Monthly Archives: January 2015

Drama, Imaginary Mexican Cinema

#127 – Hombre Discoteca (Disco Man)‏

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(1981, Mex, 89 min) Dir Alfonso Salles. Cast Hector Mendez, Sally del Toro, Eva.

I don’t know whether it’s the ubiquitous soundtrack or the fact that all anyone really remembers of the film is its dance floor scenes but people tend to forget how depressing Saturday Night Fever really is. This isn’t really a problem with Alfonso Salles’ unofficial remake Disco Man which ups the fantasy atmosphere of the nightclub scenes and really digs in with the squalor of the rest of the movie with graphic shotgun assisted suicide and not one but two dogs getting kicked to death particular highlights. Much like the original this isn’t a film about the transformative or restorative powers of dance and escapism and all of that but it makes more of the idea that the leads turning away from reality for the discotheque fantasy of the weekends is in some way a denial of that reality and that at some point it’s going to come back to bite you. Don’t mess with reality, basically. Star Mendez, who displays more grace and swagger than Travolta himself (and has a huge moustache too), also directed the film’s sequel, Disco Man 2, which was of course in turn an unofficial remake of Stayin’ Alive.

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Comedy, Imaginary Swedish Cinema

#126 – Färska Hallon (Fresh Raspberries)

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(1963, Swe, 75 min) Dir Isak Borg. Cast Isak Borg, Berit Alman, Henrik Åkerman, Charlotta Borg.

By the time the early sixties had swung by Isak Borg should have been a happy man. Of the three films that he had so far written, produced, directed and starred in all three were slapstick comedy classics that had broken the box office in his native Sweden. Isak Borg, however, wasn’t a happy man. A legendarily paranoid and depressive man, he had grown to resent more and more the influence of his fellow countryman Ingmar Bergman who was taken so very seriously while Borg was scorned by critics, festivals and awards ceremonies alike. Thankfully that curse that had struck so many before him had not struck him – he had no desire to be taken seriously. No, he didn’t want to go to the critics, he wanted the critics to come to him. Hence Fresh Raspberries – surely a spoof of Bergman’s films would puncture their pomposity, reveal to the world at large the ridiculousness of the man’s self-seriousness? Alas, it did not work. Borg’s film of a clumsy priest’s spasms of doubt being met by increasingly absurd interruptions – starting with long forgotten uncles, graduating to a troupe of mean-spirited clowns and finishing with a wise talking death – was coldly received by not just the critics but by audiences too, evidently alienated by his previous film’s good cheer having curdled so badly. Within the year the beaten Borg was back to basics with Accidental Postman Grun.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Horror, Imaginary Australian Cinema

#125 – Hannah Blet

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(1981, Aust, 104 min) Dir Chuck Mallory. Cast Jenny Bitz, Pete Pooter, Jim Billing.

Through the desert haze comes Hannah Blet, a twentysomething woman with an antique suitcase. She takes up position at the side of the road. Cut to a wide shot – this road is running through the middle of nowhere and the desert that she has just emerged from goes on forever in every direction. Cut to a close up – Hannah has a smile on her face, the same smile she’ll be wearing throughout the film no matter if she’s watching a child play or pulling apart a trucker who’s made unwanted advances like he’s nothing more than a rag doll. Who is Hannah Blet? Why is her suitcase full of Victorian clothes and sand? The film does little to answer these question but gives us a very still, very stylish atmosphere in the shape of DOP Jim Dixon’s spare compositions and Dingo Drift’s synthy score, a still atmosphere that is occasionally punctuated by very effective and very bloody violence. An accomplished debut from Chuck Mallory and a fine performance from Jenny Blitz set this Ozploitation classic apart.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Black and White, Imaginary Mexican Cinema

#124 – Delitos Menores (Petty Crimes)

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(1948, Mex, ? min, b/w) Dir Luis Buñuel.

Between Gran Casino and The Great Madcap Buñuel made the short Petty Crimes which seems to have lasted all of three weeks as a completed short following the edit before a small fire at the studio spirited it away. Buñuel, it is said, wasn’t entirely pleased with the film they had produced and regarded the incident with no great emotion, moving swiftly on to the next project. Thus the fleeting existence of Delitos Menores remained of no real consequence until the late 1970’s when a copy of the script appeared in a suitcase in the attic of Ramon Valdez, the son of famed Mexican filmmaker Pablo Valdez and future director of Sol Diablo. Valdez Senior, it transpired, had worked on Delitos Menores as script boy and general gofer. Suddenly the film attained the mystique of the irretrievably lost and Buñuel had to fend off questions about it in interviews for the remainder of his life apart, that is, from when he fell back on his deafness to dodge the inquiries. Stills soon appeared in mislaid and mislabelled boxes in an archive in Switzerland and in 2000, as part of the celebrations for the centenary of Buñuel’s birth, a sort of slide show version was produced with the voices of Martin Sheen, Gabriel Byrne and Julianne Moore reading the parts. More recently Guy Maddin included it as one of the subjects of his Seances series with Udo Kier in the lead.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Black and White, Imaginary US Cinema, Silent

#123 – Cogs of the World, The‏

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(1924, US, 786 min original/119 min studio cut, b/w) Dir Hans Bismark. Cast Dabney Leigh, Josie Robin, Pat Basket, Horace Pet.

So in a single film you’ve vaulted to the ranks of the most popular and well regarded directors in the world – what do you do now? Something a little lighter than your last epic feature? A comedy, or perhaps a romance? Or do you take three years to make a thirteen hour pseudo-communist, mysticalist epic about the foundations of civilisation as you see it and the barbarism of modern industry? It’s going to be the latter, isn’t it? Well, you’re not alone – with his skilled but slight debut At Flight! With the Devil’s Wind… buckling all kinds of swash at the box office, Hans Bismark was handed a blank cheque and no provisos. Trouble started quick with his star, Francis de Pascal, dropping out three weeks into production citing a recurrent facial cramp. Then the massive sets of an Arctic paradise that had been erected in Alaska melted. It went downhill from there, a litany of difficulties that culminated in the legendary only screening of The Cogs of the World in its complete state that was regularly interrupted by the loud weeping of its broken director. Royal Brothers Studios eventually released the film in a severely truncated form that, according to contemporary reviews, mangled the story into incomprehensibility and somehow still managed to feel too long. This version flopped and it, along with the original edit, are now lost to film history. Bismark repaired to a sanatorium until 1928 at which point, for the third time in his life, began his career anew.

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Action/Adventure, Black and White, Imaginary US Cinema, Silent

#122 – At Flight! With the Devil’s Wind…

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(1920, US, 101 min, b/w) Dir Hans Bismark. Cast Francis de Pascal, Bert Fin, Alice Pluto.

Hans Bismark arrived in Hollywood from Germany in 1920 – within weeks of Francis de Pascal – with no money and a wooden leg, both rewards of his service in the First World War which also gave him a hatred of his home country twinned with a nostalgia for how Old Europe had been when he was a child. Formerly the ‘King of the Stage’ in Germany as an actor and director, his difficult nature made the move necessary and he was determined to make his mark in his new home, and quick. Armed with his commanding presence and a couple buckets of charm he hit the studios and within no time had a picture. He hadn’t taken the easy way out either – this stage director with shaky English was to be making a high seas adventure with hot new thing Francis de Pascal. The going wasn’t easy – two stuntmen lost their lives in a freak squall and the picture ran both over time and over budget but Pascalmania had hit and At Flight! couldn’t have not been a hit if it had tried. Even the title’s eccentric punctuation couldn’t dissuade them but then how could it? It’s a rip-roaring adventure chock full of romance and featuring the kind of hair-raising stunts that would have a modern-day safety conscious studio soiling their collective pants. Out the other end Bismark was in the top-tier of film directors and de Pascal had become the apogee of male beauty. It was not to last however – within five years both men would be persona non grata in Tinseltown and within ten they would both be dead.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Drama, Imaginary US Cinema, Romance, Silent

#121 – Love in the Shadows

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(1920, US, 72 min, b/w) Dir Pit Piabro. Cast Francis de Pascal, Olivia Bead.

It can be hard looking back to fathom the appeal of what was popular in the past. The short-lived ‘Bowler Cat’ fad of the 1890’s, for example, where ladies of good breeding would keep a live kitten in their bonnets, seems from this remove unnecessarily cruel to the kittens (which so frequently fell from their mistresses’ headgear) and without sufficient reward for difficulty involved. Cinema is no different either, with the big hitters of yesteryear enjoying their moment in the sun before the public tires of them and we’re left looking back over the years wondering what people were thinking at the time. Burt Reynolds, perhaps, or Ryan O’Neal. All of this is a roundabout way of bringing your attention to Francis de Pascal and Love in the Shadows, his first English language film which was shot when he was a mere week off the boat from France. It’s the usual forgettable, melodramatic stuff but it catapulted de Pascal to a position just below Valentino in the viewers hearts for the next handful of years. Unlike Valentino though his name would nowadays be recognised by none but a few diehard film aficionados (of which I count myself one). But does his popularity now baffle, almost a century later? Is he the ‘Bowler Cat’ craze of 1920’s cinema? I’m relieved to say no – he was a fine actor and a magnetic presence on the screen but the one thing he was missing  at this point in his career was the right vehicle. Enter Hans Bismark…

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Black and White, Drama, Imaginary French Cinema, Silent

#120 – Cuisine du Diable, La (Devil’s Kitchen, The)

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(1918, Fr, 68 min, b/w) Dir B.F. Lebo. Cast Monica Lozange, Frederico de Pascal, Andreas Levant.

A pretty standard potboiler set in the fictional Parisian district of the title and about the people who call it home, The Devil’s Kitchen would be of little interest today as a film were it not for its historical import as the first feature of future star Frederico Francis St. Stephen de Pascal Paolo, AKA Francis de Pascal, who was popularly known in his heyday as the French Firebomb. He’s got a mid-level role in this as the dashing cad who lures Monica Lozange to the titular disreputable arrondissement where her innocence can be abused by its shady residents. Her beau, played by Andreas Levant in his usual white knight role, soon springs to her rescue and comeuppance is duly dealt out. The Devil’s Kitchen was a modest hit at the time but it got de Pascal noticed and it took only two further features before his name was changed and the film industry of France had become too small for him – Hollywood beckoned with his breakout role in the 1920 epic Love in the Shadows.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Imaginary US Cinema

#119 – Ich Bin Ein Bastard

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(1985, US, 120 min) Dir Rachael Gaudi. Cast Kyle MacLachlan, Sissy Spacek, John Goodman.

Hot off I Love Japanese Punks Rachael Gaudi threw herself immediately into Ich Bin Ein Bastard after she read Michael Tool’s script on the flight home from Tokyo. “I knew I had to make it,” she said years later, “I had to because I loved it and it spoke to me, I think, about not knowing who I was but also because they hadn’t released Japanese Punks yet and I didn’t know if I was going to get the chance to direct anything even again! I didn’t know how right I would be!” Kyle MacLachlan is John F Lewis, hitching his way across the United States to Virginia in the middle of winter when he’s picked up by the Illinois roadside by Sissy Spacek’s fleeing housewife Pam. He tells Pam that he’s just found out from his dying mother that he’s the product of a one night stand with then president John F Kennedy and is travelling to Arlington Cemetery to see his supposed father’s grave. Mostly a two-hander between the two actors (with a mid-film interruption by John Goodman’s hectoring but big-hearted tyre salesman) it’s sensitively handled despite the shock-effect title and beautifully shot by Sandy Pattern.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Comedy, Imaginary British Cinema

#118 – Let’s Go Crazy

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(1962, GB, 91 min) Dir Aldous Oxbury. Cast Kenny Hettie, Charles Falder, Betty Beauchamp, Netty Potts.

In 1962 Amiable Films set up what was to be their rival to (and sponging off of) the popular Carry On series with their own shameless Let’s Go cycle of facsimile features of which Let’s Go Crazy was the first. Seeing how the Barnview “loony house” is staffed by “a right load of top totty”, local lads Marvin and Pete (Hettie and Falder) fake themselves mental to get in there with Marvin pretending that he thinks that he’s Napoleon and Pete just barking like a dog. Once inside all sorts of hilarity ensues that includes being hosed down, being given therapeutic enemas, sessions with German-accented psychologists and, eventually, electroshock therapy – all very much like if, for whatever reason, they had decided to play Shock Corridor or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for lowbrow smutty yuks. Despite the tastelessness, inept direction and, worst of all, criminal lack of jokes, Let’s Go Crazy was enough of a mid-level success for a further two films to be squeezed out before the wheels came off the whole thing for good.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms