Archive for Cat People
Posted in FILM with tags Cat People, Jacques Tourneur, Nicholas Musuraca, Simone Simon, Val Lewton on November 2, 2020 by dcairns
I already tweeted about this, but what the hey, slow news day after the fuss and excitement of PUBLISHING A NOVEL. I will be mentioning that fact fairly often but it won't get in the way too much,
Rewatched CAT PEOPLE and was struck for the first time by the way the chair behind Simon Simon (above) casts the shadow of a cat's head, particularly MY cat's head (Momo has funny small ears).
Whenever looking at these things and wondering if they're deliberate, it's best to consider that, even if the filmmakers had to shoot quickly, they usually had a bit of time to think about their effects, and there were a number of heads thinking about each department, so most things of this kind probably are intentional. But it doesn't really matter, we can enjoy them either way.
Now seems an appropriate time to mention all the Val Lewton-themed limericks I've been writing at Limerwrecks, like THIS ONE.
Things I Read Off the Screen in "I, MADMAN"
Posted in FILM, literature with tags Bob Frank, Cat People, Dr Caligari, Edgar Allan Poe, I Madman, Jenny Wright, Metal Messiah, Murray Rubin, Raf Nazario, Randall William Cook, Scarlett Thomas, Stephen Sayadian, The Conqueror Worm, The End of Mr Y, The Gate, Tibor Takacs on July 26, 2010 by dcairns
NosfeRandy!
Upon meeting Shadowplayer and now chum Randall William Cook, Fiona and I became fascinated to dig into his career and find out what he'd been up to before LORD OF THE RINGS. I'd heard of THE GATE, which had occupied the shelves of video rental places during my relatively early days of movie-hunting, but had never seen it. Nor had I seen director Tibor Takacs' follow-up, intriguingly entitled I, MADMAN. I obtained both.
The film's first onscreen text: The Hollywood Reporter. Headline: Box Office Tops in 1959. My thesis: films are stuffed with writing, some of it carefully placed by production designers, some of it accidental, forced into the film by the ad hoardings and signage peppering the locations. The two form a dialogue. If we could eavesdrop of this colloquy of scenario and city, we would learn… something.
THE GATE is practically an epic, even though it mostly centres around a single house and a few characters, but I intend to interrogate Mr. Cook in depth about its amazing effects. It has an unusual structure seen also in BRAIN DEAD (AKA DEAD ALIVE) and TITANIC — all build-up for the first half, all — and I mean ALL — action for the second half. Certified genius Alex Winter is currently prepping a remake…
I, MADMAN feels smaller, but packs in a lot of ideas, not quite coherently — and to our great delight, Randy plays a central role, titular madman Malcolm Brand, an author of pulp nasties who somehow has found himself living out his own depraved fictions. To my greater delight, I now realize that Randy is also in Stephen Sayadian's surreal, dayglo, semi-porno DR CALIGARI, which I must watch again sometime.
But to return to MADMAN — it begins, extremely promisingly, with a vaguely period, Techinicolor noir sequence, exquisitely overplayed by Raf Nazario and Bob Frank (the character players are as consistently exuberant in this movie as the leads are colourless), and then a stop-motion jackal-boy jumps into view, causing Fiona to scream.
There ain't a lot of stop motion in this movie, but what there is, is cherce.
"Much of Madness, More of Sin, by Malcolm Brand." Very nicely design pulp dustcover, the title a quote from Poe's The Conqueror Worm, a phrase which fittingly concludes, "…and madness the soul of the plot."
Turns out this opening is a scene from a paperback the heroine is reading, which means we're plunged into the eighties, losing most of the flavour the forties/fifties stuff has. But Takacs does get some agreeable effects out of transitioning from one period to the other — as when Jenny Wright, our leading lady walks into the shadows in her regular duds and emerges in gown and big hairdo, all in one shot — an effect presumably inspired by Simone Simon's transmutation in CAT PEOPLE. At first I suspected a split-screen effect, disguised by the heavy shadows, then I came to suspect that the heroine in red is a stand-in, who scuttles off-screen under cover of darkness, to be replaced by the leading lady: a low-tech approach that really appeals to me.
I also dig the fact that our lead still has on her contemporary specs, but takes them off. By the next cut, her glasses and cup of tea, vestiges of our modern world, have vanished! There should be awards for creative continuity like that.
SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
ARE YOU ON OUR MAILING LIST?
NO LOITERING
Our heroine is a drama student who also works in a second-hand bookstore and is one of the few movie characters I've ever seen take a bus in LA (apart from in SPEED). Since this is a horror film, a lot of the signs in it are warnings or commands, or intrusive questions. BOOK CITY is an incredibly apt name for the bookshop, since my thesis is that cities are full of words, and the film's thesis is that books contain populations, some of them hostile.
For Malcolm Brand's works apparently have the power to cross over into our reality. This is never explained, and for a long time it looks as if it's going to turn out that the leading lady is crazy and is responsible for the series of gruesome homicides she attributes to the titular maniac of Brand's second and final novel —
Meta-fiction hits the horror movie! I was slightly reminded of Scarlett Thomas's novel The End of Mr. Y, which I enjoyed recently. In both, the heroine unexpectedly discovers the impossible-to-find and probably cursed book she's been yearning for (initially it seems that our leading lady here is both terrified and turned on by Brand's books, but nothing is made of this) and plunged into another world of craziness and menace. I, MADMAN is more generic, with fewer mouse gods, but the fact that the plot never fully resolves its mysteries leaves the door open to the creeping ineffable, which helps.
SEX FOR SWINGER! Slightly improbable book title for film.
PIANOS RESTORATION AND REPAIR – VINCENT BROS
SUBMARINE (name of a storefront) LOS ANGELES (sign on a bus) — both in the same frame, a promise of biblical deluge?
PUSH – WILL RETURN – OPENING HOURS (signs on bookshop door)
In I, Madman the novel, the narrator cuts off his face because the girl he loves doesn't care for his looks, and then creates for himself a fleshy identikit fizzog harvested from the unwilling heads of the local citizenry. This character, played by Randy Cook in the expressionist manner, emerges from the book and starts culling the supporting cast, who were only there for that purpose anyway. A more economical writing idea would have been to have him target the heroine's cop boyfriend at the climax, since he presumably has a face she DOES like.
ACTRESS SLAIN — POLICE BAFFLED BY MUTILATION
You could certainly read this movie, even if you couldn't see the pictures.
Cheekily, the movie marquee screen right advertises the director's first film, cult obscurity METAL MESSIAH, which I'd love to see.
SIDNEY ZEIT PUBLISHING INC, 4389 HOLLYWOOD BLVD, HOLLYWOOD CALIFORNIA
BOOKS 25¢ MOVIES 25¢ VIDEOS, THE CAVE ADULT MOVIE THEATER, LIVE NUDE SHOW, PEEPSHOW, ADULT BOOK STORE
The first text startles the heroine when she finds it in the small print in her face-stealing pulp fiction, the second tells her where to look for answers, and the third tells us all what kind of neighbourhood the publisher operates out of.
And this is the office of Sidney "I only do smut" Zeit, publisher of I, Madman. Magnificent performance from Murray Rubin (the great actors for B movies are out there if you look!) which swings from broad grotesquerie to touching humanity as he recalls the tragic fate of his top author.
TELEPHONE – PUBLIC LIBRARY OF THE CITY — both signs in one shot.
THE POPE SMOKES DOPE
ANGELS with swastika sign. These last two are graffiti at a crime scene.
Nobody notices that all the victims are connected to the heroine. Since there's no "it was her all along" twist, it might have been nice if the cops suspected her, as they have every reason to do, rather than just thinking she's screwy. The way society is, any crazy person connected to a murder is likely to be regarded as a suspect. And the cops could be turned into a threat rather than a potential rescue. And there's no way they could NOT suspect her, to be fair to them — and remember Mackendrick's wise words, "A character who is dramatically interesting thinks ahead."
OVER 100,000 BOOKS
NEW BOOKS DISCOUNTED
SPECIALIZING IN HARD-TO-FIND TITLES
VATTEY'S BOOK CITY
NEW – USED – RARE – ANTIQUARIAN
ROY ROY PIZZAS MEAT PIES
The above appear all in a single establishing shot! A connection is drawn between books and food.
Next, a flurry of book titles: THE POLITICS OF THE CENTURY, NATHANIEL WEST: THE ART OF HIS LIFE, ANSWERS TO EVERYDAY QUESTIONS. While, in the background, a hand-lettered sign reads SCIENCE FICTION.
The climactic struggle with Malcolm — books are falling all over the place! As he thrusts his arms through a set of shelves to paw the heroine, THE COURAGEOUS COMPANION falls through shot, and when the cop boyfriend with the designer stubble hurls him into some boxes, THE WOUNDED DON'T CRY drops into his lap: the most blatant gag title in the film, though not quite as funny as EVIL DEAD II's use of A FAREWELL TO ARMS.
Then, the long-awaited return of jackalboy, summoned from the pages of Malcolm's first book by the plucky heroine, who's decided that the contents of Brand's oeuvre tend to become real. Malcolm struggles with the half-human genetic experiment in a stop-motion battle to the death which sees Randall William Cook heroically animating a miniature version of himself. I'm not sure if that qualifies as masturbation or voodoo. Lots of motion-blur here, and the transition between human and puppet is pretty seamless, helped no doubt by the fact that Malcolm's face is by now a mass of sutured tissue — lopsided nose, swollen lips, moulting scalp.
Randy was an actor first and an animator later, getting into the biz on the advice of no less a person than Bob Clampett, Termite Alley legend. A lot of animation has to do with acting, which isn't generally understood… If you talk to Randy, you not only get great stories from his movie activities, you get all the voices too.
Jackalboy (who looks quite a bit like the excellent Harry Potter werewolf) is chopped down the middle by a sheet of glass, but rises again as a Johnny Eck-style man with half a body. A sign in the background reads THIS SIDE UP.
Then half-jackalboy pounces on Malcolm, they fly out the window, and all the loose pages somehow torn from, it feels like, Malcolm's works (but there was only, like, one copy in the bookstore, so I guess it's a lot of other books too) goes flying into the sky, and Chanson D'Amour plays us out (ra-ta-ta-ta-ta). What have we learned?
One last sign —
Sounds like a sequel to me!
Bwana Bubble
Posted in FILM, literature, Television with tags 3D week, Arch Oboler, Bwana Devil, Cat People, Domo Arigato, Lights Out, Nigel Bruce, Robert Stack, Spacevision, The Bubble, The Dark, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Giant Chicken Heart, The Prisoner, Twilight Zone, Val Lewton, William Goldman on September 26, 2009 by dcairns
So — like a lot of people who've read some basic film history, I knew that the first 3D feature was BWANA DEVIL, promoted with the tagline "A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!" There were things I did NOT know, however —
1) I didn't know that BWANA DEVIL is based on the same astonishing true-life case as THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS: an unheard-of incident of two man-eating lions who hunted together, finishing off scores of hapless humans and delaying construction of the first trans-African railway.
2) I didn't know that the film was made by Arch Oboler, genius of scary radio with a background in low-budget noir, and that he carried on pushing 3D into the 70s, long after the rest of the world had given up on it.
Oboler just wouldn't give up on "Space-vision."
I had occasion to mention Oboler this summer when I met Bruce MacDonald, director of the stupendous PONTYPOOL, which deals with the power of radio. He mentioned Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast. I mentioned Oboler's Chicken Heart broadcast, in which a giant, ever-expanding chicken heart eats the world, and discovered that MacDonald was familiar with the Bill Cosby routine based on the show, but not the show itself.
It still strikes me as weird that Oboler would come from radio, which uses only the dimension of imagination, sparked by sound, and yet the ordinary two-dimensions of cinema were not enough for him.
Here's a classic slice of Oboler — listen with the lights out!
Oboler's cult output also includes the slick psycho-noir BEWITCHED, which I wrote of here, post-atomic survival drama FIVE, and THE TWONKY, a bizarro comic fantasy about an alien visitor who takes the form of a TV set. As a drunken sports coach says, "I used to have a Twonky when I was a kid. A Twonky is something that you don't know what it is…"
The big problems with BWANA DEVIL are that (1) it doesn't really benefit from 3D much at all, and Oboler's flat, washing-line compositions are a waste of the medium. The lion leaps over the camera every time it appears, but there's not enough suspense to make us afraid of the thing. Paul Schrader's CAT PEOPLE gets one thing right — the very tactile and three-dimensional big cats in the movie feel really alive and present, in a way Oboler's cut-out creations never get a chance to. What's needed is some Val Lewton atmospherics, giving the lions the aura of the supernatural the African and Indian characters ascribe to them. The real motheaten beasts in this movie, and the CGI creations in the more modern version (another form of 3D — computer-generated 3D cartoons) are neither real enough nor phantasmagorical enough.
(2) The wonder of the story depends on the audience carrying it its head the fact that this is TRUE and UNIQUE, two qualities from outside the frame of the movie. We have to remind ourselves, in the midst of important action "Seems implausible, but apparently it really happened," and "I don't know much about lions, but apparently they never normally do this." It's a story that works brilliantly in the history books and when William Goldman tells it in prose. And the movie begins with a title, "This is a story that was told to me in Africa," hinting at the excitement he must have felt when encountering this great yarn around the campfire.
Robert Stack tries hard in a role not so much underwritten as unwritten, and Nigel Bruce, the beloved Dr Watson from the Basil Rathbone Holmes films, makes a good fist of his Scottish accent — he ought to, despite being born in Mexico (!) he was a descendant of Robert the Bruce.
"Take these damn Space-Vision glasses! Take them, I say!"
Much better is THE BUBBLE, Oboler's penultimate Spacevision production, which draws on some of the pulp mystery and numinous terror of his best radio work. A group of 1D characters is trapped in a 3D town which seems to be surrounded by a giant perspex dome. The town is as incomplete and inconsistent as a movie set reconstruction of Patrick McGoohan's Village, left half-finished, and its populated by humans reduced to robotic repetition, who "feed" by some kind of gross osmotic process conducted in a queer biomechanical temple. Is there no escape?
The groovy yet unexplained brainwashing sequence.
Oboler's direction is much friskier here, with carnivalesque effects created by camera movement and odd angles, but the aesthetic is still one of sticking stuff in the viewer's eye. Why was Oboler obsessed with 3D if that's all he could see to do with it? Unfortunately, his compelling premise fizzles out, and a lack of consistency in the characters' behaviour robs it of a lot of its potential. The crux of these Twilight Zone scenarios is that they only work if played out to their natural conclusions, with the crazy idea followed through step by step with impeccable logic.
But the hackneyed effects are still enjoyable, the underwritten character are played by fresh, unskilled but somehow believable actors, and the idea is a nice, creepy one. If Oboler had only come up with a neat, PLANET OF THE APES-style zinger ending, the movie would probably have found its place as a minor cult object.
Buy Arch Oboler from Amazon —
The Bubble
Lights Out Everybody