Russian Folk Tale Double Feature – Sadko / Jack Frost

Aleksandr Ptushko’s Sadko (1953) derives from a popular old bylina (epic poem) believed to be based on the 12^th century figure Sotko Sytinich, patron of the Novgorodian Church of Boris and Gleb. The Slavophile revival of the 19^th century saw it serve as the basis for a number of retellings, the most relevant here being Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1898 opera, from which the movie’s musical score – and frequent outbursts of song – are taken.

The movie opens with Sadko (Sergei Stolyarov), a travelling gusli player, singing in full operatic mode as his boat pulls into the harbour of Novgorod. Struck by the contrast between the suffering poor and the self-congratulatory rich, he admonishes the wealthy merchants for wasting their lives wallowing in their accumulated fortunes rather than forging trading connections with the wider world which might improve the general circumstances of the citizenry. Unable to convince them to provide him with a ship, his melancholy singing by the shore earns the amorous attentions of the Princess of Lake Ilmen (Ninel Myshkova), the Ocean King’s favourite daughter. Seizing upon her promise that she will help him to catch a golden-finned fish, he convinces the merchants to wager their entire fortunes against his success at such a seemingly impossible task, with his head as the forfeit. After realising that his redistribution of wealth to the people hasn’t completely solved the problem of poverty, he sets out to sail the world in search of the Bird of Happiness (a motivation not present in the opera). Most prominent among his companions are Trifon (Mikhail Troyanovskiy), a clever old man who had been reduced to performing as a jester; Ivashka (Boris Surovtsev), Trifon’s naïve young grandson (also a musician); and Vyashta the Giant (Nadir Malishevsky), the obligatory strongman figure.

In the original opera, Sadko hears the songs of three visiting merchants before deciding that Venice sounds like the most promising destination. Ptushko and his writer Konstantin Isayev have taken the more cinematic option, opening the story up by skipping straight past the merchants to their respective countries. First up are the Vikings, a belligerent bunch who find happiness only in fighting. After a suitable interval for some stirring beach combat scenes, their next destination is India. Hearing rumour of a Bird of Happiness concealed deep within the Maharaja’s palace, Trifon orchestrates a plan combining diplomacy and cunning which allows them entrance to the hidden chamber. The bird turns out to be a Phoenix (Lidiya Vertinskaya), whose song creates a sleepy contentment in the listener – but Sadko’s memory of his languishing love Lyubava (Alla Larionova) allows him to break the spell and they escape. The filmmakers clearly thought that Venice was too pedestrian a destination, substituting it with some stock footage of Egypt before the homesick Sadko decides to return to Novgorod. Beset by stormy seas, Sadko sacrifices himself to meet his obligations to Neptune (Stepan Kayukov) and thus save his crew – but the Princess helps him to escape and they all live happily ever after. Although the moral of the story seems to be that happiness is to be found all around you rather than located in a mythical object, the way it’s phrased in the final scene attempts to make it more about national pride in Mother Russia – almost certainly a sop to the Russian censors.

Aleksandr Ptushko was one of the pioneers of Russian animation and carried that sensibility into his live action films, pulling from a range of techniques to create his fantastical worlds. Evgeniy Svidetelev’s lavish sets are a central part of the film’s visual appeal, especially the imaginatively conceived underwater palace featured at the climax. Lighting, costume and cinematography are all marshalled to great effect, and a lot of effort has gone into the dancing sequences. Particularly successful is the realisation of the Phoenix, a deceptively simple combination of a real woman’s head and a fake bird’s body which nevertheless looks much better than it has any right to (although there’s a singing fish puppet later on which is far less effective).

Ptushko’s films were often ransacked by low budget American filmmakers in the 1960s and this one is no exception. Roger Corman’s Filmgroup, showing a characteristic “respect” for the intelligence of American audiences, stripped it of its original context and sold it to local markets as The Magical Voyage of Sinbad (1962). In doing so they removed most of the songs and some additional material to bring it in under 80 minutes. The characters were renamed, the actors were redubbed and some narration was added to paper over the gaps. This bastardised version may attract some retrospective fascination due to the fact that the rewrites were assigned to a young Francis Ford Coppola, one year before his directorial debut on Dementia 13 (1963) (recently reissued on Blu Ray in a new Director’s Cut).

Aleksandr Rou’s Jack Frost [Morozko] (1964) is more overtly fantastical, but lacks some of the visual flair of its older cousin. Screenwriters Nikolai Erdman & Mikhail Volpin have fleshed out the story considerably beyond the original fairytale, which was collected by Alexander Afanasyev in the 19^th century and is far better known to English-speakers than the story of Sadko. It’s based around the classic fairytale family unit of the beautiful and kindly daughter Nastenka (Natalya Sedykh); her loving but spineless father (Pavel Pavlenko); her wicked stepmother (Vera Altayskaya); and her belligerent spoiled stepsister Marfushka (Inna Churikova). Frustrated at Marfushka’s inability to attract a suitor, the wicked stepmother orders her husband to take Nastenka into the winter woods and abandon her to the elements. Happening upon her while he’s doing his wintry rounds, Morozko/Jack Frost (Alexander Khvylya) is charmed by her politeness and takes her into his home before sending her home bedecked with riches. Outraged by her good fortune, the stepmother sends her own daughter into the woods, but her rude and entitled behaviour causes her to be snubbed (although the movie, being far more lighthearted than the original fairytale, doesn’t have her freeze to death).

For the film version, Nastenka’s story has been buried within a larger narrative centring on Ivan (Eduard Izotov), a handsome peasant with great strength who is also a conceited asshole, treating his mother (Zinaida Vorkul) like dirt and constantly looking at his face in a hand mirror while lapping up the attentions of all the women in his village. An encounter with Starichok-Borovichok (Galina Borisova), the elderly Mushroom King, earns him a magic bow and arrow – but his refusal to bow in respect has consequences. After a convenient rocky inscription shows him how to find his destiny, he encounters – and falls in love with – Nastenka, who agrees that he’s handsome but takes issue with his ego. His misguided attempts to impress her by shooting a bear (despite her pleas not to do so) invoke the Mushroom King’s curse and he turns into a bear himself, which he blames on Nastenka. Although the Mushroom King advises Ivan to stop being so self-centred, Ivan doesn’t learn a thing and runs off trying to force good deeds on people so he can break the spell – which, since he looks like a bear, causes them to run away screaming. Eventually breaking the spell but still failing to learn his lesson, he incurs the wrath of Baba Yaga (Georgy Millyar), who puts a spell on Nastenka to get back at him. Ivan’s narrative has clearly been inserted to contrast with Nastenka’s – his self-centred blundering and failure to respect his elders screws everything up, while her kindness and patient forbearance eventually bring about good things. Although Ivan and Nastenka do get their “happily ever after” and Ivan has clearly mellowed somewhat by the end, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that Nastenka will have to exercise a great deal more patient forbearance in order to make him safe to operate in human society.

Like Ptushko, most of Aleksandr Rou’s career was devoted to making children’s fantasy films. Although Jack Frost lacks the sumptuous visuals of Sadko, there are some enjoyable fantastical creations on display – most notably Baba Yaga’s hut (courtesy of production designer Arseni Klopotovsky) and the trees which come to life (costumes designed by Yevgeni Galey). There’s a stronger touch of comedy in the overall production, although it’s not terribly sophisticated. Some of the effects, however, are rather crudely handled and lack the sense of precision Ptushko brought to his work. More jarringly, the dialogue track is severely out of synch with the performers – sometimes lagging several seconds behind the performers, other times starting long before their lips begin to move. Since the print I viewed was based on an official restoration hosted by MUBI, I can only assume this problem was present in the original film, cementing my impression of Rou’s lack of attention to detail.

Although Jack Frost has more to offer on a plot level and features an engaging performance from Natalya Sedykh, the aspects which were less well handled make me disinclined to seek out any more of Rou’s work. In contrast, while Sadko‘s plot and performances sometimes struggled to hold my attention, there’s a far greater degree of craft on display and the visuals are much stronger. I expect I’ll be delving further into Aleksandr Ptushko’s oeuvre when the opportunity arises.

MIFF69 – Centre Stage (1991) [and Painted Faces]

Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage [Ruan Lingyu] (1991) takes us back to the early days of Chinese cinema with a hybrid biopic/documentary depicting the rise to stardom and untimely death of silent movie star Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935), as exquisitely portrayed by Maggie Cheung. We’ll also be stepping outside of this year’s MIFF programming to explore a different aspect of the film industry with Painted Faces [Qi xiao fu] (1988), following the early years of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung as they trained in the Peking Opera tradition.

[A quick note on the anglicised spelling of Chinese names. I’ve chosen to reproduce the names of people and movies as presented in the subtitles of the restored print made available to the Melbourne International Film Festival. This often differs drastically from what you’ll find on Wikipedia or most other internet sources. Those sources are likely to be more accurate regarding modern anglicisation/translation conventions, but I thought it best to remain faithful to the film as I experienced it.]

Ruan Lingyu was China’s first great screen star, making her first film at the age of 16. Centre Stage joins her story in 1929 as the creative talent behind the newly forming Linhua Studio discuss their plans. Director Sun Yu (played here by his son Sun Dongguang) wants to showcase her potential to perform any role by casting her first as a prostitute in Reminiscences of Peking [Gu du chun meng] (1930) (aka Spring Dream of an Old Capital) before following up with a role as a chaste singer in Wayside Flowers [Ye cao xian hua] (1930) (aka Wild Flowers by the Road). We first meet Ruan herself in what appears to be a dramatic scene from her own life, until she breaks character with a smile to inform the director that her performance wasn’t good enough before repeating the scene. The line between her life and that of her characters continues to be blurred in the following scene – a conversation with the woman with whom she shared the previous scene seems at first to be part of the same narrative but turns out to be an intimate exchange between friends, as Ruan asks her what it feels like to give birth. In love with a man she knows will never fully commit to her, she adopted a daughter rather than rely on him but needs her friend to reassure her that you can still love a child fully without having been through the birthing experience. Although the distinction between Ruan’s life and her performances is clearer from this point, parallels between the two will remain an important aspect of the film.

Leaving aside the directors with whom she worked, the trajectory of Ruan’s life is depicted largely via her relationships with three men. First up is Chang Ta-min (Lawrence Ng), an inveterate gambler who hooked up with her when she was sixteen. Their relationship is very unbalanced – he’ll be absent for days before turning up again on her doorstep and constantly leeches off her career for extra cash and expensive gifts. He’s constantly and blatantly unfaithful, but she accepts this as just a given of being with him. The second man is Tang Chi-san (Chin Han), a wealthy married businessman first encountered alongside his mistress Chang Chih-yun, an actress who is ten years older than Ruan – and who is rumoured to be kept under his thumb by an addiction to opium. This unsubstantiated rumour is never given any credence by the film, but its introduction here foreshadows the important role that gossip will play later on. Tang takes a shine to Ruan and eventually wins her over after ending things with Chih-yun. He sets Ruan up in her own house with her mother (Hsiao Hsiang) and adopted daughter (Yumiko Cheng), taking care of the financial arrangements for the separation from her ex. Finally we have Tsai Chu-seng (Tony Leung), director of New Women [Xin nu xing] (1935) – her second-last, and most significant, film. Although it’s unclear whether or not they had a sexual relationship, they clearly have a significant emotional connection and their scenes together stand out as a highlight of the film.

New Women was based on the tragic life of Al Hsia (1912-1934), an actress and screenwriter who was hounded by the tabloids and took her own life. A little over a year after her death, Ruan Lingyu – who played her fictional counterpart Wei Ming – would leave her life in much the same way. The last half of Centre Stage is devoted to this final year of Ruan’s life. Despite being a highlight of her career, New Women was savaged by the press, who didn’t take kindly at being held to account for Al’s suicide and attempted to force cuts on the film (possibly, it’s suggested, at the instigation of the Kuomintang, who didn’t feel that Ruan was morally sound enough to represent the modern Chinese woman). Thanks to her hypocritical scum of an ex, always on the lookout for money and embittered by his bruised male ego, her relationship with Tang blows up into a tabloid scandal, beginning the spiral into depression – carefully hidden from everyone around her – which results in her suicide.

I mentioned up top that this is not a standard biopic. While much of the film’s 2½ hour running time is taken up with its dramatisation of Ruan’s life, the film opens with a discussion between director Stanley Kwan and star Maggie Cheung about their subject. Hearing a summary of how Ruan’s career developed, starting off in comedies and genre pictures before transitioning to serious dramatic roles, Maggie chuckles as she observes how much this resembles her own career, immediately establishing the theme of life imitating art. Kwan continues to intersperse his dramatic retelling with B&W interludes in which the actors discuss the real people they’re portraying and others provide additional historical context. It’s during these interludes that we learn that Chang Ta-min’s vile behaviour didn’t end with Ruan’s death – amongst the spate of dramatic works depicting the Chang-Ruan-Tang relationship triangle, Chang immediately tried to capitalise on her death by selling himself as the wronged man in a film project which was swiftly cancelled due to public backlash. Despite this he persisted, eventually playing himself in Who’s to Blame? [Shui zui guo] (1937) and a thinly veiled version of himself in Wife of a Friend [Peng you zhi qi] (1938). Neither film survives today, and Chang died in 1938.

Kwan was also fortunate enough to speak with people who knew Ruan Lingyu before her death. Included here is interview footage with director Sun Yu (filmed less than a month before his own death) and fellow actress Chan Yen-yen aka Lily Li (often characterised as Mae West to Ruan’s Marlene Dietrich) – she is played in the film by Carina Lau, who was the most significant female supporting role. Even more precious is Kwan’s use of vintage footage from Ruan’s body of work. Of the thirty films she made, most no longer exist – only seven survive in their entirety. Kwan and Chueng have done their best to fill in some of these gaps by recreating key scenes from Three Modern Women [San ge mo deng nu xing] (1932), Night in the City [Chengshi zhi ye] (1933) and The Sea of Fragrant Snow [Xiang xuehai] (1934). But while these glimpses of how it might have been are valuable, the sequences which really stand out are those in which they re-enact scenes from three films which still exist – Little Toys [Xiao wanyi] (1933), The Goddess [Shen nu] (1934) and New Women. In each instance Kwan begins by taking us behind the scenes, showing Ruan working out the details with her co-stars and listening to what her directors want her to convey. Next we see Maggie Cheung play the scenes in character, before finally juxtaposing her performance with the original scenes played by Ruan herself. It’s a masterpiece of reverse engineering how the original films were constructed while showcasing the talents of both actresses, foregrounding Maggie Cheung while granting space for Ruan Lingyu to have a voice in this depiction of her life.

Besides appearing in the documentary interludes, Kwan injects himself into the narrative by playing Fei Mu, who directed two of Ruan’s films. I’d like to quote a dialogue exchange taken from a party scene set on the last day of Ruan’s life, which she uses to say a fond farewell to her colleagues prior to her midnight suicide. Ruan is talking about the speech she’s due to give at a friend’s school in honour of Women’s Day.

Ruan: “What’s the idea of this festival? To celebrate us girls for rising up from a centuries-old men-dominated history.”

Tang (drunk): “You women are standing up and we men are falling down.”

Fei: “When women stand up it doesn’t necessarily mean men are falling down. We can stand up together in this large world.”

It’s an exchange which has little direct connection with the film surrounding it, feeling more like an authorial interjection aimed at the audience – but it’s a beautiful sentiment and, given that the film has already blurred the lines between fiction and documentary, it’s not out of place. Once we reach Ruan’s funeral in the final minutes of the film, Kwan throws out all pretense at maintaining a division between the two, cutting the emotional tension by showing his own crew filming the final scenes and the actors joking with each other. It’s a potentially risky move, but for me it worked.

I’m not very familiar with Stanley Kwan’s other work, but he received great acclaim for Rouge [Yim ji kau] (1987), a film with its roots in the same 1930s Shanghai setting. Here he’s opted for a more muted colour palette, with browns, oranges and yellows dominating – something I would have attributed to the age of the print, if not for the knowledge that this was a new 4K restoration made with the director’s supervision, making it clear that this was a deliberate choice. The movie benefits from being scripted by film critic Peggy Chiao, providing the crucial female perspective which, supported by her extensive knowledge of film history, forms the film’s spine. But for me, this is all about Maggie Cheung, who as one of the greatest actors of her generation is a perfect choice to portray China’s first female star of the silver screen. Her compelling performance demands attention whenever she’s on screen, no matter how much else is going on around her, earning her four awards as Best Actress – including the Berlin International Film Festival’s prestigious Silver Bear. Without meaning to imply anything negative about the rest of the cast, the only other performer working on the same level as her is Tony Leung. This isn’t the first time they’ve worked together, nor would it be the last. Sharing the small screen early in their careers on the TV series Police Cadet [San jaat si hing] (1984) and The Yangs’ Saga [Yang ka cheung] (1985), they went on to a string of four films with renowned director Wong Kar-wai – Days of Being Wild [Ah Fei jing juen] (1990), Ashes of Time [Dung che sai duk] (1994), In the Mood for Love [Fa yeung nin wah] (2000) and 2046 (2004). Rounding out their list of shared credits are The Banquet [Ho moon yeh yin] (1991), The Eagle Shooting Heroes [Se diu ying hung: Dung sing sai jau] (1993) – a parody made during the filming of Ashes of Time with the same cast – and Zhang Yimou’s Hero [Ying xiong] (2002).

About a week prior to my encounter with Centre Stage, I was coming to the end of a month-long binge on Shaw Brothers films which were about to leave Netflix. Among these films – which varied wildly in quality – one of the standouts was Alex Law’s Painted Faces, which provides a valuable historical perspective on the connective tissue linking the Peking Opera tradition (which stretches back to 1790) to the rise of the Hong Kong martial arts movie which started to gather momentum in the 1960s. Serving as the intersection point between the two is Yu Jim-yuen’s China Drama Academy, birthplace of the Seven Little Fortunes troupe whose most famous graduates include Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Yuen Qiu, Yuen Wah and Corey Yuen.

We’re introduced to the Academy through the eyes of Cheng Lung (Siu Ming-fui), referred to here mostly by his nickname Big Nose but later to achieve fame as Jackie Chan. Poorly suited to regular schools and having recently made a nuisance of himself at the American embassy in Australia, where his father worked as the head chef, his mother (Mary Li) drops him off here as a last resort. Excited by the prospect of doing nothing but pretending to fight, he eagerly volunteers for the maximum enrolment term of ten years, but soon finds that he’s signed up for a much stricter form of physical discipline than he’d anticipated. The first half of the film follows the life of the various male students as they train under the guidance of their “big brother” Sammo Hung (Yeung Yam-yin) and Master Yu (portrayed with great sympathy by the real Sammo Hung). Key elements of this section of the film are their gruelling training regimen; the mockery they receive from students attending the more academically inclined local school; the budding friendship between Cheng, Sammo and Yuen Biao (Koo Fai); the role Sammo plays in looking out for the others and taking them on the occasional illicit expedition outside their school; and the stage performances of the star pupils which are the school’s sole source of income.

The second half skips forward in time to the younger characters’ teen years, which are enlivened by their introduction to the world of the all-girls equivalent run by Ching (Cheng Pei-pei). This also allows for a rather sweet strand of potential romance between Yu and Ching, who have clearly nursed a long-term mutual attraction which turns them both into tongue-tied nervous nellies – with all the heavy lifting of the nudging them both along being left to Ching and her oldest student (unfortunately the credits are too sparsely documented for me to tell you her name). This period also sees the Peking Opera tradition in decline, as the hardcore fans age out and the younger audience flocks to the cinema instead. Dwindling box office puts the school at threat, and the decision of the government to demolish the building housing the school finishes the Academy off entirely, with its students dispersing to find work in the film industry as stuntmen – which will eventually see many of the schools alumni make their way up to become action choreographers, film directors and – for the lucky few – movie stars in their own right. The movie ends with Master Yu heading off to America to establish a new school before his retirement, paying a final fond farewell to his star students from the Seven Little Fortunes – although sadly whoever wrote the subtitles undercuts the final scene, failing to understand that the Chinese characters on the fan Yu has been gifted are intended to refer to the troupe’s name (I forgot to note down the alternate translation provided but it was something like “Seven Destinies”).

Alex Law has peppered his cast with significant actors from the history of the genre. Sammo Hung, of course, was a member of Yu’s troupe and it must have been a strange experience for him to play his own teacher – particularly in the scene which has him beating his own younger self. Cheng Pei-pei is best known for her breakthrough performance as the lead of King Hu’s Come Drink With Me [Da zui xia] (1966) and her late career appearance as Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [Wo hu cang long] (2000). Lam Ching-ying also has a major supporting role as Wah, Yu’s close friend who is approaching the end of his working life as a stunt performer. Sammo and Lam share one of the film’s best scenes, an extended sequence near the end in which Lam suffers a head injury during a stunt gone wrong and needs to be carefully talked down before he does himself further damage. Sadly, Lam himself was also nearing the end of his career at this point. After fifteen years as an actor he finally achieved fame as the Taoist priest in Mr. Vampire [Geung see sin sang] (1985), a role which was so popular that he became typecast and found it difficult to secure more varied roles. He died of cancer far too young in 1997, having lived for only 44 years. Also worthy of note is Wu Ma, an actor and director who had a small role in Mr. Vampire and cameos here as a film director, but is best known to me as the Taoist priest from A Chinese Ghost Story [Sien lui yau wan] (1987), one of my personal favourites.

Painted Faces is probably more accessible to a general audience than Centre Stage, for a few reasons. There’s the fact that more people have heard of Jackie Chan than Ruan Lingyu; there’s the wider range of potential audience identification points offered by spanning three generations; there’s the more conventional narrative structure of Painted Faces; and, of course, there’s the matter of length – Painted Faces is a lot shorter! Both, however, are well worth seeing – and for those who have the patience, Centre Stage offers a richer experience.

MIFF69 – Sisters With Transistors (2020)

Out of all the offerings at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, this is the one I’ve been anticipating for the longest time, ever since it was first announced as a work in progress roughly three years ago. My first viewing of Doctor Who (1963-89) as a very young child was a formative experience in many ways, but the most relevant one here is my personal musical sweet spot of 20^th century analogue electronic music. Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines (2020) charts the development of this musical form via the words and works of its most significant female contributors, some of whom may be passingly familiar to a general audience, but most of whom have only begun to be more widely celebrated since the dawning of the 21^st century.

The documentary is narrated by the familiar tones of legendary avant-garde performer and composer Laurie Anderson, whose first single “O Superman” (1981) was championed by famous British DJ John Peel, reaching #2 in the UK charts. Although Anderson sets the scene, providing context for the journey the audience is about to begin, she’s not a major presence in the film. Director Laura Rovner has chosen instead to allow the women under consideration to speak for themselves where possible via a mixture of examples from their body of work, archival footage, recordings of old interviews and – for three of the four women still alive – newly filmed footage. Most of the contextual information about their work is provided by their colleagues or by modern female musicians discussing their personal influences, with Anderson’s narration making brief reappearances only when necessary to provide connective tissue.

The first woman to be featured is Clara Rockmore (1911-98), a concert violinist who became fascinated by Léon Theremin’s newly invented instrument the theremin, helping to refine its development and achieving fame as its preeminent performer. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is next, represented by both Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) – most famous for her realisation of the Doctor Who theme music and seen here demonstrating composition from painstakingly pieced together fragments of tape – and the less well known, but crucial, figure of Daphne Oram (1925-2003), co-founder of the Workshop. Although she is modest about the extent of her contribution, quoted only as saying that she “helped” to start it, their mutual colleague Brian Hodgson is more emphatic in his statement that it would never have come into being without her. Oram was also a pioneer in the graphic representation of sound, developing her own technique known as Oramics, allowing the composer to draw shapes directly onto film stock which would be fed into a machine and translated into sound. On the other side of the English Channel, Eliane Radigue (b. 1932) developed her talents in the musique concrète tradition, training with key figures Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Both Radigue and Derbyshire talk about the influence of World War II in forming the way they thought about music – Derbyshire’s love for abstract sound had its birth in the sound of the air raid sirens over London, while Radigue enjoyed listening to the sounds of planes travelling overhead, picking apart their different sounds and rearranging them inside her head to form her first compositions.

Over in America, Bebe Barron (1925-2008) and her husband Louis collaborated on soundtracks for avant-garde films, with Louis creating the raw sonic materials and Bebe turning them into coherent musical pieces – Louis talks about her astonishing ability to mentally retain the contents of hours of abstract recordings, using only her memory to identify the exact points on multiple tape reels containing the elements she wished to use. The two are best known in the mainstream for creating the astonishing soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (1956), although the musicians union kicked up a fuss and refused to allow them to be credited as composers – they were credited instead for “electronic tonalities” and it took another 20 years before their soundtrack achieved the respect it deserved. Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center under the leadership of the higher profile Morton Subotnick and was primarily focused on live performance. Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), the one featured musician here whose name was unfamiliar to me, started off working with field recordings before developing compositions around the creation of psychoacoustic illusions and the exploration of scientific ideas. Transgender composer Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) became famous for her electronic arrangements of classical music, contributing to the scores of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980). Suzanne Ciani (b. 1946) found her musical outlet in the world of advertising, where she found that her clients’ desire to be seen as “cutting edge” allowed her complete creative freedom to experiment with her equipment. The final musician to be featured is Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945), one of the first people to use computers as a compositional tool, drawing at first on her background in Appalachian folk music before creating the Music Mouse program for the Macintosh, which she has continued to update all the way through OS9. Rovner makes clever use of her editing team to link the visual aspect of this program back to Daphne Oram’s Oramics, reinforcing the connections between her various subjects before devoting the final 10 minutes to revisiting Spiegel, Ciani and Rodigue in 2018.

Although little is made of gender at first, it becomes more prominent the further forward we journey in time. Léon Theremin’s infatuation with Rockmore is mentioned in passing and can be clearly seen in contemporary footage, but from her perspective their relationship doesn’t appear to stretch beyond friendship and collegiality. Derbyshire talks about how lucky she was to be a woman from a working class background allowed to study Mathematics at university (although Hodgson is more forthright in his comments about her mathematical abilities). Radigue introduces the difficulty of being taken seriously in macho French society, with one of her co-workers under Schaeffer saying that it was good to have her there simply because she “smells good” (although for what it’s worth she does appear to have had Schaeffer’s respect). Oliveros is the first explicitly feminist performer, writing a piece for the New York Times on institutional misogyny and providing the wonderful quote: “How do you exorcise the canon of classical music of misogyny? With one oscillator, a turntable and tape delay.” The inclusion of Carlos may be controversial for TERFs, but it’s good to see her featured here – even if, for some odd reason, she’s the one featured artist not to be mentioned on the film’s promotional website. Ciani talks about how she couldn’t get a record deal because the labels weren’t interested in female performers who couldn’t sing, and points out that although she eventually became the first woman to provide a score for a Hollywood feature film – Lily Tomlin’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) – it took another 14 years before the next solo female composer was hired. Spiegel ties the topic in a bow by addressing the reason it’s important for films like this to exist – when she was growing up, she had no idea it was possible for a woman to be a composer and her teachers actively discouraged her from becoming a musician. It wasn’t until she’d completed a degree in Social Sciences that she decided to return to her initial love and forged the career she hadn’t had the tools to imagine. Spiegel, Ciani and Radigue make it clear that women are still under-represented in the world of music composition today and clearly value the opportunity to act as role models for those yet to come.

Speaking of the visibility of women and their work, the IMDB entry for director Lisa Rovner is embarrassingly incomplete, listing only one other short film and one job as an assistant camera operator. I didn’t have to go past the first page of a Google search to find at least two other short films she’s directed, and her website makes it clear that she’s more prolific than that, although this film is indeed her sole feature-length work as director. Rovner has assembled a fine selection of interviewees, both male and female, variously credited as composers, musicologists, sound artists and musicians. I won’t provide an exhaustive list here, but among those not already mentioned above are Mandy Wigby, one of the four female synth players making up the band Sisters of Transistors (assembled by 808 State’s Graham Massey); Kim Gordon, bassist, guitarist, songwriter and vocalist for Sonic Youth; Holly Herndon, a significant electronic musician and sound artist who came to prominence in the last decade; Ramona Gonzalez, a singer-songwriter who performs as Nite Jewel; and Andy Votel of Finders Keepers Records, whose compilation Lixiviation (2011) showcasing Suzanne Ciani’s early work had a pivotal role in reviving her reputation as a key figure in the history of electronic music. It’s also important to note the contributions of Rovner’s editing team (Michael Aaglund, Mariko Pontpetit & Kara Blake) and sound designer (Martha Salogni) – more information on their careers can be found here.

Sisters with Transistors is essential viewing for anybody with an interest in the history of 20^th century electronic music, but is also accessible to those with a more general interest in unsung female contributions to the arts.

Dino Double Feature – The Lost World / Journey to the Beginning of Time

As a child of the 1970s, the fantastical productions of Irwin Allen formed a significant part of my imaginative backdrop. Popular TV series Lost in Space (1965-68) and Land of the Giants (1968-70) were constantly being repeated and I would watch them religiously, along with their stablemates Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68) and The Time Tunnel (1966-67) (which must have been on just as frequently but felt more elusive). But preceding all of these, and occupying much the same child-friendly spot in the TV schedule, was Allen’s first non-documentary feature film The Lost World (1960), which offered the holy grail of many a child’s viewing desires – dinosaurs!

The Lost World is loosely adapted from the 1912 novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, which introduced his personal favourite character – the violently obnoxious Professor Challenger, a fictionalised mashup of explorer Percy Fawcett (who would later go missing while looking for a lost city in Brazil) and physiology professor William Rutherford (under whom Doyle had studied). Although I personally fail to see the appeal of a character who would rather shout down or physically attack his opponents than explain himself, I imagine Doyle found him to be a cathartic contrast to his more famous creation Sherlock Holmes – and such a character is certainly a useful plot catalyst for adventure stories. In this instance, Professor Challenger (Claude Rains) has recently returned from an expedition to South America where he claims to have seen dinosaurs atop a distant plateau, although none of the supporting evidence has survived the return journey. To his credit, he recognises that his story isn’t particularly convincing and proposes that his chief critic Professor Summerlee (Richard Haydn) should accompany him on a return journey to visit the plateau and obtain further evidence. Seeking volunteers from the audience of the public lecture in which he aired his claims, Challenger agrees to accept the experienced big-game-hunter Lord John Roxton (Michael Rennie) and Global News reporter Ed Malone (David Hedison) – although the latter is only accepted under protest after his employer (John Graham) agrees to fund the expedition. Joining them in South America as a fait accompli are the editor’s two grown children, Jennifer Holmes (Jill St. John) – an adventurous woman pursuing an ill-advised relationship with Roxton – and David Holmes (Ray Stricklyn), talked into coming by his big sister. The final expedition members are their local guides, helicopter pilot Manuel Gomez (Fernando Lamas) and his cowardly assistant Costa (Jay Novello).

Allen’s decision to shift the story forward from 1912 to contemporary times doesn’t affect the plot in any substantial way besides the introduction of a helicopter as a means to shortcut a lengthy jungle trek, although this does undercut the idea that we’re travelling to an obscure location completely unknown to western explorers. As helicopters aren’t generally designed for long-range transport, I found myself going down a rabbit hole to learn that the Sikorsky HRS-2 in which they travel had a maximum range of 720 km before refuelling – perfectly adequate for the Korean War, but implausible when it comes to reaching a remote jungle plateau unexplored by western civilisation. This is, of course, completely irrelevant to most viewers – but as my younger self spent a lot of time poring over books with military hardware specs, it’s a little surprising I never picked up on it back then. Then again, my desperation to get to the dinosaurs is probably sufficient explanation.

More significant than the chronological shift are the changes Allen and his co-writer Charles Bennett have made to the characters from Doyle’s original novel. Challenger and Summerlee make the transition more or less intact. The reporter Malone was originally motivated to join the expedition as a way of impressing a girl – this motivation is carried forward by making him a romantic rival for the affections of Jennifer Holmes. The substantial character revisions kick in with Lord John Roxton, who in his original incarnation helped to end slavery in the Amazon. Here, although he retains his international reputation, he has been re-cast as an inveterate womaniser whose pursuit of one particular woman led him to neglect his duties to another South American expedition three years before – his failure to turn up to an appointed rendezvous resulted in the loss and presumed death of all its members. As an attempt to give his character some depth, it’s pretty perfunctory in the final script, but it does at least add something to the character of Gomez, originally an untrustworthy former slaver (and ethnic stereotype) out for revenge against Roxton for killing his brother (also a slaver). In this new scenario, Gomez’s brother was a member of the expedition Roxton failed, making his desire for revenge more sympathetic to the audience – although his decisions in pursuit of that revenge (and last minute heroic change of heart) make very little sense, owing more to plot-convenience than to any compelling psychological rationale.

As for the new characters, Jennifer Holmes is initially promising as the headstrong adventuress who won’t allow herself to be dismissed on the basis of her gender, but is quickly undermined by the writers’ decision to take a 180 degree turn and make her the type of spoiled city girl who joins a dangerous expedition in order to secure a marriage proposal, while bringing along a tiny poodle with its own carry-bag. The love triangle involving Roxton (whom she has pursued over the last two years) and Malone (who she barely knows) is clumsily handled and fails to engage, a token addition for older viewers which simply eats up screen time while boring the younger audience. But Jennifer does at least have more personality than her brother David, a thankless role which gives the actor very little basis on which to create a character and whose primary function is to act as a love interest for the token dialogue-free Native Girl (Vitina Marcus). As for Native Girl’s tribe, it suffices to say that they’re a typically generic mishmash of primitive stereotypes which don’t bear close inspection.

But what about the cool stuff? Well, the movie starts promisingly by running the opening credits over footage of lava, recognising that its young dinosaur-enthusiast viewers will also be hoping to see a volcano or two – and to provide a bit of visual spectacle to tide them over until the characters reach the centre of the action. Roughly half an hour in, we get to see our first dinosaur, and… well, your reaction to what comes next may well depend on your childhood expectations, because all of the dinosaurs in this movie are portrayed by lizards with bits stuck on their heads and/or backs. This was pretty much the default depiction of dinosaurs in live-action entertainment when I was growing up, so it brings a pleasant rush of nostalgia to see this cheerfully old-hat method of doing one’s best on a budget. It wasn’t Allen’s preferred choice – he had included a 10 minute sequence of stop-motion dinosaur animation in his documentary feature The Animal World (1956), which was realised by Willis O’Brien (responsible for 1925’s original film version of The Lost World but best known for King Kong) in collaboration with Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts) – but it was the best option available to him under the budget he had been allocated. Given these constraints, the one mistake Allen makes is to attempt to pass off some of these hybrid lizard creations under the names of actual recognisable dinosaurs. Having Professor Challenger identify an iguana with glued on horns as a Brontosaurus, or a gecko with horns and sails as a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, only undermines his scientific authority since any child with the most basic knowledge of dinosaurs would be able to point out that they look nothing alike. On the plus side, casting living creatures as dinosaurs does allow for realistic animal movement that stop-motion techniques of the time were incapable of achieving, even if this opens up a dubious animal ethics question about the fight scene between a monitor lizard (portraying a Protostegosaurus) and a spectacled caiman (appearing as a Ceratopspinus). My favourite creature of the lot, however, was (and still is) the giant glowing-green tarantula which ineffectually blocks two characters’ passage through a tunnel of webbing (Native Girl creeps around the edge of the effect before the pursuing Malone dispatches it with a single shot from his rifle). It may not do very much, but I really liked that green glow – the image of that spider is the single most vivid memory of the movie I retained through all of my childhood viewings.

Claude Rains (The Invisible Man, Casablanca) puts in a solid performance as Professor Challenger, submerging himself in a faithful character portrayal which displays a familiarity with the source material and is sufficiently different from his other more famous performances that I didn’t recognise him until I consulted the cast list. The only other performer who really stands out is Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still), giving Lord John Roxton the calm dignity of a man who knows himself better than he’d like and is quietly attempting to find redemption. David Hedison would go on to become the face I associated with James Bond’s CIA buddy Felix Leiter thanks to his likeable performances in Live and Let Die (1973) and Licence to Kill (1989), but the role of Edward Malone gives him little to work with and my lasting impression was of a petulant tantrum-throwing dullard (although Allen must have liked him since he became a series regular in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). Jill St. John, who seared herself in my memory as Molly in the first episode of Batman (1966) and was so charismatic in Diamond Are Forever (1971), starts well in her opening scenes but is unable to salvage the less inspiring material after the beginning of the expedition proper. Fernando Lamas (The Merry Widow) attempts to make something more of his character than a menacing locus of impending betrayal, but is undermined by the lack of any psychological reality to his character.

The most surprising name to find on the credits list is co-writer Charles Bennett, a talented screenplay writer best known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Secret Agent, Saboteur). His work is at its best in the opening London scenes, which provide the greatest opportunity for the characters to bounce off each other. Some signs of this sparkle can still be seen in an exchange between Jennifer and Roxton shortly after their arrival in South America, but from that point on the dialogue becomes increasingly perfunctory. Director and co-writer Irwin Allen may not have been up to much as a writer, but he certainly got a lot of use out of his dinosaur footage, re-using it in all four of his television series before allowing Hammer Films to recycle it for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). Allen’s career peaked with the disaster movie boom of the 1970s, most notably The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), the movies most likely to define his legacy. The Lost World never reaches the heights of those films, but while it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny nearly so well as the far superior Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), it still has its charms for those willing to indulge it.

Far more likely to stand the test of time is pioneering Czech animator Karel Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time [Cesta do pravěku] (1955), a charming family film combining boy’s adventure with an educational remit which I wish I’d had the opportunity to see at a younger age. Rather than perpetuating the division between intellectual and physical pursuits more typical of American entertainment of the era, Journey to the Beginning of Time ties the quest for knowledge to a physical journey down a river undertaken by four boys aged between 12 and 17 years old.

Twelve-year-old Jirka (Vladimír Bejval) discovers a Trilobite fossil while out playing near a cave. The curiosity inspired by this discovery prompts his older brother Petr (Josef Lukás), the narrator, to further Jirka’s education, beginning with a diagram illustrating the different stages of life in the intervening millennia and following up with a visit to the local museum to look at the skeletons of prehistoric life before finally reading Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth [Voyage au centre de la Terre] (1864, rev. 1867). Since this has only increased Jirka’s desire to see a living Trilobite, and “almost everything in Jules Verne books came true”, the obvious solution is for them to set off with two of their friends on a journey down the river into prehistory. Petr will record the travels in his journal, while the oldest boy Toník (Petr Herrman) will take photographs.

Sailing up Slovakia’s Váh River and through the cave where Jirka discovered his fossil, the boys emerge from the other side into an icy river and camp overnight in the Ice Age. Continuing their journey the following day, they observe a mammoth on a nearby riverbank (realised through a combination of practical macro-scale motorised puppetry and stop-motion footage matted over the river bank, depending on the angle from which it’s viewed). Further down the river they discover an abandoned campfire in a cave, admiring the tusks and antlers left over from the cave-dweller’s hunting expeditions and marvelling at the absent occupant’s skill at creating cave paintings. Toník goes off in search of the caveman, snapping pictures of the wildlife (birds and bison) before discovering a spear and promptly falling into a pit. The other boys watch two woolly rhinos battle on the opposite riverbank but hide from a mysterious spear-bearing figure who turns out to be their mud-encrusted friend and not a caveman.

Continuing back into the Tertiary Period they encounter flamingoes, gazelles, vultures, Deinotheria, sabre-tooth tigers and giraffes. If there were an American production, I’d expect at least one of the boys to have brought along a rifle, turning this into a mini-safari – but the focus of the story is very much on scientific observation and recording of data. Although the boys have some close encounters with a leopard and some alligators, their approach is to fend the creatures off with fire and make their escape. An encounter with a Uinthatherium prompts laughter from some of the boys about its silly name, leading to an impromptu lesson about scientific nomenclature and the meaning behind the funny-sounding names of prehistoric creatures.

Petr makes a narrow escape from a Phorusrhacos and they continue downriver to the Mesozoic. After fending off some exploratory dives from a hungry Pteranodon (probably more interested in the fish than them), they observe a Styracosaurus and Trachodon on the riverbanks and encounter a Brontosaurus hanging out in the river. And then, at last, they get to witness the obligatory battle between two dinosaurs – a Stegosaurus and a Ceratosaurus. Although the Stegosaurus is successful in fending off its attacker with a few well-placed thwacks from its tail spikes, it succumbs to its injuries, leaving a corpse for the boys to explore (and climb over) the following day. Disaster threatens when they return to discover their boat smashed to pieces, but the older boys are able to construct a raft and their journey continues.

Their raft finally bogs down in the Carboniferous Period, where they encounter giant centipedes, dragonflies and salamanders. Jirka’s tendency to wander off on his own gets him in trouble with the older boys, but they soon forgive him when they learn that he found Petr’s lost journal. Making the last stretch of the journey on land, they finally reach the Silurian Period (represented here by the shores of Rügen, an island off the coast of East Germany). Jirka’s quest comes to a successful conclusion when he finally gets to meet a living Trilobite, illustrated with a touching picture of the young boy holding his fossil in one hand while the other holds its still-living relative. All that remains is a quick coda featuring Petr back at home paging through his completed journal, and the film comes to an end.

The scientific elements of the screenplay by Zeman and J.A. Novotný were bolstered by consultation with palaeontologist Josef Augusta, with visual inspiration for the prehistoric creatures taken from painter Zdeněk Burian, one of the world’s pre-eminent dinosaur artists. The range of techniques used by Zeman to depict these creatures in a live-action film are still deemed worthy of study today, with one Czech educational institution offering courses which give students an opportunity to attempt to recreate his deceptively simple methods. Zeman’s characteristic reference to Jules Verne early in the film would later be realised in three heavily-stylised adaptations making use of more advanced techniques – Invention for Destruction [Vynález zkázy] (1958), The Stolen Airship [Ukradená vzducholoď] (1967) and On the Comet [Na kometě] (1970).

American producer William Cayton bought the American distribution rights, releasing a dubbed and re-edited version with additional footage in 1966 under the pretence that it was an original creation. Despite the additional footage, the US version is 13 minutes shorter than the original and some of the changes foisted upon it for the local audience actively work against the tone of the original. A reconstructed credit sequence running over abstract patterns of light puts the emphasise on the US personnel, with most of the original crew receiving anglicised names or being omitted entirely. The new footage features four Americans who, despite being filmed entirely from behind, are clearly completely different people from those in the film – they don’t even bother to get their relative heights correct. Gone is the delightful premise that Jirka (renamed Jo-Jo) wants to meet a living Trilobite – instead we are treated to an unmotivated visit to the American Museum of Natural History, as the four young men take a far more extensive tour through the museum than their Czech originals and are peppered with graceless infodumps which integrate less smoothly with the overall story progression. Unable to go along with the fantastical conceit of the original, the US version frames the events of their journey as a vision quest imposed by a funny look from a wooden carving of an “Indian medicine man” – at the end of their journey the four boys wake up sitting on the same wooden bench, with the only difference being the completed and travel-worn journal belonging to Petr (renamed Doc because he likes science). The other American boys have a more cavalier attitude to science than their Czech counterparts, all of whom were equally invested in their journey. The attitude to the cave dwelling shows off some particularly telling differences in approach. The Czech boys initially note the evidence of the caveman’s hunting skills, before being awed that he was not just a brute – he was also a talented artist. The American boys can’t help going into the patronising speculation that cave art must have had a ritual purpose rather than simply being a creative act, before reversing the emphasis of the original – underlining that a talented artist can still be a brutal killer. At the end of their journey, the Americans go even further back in time to the abstract lighting effects seen under the opening credits… accompanied by readings from the Book of Genesis about God’s creation of the world. This ham-fisted attempt to shove religion into proceedings was presumably intended as a sop to creationists, but it’s hard to see how juxtaposing this with pseudo-Native American magic serves either a scientific or religious audience. Leaving such plodding missteps aside, the US version still has its charms, but with the superior Czech original now available on Blu Ray from Second Run and looking better than ever, the US version really only bears watching as a curio.

Privileged Biker Zombies – Psychomania

Psychomania (1973) isn’t like any other biker movie I’ve seen. The biker movie genre, in my mind, is quintessentially America, whether it be in youth exploitation movies about vicious cycle gangs such as Al Adamson’s Satan’s Sadists (1969), counter-cultural classics like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), or movies which straddle the divide such as Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966). British biker movies are much less prevalent – the only examples I can think of are The Damned (1963), in which the bikers stumble into a military experiment, and Quadrophenia (1979), a period piece dramatising the conflict between the Mods and Rockers in 1964, loosely inspired by The Who’s 1973 rock opera concept album of the same name. But where the bikers of those two films are firmly rooted in a recognisable reality, the cycle gang in Psychomania is something else entirely.

We first meet our bikers in a striking opening sequence as they drive widdershins in slow motion around a stone circle in Avebury, shrouded by the early morning mist, accompanied by psych rock guitar. It’s a beautifully evocative sequence which stirs up decidedly mixed feelings in me as I feel very protective about the preservation of stone circles and can’t help but wonder about damage to the site… but it sure does look good. It doesn’t take very long after this for Tom (Nicky Henson), the leader of the gang (dramatically named The Living Dead), to take offence at a motorist who somehow failed to show proper respect and to drive him off the road with the eager assistance of red-leather-jacketed Jane (Ann Michelle). The only other female member of the gang is Tom’s girlfriend Abby (Mary Larkin), whose preference for blue corduroy over black leather marks her out as the nice one. Most of the other male gang members have either made up their own names or had very odd parents: Bertram (Roy Holder); Hatchet (Denis Gilmore); Chopped Meat (Miles Greenwood); Gash (Peter Whitting); and Hinky (Rocky Taylor). Rather helpfully, each of the gang members has their name embroidered in large, colourful letters on the left breasts of their leather jackets, which must come in very handy for the police whenever they receive reports of the gang’s depredations. (Not that the police seem particularly useful – despite knowing the identities of all the gang members, there’s no indication that they’ve ever even attempted to arrest a single one of them before the film begins.)

The members of The Living Dead are a thoroughly middle class lot who still live with their parents. Their leader Tom is very much the child of privilege – he lives in a large country house with his mother (Beryl Reid) and her manservant Shadwell (George Sanders). Mrs Latham hosts spiritualist meetings and conducts seances, but rather than being a charlatan living off ill-gotten gains, she charges no money for her sittings and appears to be genuinely talented. Shadwell is a rather more mysterious figure who looks after her and tends to her needs, but is treated by her as an equal or even (in some ways) a superior. Oh, and apparently he hasn’t aged a day as long as Tom has known him. Inquiring into the mysterious death of his father from unknown causes in a locked room, which is somehow connected to mysterious secrets of post-mortem survival, Tom convinces his mother and Shadwell to give him the key. Protected by an amulet depicting a toad, Tom undergoes some sort of cryptic occult trial/vision quest experience which provides hints to aspects of his past but doesn’t provide the answer to his burning question. This is inadvertently provided by his mother’s conversation with Shadwell while waiting for him to regain consciousness – apparently all it takes to survive death is to believe you’ll survive (his father had last minute doubts). Excited, Tom promptly drives his motorbike off a bridge.

Abby, who was with him at the time, reluctantly admits to his unfazed mother that it was suicide. She asks permission for the gang to bury him “their way”, to which his mother readily agrees. You might not think that a small motorcycle gang in a small English town who’ve just experienced their first fatality would have a traditional method of honouring their dead, but you’d be wrong. They bury Tom sitting on his bike, dressed in his full regalia, posed in a manner not exactly representative of the way most corpses would behave without considerable assistance. The funeral song is a jaw-droppingly inappropriate hippy folk anthem about a biker who just wanted to live free on the road but the oppressive culture of The Man led him to choose death in preference, eulogising an anonymous death mourned only by The Chosen Few who knew him. Musically it’s a desperately misguided choice, something you’d expect the gang to mock rather than willingly listen to, and the lyrics describe a gentle soul who just wanted to live his own life, somebody who has nothing in common with the bored thug that we’ve seen – which might have been an intentional choice on the part of the filmmakers, but I suspect this was a production decision made without the involvement of the director or writers. The pretty young hippy boy miming the song stands out like a sore thumb among the gang members and strums the guitar when he should be picking at it. Compared to this, Shadwell’s brief appearance to deposit the toad amulet in Tom’s grave and tip his hat to the mourners seems almost normal.

Presumably our deceased biker likes an audience, because it’s not until a stranded motorist (Roy Evans) takes a shortcut across the stone circle in the middle of the day that Tom erupts from the grave on his motorcycle (very impressively staged), pausing only to run him down before going on to murder a petrol attendant and several pub customers. He then lets the rest of the gang in on his secret, prompting a series of spectacular suicides which occasionally verge on the farcical, such as the guy in his speedos who staggers to the side of a river and throws himself in while chained to a bunch of weights. My favourite is the guy who left his bike in a clearly marked “no parking” zone. He lurks inside a 14^th story apartment waiting for a policeman to turn up and yell for him to come down, allowing him to surprise the relevant authorities by taking the direct route from window to pavement. It’s rare to see that level of dedication in a practical joke.

One of the suicides fails to return, but the others set out to enjoy their new existences as immortal super-strong undead bikers who can tear apart prison bars and drive unharmed through brick walls (raising the question of whether their bikes are also immortal). Only Anne – whose attempted suicide by sleeping pills failed, resulting in nothing more than a series of anxiety hallucinations – is determined to hang onto life. While Chief Inspector Hesseltine (Robert Hardy) enlists her cooperation as bait in order to arrest the gang, Mrs Latham has become increasingly disturbed by her son’s willingness to share the secret of immortality with his friends. His stated intention to work his way through the country murdering everybody who’s part of The Establishment leads her to enlist Shadwell’s assistance in bringing an end to their depredations – but will Tom manage to take Anne with him first?

Tasmanian Don Sharp is a director with solid credentials when it comes to action and stunt work, having been responsible for the action sequences in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) and the Alistair MacLean adaptation Puppet on a Chain (1971). He directed the Hammer Films productions Kiss of the Vampire (1964), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), but by this point Hammer’s influence was on the wane, while Sharp’s overall career trajectory took him away from horror and more into the action thriller mode. He pulls off a great range of vehicular stunts here, helped no end by having access to an extensive stretch of curving roads which hadn’t yet been formally opened to the public. Award-winning director of photography Ted Moore adds an extra touch of class to proceedings. His CV includes seven out of the first nine James Bond films (1962-1974), as well as the final three Ray Harryhausen productions (1973-1981). The film’s screenplay was the second and final collaboration of Arnaud d’Usseau & Julian Halevy, who were responsible for the delightful nonsense that was Horror Express (1972) (reviewed here). This screenplay is far less coherent than their first, failing to explain many of the details behind their own scenario, but I think it adds to the movie’s overall charm – it’s hard to imagine it being as much fun if every little plot detail had been nailed firmly down.

The cast is surprisingly strong for an obscure low budget British horror filmed in 1971. Nicky Henson (Witchfinder General) took the job as biker gang leader to supplement his income while performing Shakespeare in the evenings. He takes the role seriously, setting the tone for the rest of the gang and providing a solid spine on which to hang the film. He’d later turn up as Demetrius in the BBC Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1981). Roy Holder (The Virgin Soliders) has also done his fair share of Shakespeare – Othello (1965), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Romeo and Juliet (1968) – and was one of the series regulars in Ace of Wands (1972) around this time. Rocky Taylor is a stunt performer with an extensive career, including 12 James Bond films (1962-1999) and 3 Indiana Jones films (1981-1989). Robert Hardy (the police inspector) had played Henry V in An Age of Kings (1960) but is probably best remembered as Siegfried in All Creatures Great and Small (1978-1990). A really thorough trawl through the various cast members’ credits would reveal a series of parts scattered throughout classic British TV and cinema (both prestige and cult), from Doctor Who to Jane Austen. But the unquestioned stars of the film, who earn their billing at the head of the credits, are George Sanders and Beryl Reid. Beryl Reid is probably best known as a comedy performer – she had recently parodied conservative activist Mary Whitehouse in The Goodies: Sex and Violence (1971) – but she’s equally adept as a dramatic actor and never mocks the material she’s given here (much as she might have been tempted). The on-screen bond she has with Nicky Henson (playing her son) is a vital component in selling their central family dynamic. Even so, she’s overshadowed by George Sanders in his final screen performance, bringing all of the charm and poise of a career spent mostly playing smooth-talking cads – a career, sad to say, which has largely passed me by. Apart from a few scattered earlier roles – Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) – I’m most familiar with his 1960s work, from the Disney movie In Search of the Castaways (1962) through the Pink Panther series entry A Shot in the Dark (1964) to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1965), Batman (1966) and The Jungle Book (1967). In fact, come to think of it, Psychomania is the first film I’ve seen him in which I didn’t first encounter during my primary school years. Despite the unfounded rumours that his suicide (which occurred shortly after making this film) was a reaction to seeing a rough cut of the movie, he appears to have had a great time on set and he dominates the material with ease – if this had to be his final work, it’s a pretty good way to go out.

BFI Flipside assembled an interesting selection of short films to accompany their Blu Ray release. Discovering Britain with John Betjeman: Avebury, Wiltshire (1955) is a 3 minute B&W mini travel guide for British motorists, one of a series of 26 short films sponsored by Shell-Mex Petrol and narrated by poet Betjeman. It provides an opportunity to glimpse more of Avebury’s stones and teases potential visitors with its “sinister atmosphere.” There are even some sample tourists on hand, presumably to model appropriate “visiting the local sights” behaviour.

Roger Wonders Why (1965) is a weird little glimpse into the conservative England of the mid-1960s, a desperately amateurish production put together by a church youth group from Chelmsford. Roger is the narrator and “star” of the piece, taking us into the world of the Saint Andrew Young Communicants Fellowship and their wacky nights of fun forming a conga line and jumping up and down. There’s a strange new visitor in a leather jacket who doesn’t fit in, so Roger goes over to talk to him. This is Derek, a Rocker, who’s also a member of The 59 Club, a motorcycle enthusiast social venue run by fellow biker the Reverend Bill Shergold (who remained the club’s president from its foundation in 1962 until his death in 2009). Luckily Derek happens to be carrying a complete second set of Rocker gear in Roger’s size. One shoddily edited quick change later, they’re off at The 59 Club visiting the Reverend, who doesn’t pressure club members to attend church but is a strong advocate of respecting other drivers and using motorcycles “to the glory of God”. Inspired to continue his new life as a biker, Roger stops to help a fellow motorcyclist who has broken down and follows him to an exciting meeting with a group of venture scouts. After some rope play and abseiling, Roger shoehorns in some heavy-handed messaging about how these activities make him think of his faith in God, before finally returning to his youth group to share his experiences (while continuing to wear his new leather gear – which, come to think of it, was only intended to be a loan, which leaves some awkward unanswered questions about Derek). It’s hopelessly lacking in quality of concept or execution, but as an authentic social document it has its interest.

We Interrupt This JFF Plus Report for a Warning from Space

It’s Day 5 and I’ve gone rogue. I decided to skip the day’s programming entirely and instead watch Shima Koji’s Warning from Space [Uchūjin Tokyo ni arawaru] (1956), Japan’s first science fiction film made in colour.

The story follows a fairly standard 1950s science fiction movie model. While making routine observations of the sky, Dr. Isobe (Kawasaki Keizô) spots an unknown object which approaches the Earth, stops, and begins to emit smaller objects. These coincide with power disruptions in the area and bright lights in the sky, fuelling public speculation about flying saucers, an idea which is ridiculed until the sober scientists are finally able to compare notes. It also marks the beginning of a number of sightings of giant glowing starfish stalking the streets which leave behind a luminescent, mildly radioactive blue goo.

After half an hour or so of the slow build, we finally meet the Paisan aliens on their craft in the most hypnotic scene of the entire movie. Six people stand around in starfish costumes, with a glowing central eye indicating which of the Paisans is talking – which is a more important visual cue than you might think, since we can’t hear anything other than a background electronic burbling. Pillars of Japanese text appear on either side of the screen to inform the viewer of the Paisans’ conversation, which reveals that they have come to Earth to save us from ourselves but appear to inspire panic whenever they are seen. Their leader pulls a polaroid out of nowhere and somehow flicks it across the room to be pinned against the wall – as this is an example of what Earthlings consider beautiful, one of the aliens will sacrifice their form and allow themselves to be transformed into her identical double (despite disparaging comments about that ugly blob in the middle of her face, i.e. her nose).

The photograph depicts famous nightclub dancer Aozora Hikari (Tomoyi Karita), who we have just seen in what appeared to be an entirely gratuitous dance number. Given that the filmmakers go on to insert an even longer and more gratuitous dance number a little later on, this is clearly a blatant excuse for the studio to show off their new talent and attempt to promote her as an up-and-coming star – an attempt that was unsuccessful, since she apparently had a very short career. The secondary purpose of these scenes seems to be pure revelry in how different things look in colour. There are numerous scenes throughout the picture of people going about aspects of their daily lives which otherwise have little narrative purpose, even considering that lengthy scenes of people walking from one location to another were still a common sight back then.

The transformed alien, using the name Ginko, is found floating in the bay and taken in by the scientists, who know there’s something odd about her because her white blood cell count is too high. After demonstrating an astonishing leaping ability during a game of tennis, Ginko reveals her true purpose – to warn Dr. Matsuda (Yamagata Isao) against the development of Element 101 (your generic “more dangerous than a nuclear bomb” element), and to warn the people of Earth about the approach of Planet R on a collision course, which can only be averted by firing all of the world’s nuclear missiles at it simultaneously. The Paisans have approached Japan since, as the only nation to have been subjected to atomic attack, they are in the best position to appreciate the danger. Unfortunately the rest of the world is inclined to think that Japan is either making it up or easily deluded until the planet is close enough to detect, by which point it’s also having an adverse affect on our own planet.

Supposedly based on a novel by Nakajima Gentaro of which there appears to be no evidence, the story clearly owes a great debt to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) (the benevolent alien warning of human self-destruction) and When Worlds Collide (1951) (the discovery of a pending collision with Earth). The team of Japanese scientists investigating the situation are disappointingly generic – other than such basic distinguishing characteristics such as “the young one” or “the one who invented the element”, there’s very little to differentiate one character from another and I quickly lost track of who was who. This isn’t the first Japanese SF movie I’ve seen throw in a complication by including some opportunistic criminals, but in this case they’re bolted onto the story in a particularly clumsy way. After a sinister man offers to buy Dr. Matsuda’s formula in order to make a huge profit in the international arms trade, he disappears from the picture remarkably quickly, only to reappear to kidnap him while Tokyo is being evacuated due to the extreme weather conditions caused by the approach of Planet R. Not only are they short-sighted enough to do this when his expertise is clearly needed by the rest of the world, their strategy for making him reveal the formula appears to be to handcuff him to a chair in an evacuated flat, threaten him a little, and then disappear from the movie, leaving him alone to be rescued by the Paisans at the last minute. Neither the criminals nor the writer seem to have thought this through – which is very disappointing coming from Oguni Hideo, a screenwriter best known for his collaborations with Kurosawa Akira such as Seven Samurai [Shichinin no Samurai] (1954), Throne of Blood [Kumonosu-jō] (1957) and The Hidden Fortress [Kakushi toride no san akunin] (1958). He does bring some humour to the script, but on a purely plot level it’s underwhelming.

Warning from Space (whose original Japanese title translates as Spacemen Appear in Tokyo) was eventually picked up for American distribution in 1963, where (as was typical for Japanese SF) it was taken apart and re-edited before being dubbed. Although I haven’t watched the American version, apparently one of their priorities was to remove all evidence of humour just in case anybody thought they were mocking the material. The biggest difference, though, is that the big meeting of six Paisans in all of their costumed glory as they discuss their reason for visiting Earth has been shifted forward to the opening scene, completely undercutting the original version’s gradual build-up of menacing half-glimpsed appearances. A reversed transformation sequence showing Ginko turning back from human to Paisan has been added at the end, completing the shift in emphasis from a movie about humans struggling to survive, into a movie about aliens coming to save humanity.

In closing I have to acknowledge the renowned avant-garde artist Okamoto Tarō, who made the single most important contribution to this movie – the design of the Paisan costumes, which dominate most of the poster art and promise a far more interesting film than we actually got. The costumes are at their best in the movie when seen in the shadows with their glowing central eye. They’re a little more disappointing when seen en masse during the conference scene, but the way this scene plays as a telepathic conversation backed by abstract electronic noises in the Japanese version adds a level of eerie alienness. It was the appearance of the Paisans which drew me to the film, and they remain the best thing about it.

JFF Plus Online Festival Day 1 – Anime Design, Arranged Marriage and Hitman Career-Swapping

The online component of the Japanese Film Festival is in full swing in Australia, so you can expect me to go back to a daily schedule for the duration. Before launching into my first set of reviews, a quick word on naming conventions. Earlier this year, I read a review at Cineoutsider in which the writer mentioned his Japanese wife’s confusion about the inconsistent treatment of Asian names in the west. Why is it, she wondered, that westerners are perfectly capable of listing the family name first for Chinese or Korean names, but they continue to follow the western convention for Japanese names? Since starting this blog I’ve attempted to be consistent with my treatment of Asian names, although I’m no expert so mistakes may have crept in. So if I ever decide to write about the films of “Akira Kurosawa”, to take the example of one Japanese director well known in the west, you can expect to see his name recorded here as “Kurosawa Akira”.

Project Dreams – How to Build Mazinger Z’s Hangar [Maeda Kensetsu Fantaji Eigyoubu] (2020) is, I was astonished to learn, based on a true story. In 2003, the civil engineering firm Maeda Corporation established the Fantasy Sales Department, whose task was to plan and cost the construction of the giant robot’s underground hangar from Nagai Gō’s anime series Mazinger Z [Majingā Zetto] (1972-73). This movie (also known as Maeda Corporation Fantasy Marketing Department) tells the story of that project from conception through to fruition.

The project originates with maverick PR Team Manager Asagawa (Ogi Hiroaki), who drops an anime magazine on the desk of web designer Doi (Takasugi Mahiro) and asks whether it would be possibly to build what’s on the cover. Having established that he’s not actually referring to the giant robot, this seemingly random question sparks a lively discussion among the other employees in the vicinity, and before they know it Asagawa has assigned them to the new zero-budget project as “volunteers.” Cue a bombastic opening credits sequence providing anime-inspired action sequences in which each of the main cast displays a supernatural ability to wield elemental powers!

The only member of the new team who is excited by the prospect is Chikada (Honda Chikara), who despite having argued fervently that the hangar would be impossible to build, reveals himself as a massive anime otaku who owns the DVDs and is thrilled beyond measure to bring his passion into his working life. The other three members are less enthusiastic. Other Maeda employees shun them during break times, fearful of contamination by association with a project which seems like a joke, and several senior executives express concern that the corporation will be turned into a laughing stock. It looks like this is going to be the story of a midlife-crisis-driven grand personal project which will backfire spectacularly and end up destroying the careers of everybody associated with it.

PR Team Chief Bessho (Kamiji Yûsuke) is initially the most sceptical, but after being caught off guard by an unexpected compliment he binges episodes with his young son and returns to the office transformed – he’s suddenly moving and communicating in an exaggerated anime style, is bursting with knowledge about the inconsistent design of the hangar doors within the cartoon, and has worked up a full set of blueprints including the extrapolated shape and size of the hangar. Emoto (Kishii Yukino), who spaces out whenever discussions become too technical, is sent on a fact-finding mission to meet soil excavation engineer Yamada (Machida Keita). After the use of a snack food metaphor allows her to make sense of the basic problems and a visit to a bore site allows her to understand the sheer scale of the project, her increasing enthusiasm for this new field of knowledge blossoms into romance. Finally, Doi – the most skeptical all along – is challenged to solve the design problems of the hangar doors via mentoring under a dam engineer (Rokkaku Seiji). When despair strikes the team due to the late discovery of an additional engineering problem (only made apparent on detailed viewing of episode 69), Doi is the one to rally the team and inspire them to find a solution.

This film was an utter delight to experience. It never loses sight of the seeming absurdity of the project, choosing instead to revel in it. As the project develops, support begins to grow within the company, due in large part to the extent to which knowledge of the original anime has permeated society – previously hostile executives provide snippets of fan knowledge to inform the project’s direction, the project team talk about their work as if they were truly preparing a giant robot project to defend against the kikaiju of the resurrected Mycéne Empire, and in the final stages of the project other companies willingly donate their time and expertise to solving the thought experiment in the name of defending the planet. The film makes clear that, despite the project’s concern with a purely imaginary task, it has value in its own right as a testing ground for ideas and approaches which might never have been conceived without its existence. Perhaps most astonishingly, the film is also highly effective as a vehicle for glamourising civil engineering – a large part of the middle portion of the film is dedicated to instilling a sense of wonder at the pure scale of human effort and thought that goes into creating massive environmentally sustainable building projects. The association of dam construction techniques with giant robot infrastructure harnesses the power of childhood imagination to reinvigorate everybody associated with the project – with hints that the fantasy anime world may also leak into the real world in more tangible ways.

The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice [Ochazuke no aji] (1952) is a low-key, slowly paced family drama exploring the institution of arranged marriage in post-WW2 Japan. We see this through the lens of the childless Satake family, married before the war and now stuck in a rut. Taeko (Kogure Michiyo) thinks her husband is dull and spends a lot of her time creating elaborate stories to justify her absence from the house in order to go away with friends. Mokichi (Saburi Shin) is an executive at an engineering company who was a Platoon Leader during the war and enjoys a quiet life of simple pleasures. Lately he has been spending his evenings after work dining with his younger friend Noboru (Tsuruta Kōji), who has recently passed his exams and taken a position with Mokichi’s company. Noboru introduces him to the small pleasures to be gained from pachinko, leading to his chance reacquaintance with an old army friend.

The Satakes’ niece Setsuko (Tsushima Keiko) joins her aunt on one of her trips away and is dismayed to hear her disparaging statements about her husband. Setsuko’s parents are in the process of attempting to arrange her marriage, but she keeps ducking out on their attempts to arrange meetings with her prospective husbands. Although her view of arranged marriages has been caused in part by her aunt’s dissatisfaction, her aunt still insists that it’s Setsuko’s duty to enter into an arranged marriage herself. Having been used as an excuse for her one of her aunt’s trips, she drops in on her uncle when she should be elsewhere and spends the day with him and his friend, persistently resisting his half-hearted attempts to get her to meet her family obligations. When his wife returns home that evening and demands that he chastise Setsuko, he confesses that he can’t in all honesty insist that their niece submit when she has such a poor example in front of her. Although this rare moment of open and truthful communication initially worsens their domestic relations, it eventually results in a firmer grounding for their marriage as they become able to relax, be themselves and learn more about each other.

Writer/director Ozu Yasujirō is considered one of the world’s most influential directors, but I’m not sure whether his work is really for me. He’s certainly good at eliciting the performances he wants from his actors, relying on facial expressions and pregnant pauses more than the dialogue itself to convey his character-based drama. This is nowhere more evident than in the shift to more casual and comfortable interaction between Taeko and Mokichi near the end of the film. Although their conversation is important to establish the reason for the shift in their relationship, it’s the shift in the mode of their interaction which makes their exchange plausible after what has gone before. The simple activity of the couple quietly preparing a meal together in the kitchen after the maid has gone to bed goes much further to establishing their new closeness than any dialogue possibly could, and was my favourite scene in the film. While I don’t expect that I’ll seek out more of Ozu’s work – he simply doesn’t make the sort of films which are likely to grab my attention and demand that I watch them – I don’t regret having taken the time to enter his world.

Key of Life [Kagi-dorobô no mesoddo] (2012) introduces us to the soft-spoken Kanae (Hirosue Ryōko), a methodical and organised magazine editor who announces her impending marriage to her staff at the end of their latest meeting. She hasn’t yet selected, or even met, a groom, but she has allocated one month to select a candidate and another month to get to know them before the wedding date, scheduled in her personal organiser for 14 December. When asked what she is looking for in a man, the only answer she has is to repeat the same requirements she has just specified for a new part-time employee – reliable, hard-working, methodical.

Kondo (Kagawa Teruyuki) is a reliable, hard-working, methodical hitman who has just completed a job. Sakurai (Sakai Masato) is an unemployed, debt-ridden, suicidal actor living in a dump who has just failed to hang himself. Their paths cross in a public bath when Sakurai drops the soap, which ricochets off the walls and ends up underneath Kondo’s descending foot. Kondo’s locker key goes flying and lands near Sakurai who – after some hesitation – drops his own key and leaves. Kondo wakes in the hospital with no memory and Sakurai’s belongings, while Sakurai (after checking on Kondo in the hospital) sets up in Kondo’s home and pays off his own debtors.

Kanae is leaving the hospital after visiting her sick father when she happens across Kondo, asking directions to what he has been told is his house. She takes pity on him and drives him home. While he methodically tries to reconstruct his life (tidying the apartment, discovering the suicide note, successfully taking acting jobs, taking notes on what he has learned about himself) the two of them grow closer together. Meanwhile, Sakurai’s new material wealth hasn’t left him any happier and he begins to record a suicide video, including apologies to Kondo for appropriating his life. His decision to answer a phone call which would normally have gone to voice mail leads him to discover evidence of Kondo’s means of living and to become embroiled in cleaning up the loose ends left after the last hit.

This is a quieter and more slowly paced film than I had expected based on the premise, which works to the benefit of one plot strand but the detriment of others. The highlight for me was the slowly developing relationship between Kanae and the amnesiac Kondo. Both are withdrawn characters who find it difficult to build connections but find much to admire in each other. Their shared methodical approach, which might have come across on the surface level as overly clinical to others, allows them to slowly discover each other’s qualities and build a relationship which could develop into something deeper. If this had been all there was to the film, I would have been surprised but happy.

Unfortunately I found it very difficult to connect to Sakurai’s character – whether due to the actor’s performance, or to the overall pacing and tone of the film (which doesn’t allow for an overtly comic performance which might have made him more engaging), is difficult to say. Whatever the case, I found myself utterly bored by his self-pity and his attempts to fake a life as a successful hitman. Even his decision to attempt to save the woman he’s asked to kill failed to make me care much about what was going on in his life. This aspect of the film livened up after Kondo regained his memory and the paths of all three of the main characters became intertwined, leading to a satisfactory resolution of this part of the plot (and some new revelations about what Kondo’s previous life actually entailed), but ultimately the film remains lopsided. The ending demonstrates conclusively that the relationship between Kanae and Kondo was what really interested writer/director Uchida Kenji, closing with their potential reconciliation. By this point Sakurai has completely vanished from the picture – only reappearing in a brief coda during the end credits setting him up with with his cat-loving shut-in neighbour. The sight of him cuddling the neighbour’s cat finally allowed me to find something to enjoy about him.

Dubious Date Night Double Feature – And God Created Woman / Are We Not Cats

…And God Created Woman [Et Dieu… créa la femme] (1956)

The first feature film directed by Roger Vadim (Barbarella), this film is notable as the career breakthrough for both Brigitte Bardot (launching her “sex kitten” reputation) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (setting the pattern for a career playing against the alpha male cliché). Although the film had a more mature attitude to Bardot’s character than I expected, it was still disappointingly confused in its attitude to women.

Juliette (Bardot) is an openly sexual 18-year-old orphan who bores easily and didn’t take well to the constraints of the religiously-run orphanage where she was raised. She flirts with wealthy older man Eric Carradine (Curd Jürgens) but has a long-term crush on Antoine Tardieu (Christian Marquand), oldest of three brothers.

Pretty much the entire town seems incapable of viewing Juliette in any terms other than her sexual availability. Most of the women see her as a slut with no work ethic. Her friend Lucienne (Isabelle Corey) sees her as a fun friend with whom she can party and pick up boys. Antoine is perfectly happy to promise her anything to get her into bed, but has no intentions of following through on his promises because he sees her as easy and plans to marry his boss’ daughter. She overhears his plans and confronts him, but he’s incapable of understanding why this means she won’t sleep with him. Eric is less creepy than I expected – he’s very straightforward about being a wealthy older man who will shower her with gifts in return for sex, but he also seems to genuinely admire her independent spirit and doesn’t take advantage of her when he has the opportunity.

When Juliette is in danger of being returned to the orphanage, Antoine’s shy younger brother Michel (Trintignant) offers to marry her so she can stay. Juliette is genuinely invested in making the relationship work, but after a boating accident while Michel is out of town, Antoine (who has been brooding over his missed opportunity) takes blatant advantage of her while she’s emotionally vulnerable, practically abandons her by the roadside and immediately goes home to tell his mum what a dirty slut his brother’s wife is. Antoine and his mother both put the blame entirely on Juliette and assume that Michel will immediately dump her. When she disappears in a state of distress before Michel can talk to her, Antoine tells Michel that she’s a whore and tries to lock him in a warehouse to prevent him from looking for her. Although Eric eventually helps Michel to reconcile with Juliette, there’s an uncomfortable physical element to this scene which doesn’t play well these days.

Although Eric forces Antoine to leave town with him, recognising that Antoine is the one to blame, the discussion they go on to have about Juliette seems to cut against Eric’s previously expressed sympathy for her, characterising her instead as a disaster waiting to happen to any man in her vicinity. I’d like to think this was simply a lie he told Antoine to encourage him to stay away, but perhaps it’s a case of life leaking into the script – writer/director Vadim was married to Bardot at the time, but during this film she began an affair with Trintignant, which may have soured Vadim’s attitude towards her more than he was willing to admit. Whatever the reason, as this exchange between Eric and Antoine is the last dialogue in the film, it reads as a closing statement which leaves a nasty aftertaste of misogyny.

Are We Not Cats (2016)

This is a difficult movie to characterise, which would explain why so many of the descriptions I’ve come across are inaccurate. In common with the IMDb and many websites, SBS has categorised this as a horror movie, which (with the possible exception of one scene) it most definitely is not. IMDb also calls it a comedy, which perhaps, at a stretch, you could consider to be semi-accurate. What these attempted categorisations dodge around is that, at its core, this movie is a romance – a weird romance with a tendency to wallow in ugly bodily functions and largely populated by people who are difficult to like, but still a romance. Adding “comedy” or “horror” as descriptive terms seems to be an attempt to explain away the elements that are… less characteristic of the romance genre.

Most summaries of Are We Not Cats begin like this: “A young man seeks a new beginning after losing his job, his girlfriend and his apartment on the same day.” Except, again, this isn’t particularly accurate in its specifics. Eli (Michael Patrick Nicholson) is seen at the beginning of the film riding on the side of a rubbish collection truck, before jumping off to visit a girl he likes and borrow her shower. Although this is clearly a regular occurrence, there is no indication that she has ever been his girlfriend in any realm outside of his own head – she refuses to let him in because she now has a boyfriend, and she clearly feels his constant use of her shower is creepy, speculating about restraining orders. When he returns to the garbage truck, everything the driver says suggests that rather than working as a garbage collector, Eli really just uses the truck as free transport, which won’t be happening any more. And Eli doesn’t really lose his apartment – he returns to his parents’ house, where he’s been living rent-free, to find that they’ve sold it and are moving somewhere else. Out of what I assume is a lingering sense of parental responsibility, his father offers to give him their removal truck (which he was going to sell for $500) in return for Eli moving all of his belongings out of the house immediately (going straight into the back of the truck).

“Seeking a new beginning” is a generous description for Eli’s actions – hanging around friends who don’t seem to particularly like him, making up stories about his situation which they don’t appear to believe, and asking offhandedly if anybody needs any work done. He lucks into a driving job because of his truck, transporting a motor across the country for $100 cash in hand, but reaches his destination five hours behind schedule. This leads to him giving a lift to Kyle (Michael Godere), a guy with entitlement issues who forces him to share a drink of something strongly alcoholic which is clearly not intended for human consumption. Apparently this counts as some form of male bonding ritual, because Kyle drags him to a small underground sludge club where Eli becomes fascinated with Anya (Chelsea Lopez), Kyle’s girlfriend. After he lets them crash in his truck overnight, Anya thanks Eli as she leaves and tells him where she works. Eli makes a nuisance of himself hanging out in the club with its owner all day, falls asleep drunkenly humping a cushion he imagines is a girl, then steals the club’s organ while everyone else is sleeping. He then treks north to Anya’s workplace to get a job there and give her the organ as a present.

Astonishingly, despite this desperate assholery and borderline stalker behaviour, Eli and Anya are actually a good match and it eventually becomes possible to hope that their relationship will work out. The shared activity which really draws them together, though, is a mutual obsession for plucking and eating their own body hair (with the tenuous connection to the title of the movie coming in when we see Anya vomiting up huge chunks of hair). While this isn’t their sole point of connection, this activity informs the development of their relationship through the rest of the film, from getting to know each other through the central crisis point (including the one scene which could be classified as horror) to its resolution and strangely sweet aftermath.

Chelsea Lopez as Anya is really the key to enjoying this film. It could be argued that her character embodies elements of the “manic pixie dream girl” cliché, but she works hard to make her character more difficult to classify, and the overall willingness of the film to dwell on the grotesque plays against these elements. The other major characters (and several of the minor characters) are difficult to spend time with and I found it a chore getting as far as Lopez’s first appearance, but if you buy into the charm of her performance, she should carry you through all the way to the end.

Karel Čapek Double Feature – Krakatit / The White Disease

Like many people, while I’m aware of Karel Čapek as the author of the 1920 play R.U.R. which introduced the word “robot” to the world in its modern sense, I’ve never read or seen the play, let alone had any real awareness of the rest of his creative output. The most recent Virtual Cinémathèque hosted by ACMI, Karel Čapek on Film, features a curated selection of films based on two Čapek adaptations hosted by the Czech Film Classics [Česká filmová klasika] YouTube channel.

Krakatit (1948)

Karel Čapek’s second novel Krakatit (1924) was inspired by his horror at a 1917 munitions factory explosion, killing hundreds of workers (including children) and witnessed by Čapek from 25 miles away through a chateau window. His prescient novel deals with a man who invents a new explosive compound which is effectively a chemical equivalent to the nuclear bomb, named “krakatite” in reference to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Čapek uses this invention to speculate about its impact on society and to explore a range of issues relating to the imperfect behaviour of humans on an individual and societal level. In the wake of World War 2, writer/director Otakar Vávra simplified the novel to focus more specifically on the impact of krakatite’s creation as an analogue for nuclear proliferation.

The narrative is formed from the fevered recollections/imaginations of Prokop (Karel Höger) as he receives emergency medical treatment for a combination of meningitis and pneumonia. He is initially seen stumbling through the street in full film noir Peter Lorre mode, barely keeping himself together physically or mentally, before collapsing in the arms of Tomes (Miroslav Homola), an old friend from his student days. He was working with a small quantity of his new discovery when it unexpectedly detonated in his face, triggered by the frequency of a late night pirate radio station broadcast. Tomes, who studied chemistry but is unemployed and desperate for money, pumps the delirious Prokop for information about his invention. Prokop wakes the next day to find himself alone and receives a visit from a mysterious veiled woman with a desperate message for Tomes. Still in a precarious state, he somehow makes his way to the house of Tomes’ father, who just happens to be a doctor.

After being nursed back to health by the doctor and his daughter (a nice girl with whom, of course, he falls in love), the chance discovery of a personals ad about krakatite in a discarded newspaper sheet drags him back into the plot – and further from reality. The view from the window of the doctor’s house is a film projection of Prokop climbing the hill to his own house, and suddenly we are inside the house with him as he encounters the person who placed the ad. After a night of drunken abandon, Prokop wakes up in another country, where he is forced to work on his invention. Although not very responsive to direct coercion, Prokop succumbs to the seductive overtures of Princess Wilhelmina Hagen (Florence Marly), who pulls out all of the femme fatale stops to wrap him around her finger. Their initial encounter, after she hides him from her men, is startlingly staged. Stating that she’s heard that he can judge a person’s character simply by holding their hand (a direct appeal to his sense of pride), she offers him her hand. The camera spends a great deal of time focused on their hands as they writhe together, becoming more frenzied, in a clear evocation of sexual congress, after which she pointedly observes that she is ready to explode in the arms of the right man. We next see her walking, seemingly oblivious to his warning cries, near the scene of the first test of his new explosive. When he tackles her to the ground to take cover, landing on top of her, she clutches him to her and bites his neck, leading him to begin kissing her shortly before a huge explosion leaves them both panting.

When Prokop eventually realises the extent to which he’s being manipulated, he escapes (in an increasingly unlikely sequence) with the aid of D’Hémon (Jirí Plachý), the ambassador, who reveals his true (rather unsubtle) name to be Daimon soon after we realise that is car is now travelling through the clouds. Daimon takes Prokop to meet an assembly of aristocrats and military leaders being charmed by an obvious analogue for Hitler, before whisking him away for a blatant “temptation of Christ in the desert” moment at the secret mountain base of the krakatite-triggering pirate radio station to offer him dominion over the Earth.

Far more didactic than the original novel, these elements of the movie are less irritating than they might be thanks to the way in which Vávra stages the material. The style of filming becomes more dream-like and openly expressionist, with perhaps the most effective sequence being the scene where Prokop confronts the Princess about her manipulation, only for her to freeze in place as her face fades away to a featureless mask. Frequent collaborator Jiří Srnka’s score is alternately bombastic, menacing, and gentle, with its experimental style foreshadowing the science fiction movies of the 1950s. Although the film ultimately turns out to be a moralising hallucination about the responsibility of the scientist to consider the repercussions of their inventions and their potential abuse by entrenched power structures, Vávra’s more imaginative sequences within this material create a more lasting impression.

Light Penetrates the Darkness [Svetlo proniká tmou] (1938)

Otakar Vávra worked in a range of styles throughout his career and would later become a mentor to prominent members of the Czech New Wave such as Miloš Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Věra Chytilová (Daisies) and the recently deceased Jiří Menzel (Closely Watched Trains). He began his career as a director in a more avant-garde mode with this paean to electricity, frantically scored on piano by Joachin Bärenz, an abstract exploration of the relationship between light and dark which is at the core of black & white cinematography.

The White Disease [Bílá nemoc] (1937)

Just as Krakatit is haunted by the aftermath of World War 2, The White Disease is infected with the pestilential atmosphere heralding the war’s imminent outbreak. Karel Čapek’s play, starring Hugo Haas, debuted in Prague in 1937. Haas wrote and directed this movie adaptation, featuring most of the original cast, for release in December. Before the expiration of another year, Nazi Germany had annexed the Sudetenland, leading to the complete occupation of Czechoslovakia five months later.

The White Disease opens with a nationalistic rallying cry for military expansion into the territory of the unknown country’s “inferior” neighbours, presided over by The Marshal (Zdenek Stepánek) in full-on Hitler mode. We first meet Doctor Galén (Hugo Haas) – named in tribute to the ancient Greek physician Galen – in the middle of the crowd at this rally, appalled at the populace’s eager response to the Marshal’s warmongering.

While the nation prepares for war, it is also suffering from the increasing encroachment of the disease morbus chengi, a new form of leprosy which initially manifests as a white spot on the neck, is only infectious to those over 45 years old, and has no known cure. Professor Sigelius (Bedrich Karen), the self-important doctor in charge of the hospital, is complacently content to shunt the patients off into wards segregated according to social standing – the poor are treated with potash, while the wealthy are treated with Peruvian Balsam. Rather than being of any medical benefit, these “treatments” simply act to reduced the smell of their wounds – the final stage of treatment is the administration of morphine while the patients are left to die.

Dr Galén, a general practitioner who works with the less well off members of society, has a great deal of difficulty in convincing Prof Sigelius to allow him to implement a potential cure that has shown some promise among his patients. Sigelius is extremely resistant, insisting at first that he will only allow tried and true procedures in his hospital, and since the current course of treatment is (to his mind) proving effective (i.e. proceeding smoothly and hiding the problem without curing it), there is no reason to change. When he is convinced, after great persistence, to consider that the new treatment might actually work, he is only concerned with the prestige of discovery, refusing to implement the cure unless he is given the complete solution and allowed to test it himself. Only after the possibility is raised that he himself might one day be infected will he allow Dr Galén to conduct a clinical trial to confirm the cure’s success on the hospital’s “charity cases”.

Although Sigelius tries to crowd Galén out of the picture after the cure is proven to be effective, Galén (an ex-military doctor who was horrified by the waste of life he saw in the trenches of World War 1) announces to the press that he is the only one who knows the cure’s secret, and that until the wealthy and powerful exert their influence to end war and commit to peace, he will only administer the cure to the poor. Rather than negotiate with Galén, Sigelius kicks him out of the hospital, and Galén makes good on his promise.

Much of the rest of the film involves the attempts of those in positions of privilege to convince Galén to treat them. People with varying levels of societal influence are encouraged to do what they can to encourage peace, such as quitting their job in the munitions factory or using their monetary/political influence to campaign for peace in the press. None of them, however, are willing to give up what they have in the cause of peace, even though it will mean their death.

No sooner has Sigelius received approval to set up concentration camps for the infected than the disease begins to become apparent in those further up the national hierarchy. The climactic confrontation between Galén and the Marshal exposes the arrogant self-absorption of the man at the top, who portrays himself as merely being a conduit for the will of the people despite having consciously worked to rile up his countrymen’s aggression, orchestrating faked diplomatic incidents over a period of months and planning for a sneak bombing raid on the enemy prior to the declaration of war, all for the sake of the military glory which he believes his country should want. His ego-driven feelings of divine authority even lead him to deliberately expose himself to the disease by shaking the hand of his infected friend, believing himself too strong to succumb to something which surely only affects the weak (with predictable consequences). The disease finally manifests once he has irrevocably committed the country to a war which will not be the easy victory he expected, and he discovers that he has made himself so indispensable to the military hierarchy that the entire war effort would collapse on his death. After imagining himself leading the war effort on horseback from the front as the flesh decays from his skeletal figure, the Grim Reaper incarnate, he finally succumbs to Galén’s condition of peace and summons him to the ministry… only for Galén to be killed by the crowds outside the ministry before he can enter, due to his refusal to join in with their cries for war.

Haas’ technique as a director technique isn’t visibly on display for much of the film, probably because of its origins as a stage play. One sequence that stood out to me came during the conversation between Galén and the Marshal, when the Marshal attempts to appeal to Galén’s military experience as a way of evoking a sense of duty. The camera focuses on the Marshal’s gleaming military boots, pacing backwards and forwards, before contrasting them with Galén’s ordinary footwear, firmly in place. We then cut to a shot of the Marshal’s torso, chest puffed up, decorated with medals and military braid, contrasted with Galén’s shabby civilian suit. Finally we see a shot of the Marshal’s face as he attempts to pull rank, switching to Galén’s face as he raises his chin high and refuses to comply, demanding to be arrested for insubordination.

Although the movie aims for a message of hope despite the cynical inevitability of Galén’s death, the very forces that Čapek and Haas railed against were soon to overtake their country. Čapek, named by the Nazis as “public enemy number two”, died in 1938 of pneumonia, not long before they seized power. Haas lost his position with the National Theater due to his Jewish background and fled to America with his immediate family, but was to lose both his father and brother to the concentration camps.

Strange Fascination (1952)

After moving to America, Haas found it difficult to reestablish his film career. He broke back into acting in 1944 and finally obtained work as a writer/director again in 1951 with a string of B-movie films noirs, generally involving an older man (played by Haas) who is exploited by an attractive younger woman. In Strange Fascination, selected as a support feature by ACMI, Haas plays an emigre pianist struggling to establish a career in America, enticed into a relationship with a dancer (Cleo Moore) before she dumps him for a younger man. It’s more sentimental than most films of its type, building the pianist’s life back up again at the end with his original wealthy patron. It’s perfectly competently made on a tight budget, but I found little to recommend it, despite the esteem in which it’s held by Martin Scorsese.

Witchcraft Double Feature – The Witch (1952) / The Girl on the Broomstick (1971)

I am very grateful to Kat Ellinger (editor of Diabolique Magazine) for the opportunity to see these films as part of her Cineslut Film Club. Both have been on my long-term viewing list and both are worthy of receiving proper blu ray releases – I’d certainly buy them.

The Witch [Noita palaa elämään] (1952)

1952 was clearly a good year for Finnish horror films with strong female protagonists, although The Witch is more comedy than horror. Released a little over two months after The White Reindeer [Valkoinen peura], this story begins with an archaeological dig conducted by Greta (Hillevi Lagerstam) and her husband Hannu (Toivo Mäkelä). They unearth the body of a woman with an aspen stake through her heart, which identifies her to the villagers as Birgit, killed for being a witch 300 years ago. Despite their warnings, Hannu removes the stake and a strong wind whips up, immediately confirming the villagers’ belief that the witch will return to life.

Conceptions of gender are quickly revealed to be central to the film as Greta and Hannu return to their base at the Baron’s mansion. The Baron’s son Veikko (Sakari Jurkka) takes Hannu’s assertion that he has discovered a witch to refer to Greta. Local painter Kauko (Helge Herala) also makes this connection, but with a stronger connection to her sexual allure, as he has not given up his pursuit of her affections despite her marriage (affections which she is steadfast in rejecting in a no-nonsense fashion, making it very clear that she loves her husband and that her views on the matter are paramount). Finally, Baron Hallberg (Aku Korhonen) takes the connection one step further with his statement that all women are witches, and we discover later that his son is reluctant to form a relationship with any of the women in the village as he couldn’t be certain that they weren’t his father’s offspring. The women of the village, rather revealingly, state that Birgit must have been a witch because she resisted the advances of that era’s Baron.

That evening, as the storm worsens, a naked woman (Mirja Mane) is discovered lying unconscious in the grave from which the witch has been disinterred. Seemingly amnesiac, all she can recall is that her name is Birgit. Everybody except Greta is convinced that Birgit must be the witch returned to life, even more so when they discover that the witch’s clothes (in surprisingly good condition after 300 years) fit her. Birgit seems to confirm this impression with her wild behaviour and references to her burial, although the fact that all of the men surrounding her at her return to consciousness have insisted on identifying her as the exhumed witch should throw her self-identification into doubt. Various strange incidents accompany her encounters with the villagers the next day, which could be coincidental or could be signs of her powers.

Mirja Mane is strikingly alluring in her role as Birgit, providing a magnetic performance which throws all of the men in the Baron’s mansion off-kilter in a plausible manner. For the 1950s, she spends a surprising amount of time naked on-screen, but it should be stressed that she spends most of the film clothed and the nudity is not relied on to explain the power she exerts. Without giving away the resolution of the story, the escalation of the effect she exerts on the men during the final 20 minutes is compellingly portrayed, as the staging of the scenes becomes more heightened, the imagery becomes wilder, and events unwind at a more frantic pace, disrupting the narrative and careening towards the climax.

Because this was the 1950s, it’s not terribly surprising when the film attempts to convey a specific moral message during the final scene, likely deriving from the play on which it was based. Whatever the source of the message, it’s not a lesson that can convincingly be drawn from the film as presented. To me, the actual message delivered by the film is a critique of men who project their sexual fantasies onto women and attempt to make them conform to those fantasies while pretending to value their autonomy.

The Girl on the Broomstick [Dívka na koštěti] (1971)

Delightful Czechoslavakian family comedy directed by Václav Vorlícek, who would go on to make Three Wishes for Cinderella [Tri orísky pro Popelku] (1973). I was fortunate to have seen this later film thanks to my wife’s German penfriend, who grew up loving it and bought her a copy of the German dubbed DVD under the title Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel. The Girl on the Broomstick also has a touch of the fairy tale, but more in the “contemporary children’s fantasy” mould.

The titular girl on the broomstick is Saxana (Petra Cernocká), a teenage witch who’s bored by her magic classes. The school setting follows the template of a classic cobwebby castle/dungeon, with a vampire janitor and a four-armed headmaster. Saxana and her classmates exhibit a magnificent range of colourful and exotic fantasy costuming and it’s a great pity that we don’t get to see much more of them. After being given 300 years of detention for failing to do her homework, Saxana turns herself into an owl and flies off to visit our world for 44 hours. Upír the janitor (Vladimír Mensík), who inadvertently assisted her departure, is sent after her to make sure that she doesn’t drink any Hag’s Ear potion during her visit, which would prevent her from ever returning.

Arriving at the zoo in her owl form, Saxana is taken home in a bag by the zookeeper as a gift to his son Honza (Jan Hrusínský), who is pleasantly surprised when Saxana climbs out of the bag in her human form instead. Thankfully the story avoids any sleaziness and establishes a more innocent connection of friendship-which-might-become-something-more-eventually. Saxana accompanies Honza to school the next day. After getting in trouble for too much whispered conversation with Honza, she is moved to sit at the front of class next to Rousek (Jan Kraus), the school troublemaker. Having already decided she wants to stay in our world, she agrees to cast some spells for Rousek in exchange for a hag’s ear. Unfortunately, Saxana is very much the trusting innocent (despite having been raised with the expectation of one day being the sort of witch who traps and eats children), and Rousek and his friends take full advantage of her naivety.

While I got a great deal of enjoyment from this film, I found it very difficult to put up with Rousek and his friends, as they’re just horrible little weasels who seem to have far too easy a time of it for much of the film. After Saxana has turned the school faculty into rabbits (an animal the boys suggested because they’re likely to end up being eaten!) and asks for her hag’s ear, the boys roll around on the floor laughing at her, finding her even more hilarious when they think she’s about to cry. When she threatens to leave, they shove a gag in her mouth, tie her up and push her into a cupboard. Although Saxana quickly rescues herself and flies away on a broom, I wasn’t convinced they would have been able to get away with their behaviour that easily, and they get away with a lot more in the course of the film, before their ultimate comeuppance. I suppose the exaggerated level of success in their villainy fits in with a children’s fantasy, but it still bugged me.

Having said that, Saxana and Honza do manage to wrap things up neatly, with Saxana retaining her agency while setting everything to rights. None of the transformed humans come to any harm, Rousek and his friends are punished, Upír meets a nice cleaning lady and Saxana achieves the life she wants. It’s lightweight fantastical fun which left a smile on my face.