Tag Archives: Culture

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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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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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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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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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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Drama, Imaginary German Cinema

#117 – Pass into Heaven’s Arms, The

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(1976, WGer, 100 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Harvey Keitel, Isabelle Adjani.

Tough American mountaineer Jack Maggit (Keitel) has secured permission to enter China to search the Himalayan Mountains for the fabled valley of Pannak Coor, the mystical opening into the earth that eluded his famed explorer father, eventually driving him mad. Maggit sees this as his last best chance of wresting his family’s name from his father and securing himself a lasting legacy. Desperate to claim the glory for himself alone he permits only his wife Alison (Adjani) to come with him and document the trip. This set up takes all of five minutes at the film’s head with lots of methody shouting in a New York apartment before they leave, slamming the door and the film cuts to the Tibetan plateau where the echo of the slamming door melts into the sound of the wind as the two distant specks that are Jack and Alison are dwarfed by the mountains around them. It’s odd though, for Sacher, as the start of the film is much more like what one would expect from the director – enclosed spaces and lots of acting – and the rest of the film is altogether more sweeping, epic and visual than is common in his oeuvre. That’s not to say that it doesn’t work and that there aren’t a couple of scenes of intense emotion (and shouting) to be had either because it does work and there are plenty of acting moments for Keitel to chew on too. The film’s ending is another story completely, turning from a David Lean film into a Alejandro Jodorowski one when the valley is found and visions of inverted rainbows and glowing green spider webs that bind the world start flying about.

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Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#116 – Love is the Death

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(1990, Fr, 94 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Amanda Pan, Joseph DiMatt, Jean Fillet.

When a director steps away from the camera for years, maybe decades, it can’t help but induce longing in their fans. Will they ever come back? What kind of films will they make if they do? News of projects possibly incoming, possibly abandoned, float to the surface every once in a while and the appetite is whetted once again. Generally – not always but generally – when a long MIA director returns to the fray it’s a disappointment. Alas it is my sad duty to reveal that Catherine Dominique’s energence from obsurity is exactly that – a disappointment. I’m not going to even bother with a synopsis or even to deliniate the disappointments that litter the film merely to say that the decade she spent away from the camera living did much to dull her once unimpeachable instincts with the resulting film almost indistinguishable from the standard straight to video softcore product. At a recent retrospective Catherine herself was sanguine about this, her last film to date: “Maybe one day I will try I again, who knows? I remember halfway through this, you know, and I look across at everyone working away, so serious, and I think to myself – who gives a fuck? Not to offend to anybody but I thought, well, that I’d said all that I needed to say and that was that.”

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Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#115 – Falling Blossom

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(1981, Fr, 101 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Allegra Biscotti, Serge de Foy, Jean Fillet.

The peak of the latter half of Dominique’s career and the last film she would make until 1990’s Love is the Death, Falling Blossom would also, if you removed all of the sex (which, sensitively handled and beautifully shot though it might be, is still pretty filthy), be a perfectly heartbreaking coming of age story. Allegra Biscotti, here in her first film role, confirms Dominique’s unerring eye for a beautiful lead actress as the titular Blossom, growing up in her family’s country house in the French countryside of the 1930’s. She becomes besotted with a local artist called Phillipe (de Foy, of Claude Claude fame) and through a campaign of borderline stalking manages to snare him, the two of them falling into passionate love over the course of this one hot, sweaty summer. Alas once summer is done Blossom must return to the city and Phillipe, staying behind, gives in to the ghosts of the old war he fought not so long ago while simultaneously fighting the premonitions of a new one looming on the horizon. Everything came together for Dominique here, perhaps now that the greater excesses of her work have been purged. Not that she would agree: “This is me,” she has said, “And so is that. There is no difference.”

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms