Category Archives: Imaginary US Cinema

Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema, Musical

#223 – Ladies on Parade

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(1958, US, 93 min) Dir Blake Edwards. Cast Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Martha Hyer, Norma Varden

Dean Martin and Tony Curtis are a pair of big gambling, swinging bachelors who elect to skip town ahead of their debts on a transatlantic cruiser with the scheme of hitting the tables of the French Riviera and winning big to pay back their debts. Also on board, luckily for them, are the American contenders for the International Lady competition. Amourous highjinks ensue with the two men trying their best to woo under the nose of the ladies chaperone (Varden). Of course despite having a boatload of beauties to choose from, the two men inevitably fall for the same woman – the morally upright and untouchable Patricia Lewis (Hyer). Further highjinks ensue. A candy-coloured comedy which lets up it’s breakneck pace only for a couple numbers from Dino. Martin and Curtis make a fine double act too, full of genuine cameraderie. The screwball finale in the Casino Magnifique where the two men try to make their winnings while constantly running upstairs to compete for Patricia’s affections as she competes for the role of Queen International Lady is a classic.

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Black and White, Horror, Imaginary US Cinema, Science Fiction

#222 – Man-Ant, The

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(1947, US, 73 min, b/w) Dir Ray McCarey. Cast George Brent, Boris Karloff, Anna Lee.

Due to be Val Lewton’s next film for RKO following Beldlam with pre-production completed by him and his regular collaborator Mark Robson, it was picked up by B director McCarey (with this his last picture before his death the following year) following Lewton’s dismissal from the studio. While not up to the standard of Lewton’s other RKO productions such as Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie it’s still a fun addition to the studio’s repetoir of the fantastic. Brent plays one Professor Radley Hammond whose courtship of Dolores Pearson (Lee) brings the ire of her father, the well-regarded but undeniably mad scientist Dr Lawrence Pearson (Karloff). Dr Pearson reacts to the news of their engagement in the manner one would expect of an unhinged man of science – he slips the prospective groom one of his experimental formulas in his celebratory drink which shrinks the unfortunate man down to the size of, you guessed it, an ant. Cue lots of fantastically huge props and a great chase scene involving the fleeing miniature man and an enraged household cat. Good fun, like I say, though one can’t help but wonder what the finished product would have been like had Lewton and Robson been able to complete it themselves – surely a great more vim would have been instilled into proceedings, especially in a baggy first half.

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Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#221 – Wichita

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(1987, US, 104 min) Dir Gary Schmaltzer. Cast Tom Hanks.

Before he was stranded alone on an island in Castaway a pre-America’s Everyman/modern day Jimmy Stewart Tom Hanks was stranded alone in a new house in Wichita, a film probably best remembered for its TV ad campaign – a dark screen with someone whispering, with increasing urgency, “Wichita! Wichita!! Wichita!!!” followed by a shot of Hanks’ terrified face. Here he is Jim Grady, loving husband and father, whose family are moving to a new house in – yes, you guessed it – Wichita, Kansas. While his wife stays in New York with the kids packing up their things he’s in the new place overseeing the repairs. As the film starts he’s waving goodbye to the workmen leaving him in the house with just the family dog for company. He cracks open a beer and heats a tin of beans for dinner with the sun going down outside the window, talking away to Jake the dog the whole time in a terrifically funny and sustained one-sided conversation. That’s when the noises start and the light hearted banter ends. Is it an intruder? Are there supernatural secrets to this old house? The film keeps the viewers guessing an admirably long time. It’s a bit of an oddity for Hanks, sandwiched as it was between Dragnet and Big, though it nonetheless shows his serious acting chops being fleshed out in anticipation of later dramatic fare and in fact a late scene in the film in which he breaks down to a police officer is eerily prescient of the final scene in 2013’s Captain Philips.

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Horror, Imaginary US Cinema, Thriller

#220 – Night Driving

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(1978, US, 111 min) Dir Jack Blackstaff. Cast Omar Sharif.

