The Grant Mystique: Operation Petticoat (1959)

If you were to name Cary Grant's most influential movies, you might name films like North by Northwest, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, or The Philadelphia Story, which are all bona fide Hollywood classics. You might not get around to Operation Petticoat (1959, directed by Blake Edwards), and you would be wrong to omit it. In its way, it is among the most influential of all of Grant's films, and not just because it was Grant's biggest box-office hit (spoiler: it was). My own relationship with the film might be instructive. I originally saw the film when I was a kid. I saw it on television with my dad on a Saturday afternoon. It was very much a "dad" kind of movie: a comedy about the experiences of a military unit in the war. This was familiar territory because service comedies were a staple of the television of my youth. Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy, Gomer Pyle, F-Troop, M*A*S*H, all of these were everywhere back then, playing endlessly in the vampiric half-life of syndication. All of them trace a lineage to Operation Petticoat, either directly or in passing. Because, as I've said, Operation Petticoat was an absolutely gigantic hit. Hollywood follows the money. The downside of its influence is that Operation Petticoat sometimes feels like a TV sitcom. Many of its supporting actors--particularly Dick Sargent and Gavin McLeod--went on to long television careers. The film begat a TV spinoff in 1977 unto itself, which I may have seen before I saw the film proper (this happened with M*A*S*H, too). Its director, Blake Edwards, was at that time primarily known as a television writer and director, whose work on Peter Gunn was contemporary with Operation Petticoat. Operation Petticoat would launch him into the big time, and his films over the next decade would include the Pink Panther movies, Breakfast at Tiffanys, Days of Wine and Roses, and Experiment in Terror, among others. For all that, the presence of Cary Grant and, to a lesser extent, Tony Curtis removes the film from being merely an elaborate TV sitcom. The film persona of Cary Grant guarantees this. Grant was well rewarded for his service here, too. The film netted him three million 1959 dollars, which is about thirty-one million in 2023 dollars. It's not for nothing that Grant was among the wealthiest movie stars who ever lived.

The film itself? It has its pleasures.

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Strange Cargo

I commented on social media last week that I thought you could stage The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023, directed by André Øvredal) as a play. Find a production of The Pirates of Penzance that's closing and mooch on their sets and you're all ready to go. One of my friends asked if I would make it a musical. I absolutely would. It would be the off-off-Broadway hit of the season. Buy your tickets now.

The story of the Demeter is from Dracula, of course. It occupies chapter seven of Stoker's novel, represented as news clippings pasted into Mina Murray's journal and as the logbook of the ship as reported in those clippings. The Demeter is usually seen at the end of its journey in movies. In the Tod Browning film, the sole survivor is Renfield (he is not on the ship in the book), with Dwight Frye's mad grin staring up at the investigators when the Demeter drifts into harbor. In Murnau's film version, there's an abbreviated version of the voyage. The first still from Nosferatu I ever saw was of Max Schreck standing on the deck of the Demeter. This was years before I ever saw the film. The most indelible version of the Demeter I ever saw was in John Badham's 1979 version of Dracula in which Harker joins the rescuers for the wrecked ship only to discover a man lashed to the wheel with his throat ripped open. A version of this image appears in Jon J. Muth's graphic novel, Dracula, A Symphony In Moonlight and Nightmares. The final voyage of the Demeter from Varna, Bulgaria, to Whitby, United Kingdom is such a vivid part of the Dracula story that it's shocking that no-one has made a film of its voyage until now. It's been, what? A hundred and twenty-six years at this point?

A lot of the imagery from previous versions makes it into this new film, but most of that imagery was already there in Stoker's book. It's a rich novel for interpolations.

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Hand in Hand

There's a deep mythological undercurrent in Talk to Me (2022, directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou). When I described the film to my partner, she immediately suggested that the film's Maguffin is a hand of glory, a magical artifact made from the left hand of a hanged man which has powerful magic abilities. You may remember the hand of glory's appearance in The Wicker Man, among other places. The thought that it was a hand of glory occurred to me, too, while I was watching the movie. The severed hand in Talk to Me isn't exactly that, but bears a strong enough resemblance nonetheless, even down to the related use of a candle to invoke its power. It reminds me a little of the monkey's paw in the W. W. Jacob's story of the same name, as well, which itself seems descended from the hand of glory and its other mythological relatives. In Talk to Me, the severed hand of a medium is preserved inside a ceramic shell. It enables someone holding the hand, as if shaking it, to see and talk to the dead. If the holder invites the ghost, the ghost can possess them. Like the hand in "The Monkey's Paw," the hand in this film promises answers and wishes. Sort of. In the film, it's the center of teenage shenanigans so it all ends badly, as it must. These kids could have prevented a lot of heartache if they had all watched The Ring or Witchboard or some other tale of teens dabbling in the supernatural. But then you wouldn't have a movie.

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A Sympathy of Choices

“If there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
The jaws of darkness do devour it up;
So quick bright things come to confusion.”
--William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act I, Scene I

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The espionage thriller has been flirting with science fiction for decades now. The first James Bond film, Dr. No, set the precedent, and the Harry Palmer films, the Flint films, and the Jason Bourne films have all followed its lead. The Marvel films are built in equal measure on the espionage thriller and on science fiction, with their very own super spy organization as a through-line lacing the entire franchise together. Get Smart had a character who was an android. It's in the DNA of the form now in spite of the best efforts of John le Carré and Graham Greene to ground the genre in reality. The Mission: Impossible television series and films are science fiction-y most of the time, with their cyberpunk stylings, but this year's Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023, directed by Christopher McQuarrie) crosses the border into broad sci fi with nary a backward glance. Like a good science fiction story, it starts with a what if: "What if a self-aware artificial intelligence infiltrated every corner of the internet? What if truth and reality became suspect, at the whims of that intelligence? What if the world's powers raced to gain sole control of that intelligence, and by extension, the world? And what if that intelligence had plans of its own?" Given the socio-political moment into which the film was released, an aware viewer can be excused for wondering if this question is even science fictional. She should ask, rather, are we living in a science fiction reality? (Note: we absolutely are). This is another film about The Singularity, a subject matter that is moving more and more out of science fiction and into the broader discourse about, well, everything. At this writing, the artists who create movies are on strike specifically to thwart the movie industry from replacing them with machines. There's a meme on social media noting that a future in which AIs compose poetry and art while human beings perform subsistence menial labor is NOT the future anyone imagined. More ominously, there is debate in technology schools like Cal Tech and MIT about the ethics of developing autonomous AI for use in drone weapons for the military. Every job in the world that doesn't require a pair of hands is under threat right now. If this sounds like a scenario that leads to Skynet, don't think the makers of Mission: Impossible haven't noticed this too. Dead Reckoning is absolutely descended from Colossus: The Forbin Project and The Terminator.

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The Grant Mystique: Charade (1963)

Cary Grant made three films with director Stanley Donen between 1958 and 1963. Those three films arguably define the sunset of his acting career. The last of the three, Charade (1963), is Grant's last legitimately great film. He made two more films afterward and then retired from acting in 1966. Charade is also a transitional film for American cinema generally, perched as it is between the last gasps of big studio filmmaking in the 1950s and the first rumblings of the American New Wave. Stanley Donen was the ideal director for such a film, given that his filmmaking style already resembled various New Waves before any of them even began to swell on the cinematic horizon. Donen was flexible and creative, able to slot right into whatever genre to which he was assigned (maybe not science fiction, but that may not have been his fault). Even though Donen was primarily known for making musicals in the 1950s including arguably the greatest musical ever made, Charade demonstrates a surprising--and surprisingly brutal--facility for thrillers in the mode of Alfred Hitchcock. Charade is sometimes described as the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made, though that might be hyperbole.

Donen was also one of Audrey Hepburn's principal directors, having made Funny Face with her in 1957 and with Two For the Road--a New Wave film if ever there was one--ahead in 1967. The pairing of Hepburn and Cary Grant perhaps delayed Grant's retirement. Of his experience on Charade, he said, "All I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn." Alas, that never came to pass. He was lured into making Father Goose with the promise of Hepburn as a co-star, though the part ultimately went to Leslie Caron. Maybe that's just as well. Donen intended to make a further film with Grant, too, but the actor retired and the part in Arabesque went to Gregory Peck instead. For what it's worth, that's a pretty good movie, but I don't think Grant and Sophia Loren would have gotten along well. They had a history. And Grant was probably too old by then for that kind of globetrotting adventure anyway.

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The Quatermass Legacy

I sat in on this vodcast (is that even a word?) celebrating the 70th anniversary of the original broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment. Please pardon my nervous energy. I have a fear of speaking in public.

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Victory Through Air Power

Air Force (1943, directed by Howard Hawks) is absolutely propaganda. Let's make that crystal clear at the outset. Almost all war films made during the Second World War were propaganda and there was no space for anti-war sentiment in the cinema of the day. Nor was there room for criticism or pacifism in the era's politics more generally. Many such propaganda films are a drag, reducing characters into symbols without any interior life and choking on their own patriotism. This one is not like that, or not much like that, which makes it effective. It's a gripping adventure film from beginning to end, even in spite of the fact that it starts with a quote from the Gettysburg Address and ends with a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In between, though, is a pure Howard Hawks action film about his favorite types of people: Flyers. Men banded together to do a job. Professionals.

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The Prodigal Daughter

One of the first questions I asked myself about Monica (2022, directed by Andrea Pallaoro) as the projectionist closed the curtains to narrow the screen was, "why is this in the Academy ratio?"* The flippant answer I gave myself is that transgender people don't get widescreen epics. Upon reflection, that's not far off. The frame of the film constrains its central character as much as her circumstances. It creates a claustrophobic space for her to exist in with no obvious room to transcend that space. The second question I asked myself, mid-film, was "why is this character a sex worker?" I know the answer to that, too, but it would be a huge relief to see a film about a trans woman who wasn't a sex worker. No shade toward sex workers, or trans women who are sex workers, but I think I can name three films this century where a trans woman character wasn't a sex worker when her occupation was known to the audience. Maybe. The third question, and it's one I asked about the similar A Fantastic Woman a few years ago, was, "is there no possibility for joy for this character?" Monica veers perilously close to trans misery porn. But then its B-plot is about a woman dying of brain cancer, so these things are relative.

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The Grant Mystique: To Catch A Thief (1955)

Of the films Cary Grant made with Alfred Hitchcock, To Catch A Thief (1955) is the one that has been dismissed most often by the director's admirers and detractors as a lightweight "entertainment." A bauble, if you will. Candy. Empty calories. It is certainly a film conceived of and drenched in the glamour of classic Hollywood. It pairs the biggest star in the world opposite one of the most unattainable beauties of its era. It sets its action against a backdrop of wealth and intrigue on the French Riviera and Monaco. It hobnobs with the idle rich. It's a caper film about an international jewel thief. It's pop filmmaking at its most trivial. It's a fantasy. And sure: It lacks the sinister undertones of Suspicion, the complex psychological depth of Notorious, and the stakes and forward motion of North by Northwest. But to look only at its surface gloss is a mistake. Smuggled under the candy coating is a story about hollow men in a Europe still recovering from the calamity of the great wars, in which bad men never escape their pasts and visit their sins on the next generations. It's a significantly darker film than its reputation would have you believe. It's also a portrait of Hollywood films in transition from the studio era--whose days on the stage were numbered--into a conversation with the rest of the world. This was partially filmed in Europe, perhaps with a propagandist intent. Like many American films of its era, it's a weapon in the Cold War, when Hollywood movies that wallowed in a gaudy affluence were a bulwark against the gray economic heat death of Soviet communism. All weapons should be so brazenly sexual.

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Art School Blues

Kelly Reichardt's new film, Showing Up (2022), strikes me as a film with a verrrrry specific audience, and unless you're either a fan of Reichardt's brand of minimalism or a member of the specific audience I have in mind, a potential viewer might have a hard time with it. I'm part of that very specific audience, having been through art school and having worked on and off in the arts throughout my adult life. As a result, there's a bracing shock of recognition in this film. It captures something ineffable about trying to make art in the wreckage of late capitalism and in a world that no longer values art and artists as it once did. I've never seen a film about art before that captures just how utterly tired artists are. It's no wonder that so many artists turn into cranks as they age.

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Eat the Rich

The billionaire class really ought to pay closer attention to what's bubbling through the collective unconscious of the current era. The horror movies of this decade, if not this entire century, have been sending them warnings that have gone unheeded. Horror movies are a canary in a coal mine, a good barometer of where the stress points on broader society lie. The moneyed class definitely should be alarmed that you never, ever, see a "good" billionaire in a horror movie. And if there's a tech-bro Steve Jobs-type dude in one? I can almost guarantee you that he'll be monster chum in short order. You can't buy yourself out of the horrors, movies are saying, especially the ones you've created yourself. There's a scene in The Menu (2022, directed by Mark Mylod) that is explicit on this point, when the corrupt billionaire who has financed the exclusive restaurant run by insane chef Julian Slowik is styled as an angel and lowered helplessly into the ocean where he then drowns. The obvious symbolism is that there are no good billionaires. Only a shade less obvious is the idea that billionaires as a class are fallen angels. I. E. they are devils. I appreciate the layered nuance. Mind you, this film is only a horror movie if you're rich. If you're not, then it's either a satire or a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Or maybe both.

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Matchstick Women

Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." That's so breathtakingly off the rails you just have to hang your head and laugh. It makes director Mervyn LeRoy's opinion of Bette Davis look positively even-handed. He didn't think she could act. His conviction in this was so strong that he actively marginalized her part in their only film together, Three On a Match (1932). In his defense, Davis was about ten or twelve films away from stardom at that point, with her roles in pre-Code films being almost entirely marginal. She was often grossly miscast. It's not for nothing that Robert Aldrich cribbed footage for Baby Jane Hudson's adult career in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? from Davis's pre-Code film, Ex-Lady and Parachute Jumper, both made after Three On a Match. Perhaps on the advice of Davis herself, Aldrich picked those two films as her very worst performances. How much of this is on Davis and how much of this is on her earliest directors is open to debate, but it's hard not to cringe at her Southern accent in Parachute Jumper. What is most surprising about Three On a Match, then, is not that it squanders Bette Davis. She was consistently being squandered in her early films. Rather it is surprising that it also squanders its ostensible star, Joan Blondell. Blondell was top billed, and the film is categorically slanted toward her character and her rise from streetwise reform-school kid to high society paramour and wife. But LeRoy had eyes for his third lead actress, Ann Dvorak, who seizes the film away from her costars with a twitchy descent into degradation of the sort that would eventually ignite Davis's own stardom in Of Human Bondage two years later. Dvorak devours her part, vacillating between amoral social climber to reluctant kidnapper to trapped gangster's accomplice to strung out coke fiend. LeRoy abets her performance by filming her in the style of a madwoman from some silent melodrama.

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Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon: The Narrow Margin (1952)

The Narrow Margin (1952, directed by Richard Fleischer) was completed in 1950, but wasn't released by RKO Pictures for another two years. When a studio shelves a film for two years before releasing it, that ordinarily means that the powers that be have no faith in the project or that the studio is going through some kind of transition at the top. It's almost never a good thing for the picture and it is often an omen portending a financial or critical disaster. In the case of The Narrow Margin, however, RKO and its then-owner Howard Hughes felt that the film was too good to waste on non-bankable actors. Hughes wanted to remake the film with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. At some point, he had the film delivered to his private screening room where according to legend, he promptly forgot about it. And there it sat for two years. When it finally saw release, it proved to be RKO's biggest money-maker of 1952, a turn of events enhanced by the film's minuscule $230,000 budget, which was small even by 1950 standards. Hughes's instinct about the film was correct. It was good. Damned good. While it might have worked just fine in color with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, it's hard to imagine such a film bettering Fleischer's film or improving on the hard-boiled performances of perennial B-movie actors Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor. This was born to be a pulpy B-feature, one of the best of its kind, and it needed those pulp actors to give it just the right flavor.

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True/False 2023: Fathers and Mothers

Red Herring (2023, directed by Kit Vincent) starts with an image of a man swimming at twilight. This man is the director's father, Lawrence, who is dealing with the knowledge that he is going to outlive his son. The Sword of Damoclese hanging over Kit Vincent and his family is an inoperable brain tumor that will kill him in four to eight years. The film covers four of those years. It's mostly about the relationship between Kit and Lawrence, and how they deal with impending mortality, but it also spends time with Vincent's estranged mother, and less so with his partner. His father's confrontation with mortality leads him to philosophical Judaism and ultimately a conversion to that faith. His mother has been keeping a secret about her own parentage that the film drops about two thirds of the way through, potentially creating a drastic reexamination of Vincent's relationship to his mother, though that never materializes. The film is organized around the director's brain scans which provide chapter stops for the film of a sort, in which the entire family gathers around the cell phone to listen to the results.

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True/False 2023: Knocked Up

How To Have an American Baby (2023, directed by Leslie Tai) takes a long look at the practice of Chinese tourism to the United States in order to give birth to children on American soil, thus granting the children citizenship. This is facilitated by so-called "maternity hotels" who host the mothers while they wait out the last three or four months of their pregnancies. These facilities are sometimes apartment buildings, sometimes residential houses, which the services own and rent to their customers for a premium. They also arrange health care. There is a booming economy in birth tourism on the West Coast. As you might guess, certain kinds of American citizens have their panties in a twist over this, though for entirely wrong reasons.

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True/False 2023: Masculine and Feminine

Here's another dispatch from True/False. The festival's programmers don't set out to rhyme the films on the schedule with one another, but sometimes they do in spite of themselves.

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True/False 2023: Fire and Myth

The annual True/False film festival has rolled into my fair city once again. Once again, I'll be offering notes from the interior.

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The impending climate apocalypse has been on the mind of documentary filmmakers for years at this point. They point their cameras at any number of canaries in the coal mine, be it arctic ice, desertification, climate-induced wars, and what have you and they still have no effect in changing the direction of the world. It sucks to be a Cassandra. Always has. The subject of Paradise (2022, directed by Alexander Abaturov) is wildfires in Siberia, but that's only cover for its real concerns. It points an accusing finger at the true authors of climate change while suggesting that community and mutual aid is the way we might survive it. Maybe.

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The Grant Mystique: Suspicion (1941)

By 1941, Cary Grant was THE movie star. Grant had cultivated a screen image based on charm, charisma, impossible good looks, and a refusal to take himself seriously. He was the ideal leading man for the age of the screwball comedy. But there was always something more to the Grant persona. Something darker. You saw glimpses of it in His Girl Friday, in which Hildy Johnson laments of Grant's vile Walter Burns, "I just wish you weren't such a stinker," and tells her fiancee of Burns's charm "he comes by it naturally; his grandfather was a snake." There were glimpses of it, too, in the callousness as armor against loss in Only Angels Have Wings. Even before his major stardom, there was Grant's antagonist opposite Fredric March in The Eagle and the Hawk, in which Grant played the most brutal character he was ever asked to perform. Alfred Hitchcock spotted it right away, and exploited Grant's potential as a sinister leading man in the first two films of their collaboration. In their first film together, Suspicion (1941), Hitchcock confronts the audience directly: could this man, this polished movie star, this easy light comedian, be a murderer?

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Cops and Robbers

James Cagney in G-Men (1935)

While I was discussing gangster films with my long suffering partner a couple of nights ago, I asked her to name a famous bank robber off the top of her head. Her response was "Bonnie and Clyde." She could have named John Dillinger, I suppose, or Pretty Boy Floyd, or maybe even D. B. Cooper, but the thing about all of these names is that they are in the past, and all of them have been subsumed into American folklore. There have been countless films about these characters. The lion's share of these people lived during the Great Depression, and one of the reasons that they became famous, became folk anti-heroes of a kind, is because the economic calamity following the Wall Street crash of 1929 undermined the faith in American capitalism. Banks were villains to most folks. For a brief period, the idea that the United States might follow Russia into communism was more than just a leftist fantasy. It's more difficult to name famous bank robbers who worked after the Great Depression, because America successfully engineered a stable capitalist society from the New Deal and demonized bank robbers in films. Apart from D. B. Cooper, who is mostly famous because he was never caught and who remains an enigma, I couldn't name you a bank robber who worked during the last fifty years. Willie Sutton is probably the last great bank robber of the public imagination, mostly because he was famously quoted as robbing banks "Because that's where the money is." It's harder to rob banks these days, and most transactions are electronic anymore, but the twilight of bank robbers as folk heroes happened long before the advent of digital money.

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Phone a Friend

I wish The Black Phone (2022, directed by Scott Derrickson) had the same ferocity as Sinister, the director's last horror movie. That film hinted at awful things for its whole length and then made good on those awful things in a way that was not reassuring for the audience as they filed to the exits. The Black Phone hints at awful things, too, but an alert viewer will realize that this is a different kind of dark fantasy film, one where the powerless must find power in themselves to overcome the monster. It's a Twilight-zoney film in which the whispers of other worlds are in contrast with the horrors of the mundane, but it's one that's reassuring in the end in a way that Sinister was not. I don't think I'm giving anything away with this, given the premise and structure of the film. It's a tense suspense film through its entire length, but it's only very occasionally scary.

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When the Autumn Moon is Bright...

Every time I revisit The Wolf Man (1941, directed by George Waggner), I envision screenwriter Curt Siodmak upon writing the werewolf's rhyme leaning back in his chair and lighting up a big cigar. He was awfully proud of that bit of doggerel (if you'll pardon the pun). So much so that he puts it in the mouth of seemingly every character poor doomed Larry Talbot meets in the first half of the film. You know the one, right? "Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night, may turn into a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright?" You can't miss it. They repeat it for emphasis in the mouths of multiple characters.

The great flowering of horror movies during the early 1930s were seriously curtailed by the ascendance of the production code in 1934. Some of the films from the era went into vaults because they could not comply with the code (Freaks was unseen for 30 years), while others were cut into compliance on re-release, sometimes to the point of defanging them. King Kong survived the cuts well enough. Frankenstein perhaps less successfully (cuts demanded by the Kansas board of censors would have removed over half of the movie). James Whale famously foxed the censors while making The Bride of Frankenstein, complying with the letter of the code but not the spirit. After the Bride, horror movies began to fade, but Universal never forgot the mountain of cash its first wave of horror movies had amassed. And if they had, they were reminded when an LA theater booked a double feature of Dracula and Frankenstein in late 1938 to record crowds. That double feature spread throughout the country and its returns dwarfed the original box office of either film. Suddenly, Universal was back in the monster business. Son of Frankenstein was a success, so the powers that be wanted a new monster to add to the roster, and a new star to play him. They chose Creighton Chaney to be that actor, in part because his father was Lon Chaney, a name with which they could still conjure. They billed Creighton as Lon Chaney, Jr. and improvised a werewolf story around him. The result was The Wolf Man. It wasn't the first werewolf story Universal made--that would be The Werewolf of London six years earlier--but it's the one that assumed a place in the pantheon of the Universal monsters.

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You Inherit the Flames

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
But you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
--Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

I don't know if Clive Barker was ever a Catholic, but if he wasn't, he sure expresses some of the baggage of Catholicism. The idea that the slightest slip from the path of righteousness, even if you don't know you've slipped or don't know the rules, will land you in eternal damnation is a thread that runs through Barker's The Hellbound Heart even without the trappings of the church. Barker transmits this theme to the Hellraiser movies more or less intact, though films subsequent to the first two Hellraisers are less rigorous in their exploration of this idea, if they're aware of it at all. There's a queer layer to this, given Barker's sexuality and, um, colorful history working at gay leather clubs in the 1970s. His Goth-bondage demons seem tailored to a queer man's self-loathing, where his demons flog not only himself for his deviance, but everyone around him. Sin, it seems, has collateral damage.

The new version of Hellraiser (2022, directed by David Bruckner) has a different set of sins and a different source of self-loathing for its protagonist, but the idea is largely the same. In the Hellraiser universe's framing, basic needs when taken to extremes will land you in hell, whether it's a need for kinky gay sex or for pharmaceutical kicks. All human needs are addictions of a sort. The sins committed by Hellraiser's explorers of the frontiers of experience are a stand-in for any "sin" you like, however small and trivial. The fallout for the people around an addict is usually more dire than for the people around a self-loathing gay leather boy. So, sure. Why not. But there's a downside to this idea. It takes a property that, for all its flaws, originated as outsider art and frames it as mainstream product. Addiction narratives are mainstream films--everyone in Hollywood makes addiction movies eventually. All queer films, even today, are outsider art. You see the dichotomy, right? And this transcends the relative production values and even the competence of the filmmaking. This film has the most technically competent director who ever came near the series not excluding Barker himself, and production resources that dwarf any previous edition, and yet this fails to pull itself away from its progenitors.

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Bride and Doom

[•REC]3: Genesis (2012, directed by Paco Plaza) makes the same "mistake" committed by Halloween III: The Season of the Witch all those years ago: it departs from the tried and true form of a beloved franchise in order to create something new and different. This entry isn't the same variety of grim and apocalyptic one finds in its predecessors. Moreover, it departs from the series' found footage aesthetic after a lengthy prologue, and then has the gall to have a sense of its own absurdity. It laughs at itself. To an audience expecting more of the same from this series, I'm sure it was a disappointment. Me? I kinda dig it. There's something about watching a wedding go off the rails that appeals to me. I'm a hopeless romantic, sometimes.

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Sunglasses at Night

I told a friend that Dario Argento's new film, Dark Glasses (2022) strikes me as what you might get if you fed his old film, Cat O' Nine Tails, into an AI filmmaking engine. It would be equally soulless, but maybe that's being unkind. Dark Glasses isn't the same kind of car wreck Argento was making when last we met. Whatever the new film's deficiencies, it is an absolute baller in comparison to his Dracula. Faint praise, I know. For a brief period at the start, I thought the Argento of the early 1970s was behind the camera. The opening sequence is creepier and more suggestive of a world out of joint than the entirety of the director's output this century. But it was not to be...

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Childhood Trauma

In retrospect, Tobe Hooper probably should have walked away from Cannon Films and Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus after the debacle of Lifeforce. Hooper still had cache after directing Poltergeist for Steven Spielberg, and the lingering reputation from the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but his three pictures for Cannon were career killers. Cannon had a reputation for producing schlock while over-promising on the quality of their films and one has to wonder if that had something to do with the reception for the remake for Invaders from Mars (1986). There was a staggering amount of talent associated with this film, including Hooper, cinematographer Daniel Pearl, screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, special effects masters John Dykstra and Stan Winston, and a cast of familiar faces, even if there were no big, big stars. And the film itself? It's better than I remembered it being. Mind you, I didn't really understand this film when I first saw it when it was in movie theaters. I hadn't seen the original film as a kid, so I didn't feel its wavelength as a children's movie. Nor did I recognize how thoroughly it reconstructed the original film for the 1980s. I did have the feeling that it was a poisoned fruit from a poisoned tree, which is perhaps not really true.

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Sins of the Fathers

"Henry, your sovereign, Is prisoner to the foe; his state usurp'd, His realm a slaughter-house, his subjects slain, His statutes cancell'd, and his treasure spent; And yonder is the wolf that makes this spoil" -- William Shakespeare, Henry VI part III

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The Cursed (2021, directed by Sean Ellis) is a full-bore Gothic that seems more critical of wealth and power than is usual for the genre. I mean, speaking truth to power is baked into the form even going back to its earliest days, but rarely are Gothic works so explicit and up front with the sins that motivate their plots. Unlike more traditional Gothics, it doesn't conceal its sins behind a veil of plot. It is an inheritor of films like The Fog and The Nightingale in which the villains and their sins are laid bare. It turns the xenophobia of so much of the genre on its head, and shows us the true face of evil: rich white men protecting their stolen wealth from the peoples they stole it from. As such, this is a fantasy, because the villains in this movie get their just deserts. Maybe I'm just being cynical.

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Double Double Toil and Trouble

October is upon us again and that means horror movies and the October Horror Movie Challenge. The first film I watched was Underwater, which I wrote about when it was in theaters. This was the second.

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I was a grown adult when the original Hocus Pocus came out in 1993 and I never had children of my own, so that film was never part of my childhood. I saw it on television one year and charitably decided that it wasn't for me. I wasn't really planning to watch the sequel, newly released to streaming, but it's had pretty good notices--something the original item never got--some of them from people I admire. So in the wee hours of the morning on the first day of October, I clicked play. Hocus Pocus 2 (2022, directed by Anne Fletcher) is considerably better than the first film, at least, as far as I can remember. It's been a while. As kid-friendly spooky shows go, I could get behind this one if I had little ones of my own. Even as a bitter middle-aged woman, I can see its charms. I'm inclined to Halloween candy more than is probably good for me.

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Wedding Jitters

The main villain in The Invitation (2022, directed by Jessica M. Thompson) looks like someone crossed Sean Connery and Udo Kier in a genetics lab, which for a film like this one is like flashing a big red light to warn the heroine (and the audience) to run away as fast as she can. She does not run away, alas, and gets herself ensnared in a Gothic mansion full of creepy aristocrats and even creepier family history. I sometimes wonder if the Gothic as a mode of filmmaking hasn't worn out its usefulness in the age of microchips and LED lights, and this film doesn't make a case for the opposite point of view. But I also wonder if it's just the filmmakers who make use of it. There's plenty of evidence on screen that the latter case is where the rot resides.

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The Grant Mystique: Penny Serenade (1941)

On the Wikipedia page for Penny Serenade (1941, directed by George Stevens), there's a short section detailing a recent "AI colorization" of the film. Curious, I took a look. It looks about the same as colorization has looked for a couple of decades, now, which is to say it doesn't look very good at all except for in fleeting moments. It's in the wrong aspect ratio, too. This particular film is a prime victim for this sort of noodling because when the copyright came up for renewal 28 years after its release, Columbia Pictures neglected to renew it. Thus, it fell into the public domain. As a result, its presentation on home video usually has been awful, with countless editions available from fly by night video companies. Public domain is invaluable and necessary, but it is often a haven for philistines and grifters. Most PD versions of Penny Serenade are short five minutes of movie in addition to the usual defects. It's a shabby fate for a film that contains Cary Grant's first Oscar-nominated performance and a performance from co-star Irene Dunne that the actress herself felt was her very best. For what it's worth, the edition from Olive Films is excellent, sourced from primary materials and restoring the entire film. My screen caps for this post come from the Olive disc.

The story one finds in Penny Serenade follows the marriage of Julie Gardiner (Dunne) and Roger Adams (Grant), from their first meeting through tragedy after tragedy in which Julie loses her unborn child in an earthquake in Tokyo and becomes unable to bear another child. They adopt an infant daughter after a close inspection by the state, only to have her die of a fever. Roger loses the newspaper he owns, and the law refuses to allow them to adopt another child due to Roger's insolvency. Pleading with the courts. The shock is too much to bear. We meet them at the very end, as they are prepared to go their separate ways. The flashbacks that tell their story are keyed to music--they first meet in a music store where Julie works--and the film's vignettes are accompanied by well-known songs of the day (hence the title of the film).

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The Films of Robert Aldrich: The Dirty Dozen (1937)

When I originally started to write about Robert Aldrich in the early days of this blog, I formulated a list of some of Aldrich's main themes and recurring story elements. Aldrich was a true auteur in so far as his private universe is distinctive and consistent across the entire body of his work. Aldrich had contempt for authority, a deep hatred of Hollywood myth-making, and a preference for protagonists who are individualists caught in a suffocating system. I also had the idea--maybe the main idea when I look at his films--that he made Gothics, and not just the pair of psychobiddy films he made in the early 1960s. One of the key films in my thinking is The Dirty Dozen (1967). On the surface it doesn't seem much like a Gothic film. It's a classic "men on a mission" film--at this point half a century later it's probably THE classic "men on a mission" film--which seems far removed from brooding castles and ghosts and madwomen in attics. But let's look at some of the elements of the Gothic: sublimated sexual derangement, confinement as a microcosm where personalities and psychological forces collide, a sense of encroaching doom, characters haunted by past crimes, a big house that is a character unto itself. Many Gothics--maybe even most of them--are psychoanalytic in nature. If we look closely at the elements of The Dirty Dozen, most of these hallmarks are actually there, including the psychoanalytic nature. This is the frame into which Aldrich slips his own private obsessions. The Dirty Dozen is one of the key works on his resume. Even if it hadn't been a gargantuan hit, it would be an important film. It was a gargantuan hit, though. It was the highest grossing film of 1967. Its success enabled Aldrich to form his own production company in order to keep working on more personal projects, at least until he found another gargantuan hit. It took him a while to find that next hit, and he went through The Dirty Dozen's capital--both social and commercial--in due course. But that, as they say, is another story.

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