s increasingly repetitive formula of high-speed-chase/gunplay/blow-shit-up. Muscular, terse, almost brutally pragmatic in her relationship with her son John (Edward Furlong), Hamilton gives us Sarah Connor Version 2.0. And a scarier prospect she’d present than even the old killing machine itself, the T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) … except that the T-101 is now good guy and there’s a new Terminator, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) on the block.

And here we come to the problem with ‘Judgement Day’. Well, one of the problems. Let’s start at the beginning. You know how I said having Cameron back in the director’s chair preserved a continuity of vision? That was kind of a backhanded compliment. What Cameron does is basically remake ‘The Terminator’ but on a bigger budget, running a nearly an hour longer and with John Connor as an actual character and not just the (literally) embryonic concept he is in the first film. Things kick off with a vision of Armageddon, a kiddies’ playground exploding under the nuclear blast, and a voiceover announces that, hey, you know how Skynet sent a Terminator back through time to try to kill John Connor before he was even born, well damned if the sneaky li’l sunnovabitch didn’t pull exactly the same shit thirteen years later.

Yup, what we have here is essentially ‘John Connnor: The Teenage Years’. ‘John Connor: The You’re Not My Real Mom and I Hate You Years’. ‘John Connor: The I’m-Working-Some-Personal-Shit-Out-By-Flipping-My-Adoptive-Parents-Off-And-Tearing-Around-On-a-Motorbike Years’. Or, as the film would have been titled in the Agitation-approved cut ‘John Connor: The FFS-Won’t-Somebody-Slap-the-Little-Prick-Upside-the-Head Years’.

So, yeah: we’ve got a squeaky-voiced future leader of the resistance trying to cut it as a juvenile delinquent only his shirts are too clean and his haircut too prissy. We’ve got his estranged mother locked up in a sanatorium. We’ve got the T-1000, all liquid alloy and fond of impersonating highway patrol officers (I swear to God I am not making this up). And we’ve got our old mate Arnie in scuffed leather jacket and shades ensemble, all gutturally monosyllabic but with (bad move) more dialogue. And this time he’s the good guy.

I may have already mentioned that this brings us to the single biggest problem with ‘Judgement Day’. How best to describe the paradox? Like watching ‘Halloween II’ only this time Michael Myers is the sensitive soul who’s doing his best to help Laurie through the aftermath and if that means getting in a final act smackdown with some totally new and random character who’s doing all the shit that Michael was doing in the first movie, right down to the hockey mask business, then so be it. Because Michael’s the good guy this time. He is. Honest.

If ‘Judgement Day’ itself represents a sop to the audiences who flocked to ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Aliens’ in droves but stayed away from ‘The Abyss’ in roughly the same numbers, then the re-imagining of Arnie’s protagonist is a sop to the mainstream popularity the actor come to enjoy and which would remain unquestioned by moviegoers until ‘Last Action Hero’. It’s almost as if a memo went round before a word of the script had been written or a frame of footage shot: Arnie’s the good guy this time; work with it.

All right, I’m 700 words into this polemic and I’d really like to post it on the blog before sundown, so I’ll skim over some of the other issues – chief among them, the decision to follow slavishly the formula of the first instalment (which was, after all, a chase movie) only to incorporate a Cyberdyne-heavy subplot two thirds of the way in which effectively keeps the T-1000 off the screen for a good 40 minutes (that’s right, it’s a chase film in which the guy doing the chasing suddenly disappears only to suddenly reappear for the finale without any indication of how he even got there) – and simply observe that ‘Judgement Day’ can best be summed up by its extended-to-the-point-of-interminable finale: it’s visually spectacular, blazingly action-packed and supremely well-executed, but – jeez – it doesn’t half go on!