Little Otik (2000)

 

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Screenplay: Jan Švankmajer

Cast: Veronika Žilková as Božena Horáková, Jan Hartl as Karel Horák, Kristina Adamcová as Alžbětka, Jaroslava Kretschmerová as Alžbětka's Mother, Pavel Nový as Alžbětka's Father, Dagmar Stríbrná as Pani spravcova (the caretaker), Zdenek Kozák as Mr. Žlábek

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)/Canon Fodder

 

Jan Švankmajer’s tale of a couple who merely wanted a child, but cannot, opens with such strange images like the husband envisioning a fishmonger wrapping a baby up in newspaper outside the pregnancy clinic. Unable to have children due to medical sterility, the couple’s life takes a drastic turn when, as a sweet joke, the husband Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) finds a tree stump that looks like a child vaguely and dresses it up as one, only for Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) to literally take the carved and varnished stump as a literal child to his horror. After a contrived nine month pregnancy they fake, a be-careful-for-what-you-wish-for tale transpires when after this pregnancy the tree stump now christened Otik comes to life.

Švankmajer had nearly three decades as a stop motion animator before this film, working on shorts and even one music video for Hugh Cornwell named Another Kind of Love (1988), before he made his first theatrical film with Alice (1988), an Alice in Wonderland interpretation which is whimsical, if surreal and embraces macabre horror tropes, more so as he used real taxidermy animal and bones to create some of the denizens of his Wonderland. Švankmajer made his craft from his native Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic literally animating anything from paper furniture to paper, his later films after Little Otik going onto real cow tongues (Lunacy (2005)) to photo cutouts in Surviving Life (2010), and his work here embraces a macabre humour contrasting the tragedy that will transpire.

For the Horáks, children are what are important for their community in the apartment complex as much as they sincerely want kids, not just take the cat out on a leash for walkies. Whether a good thing or not, it is turned into an obsession that is not just that of Alžbětka (Kristina Adamcová), the one child in the complex lamenting the lack of other children, and overenthusiastic to the point of reading medical texts about sterility and “slow semen”. The set up is from a fairy tale, of the Otesánek by Karel Jaromír Erben which is retold in fairy tale illustrations animated onscreen, but it is streaked by Švankmajer as a card carrying surrealist skewering the weird ritual of proud parents and those around the Horaks who celebrate their consummation of parenthood. Alžbětka’s obsession is as an over inquisitive child, but her mother celebration of the fake pregnancy cycle in the first act is as odd when viewed from afar, as is Mr. Horák being congratulated at work with drinks. Children are a positive thing in the right context, an important moment for any parent even with adopted sons and daughters to undertake, but the ritual is seen as having existed for its own sake. With Mr. Horak’ early hallucinations of babies being everywhere before the tree stump is literally dug out, their wish for parenthood is arguably one as much pressured and forced onto people even when they wish and feel lost without this in their lives.

Švankmajer uses his career to prod at human behavior in its curiosities in the theatrical and short length films. Virile Games (1988) mocked the sport of soccer as a television event as much for an excuse for significant food consumption as much as violence, whilst Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), the theatrical film before this one, whilst sympathetic to its anthology cast was about sexual fetishes, done with the least conventional ones where his own hand crafted pieces for the film, like kitchen utensils like rolling pins fashioned to give pleasurable massages with artificial tongues, matched how all the pieces within itself showed these men and women painstakingly crafting the items and costumes needed for their elaborate sexual fantasies, even the man who dresses up as a papier-mâché bird creature to swoop on a woman who has a stand in he also built.  With Alžbětka’s father always watching adverts on TV and getting drunk constantly, or the really twisted joke you normally would never get, that the old man in the complex is a pervert eyeing up Alžbětka, you see Švankmajer turning ordinary Czech lives into his creations to scrutinize them, as he did literary sources. His obsession with food, the destructive act of eating and its strangeness, is the most prominent example of this from his entire filmography and perfect to see here, as Otik when he comes alive is very hungry and, as he grows, even the post man isn’t safe. Food has been one of Švankmajer’s obsessions for his whole career, continuing it even in one-off surreal moments here like nails being seen in a broth or a sentient breathing pancake.

This is one of his most robust narratives too, where the first act fully sets up the sick humored turn to Otik’s parents having to hide his consumed victims. Little Otik at that point definitely belongs to the horror genre among others as, stripping his food down to freshly bloodied bones by his crib, or guts and blood split on the glass of his bedroom’s windowed door, we will see Otik move from an incredible piece of stop motion magic to a giant practical suit and off-camera implications. Otik himself, let alone the rest of the animation in the film, is visibly the craft of a veteran animator (and all his collaborators on this production) who had four decades before the film to hone his skills, let alone is an acclaimed artist in his own right in various forms of materials shown in galleries over the decades after. Just Otik himself in his initial living version is the result of having to find and put together real pieces of wood visible for all the titular child’s mannerisms and facial expressions in his initial form. All the stop motion in general, whilst at this point in his theatrical career fully focused on making sure his human actors and their performances also suit, had to be painstakingly put together even for pure gags, with the knowledge Švankmajer’s trait of not using conventional items for the motion would have added new challenges for him and an animation team to work with. Even if giant Otik becomes an entity not shown fully onscreen when his parents finally lock him down in the coal cellar of the apartment complex, I see they depict his hands with real twigs that had to be painstakingly collected and likely led to multiple hands needed to accomplish the whole film.

Švankmajer is truly an artist but, whilst Alice is a masterpiece in its own right, the real turn by Conspirators of Pleasure and this film is that he fully embraced these longer films for being dramas too. Whilst Alice focused on one young girl in the lead and his stop motion, here he has a full cast and it feels he felt completely comfortable there too. Actors did exist in his short films, and one The Garden (1968) is entirely around people without animation its central focus, but you see here he found a new side to filmmaking he embraced as he made more theatrical length films which had longer stories. A corpse humour, even pure silliness, is found in the performances too to be as dynamic as the animation, the tragedy matched with the farce. He finds humour in, say, a man pretending to be the postman your child ate and post his mail deliveries at night, even if it leads to questions from far away onlookers of why the postman is late posting his mail. Or the nonchalant conversation that, if forced horrifically to cut your tree child to pieces, you can just ask your soused neighbor for his chainsaw with no questions asked.

Because of this, the story is as good, with its own twisted turns as, with the naivety of a child but her innocence causing as much harm, Alžbětka in the second half befriends Otik in his cellar confinement. Feeding the local pedophile to him is one thing the viewers will applaud, but when she has no qualms in debating to feed anyone including her family members to him, when she cannot get any food for him anymore, you see a nasty little parable about how childhood for all its innocence has a naivety which does not process the consequences of life and death. This can be revealed in as a subversion of proper etiquette but it also shows that, like with Otik himself, our perceived notion of the beautiful innocence of children is just as strange and deserves to be subverted as seen in both children we follow here, all needing to be resolved by the elderly female neighbor in the end. Tellingly the film ends before this inevitable finale to stop all this is seen onscreen, as Švankmajer has already told his parable in its fullest with the fairy tale sequences telling Karel Jaromír Erben’s original story. The parable is this strange tale of wanting a child regardless of the cost, and its sickly humored morals close us out before the unfortunately meeting of an Otik with a garden hoe because that was always inevitable, whilst the journey itself is the delirious and impressive ride we had just experienced over two hours.

Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988)

 

Director: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay: Rio Kishida

Based on the work of the Marquis de Sade

Cast: Renji Ishibashi, Seiran Li, Kôji Shimizu, Yasumi Hara, Kimiaki Makino, Kumiko Tachibana, Minori Terada and Miwako Yonezawa

Canon Fodder

 

Prosperities of Vice takes us to the Taisho era of Japan in the 1920s. A group of upper class men and one women, Sadean figures of power, are being served at a long dining table by topless, submissive female maids, and they recount their tales of sin and debauchery, be it turning a public officer's wife into a pet, or executing an innocent man as a judge and being aroused by it sexually. One of them, a nobleman calling himself a Marquis (Kôji Shimizu), runs a theatre and sets about adapting the novel Justine by his namesake the Marquis de Sade using real criminals, murderers and sex workers as the cast. It is all with the intention to show the deepest desire of people secretly to commit crime, to "teach the pleasure of vice" to audiences.

His wife, the beautiful Seiran Li, a former sex worker herself bought by him and playing the titular character, is shown mirroring Justine herself, having become a sex worker out of losing her family and being left an orphan, a real life example of the character without needing to live in a world of period appropriate French dress costumes. The Marquis however made an ill-advised decision in doing this, as he decided to cast a thief in the lead male role (Renji Ishibashi), even going as far as have him seduce and take his wife for his voyeuristic pleasures behind a peephole. The thief and wife fall in love, undercutting the ideology of vice with their true love beyond Sadean ideas. Also significant is the historical date as, with the thirties approaching, here as in real life Japan, there would be a military uprising would lead to the end of the Taisho era, and the push to a far right wing military leadership.  They would invade other countries and, leading the Pacific and Second World War's aftermaths, and would cleave through dissidents considered "anti-Japanese" to the new leaders the moment they got power.

An eighties Japanese film with a very glossy look that is unique to Japanese cinema, it is a late era Roman Porno and still as much an erotic film if undercut by its melancholic air. This is in mind to its director Akio Jissoji, whose style completely takes the period erotic drama here into a fascinating direction. He was a fascinating director in general still needing more attention given to him. With his debut This Transient Life (1970), and his other films for the Art Theatre Guild, he created very striking existential dramas, the debut itself with each image and scene playing out with continual movement of the camera or with something important and distinct in each shot. Yet he was also directing tokusatsu films and television series like for the popular Ultraman franchise. He would juggle genres and themes over the years, even adapting Edogawa Ranpo tales by the nineties, and here he presents many distinct, eye catching images and sequences, all centred around this illusion which is broken by a real murder in the theatre midway through.

The film is very subdued and is drawn back in its plotting, its sensuality and even the sense of depravity marked against its mood, which slowly re-tales Justine against the inevitable tragic end to the tale. Even in mind that the Sadean lot are not good people, the irony of their depravity to the militarisation that comes, and how its defeat radically scarred Japan literally and culturally, is not lost. There is a lot to take in that would need multiple viewings, which makes the rarity of the film more disappointing, its elusive tone pulling the plot further from being fully conveyed conventionally on purpose.

The film is more fantastical than This Transient Life, of clocks and a small cramp hideaway full of life sized mannequins. The concept of de Sade's virtues of vice are forced to be re-evaluated when a real death takes place, the real world encroaches on your desires, and someone you control goes against your wishes by falling in love. The film splits itself in the real and the abstract. The machinations of real life, seeing actors getting into costumes and rehearsing, are contrasted against the actual theatre stage. The film cuts from one time period to another, the play reflecting what is happening off the stage, and when the otherworld is brought up by the end, the theatre becomes an internal construct of the characters' minds as well.

In terms of sexuality and debauchery, it is as subdued. Baring a scene of said maids being forced to eat sea cucumbers, which turns out to be the most grotesque scene even next to all the perversions depicted, it is as subtle as its tone. It is not Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) either. It is still a very erotic film, but it conveys it through image and mood rather than actual sex even when that is shown. For a film which even has an explicit scene of necrophilia, it is depicted with a matter-of-fact eeriness which is less shock value, but portrayed through a baroque tone as a heighted dramatic denouement for some characters.  Unlike other depictions of Sade as well, it is about the ideas being conveyed through words and thought rather than the whips and chains of, say, Jess Franco's adaptations. Like This Transient Life, it matches this with a visual texture to make everything, the actors' naked bodies to the environments around them, sensual. Even when he adapted more fantastical genre work, like Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988) with its time hopping tale, including the Taisho era, of the war between Tokyo and a magician wishing to reduce it to rubble, the director was just as fascinated with the visual textures and mood of his work. Its depictions of the occult and the monstrous felt from the same director of This Transient Life, making his career directing the likes of Ultraman even more compelling to contrast to these films.

The result is very unconventional. The concepts of de Sade are placed against reality itself, of political strife and emotional strife, the Marquis and his friends as isolated in their perversions as the four leaders in Salo... while the world changes completely for them outside the buildings they are housed in. The virtues and vices cannot be easily separated as his wife proclaims at one point she is neither Justine nor the good Juliette, of the other Marquis de Sade tale that was written as a mirror, instead her own person with her own thoughts, ideas, and her own forms of virtue and perversion. The plan of the Marquis to bring the joys of vice to people through the play does not bear in mind that the people he is around already act out their own delights, and like most people, he becomes hostile to it. Despite the heavy subtext this and This Transient Life have, they are all about where people place themselves when they are separated from perceived texts and concepts, and have to think about their own existence. Mandala (1971), which could be a deeply troubling film nowadays to some to watch as it followed a religious cult who practiced rape to bring in subservient members, was a pretext for themes this film had with hindsight for me. Like the Japanese cinema and culture I have been able to view so far, it is very much an existentialism that goes as far as the soul, and does not shy away from the perverted and vulgar in answering the questions, or mixing it into "vulgar" genres like pinku films. Nikkatsu, who produced the film, abandoned the roman porno movies that kept them afloat by the time this was made. Those films are still there for me to view, but it is befitting I became aware of the one which breaks the ideas of sexuality and perverse delights down and scrutinises them.

One day, I hope this particular film gets rediscovered and brought in full restoration due to these reasons talked of in the review, a film which does scenes that are deliberately erotic even if playing with taboos, in green dream haze flashbacks having politicians' wives crawl naked with their sleek figures and black bob haircuts on chains like a pet, but contrasting it with the deconstructions of these philosophies. It contrasts them with the absurd naivety of the Marquis' last meal, starting with a mere olive stuffed into an animal carcass than insert that into more animal carcasses so that the olive itself, with the rest disposed of, takes all the succulent flavours of the earth to the sky in one single bite. Decadence is shown but with a moral knife point, where the philosophy meant to free people of organised religion, government and guilt in the West is shown here as being as complacent and as capable of being a tool for the elite to hold power against the public, eventually to be swallowed by another elite iron fist which was not complacent in real life. 

What becomes true liberation is how, in the romance in the centre of the plot even to be lost, eroticism is found even within the actresses' makeup, sensual even without the sex or nudity. The eroticism that is pure and sensual is in how much coloured gel and decor there is as well as the intimacy show, fully liberated as much as in how characters talk to each other intimately bonding as much as the sex. Dolls populate the environment and they move, opening their eyes or turning their heads. A pubescent girl doll spills from her stomach vibrant, sexually red strawberries. The artificiality of the Western European clothes in this Japanese film give as much a sense of the unnatural especially as, until we see the chaos in the real world once or twice, it is entirely closed within its own existence. It is a film which ends with unexpected half-clown makeup and dress, and feels appropriate to the tone of the work, a sense of art and pulp that sent a shiver down my spine.

The Lion Has Seven Heads (1970)

Director: Glauber Rocha

Screenplay: Glauber Rocha and Gianni Amico

Cast: Rada Rassimov as Marlene, Giulio Brogi as Pablo, Gabriele Tinti as the American Agent, Jean-Pierre Léaud as the Preacher, Reinhard Kolldehoff as the Governor, Aldo Bixio as the Mercenary

Canon Fodder

 

Shot in the Congo during a turbulent history, liberated in 1960 from Belgium, and in 1971 about to enter a dictatorship, renamed Zaire, until 1997, Lion has enough material to deal with the issues of colonialism and abused power. I will admit I was disappointed, as someone who saw Glauber Rocha's acclaimed trilogy of films in his home country of Brazil which blew me away at a younger age - Black God, White Devil (1964), Entranced Earth (1967) and Antonio das Mortes (1969). I still have admiration for a deeply flawed experiment with a noble heart, but it is flawed. Lion, originally called Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, with the title an amalgamation of languages, is a director whose country was going through a dictatorship at the time, going to an African country which suffered through colonialism from the West, and visibly seeing the parallels from two different Third World nations of the turbulence of power and control.

This is a stream of consciousness from Rocha, which feels appropriate as, with the Republic of Congo formally a colonial country, you can dissect all the history with greater ease than trying to use a regular story framework. Though the emphasis on non-local foreign actors poses one of the biggest issues with Lion, it certainly feels apt to begin with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mad priest, first introduced in a shredded and dirtied white robe, losing his mind with a wooden mallet in hand and talking of the whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations to a befuddled group of local women. Alongside imaging how fascinating his career has been, able to go from this to Jacque Rivette's Out 1 (1971) just from a couple of films in a rich decades long career, Léaud is the one figure I would have kept even if I would entire rewrite the film's structure. As the literal import of Christianity to the country and continent, he is both captivating in how he commits to the role but apt, alongside cynically being a bankable actor for a very avant-garde film, appropriate as a character to have, dealing with those who joined the colonisation of Africa as a whole continent under the belief of noble causes, only to be left deranged by the truth. There is a lot you could unpack if playing to a series of sketches as this at times, and in mind to all the themes to unpack, it feels apt to see such sketches and the liberation of this fictionalised version of Congo as a sudden cloud burst of emotions.

Rocha stages the film like series of theatrically performed images and emphasises this point - the anti-colonial protestors carrying their own that have been slain, to the white soldiers wandering to-and-fro in choreograph in a scene with guns. This is clearly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard as well, with the Dziga-Vertov Group era felt here the most, all part of movements who found narrative a way to lie and not able to carry themes of great political weight to viewers, a symbolic essay form used within them even if this one still retains plot beats to thread them. Ironically, this style is far more difficult than stories, or even surrealist subversions of narratives which still flesh out the depth of characters and/or the scenarios.  

One of the biggest issues, which Godard's Dziga-Vertov films had, were how naive and simplistic they came off being without the sense the simplicity being on purpose. With Lion set around a revolution, its leader trying to amass locals and tribes to free themselves, alongside the evil white colonialists, none of the film does not try for the complicated and difficult issues of a revolution. Central to this is instead the comically broad villains who without moustaches to twirl instead of just maniacal. They, as I will get into, still work for me as pure evil, whilst a lot of the bigger concerns is the lack of priority in the figures meant to overthrow them, including the wife of one of them Marlene (Rada Rassimov), who is there to have Rassimov be nude for large portions of the film as the whore of Babylon stand-in. There is also the Latin Revolutionary, in capitals for emphasis, which raises the issues with Lion being set in Congo but not really telling the tale of its people, as this figure becomes integral for multiple scenes, including Léaud dragging him around with the mallet, when they should have been given to other characters.

As this is directly telling you what the meaning is, you really get a very simplistic work at heart, the earnestness of Glauber Rocha accidentally using his setting as a mere pretence for a film which could have been shot anywhere. Slithers do work, and open up the idea if this had focused on the local casting, as Rocha is not a fan of peaceful revolution, a jaded man in terms of where his country of birth originally was. The closest thing to peaceful here involves making a puppet first president, which becomes one of the strongest sequences. Though he has a wonderful saxophone trio with him for speeches, this black local presidential figure is tellingly depicted having bought a new suit like an 18th century French dandy, including the white wig, as a satirical nod to the idea that anyone can be bought by the colonial invaders. The revolutionary, the local leader and not the Latin exile, has some of the more interesting filmed theatre scenes, and should have been the central focus of the whole film and scenes which are instead given to the Latin figure. Be it being circled by dissenters, or his speech to a local chief explaining his string of miseries being unfair and unnecessary, and you see here what Rocha could get into, an equivalent to the raw energy Antonio das Mortes beautifully hit in using Western tropes, but here using more theatrical avant-garde pacing instead for a change of pace. This could have been the more experimental take on revolution, but the character who should have been the hero is a minor figure in his own film, which causes immediate issues.

What this accidentally becomes is Rocha the tourist, and whilst it does involve the least expected nude crucifixion transpiring in the final scene, I think the best moments of The Lion Has Seven Heads reflect its comically evil white colonialists for what they represent, mining all the resources and eating fruit off a dead local, contrasted against the actual country and citizens. Contrasting these broad, ridiculous monsters with their over-the-top acting and exaggerations from the Western nations against the real people of the country the film was shot in, seeing the real scenes of the local tribal dance rituals, and the local women looking on in amusement at Jean-Pierre Léaud screaming at the sky performance, is some of the more striking images. They show the figures that should have been central but were marginalized, whose scenes are all serious and thoughtful in contrast to the manic lunacy of the non-Congo figures that would have made a perfect contrast. I am glad to still see Lion, and as time goes on, I hope to grow a fondness for its virtues to admire here, but it is with having to accept this felt like a production compromised by how it was put together.

First Name: Carmen (1983)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville

Loosely based on Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Cast: Maruschka Detmers as Carmen X; Jacques Bonnaffé as Joseph; Myriem Roussel as Claire; Christophe Odent as Le chef; Jean-Luc Godard as Jeannot

Canon Fodder

 

No one needs an atomic bomb. Nor a plastic cup.

Jean-Luc Godard is Mr. Jeannot, a patient stuck in a health clinic, a has-been director pretending to be sick to stay in his room on threat that he will be kicked out by the staff. "Uncle Jean" as he is explicitly called by his niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who visits, is a filmmaker who refuses to make films again, lost to his boom box matching classical piano pieces to combat sounds. Said niece Carmen, part of Godard's loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, comes to her uncle, during his stint in getting stick every week to find somewhere else to live, to ask to use his paid up place at the coast for a film production she is currently in the middle of with friends. This is however a cover, as she is part of a gang, posing as a film crew, who intend to rob a bank. The equivalent of Don José, the soldier who falls in love with Carmen from the source, is Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé), one of the bank guards there who falls in love with her mid robbery, joining her.

Godard was always unconventional. His eighties output is stranger knowing he clearly wanted to transition to experimentation post 1968, his Dziga-Vertov Group work, due to his concerns of trying to be a political filmmaker, but returned back to narrative cinema from his second "debut" Slow Motion (1980). This second "mainstream" run before he went to, arguably, the post Film Socialisme (2010) era as the elder statesman still has experiments within them, and the more I see these films, the more it becomes obvious he was still interested in narrative dramas even if he would gracefully move away from them. The thing about his films however, in the same way as with the original run of his first successes in the sixties, is how he would structurally undercut them in presentation.

First Name: Carmen is narrative drive, among films where he found narratives which he could tell, with his other concerns, which were still interested in the experimentation around the plot. This is also at the point when Anne-Marie Miéville, an important Swiss filmmaker by herself, is important to consider, meeting Godard by accounts in 1970, at the Cinémathèque Suisse, and their relationship growing further after his near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971¹. Their collaborations in the seventies into the eighties mean a lot for me in context - the Historie(s) du Cinema and post-Film Socialisme work feel indebted to their collaborations, experiments in video for television and short films sadly not readily available to see, and for the eighties films, she worked in this "mainstream" period as a screenwriter, a co-writer or here for First Name: Carmen the sole screenwriter. She would also work as an editor, and as a general collaborator, which gives her significant weight to this era of films alongside how Godard was changing in his own right too in this later period.

Here, Godard with Melville makes a narrative film but, like even his sixties output, this among the other eighties and early nineties films I have seen move like sketches and character dramas than actual plots, even when a group armed with gun abruptly storm a bank out of nowhere. That Godard has an older man sitting nonchalantly during a gun fight, reading his newspaper until he is shot, or a female cleaner left to sort out the mess with her mop, really emphasises as well how he had a tangential attitude to plot, include farcical moments like this, even if the character drama still drives this film far more than others from his output. With this central pair of Carmen and Joseph hiding out in Uncle Jean's apartment, the later falling for Carmen fully, there is still the set up of a poetic story, contrasted by scenes of a string quartet that score this narrative almost entirely outside the main narrative. This drama is sincere even if with the scenario undercut by grim and absurdist moments of humour. The central romance a tense one, effectively a more sexually frank take on his sixties films where Carman's romance with Joseph has left her precarious among her own group, he a latch-on to theirs. It is frank in how sexually explicit it is in nudity, but it is equal opportunity, Bonnaffé as much as Detmers to bravely bear all onscreen. Bonnaffé also has the most explicit moment of self touching; in fact, whilst an entirely different film in attitude, that moment does feel like it would appear in French New Extreme films decades later, a prototype more appropriately to the type of naturalism, including sexual explicitness, a director like Bruno Dumont would casually depict.

Godard is also making a film in eighties urban France, not the classic sixties France which he himself idealise with his pop art films. Neither is this the France of later productions from the nineties on with middle class characters in the narratives, but the world of gas station France with some extravagant locations just in-between a locations. Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette among others like Godard wandered into this world, and whilst elegance is here, it feels fascinating to see a film this grounded and closer to the modern day in look, despite some technology and fashion, with its idiosyncrasies like VHS tapes and shell suits just touches of the time. Godard would even explicitly touch on these subjects, in dialogue and in terms of playing with the medium, like playing with a Triple XXX sign in neon and videotape in Détective (1985), so he was more naturally suited to play with the changing France onscreen. There is a sense, honestly as I will get into later, this era feels neglected from Godard's career, because of the iconography of his sixties films was what codified what his style was for many, even parodied in the mainstream, alongside when he fully embraced colour in magnificent visual choices in films like Pierrot le Fou (1965). By the later renaissance in the 2010s, that final era before Godard's passing in 2022 was experienced in real time when he was already canonised as a filmic giant.

In contrast, something this grounded, even if of the past, feels less comparable and closer to the modern day than images from the likes of Breathless (1960), its own rich art style of naturalism constantly punctured by the experimentation. Godard's films, from the eighties within these environments, fascinate between how he stretches and kicks even against plots, wanting to clearly wanting to bend the form, and also a sense of melancholia found in certain films. This does admittedly provide his humorous side including the delight of how he would parody himself, here lovably goofy as an older befuddled man in one scene who just wanting some baked productions and a wardrobe woman to mend his coat. He is riffing on a man who exists out of time and even bumbling in-between a second fake film shoot, to kidnap a man and daughter at a casino, channelling his love of Jerry Lewis in awkward form. Even this character though has his moments of clarity and show Godard's mood from this era, the quotation opening this review his, of a man who has seen time continue, and neither likes the threat of nuclear war nor the consumerism of the time.

First Name: Carmen is almost the least experimental of a lot I have seen from the eighties period barring its use of sound. Intercutting continually to a strings quartet practicing in a room, the soundtrack is very idiosyncratic and one you would never get for a film like this in another context. The soundtrack can switch to gulls, to abrupt silence, to using Godard's beloved Beethoven but also suddenly having Tom Waits at one point, even within that scene having both Waits and strings at the same time. Here, as he would also lean on very recognisable names in his work onwards, from Bob Dylan to Scott Walker, Godard would be playing with soundtracks onwards, heavily as well showing he was good at choosing choice music cuts for whatever purpose.

In terms of the melancholia the film has, in contract to a King Lear (1987), the most infamous of his films from this run, a Shakespeare adaptation by Cannon Group not made by someone who read Shakespeare, or to actually follow the source, First Name: Carmen is a languidly paced and tragic tale of love between two people which will not come to be. He has his humour within this still as mentioned - the man spooning a jar of food, in a Mobil garage mini-market bathroom of all places, springs to mind whilst two people handcuffed together attempt to negotiate around one of them needing to pee whilst he is in the same bathroom - but this still a sombre and ultimately rewarding drama as a result. It feels a forgotten film for me, which is odd to say, felt only in how, with titles from the eighties in general, even King Lear, his output from this era is frankly maligned, Carmen not a film talked of greatly. Again, his sixties work, to be honest, casts a shadow on who he is as a film maker until Film Socialisme onwards, where his more experimental work from the 2010s has the benefit, for incredibly radical work that would be difficult to sell, of a legendary name to sell them on. This is a shame as, with the eighties films incredibly rewarding, this among them as a drama is a highlight.

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1) Love and work differently: Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema of companionship, written by Albertine Fox and published for Sight and Sound magazine, in an updated version, on June 20th 2018.

Mystery Train (1989)

 

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Masatoshi Nagase as Jun, Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, Screamin' Jay Hawkins as the Night Clerk, Cinqué Lee as the Bellboy, Jodie Markell as Sun Studio Guide, Nicoletta Braschi as Luisa, Elizabeth Bracco as Dee Dee, Sy Richardson as the Newsvendor, Tom Noonan as the Man In Diner, Joe Strummer as Johnny "Elvis", Rick Aviles as Will Robinson, Steve Buscemi as Charlie, Vondie Curtis-Hall as Ed, Tom Waits as the Radio D.J.

Canon Fodder

 

His name is Dave.

An anthology produced with backing from JVC, the Japanese electronics company did work in multiple mediums such as video games to anime, so this is not an alien concept to them alongside their main form of business, including their legacy in televisions and videotape recorders. Thankfully, among their investments was also Jim Jarmusch's 1989 tribute to Memphis and its music, the beginning of his series of anthologies over these years such as Night on Earth (1991) to compiling the Coffee and Cigarettes films started in 1986 into one film from 2003.

Mystery Train really is not a film about a dramatic plot, instead three interconnecting mood pieces, with the first absolutely setting up this greater emphasis away from dramatic tension as there is none, only the adventures of a young man and woman from Yokohama in Japan. They do argue whether Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins was better, but are a loving couple. They are tourists out of their element, star struck by the home of their favourite music, without any cheap jokes at their expense; even the later presentations of this film through Criterion went further to fix issues in the past with the subtitles for their dialogue, mostly in Japanese, which prevented viewers from knowing everything they say. They say a lot, as loving music fans who wonder the real locations of Memphis, including a confused tour of Sun Records, with a language barrier, a leather jacket between them on her, and their large red luggage case being carried by the pair on a giant wooden pole. Both of the actors, Masatoshi Nagase as Jun and Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, stand out with personality, both with prolific careers after this. There is also the added delight that, looking the part for a youthful rockabilly here or a Wong Kar-Wai protagonist, Masatoshi Nagase became grizzled as he got older and starred, in just one year, in Sion Sono's Suicide Club (2001), Gakuryū Ishii's Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), and Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera (2001), three of the most idiosyncratic Japanese filmmakers at their most idiosyncratic and interesting.

Their story is entirely about two people talking and bonding, some arguing and the cool trick of using a lighter with your feet being demonstrated. To be honest, Jarmusch's tone for many of his films, whether a good comparison for some or not, is closer to Quentin Tarantino's throughout his career, extensive conversation from characters about their obsessions, only with the emphasis on Jarmusch further from cinema to an entire spectrum of tangents, from Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes being obsessed over a Tesla Coil in Coffee and Cigarettes to Mystery Train having a tangent over one of the characters being named Will Robinson, after the Lost in Space television series, which he dismisses as dumb white people being stuck on an asteroid. Though Jarmusch has dabbled in more overt plots too - Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) - another factor to his career, unlike Tarantino, is a more warm and humane tone, where even when it comes to his horror film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), it is more about bonding over awesome old LPs and character dynamics with the horror coming unexpectedly, even as a punch line for sick humoured gags. The Limits of Control (2009), his drone metal scored assassin narrative, plays like a pastiche but not in an ironic way, and with Mystery Train, though a gun is set off at two points, it feels entirely like an empathetic ode to these characters obsessed with culture of all kinds.

Thankfully, Jarmusch has always been able to make likable characters, the first act's outsiders who go along without unnecessary contrivances against their expense. They also set up the central hub to all the scenes, as they are the first to enter the hotel everyone in the three stories reach, where you have Cinqué Lee, Spike Lee's brother, as the bellhop, and legendary proto-shock rock musician and singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, in an incredible red suit, as the hotel manager. When not eating a Japanese plum, these two are in the centre as a Greek chorus to all the other stories. This includes a grieving Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), travelling to Rome with her husband's casket, in a story where she is able to overcome this in spite of this. This involves Tom Noonan, being very creepy, talking about encountering the ghost of 1956 Elvis in the night, forced to flee him but encountering another woman lost also by herself to share a hotel room with. For the third story tension does come in, but with a comedic edge, involving Joe Strummer of The Clash, the legendary punk band. By this point, Strummer had disbanded the band in 1986 after the infamous Cut the Crap (1985) album, compelling to listen to as a strange mix of football chanting, layered audio and cheap synth beats, but understandably a misfire of big proportions even as someone who found songs likable on it. It was the ill-advised decision by Strummer to have key members of the band forced out the band, replace them and attempt to return to their roots without doing so at all. He would move onto solo projects and also start a film career, such as here or with Doctor Chance (1997) by F.J. Ossang, a French film maker whose films I wish was more readily available, where he has a small cameo talking about his gonads. Strummer is Johnny, or Elvis as everyone calls him due to a passing similarity, an English ex-pat who has lost his wife and job. Drunk, and with a loaded gun, his brother-in-law as portrayed by Steve Buscemi, continuing a career here of always getting the worst luck, having to be brought in with Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) to stop him doing mischief. "Elvis", due to one racist liquor seller later, does end up firing the gun and they find themselves hiding in the hotel as a trio, stuck talking in one of the rooms about the fact there should be a Malcolm X suite instead of Elvis photos everywhere.

Mystery Train is not a dramatic, plot driven film even by this point, and this is factoring in that the real ghost of Elvis Presley accidentally appears in a hotel room for a cameo. Mystery Train is about the characters in place, not forced to move for the sake of drama but allowed to breathe, Jarmusch liking to write extensive dialogue between them hanging out. His cinema is not as overt as Tarantino's in being post-modern or self-reflective either, instead name checking his favourite things but Jarmusch still emphasising the characters existing in the pretence of narrative structures. They are characters with suggested lives, unlike early Pulp Fiction era Tarantino where they were absolutely archetypes. Set around one specific time period, with Tom Waits as the radio announcer's voice heard through all this, Memphis itself and the cultural heritage is as much the subject, the title of the film itself a song heard in both versions by Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. A warm film, it nonetheless does also tackle some serious topics in this mood; the two covers of Mystery Train in itself two also name checks the issue of Elvis being placed as a white musician seen as appropriating black musicians' work and being easier to sell to white audiences, which is a subject of discussion alongside tensions of race occasionally raised in the film. Elvis himself is not demonised, but for a fond film, which is charming and sweet, it still nods to complexities which Jim Jarmusch has shown throughout his career, as it is using these three stories to create a work about Memphis as a place with its rich history just in terms of music, let alone the actual urban landscape as shown throughout.

Mystery Train has always been a film I admired, in mind that it is a film literally about nothing if you take a simple view of it - no consequences, even of firing a gun into someone, or two, are shown at all with an open ending to the third story. Nonetheless it does feel like an experience, lived in, enjoyed, with a few one liners which are hilarious, and it wins me over repeatedly every time I return to this film.

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Director: Akio Jissoji

Screenplay: Kaizo Hayashi

Based on the novel by Hiroshi Aramata

Cast: Kōji Takahashi as Koda Rohan; Shintarô Katsu as Eichi Shibusawa; Kyûsaku Shimada as Yasunori Kato; Mieko Harada as Keiko Tatsumiya; Jun'ichi Ishida as Yoichiro Tatsumiya (as Junichi Ishida); Haruka Sugata as Yukari Tatsumiya; Ken Teraizumi as Torahiko Terada; Bunshi Katsura Vi as Shigemaru Kuroda; Tamasaburô Bandô as Kyoka Izumi; Shirô Sano as Junichi Narumi; Katsuo Nakamura as Ogai Mori; Jô Shishido as Noritsugu Hayakawa; Hisashi Igawa as Ryokichi Tagami; Shôgo Shimada as Arata Mekata

Canon Fodder / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis came to me, and Britain, through an old Arts Magic DVD release, one of the earlier DVD distributers who brought a lot of cool stuff in the medium’s older days, some returning in Blu Ray (the Bloodthirsty trilogy of Toho Studio vampire films from the seventies like The Vampire Doll (1970)) to those sadly not (their dalliance in early polygonal 3D anime like the bizarre dystopian body horror Malice@Doll (2001)). Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis has a lot of significance as a film just by itself as a release. It is an adaptation of the first novel of Hiroshi Aramata’s series documenting the history of Japan through occultism. Aramata has been described as a polymath and the best way to some up his work with this story, all centering around a villainous magician named Yasunori Kato who attempts to destroy Tokyo over countless decades of the 20^th century, is that he is also alongside his acclaim in fantasy/science fiction literature a natural history specialist, one who brought Western texts to Japan off the back of the success of his literature, translator of fantasy novels, author and expert in a variety of areas from occultism and to iconography, and an honest-to-God candidate to that term "polymath" in his knowledge. His book franchise, which Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis begins adapting the first 1985 novel of, begins here with Kato brought to 1912 Japan, at a significant turn in the country's history to modernization in Kato's quest to resurrect Taira no Masakado, a Heian period provincial magnate and samurai, who died on March 25th 940 and famous as the leader of the first recorded uprising against the central government in Kyōto. Killed and with his head eventually finding its way to the future site of Edo, later to be Tokyo, it was buried there and is of course the central target in this film for Kato to resurrect in his goal to destroy Tokyo itself, even if Masakado himself wishes to not be resurrected and disturbed from his slumber. The legend of Masakado's head, among the details that sadly might be lost to those without knowledge brought to this tale, makes even Kato's goal to ravage Tokyo more connected to real folklore; the 1923 earthquake which is central to the film when it comes to the burning down of the finance ministry building during said earthquake in Tokyo, was blamed on Masakado¹.Alongside the decision, in 1874, of the new government officially proclaimed him an “enemy of the emperor”¹, neither did bulldozing his grave by mistake when building the finance ministry help, and by 1928, a new grave was build with even a priest called in to hold a pacification ceremony¹. Beyond even then, more incidents blamed on a curse followed, only for change to transpire in 1984 when, after public pressure, his deity status was reinstated and great care taken not to antagonize him any further².

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, if there is a big issue with the film, tries to cram so much in just over two hours of an ambitious work. As this novel series goes, it continues with Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States, as prominent character in one of the stories, a target for occult assassination, as does the controversial novelist Yukio Mishima, so Hiroshi Aramata's has so much content within itself to unpack as ambitious storytelling. For what it is worth, this does an admirable attempt in containing just a prelude to this wider novel series, contained in a worthy way, and the film is important for me too as this was my introduction to its director Akio Jissoji, who presents the fascinating and noble trait of how he could saddle art cinema and genre cinema without contradiction. He worked both with the Art Theatre Guild, a significant film production and distribution company for seminal experimental work, with the titles as deep and experimental like This Transient Life (1970), to pure genre, his legacy also encompassing his work in the tokusatsu genre with television and cinema like his collaboration in the Ultraman franchise. Even the screenwriter Kaizo Hayashi stands out; before this film, he made the truly unique film To Sleep So as to Dream (1986) as his debut, a tribute to Japanese silent cinema by way of a magical realism detective narrative.

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis is more genre leaning, but you can see a director (with his screenwriter) who fit at ease with the fantastical and the somber with this curious mix of real Japanese history attacked by demons and evil occultists, presenting the Meiji era ending in 1912 and leading to the Taishō era, a period of flourishing Western influence and big events, the construction of the first Tokyo Metro Ginza Line subway beginning in 1925, a year before the end of the Taishō era itself. The Taishō era itself, through pop culture, has become a fascinating era for me in its eventual turmoil, leading to the militarization of Japan, and its aesthetic culture, from Seijun Suzuki’s incredible trilogy of surreal films between 1980 to 1991 set in the decade, authors like Edogawa Ranpo starting their career from the era and anime series like Mononoke (2007) having a narrative arch about a cat-goblin monster terrorizing people on one of the earliest subways in Tokyo opened in the era. Even if you have no knowledge of a lot of the history or the mythology and occultism filtered through Aramata’s work, this film adaptation is rich in presentation and story.

It is visibly a big box office film from the eighties Japanese cinema era, and yet also really idiosyncratic due to its content. It finds itself between horror and supernatural period suspense, even pure body horror, contrasted by a historical drama where its biggest drama when not saving Tokyo from decimation is its growth into the 20^th century. Alongside Taira no Masakado's possible resurrection, there is also the real figure of Eiichi Shibusawa (played by Shintarô Katsu here), the father of "Japanese capitalism" in charge of the head of the Tokyo Improvement Project, bringing together a variety of specialists in different fields trying to transform Tokyo into a major metropolis with global influence. All of this is under threat if Kato, if not through the assistance of a direct descendent of Masakado, Yukari Tatsumiya, uses her daughter instead into the 1920s if need be to get his goal completed.  It does feel with hindsight a prelude to a bigger work, over other novels, but this film does not feel slight, its own fully told tell but a curious juxtaposition between conversations between higher ups about where they will take Tokyo to turn it into an influential city, and deal with the constant risk of earthquakes, contrasted with stop motion monsters and work even involving Swiss artist H. R. Giger among the great practical effects and craft on display.

The film’s escalation is pretty simple – Kato wants to reawaken the buried Masakado in the middle of Tokyo, whether he wants to be resurrected or not - and instead the film becomes a curious juxtaposition of history and occultism, where even if it based on spirits and luck, a prominent detail of the film is the theme of industrialization and indiscriminate expansion of Tokyo destroying stability if not done carefully, notable as this brings in the 1923 earthquake as caused by Kato. This is a film where real author Kōda Rohan is the protagonist, as played by Kōji Takahashi, trying to save Tokyo, and it is fascinating as a film because of these juxtapositions. There is a long scene discussing the way to evoke, even if considered to build underground, going through a tumultuous period in its history, between destruction to economic growth, immediately followed by a stop motion worm creature being forcibly removed out of a female victim from the throat, which pretty much sets up the tone.

This alternative history narrative is an acquired taste, but compelled me as a viewer, not just from all the curious details of real and reel Japanese history onscreen and behind it, including Jô Shishido, of Branded to Kill (1967) fame, playing the real life businessman Noritsugu Hayakawa, here as in real life funding the first subway, Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, that becomes a huge plot point here. How it reimaginings such an important century in world history, let alone Japanese, in all its chaos and modernization, is important even in terms of the Tokyo subway itself, seen as a huge moment for Tokyo if, in this case, its biggest threat being all the little goblin-like stop motion creatures underground. mauling the workers trying to create the tunnels. Alongside how a literal robot is required, it presents a fascinating world where occultism, including figures that specialize in lay lines, is as vital to the plot as the men and women forced to fight Kato, and how they are just among all the figures who influence this world, contrasted with real Japanese sociological history and both viewed with fascination. The occultism itself, in the world of vivid horror cinema aesthetic, is presented as vibrant and even surreal, where the production design is allowed to be as imaginative as the period setting is an attempt to bring accuracy to the time periods. H.R. Giger visibly provided work here, especially on what is effectively his take on the floating orbs of the Phantasm horror franchise, but this is also a film where a multi-limbed behemoth, in stop motion, wandered out of a Ray Harryhausen production, looking magnificent when revealed among other special and practical effects. It a spectacle film as much as with its other content, one which is finding the right foot between its genre beats and a grandeur, where Kato, through Kyusaku Shimada’s performance, is a villain but one given the cadence of a figure with menace and a justification of humanity destroying the world through their growth.

A sequel came, Tokyo: The Last War (1989), which follows in 1945 in the eve of Japan’s lost in the Pacific War with the United States, reflecting a seismic change in the country in real history, but sadly never came to the West. Doomed Megalopolis (1991-2), an animated episodic adaptation from Rintaro, a well regarded anime director who started in the beginning of the industry as we know it in the sixties, came later, readapting The Last Megalopolis in a more overtly horrific and supernatural take, and even Takashi Miike would cross paths with this franchise as, among the many tie-in and spin-offs works in cinema and in literature around Hiroshi Aramata's creations, the last novel Kato was in, Aramata's The Great Yokai War, was adapted by Miike in 2005. It also cannot be denied that the version of Yasunori Katō as shown here, with his militaristic costume including cap and cape, likely influenced the design of M. Bison/Vega, the boss antagonist character from the Street Fighter video game franchise.

Even if you the reader only know the games through Raul Julia’s portrait in the 1994 film, with the costume strikingly similar to Kato’s here, so Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis is a big work to consider. It is a novel franchise which sadly seems not to have come over to the West, in mind to how much content within it is of its own country's and Eastern Asian culture, to the point Hiroshi Aramata can be thanked for how much interest he brought to occultist folklore in his homeland, and would need a lot of explanation to Western readers. It is however novel franchise which tantalizes, as with every time I have seen this film, even if it struggles with the loftiness of cramming a huge text into one film, it still has so much to admire. Even those who helped fund the film have a huge significance in Japanese genre cinema as, for an exclamation mark, its executive producer is Takashige Ichise. He early on funded screenwriter Kaizo Hayashi's debut directorial film To Sleep So as to Dream, and worked with Brian Yuzna with American-Japanese co-productions like Crying Freeman (1995). He also produced Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998), Dark Water (2002), Takashi Shimizu's Ju-Oh: The Grudge (2002) and a lot of Japanese horror films during the early to mid-2000s boom in "J-horror" cinema coming to the West. He comes off, with an incredible and idiosyncratic list of productions even into the 2020s, as a king level figure for genre history.

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1) The curse of Masakado: why a malevolent ghost haunts Tokyo, written by Jonathan Clements for the Guardian, published 10th June 2019.

2) Taira no Masakado, written for Yokai.com, written, illustrated, and maintained by Matthew Meyer.

Number Seventeen (1932)

 

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville and Rodney Ackland

Based on the play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cast: Leon M. Lion as Ben, Anne Grey as Nora, John Stuart as Barton, Donald Calthrop as Brant, Barry Jones as Henry Doyle, Ann Casson as Rose Ackroyd, Henry Caine as Mr. Ackroyd, Garry Marsh as Sheldrake

Canon Fodder

 

Sausage. Hit him over the head with.

Number Seventeen promises a lot as an early Alfred Hitchcock film immediately, of expressionist shadows as a homeless sailor enters a house for sale, only to find another man and also a corpse there. Already you have awesome compositions, almost like a supernatural drama, of looming shadow hands alongside jump cut editing to a train to show shock. It is however, just in its title too, a weird film for Hitchcock, the kind of “weird” in terms of not a positively delirious title but something that is absolutely curious in his career. It is an oddity with virtues but a lot of issues behind its creation.

Hitchcock had to make this film, part of his career with British International Pictures¹. Despite the fact he had already made The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Blackmail (1929), and was becoming an acclaimed filmmaker, his career up to sailing to Hollywood and the United States for Rebecca (1940) includes films which stand out in premise (his personal project, the drama Rich and Strange (1931)), only to not become films which stand out the highest in his career, and titles which he made as a studio director whether he wanted to make them or not, such as the operetta film with Jessie Matthews, Waltzes from Vienna (1934). Number Seventeen, based on a thriller play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, has a suspense plot including one of the earliest McGuffins, if not for the first, for Hitchcock’s career in that it is a piece about jewel thieves swarming around this house alongside a detective, his daughter, a cop in disguise and the homeless man Ben (Leon M. Lion). Hitchcock however, in adapting this, decided to turn it into a farce on purpose tonally, which affects the final result.

The final film because of this is a really broad farce which does not really work. Hitchcock films can be legitimately funny, without becoming comedies but being suspense films which have incredibly dour winks at the banal mixing with the morbid – the cop in Frenzy (1972), one of his grimmest tales, whose wife is trying experimental cooking to his horror, or a key scene of Strangers on a Train (1951), whilst not played for laughs, being based on whether the lead can complete a game of tennis as quickly as he can – or incredible one-liners, such as the many Cary Grant has in North by Northwest (1959). This does eventually have charm, with Leon M. Lion as Ben, once you get past his initial gurning klutz performance, becoming lovable as a genial homeless man caught in the middle of this against his will, but a lot of the humour, being the slapstick to speed up fight scenes, goes over the head in actually landing. A lot of it being a pastiche of the suspense drama completely falls flat when it eventually gives up and becomes a more heightened crime film by the finale. Instead a lot of this feels like a stage play with Hitchcock managing to make it visually vibrant and soaked in shadows, entirely set at night, of a group of people ending up in this house all at once. The sense of this comes when one of its parodies, the female lead on the villains’ side who is so mysterious she is a deaf-mute, being jettisoned. When this character Nora (Anne Grey) just starts speaking, completely kneecapping one of its more idiosyncratic touches as quickly as it is introduced in a film only an hour long, you get the feeling Hitchcock made a legitimate mistake with his collaborators which effects the final quality.

Seventeen, by way of its finale with model trains, gets a really thrilling ending of escaping by train and the commandeering of a public bus to catch up with it, which shows how the film could have been cultivated into an ambitious and grander work by its director. The film had the potential to be a great production, full of McGuffins and plot points for the sake of getting to the next scene – corpses not quite dead, cops posing as lackeys, heroines secretly hiding in the villains’ side – as people fight over an expensive necklace. Even a scene of falling over a broken wooden railing does show how the comedic tone of the film could have mixed with suspense. What this feels like is a germ of a bigger work, and instead it is Hitchcock the master craftsman who sticks out than a successful result, still early in his career showing the mind which planned out his films carefully before they were filmed, compositions even here of the images which stand out incredibly. If it is a failure in Hitchcock’s career, but that does not mean you cannot appreciate the skills he shows here that would grow in his filmography.

 

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1) Alfred Hitchcock Collectors’ Guide: Number Seventeen (1932), written by Brent Reid for Brenton on Film and published on August 16th 2019.