Yesterday’s excursion into Slovakian cinema didn’t go so well for me, but today’s experience with a Czech classic was far more successful. The Ear [Ucho] (1970) captures the paranoia of life in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule and specifically with the circumstances of living under the constant threat of state surveillance where you never know which minor misstep might come back to bite you.
The film is largely a two-hander, following a night in the lives of Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý), the Deputy Minister of Transport, and his wife Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová). It begins with their return home after an official State function as the sober Ludvik and less-sober Anna find themselves unable to find their keys. What might normally be a fairly innocuous (and not unusual) event is swiftly invested with a frisson of menace as Ludvik gazes uncertainly at the dark car which has just pulled up further down the street. He knows that he left his keys at home and remembers his wife locking the gate as they left, so what could have happened to her keys? As he ponders how to get into the house his wife discovers the gate is unlocked – and after makes his way inside, he finds his keys sitting in the now unlatched front door. Perhaps their son was playing games before bedtime? The power is out, although the neighbours’ houses are lit as normal, and the telephone isn’t working. And people are visible at sporadic intervals observing the house from the garden and/or the street.
As Ludvik racks his memories for a clue as to what might be going on, the action periodically flashes back to the event they attended earlier that evening. Various interactions are replayed from his point of view as we gradually piece together evidence that a ministerial purge of individuals deemed unsound is underway. A military man observes that there is currently no Minister of Transport, which is news to Ludvik – didn’t he see that very man arrive earlier in the evening? Although he doesn’t appear to be anywhere now… Some of his fellow ministers appear to know more than he does, but they quickly clam up and move on once they realise Ludvik isn’t in the loop. A scene for which he wasn’t present plays out as, back at home, he presses his wife for details of her interaction with the most senior Communist Party representative – did he use her first name, which would indicate they are still in favour, or not? Much of the night is spent with feverish attempts to recall exactly what they said to whom at the party, while simultaneously dissecting their memories of which conversations they’ve had in different areas of the house, as Ludvik tries to locate any personal notes or documents which might now be interpreted as politically suspect.
The Ear of the title – also capitalised in the English subtitles – is the Ear of the State, i.e. the pervasive use of bugging devices to keep track of the citizenry. As Ludvik and Anna go back over the assumptions they have made about the locations of any potentially hidden microphones, the fragility of their conclusions becomes more apparent – some of the received wisdom about which areas are never bugged comes from people who have since been taken into detention, and how reliable can general “knowledge” about such matters really be in a highly monitored society? The choice to shoot most of Ludvik’s recollections of the State function from a first person perspective emphasises the theme of surveillance, reminding the viewer that the camera has an intelligence behind it which is paying attention to its observations. Sometimes the camera angle rotates through 180 degrees to give us a glimpse of Ludvik’s reaction to the ongoing conversations – a technique which is subverted in one instance as the camera continues to move on to the real Ludvik, revealing that the first shift showed only his reflection – and raising the possibility of another layer of observation through one-way mirrors.
As the evening of the couple’s 10th anniversary wends its way to the following morning, all of the faultlines in their personal relationship are laid bare – but where a more conventional drama might turn this night of paranoia into the crisis point which changes everything, here it comes across more as a heightened expression of the daily strains that living in such a society have put upon them as they veer between bitter personal recriminations and mutual comfort. By the time they learn what this night’s events mean to them, it’s been made very clear that even those who are successful in such a tightly policed society are wavering in a constant state of uncertainty as to their future.
Although the film was completed in 1970, it will probably come as no surprise that it was banned by the Communist Party of the day, only receiving a formal release after the regime change in 1989 (and being nominated for the Golden Palm at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival). Although there are clear signs of damage to the film stock in some sections, the National Film Archive in Prague have done an excellent restoration job. This wasn’t the first of director Karel Kachyňa’s films to be banned – both Coach to Vienna [Kočár do Vídně] (1966) and The Nun’s Night [Noc nevěsty] (1967) were removed from distribution after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. Having begun his filmmaking career with social-realist documentaries before moving into more politically critical territory, he found himself relegated to less controversial historical material and children’s movies for the remainder of the 1970s, including the beloved fantasy The Little Mermaid [Malá mořská víla] (1976). His screenwriting collaborator Jan Procházka, who wrote all three of Kachyňa’s banned films, is better known to me as the writer of Karel Zeman’s animated Jules Verne adaptation On the Comet [Na kometě] (1970). He also contributed to the production of Jan Němec’s acclaimed debut feature Diamonds of the Night [Démanty noci] (1964), which dealt with two boys’ escape from a train destined for a Nazi concentration camp. Svatopluk Havelka also deserves mention for his intriguing score, contrasting the conventional folk music present at the official function with more abstract atmospheres which help draw the audience into the protagonists’ sense of unease.
The Ear is a tense, self-contained piece which could easily have worked as a stage play but makes good use of the possibilities of film. Thirty years after initially being rescued from oblivion, Second Run made it available to a wider audience on Blu Ray – and it’s their subtitled version that is airing as part of the Czech & Slovak Film Festival of Australia. They’ve rounded out their release with the inclusion of The Uninvited Guest [Nezvaný host] (1969), a film made by one of Kachyňa’s students which was deemed controversial enough that Kachyňa lost his job as a teacher – I may just have to track that one down.
The 9th Czech & Slovak Film Festival of Australia (7-16 October 2021) has crept up on me unawares, so I intend to spend the next few days sampling this year’s offerings. First up is Pacho, the Thief of Hybe [Pacho, Hybský zbojník] (1976), a digital restoration from the Slovak Film Archive, a fairly broad and simple comedy parodying the local equivalent of Robin Hood.
The “King of Thieves” Juraj Jánošík (1688-1713) is a Slovakian folk hero reputed to have robbed from the rich and given to the poor, a symbol of resistance to oppression so popular in the region that one band of anti-Nazi Slovak partisans named themselves in his honour. His appearances in popular literature date back to 1785 and there have been at least nine different film versions of his story since 1921, the most recent being Agnieszka Holland’s Janosik: A True Story [Janosik. Prawdziwa historia] (2018).
Pacho (Jozef Kroner), on the other hand, is a hapless bumbler only slightly more intelligent than everybody else in the film, fumbling his way through the story thanks to what is either a brief outbreak of supernatural powers or a series of astonishing coincidences. Returning to his village of Hybe after a fourteen-year absence, Pacho hopes to reunite with his sweetheart Hanka (Eva Máziková), whom he rather unreasonably expects to have remained piningly devoted to him the whole time. Happening across Count Erdödy (Marián Labuda) beating one of the local peasants, who has sent his daughter to work in his place while he gathers wood, Pacho snatches the whip from the hands of the unwary nobleman – but his efforts go unappreciated as the old man keeps handing the whip back to the Count, until Pacho finally gets frustrated and beats the Count himself. Both Count and peasant run off, at which point Pacho is immediately surrounded by the local brigands who force him to join them. Asking hopefully whether he could be their leader, Pacho is challenged to a contest of strength by captain Jano (Karol Cálik). A series of Pacho’s sneezes appear to fell the brigands and a nearby tree; the birds appear to obey when he asks them to start and stop singing; and he wins a drinking contest by pulling out a flask of liquid gunpowder.
Their initial attempt at robbery isn’t very successful, netting them a large amount of fine clothing rather than the money for which they’d hoped. Considering the clothing ruined, Countess Erdödyová (Ida Rapaicová) poutingly instructs her husband to burn it and the fire spreads to the village, leading Pacho and his men to burn the chateau. This turns into a sequence of retaliatory burnings which he and his band extend to all of the other local noblemen in a form of petty class warfare. An eventual confrontation between the noblemen and the bandits ends up with the noblemen defeated and their wives delightedly having their way with the willing bandits, followed by a spate of newborns nine months later. All except for Pacho, who spurns the attentions of Erdödyová and seeks out his beloved Hanka only to find that she’s been married for seven years – and although she’s more than willing to dump her husband immediately, Pacho runs off cursing his misfortune. The disgraced noblemen seek the assistance of Empress Mária Terézia (Slávka Budínová), but their description of him is so exaggerated that when her troops finally arrive (with the intent of carrying Pacho away to be the Empress’ husband) none of them are willing to believe that they’ve found him.
Martin Ťapák has a long career in Slovak cinema, with 40 directing credits to his name and additional work as an actor and choreographer, and this film in particular is apparently well regarded – but I assume that I lack the necessary cultural background to appreciate its achievements, as I simply cannot see what all the fuss is about. If not for the fact that the film otherwise appears to be competently made, from the way the various characters shamble around in front of the camera I would have assumed the director was a novice – I can only assume that this was a deliberate stylistic choice as a part of puncturing the myth. It’s in line with the general style of comedy in the script, but to me it all seemed very heavy-handed and uninteresting. There are some attempts to satirise the relationship between noble and peasant, but since almost everybody in the movie is an idiot it doesn’t really go anywhere. I can at least offer some positivity in relation to Svetozár Stracina’s jaunty folk-based musical score, which evokes a strong sense of place and supports the general antics going on around it.
As a counter to my fairly harsh perspective, I feel that I should point the interested reader to Nicholas Hudáč’s essay “Disarming the Bandit – Pacho, Brigand of Hybe and the Attempt to Neutralize an Ethnic Symbol” (East European Film Bulletin Vol 51, March 2015). Thanks to his greater understanding of the cultural context, he was able to find far more to appreciate here than I was – and while he hasn’t won me over to a better appreciation of the form of comedy on display, I found his analysis of the way in which the film engages with Juraj Jánošík’s cultural legacy to be fascinating.
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.
Originally portrayed by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury [Jing wu men] (1972), Chen Zhen is a fictionalised mashup of two disciples of Chinese martial artist Huo Yuanjia (1868-1910), the co-founder of Shanghai’s Chin Woo Athletic Association, who achieved folk hero status for his public bouts taking down foreign fighters. Screenwriter Ni Kuang saw the name Chen Zhen in Huo’s obituary and, liking the sound of it, pinched it for his story – creating a character with a number of parallels (possibly unintentional) to another of his followers, Liu Zhensheng. The character has undergone a number of revivals over the years, most recently being reinvented as a pulp action hero played by Donnie Yen in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen [Jing wu feng yun: Chen Zhen] (2010).
But before getting to that, it’s worth going on a quick trawl through the cinematic history of Chen Zhen. Having spent several years in Hollywood but never quite cutting through to the level of success he deserved, Bruce Lee came up with the concept of the martial arts/western TV series Kung Fu (1972-75) as a personal vehicle, only to see to the lead role handed to a Caucasian actor who had no martial arts training (David Carradine), with the studio refusing to credit Lee due to their claim that they had already come up with the same idea independently – a claim which doesn’t hold much water since they had apparently told Lee they wanted it to be set in the modern day rather than the Old West. Returning to Hong Kong, Lee was astonished to discover that he had become famous for his role as the Asian sidekick Kato in The Green Hornet (1966-67), a Batman (1966-68) spinoff generally referred to there as “The Kato Show”. His newfound local fame led to four films with Golden Harvest, the last of which was interrupted in order to make his international breakthrough film Enter the Dragon (1973) – although sadly he never had the opportunity to capitalise on his success, dying one month before its release.
Lo Wei’s Fist of Fury was the second of Lee’s films for Golden Harvest, set in 1930s Shanghai at a time when the Chinese people were being oppressed by the Japanese. Returning to Shanghai to marry his fiancée, Chen Zhen learns that his old master Huo Yuanjia has died and the remaining students are being harassed by the members of a rival Japanese dojo. After experiencing heapings of racist abuse in a variety of situations, Chen discovers that his master was actually poisoned and takes on the rival dojo single-handed, defeating all of the students and killing their master. Chen surrenders to a Chinese policeman only to be confronted by armed Japanese soldiers, with the film ending on a freeze-frame accompanied by gunshots as he launches himself at the soldiers.
Fist of Fury was a huge success, but the death of Bruce Lee (and the character of Chen Zhen) didn’t exactly leave much room for a sequel. During the mid-1970s race to find “the new Bruce Lee”, Lo Wei attempted to establish Jackie Chan as his successor in New Fist of Fury [Xin jing wu men] (1976), in which Chan played a street kid befriended by Chen Zhen’s fiancée. In the wake of this film’s relatively poor reception, Bruce Lee look-alike Bruce Li (real name Ho Chung-tao) starred as Chen Shan, Chen Zhen’s brother, in Fist of Fury II [Jing wu men xu ji] (1977) and Fist of Fury III [Jie quan ying zhua gong] (1979).
Chen Zhen himself finally returned to the big screen in the form of Jet Li in Gordon Chan’s Fist of Legend [Jing wu ying xiong] (1994), a remake of the original set once again in 1937 Shanghai. It’s a worthy successor to the original, taking some liberties with the story but overall faithful in spirit, if more nuanced in its consideration of race relations. The Japanese antagonist of the original has been reinvented as General Fujita, a violent madman who is detested by the pacifist Japanese ambassador. In this version of events Chen tries to avoid killing Fujita rather than deliberately setting out to murder him, and the Japanese ambassador colludes in faking Chen’s death to satisfy the Japanese authorities and prevent the outbreak of war. This changed ending presumably owes a debt to TV series The Fist [陳真] (1982), starring Bruce Leung, which saw the Mayor of Shanghai faking Chen’s death – although where the TV series had him temporarily retire to Beijing, Jet Li’s character heads to Manchuria to continue the fight against Japanese oppression.
Those paying attention to the dates mentioned earlier may have noticed one glaring error with the chronology of the films – Chen Zhen’s teacher Huo Yuanjia died not in the 1930s, but in 1910. This is not, as far as I’ve been able to determine, an error made by the various TV versions of his story. Although Fist of Legend was more successful internationally than it was in the domestic market, its revival of the character may have been a factor in the commissioning of TV series Fist of Fury [Jing wu men] (1995), which saw Donnie Yen play Chen Zhen for the first time. Given 30 episodes to work with, the show starts with Chen’s arrival in Shanghai prior to his first meeting with Huo Yanjia (here named Fok Yuen-gap in line with the earlier TV series The Legendary Fok [Daai hap Fok Jyun Gaap] (1981)) and ends the same way as Bruce Lee’s original.
Which finally brings us, fifteen years later, to Donnie Yen’s return to the role in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen. Although initially conceived as a sequel to Fist of Legend, given that it opens in 1917 the absence of a time machine in either movie rather undermines this – it makes more sense to think of it as a sequel to Yen’s TV series minus the final scene. The film kicks off with an action sequence set in the trenches of World War I, where Chen has escaped his fate by joining the 140,000 Chinese labourers sent overseas to assist the British and French in lieu of troops. During the course of this set piece, which establishes Chen’s action hero credentials while maligning the Allied Forces as the sort of people who’d withdraw their troops without concern for the lives of their civilian support personnel, Chen’s best friend Qi Tianyuan is killed in action. Chen and his companions agree to take advantage of this sorry event to fake Chen’s death, with Qi’s sister back in Shanghai – Qi Zhishan (Zhou Yang) – a willing collaborator in the ruse.
Upon their return home, Chen becomes a pianist in a Shanghai nightclub (apocryphally named Casablanca in homage to the 1942 film) run by lovable patriotic gangster Liu Yutian (Anthony Wong), which provides cover for his activities with the underground anti-Japanese resistance movement due to its extensive clientele of foreign dignitaries. One night Chen follows the young General Zeng (Shawn Yue), son of a Chinese warlord, to secret peace-talks with his father’s rival General Zhuo (Ma Yue) only to realise that Japanese troops are lying in wait to sabotage the talks by killing Zeng and blaming his death on Zhuo. Concerned about breaking his cover, Chen makes the convenient discovery that he’s right outside a cinema showing a movie about a masked hero – and, even more conveniently, there’s a display window with a replica of the hero’s costume which just happens to be his size! Donning the outfit in record time – which, in a direct homage to Bruce Lee, looks exactly like the outfit he wore as Kato in The Green Hornet – he saves Zeng’s life and gives him a little speech about the need for China to come together against Japan before beginning a regular moonlighting gig as a pulp hero vigilante protecting the Chinese.
While Chen continues his exploits, he strikes up a relationship with Kiki (Shu Qi), who hits many of the classic femme fatale tropes – attractive nightclub singer fending off the attentions of her boss (good-natured) and patrons (less so), a damaged and conflicted individual with a drinking problem, and – most crucially – one of two spies within the nightclub secretly working for the Japanese. Although her interest in Chen is genuine, it’s not long before her superiors work out that he must be the masked vigilante, ordering her to report back on his movements and associates. Although he works out that she’s a spy, by that point the damage is already done – her superiors have enough information to make a brutal impact on his life. The final section of the film is basically a remake of the climactic confrontation in Fist of Fury set against the backdrop of the 1937 Japanese invasion as Colonel Chikaraishi (Kohata Ryu) – the leader of the forces Chen has been fighting and (by an astonishing coincidence) the son of the General he killed before heading off to the trenches – lures Chen to his father’s dojo, intending to re-stage the scene of his father’s death with a different outcome.
Donnie Yen, appearing here in the dual role of star and action director, is one of Hong Kong’s top action stars and notable for the lengths he takes to invest each of his characters with a fighting style suitable to their character. On record as stating that “Chen Zhen is Bruce Lee”, he avoids direct imitation of Lee for much of the film, choosing instead to honour the spirit of his approach by demonstrating a range of styles drawn from different traditions, much as Lee drew on a range of influences to create his own style of jeet kune do. It’s only in the final sequence that he allows Lee’s style to dominate – dressing in the same style of clothing, wielding nunchaku, emulating specific poses and movements, and making use of Lee’s characteristic vocal style. It’s a tour de force celebration of Lee’s oeuvre which makes no claims to originality but is nonetheless effective as a rousing conclusion.
Although I’ve noted that the setting of this film is more historically appropriate than the earlier versions, it’s got to be said that Legend of the Fist‘s version of Shanghai bears a greater resemblance to a historical theme-park than to any grounded reality. The Shanghai of the earlier parts of the film is all glitz and glamour, a hodgepodge of elements from the 1920s and 1930s thrown together in evocation of an era that never really existed as it’s been remembered through popular culture. As the Japanese gain power and the clock ticks down towards their invasion of China, the glitz and the colour palette begin to fade, colours becoming more and more washed out before finally transitioning to browns and greys. Gone, too, is much of the nuance added to Fist of Legend. The white Europeans are all either racist, incompetent, corrupt, or stupid – or some combination thereof – which, while blatantly stereotypical, does feel like a legitimate and justified perspective for Shanghai’s Chinese inhabitants. The Japanese characters are almost uniformly portrayed as evil, with Kiki being the sole exception – although even Kiki, while despising the results of her actions later in the film, is never really given the chance to redeem herself, continuing to carry out her orders regardless of her personal feelings and only achieving a vague sense of redemption through her pointless death. Apart from Kiki, only the Chinese characters are allowed any sort of complexity, and even then they are all – even the gangsters – unquestionably on the side of Chinese self-governance and unity, differing only on the means to achieve it. Having said that, there have been plenty of Hollywood films which are just as single-minded about American exceptionalism while reveling in much worse racial stereotyping – my feeling is that Legend of the Fist errs on the side of “simplistic” rather than “actively offensive”. (Japanese audiences may well feel differently, but the filmmakers have at least gone to the trouble of recruiting Japanese actors to fill out the cast.)
Director Andrew Lau has an eye for a skilfully composed image, having started in the film industry as a cinematographer and worked in this role with no less a luminary than the renowned Wong Kar-wai on As Tears Go By [Wong Gok ka moon] (1988) and Chungking Express [Chung Hing sam lam] (1994). Although my first encounter with his work as a director was the luscious wuxia epic The Storm Riders [Fung wan: Hung ba tin ha] (1998), he’s probably best known for the crime movie Infernal Affairs [Mou gaan dou] (2002) and its twosequels. Both Shu Qi and Anthony Wong, the most prominent supporting actors, have appeared in many of his films but have substantial careers of their own – Western audiences unfamiliar with their broader careers may recognise Shu Qi from the Jason Statham film The Transporter [Le Transporteur] (2002) and Anthony Wong as General Yang in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). Among the smaller roles, Zhou Yang stood out to me for her performance as Chen’s sister, although she has one of the those tiny CVs which looks completely different depending on whether you check IMDB or HKMDB – a more detailed cross-check reveals that IMDB have split her career into two separate entries, crediting her for stunt work in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) as Zhou Yang but attributing her other acting roles, including a more prominent billing in Love You You [Xia ri le you you] (2011), to a supposedly separate individual listed as Yang Zhou. (Love You You appears to be her last work in the industry.)
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is far from being a sophisticated film, but it looks gorgeous, has some great action sequences and is solidly entertaining – which is pretty much all I was looking for.
The two works which cast the biggest shadow over the development of the horror film are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), spawning notable cycles of adaptations and spin-offs from both America’s Universal Pictures (1931-1948) and the United Kingdom’s Hammer Film Productions (1957-1974). A few weeks ago I wrote about what happened when Japanese studio Toho, riding the waves of success of its Godzilla series in the mid-1960s, expanded Frankenstein’s creation to giant size to join the ranks of their kaiju films. By 1970 the Japanese film industry was beginning to feel the impact of television – audiences were increasingly staying home to be entertained with free programming rather than venturing out to the cinema, and by the end of the decade cinema attendance had dropped to one sixth of its previous level. As Japanese cinema began looking for new ways to offer cinema audiences material that they couldn’t see on TV, Toho producer Tanaka Fumio turned to Christopher Lee’s Dracula for inspiration. What followed was a series of three distinct takes on the western vampire in contemporary Japan from director Yamamoto Michio, known collectively as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy (Chi o Sū Shirīzu).
The films in this unofficial trilogy share only a few things in common: the director; a screenplay co-written by Ogawa Ei; a score by Manabe Riichirō; special effects by Nakano Teruyoshi; a contemporary setting; a decomposition scene modelled on Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958); and a complete absence of Dracula himself. Indeed, the first of the three films – Legacy of Dracula: The Vampire Doll [Yūrei Yashiki no Kyōfu: Chi o Sū Ningyō] (1970), literally translated as Fear of the Haunted House: Bloodsucking Doll – takes Dracula’s absence one step further by omitting vampires altogether! What we have instead is a twisted Gothic family drama which flirts with the appearance of vampirism but presents another explanation entirely.
On a dark and stormy night, Kazuhiko (Nakamura Atsuo) returns from 6 months overseas to reunite with his fiancée Yuko (Kobayashi Yukiko). After being greeted and assaulted by deaf-mute servant Genzo (Takashina Kaku), he is shocked to learn from Yuko’s mother Shidu (Minakaze Yoko) that Yuko had died two weeks previously in a traffic accident. Settling in to stay the night, he begins to doubt Shidu’s story when he catches fleeting glimpses of Yuko, following her outside to the site of her grave, where she begs him to kill her. Assuming she’s just really unwell and being hidden by her mother, he moves in to comfort her – and her visage transforms, golden eyes gleaming from a porcelain visage with a disturbingly gleeful grin. His subsequent disappearance leads his sister Keiko (Matsuo Kayo) and her fiancé Hiroshi (Nakao Akira) to retrace his footprints and conduct their own investigation, uncovering the tragic history of the Nonomura family. Twenty years ago an unidentified intruder broke into their house, killing everybody except Shidu – who gave birth 9 months later to Yuko. The revelation of this unknown intruder’s identity ties in directly with Yuko’s state of being, which owes its inspiration more to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) than to Stoker’s Dracula.
Yamamoto was at first reluctant to make a horror film, being more interested in the thriller genre – he only agreed to make The Vampire Doll after receiving permission to make Terror in the Streets [Akuma ga Yondeiru] (1971) in tandem using the same cast and crew (with both films released together on a double bill). Yamamoto’s second instalment in the pseudo-series – Lake of Dracula [Noroi no Yakata: Chi o Sū Me] (1971), or more literally Cursed House: Bloodsucking Eyes – comes closer to the western tradition of vampire stories, but nestled inside a psychological thriller framework more typical of Alfred Hitchcock or the luridly implausible machinations of the giallo genre at its best.
Lake of Dracula opens with the oneiric recreation of a dimly remembered childhood trauma. Five-year-old Akiko (Yamazoe Michiyo) chases her dog Leo through a forest to a rundown house, barely eluding the grasp of a strange old man (Otaki Hideji). Venturing into the parlour, she is confronted by a series of shocks in quick succession: the woman sitting at the piano (Fusako Tachibana) is revealed to be a corpse, shortly before a golden-eyed man with blood dripping from his teeth (Kishida Shin) begins to descend the stairs… and there her memory ends. Eighteen years later Akiko (Fujita Midori) is a schoolteacher living near Lake Fujimi with her younger sister Natsuko (Emi Sanae) and engaged to a doctor, Takashi (Takahashi Choei). Still haunted by her childhood memories, Akiko has just completed a menacingly surreal painting of a burning golden eye in a red sky, casting its gaze over a shadowy and indistinct landscape (possibly in homage to the Yuki-onna segment of 1964’s Kwaidan).
The completion of this artwork almost seems to act as a summons – while visiting Kyusaku (Takashina Kahu), proprietor of the local boat house and general handyman, he unexpectedly receives a mysterious coffin-sized delivery from a pale-faced van driver (Futami Tadao) purporting to have been sent by Dracula (never referenced again in the film, apart from a mention of the novel). That evening the coffin opens to reveal Akiko’s childhood menace, who wastes no time transforming Kyusaku into his Renfield and suborning Akiko’s sister, who appears to take great delight in gaslighting her sister and attempting to steal her fiancé – whose own encounters with a spate of blood-drained patients at the hospital lead him to make all of the correct conclusions. Then, right at the point where most vampire films would begin to concern themselves with how to dispose of the headlining menace, the film swerves back into psychological thriller territory as Takashi takes Akiko back to the site of her childhood trauma in order to reawaken all of her memories. This allows Takashi to come up with a psychological explanation for everything that’s happened – a theory which is both right on the money and fatally flawed, as it causes him to forget about the bit where there is actually a vampire on the loose as well! At this point the movie reverts to its model and everything resolves more or less as you’d expect.
The final entry in the loosely affiliated series – Evil of Dracula [Chi o Sū Bara] (1974), or more accurately Bloodsucking Rose – comes the closest to feeling like a Hammer vampire film, which is ironic as it was the success of a completely different horror film, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), which prompted Toho to return to the well once more. This time around, in keeping with the trajectories of both Hammer Films and the Japanese film industry, the filmmakers have spiced the mix up with some female nudity and upped their order of fake blood, although these aspects are fairly tame compared to what was going on elsewhere in the industry.
On the face of it, Evil of Dracula comes across to the Hammer fan as a variant on Jimmy Sangster’s ham-fisted and fatally compromised Lust for a Vampire (1971). Both movies centre on a male teacher taking up a post at a girl’s school, uncovering the activities of vampires, and – ahem – finding romance with one of their students. (Thankfully this element of the plot is a lot more toned down than the breathtakingly unethical goings-on in Lust for a Vampire – where that film’s sleazy protagonist fakes his qualifications as a way of meeting unattached young women, the lead in Evil of Dracula is a genuine teacher who treats his charges with respect and ensures that they are decently covered when vulnerable.) However, as Jasper Sharp points out in his excellent liner notes for the Arrow Blu Ray, Lust for a Vampire was never released to Japanese cinemas so the extent of its influence is dubious – at most, one might speculate that Toho had access to a press kit summarising the plot for potential distributors.
The opening section of Evil of Dracula reproduces Stoker’s major plot beats of Jonathan Harker coming to Transylvania to meet the Count. Professor Shiraki (Kurosawa Toshio) arrives in Nagano to take up a post teaching Psychology at the Seimei School for Girls, but is unable to obtain any assistance in reaching his destination. A mysterious vehicle pulls up and conveys him to the Principal’s house where he spends the night. His sleep is interrupted by an encounter with two vampire women – the Principal’s recently deceased wife (Katsuragi Mika) and a girl later revealed to be a missing student (Agawa Yasuko) – but he wakes up in bed the next morning as if nothing untoward had occurred. He checks the cellar to confirm that the Principal’s wife is still dead in her coffin – oh yes, according to the Principal (Kishida Shin) it’s a local tradition for dead people to spend a week in the cellar before burial – is yelled at by the Principal for his troubles (not at all suspicious) and moves into his room at the school.
While puzzling over the Principal’s announcement that Shiraki will take over as Principal for the following term, he meets three of his students – Kumi (Mochizuki Mariko), Yukiko (Ota Mio) and Kyoko (Aramaki Keiko) – and Professor Yoshii (Sasaki Katsuhiko), the weird French literature teacher who spends all of his time either staring at the students and/or reciting Baudelaire. Kyoko becomes the vampire Principal’s next victim after a white rose is left outside her door – a rose which later, in an eerie sequence, flushes crimson as the next victim is drained. As Shiraki continues his investigation he learns the 200-year-old story of a shipwrecked foreigner who was tortured into renouncing Christianity, becoming a vampire after drinking his own blood to survive. He becomes even more disturbed when he learns that the school has a pattern of Principals dying shortly after their wives, only to be replaced by newly hired teachers who experience a sudden change in personality… Although it could be argued that this aspect of the plot owes its inspiration to The Exorcist, a better comparison would be to Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face [Les Yeux sans visage] (1960).
Although there are more women this time around, it’s very much the men who drive the action. Kishida Shin remains on fine form in his new vampire guise, with Kurosawa Toshio a suitably stolid lead and Sasaki Katsuhiko relishing his role as a Renfield-equivalent. Both men built up a solid film career before transitioning into mostly TV works. The female leads are, if anything, less experienced than those in Lake of Dracula, with no more credited roles after 1977 – but they all succeed at doing what’s required of them.
Director Yamamoto Michio got his start as assistant director to Kurosawa Akira on Throne of Blood [Kumonosu-jo] (1957), continuing his training with five more films under Okamoto Kihachi before making his solo debut on the action film Resurrection of the Beast [Yaju no fukkatsu] (1969). He escaped into the world of TV after Lake of Dracula before getting bored and answering the summons to come back for Evil of Dracula, finally abandoning film entirely to return to TV. Although he was never particularly enamoured of the horror genre, these three films display a shared eye for poetic imagery which persists through changes behind the camera – while Hara Kazutami (later to work on the 1984 reboot The Return of Godzilla [Gojira]) was the cinematographer on both The Vampire Doll and Evil of Dracula, Nishigaki Rokurō took over for Lake of Dracula. The combination of Yamamoto’s feel for atmosphere with Ogawa’s psychological concerns gives these three films a shared identity which goes beyond the tendency of western reviewers to dismiss them as simply Hammer imitations. Completing the picture – or perhaps I should say complementing the pictures – is composer Manabe Riichirō, whose combination of traditional instruments with electronics ties the films together into a shared sonic world while still maintaining the individuality of touch to keep them distinct. I only recently encountered his work for the first time on the delightfully bonkers Godzilla vs. Hedorah [Gojira tai Hedora] (1971), which saw him leaning heavily into psychedelic jazz. Although his follow-up work on Godzilla vs. Megalon [Gojira tai Megaro] (1973) was less inspired (much like the film itself), Manabe’s work on the “Bloodthirsty Trilogy” has cemented his reputation in my books and I’ll be keeping an eye out for his name in future viewing.
Often dismissed a cinematic cul-de-sac, I found Toho’s flirtations with Hammer’s Dracula movies to be far more creatively rewarding than the crazy hijinks of their Frankenstein films (much as I enjoyed them). I’d happily recommend them to anybody looking for a twist on mid-20th-century Gothic cinema.
Christopher Plummer was a fine actor with a lengthy and respectable career. And yet, when I decided to trawl through his filmography in the wake of his recent death, I took a perverse glee in the realisation that I now had an excellent excuse to watch Starcrash [Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione] (1978). When asked about the film in a 2013 AV Club interview, Plummer was only willing to say two things. One was that Caroline Munro, the star of the film, was “something incredible to look at.” The other: “[G]ive me Rome any day. I’ll do porno in Rome, as long as I can get to Rome.” Although it’s now a little late for anybody to take him up on that offer, we still have Starcrash as proof of his dedication.
Entering production at Cinecittà studios five months after the cinematic debut of Star Wars (1977), director Luigi Cozzi (credited under the pseudonym Lewis Coates) insisted that it wasn’t a cheap cash-in but had already been written and designed before the more famous film was released. This is immediately thrown into doubt by the opening scene, in which we view a large spaceship from beneath as it gradually encroaches into the image from the top of the screen. The evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) wears a body suit which is strikingly similar to Darth Vader’s, complete with cape (red velour in this instance) – although the Count is at least not wearing a helmet. What he lacks in menacing dignity, he more than makes up for in scene-chewing fervour, which might explain why the film eats through its sets so quickly.
After establishing the threat of the Count’s weaponised planet (did somebody say Death Star?) as a passing ship’s crew are attacked by red spotlights from a lava lamp space-disco, we are introduced to our heroes – expert smuggler and ace astro-pilot Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and her deus ex machina sidekick Akton (Marjoe Gortner), an over-tanned humanoid with tight blonde curls who can be relied on to possess whatever knowledge or unexplained mystical powers are deemed convenient to the plot. Escaping pursuit by the Imperial Space Police, they stumble across the sole survivor of the attacked ship, whose disoriented delight at being rescued by Stella Star is evident from the bulge in his tight silver jumpsuit. Unfortunately it turns out their escape wasn’t particularly effective as they are immediately caught by their implacable nemeses – the dour corpse-green-skinned Police Chief Thor (James Messier) and Sheriff Elle (Judd Hamilton), a jovial robot with a strong Texas accent provided by Hamilton Camp (better known to my younger self as Greedy Smurf from 1980s cartoon series The Smurfs).
A large green tentacled head sentences Stella and Akton to serve out their extensive sentences on separate prison planets. Despite her prison planet clearly having a uniform dress code for prisoners, Stella is instead allowed (or encouraged) to wear a black leather bikini ensemble with thigh boots, a look which clearly appeals to her as she changes into two other variants on this theme in the course of the movie. Immediately asking the first people who will speak to her about the possibilities of escape, she’s whacked with a tinfoil sword by a guard, which has little effect other than allowing her to grab his gun and start blazing away. Pausing only long enough for her actions to result in the deaths of the two prisoners she just spoke to (and most of the other people on set), we jump cut to a view of Stella running through long grass for a few seconds before being captured again by Thor. Fortunately, he was on his way to secure her legal release from her prison sentence in return for her agreement to undertake a mission (which must be a great comfort to all of those needlessly slaughtered people she just left behind).
Reunited with Akton – who inexplicably greets her with the line: “Would I lie to you?”, words which have no relation to anything anybody else has said or will say – Stella is given her mission by the Emperor of the Universe (Christopher Plummer), whose appearance via hologram provides a welcome oasis of acting talent. Delivering his speech as if phoning in from another movie entirely, with pauses reminiscent of his old understudy William Shatner, the Emperor asks her to rescue his son Prince Simon and destroy Count Zarth’s megaweapon. Akton shows off his skill at generating multi-coloured oscilloscope waves in the palm of his hand en route to their first stop, where Stella and Elle are captured by scantily clad Amazons on horseback. Upon reaching their base, Stella shows off what are presumably intended to be her formidable fighting skills, despatching six Amazons with karate chops before anybody thinks to point a gun at her. Amazon Queen Corelia (Nadia Cassini) swans around shamelessly, swirling her cape into dramatic poses, determined to make the most of her few minutes of screentime. Her speech can best be summarised as: “You’ll never find the Phantom Planet but let me just give you a couple of clues which will help you to identify it if you happen to escape and accidentally land on it.” It turns out that Amazons have terrible security and are unable to recognise whether they’ve destroyed a robot, as Stella is immediately rescued by Elle. They escape pursued by a shoddily sculpted giant statue in a blatant ripoff of the Talos scene from Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which at least serves as a reminder of just how good Ray Harryhausen was at his job.
After a space battle in which the protagonists display a shockingly poor comprehension of basic numeracy (counting down the number of remaining enemy ships from 1 to 3 to 6 to 5), they land on an ice planet (anticipating The Empire Strikes Back – maybe Cozzi was right and they were ahead of their time!). The thinly characterised elite space cop suddenly turns out to be working for Count Zarth for no readily apparent reason, killing Akton and abandoning the others to freeze to death. Except that Akton is suddenly not dead because he (read the script) knows the future but can’t tell anybody about it (wha–?!), displaying a previously unseen ability to absorb and redirect lasers and thus taking care of Thor. Setting his hand beams to defrost, he revives Stella and they journey to their final planet, where once again Stella and Elle are the only two to make planetfall (almost as if the filmmakers were reluctant to spend too much on location filming, cutting their travel costs by sending only the star and her husband to each new setting). There they are attacked by remarkably acrobatic Marty-Feldman-look-alike cavemen who destroy the robot to the strains of John Barry imitating Richard Strauss à la2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Stella is rescued by Prince Simon (David Hasselhoff) wearing a cut-price imitation of the Grand Vizier’s mask from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) which can shoot lasers from its eyes but has a low battery life. Akton shows up to rescue them in turn, wielding a light blue laser sword which is definitely not Luke Skywalker’s lightsabre. Concerned that the madcap pace of the plot isn’t moving along quickly enough, he lets them know that this is the planet with the secret weapon, which he totally worked out from the clues provided by Queen Corelia in a conversation he never heard, and not – say – from the fact that THEY WERE ATTACKED BY THE SUPERWEAPON WHEN THEY REACHED THE PLANET. Now that they’ve found the secret superweapon which the bad guys knew they had no hope of finding, Count Zarth turns up to reveal that this was actually a cunning trap to kill the Prince. I can only assume that Stella’s deep freeze experience destroyed a few brain cells, because despite having been sent on a mission by the Emperor to find his son Prince Simon – AND HAVING TOLD SIMON THAT THE EMPEROR HAD SENT HER TO FIND HIM – she somehow failed to realise that he was the Prince. (Let me just pick my head up from the desk.)
Freed by the filmmakers’ admission that consistency and logic are not high on their priorities, Akton decides to stick it to George Lucas, revealing that his lightsabre is now green (six years before Return of the Jedi) before sacrificing his life to save Stella and Simon. His body vanishes into a video effect (definitely nothing like Obiwan Kenobi’s death) and the Emperor arrives to rescue the survivors. Although there are only three minutes remaining until the planet explodes, Christopher Plummer channels his training as a Shakespearean actor into declaiming at the air, which as we all know allows him to “halt the flow of time” long enough for everybody to evacuate. All that’s left is the final battle, a surprise assault on Count Zarth’s secret base, which is shaped exactly like a clawed black glove with folding turrets in the place of fingers. Zarth appears to be suffering from a sugarcrash by this point, randomly pointing here and there during the battle while he states the word “kill” matter-of-factly over and over. He rallies briefly before the end but I suspect is more relieved than aggrieved by his ultimate defeat. Stella reveals that the porthole windows on her ship have no glass or other barrier as she dives through to make her escape before demonstrating that, in space, not only can people hear you scream – they can hear you from inside their spaceship as you casually call “Simon we’re over here” from some distance away.
One of the biggest surprises about this film is that everybody with a speaking role has English as their first language – because based on most of their performances, I would have sworn it was an alien tongue. To be fair, this is probably related to the filming process. As was standard for Italian film productions, Starcrash was filmed without sound and all of the voices were dubbed on afterwards. Post-synch dialogue performance is a skill in its own right, and not every actor has the talent to recreate a believable performance which matches what can be seen on the screen. The only actor who comes across at all well in their vocal performance is old pro Christopher Plummer, although Joe Spinell (who would work with Caroline Munro again in 1982’s The Last Horror Film) puts in a gleefully hammy performance, snarling his dialogue and elongating the sounds for maximum value. I was taken aback at first that Caroline Munro’s performance lacked any of the nuance she displayed in her minimally scripted role in At the Earth’s Core (1976) (reviewed here), but the reason became clearer when I discovered that it wasn’t her voice. Stella Star’s voice has been unofficially credited to Candy Clark (The Man Who Fell to Earth), who was married at the time to co-star Marjoe Gortner – but Candy has since claimed that it’s not her voice at all, which should tell you something about the quality of the work. David Hasselhoff is overly earnest but pretty much does what is required of his role as minor male love interest.
Despite the low budget and my disparaging comments on some of the effects, Aurelio Crugnola’s production design actually looks pretty good, especially when combined with the vibrant multi-coloured lighting, which makes the sets and the spaceship models more pleasurable to look at than the better-constructed but relentlessly grey equivalents in Star Wars. John Barry’s score goes some way to giving Starcrash the sound of a much better film, but in retrospect the best aspects of the score can be seen as a dry run for his superior score for the Bond film Moonraker (1979).
Despite being credited to three writers, this is very much Luigi Cozzi’s film. Producer Nat Wachsberger has only two writing credits on his CV, the screenplay for Starcrash and a story credit thirteen years earlier. R.A. Dillon provided “additional dialogue”, which I suspect means that he or she was brought in to liven up a lacklustre translation of Cozzi’s original Italian script. Judging by the finished film it’s no surprise that this was Dillon’s first and only screen credit, as the dialogue still bears only a passing resemblance to recognisable human conversation. Leaving aside the quality of the story, Luigi does manage to imbue the film with a manic energy as it careens from incident to incident in multiple settings without showing much concern for the connective tissue. It came as a shock to learn that when the film was purchased by New World Pictures (after being rejected by American International Pictures), company owner Roger Corman insisted on adding 5 minutes of footage to make it more coherent – I can only imagine what the less coherent version must have been like. I haven’t seen a lot of Cozzi’s work, but a glance through his filmography reveals his best films to be those where he worked under the direction of Dario Argento, making contributions to the script, special effects or second unit. He was a big fan of science fiction, but after following up with the SF-horror Contamination (1980) his attempt to make a sequel to Starcrash – Star Riders, starring Klaus Kinski (!) – fell through. Instead we ended up with Escape from Galaxy 3 [Giochi erotici nella terza galassia] (1981), a lower budget not-a-sequel from an obscure Italian director who reused the effects scenes for Starcrash to tell the story of heroine Belle Star, complete with some outrageously 1980s space fashion and bonus (?) sexcapades.
In the dying days of Amicus Productions, best known for their series of portmanteau horror films, company founder Milton Subotsky concluded his run of adapting other people’s work with At the Earth’s Core (1976), a fairly faithful adaptation of the 1914 novel of the same name (the first in a series of seven) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan (who would eventually take a trip into the Earth’s core himself).
British gentleman scientist Dr Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) is the inventor of the Iron Mole, a manned vehicle designed to drill through solid rock. Providing the money is American mining heir David Innes (Doug McClure), who despite having had an intelligent father boasts of being Dr Perry’s worst student of all time. David has wagered that the Iron Mole, on its maiden voyage, will be able to drill all the way through a mountain in Wales before a man on horseback can cover the same distance. After this dubious attempt to enlist the audience’s sympathies for the privileged idiot filling the square-jawed hero role, they begin to drill down into the mountain, intending to descend for 700 feet before ascending again to emerge on the other side. Inevitably, something goes wrong and they continue to descend at an ever steeper angle before blacking out from the heat.
Returning to consciousness after the temperature in their transport implausibly drops below freezing, they eventually emerge in Pellucidar, the perpetually daylit world illuminated by a miniature sun which occupies the hollow core of the Earth. After being attacked by back-projected footage of a man in a dinosaur suit with a bird’s head, the two men are captured by the Sagoth, a race of creatures who are supposed to resemble brown-furred gorillas but look rather more like well-groomed cavemen with porcine prosthetics over the top half of their heads. After some token chest-tapping and name-stating, our protagonists are of course immediately able to communicate in English with the local tribespeople who are their fellow prisoners – these include Dia (Caroline Munro), a princess originally named Dian the Beautiful in the novel; Ghak the Hairy One (Godfrey James), her not-particularly-hairy father; and Hoojah the Sly One (Sean Lynch), an ineffectual romantic rival who gets punched in the face pretty quickly and never amounts to much of a threat.
After watching a fight between two more men in dinosaur suits (this time wearing the heads of wild boars), they are set to work in a network of caves complete with rivers of lava and curtains of fire which can only be bypassed via retractable bridges. Here they are ruled by the Mahars, a race of man-sized reptilian bipeds with wingflaps under their arms whose eyes glow green when they exert their mind-control powers. It’s just as well Dr Perry is on hand to inform us that they look exactly like the Jurassic-era pterosaurs we know as Rhamphorhynchus, because there’s no way the viewer (dinosaur-literate or otherwise) could be expected to draw this conclusion.
Escaping the caves, David has a meet cute with Ra (Cy Grant) after arrogantly assuming that meat roasting over a camp fire could not possibly belong to anybody else. They have a jolly good attempt at killing each other before rolling into a cave and being grabbed by the tentacles of some weird-looking carnivorous plants. David nobly rescues Ra from their clutches, somehow killing both creatures immediately by the simple act of cutting through one tentacle. The two complete their male bonding ritual before setting out to rescue David’s friends and destroy the Mahars.
40-year-old Doug McClure is a bit of a stretch as an action hero. His performance is… serviceable, but he lacks the charisma to sustain the amount of screen time devoted to him. Peter Cushing barely needs to exert himself to act McClure off the screen, his dotty professor persona very much in the vein of his performance in the earlier Amicus adaptations Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966). Caroline Munro is given very little material to work with, mostly being called on to just stand around looking alluring, but makes the most of her few lines and shows more emotion in one scene than McClure can manage in the entire movie. Sean Lynch is also clearly capable of more, but has little to do besides looking treacherous/or and shifty.
Scriptwriter and producer Milton Subotsky has an unfortunate history of hiring talented writers only to decide that he knows better and rewriting their work. In this instance, he went straight into writing the film himself, leading to a characteristically faithful but uninspired script. Director Kevin Connor had the distinction of directing one of the best Amicus portmanteaus, From Beyond the Grave (1974). While I’ve been unkind in my comments about the costumes, Connor does his best to make them work onscreen, managing to make the back-projected film sequences blend with the rest of the action most of the time and using close-ups of giant heads whenever the actors need to be seen interacting with the creatures. The fire-breathing creature actually looks quite good – although this is probably due in no small part to its always being seen from a distance and never having to move very much. The sets are rather more successful – the jungles and caves look pretty good for their era, even if they don’t quite have the same impact as the sets in the classier (and bigger-budgeted) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). Unfortunately, the Mahar costumes are a big letdown. Connor is aware of their limitations, keeping them in shadows when possible and showing only a single glowing eye (accompanied by eerie electronics) when they use their telepathy, but all too frequently they need to be seen taking a more active role which the costumes can’t sustain. I can’t help wishing they’d been more like the Winged Devourers from The Beastmaster (1982), or even the Sleestaks from kid’s TV series The Land of the Lost (1974-1976) – they wouldn’t be any more faithful to the source text, but they’d look a lot better. Composer Mike Vickers does a great deal to elevate the movie’s effectiveness. An early member of Manfred Mann, he was one of the first British musicians to use the Moog synthesizer. His use of electronic music sets the tone during the opening credits before lapsing into a disappointingly conventional string arrangement during the first few scenes. Once we hit the realm of Pellucidar his music springs back into life, with the electronic component alternately underlying a more bass-oriented orchestral score or rising to dominate as the orchestra drops away entirely.
Kevin Connor and Doug McClure made two other Burroughs adaptations for Amicus, The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and The People That Time Forgot (1977), followed up in a similar vein with Warlords of Atlantis (1979) for EMI. Connor’s other work in the fantasy adventure genre (thankfully without McClure) included Arabian Adventure (1979), reuniting the team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and two episodes of the short-lived TV series Wizards and Warriors (1983). After the dissolution of Amicus, Milton Subotsky went on to form Sword & Sorcery Productions, attempting unsuccessfully to secure the rights to Robert E. Howard’s Conan and settling for Lin Carter’s The Wizard of Lemuria (1965). Adapting the novel as Thongor in the Valley of Demons (1978), the funding fell through and – for better or worse (I leave that up to the reader) – the film was never made. Whatever the final film might have been like, I strongly suspect it would have been no match for John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982).
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).
Greetings 2021! I’ve been away from this blog longer than intended, due to a mixture of social commitments, excessively hot weather and laziness. Today I’m beginning to catch up on my viewing from the monthly Cineslut Film Club. The theme for October was Eastern European Fairy Tales, a genre niche which is like catnip to me, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to explore three examples previously unfamiliar to me. It’s now been over a week since I watched them, so it’s about time I assembled some of my thoughts before the details have faded from memory.
First up is The Bloody Lady [Krvavá pani] (1980), a feature length Slovakian animation telling the tale of Countess Alžbeta Bátoriová, better known to English speakers as Elizabeth Báthory or the Blood Countess (1560-1614), whose influence as the primary historical inspiration for countless female vampires continues to echo down through the centuries – although you could be forgiven for failing to recognise her at first in this unusual take on her story.
When we first meet the Countess, she’s very much like your traditional fairy tale princess, a sweet blonde girl beloved by all and beset by suitors. Every day, as she looks down to the courtyard from her room, her perpetually present suitors show off with displays of physical prowess. Two of them take turns shooting arrows at each other and attempting to catch them; another must have travelled a very long way to be there, since he’s wearing a karategi and putting on a martial arts exhibition. The Countess isn’t particularly interested in these macho displays, preferring to sneak out of the castle and frolic in the forest with her woodland friends, an assortment of animals who delight her with surprisingly well choreographed performances. One day the weather suddenly turns sour and she’s caught in a torrential storm while the animals flee for shelter and her horse bolts. A handsome woodsman finds her unconscious form in the forest and nurses her back to health, while her animal friends bring her presents of food. (Rather perversely, the bird brings her one of its eggs, and it’s made very clear that the bird is effectively bringing her its own child to eat – but it’s played for comedy, with the bird simply giving a sheepish shrug to the viewer in acknowledgement.) Inevitably, the Countess falls in love with the woodsman, and as she prepares to depart for home she gives him her heart. Literally.
In a delightfully twisted turn of fairy tale logic, her new heartless state has dire consequences. She’s abusive towards her woodland friends on the journey home, presaging a gradual increase in bad-tempered and sadistic behaviour, flying into a rage for trivial reasons and tormenting her servants. And then comes the fateful incident when she scratches a servant girl’s face. Wiping away the drop of blood which landed on her hand, she discovers that the newly uncovered patch of skin has turned the purest white. It’s just a short step from there to her new skin care regime – having her servants murdered and then bathing in their blood. Her suitors soon meet the same fate, invited to her chambers via a secret route only to meet their demise in one death trap or another. The woodsman eventually discovers what’s going on and attempts to restore her heart, but she no longer wants it and he’s barely able to rescue it from her dog’s jaws. After a physical confrontation with the Countess’ henchman – whose death, bizarrely, results in snakes slithering out of his head – the woodsman escapes. Her crimes are discovered, the authorities wall her up in her castle to starve to death and justice is (presumably) served. The end? No, because the woodsman suddenly appears inside the sealed tower and revives her corpse by reinstalling her heart, allowing the two to live happily ever after!
It’s difficult to tell whether or not this film was intended for viewing by children. The sometimes overly cute art style, the Countess’ woodland friends and the odd choice to give her a happy ending suggest that it might have been, but the acts of violence and occasional female nudity are… atypical at best for a child audience. The story is told without dialogue, with only a couple of sentences of opening narration to provide any context – but since the version I watched did not include subtitles, I’m left none the wiser.
Writer/director Viktor Kubal was a pioneer of Slovakian animation, involved with the creation of the first Slovakian animated film in 1943, and frequently incorporated elements of local legend and folklore into his work. It’s difficult to find much information on him in English, but as best as I can tell he turned out a substantial body of work from the 1940s to the 1980s. The Bloody Lady is his second and final feature length animation. Although the art style was sometimes a little twee for my tastes, his animation techniques display a great deal of creativity and slowly won me over. The moment which most stood out for me was the transformation of the innocent Countess as the storm struck. During her sun-soaked frolics, her billowing dress made her look very much like a flower; the sudden onslaught of the storm caused her dress to collapse completely, leaving her looking like a drenched bell flower. (There’s some resemblance to Angel’s Trumpet – which, being a poisonous flower, may be a deliberate hint of what’s to come.) Kubal’s fluid animation style is at its best when the forms of objects or people become mutable and their colours flow (with red and white dominating the palette).
Don’t be fooled by the lurid poster for The Rat Saviour [Izbavitelj] (1976) – the movie itself is far subtler and more interesting than the poster would have you believe. An unidentified town in contemporary Croatia is in the throes of a recession. Novelist Ivan Grajski (Ivica Vidović), desperate for money, approaches his publisher hoping for good news only to learn that his allegorical plague novel has been rejected as unsuitable for the times. Returning home to his apartment, he finds himself expelled by the landlord for non-payment of rent. With only a few books and the clothes on his back to his name, his only recourse is to sell his books at the local marketplace. Sonja (Mirjana Majurec), a young woman selling some of her father’s books, takes pity on him and leaves him with her scarf and phone number. Ivan passes a political rally, where the Mayor (Relja Bašić) is making empty promises of wealth and prosperity, before settling down to sleep on a park bench. The policeman who wakes him turns out to be his local butcher, who covertly grants him access to the abandoned Grand Central Bank building on the condition that he stays for only one night and tells nobody.
At this point things take a turn for the surreal. A disused cabinet turns out to be brimming with fancy prepared meals (and the odd rat or two). Ivan finds a working phone and calls Sonja – much to her surprise, since her phone is broken. And he stumbles on a raucous feast-cum-orgy of ratlike people who are discussing their plans to kill Professor Martin Bošković and his daughter. Attempting to expose the gathering to the police the following day, he finds that the cabinet is empty, the phone no longer works and there’s no sign of any large gathering having taken place. Burgeoning doubts about his own sanity are relieved when he’s accosted by the Professor (Fabijan Šovagović), who narrowly escaped an attack by rat people the previous evening and followed him from the police station. The Professor and his daughter (who of course turns out to be Sonja) are the only people aware of a secret conspiracy of rat people (indistinguishable from regular humans until killed) who are ruled by a rat king, as referenced in a 15th century text. The Professor has been attempting to wage biological warfare against the rat people, who are gradually taking over all positions of power and privilege within society. Ivan is enlisted into his mission to expose and destroy the rat king for the good of society.
The Rat Saviour was based on the early 20th century short novel “The Rat-Catcher”, written by Russian author Alexander Grin (aka Aleksandr Green). Director Krsto Papić (considered one of Croatia’s best filmmakers) adapted the novel in conjunction with his frequent collaborator Ivo Brešan and fellow director Zoran Tadić. Although on the surface it’s constructed as a surreal conspiracy thriller, and generally seems to be classified as a horror movie, beneath the surface gloss (or rather surface grime) the movie reveals itself to be a social satire using the rat people as an allegory for political corruption. Given that the movie begins with the novelist protagonist having a similar work rejected by his publisher, it’s tempting to speculate about a connection between his novel and the unfolding story. Was Ivan’s novel denied publication by a lackey of the political elite because it cut too close to the bone? Has Ivan found himself trapped in a nightmare of his own imagination? Do Ivan’s artistic sensibilities provide him with a unique insight which allows him to perceive a reality invisible to most? A definitive answer to any of these questions would be disappointing, but the movie has enough substance and mystery to sustain any or all of these perspectives on the material. It’s certainly possible to watch it as a straightforward fantasy horror, but looking for the subtext makes it a more satisfying experience. Papić clearly felt he was dealing with fertile material, since he would return to the well with Infection [Infekcij] (2003), a movie which is variously described as either a remake or a sequel. The movie poster stirs up vague feelings of familiarity – I’m pretty sure I read about it not long after its release – but I haven’t had the opportunity to see it myself (one for my ever-expanding list).
Finally we come to The Ninth Heart [Deváté srdce] (1979), my favourite of the bunch. Czech director Juraj Herz was responsible for the masterful dark comedy The Cremator [Spalovač mrtvol] (1969). His first entry in the fairy-tale-inflected fantasy genre was Morgiana (1972) which, like The Rat Saviour, was an adaptation of an Alexander Grin novel. While Morgiana didn’t really include any fantastical elements, they are very much an integral part of The Ninth Heart‘s story.
The hero of the story is the penniless student Martin (Ondřej Pavelka), although there’s little evidence on display for his status as a student as he seems to spend all of his time wandering from town to town and admiring the pretty women. Smitten by assistant puppeteer Tončka (Anna Maľová), he falls in with a group of travelling players and tricks a snobbish innkeeper (Václav Lohniský) into feeding the entire troupe, which lands him in jail when he’s unable to pay the bill. Fortunately, he discovers that his newly acquired cloak (a gift from a poor musician to whom he was kind) is actually a cloak of invisibility. Unfortunately, he sabotages his own escape attempt by spending too much time tormenting the arresting officers, losing his cloak when it gets caught in a closing door.
Facing a severe punishment, Martin volunteers to undertake a quest to lift a curse from the Princess (Julie Jurištová), a task which has seen eight other young men disappear never to be heard from again. This turns out to be an elaborate scheme on the part of court astrologer Count Aldobrandini (Juraj Kukura), who is working a spell to make the Princess fall in love with him while using the curse as a pretext to obtain the hearts of nine young men, an essential ingredient for the potion which has allowed him to live for 300 years. The court jester (František Filipovský), who has his suspicions about the astrologer, joins him on his quest, in which a pomegranate necklace bestowed upon him by Tončka to remind him of their love also has an important part to play.
I don’t know what it is about Czech fantasy which resonates so strongly with me, but The Ninth Heart is a gorgeous example of what this type of film has to offer. Herz is in complete synch with his cinematographer, production designers and makeup artists. Among this highly talented group of collaborators, the names which really stand out to a western audience are the celebrated surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer and his wife Eva Švankmajerová, who were responsible for the art direction, visual effects and title design. This was during the period when Švankmajer had been banned by the government from making his own films, leading to several years working in the background of other Czech productions. Although the travelling players’ puppets provide the clearest connections to Švankmajer’s other work, the visual highlight of the film is the astrologer’s Chamber of Time. This beautifully constructed set is a large hall filled with tall flickering candles, requiring careful navigation by the cast members. The back of the set is dominated by a gigantic pendulum straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, swinging back and forth across the fork of a bifurcated staircase, making it impossible for anybody to use unless the pendulum is halted. It’s a stunning piece of work and is heavily featured in the later sections of the film, allowing plenty of time for the viewer to revel in its beauty and construction.
The Ninth Heart was made back to back with Herz’s Beauty and the Beast [Panna a netvor] (1979), which beat it to the cinemas by a month and made the unusual choice to depict the titular Beast of the classic French fairy tale as possessing an avian form. Hopefully the rumours of an impending blu ray release for the English language market will turn out to be true, because The Ninth Heart has left me desperate to see more.
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 