Les Carabiniers

Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963) is an allegorical journey of two brothers in an unspecified country who are enlisted in the unspecified King's army to fight all the King's enemies until the King has finally won the war. Marino Mase and Albert Juross star as Ulysses and Michel-Ange, rural peasants who live in a wooden shack without electricity or indoor plumbing, along with their girlfriends Cleopatra (Catherine Ribeiro) and Venus (Genevieve Galea). Godard co-wrote the original script with Roberto Rossellini and the film makes obvious cross-allusions to the beginnings of WWII, albeit translated to the modern-day 1960s. Two of the King's soldiers visit the quartet on their bleak farm and offer not only all the riches and marvels of the world (taken at their enemies expense) but all of its atrocities as well (rape, arson, execution). Filmed in a desolate b/w and intermixed with newsreel footage and war-torn urban locations, the camera accompanies Ulysses and Michel-Ange on their Odyssey across the European and North African countryside as they transform into willing and eager carabiniers, executing the blond Leninist spokeswoman of the 4th Territorial Action Group who compares Bourgeoisie Capitalists to evil insects, yet faithfully writing letters home to Venus and Cleopatra from every stop along the way. Upon their return, they indeed have all the world's riches and marvels with them. Though Godard's work, at times, seems to betray a need to insulate himself from criticism by intertwining style and message (if you fault one he blames the other), Les Carabiniers is a tragic-comedic homage to the theater of the absurd; its deadpan style (and title cards) reminiscent of Chaplin at his best--The Great Dictator being an obvious starting point. The film also manages to employ many of Godard's usual motifs: movie theaters, bathtubs, American cars, cigarettes, revolutionary politics, advertisements, guns. Upon its release, Louis Chauvet wrote in Le Figaro on June 5, 1963 that it offered only "childish paradoxes of war" and Michel Cournot, writing in L'Express on June 13, 1963, said that its unbearable ignominy was a disaster to French filmmaking and that it should be shown in an empty lot with a sheet on the wall and viewers sitting on empty milk crates instead of in a nice theater with velvet seats (Cournot did not realize that he was way ahead of his time). Les Carabiniers remains a kind of forgotten film of the French New Wave, though it deserves a place alongside Band of Outsiders (1964) as Godard's finest work. Watch for Barbet Schroeder (Maitresse, Barfly) in a small role as a car saleman.

Salt of the Earth

The only movie banned by the United States government, the neo-realist Salt of the Earth (1954) is a film of stunning beauty and grace made by three blacklisted filmmakers on location in New Mexico, depicting the real-life story of the 1951-1952 strike by Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers against the New Jersey Zinc Company in Bayard, New Mexico. Local 890 was the Mexican American chapter of the union and the story interweaves the miners' hostility toward the company regarding the lack of on-the-job safety regulations, poor company housing with no indoor plumbing, and lesser pay compared to white workers as well as disruption within the Mexican American community regarding the newly-formed Women's Auxiliary--which in both real-life and in the film, won the strike after male employees were barred from striking by court injunction (courtesy of the Taft Hartley Act of 1935). The film offers a blistering critique of racism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of workers, yet balances very human and nuanced portrayals of the inner conflicts of the miners, their wives, Mexican tradition, the white union representatives, the company bosses, and the local police. A local union meeting is transformed into a community meeting, allowing wives and sisters an equal vote. When women and children are arrested they literally overflow the small jailcell, turning the deputies into the prisoners. The eviction scene that closes the film is another particular triumph. Salt of the Earth was directed by Herbert J. Biberman, one of the original Hollywood Ten who would not name names when called before the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1947. Biberman was one of only two directors (along with Edward Dymtryk) in the original ten, and served six months in federal prison for his refusal to talk. The film was written by Michael Wilson, an Oscar-winning co-writer of A Place in the Sun (1951) who served in the Marines during WWII before being blacklisted (and later wrote the 1969 Che! starring Omar Sharif as Guevara and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro), and was produced by Paul Jarrico who had written a U.S. military-funded pro-Soviet movie during WWII called Song of Russia (1943) for MGM. It was Jarrico who came across the striking miners during a vaction in Taos, and who quickly put the film in motion. The production, though free from Hollywood, was beset by protests from neighboring towns and the national press, investigated by the FBI, denounced by the House of Representatives, and banished following its premiere from U.S. theaters though it triumphed in Paris and Mexico City. The cast was largley made up of local miners and actual participants in the 1951-1952 strike; foremost among the "non-professional" actors was Juan Chacon (the President of Local 890) who starred as Ramon Quintero, the de facto leader of the strikers (begun after a Mexican miner is killed in a highly-aviodable accident) . The true heart of the film, however, was Esperanza Quintero, the reticent-leader of the women (and community) played by the Durango-born actress Rosaura Revueltas. Revueltas, who appeared in Emilio Fernandez's The Torch (1950) with Paulette Goddard and Pedro Armendariz, was blacklisted after the movie was released and eventually deported to Mexico, where she continued to work in theater and film. It is somehow extremely fitting to realize that Salt of the Earth was released almost simultaneously with Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando and Eve Marie Saint. Brando's performance as Terry Malloy, the heroic informer against mob (union) corruption helped the film sweep the Oscars, though it remained a see-through attempt by Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg (who personally named Biberman) at self-exoneration for talking when called before the same committee, with exactly as much to gain or lose, as the filmmakers of Salt of the Earth.