Northern Irish director Blackstaff elected to follow the Death Wish bandwagon jumping of Anvil Strikes! with Night Driving, seemingly designed by the producers to race the same year’s Convoy to theatres. Apparently uninterested in the plot of their film however, so long as it had trucks and CB lingo in it, they were presented with this supernatural number, surely the strangest entry in Omar Sharif’s CV and atypical of Blackstaff’s usual work. Sharif plays a cross-country trucker by the name of Joe Waylon and as the name might suggest the subject of his nationality and race are never mentioned – so far as the film’s concerned Sharif’s just another red-blooded American trucker and I’m not sure this is progressive or of Blackstaff couldn’t be bothered with a rewrite. Anyway – he’s pulling an all-nighter to get to the west coast through the Nevada hills when he’s cut off by another truck, all black and driving hell for leather with no lights on. In no time it’s vanished into the dark. Joe pulls in at the next stop and is greeted icily when he mentions this reckless driver. Perturbed, he carries on only to find that wherever he goes it seems he can see the black truck always up ahead and just out of reach. He races on, ever faster, trying to catch it. A deeply odd film that’s a strange blend of the existential road movie like of Two Lane Blacktop or Vanishing Point and the supernatural. Despite the potential for ridiculousness (and a generous frame of mind helps when watching) a committed performance from Sharif makes a little go a long way.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary US Cinema

#218 – Christmas is About Jesus

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(2014, US, 92 min) Dir Raoul Acton. Cast Jimmy Grits, Feluza Marks, Mark Yorker-Clipse.

Humourless polemic masquerading as a cack-handed action film (and entertainingly advertised, as per the director, as “An Acton Film”) memorably described by reviewer Pan Nicholls as “Taken for Christ”. The time is now and Leo Clay (Grits) has returned from defending the country against the godless in the desert heat of some nameless Middle Eastern country and has decided to do something about the rising tide of atheism in the country he loves. He’s going to militarise the War Against Christmas. The fight begins at his local supermarket that won’t put up decorations for fear of offending the non-Christians. Now, I don’t know where in the world this shop is since I’ve never been in a shop at Christmas that isn’t floor to ceiling with festive tat, blaring seasonal music and slathered with more tinsel and lights than two sane eyes can cope with. But I digress – the determined Clay has soon taken his message all the way to the top of the liberal media’s ivory tower where he can shoot at the hand that pulls the puppet strings and strike a blow at the heart of the Global Conspiracy. One gets the idea that the script was written in all caps. Terribly shot, scored, acted and not very violent, it will no doubt entertain the similarly deluded but everyone else will leave bored and/or angry.

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Black and White, Imaginary US Cinema, Science Fiction, Silent

#216 – Action Dreaming

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(1910, GB, 14 min, b/w) Dir James Gilroy Munce. Cast Unknown.

Possibly the craziest, most ahead of its time and influential fourteen minutes of early cinema as film pioneer James Gilroy Munce corrals every optical trick available to him and invents a few more for this mostly narrativeless explosion of invention. Now little seen (and only now available for viewing in the Munce museum in Colorado) it spent a good twenty years following its production travelling with Munce or one of his trusted associates to every corner of the United States with his other films, enrapturing audiences wherever it went. No doubt some of the future titans of SFX saw it on this run and, inspired by shots such as the lead character – usually referred to as The Dreamer – leaping to the moon, went on to replicate them in their own features in later life. Cooper and Schoedsack, it is said, were inspired by the Dreamer’s wrestling with a sea colossus (having first swollen to match it in size) to realise King Kong themselves in 1933. To any student of film history, afficianado of the medium’s early years or even the mere fan a pilgrimage to Colorado’s to view this relic of enterprise and inspiration is an absolute must.

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Crime, Detective, Drama, Imaginary US Cinema

#211 – Strip, The

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(1974, US, 118 min) Dir Tom Gries. Cast Robert Duvall, Jennifer O’Neill, John Saxon.

California, October 1969. The paranoiac pall from the Tate-La Bianca killings hangs over the city. Private investigator Tom Beckett (Duvall) is hired by an old Korean War buddy to track down his missing daughter Sally. Fifteen years old. Last place seen: the Sunset Strip. Tom takes to the strip each night, pounding the streets, bugging each and every freak and drop out until he meets Cat (O’Neill). She knows Sally, recognises the picture. Saw her at a party in a house up in the hills. An abandoned mansion. It was too much of a dark scene for Cat – all kinds of sick sex rituals and power trips. People have been telling stories about this gang, roaming the streets in a fleet of Beetles, picking up ‘strays’. Word is that they were in on the killings up in the hills, they just didn’t get caught. She takes him to this house, the abandoned mansion. There are kids there with scared eyes. They tell stories that make no sense. About a ranch out in the desert, underground bunkers and mass graves. Tom and Cat investigate… A tense and moody film fantastically shot all at night by Lucien Ballard with a stand out performance from Duvall like a clenched, sweaty fist. Director Gries, incidentally, would go on to shoot the 1976 TV film of Helter Skelter which notoriously shot the Tate-La Bianca murders at the actual crime scene.

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Art Film, Imaginary US Cinema

#210 – King Eye

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(1968, US, 122 min) Dir John Alpha. Cast Johnny Spigott, Dean Martin, Mia Farrow, Mae West, Olivia Bream.

Legend has it that psychedelic freak-out King Eye was conceived at a LSD party when legendary studio producer Pat Wagner, then 86, met young freak John Alpha (real name Casanova Berlardinelli), expert party-surfer and professional bullshitter. After a long night crawling on the floor of the universe the two of them bonded hard with Wagner going so far as to employ Alpha as a producer with King Eye, which they had plotted during the consciousness raising blow out, as their first feature. Alpha himself directed and with Wagner’s help cast a slew of big names all desperate to connect with the younger generation by starring in a hip epic. The story was that there was no story, instead two hours of vignettes were produced, some linked and some not, intercut with manic collages of Vietnam War footage, American football games and advertising. Halfway through the film its ostensible lead gets turned into a talking dog and befriends a reanimated JFK whose burst and bloody head sickens everyone they meet. Of course it was a disaster – even in an initial screening filled with friends of the makers it flopped. Wagner’s straight compatriots were incensed at the film’s plotless madness and Alpha’s freaky pals had their vibes totally harshed by its gross violence, aggressive editing and mad lurches in tone. Cut in half it was released a decade later on late night TV where a cult audience with a stronger constitution lapped it up. For Wagner and Alpha however their film careers were over.

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Art Film, Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema, Musical

#209 – Manson!

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(1973, US, 156 min) Dir Heinz Bohnen.

Tasteless and epic Brechtian musical about the eponymous Charlie and his Family produced by the North Californian experimental theatre company Evlove as headed by the by then octogenarian Austrian-born artist and agitator Heinz Bohnen. It is essentially a filmed performance in the blank space of Smallwater High School’s football ground at night, the arc lights strong enough to bleach out the faces of the participants and, depending on their positioning, cast long black shadows across the pitch like dark fingers threading the grass. The acoustics are also terrible in such a big venue, especially with their basic sound system, but this too turns out to be a distinct advantage with the music leaking out into the night around them, making the proceedings sound as though the troupe were performing in a void or while pitching off into deep space. Despite all of this eeriness of presentation and the uncomfortable subject matter, Bohnen positioned Manson! as an old-fashioned comedy extravaganza complete with trousers falling down to the accompaniment of a slide whistle sound effect, slapstick accidents and the grisly murders for which the Family are famed recast as prolonged Keystone Kops style farce. Bohnen is ploughing the same furrow he’d been working his whole career here and his followers knew what he was getting at but, perhaps to his surprise, the outcry that greeted the film’s release reached places the plays themselves couldn’t reach and some say it helped ease him into his grave a year later when he died following a dinner of ninety-seven oysters and a whole cooked hen.

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Action/Adventure, Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#208 – Lost Generation: A Murderous Feast

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(2010, US, 135 min) Dir Jeremy Bangold. Cast Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy, Robert Pattinson, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Stewart, Marion Coitillard.

With a mega cast like this and a concept higher than high who would have thought that this franchise could have stalled? Who might have thought the paying public shy of shelling out for the adventures of modernist writers solving occult mysteries? I know – who’d of thunk it? Riding a wave of hot cash on the back of Gerard Butler starrer Frogman, Bangold winkled a cool $100 million for this and I really can’t think of money better spent. At an unspecified time in the 1920’s in Paris there has been a murder in the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. The fact that the victim, a M. Reynold Chouff, regularly paid the bar tabs of authors leads tipple hounds Joyce (Fassbender), Hemmingway (Hardy) and Fitzgerald (Pattinson) to investigate the crime with Joyce electing to begin by interrogating the cats of the bookshop murder scene (and apparently gaining testimony). Unfortunately the central trio spend most of their time in drunken speculation and are perpetually beaten in their quest for clues by the more sober triumvirate of Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas (Stewart, McCarthy and Cotillard respectively). At the end of the day all paths lead to Cthulhu (of course) and the budget starts to show itself but the wit of the slower, more character based first half never lets up. The finale, with the reveal of the dastardly Aleister Crowley (Mark Strong, obviously), set the tone for what was supposed to be a franchise and even now, five years later, there are occasional Twitter campaigns to resurrect the idea. We should forget the idea and be glad of the crazy vision that we have.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms