The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

 

Director: Rafael Baledón

Screenplay: Rafael Baledón and Fernando Galiana

Cast: Rosita Arenas as Amelia, Abel Salazar as Jaime, Rita Macedo as Selma, Carlos López Moctezuma as Juan, Enrique Lucero as Dr. Daniel Jaramillo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Moody atmosphere immediately introduces you to this Mexican horror film, referring to the legend of La Llorona, a vengeful ghost who mourned the children she drowned, in a rage due to her husband's infidelity, at bodies of water whilst being a symbol of death or misfortune who hear her weeping. Be it 1933's La Llorona, or The Curse of La Llorona (2019) for the US film industry, this figure has returned over and over the decades, and here in a period drama, we immediately see an alternative take on her as an evil figure. A horse drawn carriage with two men and a young woman make the ill advised decision to drive in the middle of the night in an area where murders have been credited to a beast, and in reality, it is a knife throwing older man, with throttling hands of steel, and his mistress he works under who are the real threat. They neither waste time killing the occupants and draining all the blood from their victims.

This immediately points to a huge virtue of Rafael Baledón's film. The law are naturally concerned it is a madman without real knowledge of the culprits, whilst the film does not hide from the viewers that Aunt Selma (Rita Macedo) is the same person from this prologue, awaiting her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her, on the eve of Amelia's birthday, that naturally plays an integral part of the narrative. A piece of pure Gothic cinema, of an old mansion and a fog shrouded dark nights, it is the worst place for our lead and her husband to be, especially obvious when the mirrors are all covered up, which should be an immediate alarm bell. It is also a delight for a film not to waste time with pointless mystery - we know from get-go the place is cursed, and the greater concern is having found yourself stuck there trying to survive as her aunt wants Amelia to help resurrect the Crying Woman.

The resulting work is a haunted house in filmic form in the best of ways, cobwebbed cellars with torture devices and ghouls on pulleys charging to the camera. Cool production design is here in swathes - corpses attached to wheels of torture, rubber bats, or the cutest rats possibly seen in a horror film in the foreground even if they are meant to represent decay.  Madame Marina, the Crying Woman, is the decayed figure on the wheel of torture here, a figure who sacrificed people for magical powers and who Selma's late husband was researching. She is not even hiding to her niece Amelia that she is taken Marina's lead for power too. Obviously, this is all a metaphor for the idea of trying to cheat death and the immortality that can come from this, to cheat death by sacrificing others. It is an obvious story trope, and honestly a conservative way of seeing things, as horror over the decades has been complicated by stories, even if comedic, which offer witches to vampires to be actually nice people and potentially immortal. A much more interesting modern reading is to interpret Selma as representing a blinded devote who is trying to convince her niece to join a cult, even if it means sacrificing others and her own empathy.

There is also a literal curse where, even with the conclusion of this, the story leaves Amelia with the sense that nothing will be the same for her, adding the more tantalizing and spooky undercurrent to the plot. The set up with Amelia being convinced by Selma to help is a ghoulish mortality tale with the additional advantage that director Rafael Baledón will bring in moments to make an already sumptuous looking period horror film have memorable scenes. Be it German expressionist touches, like the night sky suddenly becoming glaring eyes when Amelia may be turning into a Crying Woman, or the flashback to Selma's past done in reverse negative images, the film is giving an incredible style to what is a rollicking spectacle. It is the kind of production with this careful sense of being well made with a sense of fun, where in that flashback we get a random wolf man in a suit, with no further context, just to add spice to the proceedings without feeling pointlessly random.

This is also factoring in that The Curse of the Crying Woman is still a gruesome film decades after its creation, such as the man left decrepit and incarcerated in a jail cell to be continually punished, only to finally get his revenge on his captor. Or dogs sent to maul police officers even if, cutely, they were clearly shot in some images encouraged to lick a glass screen which the camera is behind to represent rabid dog attacks. It still has a sickly sense of the macabre even in the non-gruesome scenes like this to its advantage. Even on a base pleasure level, with the roof literally coming down in the finale, this older film gets far more spectacle and shock into its length than films made decades later that could have the gore and perversion, but wasted time on plot padding and a lack of style, whilst this flexes its production muscles spectacularly. Its director Rafael Baledón was a veteran of countless genres - comedy to luchador films - with the advantage he had been an actor too, which allowed him to engage with his casts. He was also a prominent figure in Mexican horror cinema, and it is clear with this film alone he had the right idea of how to treat them in productions style and without losing his audience in dull exposition.

Chamber of Horrors (1966)

 

Director: Hy Averback

Screenplay: Stephen Kandel

Cast: Patrick O'Neal as Jason Cravette; Cesare Danova as Anthony Draco; Wilfrid Hyde-White as Harold Blount; Laura Devon as Marie Champlain; Patrice Wymore as Vivian; Suzy Parker as Barbara Dixon; José René Ruiz Martínez (credited as Tun Tun) as Senor Pepe De Reyes; Philip Bourneuf as Insp. Matthew Strudwick

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A failed TV pilot, based on the 1953 House of Wax with Vincent Price, this like many were salvaged for every other which were simply abandoned to be rediscovered online, to recoup the costs of having made them and at least having a final product, especially as like a few pilots over the decades of American television, this is a feature length one meant originally to introduce this premise. Many however were made into TV movies, whilst from Warner Brothers, Chamber of Horrors was re-appropriated into a theatrical film with a William Castle-like gimmick, where at four gruesome moments, a horror warning (with disregard for epilepsy) fires up with a red light flashing and a "horror horn" blaring. This also opens with a great set piece, likely a scene among a few dubbed too gruesome for the TV series to have been created, where the villain Jason Cravette, actor Patrick O'Neal playing up to Vincent Price mannerisms at points, forces a priest at gunpoint to marry him to a female corpse, the cat at the piano watching as he climbs the stairs with his bride in what is, for a sixties Warner Bros. feature, an act of wedding night necrophilia the film portrays within what they could get away with. Unlike the previous Waxworks films, Price's and the film it remade, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the wax museum owners here, alongside recreating horrifying murders for their patrons, have a moral too, as a trio of amateur sleuths happy to help the police catch potential subjects of their museum, such as our villain Cravette himself.

One is an expert and craftsman of the wax models, a charming older man played by Wilfrid Hyde-White, whilst the handsome face of the trio, played by Cesare Danova, is the ladies man who will eventually woo another important character later in the second act, a female sex worker played by Laura Devon, and then there is José René Ruiz Martínez/ Tun Tun as Senor Pepe De Reyes. Tun Tun as he was known is playing a character here that, even if he has many jokes about his height, is portrayed by an actor with dwarfism who is able to whip back the perfect one liners and is absolutely charming as their reconnaissance man. They make a legitimately great trio of male characters, actually good ones with distinct personalities, who are brought on the case of Jason Cravette by his own aunt, someone of high privilege who wants him off the street and not strangling debutants when he is not hiring women to dress as brides.

For a former TV pilot, shot on film at the time, it looks good for a period chiller set in the 19th century, one where even if the film is tamer next to others from the time, is gleefully morbid with scenes like severed hands on a tray. Honestly the only thing that has badly aged is a non-Asian actor playing a Chinese merchant for a brief scene, setting up the second act where, after being arrested and escaped the death sentence at a self inflicted cost of a hand, Cravette is provided a collection of new pointy ones including a hook and various blades to start his revenge on those who tried to execute him, with the twisted plan to construct a body from parts of law enforcement who were involved. The horror warning gimmick itself can also be argued to be a pointless inclusion, as alongside the issue of epilepsy with a flashing red light, it neither goes off a few second before the horror moment, but with enough gaps to not work "properly". It is, however, at least, a cherry on top, to what becomes compelling pulp piece which works by itself, if you really want a fully pulpy genre film which gets a lot right.

Chamber of Horrors was a one-off, which could have spawned a film franchise, juggling the suspense and light tone well here. It manages, goreless, to be legitimately creepy in its premise, as quick to capitalise on the case they are on, the wax models by the leads allow this to show the icky case in detail, including of a headless and armless body wrapped in parcel tape like a public art piece. Contrasting this is the whit, Hyde-White in particular a gleefully invested English man, wishing to separate himself from his family back home, happy to run his museum and publish books on strangulation. It is a film that I would be happy to see get a lot more love for as, for an American horror film, this is a good one from a period where, with movements in the genre coming forth from outside the United States to the independent drive-ins especially, you have something like this, despite its origins as a TV pilot for a show that never came to be, you could hold as a nice gem from mainstream Hollywood.

Two Thousand Maniacs (1964)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: Connie Mason as Terry Adams; William Kerwin as Tom White; Jeffrey Allen as Mayor Buckman; Shelby Livingston as Bea Miller; Ben Moore as Lester MacDonald; Jerome Eden as John Miller; Gary Bakeman as Rufus 'Rufe' Tate; Stanley Dyrector as Harper Alexander

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Following on from Blood Feast (1963), the most telling thing about his follow-up in the eventual gore trilogy is that Two Thousand Maniacs is how much of a step up in production this turned out to be. Set up as a group of six Northerners welcomed into a Southern town called Pleasant Valley, four in one car and a hitchhiker played by Blood Feast star William Kerwin with a female driver in another, you can tell from the get-go the budget and production of the film, even if still lower budget, was improved, taking the splatter film template Lewis created a year before and placing it within a full narrative.

The immediate thing to talk about is its theme song. Outside of its original context, it is a difficult song to digest, as its lyrics are from the perspective of Southerners threatening that "the South will rise again", an issue in the same way as a Confederate flag is because of how, to express Southern culture, unfortunately this has involved using the symbolism of the Confederates who practiced slavery. As an earworm, sung by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself as well as written by him, this makes this a guiltier issue to deal with, because it is a damn good song in terms of being stuck in the brain. In context though, it is perfect, as even if this is a splatter film first, the choice of its subject, and looking at both stereotypes of the South, and the uneasy relationship in culture between the Northern states and the South since the Civil War, is prominent and deliberate even as an exploitation film. Set in 1965 at the bicentennial of the end of the Civil War, the film is still meant to be a splatter film for entertainment at heart, but it is distinct touch from Herschell Gordon Lewis to tackle the conflicting emotions of the North and the South post-Civil War even within this film's playful tone, [Plot Spoilers] how the Pleasant Valley town is full of literal ghosts out for revenge for what Northern soldiers did to them when alive during the conflict [Spoilers End].

This is still a very goofy film, openly so with a sense of humour, for how many films has one such murder among its string of them being a game of hitting a tiny target to drop a giant rock onto someone? That or the sequence involving a very dangerous version of a barrel roll, played for sick humour as with Blood Feast and the director's other films? It still presents moments that, in context, are pretty nasty, as this feels like the cousin of Blood Feast with someone getting an arm axed off, but as with that film, it managed to be almost charming in spite of this. Unlike Blood Feast, the humour here is far less unintentional but deliberate, part of many tonal changes which transpire in just a year from the previous production. A considerable change of emphasis onto a plot, with dialogue scenes and more fleshed out characters, is found here even over some later films. The plot too, imaging the ghosts of the Confederate deciding to get their revenge on the Northern Yankees a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, is also tantalising even if this still, as an early Herschell film, a string of gore scenes first as priority. It is a loaded one, and how this bothers to even have an epilogue, where the ghosts leave to where they go to, is definitely something distinct from the director's filmography.

Out of a lot of Lewis' films, this is conventional and well put together, in that it is a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end which even people likely to be put off by his productions would appreciate. It also establishes many of his best virtues being how, when possible, he could pull resources when needed. It may seem odd not to immediately talk about the gore, but instead the music turns out to be the film's best virtue, where this is indeed a film where the virtues of the soundtrack are to be found. With talented musicians hired in the cast, playing members of the town who play jovial songs even over victims' remains being ritually barbecued, you do not expect a splatter film to be memorable for its traditional folk songs. Two Thousand Maniacs however has a ribald energy just from this music alone.

Arguably this tone could be unintentionally darker due to, unfortunately, a more complex question with depiction the South, entirely because the history of the American South and its idealised past. It is poignant here, in the slow burn ending, where the dead literally came back to haunt the modern day, which cannot be dampened even in the film of over-the-top performances and humour. Most of the cast have the right type of pulpy energy that one would like and, even if the film's structure means some not-surprising predictability in the pace, this is a film that became one of Herschell Gordon Lewis' most well regarded for a good reason. Hell, I think the knowledge of what this inspired says a lot of how well regarded the film is, that this not only inspired a 2005 remake but also the least likely band to take their name from them, 10,000 Maniacs an alternative rock band capable of very poetic songs on the likes of the In My Tribe album but still naming themselves proudly after the two thousand maniacs here. I like other, weirder films from later in the director-producer's filmography, but I see the virtues with Herschell's film here as clear as day even if there is fake blood over the skyline.

The Owl Service (1969–1970)

 

Director: Peter Plummer

Screenplay: Alan Garner

Based on the novel by Alan Garner

Cast: Dorothy Edwards as Nancy, Gillian Hills as Alison Bradley, Michael Holden as Gwyn, Francis Wallis as Roger Bradley, Raymond Llewellyn as Huw, Edwin Richfield as Clive Bradley

Ephemeral Waves

 

I think she longs for the time she was flowers on a mountain.

The Owl Service, first broadcast over eight episodes on regional Granada TV, between December 1969 and February 1970, is idiosyncratic; from the get-go, changing between strings to strange noises on the opening credits, this is an unconventional. Based on a novel by Alan Garner, adapting his own work to the production, this is a Welsh narrative explicitly evoking the stories of the Mabinogion, the earliest tome for Welsh legends, which begins in a manor home in the Welsh countryside where scratching noises in the attic lead our protagonists upstairs in their home, finding old china plates in the attic. These plates cause Alison (Gillian Hills), one of the siblings staying in the manor on vacation, to experience strange images. What this becomes, as well as a class conflict narrative, is not quite horror but a weird folk supernatural tale which fits at home with so many productions at the time, such as for children between this and Children of the Stones (1977), which were dealing with the peoples' relationship with the countryside.

Contextually, this is set around a single father Clive Bradley (Edwin Richfield) who remarried, his son Roger Bradley (Francis Wallis) and him going to the Welsh country home of the father’s new wife, a widow named Margaret who we never see, and her daughter Alison, who acquires the plates and becomes obsessed with their owl patterns. Their maid Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) has a son named Gwyn (Michael Holden) who is developing a chemistry with Alison, finding himself in a romantic triangle as, despite being new step siblings, there is a clear awkward relationship between Roger and Alison too. Their story ends up crossing paths with the tale of Blodeuwedd, a maiden created from flowers who was made for a hero but, understandably, is not impressed and falls for another man, leading to murder. Her punishment is to be turned into an owl, and the first scenes create the catalyst, the ceramic tea set with patterns which almost possess Alison, starting to create paper owls, beginning the cycle which starts to fully come to be with flashes to the cast in face paint for quick cuts and one being chased by birds.

The supernatural tone, as much due to the budgetary limitations, is at first merely implied, also psychological but as part of its tone, The Owl Service becoming more explicit in its plot with this as the episodes continues on. Time is repeated as Roger captures images on his camera mid-way through, clearly the current leads in the roles, of both a man throwing a spear, part of the legend, and of a motorbike, as the story includes Bertram, a cousin of Alison’s whose demise, by crashing his motorbike, may be part of a previous time this tale of Millennia has past. The Owl Service is as curious as my initial interest in the mini-series suggests, a whimsical fantasy tale undercut with grit, neither occult or horror but a family melodrama with implied psychosexual tension and an ending of explicit phantasmagoria as someone is about to turn into an owl unless love helps them. Recaps at the start of each episode will help a lot of viewers keep up with its plot, but at the same time, the legend in its centre keeps merely a frame for its story in terms of these young adults' anguishes and clashes, particularly Roger and Gwyn, as the later is attempting to romance someone "above his station" in Alison, part of a well-off family, much against the family itself, causing a greater schism for the legend to infect the present day.

The Owl Service as a result also becomes about class bias – where the family is English, staying in Welsh countryside, and Nancy and Gwyn are Welsh alongside the gardener Huw (Raymond Llewellyn), who seemingly lives in his own cryptic world, Nancy hating her working class roots due to a secret in her past, even threatening to pull Gwyn out of grammar school and force him to work at a Co-Op. He is later revealed to even have elocution records, because he feels even his Welsh accent is too prominent for him to get anywhere in his life, feeling he needs to speak “proper” English than with his natural accent. Barring in mind the limitations of the story – close up shoots of dialogue scenes, a serene 60s Britain with outside on-location shooting, apt for a supernatural tale where the tension already early on – The Owl Service stands out in terms of “Hauntology” where its themes of the past being vividly part of the present is found here. The elliptical nature of how the story is told, whilst likely to cause some frustrations to some viewers, is compelling when in tuned to its tone, the legend being told as much an outbreak of the emotions of these leads as it becomes real by its final episode. Able to appreciate this, I was able to find a lot in this mini-series which lived up to my expectations.

The Ghastly Ones (1968)

 

Director: Andy Milligan

Screenplay: Hal Sherwood and Andy Milligan

Cast: Veronica Radburn as Martha; Maggie Rogers as Hattie; Hal Borske as Colin Trask; Anne Linden as Vicky; Fib LaBlaque as Rich; Carol Vogel as Liz; Richard Romanus as Don; Eileen Hayes as Veronica; Don Williams as Bill; Hal Sherwood as Pastor Walter; Neil Flanagan as Dobbs; Ada McAllister as Ada; Robert Adsit as Robert

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Andy Milligan got on the Video Nasties list, and whilst with gore to be found here, you do watch The Ghastly Ones, and I find myself thinking of people who were disappointed by this, hated it, or came to this because of a cult surf-garage band named the Ghastly Ones, and see how much a farce the Video Nasties panic was. Yes, there were some extreme films in that list - the Nazisploitation genre, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - and people not used to horror films being gory would have been shocked, but with how this is matched by how more extreme Hammer films got by the seventies in their own way to match the trends, it would be like they were living in a cave. I am coming to this too with admiration for the production too, but with prior knowledge of Andy Milligan cinema as being about lengthy monologues and dialogue scenes, usually full of misanthropy, from a producer/writer/director that started in independent theatre and found that horror cinema was the best way to get to make films. Acquired taste is the appropriate word here.

Milligan has been reassessed - it helps as well a cult filmmaker, Nicolas Winding Refn, is obsessed with buying seemingly lost films and helping get them preserved - but Milligan himself is as idiosyncratic as you can get in terms of actually watching the films, low budget dramas with misanthropic views of humanity and low budgets, The Ghastly Ones set in the late 1800s where an inheritance of a deceased father naturally leads to someone picking people off. The tone is set up fully in its presentation - extreme low budget independent cinema, using what period appropriate costumes could be found, sets which masked the real world of the time, in this case filming at a home from the appropriate era on Staten Island in New York City, and a cast mainly of people who, if not prolific in small roles, only have a few usually in exploitation cinema or even in Milligan's own filmography. Milligan would attempt this in a Civil War period, only for the film never to be properly finished if thankfully made available, in House of Seven Belles (1979), and here as there he does manage to create a period horror film which is not going to be as immaculate as a higher budget period film, but let's one enter the time period with suspension of disbelief.

A will is to be confirmed at a late father's mansion, isolated on an island, where his three daughters, who had to be married first before the will could be opened, will have to stay there to complete the requests of the document and claim their rights, within three days of "sexual harmony". A threat with a dead animal left on someone's white linen offers the first warning signs harmony will not last, and for those uninitiated with Andy Milligan, as stated he really liked dialogue and to have it spoken, characters emoting their anxieties and grievances for large passages of the film. Watching said lengthy dialogue scenes, whilst enjoying them myself, does with hindsight make police prosecutors in the period when this got on the Video Nasties list look bad, the sense no one bothered to actually watch the film. It takes a long time from its opening, where a man and a woman are butchered by the titular ones, to when our leads start to be picked off themselves. Slanted camera shots and close-ups make up the look of the film, and neurosis is filtered throughout until it explodes out into actual bloodshed.

The will is how it is because the father, reflecting on his own issues with his wife, felt there was no love in their marriage; this is something which in mind to who turns out the killer, [Huge Spoiler] a daughter from another relationship who was treated like dirt and as a servant [Spoilers End], proves to be his fault as much as his wife's, for creating a literal monster who serves a human head at the dining table on a silver platter. Disabled characters are a subject in his work, whether they are dealt with well or not with hindsight; here the figure with a mind of a child among the servants on the island, Colin (Hal Borske), is definitely a sympathetic figure who is as manipulated, that despite the broadness of his performances is someone who is a real casualty among the figures who probably did deserve their fates in contrast. Among Milligan films, this becomes one of the more focused in terms of genre tropes, as a figure starts bumping people off, wearing black hooded robes and aiming pitchforks into necks, but you have a slower paced proto-slasher in many ways here where the dialogue is its central prerogative. Considering one of Milligan's visual trademarks has been to swing the camera around erratically in a violent scene, as seen here, we are dealing with a director in the fringes, pulled into the light with this film when the British video watchdogs came a knocking.

It is, for those able to pick up its vibes, the slasher/murder mystery of his career which for a pure pulp title is deliciously camp. His career can be summed up well with one of the films he made in his brief stint in my home of Britain, The Body Beneath (1970). For a prominent moment, the low budget vampire story takes a back seat to scenes of the vampires, debating whether to leave the country for bloodier pastures, factor in how drugs has made the blood supply worse and how difficult it is to get anything done due to the police out at night. The Ghastly Ones is a Ten Little Indians scenario in his career, one of his most prominently known due to its Video Nasties credits, which is just as idiosyncratic for where it tangents off into.

Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

 

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant as Elias; Marie-France Pisier as Eva; Christian Barbier as Lorentz; Charles Millot as Franck; Daniel Emilfork as policeman; Henri Lambert as police inspector; Alain Robbe-Grillet as Jean, the film director; Catherine Robbe-Grillet as Lucette

An Abstract Candidate

 

Assassins can be funny too.

Trans-Europ-Express is a meta-film, introducing three individuals - including director-writer Alain Robbe-Grillet himself and his life partner Catherine Robbe-Grillet - on the titular train line in France, imaging a film about drug smuggling which is the film we will be seeing playing out. Immediately a lark is had in imagining first a cartoonish version of this tale, with fake beards and a cartoon smoking bomb on board, but the production breaks the fourth wall constantly, alongside introducing Jean-Louis Trintignant as Elias, already in the midst of a drug smuggling plot when he briefly enters their car. Around him a story is set up, beginning with Elias getting on board with cocaine in a secret compartment in his suitcase and a book cut out to hold a pistol.

The film, more so than others from Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a flex in storytelling as a concept itself, a pulpy crime story which just happens to makes its artificiality know to the viewer throughout. Revisions to the story, trying to figure out what the tale is, happen and are usually caused by Catherine Robbe-Grillet's character making sure, as the secretary keeping audio recorded notes, that plot continuity is kept alongside the three questioning new ideas, such as considering (and rejecting) the idea to change to diamond smuggling. Plot holes are explained and they remove the cocaine on Elias' person, even completely ditching a plot thread and whole character by asking between each other why a young woman introduced onscreen would steal his suitcase in the first case for one considered twist.

It plays this narrative straight, but this game-within-a-game is compelling in itself. There is also how Elias has a fetish for bondage, seen when he hides a magazine, between a more respectable one, of female models posing tied up or wrapped in chains. This connects to Robbe-Grillet's own taste for this, but it is also part of the simulacra here too, the faking and constructing of scenarios, as he is introduced to a prominent character of Eva (Marie-France Pisier), a sex worker who he pays for a staged scenario of forced restraint and rape. That scene is going to make some viewers understandably uncomfortable, but it is all acted out as a consenting act by her and Elias, part of the games of the film as fiction as he will return to her to play out this bondage scenario.

She will play out a potential femme fatale role, as her connection to the criminal group Elias is trying to ingratiate himself within becomes more noticeable. The gang itself, playing to Alain Robbe-Grillet's films being about their stories being games or shifting in how they are staged, set out constant tests for Elias to react to, from the entire fake like of Father Petitjean the mythical drunk priest used for coding messages, to even staging fake cops apprehending him. Trans-Europ-Express is arguably one of the more accessible works for Alain Robbe-Grillet because it is a genre pastiche, which unlike Eden and After (1970) is more focused on the plot it is still undercutting. Elias' journey in the game, as it is being connected and made sense of by its creators, still becomes a crime story at heart even if the film knows it is all staged and plays to this. Even its style, the sleek cinematography by Willy Kurant, befits a pastiche of films like this from this era. Only its BDSM content really takes this to another tone, in mind to Robbe-Grillet's real life obsessions, but even this within the movie plays to the whole constructed nature. Even when this gets serious in the end, with everything closing in on Elias after he actually kills someone, the film openly undercuts this with a wink and a happy ending, reminding everyone viewing this elaborate and perfectly made film it is still a story.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Metatextual

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Devil Doll (1964)

 

Director: Lindsay Shonteff

Screenplay: Ronald Kinnoch

Based on a story by Frederick E. Smith

Cast: Bryant Haliday as The Great Vorelli; William Sylvester as Mark English; Yvonne Romain as Marianne Horn; Sandra Dorne as Magda Cardenas; Nora Nicholson as Aunt Eva; Alan Gifford as Bob Garrett; Karel Stepanek as Dr. Heller; Francis De Wolff as Dr. Keisling

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

An obscurity among British b-movies, said wicked doll is named Hugo, a figure who finds himself between transitional eras for British b-movies. Before, from the nineteen thirties on, the b-movies as they were known, the double bill with an "A-movie", were enforced by law to be created to allow the British film industry a chance from Hollywood dominating the country. By and after Devil Doll this is less of an issue, when you get into an era where, whether from America, Canada, British, Italy etc., you have the exploitation wave of usually independently made genre films that were no longer the quickie genre film but tapped into more explicit content to sell in multiple places. Hammer horror was already in full swing in 1964, and names like Norman J. Warren from British genre films will become prominent as the more lurid content also starts to creep in.

Devil Doll also follows the Great Vorelli, a mesmerist and ventriloquist who, whilst performing at night, is also an evil man who wishes to possess a beautiful woman's mind, part of a story you could adapt in the nineteen thirties but absolutely shows the streak of more salacious content starting to be acceptable. Obviously, with its premise, Hugo a ventriloquist doll of Vorelli's which has a mind of its own, there is a lineage that causes some to instantly think of will instantly think of Dead of Night (1945). The segment from this legendary anthology tale from Ealing Studios which has had the iconic power was also about a ventriloquist, played by Michael Redgrave who finds himself psychologically at war with his own doll for his mind. There were stories about ventriloquists before that film, and dolls have always been a source of fascination over the years for their uncanny appearance. Hugo is suitably creepy, though he stands out as he is able to walk independently of Vorelli, clearly a sentient figure whose relationship with Vorelli is hostile as a working duo. Michael Redgrave was never threatened with a knife mid-performance at a charity dinner party for example.

Devil Doll is pure pulp - esoteric powers from non-Western spirituality is evoked, the ability to transfer souls, and Vorelli wishing to hypnotise and control a beautiful and wealthy young woman linked to Mark English (William Sylvester), an American journalist whose scepticism changes to trying to learn of Vorelli's past to save the woman of his life. Credit to this film, produced by Lindsay Shonteff, it is at least a solid production, absolutely interesting as a genre film, working around its clear limited budget and embracing the environment of mid-sixties Britain even if the film's plot is fantastical and even Gothic in tone at times. Even when they need to cheat and depict going to Germany on the hunt for Vorelli's past, the world of small apartments and performance halls helps prevent this film stretching credibility. There is one curious piece to the film's history, knowing that Sidney J. Furie was originally meant to helm Devil Doll. Furie jumped ship to another film, Swingers’ Paradise (1964), with pop icon Cliff Richards¹, and then would go on to The Ipcress File (1965) a year later, a significant film for many from British cinema at the time. It presents a curious alternative timeline if he had not switched from Devil Doll, though I come to this with the sense this film would have likely not changed as much in the final film we got.

This is also fascinating for what is already mentioned, of how this is at a fascinating turn in British genre cinema. The tale could have been told in a thirties film, but alongside seeing Britain in the mid-sixties, which is compelling for me, you also get the inklings of the later exploitation films, including the fact that there were two cuts, a British censored release and a racier export cut¹. There is the creepy aspect that Vorelli, alongside wishing to marry her and bump her off for her money, hypnotises the female lead and clearly seduces her against her will, alongside the eroticism of Vorelli's female assistant, an older woman who is a lover realising she is being spurned. The export cut had greatly more explicit material, and there is the creep towards more violent and sexually explicit material which would become as much an issue in British genre cinema. We would eventually make some sleazy productions, and more adult genre films in their themes and content, making Devil Doll interesting in how a scene of an undressed woman in bed, being set up by Hugo with a knife, shows the eventually ease of restrictions in British cinema.

It is worth seeing, a film I am surprised is less freely available in its homeland, considering that least in my country of Britain, a resurgence of interest over decades has lead to films like this being available even on basic DVD releases. It is worth experience in terms of a b-movie which does not stretch itself and make mistakes, and Bryant Haliday makes a compelling villainous lead. Working through in a slew of British horror films, he is one of the best things about this film, and he is also fascinating for the least expected thing I thought I would learn of with Devil Doll. That being how, alongside being great in this film, Haliday with Cyrus Harvey, Jr. founded Janus Films in 1956, the legendary American distributor of legendary films in art and world cinema, from Akira Kurosawa to Ingmar Bergman. Considering the ties that company has with the Criterion Collection, and how Janus even in the current day is held in such importance for these films staying in the public eye, it is beautiful that this vital organisation has this curious real life link. That, befitting cinema as a medium, one of its founders was clearly game arguing with a sentient and hostile ventriloquist dummy in a horror film. It is worthy, even with a non-alcoholic drink, to raise a toast to Bryant Haliday and the film itself for that reason let alone its own virtues.

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1) Hugo is No Dummy, written for Cinema Sojourns and published on October 28th 2021.

Half A Man (1966)

 

a.k.a. Un Uomo a meta

Director: Vittorio De Seta

Screenplay: Vittorio De Seta, Fabio Carpi and Vera Gherarducci

Cast: Jacques Perrin as Michele; Lea Padovani as Madre di Michele; Gianni Garko as Fratello di Michele; Ilaria Occhini as Elena; Rosemary Dexter as Marina; Pier Paolo Capponi as Ugo; Francesca De Seta as Simonetta

An Abstract Candidate

 

A man in a suit, with a briefcase, is laid down in the grass of a recreational park. With psychological issues coming forward, he asks why he is there, beginning a trawl through past traumas. They involve his family and a potential love that reveals the isolation that he is in within his mind as well as to others. Halfway through the film, after seeing only fragments, we see how he became who is he is fully.

Vittorio De Seta is an Italian film maker I was introduced to when not as readily available as all filmmakers should be. De Seta is interesting in how, out of his films I have seen, Half a Man was an outlier for his career. A large portion of his legacy is not feature length or fiction, but a series of short documentaries christened the ten films of “The Lost World”, made in southern Italy and Sardinia between 1954 and 1959, and connect to his debut theatrical length film Bandits of Orgosolo (1961). Half a Man is a curious production for De Seta in hindsight, an abstract film which has such a drastic change of pace in his filmmaking history from before, something which does not stay to the legacy of a neo-realist whose career has been beforehand documenting the likes of fishermen in his homeland. As one would hope, however, the outlier for a director is fascinating and this particular case is special, fully investing into how these types of films are still personal for their creators, De Seta producing it, but with an exceptional final result here.  

The film plays off with a languid tone as the viewer is drip fed new memories. Shot in black and white, it has a woozy poetic tone as it shifts between what is imagined and what is actually happening, and even as a film I have had to see in digitized rips over the years, i.e. unavailable with a print version which was not great, it is all deliberate and exceptional to see. The plot as it is becomes very simple when put together – with neurosis over a women in his life named Elena, our lead Michele (Jacques Perrin) has been placed in a mental health clinic for the eventual breakdown, caused when there was another man in her life and an ill advised yacht trip lead to him committing violent act with an implement through a bare foot. Michele’s health issues stem from his youth before, with his domineering mother and his older popular brother who was a war hero, the film connected to World War II with how the older brother’s standing is greater fighting for his country whilst Michele stayed at home.  Michele, who barely talks, has struggled with more than one woman he has been attracted to his whole life, and that in itself has factored into the many weights on his mind.

It is clear, as De Seta’s documentaries were as natural to their subjects as possible, that he wanted to make a film that is intentionally alien in presentation, with slow motion and slow paced editing to create a dramatic effect. The sense of a documentary filmmaker is making the film is clear by how he makes sure the scenes do not feel artificial but environments and moments you are drawn into. It is however also clear, in how the film is shot, that he is cutting loose, to use a blunt point, with a tone and style to match the absolute ill ease on hand, most shots insanely striking and the mood at ill-ease. Everything is amiss, with sexual repression involved, the dominating presence of Christianity, by way of how his mother welds it, enforced when she reprimands him for perceived lustful acts with a woman he is smitten for. It even gets into something more uncomfortable by, in one scene, having this woman of his then-dreams replaced on a swing near him with a twelve year old girl. There is also how children in this tale, having to live in a place where children are being cared for by a German maid under his mother’s watchful eye, are figures he is fascinated by, with no hidden sinister nature to his gaze, but they themselves unsettling in their appearance with how the film shots them in context. For all their innocence too, these child characters are also shown to be world weary as they talk among themselves of how initially he is being lead along by the woman, from a well off family, who has had to taken shelter in their place mid-war.

Ennio Morricone, able to shift into varying types of Italian cinema, contributes one of his most avant-garde scores to fit the nature of the film, drones and atmospheric sounds that adds to the sense the film is from the main character's self-analysing mind. This is just one of the many likely unknown to people considering how prolific the legendary composer was and, having fallen under his spell for his incredible work with Sergio Leone’s westerns, it rewards me the more I see of his career in cinema how Morricone could vary himself between giallo thrillers to contributing these abstract scores through his filmography.

The central drama itself is immensely engaging. At times even unable to say a word, the protagonist Michele is literally half a man, the favourite of the father who is not there, hated by his mother, the past revealed to the viewer showing that he is damaged by his upbringing but as much the result of who he is as a person since he was born, alien to the world. His horror, as we see the images in an unsettling amount of slow motion, of the act of hunting birds for sport with the family, emphasises that he is disconnected to his own lineage and isolated. The characterisation has been seen before in many other films - of the mother disappointed in her son, the superior older brother, the distant and antisocial younger son - but the tone of the film gives the drama more effect because the abstract tone forces you to engage with the drama more when it is finally given to you. After abrupt images of birds falling out the sky in slow motion are first seen, the original context of such images later makes them even more striking when tied to a key point in the character's memories. It is a shame the film is as obscure as it has felt for me, as this fascinates as De Seta, gaining his acclaim for his work in documentary, committed as much to this project he helped co-write, showing his voice was as committed to a project entirely outside his work from before. What he makes, fully feeling like the logical progression of how the vastness of a novel can be interpreted in the medium of cinema by the latter’s techniques, is the kind of intense, minimalist drama comparable to Michelangelo Antonioni, that is far more rewarding in that it makes the route of the truths as rewarding as the reasons behind the characters themselves.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychodrama

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Made in U.S.A (1966)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Anna Karina as Paula Nelson; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Donald Siegel; László Szabó as Richard Widmark; Ernest Menzer as Edgar Typhus; Kyôko Kosaka as Doris Mizoguchi; Yves Afonso as David Goodis; Sylvain Godet as Robert MacNamara; Jean-Claude Bouillon as Inspector Aldrich

An Abstract List Candidate

 

It’s like being in a Disney film starring Humphrey Bogart

The last Jean-Luc Godard film starring Anna Karina is a bright pop art crime pastiche, making this known just from the outset. Karina is in a checkered primary colored knit dress, taking out a diminutive man in her hotel room with a shoe; his unconscious form is left with his younger male relative and his girlfriend, the prone form laid in the middle of the bed as a typical Godardian conversation transpires around him. Looking for the murderer of Richard P…, the man Karina’s Paula was close to, Made in U.S.A. is however also stepped in melancholia. It was made on request of a friend of Godard’s, long-term producer Georges de Beauregard¹, but for me from the context of all films having a point eventually in the end, Made in U.S.A. was always a significant film, not the one which never got even a USA premiere until 2009², in how this would mark how the marriage of Godard and Karina would end, this would be her last film with him, and politics are unavoidable. In among its bright colours and the closing aesthetic of the later sixties is however around the auteur’s world absorbing the political world around them, even seen in how, in a fake out against Paula in a doctor’s office, she uncovers a fake skeleton wrapped in bandages and fake blood which befits the motifs of war and violence referred to over and over, including people being tortured off screen for information.

It marks a goodbye to two collaborators who were intertwined at the time, but in 1967 we would also see Week End, Godard proclaiming his career dead, and marking the end of his most well known era of cinema for more “difficult” films. Watching Made in U.S.A., marked as well by Jean-Luc Godard’s passing in 2022, his films even when he was “popular” in the French New Wave make that fame a weird lightning in a bottle moment for a director, at the right time, which always was unconventional. The title Made in U.S.A. is clearly fed on old American pulp with Karina as the sleuth figure, as much as pastiche French crime films, but most of this film is a series of sketches, wrapped around a narrative, with a lot of Godardian monologues. Many are clearly from him speaking through his characters, on the climate of politics as much as the past and future, the socialist left wing and the authoritarian right wing central here. His relationship with other cinema – the pastiches to Quentin Tarantino referencing Bande à part (1964) even for the name of a VHS publishing arm – really becomes curious when, digging into his career, Godard was from day one was undercutting his work. Passages here are close to the kind of non-narrative tangents of independent dramas and comedies, such following a male patron viewing the world in a bar as the counter kicking Katrina than visa-versa. Where this becomes marks his later “difficult” films is how more and more the political and sociological concerns are impossible to ignore.

The actual plot, splice and obfuscated here, is explicitly referring to Mehdi Ben Barka, the bright colours hiding a really dark and very real incident in its pastiche form. A left-wing Moroccan politician, Barka vanished in Paris in October 1965³, in which it was learnt the French police force were involved in helping Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel,  by making Barka “disappear”¹. Whilst it could be seen in bad taste to have this in context as the film’s template, especially as this was made only a year later from the disappearance, the film is not avoiding the real life politics it is made within, as Godard’s cinema could not avoid them by this point. The film, without any context of this, is a film noir tale re-imagined – the Walt Disney film with Humphrey Bogart and politics to smash together two different pieces of Paula’s narration – through a mess of intrigue and backstabbing, still political in how it deals corruption, how Richard P…., heard in voiceover only, is a victim of a conspiracy to silence him. Stills from American film noir representing his death, and it befits a film touching on a real conspiracy that this is how cinema and reality intermingle.

Whilst he praised Monogram Pictures in Breathless (1960), Godard also name checks literature and classical music in his work, and the cocktail here contrasting the encroaching political strife of the world ahead, reference to war throughout, against the luster of pinball machines befits this complete disregard between what is low and high brow subjects. The film, not withstanding one “Chinese” eye movement which has not aged well, does feel ageless elsewhere, a snapshot of the era where Godard was using his experimental style beyond just narrative to outside stories. This is also at the time when Godard got colour film in his hands and, undeniably, this alongside Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Week End emblazoned it in an incredible glow even for one of his more melancholic works. With how well composed this film is even among strong colour films from Godard in just this tiny window of his career, red as a colour looks entirely of Godard’s here with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and that it is contrasted with the banal “real” France, of urban gas stations and apartments, does emphasis this aesthetic beautifully. Even here in the film’s melancholia, right down to Katrina’s blue eye shadow, the film can still have elegance to it, openly playing to comic book and pulp tropes, even stylistic ticks in a Batman-like sound effect onscreen for someone being knocked out at one point. Even when it stops for an extended Marianne Faithful cameo where the sense of sadness starts to rear its head, this film is thinking with its style and composition to a level that is unparallel, no longer the freeness of Breathless’s energy but thinking of how to look with meaning, something really important when Godard, even alienating his audiences, came to his later films.

When a character says Dickens and Melville were better than the search for truth, that rings as Godard himself speaking as he yet still embraced the trends of the time, something you realize when other members of the French New Wave were as much interested in pop culture as they were high minded, such as when Alain Resnais nearly collaborated with Marvel Comic’s Stan Lee⁴, or when decades later Chris Marker embraced Second Life⁵, an online multiplayer platform, for a virtual identity and to do interviews with the public from⁵. Whilst politics came to many of these directors from this movement, Godard was heavily affected by them, far from out of place here as a mere joke about having goons named Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara is contrasted by how, in its narrative about trying to find out what caused Richard P…’s death, and the political conspiracy behind it, Paula will still be affected by the emotional journey of the answer even if played as a jaunt at times. It feels, though she stands tall in the end, Paula feels desensitized, as with the sense Godard became. Despite a sweet final monologue between her and a male character that fascism will have to fade out as surfing and rock music does, it comes in mind that this would lead into the notorious Dziga-Vertov Group era of Godard’s career, where whether he succeeded or not, and at times even crossed the line by documenting how to create bombs in one of the films, it came apparent for him that more was required for him as a creator politically than he ever did before.

Made in U.S.A still has a lot of playful to it – the character of Richard with his unfinished novel, or Jean-Pierre Léaud playing a buffoonish goon revealed to deserve a gunshot for his troubles – but as the central plot involves past political campaigns, even the final monologue states how the old versions of left and right wing politics were not enough. As you see as Godard and Karina departed, so would Godard begin to change. The 1968 Cannes Film Festival, where he and François Truffaut led protests to shut the festival down in mind to protests transpiring at the same time in France⁶, would come as would Week End, and Godard would shift styles. The film, if marking close to the end of this period with other films up to Week End, does still have its frolicking experimentation, this passage where Godard was allowed to be experimental and playful all whilst seen as a huge figure at the period. Again, it is strange in a great way he was able to make films like this, and was seen as a sellable figure, but that was for the better. It also means that this does not feel like a “small” film despite the circumstances of its creation, as important and idiosyncratic as the others from the period, and full of its own creative virtues.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) For Nick, Sam, Nixon and Karina: Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In U.S.A, written by Adam Bat for Medium.com and published on November 13th 2012.

2) Made in U.S.A. – Godard spilt the beans on politics and atrocity, written by Peter Hulm and published by Global Geneva on December 3rd 2019.

3) France accused 44 years on over Moroccan's vanishing, written by Lizzy Davies for The Guardian and published on October 29th 2009.

4) Marvel mon amour: Stan Lee and Alain Resnais’s Unmade Monster Movie, from Criterion Channel, released February 26th 2018.

5) Chris Marker’s Second Life, published for The Criterion Collection on May 13th 2009.

6) Cannes 1968: The Year Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut Led Protests That Shut Down The Festival, written by Damon Wise and published by Deadline on May 18th 2018.