Aleksandr Ptushko’s Sadko (1953) derives from a popular old bylina (epic poem) believed to be based on the 12th century figure Sotko Sytinich, patron of the Novgorodian Church of Boris and Gleb. The Slavophile revival of the 19th 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 19th 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.
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.
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 20th 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 21st 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 20th century electronic music, but is also accessible to those with a more general interest in unsung female contributions to the arts.
In the closing days of the Second World War, a squad of Nazis seized the still-beating heart of Dr Frankenstein’s creature from a Frankfurt laboratory. Handed off to a Japanese submarine by its Nazi custodians just before being bombed by Allied forces, the heart was transferred to a laboratory in Hiroshima, where speculations about its potential medical benefits for humankind were brought to a premature halt by the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Thus begins one of the more unusual variations on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831).
Toho producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, who launched what would become the Godzilla franchise and oversaw all of their tokusatsu (“special filming”, i.e. special effects-based movies) output, first raised the possibility of importing Frankenstein’s legacy to Japan in 1961. Following up on The Human Vapor [Gasu ningen dai 1 gō] (1960), a riff on H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897) featuring a man who could disperse his body into an invisible gas, Tanaka commissioned a sequel – Frankenstein vs. the Human Vapor – in which the Human Vapor recruited the aid of Frankenstein’s monster to revive his deceased girlfriend, although the project was cancelled before the script had been completed.
The following year Toho were approached by an American producer to make King Kong Meets Frankenstein, based on a treatment by Kong’s creator Willis O’Brien. Toho agreed but dropped Frankenstein from the picture in favour of their own creation, to great success – the resultant King Kong vs. Godzilla [Kingu Kongu tai Gojira] (1962) transformed Godzilla from the featured menace of two 1950s monster movies into the star attraction of a multi-movie franchise. Toying with the possibility of following up with Frankenstein vs. Godzilla, Toho ultimately decided to keep Frankenstein separate from their most famous creation, reworking the ideas from this script into what would become Frankenstein Conquers the World [Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijū Baragon] (1965), more accurately translated as Frankenstein vs. Underground Monster Baragon.
Fifteen years on from the opening sequence, Honda Ishirō confronts his audience directly with the legacy of Hiroshima, with doctors observing in resigned despair as a young woman who lost her parents in the original blast slowly succumbs to a lingering death from radiation poisoning. Running through all of Honda’s kaijū films from Godzilla [Gojira] (1954) on is a consistent theme of pacifism and compassion. The choice to have the prologue’s WW2-era Japanese scientists more interested in the medical benefits of Frankenstein’s heart than in weaponisation is telling – although it could be argued that this is a whitewash of the less ethical medical experimentation carried out in Japan at the time, it does effectively set Honda’s aspirational tone for the motivations of his contemporary scientist heroes. While horrified by the aftereffects of radiation, his scientists hope that the opportunities presented to study human cells will allow them to derive future benefits to humanity from the midst of tragedy. The most prominent members of this team are Dr. James Bowen (Nick Adams, dubbed by Naya Gorō), an American doctor who felt a responsibility to come to Japan due to his own country’s part in the bombing; Dr. Togami Sueko (Mizuno Kumi), a respected female scientist whose role as a love interest for Dr. Bowen is de-emphasised by the script’s determination to treat her as an equal partner; and Dr. Kawaji Ken’ichiro (Takashima Tadao), who begins to reveal a less-than-ethical side later in the film (possibly intended to invoke the darker side of Japanese war-time research).
Intrigued by tales of a feral Caucasian boy (Nakao Sumio) living off small animals in the streets of Hiroshima, our trio of scientists discovers the boy cornered in a cave and take him back to their hospital. There they discover that the boy – whose flat ridged forehead evokes the classic screen designs of Frankenstein’s monster, but could equally well suggest Neanderthal ancestry – is resistant to radiation, possesses enhanced strength, and is growing at a rapid rate. Dr. Togami – the only member of the team the boy will trust – becomes central to the process of raising and socialising him, in addition to encouraging his compliance with various tests. Due to his strength and uncertain temper, the boy is kept locked up in a large cage, although as he continues to grow at an alarming rate they have to keep building bigger cages to contain him. When Mr. Kawai (Tsuchiya Yoshio), the former Imperial Navy officer who brought Frankenstein’s heart to Hiroshima, turns up and suggests that the boy might have grown from the radiation-infused organ, Dr. Kawaji travels to Frankfurt to consult with Dr. Riesendorf (Peter Mann, dubbed by Kumakura Kazuo), the German scientist from the opening sequence. Asked whether there could be a link, Dr. Riesendorf says there’s only one way to know – cut off an arm and a leg! If they grow back, the answer is yes. Kawaji is disturbingly willing to accept this as a necessary action, completely oblivious to the ethical concerns raised by Dr. Bowen & Dr. Togami, whose objections he seems to consider as the pointless whining of spoilsports. Sneaking off to perform the double amputation behind their backs, he’s interrupted by the arrival of a cavalier television crew, whose ill-advised decision to shine bright lights into the boy’s face enrages him sufficiently to prompt his escape – leaving behind a still-briefly-living hand in one manacle (although this proof of Frankenstein’s legacy in no way lessens Kawaji’s drive to cut bits off the now-gigantic boy).
Meanwhile, a giant burrowing creature has begun to ravage the countryside but has gone almost completely unnoticed, with only Mr. Kawai believing that the damages are attributable to anything other than earthquakes. Baragon (Nakajima Haruo) has got to be one of the silliest creatures to come out of the workshops of special effects director Tsuburaya Eiji. Imagine a giant armadillo with a face like a pug. Add some floppy batwings for ears, a bizarre design choice which looks ridiculous and would be terribly impractical for a burrowing creature. Slap a curved horn in between its eyes. Season with flame breath and a kangaroo-like ability to make powerful spring-loaded leaps and you have Baragon. Somehow this creature remains completely undetected and the deaths caused by its rampages are blamed by both authorities and media on the Frankenstein boy (played in his giant form by Furuhata Koji), with only Bowen and Togami willing to believe Kawai’s initial sighting of the creature (which pre-dated the boy’s escape). Pursued by Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, the boy eventually encounters Baragon 75 minutes into the movie and a fight ensues, leading – thanks in no small part to his greater manoeuvrability compared to a man in an armadillo suit – to his inevitable victory.
And then – with 4 minutes of running time remaining – a giant octopus turns up from nowhere! Their fight takes them over a cliff edge into the sea, where they disappear from human sight, and the movie ends. Or, at least, that’s what happens in the version I watched. Originally, the movie ended with Baragon and the Frankenstein boy being swallowed up by a volcano, but American producer Henry G. Saperstein wasn’t too impressed by this and requested that a new ending be shot with an octopus for the American release. After laboriously bringing the production team back together to build a new set and film the new ending, the eventual American distributors ended up cutting the new ending and going with the original. Back in Japan, the octopus ending was accidentally retained for an alternative version aired on television, now referred to as the international version and marketed overseas under the alternative title Frankenstein vs. the Giant Devilfish. While I willingly concede that this alternative ending doesn’t belong in the original film, I can’t help but feel affection for it as one more piece of crazy layered on top of a film riddled with craziness.
Much to my delight, The War of the Gargantuas [Furankenshutain no Kaijū: Sanda tai Gaira] (1966) – whose title literally translates as Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira – opens with the return of the giant octopus! (Well, it’s probably a different one, but I don’t care – I’ll happily take this pseudo-continuity with my preferred ending as an excuse for more cephalopod action.) A tentacle sneaks into a ship’s bridge behind the helmsman (Yamamoto Ren), who turns in time to whack it with an axe. Larger tentacles burst through the windows to envelop him, but retreat when a shaggy green biped (Nakajima Haruo) rears above the waves. Handily dispatching the octopus, the looming green creature immediately turns on the ship. Only the helmsman survives to tell the tale – all that’s left of his fellow crew members are the torn and bloodied remnants of their clothes drifting on the waves.
In an odd step away from maintaining continuity, the central three scientists of the original have been replaced with three new characters, although as far as the script is concerned they must be the same three individuals since they share the same history and interpersonal relationships. The American scientist is now Dr. Paul Stewart (Russ Tamblyn); the female scientist, although still played by Mizuno Kumi, is now named Dr. Togawa Akemi; and the third scientist (minus the dubious ethics) has become Dr. Majida Yuzo (Sahara Kenji). Dubious of the surviving sailor’s identification of his assailant as Frankenstein, due to the uncharacteristic level of violence and cannibalism, Dr. Stewart & Dr. Togawa visit the Japanese Alps to confirm a sighting of the original creature’s giant footprints. While they are away, an appalling nightclub rendition of “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat” by a terrible American singer (Kipp Hamilton) is interrupted by the appearance of our jolly green giant, who expresses his aesthetic appreciation by attempting to jam the singer down his own throat (a scene which would later be homaged in the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode “Battle of the Humungonauts” (2010)).
Theorising that a creature living the dark ocean depths must be sensitive to bright light, the Self-Defence Forces manage to drive the creature off from further urban attacks by asking everybody to turn on their lights and start bonfires, but after cornering the creature in the mountains with portable lasers and electrified water, it’s suddenly rescued by its slightly taller fuzzy brown counterpart (Sekida Yû), clearly establishing that the original creature was innocent. Apparently a tissue sample left behind by the wounded original was washed away into the ocean and, in the intervening five years, grew into Aqua-Frankenstein (Aquastein?). After a pause to inform the public of the names which have been arbitrarily assigned to the two creatures – Sanda (or Brown Gargantua in the American version) and Gaira (or Green Gargantua) – the authorities resume their attempt to kill both creatures, taking a stance on the nature vs. nurture debate with their assumption that if Gaira is a vicious cannibal, this must also be true of Sanda (despite the lack of any Alpine cannibalism incidents since he first disappeared). This illogicality aside, the SDF are at least willing to accept that blowing them up is not an option if they want to avoid inadvertently growing a whole new crop of creatures.
Unfortunately the illogicality stretches beyond the reasoning of the authorities into the script’s conception of the creatures’ strengths and vulnerabilities. (Yes, the entire concept is nonsensical, but that just means that internal consistency is even more important.) After rescuing Dr. Togawa from a fall, Sanda discovers human remains next to Gaira and attacks him, setting off the climactic battle across the Japanese countryside. At this point it’s suddenly revealed that Gaira – previously successfully driven off by bright light – is no longer bothered by bright light, especially fire (which hurts Sanda but not him – why??). Instead, he is now actively attracted towards light sources, viewing them as indicators of where to find food (which causes the authorities to ask everybody to switch their lights off again). There’s a brief moment in which it seems that Gaira may carry a genetic memory of Dr. Togawa’s kindness towards the young Sanda, but nothing is ever made of this in dialogue so it’s possible I’m seeing a greater depth where none was intended. The battle between Sanda and Gaira eventually leaves the land and returns to the sea, where the two of them are bombed (er, whatever happened to not wanting to grow new creatures from the fragments?!?) and disappear into the smoke of a conveniently appearing undersea volcano (!!) which rises during their battle before sinking again.
Tsuburaya’s creature designs here are far more successful than in the previous film. Although Sanda bears little resemblance to his original caveman appearance, his Bigfoot/Yeti (Gargantuafoot?) appearance isn’t too far-fetched as an extrapolation and looks far more impressive. Gaira’s green colouring brings him closer in appearance to earlier filmic conceptions of the Frankenstein monster, with his furriness evoking the fuzzy vest first seen in Son of Frankenstein (1939). Far less successful is the replacement of American actor Nick Adams with Russ Tamblyn. Adams was a struggling actor who was friends with James Dean and Elvis Presley but never managed to find his breakthrough role. Frustrated with his lack of success in America, he moved to Japan shortly after filming Die, Monster, Die! (1965) to make three films: Frankenstein Conquers the World; Invasion of Astro-Monster [Kaijū Daisensō] (1965), the sixth Godzilla film; and spy thriller The Killing Bottle [Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Zettai zetsumei] (1967). He made an effort to learn the language and understand Japanese culture, forming a strong working relationship with Mizuno Kumi, his co-star in all three films and likely also (according to persistent rumours) his girlfriend. He has a good rapport on screen with his fellow cast members and was generally remembered as a pleasure to work with. Tamblyn (West Side Story, Twin Peaks), on the other hand, despite – or perhaps because of – his higher profile, clearly believes he’s above the material or any need to integrate with the local culture. He gives a thuddingly uninterested performance, is utterly unbelievable as a romantic interest for Mizuno, and presents an overall impression that his character would like everybody to go away and let him get on with exploiting Sanda in the lab for selfishly motivated research. His performance is so thoroughly at odds with the demands of his role that his very presence is a leaden weight dragging the entire production down.
Director Honda Ishirō, of course, is best known to the world as the director of Godzilla and the majority of Toho’s science fiction output, but he was more than capable of working in other genres – he simply lacked the opportunity after Toho decided he was a safe pair of hands to put in charge of special effects extravanganzas. His work as an assistant director on Kurosawa’s Stray Dog [Nora inu] (1949) enabled him to make the transition to full director, and he came out of retirement to work with Kurosawa again on his final five films – Kagemusha (1980), Ran (1985), Dreams [Yume] (1990), Rhapsody in August [Hachigatsu no rapusodī] (1991) and Mādadayo (1993). Screenwriter Kimura Takeshi was a member of the Japanese Communist Party whose scripts tended to draw out the political angles of his scenarios and were generally more cynical about the state of humanity. Joining Toho’s monster stable with Rodan [Radon] (1956), he considered Matango to be the pinnacle of his career (with good reason). Unfortunately he became dissatisfied with his treatment by the studio not long after – he considered all of his work from Frankenstein Conquers the World until the end of his screenwriting career to be nothing more than work-for-hire, using the pseudonym Mabuchi Kaoru to separate himself from the work. (I expect that this goes some way towards explaining the cavalier attitude to internal consistency in The War of the Gargantuas.)
Sanda’s original opponent Baragon would later join the Godzilla franchise as one of the inhabitants of Monster Island in Destroy All Monsters [Kaijū Sōshingeki] (1968). Frankenstein’s illegitimate offspring Sanda and Gaira weren’t quite so lucky, although they would both appear again on Japanese TV as minions of Hell in Go! Godman [Ike Goddoman] (1973) and Go! Greenman [Ike! Gurīnman] (1973-1974). American audiences remained unaware for sometime that there were two Japanese Frankenstein movies, as all references to either Frankenstein Conquers the World or indeed Frankenstein himself were stripped from the re-edited and re-dubbed The War of the Gargantuas. Germany, on the other hand, went Frankenstein mad after the local success of Frankenstein: Der Schrecken mit dem Affengesicht (aka Frankenstein Conquers the World), slapping the Frankenstein name haphazardly on almost any Japanese movie with a giant monster. Following on from the sequel Frankenstein: Zweikampf der Giganten, six more of Toho’s offerings were marketed as Frankenstein films: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep became Frankenstein und die Ungeheuer aus dem Meer; King Kong Escapes (1967) posited an unlikely family connection in King Kong: Frankensteins Sohn; Son of Godzilla (1967) was reframed as Frankensteins Monster jagen Godzillas Sohn; Destroy All Monsters became Frankenstein und die Monster aus dem Weltall; Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) took on a supernatural tinge as Frankensteins Kampf gegen die Teufelsmonster; and Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972) became the similarly lurid Godzilla gegen Frankensteins Höllenbrut. Two other studios also found their creatures appropriated into Germany’s bizarre little world of Frankenstein. Nikkatsu’s Gappa the Triphibian Monster (1967) was renamed Gappa: Frankensteins fliegende Monster, while two of Daiei’s rival Gamera movies were also inducted into the club: Gamera vs. Gyaos (1967) became Gamera gegen Gaos: Frankensteins Kampf der Ungeheuer, while Gamera vs. Jiger (1970) was rechristened as Gamera gegen Jiggar: Frankensteins Dämon bedroht die Welt.
So there you have it – more than most people are ever likely to want to know about the intersection between Mary Shelley’s creation and Japanese monster movies. I’m indebted to David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series (Second Edition) (McFarland & Company, 2010) for drawing my attention to Germany’s Frankenstein mania; for documenting the hypocritical double standard among American audiences who praised the acting in Kurosawa’s films while criticising the supposed “bad acting” of the exact same actors in Honda’s films; and for general background knowledge which has no doubt informed this piece.
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.
Today I’m delving back in time into Asian supernatural cinema of the 1960s and the motif of the vengeful ghost. One film is a stately piece of carefully composed B&W cinematography informed by traditional Japanese literature. The other is a colourfully chaotic mishmash of Korean melodrama with barely believable plot contrivances propelled by a pulpish energy which still finds room for moments of contemplation.
Kuroneko [Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko] (1968) is a tale of supernatural revenge and doomed romance set in the late 10th century during a time of civil unrest in Heian period Japan. Yone (Otowa Nobuko) and her daughter-in-law Shige (Taichi Kiwako) live alone in a house on the fringes of a bamboo grove, forced to fend for themselves since their son/husband Hachi (Nakamura Kichiemon II) was forcibly recruited to fight for one of the warring clans. In his absence, a random raiding party of soldiers pillages their residence, rapes and murders the two women, and burns their house to the ground. After their black cat attempts to revive them by licking their corpses, the two women take new forms as vengeful shape-shifting cat demons whose purpose is to lure and kill lone samurai.
The opening sequence is filmed with subtlety and restraint. We first see the house in a wide shot at the left of screen, with the fringes of the bamboo forest prominent in the background. A scattering of men become visible emerging from the forest and undergrowth, slowly revealing themselves as a band of 20-30 soldiers silently approaching the lone residence. The camera doesn’t dwell on their violent activities upon entering the house, instead panning across the menacingly unemotional or leering faces of the men observing and waiting their turn. The opening wide shot is revisited as the soldiers silently return to the forest fringes. Just as the last man disappears into the bamboo, a huge cloud of smoke billows forth from the doorway, rolling across the screen in an eerie fashion more evocative of supernatural mist than a regular fire.
We next meet Shige waiting at the Rajō gate at night, enlisting the aid of a passing samurai to escort her home, as she claims to be afraid of bandits potentially lurking in the wood. Reaching her destination, she invites him into the mansion now mysteriously occupying the location of her old house. Yone plays the dutiful host while Shige plies the samurai with sake before inviting him to her bed. Yone performs a stately Noh dance in the corridor outside her room as Shige goes through the motions of seduction before transforming and tearing out the samurai’s throat with her teeth. And then the same thing happens again – an extended sequence of tricking samurai after samurai, accelerating the pace of the cutting with each repetition, largely following the same pattern with some variation. This section of the movie is a masterful mixture of shadow and light, white figures standing out in stark relief against the darkness, details of the background fading into pure black. Glimpses of the women’s supernatural nature are seen as they leap and tumble across the screen from right to left, a movement which resonates exquisitely with the earlier billow of smoke from left to right, creating the impression of a constant cycling back towards their instigating trauma.
At roughly the half hour mark, just when it’s beginning to feel like the movie is stuck in a loop of ghostly revenge, we learn what happened to the missing Hachi. Three years after his abduction, Hachi returns as the sole survivor of his war party, having slain the enemy general thanks to a lucky accident on the marshy battlefield. Inventing a more heroic-sounding story, he presents the general’s severed head to his leader, the historical figure Minamoto no Raikō (Satō Kei). Raikō rewards his victory by acknowledging his newly chosen name Gintoki and elevating him to the rank of samurai. Hoping to share his good fortune with his family, Gintoki’s joy is cut short when he discovers the ashes of his former home. The other peasants living in the area are unable to throw any light on the matter, having evacuated the area when Kyoto was burning – upon their return, there was no sign of the former residents.
With no more family and only his duty to his lord remaining, Gintoki returns to Raikō and is tasked with killing those responsible for the recent spate of samurai deaths, setting up the classic clash between duty and love which informs so many samurai tales. Shige and Yone recognise Gintoki as Hachi, but the terms of their new existence mean that they are unable to reveal their true identities to him – and, as a samurai, they are expected to kill him regardless of any past connection. Gintoki likewise recognises the women as his wife and mother, but is unable to settle on an explanation and keeps vacillating between the options. Are they amnesiac? Is the resemblance coincidental? Are they being impersonated by shape-shifting demons? Or are they actually his dead wife and mother? When Shige decides to betray her oath and resume their relationship, he is gleefully cooperative but still unable to determine whether she is really his wife. Even when he eventually seems to have accepted the truth, an anomaly in his mother’s reflection causes him to jump to the worst conclusion, leading to a confrontation which draws on a folk tale about renowned samurai Watanabe no Tsuna and his meeting with the oni Ibaraki-dōji. Although I don’t want to give away anything further about the conclusion, it’s safe to say that none of the trio get the ending they would have wanted.
Director Shindō Kaneto made his name, both in Japan and internationally, as a director of socially relevant political films. Onibaba (1964) marked the beginning of a new phase in his career in which began to integrate explorations of human sexuality into his films. Similarly to Kuroneko, Onibaba centred on an older woman (Otowa Nobuko again) and her daughter-in-law attempting to survive in the absence of their son/husband by killing lone samurai and selling their belongings. Satō Kei plays the sole survivor of the missing male’s war band, setting up a struggle for the affections of the younger woman, without whose assistance the older woman would be unable to survive. The critics who had championed Shindō’s earlier works tended to look down on these later productions, responding as if the use of these elements represented a betrayal of his earlier material, but it would be a mistake to characterise these films as lacking a political element. It’s telling that the band of samurai responsible for the raid which opens the film are never identified – from the point of view of the victims, it makes little difference which side they were on, as they are a symptom of a wider societal unrest which puts no value on the peasantry who provide the essentials without which their society couldn’t function. Gintoki’s return to his home in search of his family is met with suspicion – a man he used to know fails to recognise him in his new guise as a samurai and is clearly fearful of his attentions. When Gintoki attempts to explain the motivation for the killings later on, Raikō finds it inconceivable that anybody could possibly hold a grudge against samurai, since they supposedly exist to defend the lifestyle of “nobles and the masses” – but his own words and actions have shown that he holds both nobles and the masses in contempt, valuing only himself and those whose martial ability can be marshalled in service of his own prestige. Shindō’s sympathies are clearly with the oppressed as opposed to the much-vaunted honour system of the warrior classes, which is presented here merely as lip-service justification for self-aggrandisement at the expense of others. Hachi’s elevation in society fails to bring him happiness and ultimately undermines his attempts to reconnect with the beloved family unit motivating his actions.
Kwon Cheol-hwi’s The Public Cemetery Under the Moon [Wolhaui gongdongmyoji] (1967) is a far less polished film, but the demented glee with which it layers alternately melodramatic and supernatural plot elements gives it a fascinating drive which makes me wish that the print I saw had been in better condition. Thanks must go to Diabolique editor Kat Ellinger’s Cineslut Film Club for introducing me to this film, which marks the first occasion I’ve ventured into Korean cinema of the 1960s.
No sooner have the opening credits finished than a monstrous, decaying visage looms into view. He immediately tells us not to worry because 40 years ago he used to be a handsome narrator of silent films and he’s simply turned up to tell the tale of one of the cemetery’s many occupants. We’re then treated to 90 seconds of long dark hair streaming across the screen, blown about by a strong wind, against a background alternating between red and blue light accompanied by slow, rhythmic, echoing percussion. Suddenly a grave splits in half, revealing the body of our heroine Wol-hyang (Kang Mi-ae). Her burial shroud is stripped away, her eyes open and she emerges from the coffin. She reappears outside the cemetery, surprising a taxi driver who drives straight through her and crashes, only to discover her sitting in his back seat. She’s rather put out when he faints because – unusually for a ghost – she needs a lift to reach her destination!
Meanwhile, at said destination, Nan-ju (Do Geum-bong) – second wife to Wol-hyang’s husband Han-su (Park No-shik) and previously their cook – has bullied her mother (Jeong Ae-ran) into poisoning her baby step-son Yeong-jin so that they will be Han-su’s sole heirs. Having waited until he was away for a few days on a business trip, the sound of a car pulling up outside sends her into a panic. Her first thought is to greet her husband at the door with a knife in the throat before killing herself, but her mother persuades her that a more sensible option would be to welcome him inside before killing him and running away. Presumably this car is actually the taxi dropping off Wol-hyang to her old home, as the next thing we see is the materialisation of her ghostly form in her son’s room. Spotting the empty bottle of poison left next to her child, she manages to save his life via the recognised medical technique of breastfeeding, while the guilty Nan-ju is haunted by the ghostly strains of gayageum music which used to be heard in the house while Wol-hyang was alive. Wol-hyang disappears at the sound of the cock’s crow and the cessation of the gayageum’s plucking prompts the remaining two women to take another go at killing the baby, which is immediately thwarted by the premature return of Han-su, who had dreamed his son was in danger.
At this point the narrator decides to fill us in on the backstory, leading to the revelation that this story is set during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century. Wol-hyang, previously Myeong-sun, came from a wealthy background but was left to survive on the streets when her brother Choon-shik (Hwang Hae) and fiancé Han-su were arrested for protesting against Japanese imperialism. Once a promising student, Myeong-sun is left with no other alternative than to work as an “entertainer” for three years. She adopts the name Wol-hyang as a pseudonym for her unwanted career – leading to the puzzling question of why we were introduced to her under this name, as it seems unlikely that she would have retained this identity after marriage. The narrator seems to come to this realisation at the same time, because for the rest of the film he refers to her by her birth name Myeong-sun.
Choon-shik shoulders primary responsibility for the insurrection charges so that Han-su can be released sooner and rescue Myeong-sun from her life on the streets. Five years after his release, Han-su and Myeong-sun are happily married millionaires, thanks to Han-su’s freak discovery of a gold deposit (what?!), but Myeong-sun’s health is ailing due to concern for her brother (whose sentence has been increased to life due to his constant escape attempts). Or at least so everybody believes, because the superficially devoted servant Nan-ju has secretly been poisoning her. Although the doctor (Heo Jang-gang) immediately picks up on this, he takes the unusual medical stance of recommending a slower and less obvious method of poisoning in exchange for Nan-ju’s sexual favours.
As Myeong-sun gets sicker, Nan-ju begins making advances towards Han-su – and no sooner have they had sex, than who should turn up but the escaped prisoner Choon-shik, paying a last visit to his beloved sister before escaping to the countryside. There’s a few minutes of “who’s hiding under the sheets” farce before Choon-shik expresses his fury at his friend’s betrayal of his sister, leading the sick Myeong-sun to emerge from her room and pretend that she sent Nan-ju to sleep with her husband. This misguided martyrdom is intended purely to make her brother believe that she’s happy so that he will continue his escape. As soon as he’s gone she refuses to spend any more time with her betrayers, although somewhere along the line she gives birth to a son. Her enforced separation isn’t good enough for Nan-ju, who pays her gambling-addicted brother to pretend to be a “male caller” while Myeong-sun is dead to the world from sleeping pills. The hypocritical Han-su is furious at her perceived betrayal, refusing to believe she was unconscious even though it takes him a solid minute of shaking her before she’s conscious enough for slurred speech. He throws a shoe at her head and she commits suicide, leading to a rapid switch from melodramatic farce to an exquisitely poignant funeral scene in which several women dressed in white sit around her coffin while one of them sings the contents of her suicide note.
This marks the end of the extensive backstory flashback, leading to the final half hour of betrayal upon counter-betrayal upon haunting. Han-su now realises what a dick he’s been and refuses to let Nan-ju anywhere near his son, rightly suspicious of her intentions. He now blames Nan-ju for Myeong-sun’s death, which while technically accurate does elide a significant amount of his own responsibility for her unhappiness and consequent suicide. Han-su and Nan-ju race to get each other in trouble with the law, while the disreputable doctor attempts to lay his erotic claims to Nan-ju. The only people who seem to display any true regret for their part in events are Nan-ju’s gambling addict brother and their mother, who are the first ones to suffer ghostly vengeance. The increasingly frantic machinations of the remaining three characters keep the momentum going while Myeong-sun uses supernatural trickery to deal with Nan-ju and the doctor. Han-su is spared in order to raise their son, but a final encounter at Myeong-sun’s grave makes it clear that her brother will never forgive him.
While breaking the plot down to its bones like this lays bare many of the more ridiculous aspects of the story, it doesn’t really convey the chaotic energy which propels the viewer through the piece. It also obscures the level of skill involved in unfolding the various layers of the plot – it’s difficult to work out exactly what’s going on in the first parts of the movie (let alone why the story requires an undead narrator), but the pieces begin to fall into place as the backstory gradually unspools, setting up the conflicting agendas which crash against each other in the final third. Careering from the clumsy to the sublime, it’s an entertaining ride which is just begging for a decent restoration and re-translation.
I wasn’t able to find a proper trailer for my second selection, but this subtitle-free presentation of two short extracts provides a taster.
The 1980s were a golden era for after-school television programming on the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster. Doctor Who and The Goodies, Danger Mouse and Roger Ramjet, Battle of the Planets and Astroboy… but perhaps the most culturally unusual option available was Monkey [Saiyūki] (1978-1980), a British-dubbed Japanese TV show based on a 16th century Chinese novel about a Tang dynasty Buddhist monk travelling to India with three animal spirits while various demons attempt to thwart their quest to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China. Hooked from the very first episode I saw (#6 “Even Monsters Can Be People” [Goku Hanmon! San Yokai No Wana]),I never missed an episode if I could help it, including repeats. As I grew older I tracked down the Penguin Classics edition of Journey to the West (unfortunately abridged) and sought out any other adaptations I could locate, which proved frustratingly elusive (only 5 movies and 2 other TV series prior to this). I’ve recently been able to add to this tally with two very different animated takes on the story.
The adventures of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, play a significant role in the history of Chinese animation. The very first animated feature in China was Princess Iron Fan [Tiě shàn gōngzhǔ] (1941), a loose adaptation of the story of one of the most popular villains, later featured in the 24th episode of Monkey: “The Fires of Jealousy” [Kaenzan!! Bashou Sen No Ai] (1979). The Wan Brothers began planning a sequel immediately, but the capture of Shanghai by Japan during World War 2 put a significant dent in their plans until their return in 1954. It took another ten years to complete Havoc in Heaven [Dà nào tiān gōng] (1961/1964), which was released in two parts before finally being screened as a complete film in 1965.
Havoc in Heaven restricts itself to telling the backstory of the Monkey King, which forms the first part of Journey to the West and was covered in the 1st episode of Monkey: “Monkey Goes Wild About Heaven” [Sekien Tanjou Su] (1978). Sun Wukong accidentally breaks his sword while showing off for his subjects, so visits the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea to request something stronger. The Dragon King makes the mistake of offering him his greatest treasure, the Magic Wishing Staff, under the mistaken assumption that the Monkey King will be unable to lift it. In a huff at the unintended consequences of his own arrogance, he tells the Emperor that the weapon was stolen, but the court decides the best way of keeping Wukong out of trouble is to find him a meaningless administrative post in Heaven. In his new role as Head of the Imperial Stables, it seems clear to him that the best way to look after the horses is to let them run wild, but when he realises he answers to somebody higher up, he quits and returns home to Flower-Fruit Mountain, fighting off the gods sent to capture him.
Part Two sees Wukong brought back to Heaven again to guard the Heavenly Garden and its peaches of immortality, but once again Heaven’s plans backfire when he eats the peaches intended for the Queen Mother’s feast. After finding out that he’s not on the invitation list, he invades the banquet and puts everybody to sleep before getting drunk and stealing all of the food for his subjects, with a side trip to steal the Emperor’s golden pills of immortality. The rest of the film is taken up with a series of battles, eventually resulting in his capture. After the failure of multiple execution attempts, he breaks free, wrecks the place and returns home in triumph – which is where, surprisingly, the film ends! A rousing moral example for the nation’s youth.
The design of the animation draws on a mixture of traditional Chinese art and Peking opera conventions, depicting a recognisable mythological world with fluid and frequently stylised action. One of the great virtues of the medium is the ability to make Sun Wukong look and move like an actual monkey, rather than being restricted to the limitations of human body – he comes across a creature of pure mischief and fun who sees no need to respect the boundaries of authority, but who becomes an embodiment of chaos unleashed when he perceives himself as having been slighted. The extensive series of fight scenes between the Monkey King and the various gods include some traditional fight choreography, but make extensive use of stylised animation techniques to depict the effects of magic and otherwise make the battle scenes come alive. These scenes have been accelerated in the version of the film I watched, which was apparently able to slash 20 minutes from the running time without making any cuts by the simple expedient of speeding up the fights – which says something about the number of fight scenes in the second half, as this is in no way an impediment to being able to follow the action. The connection with Peking opera is cemented by Wu Yingju’s score, dominated by the traditional raucous percussion but finding space for some quieter moments.
Havoc in Heaven was an international success and has been lauded as the pinnacle of Chinese animation produced during the Second Golden Era of Chinese cinema, which came to a close in 1966 with the coming of the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the Shanghai Animation Film Studio was able to follow up with two further adaptations, Monkey King and Fruit of Immortality [Ren shen guo] (1981) and The Monkey King Conquers the Demon [Jīn hóu jiàng yāo] (1985), neither of which I’ve seen.
Monkey King: The Hero starts promisingly in full mythic style as it depicts the climactic battle between Sun Wukong and the forces of Heaven before his imprisonment in a cage of ice deep beneath a mountain. Rendered in full pseudo-3D computer animation, the epic combatants are depicted in a “flattened” style which evokes the feel of ancient illustrations come to life, acting out their conflicts against the parchment backdrop of a bygone time which might never have existed. The remainder of the movie switches to a more “realistic” style which reminded me strongly of the output of DreamWorks Animation – a switch which, I’m sorry to say, signals the end of the only part of the movie worth watching. The remainder of the story deviates significantly from the source material, a choice which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it worked for The Monkey King [Dà Nào Tiān Gōng] (2014) and A Korean Odyssey [Hwa-yugi] (2017) – but in this instance represents a bland adoption of a mediocre plot which could have been grafted onto any fantasy setting.
The sole survivor of a troll attack in the mountains, the freshly orphaned Liuer was found and raised by an old monk from a nearby town. A few years later a larger band of trolls attacks the town in search of children, and the young Liuer narrowly escapes with a baby girl in his arms. Chased into the wilderness, he ends up accidentally releasing the Monkey King from his prison. Despite his powers being dampened by the single cuff which remains attached to his wrist, Sun Wukong defeats the trolls before escaping to the wilderness, but is unable to shake the unwanted company of the two young children. Much against his wishes, they are soon joined by Pigsy, one of the Monkey King’s celestial opponents who fell to Earth and was transformed into a pig spirit. It turns out that the trolls’ leader, helpfully identified in the credits as Evil Lord, needs children to create an elixir of immortality. The Monkey King continues to be an annoying prick who doesn’t want to help anybody until Lieur is killed by the Evil Lord, at which point Wukong’s rage allows him to break the shackle, regain his powers and defeat the baddie. There’s an artistic final shot of him against the skyline, and the movie ends. What? Really? Oh, except a 2D-animated coda playing during the final credits shows that the boy wasn’t really dead (he’s covered in comedy bandages) and they all live happily ever after, with no sign of the Monkey King. Er, OK. What?!
The inaccurately-named Monkey King: The Hero features the most unsympathetic interpretation of the titular character that I have ever encountered. Adding to the effect is an appalling performance by Joey Richter, about whom the best that can be said is that at least his petulant portrayal matched the material. Astonishingly, somewhere along the line, somebody made the decision that the Australian and New Zealand audiences would rather listen to him than to the original English dubbing choice for other markets – Hong Kong action legend Jackie Chan! Admittedly, Chan’s strengths lie more with his physical talents than his dramatic range as a dubbing artist, but it’s difficult to imagine him being worse than Richter (and you can hear him in the trailer below). The one bright spot in the voice cast is James Hong (Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China) as Old Monk, but he has such a small role that Hong’s presence is barely felt.
The character design is largely uninspiring, although the decision to conceptualise the trolls as a cross between frogs and apes has potential. Sadly, after showcasing the froglike aspects of their movement in the initial assault upon the town, the animators seem to forget about this aspect and the trolls spend the rest of the film moving around like any other biped. The only creature that comes across at all well in the body of the film is a white dragon – the designers have sensibly realised that Chinese dragons don’t need to be redesigned and it moves beautifully, writhing sinuously through the air with scales gleaming. The landscapes are also quite lovely to look at – although, being mostly static (at least until some of the bigger creatures start colliding with them), they don’t really present much of a challenge to the animation team.
Anybody unfamiliar with the Monkey King could be forgiven for not realising that Havoc in Heaven and Monkey King: The Hero were inspired by the same source material, so different are they in plot, tone, character and style. While Havoc in Heaven adapts only the first seven chapters of Journey Into the West, stopping just short of the Monkey King’s punishment and skipping the remaining 93 chapters which depict the journey of the title, it’s both faithful to the source material and imaginative in its visualisation. Monkey King: The Hero starts where the other film left off, but barely pays lip service to the source material, with every single creative divergence serving to turn the story into a poorly structured bland retread of well-worn Hollywood cliches. If you absolutely must watch both films, make sure to save Havoc in Heaven for last – and, ideally, wait to watch it on another day entirely so that the taint of Monkey King: The Hero has had time to fade away.
Brian De Palma is a director best known for this work in the crime, psycho thriller and horror genres, frequently (and unfairly) accused of being a slavish imitator of Hitchcock who favours style over substance. Robert De Niro is a hugely successful actor best known for his roles in the crime genre and his extensive body of work with Martin Scorsese. And yet between 1966 and 1970, at the beginning of each of their careers and years before being reunited on The Untouchables (1987), these two collaborated on a run of three counterculture comedies.
The Wedding Party (1969) was De Palma’s first feature length film but the third to be released. It doesn’t really have a plot as such, following Charlie (Charles Pfluger) through a loosely connected series of incidents as he arrives at a Long Island estate the day before his wedding to Josephine (Jill Clayburgh). His groomsmen Alistair (William Finley) and Cecil (Robert De Niro, credited as “Robert Denero”) initially try to talk him out of the marriage, pressing on him the keys to a hidden escape vehicle, but Charlie remains adamant in his intent and refuses to join them on their planned stag night festivities. By the next morning, Charlie has begun to have second thoughts. Each new “reassuring” interaction with Josephine, her family, her ex-boyfriends and the priest just reinforces his doubts (although what on earth the priest thinks he is conveying through his obscure bicycle and minigolf metaphors is anyone’s guess). Even his friends have suddenly changed their tune, arguing in favour of marriage against the same arguments they had previously proposed.
Filmed in black & white, it has something of the feel of a 1930s comedy, broken into chapters by stylised intertitles featuring quotes from the (presumably fictional) text The Compleat Bridegroom and making strategic use of undercranking to accelerate the action for comic effect. The whole opening sequence is played at this accelerated speed, as Charlie and his friends arrive on the island and are driven frantically all over the place by the bride’s mother (Valda Setterfield) while her servant (John Quinn) – hired as a chauffeur but never allowed to drive – tries desperately to salvage falling luggage and keep them from crashing. The pace keeps up until they arrive at the house, at which point the film shifts suddenly into slow motion as Charlie goes through a seemingly endless procession of meeting the bride’s elderly female relatives, their slurred voices overdubbed. The other significant use of undercranking occurs during the feast on the night before the wedding. The babble of conversation plays at normal speed over the accelerated footage, jarring disjointedly with the visuals as De Palma begins to cut more and more quickly between shots, conveying Charlie’s disorientation as he attempts to process his whirling doubts in the face of his rapidly approaching nuptials.
The story was loosely inspired by De Palma’s experience as a groomsman for the 1963 marriage of his college roommate Jared Martin in a similar setting. Robert De Niro (in his first professional screen role) was cast to play a version of De Palma, while the other groomsman William Finley played a version of himself. Originally planned as one of three segments of an anthology movie to be co-directed with Wilford Leach (a Theatre Studies teacher) and Cynthia Munroe (a wealthy student who provided the money), the other segments were dropped and Munroe’s script (based on De Palma’s anecdotes) was expanded to feature length. Leach was put in charge of directing the actors while De Palma was responsible for all other aspects of filming. Appearing in cameo roles were Cynthia Munroe as one of the bridesmaids and original groom Jared Martin as one of the wedding guests. Sadly, Cynthia is reported to have died before De Palma finished editing the film in 1966.
The Wedding Party was eventually released for a brief run in 1969 but made little impact and vanished into obscurity, before the advent of home video caused it to be revived and deceptively marketed as a star vehicle for Robert De Niro, whose relatively minor role plays second fiddle to Finley’s character. Finley would continue his association with Brian De Palma, appearing in seven more films for him between 1968 and 1980 – most notably his starring role as the titular Phantom of the Paradise (1974). After a significant gap, he would reunite with de Palma for his final film role in The Black Dahlia (2006). Although Wilford Leach’s blocking of the actors was reportedly unsuitable for De Palma’s filmic sensibilities (requiring some intervention), he went on to became a Tony Award-winning theatrical director, translating his talents to film more successfully for the Kevin Kline vehicle The Pirates of Penzance (1983).
De Palma’s first film to hit the cinemas was the obscure thriller Murder à la Mod (1968), followed in short order by his return to comedy with Greetings (1968), a loosely structured ramble through various revolutionary 1960s concerns connected by the central trio of Paul (Jonathan Warden), Jon (Robert de Niro) and Lloyd (Gerrit Graham). Rather than writing a script, De Palma and co-writer/producer Charles Hirsch concocted a series of scenarios as a rough guide and encouraged the actors to improvise their scenes. Opening and closing with footage of Lyndon Johnson on television talking about sending troops to Vietnam before telling the American public that they’ve never had it better, the movie latches onto the Vietnam draft as a potential motivating force for the three men. After receiving his draft letter, Paul provokes a bar fight in the hope he’ll be pronounced medically unfit, causing his two friends to roleplay various scenarios which they claim are guaranteed to cause him to be rejected. This thread is quickly dropped – after being told to wait to weeks for a verdict, it’s roughly an hour until Vietnam is mentioned again. Two contrasting takes on the war are delivered to camera (a sober reflection from an ex-GI followed by an anecdote about the rampant drug use by soldiers) before another character’s attempt to portray himself as too psychotically right wing for the army backfires.
Each of the three characters follows their own thematic strand. After a seduction scene staged next to an “Abolish HUAC” poster, Paul spends the rest of the film going on a series of computer dating encounters. A “Bronx secretary” (Ashley Oliver) dressed to the nines berates him for not making an effort and expecting to jump straight into bed; a “gay divorcee” (Cynthia Peltz) turns out to have a baby, causing him to bail immediately; a “mystic” (Mona Feit) proves to embody all the sexist stereotypes of the intense New Age flake. Paul is very much the straight man and this is the least interesting part of the film – possibly because it was an afterthought on the part of writers who had two strong concepts but needed three.
Each of the other characters follows a particular obsession of one of the two writers. Lloyd’s obsession with the JFK assassination comes courtesy of Charles Hirsch. Every situation Lloyd finds himself in is an excuse to spout facts and theories about the secrets behind the assassination, to the point where rather than sleeping with a naked woman he scribbles diagrams on her body and triumphantly concludes that the entry and exit wounds of the bullet don’t match. At his bookstore workplace he meets a fellow conspiracy enthusiast (Peter Maloney) who claims to be a relative of one of the dead witnesses. The enthusiast ultimately fails to show up to their rendezvous point, leading to Lloyd’s assassination as witness #18. Gerrit Graham is the most talented comic actor of the three and, although it could be argued his performance is a little too large, his scenes are the most entertaining to watch – even his exaggerated death scene.
De Palma’s particular enthusiasm is for voyeurism – not simply sexual voyeurism (although that’s certainly present), but also in the broader sense which sees cinema as a whole as an act of voyeurism. Just as he played a fictional version of the director in The Wedding Party, Robert De Niro once again acts as his proxy here. Peering through a bookstand at a woman who’s shoplifting (Rutanya Alda), Jon extricates her from an awkward situation with the store’s manager (Ted Lescault). We next see him reading to the camera from a book about voyeurism before meeting up with her again. Standing next to a window through which a woman can be seen taking off her coat and brushing her hair as she prepares for bed, he tells the shoplifter that she’d caught his eye as the perfect casting for a film role. Back at his place, we watch through his camera as he instructs her to perform the same actions he saw the woman in the window performing before encouraging her to remove more and more clothing (a situation left unresolved when the film runs out). In a later scene, his attempt to get a passport photo ends up flipping the scenario on him, as the tapdancing photographer (Roz Kelly) talks him out of his own clothes. Both scenes are played for comedy, but they’re not the exact equivalents the filmmakers appear to believe they are. The first scene comes across as uncomfortably exploitative, with the male in control and his subject’s own views on what she’s experiencing never entirely clear. Although he’s not in control in the second scene, he’s clearly a willing participant. Despite the more active female role in the second scenario, both scenes are straightforwardly male-inflected sexual fantasies. In between these scenes, Jon follows a pretty woman from a party and ends up talking to a man credited as “Smut Peddler” (Allen Garfield) who sells him a stag film reel hidden inside a Coca Cola box, which turns out to depict Paul’s fourth and final computer dating experience (in which we are apparently intended to conclude that he dies from sexual exhaustion – not that it’s at all clear from the scene). Jon ends the film in Vietnam, attempting to recreate his voyeuristic fancy yet again while being interviewed by real life TV news correspondent Ray Tuttle, presumably intended to be a comment on the nation’s experience of the conflict as the first televised war.
De Palma selects his shots to explore the more technical aspects of cinematic voyeurism, ensuring that there’s always something else going on in the background of otherwise static conversation scenes. His decision to film some street scenes from above creates a sense of covert surveillance, perhaps intended to evoke the perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald peering down from the Texas School Book Depository with his rifle ready. Characters demonstrate their awareness of being watched, frequently turning to deliver their dialogue to the camera. De Palma has also developed techniques first used in The Wedding Party, in particular a subversion of the standard shot-reverse shot switch depicting two sides of a conversation. Rather than shift the camera around to shoot from one person’s perspective and then the other, he has the characters swap places, so that the scenery remains static while the people flicker backwards and forwards. He draws attention to the technique by switching the customer and shopkeeper in the foreground each time he switches perspectives. It might well be a consciously artificial technique which serves no real narrative purpose, but a) I don’t care because I liked it and b) it’s arguably thematically appropriate.
De Palma & Hirsch described the film in its press book as an “overground sex-protest film”, which might have sounded clever at the time (it was splashed all over the promotional material) but comes across now as self-consciously provocative. In interviews, they talked about the film as their tribute to Godard’s Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (1966), which similarly follows a group of men in the shadow of military service. It’s not one I’ve seen, but Chris Dumas points out in his essay “Before the Revolution” (1968) that the film’s viewpoint is distinctly male, rather than the more equal perspective suggested by its title – a criticism which applies equally to Greetings. While I have a soft spot for the rambling shambolic cinematic mishmashes of this era, I’m not sure I’d agree that Greetings is one of the better ones. It’s an interesting reflection of its era and its creators, but as a whole it’s less successful than its better parts.
De Palma & Hirsch followed up on the critical success of Greetings with a sequel, Hi, Mom! (1970), which was to be their final collaboration. In contrast to their first film, the sequel actively engages with politics rather than simply being informed by them. Significantly, in the gap between making these two films, De Palma had collaborated on a documentary about African America social housing, To Bridge This Gap (1969), before filming an experimental theatre production of Euripides’ The Bacchae as Dionysus in ’69 (1970). Both of these experiences have clearly informed the techniques and subject matter on display in Hi, Mom!
Jon (Robert De Niro), the sole survivor of the original trio of characters, returns from Vietnam and secures a shitty over-priced apartment. Its sole saving grace (pointed out to him by a leering superintendent played by perennial supporting actor Charles Durning) is its clear view through the windows of the apartment building opposite. The first section of the film riffs on Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) as Jon sets up a telescope and convinces Joe Banner (a returning role for Allen Garfield’s pornographer from Greetings) to finance his concept of Peep Art (as opposed to Pop Art). Drawn to one window in particular, through which can be seen two young women perpetually dressing or undressing as they prepare for their endless parade of dates, Jon zeroes in on Judy (Jennifer Salt), the third tenant who always ends up alone and sighing. Pretending to have been sent to her apartment by an incompetent computer dating agency, he convinces her to go out with him and constructs a fake persona to play into her cues. His ultimate goal is to arrange a second date in her apartment, putting his camera on a timer to film them having sex. After various comic mishaps caused by his underestimation of her eagerness, the camera droops on its stand at the crucial moment, drifting to the apartment below where radical activist Gerrit (a returning Gerrit Graham in a new role) has painted his entire body black – except for his penis.
In the midst of all this De Palma introduces two other strands. In one, a middle class housewife (soap actress Lara Parker on a break from her recurring villain role as a witch in Dark Shadows) buys a camera and begins to create her own film diary. Based on interviews from around the time the film was being made, this segment was originally intended to be more significant, but it takes up barely any screen time and is dropped entirely after the first 30 minutes. Far more important are the intrusions of 16mm black & white footage from the N.I.T. (National Intellectual Television) Journal production “The Black Revolution”. This starts off as a series of vox pop interviews in which a couple of African American radicals (Hector Valentin Lino, Jr. & Carole Leverett) ask random white people whether they’d like to experience what it is to be black rather than pretending to understand. The interviewees are encouraged to come to their play “Be Black Baby”, posters for which Gerrit has been plastering all over the city. Jon, freshly fired from his unsuccessful flirtation with pornography, answers an ad looking for white men with a military background to play policemen.
At this point the N.I.T. footage takes over entirely and the film becomes a documentary presentation of radical situationist theatre. The white intellectual audience are eased into the performance, being allowed to touch the black performers’ afros (surprised at their softness) and taught to dance “like a black person”. They are then fed stereotypical “black food” before having their faces painted black. Meanwhile the actors have painted their own faces white and begin to patronisingly ask the audience probing personal details about their lives. This gradually transforms into a gruelling experience in which the audience are subjected to increasingly dehumanising behaviour escalating almost to the level of assault, at which point Jon bursts in as a policeman and harasses the innocent audience, ignoring the real (whiteface) perpetrators. Suddenly the audience are outside again, gushingly recommending the play to their friends and spouting off about how they now understand racial oppression. The actors disgustedly realise that the audience haven’t really learned anything – and Jon suddenly incites them to attack the apartment building! Their armed invasion ends tragically and farcically as the surprisingly well-armed tenants massacre them with machine guns and garrottes. Returning to colour footage for the final 15 minutes, Jon (who has watched the massacre on TV) swears revenge. Three months later, having set up a cover identity as a happily domestic insurance salesman living with the pregnant Judy, he goes downstairs to do his laundry and blows up the building.
Hirsch’s take on the film is that Jon returns from the war a disillusioned radical who becomes increasingly radicalised throughout the film before declaring war on middle America, but this requires a great deal of special pleading – Jon’s character lacks the psychological reality for this to be at all believable. This supposedly simmering radical just waiting for a trigger point is completely absent from the first section of the film. What we have instead is a logical development of his character from Greetings if he’d never been off to war in the first place. The trigger point that begins his radicalisation is his involvement with the theatre group – but he only joins them because he’d lost his job and his attention was snagged by the sight of a naked breast adorning the “Be Black Baby” poster. He appears to enjoy the thuggery of his role as a policeman a little too much, and is happy to incite the group to violence when he’s hopped up on adrenalin without joining their assault himself. His abandonment of his middle class “cover identity” is triggered by Judy’s complaint that he bought her a secondhand white dishwasher rather than a new yellow model which would match her kitchen décor. There are glimmerings of distaste for middle class complacency in both instances, but it’s hard to buy into the idea that he’s actively embraced radical values. It feels instead as if De Palma has subverted Hirsch’s idea of the story by satirising the emptiness behind white pseudo-radicals who attempt to create meaning for themselves by emulating the actions taken by those who are more politically committed. Whether this is what De Palma truly intended I don’t really know – but regardless of whether the film works as a whole, the middle section of the film stands out as a viscerally effective representation of the rage felt by African Americans in the face of societal oppression and misguided claims to understand their lived experience.
After a disastrous experience making another comedy – the creatively compromised Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972) – De Palma returned to his love of the thriller genre with Sisters (1972), setting the path for much of his future work. Jennifer Salt, having had minor roles in De Palma’s first two films before playing De Niro’s love interest, would receive second billing in Sisters before establishing a career in TV, most notably a recurring role as Eunice Tate in the popular sitcom Soap (1977-1981). Charles Durning also found himself cast in a larger role in Sisters and would work with De Palma again on The Fury (1978). Gerrit Graham, having given a more sober performance in Hi, Mom! than in Greetings, would pull out all the stops for his performance as the camp rock musician Beef in Phantom of the Paradise (1974) before returning for one more stab at comedy in De Palma’s Home Movies (1979).
Giulio Questi is an obscure figure in Italian cinema who left behind a small body of work of unusual genre explorations. I only really became aware of him during a panel at the 2019 Melbourne International Festival, when Peter Strickland singled out his film Death Laid an Egg [La morte ha fatto l’uovo] (1968) for mention. Questi fought against the Italian Blackshirts during World War 2 as part of the partisan resistance, turning to communist politics after the war and appearing in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) before turning to making films himself – two of which I recently viewed for the first time.
Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! [Se sei vivo spara] (1967) opens on a man’s hand as he slowly attempts to drag himself free of a mass open grave. The half-Mexican Stranger (Tomas Milian) – whose name is not Django (I’ll get into that later) – and his gang of Mexican bandits teamed up with a bunch of American bandits to massacre US Army troops and steal the shipment of gold dust they were escorting. When it came time to divvy up the spoils in the desert, Oaks (Piero Lulli) revealed that his gang of white American bandits were also racist scum and had no intention of sharing their ill-gotten gains. One of the Mexicans broke free and attacked the horses with a machete, hampering the gang’s ability to return to civilisation, before finally being gunned down, followed shortly after his compadres.
The Stranger is helped from the grave by Italians generically identified as “Indians” (Miguel Serrano & Ángel Silva) whose style of dress looks, if anything, more South American than North American. While he was unconscious, they’ve performed the astonishing feat of smelting all of the gold dust on his person into a surprising number of gold bullets. They wish to accompany him and observe his quest for revenge in return for being told what he saw in the afterlife.
Most westerns would spend the rest of the story following his trail of vengeance until he finally kills the boss of the gang and the end titles come up. Not this one. Oaks’ gang manages to reach a town at the edge of the desert (only ever named by the Stranger’s companions as “The Unhappy Place”), but the townsfolk are immediately suspicious when they attempt to buy new horses with gold. It’s not long before they attack the gang en masse, either shooting or lynching them all – except for Oaks, who doesn’t last long after the Stranger hits town. Rather than take the $500 he was offered to kill Oaks, he tells the saloon owner Templer (Milo Quesada) to hold onto the money until tomorrow while he gets some rest.
It turns out that Oaks isn’t quite dead, so dodgy ranch-owner Sorrow (Roberto Camardiel) – in an attempt to find out what happened to the rest of the gold – has him taken to the town’s nearest equivalent to a doctor. Unfortunately for Oaks, the doctor’s extraction of the first gold bullet sparks a new gold rush and the spectators descend upon his body in a prospecting frenzy. Meanwhile, Templer and the local pastor Alderman (Paco Sanz) – who doubles as the town moneylender – have already divided up the gold between them and hidden it away.
Where Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name (and his many imitators) would have gone on to set the various venal town factions against each other, Thomas Milian’s Stranger instead drifts more-or-less aimlessly between them and intervenes sparingly, apparently unable to leave town until he has used up all of his gold bullets. In the process he uncovers the town’s various secrets. Templer is carrying on a long-term affair with saloon singer Flory (Marilù Tolo), which he feels an inexplicable need to keep secret despite his wife no longer being in the picture. Templer’s son Evan (Ray Lovelock) tears into Flory’s lacy clothing with his knife like an unhinged sex killer before leaving town and being held hostage by Sorrow as leverage for obtaining the gold. While most of the townsfolk are effectively unofficial members of a gang presided over by Templer, Sorrow’s gang consists of cowboys in identical smart black clothing who are heavily implied to be homosexual. The pale woman in grey (Patrizia Valturri) ripped straight from the pages of a Gothic novel, glimpsed gazing down on the town through heavily barred windows like an ominous spectre of death, turns out to be the hypocritical pastor’s wife, locked away years ago after she fell in love with another man. And the rest of the townsfolk can routinely be seen in the background kicking dogs or using children as foot-stools.
The whole staging and conception of the film is bizarre, not so much a revenge western as an afterlife rite of passage in which the Stranger must accompany his spirit guides on a descent into Hell and dispense with his material goods (rejecting payment and expending his supply of gold bullets) before he can gain some form of redemption and leave his life of violence behind. There’s even a sequence in which he is explicitly turned into a Christ figure, spreadeagled in the prison and stripped down to his loincloth, headband evoking the traditional crown of thorns, tormented by hallucinations of bats, iguanas and armadillos.
Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! more than earns its reputation as the weirdest Italian western ever made, joining the ranks of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Mexican western El Topo (1970) (generally considered the weirdest western any country has produced) and Jan Kounen’s French western Blueberry: L’expérience secrète (2004) (which I’d love to see but has so far eluded my grasp). It only lasted a week on its original release before being pulled out of circulation by the Italian censors, who ripped out 22 minutes of footage before allowing it to be re-released. The original cut was impossible to see until it was restored to its full length in 2003. Even in the complete cut some of Questi’s storytelling decisions can come across as arbitrary or haphazard, but Franco Arcalli’s flashes of disorientingly experimental editing techniques suggest that this was deliberate. It’s a distinctive work which will irritate some, but I for one think that the genre is much richer for its existence.
Anybody paying attention to the original Italian title will have noticed that the name “Django” is decidedly absent and that there is nobody named Django in the film. This can be attributed to the enormous popularity of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), the film which made Franco Nero’s career. In the wake of its success, the Italian film industry spent the next six years churning out unofficial sequels and ripoffs, haphazardly slapping the name Django onto unrelated characters or adding it to the titles of films even if no character by that name appeared. (It’s no real surprise that Quentin Tarantino would dip back into this well and appropriate the name for his own unrelated western Django Unchained (2012), although he did at least give Nero a cameo role.) In a further attempt to cash in on audience popularity, the film’s American distributor did their best to make it look like a Sergio Leone movie, cobbling together a trailer which omits any actual footage from the film in favour of crudely copying the opening credits style of Leone’s westerns – the only hint remaining of the original film is the theme music by Hungarian composer Ivan Vandor. As for the stars, Nero and Milian would later appear together in Corbucci’s Compañeros [Vamos a matar compañeros] (1970), an example of the more politically engaged subgenre known as Zapata Westerns.
Django Kills has been released on Blu Ray as part of 88 Films’ Italian Collection, using an English language print with optional Italian soundtrack. Disappointingly, Eric Zaldivar’s bonus featurette Django Kill and the Evolution of Tomas Milian (2017) isn’t up to the level of his other work for the label, being surprisingly dismissive of the film itself, but is much better when discussing the career of the film’s star.
Questi followed up his calculatedly ramshackle western with the far more polished (but no less bizarre) Death Laid an Egg, an unconventional giallo with an art house gloss, a respected cast and a smidgen of science fiction to taste. The grime of his first film has been replaced with an ultra-modern sheen of crisp geometry, pristine whites and vibrant colours.
The story centres around an automated poultry farm owned and run by Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anna (Gina Lollobrigida), who live on the property and are occasionally harassed by their understandably aggrieved ex-factory workers, unceremoniously laid off when the wealthy couple decided they could do just as well without them. They are currently sharing their residence with Anna’s younger cousin Gabri (Ewa Aulin), a seemingly guileless young woman who is secretly carrying on separate affairs with both of them.
We first meet Marco as he is in the progress of murdering a prostitute in a posh hotel while being observed from the adjacent apartment’s balcony by Mondaini (Jean Sobieski), a younger man who is later revealed to be working on an advertising campaign for a consortium of poultry suppliers who feel that the public needs to be taught to properly appreciate chicken. He later accompanies Gabri to a party thrown by Marco and Anna for a group of their married friends which turns into a weird pseudo-swinger’s game. Visiting the party briefly is Luigi (Renato Romano), a man suffering memory loss from years of electroshock therapy who had earlier latched upon Marco as the only face he could recognise from his past (and who is completely absent from the shorter “giallo edit” which was the only version available until recently). To top it all off, the factory’s on-site chemist (Biagio Pelligra) has been experimenting with chicken embryos, ultimately managing to produced a headless and wingless chicken, a practically boneless ovoid of quivering flesh which sparks Anna’s maternal instincts and Marco’s disgust.
One of the delights of the giallo genre is the convoluted plotting involving characters with messy interrelated agendas. Closest to the surface is Marco’s desire to orchestrate an elaborate accidental death for his wife, ideally following this up by running off with Gabri (who firmly insists that she has no interest in doing so but doesn’t exactly attempt to dissuade him from his murder plans). Questi carefully doles out snippets of conversation between his characters to obscure the exact nature of their discussions or their underlying motivations, playing similar tricks on a visual level to trick the audience into thinking they’ve seen one thing when something else entirely is going on. Franco Arcalli is once again on hand as editor, cross-cutting between plot threads and seemingly unrelated shots to create a kaleidoscopic impression of associations which both serves Questi’s purposes of obfuscation and provides a greatly enriched storytelling experience. Dario di Palma’s cinematography and shot composition elevate the visuals significantly above those in Questi’s previous film. Layered on top of it all is a magnificently avant-garde score by composer & conductor Bruno Maderna, contrasting frantically off-kilter assaults of percussion and electronics with smoothly romantic strings and disjointed stabs of flamenco-tinged pop. The most striking use of his score comes early in the film when Marco believes he has spotted an intruder in the factory. The female voice of the suspected intruder blends so seamlessly with the sounds of the machinery, the chickens and Maderna’s music that it’s impossible to tell for sure whether her words are real or imagined. (At least in the original Italian version – I haven’t watched the English dub for comparison, so I’m uncertain whether it comes across as well there.)
It’s a genuine surprise to see the calibre of actors Questi managed to secure for this oddity. Gina Lollobrigida was an international star with a body of work stretching back over twenty years who was in position to take only those roles which appealed to her, although it wasn’t long afterwards that she began a slow transition from acting into photojournalism (foreshadowed by her character’s skill at photography). Jean-Louis Trintignant didn’t receive his big break until 1956 with Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman [Et Dieu… créa la femme] (reviewed here), but by this point had worked with talented directors such as Georges Franju, Claude Chabrol and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The much younger Ewa Aulin had previously worked with Trintignant on Tinto Brass’ thriller Col cuore in gola (1967). Her ensuing career was split more-or-less evenly between sex comedies set in the Middle Ages and a more respected body of work in the thriller genre.
Nucleus Films have lavished Death Laid an Egg with their attentions for the Blu Ray release. The BFI’s James Blackford fills in the known details of Giulio Questi’s life and career, while soundtrack collector “Lovely Jon” provides a detailed appreciation of the score along with a potted history of trends in the collector’s market. There’s a tangential 2009 interview with the director and a commentary from genre experts Kim Newman & Alan Jones (still unwatched). There was also a limited edition release including a copy of the soundtrack on CD, which I am deeply gutted to have missed out on.
Giulio Questi and his co-writer/editor Franco Arcalli would collaborate on one more film – the much less easily available supernatural horror Arcana (1972), reputedly his weirdest film (!) – before a nine year gap in Questi’s career, after which all of his work was for television. Arcalli was far more fortunate, working as both an editor and screenwriter for directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Liliana Cavani until his death in 1978. Six years later he would receive one final posthumous credit for his contribution to the screenplay for Sergio Leone’s last film, the epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
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 14th 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.
Eclectic Ramblings 