Twinky

Charles Bronson and Susan George starred in the Lolita-inspired Twinky (1969) about an affair and marriage between a 38-year old American writer of pornographic books living in London and a 16-year old redhaired school girl whose stiff, old-fashioned parents do not approve. Bronson, who teaches his young wife about sex, spanking, and how to cook a proper breakfast, enjoys the level at which he and Twinky communicate. She loves the way he smiles at her. Coming immediately off the classic Dirty Dozen (1967) directed by Robert Aldrich and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone, Charles Bronson (1921-2003) plays somewhat against type as the struggling writer Scott Wardman. Susan George, on the other hand--who is best known for her stunning performance in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and for dating Prince Charles (pre-Diana)--was rather in type as the headstrong nymphet Lola Londonderry. Her clandestinely debauched Grandfather (Trevor Howard) was excellent in flashback scenes depicting his own reading of erotic novels and taking of bubble baths with a variety of young girls. The best part about Twinky is that it says fuck all to Blow-Up or Alfie and presents a picture of swinging London for the working-class. When the film switches to New York, it features night shots of the Silvercup sign in Queens and 59th Street Bridge, a few token scenes near South Street, a great Puerto Rican rights demonstration outside of Twinky's high school (where Bronson goes to jail for accidentally punching a cop), and many images of Twinky bicycling through the city streets. The film, renamed Lola in the United States, as if the Lolita connection was somehow not obvious enough, was directed by Richard Donner, whose long career has included movies such as The Omen (1976), Superman (1978), The Goonies (1985) and also TV, including episodes of The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone, Kojak, Gilligan’s Island, and Tales From the Crypt (Donner once appeared on a funny episode of the self-indulgent Jon Favreau show Dinner For Five (IMC), where Favreau warns him "you don't want me talk about Gilligan's Island do you?")(in another episode Favreau admits he yearns to one day be considered a Hitchcock or a Coppola)(the drinking on the show was apparently not faked). Twinky is not for the Bronson fan of The Magnificent Seven (1960) directed by John Sturges or even Death Wish (1974) by Michael Winner, but rather the Bronson fan who might rewatch House of Wax (1953) with Vincent Price or enjoyed the sly Breakout (1975), about a complicated Mexican jailbreak of Robert Duvall (in a helicopter) that Bronson undertakes to woo Duvall's wife (Jill Ireland). Breakout also features John Huston as the mysterious man who sets Duvall up and Randy Quaid as Bronson's loyal assistant.

Ace in the Hole

Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) paired Kirk Douglas as the ruthless, scheming New York newspaperman Chuck Tatum with Jan Sterling as Lorraine Minosa, the petty and conspiring wife of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) who has become half-buried under debris in a deep cave while uncovering Indian artifacts near his home in New Mexico. Douglas has wound up at the small Albuquerque Sun Bulletin by way of his heavy drinking, fighting, and skirt-chasing at other newspapers across the country. Craving a big story that will put him back on top of the journalistic world, Douglas controls both the rescue effort (only he can access Minosa) and the press (he has exclusive coverage) and rapidly turns the quiet desert into a raging, untrammeled carnival of tourism, games, rides, and entertainment (the film was released, to Wilder's dismay, as "The Big Carnival"). Though his trademark cynicism is more bare under the glare of the New Mexican sun and not tempered with the same kind of humor or emotion that marks Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity, Wilder's vision of America is perfectly embodied by the calculating stare of Douglas. Whereas Joe Gillis (William Holden) or Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) stumbled across their darker natures (each at the hands of a domineering woman), Douglas needed no guide to reach the lower depths of his soul. Particularly amusing in the film was Sterling's complicity gernerated by the increased profits at her (and her trapped-husband's) roadside diner as well as the slow corruption of the wide-eyed staff photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur), who idolizes Douglas. The film was loosely based on the real-life fatality of Floyd Collins, who had been trapped in a cave in Kentucky and the local Louisville newspaper that earned a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Kids trapped in wells still generate frenzied coverage on television and by morbid curiosity-seekers today. I first saw this movie in Oklahoma City in 1996.

Warren Oates as "Nobody"

Warren Oates is my favorite actor, and there is nobody who stands even a close second. Equipped with the face of a loser and a wide, toothy smile, Oates thrived in supporting roles throughout the 1960s and 70s, usually playing Southerners, Westerners, or expatriates living (and dying) in Mexico. But, as Benny warns the mobsters in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, "nobody loses all the time." Oates' filmography is well known to his devoted fans, from his starring roles in Alfredo Garica (1974) or Dillinger (1973) to his astute charater pieces such as Sissy Spacek's father in Badlands by Terrence Mallick (1973) or the small-town deputy in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger (1967). He starred with Peter Fonda in a cheap horror movie called Race With the Devil (1975), which was also a kind of parody of Easy Rider, with the now-settled down Fonda and Oates driving across Texas in an RV (with their wives) when they encounter a group of Satanist hippies in the middle of an orgy/sacrifice, and he was masterful in Ivan Reitman's 1981 comedy Stripes, starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. But while Oates was great in all of these movies, the hard drinking, Kentucky-born, former Marine became something truly legendary in the films of Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman: Ride the High Country (1962 with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott), Major Dundee (1965 with Charlton Heston and Richard Harris), The Wild Bunch (1969 with William Holden, Robert Ryan, and Emilio Fernandez), and Alfredo Garcia (with Isela Vega and Fernandez) for Peckinpah, and The Shooting (1967 with Jack Nicholson), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971 with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson), Cockfighter (1974 with Harry Dean Stanton from a novel by Charles Willeford), and China 9, Liberty 37 (1978 with Jenny Agutter from Walkabout) for Hellman. The more you watch Oates on screen--in any role--the more you see in his sheepish grin certain things about loyalty, dignity, honor, and a kind of spiritual kinship that you don't find packaged in one place very often.

But prior to and during all of this Oates maintained a prolific television career, getting a break in the late 50s with supporting roles in the Peckinpah-created The Rifleman (with former pro athlete Chuck Connors) and other westerns. In 1967 he appeared in two episodes of the otherwise forgettable Cimarron Strip, set in the 1880s Indian Territory and starring Stuart Whitman as Marshall Jim Crown and Jill Townsend as Dulcey Coopersmith, a doe-eyed and demure English girl intent on civilizing the Old West. The 90-minute show was produced (at cut rate) by the makers of Gunsmoke and aired for one season on CBS. Oates appeared in the pilot episode (with Telly Savalas) called the "The Battleground" and guest starred in the fantastic "Nobody" as the half-Indian drifter Mobeetie, a kind of "lean hound for the long ride" and "half-wit saloon swamper." The plot invloves a boxcar full of dynamite, a secretly-hatched murder plot, and the chance for a loser's redemption. Oates was, as usual, the most brilliant and noble loser around.

Boudou Saved From Drowning

Jean Renoir's critique of middle-class values Boudou Saved From Drowning (Boudu Sauve des Eaux) made a star of Swiss actor Michel Simon (La Chienne, L'Atalante). Simon's performance as a Parisian tramp named Boudou, who is "rescued" from a suicide attempt by bourgeois bookseller Edouard Lestingois, caused riots in theaters when it was released in 1932. When his dog runs off from the shade of a tree where they had been lounging together in the Bois de Boulogne, Boudou searches desperately before jumping into the Seine, in a remarkably-filmed scene featuring a long take on a Paris street with hidden camera. Lestingois, who has been spying on girls walking on the sidewalk through a telescope, spots Boudou prior to his dive into the water and comments that he is a perfect specimen of vagrant. Lestingois rushes to Boudou's rescue from the river, diving in and carrying him to safety to the bemused amazement of the Depression-era public, who have been watching the scene unfold from bridges over the Seine. All hell breaks loose when Lestingois completes his rescue of Boudou by dressing him up and tutoring him in middle-class manners and values. Boudou disrupts the entire household, cuckolding Lestingois of both wife and mistress (his maid Anne Marie) who, in dispassionate bourgeois custom, live under the same roof. Boudou, the pure id that Lestingois has repressed, revels in the anarchy he creates but finds he must, once again, plunge himself into water to escape the constrictive conventions of modern society--though this time to much different ends. Renoir, who had paired with Simon the year before with La Chienne, went on in 1937-1939 to make three of the greatest movies of the decade: La Grand Illusion, La Bete Humaine, La Regle de Jeu (Rules of the Game). Seemingly never far from water, Simon later starred as the tattooed barge sailor Jules (and his many mechanical objects, kittens, and accordian) in Jean Vigo's classic L'Atalante (1934). Boudou Saved From Drowning was needlessly remade as the horrible Down and Out in Beverly Hills in 1986.

Blood and Sand

Blood and Sand (1922) starred Rudolph Valentino as torero Juan Gallardo who rises from his poor Seville roots to become the most famous matador in Spain. Still one of the most accurate bullfighting movies ever made, Blood and Sand was based on a novel by Vincente Blasco Ibanez and featured Lila Lee as Gallardo's childhood sweetheart Carmen, who he marries before achieving his greatest successes in the arena. Enmeshed in a world of both sicophantic enablers and guilt, Gallardo begins an affair with wealthy widow Dona Sol, who was played by Nita Naldi, a dark-eyed Irish-Italian vamp, former Ziegfeld Follies girl, model for pin-up artist Vargas, and co-star of Valentino in two other films who is now buried in Calvary Cemetery off Greenpoint Ave. in Queens. Blood and Sand was directed by Fred Niblo, an Oklanhoma-born veteran of Vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood who directed Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. Remade in 1941 by Rouben Mamoulian (who had a career remaking classic silent movies in sound), the Technicolor film featured Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Anthony Quinn, and Rita Hayworth (as Dona Sol). A much better 1941 bullfighting movie, however, is the Cantinflas classic Ni Sangre, Ni Arena (Neither Blood nor Sand), a parody about an unemployed misfit named El Chato who, while running from the police, gets confused for his doppleganger--a famous matador also played by (of course) Cantinflas, albeit sin moustache. Although it is hard to find a subtitled version (if needed) it is just as funny if you don't understand Spanish for, like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the humor of Cantinflas is universal. Directed by Alejandro Galindo and shot by Gabriel Figueroa, Ni Sangre, Ni Arena was a smash hit in Mexico. As Betty Kirk wrote for the New York Times on June 15, 1941, the film outgrossed Chaplin's Great Dictator by 70% while also shattering all records for foreign or domestic movies ever released in Mexico. Kirk wondered if the premiere of Neither Blood nor Sand just before the Tyrone Power version "raises the question as to whether this is not a sharp piece of sabotage for the Hollywood movie . . . That the two movies approach the bull fight from opposite poles is still, however, evident, for Blood and Sand deifies the life of the matador, while Ni Sangre, Ni Arena ridicules it." The Valentino Blood and Sand was released on dvd with several extras, including a Will Rogers parody and a fantastic introduction by Orson Welles. I bought the Cantinflas dvd for five dollars in Jackson Heights one rainy afternoon last winter.

Hanky Panky

One of the better Hitchcock spoofs, Hanky Panky (1982) is a cross-country suspense thriller comedy starring Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner. It was directed by Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier, who had directed Wilder and Richard Pryor in Stir Crazy two years earlier. Wilder plays a Chicago architect named Michael Jordan (the real Michael Jordan wasn't drafted by the Bulls until 1984) visiting New York on business, where he becomes infatuated with Radner and embroiled in a vague pseudo-militaristic conspiracy at the same time. Wilder, as stand-in for Cary Grant in North By Northwest, is never quite sure which side Radner, as Eve Marie Saint, is on. Is she simply investigating her brother's murder or is she a double agent? Richard Widmark (Kiss of Death, Pickup on South Street) as "Ransom," the head of the conspiracy, will stop at nothing to retrieve the missing reel-to-reel sized computer tape. Though the New York Times called Radner "not ideally cast" for this film on June 4, 1982--no doubt they would have preferred Pryor--it was on the set that Wilder and Radner fell in love. They married two years later and lived, by all accounts, a tremendously happy life together until Radner's death in 1989. They also worked together in The Woman in Red with Kelly LeBrock (Wierd Science). Hanky Panky travels from Manhattan to Boston to Maine to the Grand Canyon, and has a fantastic scene in a secret room underneath Madison Square Garden. Watch for "Mister Magic."

Call Me Mike

Originally filmed in 1979, Llamenme Mike (Call Me Mike) premiered in a few theaters on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1982 before achieving a brief domestic cult status. That it is relatively unknown in the U.S. is a shame. Alfredo Gurrola, who has had long career in Mexican film and television, directed this minor masterpiece starring Alejandro Parodi as a corrupt but hapless narcotics cop named Miguelito who is obsessed with Mickey Spillane novels. When he is busted stealing drugs from a local gang of smugglers and dealers, he is removed from the police force and sent to prison. It is only here that things go bad for him, though, as he is thrown into same cell as many of the drug smugglers he himself had put away. Beaten unconscious, he is revived by the prison doctor but is clearly not the same--now convinced that he is the real Mike Hammer and that the Mexico City drug dealers are part of an international Communist conspiracy (ala Kiss Me Deadly) . After escaping the prison mental ward, "Mike" goes on a one-man crusade to uncover the secret Communist plot. The drug dealers think he is insane as do his own family and friends, among whom is Sasha Montenegro, who he now treats with a confidence and arrogance she has never seen from him before (and which vaguely turns her on). Montenegro was perfectly cast as the femme fatale, as both Gurrola and Parodi--who also worked in academia--were interested in commenting on American film noir, Mexican masculinity, and the state of the cinema in Mexico, where throughout the seventies the most popular films were El Santo/lucha libre movies and soap operas (Montenegro starred in both). Montenegro, an Italian-born Yugoslavian, is also notable for her long time affair with Jose Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico from 1976-1982, which coincided with her work on this film. After each obtaining a divorce, they finally married in 1995. Llamenme Mike is a must see for any fan of Robert Aldrich or Sam Peckinpah's later films. Once you get past the slow start, the movie becomes a hilarious Mexican cross between Dirty Harry, Bad Lieutenant, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with plenty of surprises thrown in. Perhaps also of interest is cinematographer Miguel Garzon who later shot Death and the Compass (based on a Borges story) for Alex Cox (Sid and Nancy, Repo Man, Straight to Hell) in 1992, and had earlier worked as a cameraman on Jodorowsky's 1973 Holy Mountain.

She-Devils on Wheels

She-Devils on Wheels (1968) is the story of a South Florida all-girl biker gang called the Man-Eaters who race motorcycles for first choice on the "stud line" back at their headquarters. New recruit Karen sneaks out of her house to ride with the girls but must continually prove her loyalty to the gang who, led by the Queen, also includes members knicknamed Whitey, Honeypot, Supergirl, Poodle, Ginger Snap, among others. The film was made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, one of the all-time low budget kings of filmmaking (along with Roger Corman and Russ Meyer), better known for films like Blood Feast (1963), Monster a Go-Go (1965), A Taste of Blood (1967), and the Gore Gore Girls (1975). Partly in response to charges of misogyny in his gore-based splatter films, Lewis devised the all-girl gang who use men for their pleasure, defend their turf against rival gangs, protect their own, and will fight, brawl, maim, and kill if necessary. The movie was filmed on location in the small rural town of Medley, Florida which is just outside the Everglades in greater Miami. The diminuitive and underaged mascot of the gang, Honeypot, who rides a scooter rather than a motorcycle before winning her longed-for initiation, was played by Nancy Lee Nobel. Nobel also starred in Lewis' Just For the Hell of It, also released in 1968, about a deviant group of social misfits who terrorize the residents of a small South Florida town. The She-Devils on Wheels theme song "Get Off the Road" features the refrain "We are the hellcats that noboby likes, Man-Eaters on motorbikes!" It was covered by the Cramps (with Ivy singing) and is now included on the cd version of the 1985 classic A Date With Elvis.

Le Cercle Rouge

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 Le Cercle Rouge starred Alain Delon (Le Samourai, L'Eclisse) as an ex-con who returns to Paris with the familiar trinity of trenchcoat, cigarette, and gun. Delon befriends fugitive Gian Marie Volonte (who has hid in the trunk of Delon's car) and leads one of the greatest jewel heists ever filmed. Melville's genius is to work with the tropes of American gangster movies without irony and completely within his own time and place. Melville had, of course, been long obsessed with the United States. While it is often noted that his nom de plume was taken from Herman Melville, his films seem to owe much to the restrained/repressed dynamic of Hemingway's Paris-based fiction, such as The Sun Also Rises and Men Without Women--which could double as a title for a book on Melville's cinematic characters. Le Cercle Rouge is easily among Melville's most important films, along with Bob le Flambeur (1956), Le Samourai (1967), and Army of Shadows (1969). While perhaps not quite as sparse and stylized as his other works, Le Cercle Rouge had many touches that his earlier films lacked, and the particular brand of melancholic fatalism that marks this film was never grim or bleak. Delon's sang froid performance was masterful as usual. Of special note were the roles of the lead inspector, played by Andre Bourvil, and that of the alcoholic ex-policeman sharpshooter (a brilliant performance by Yves Montand) who comes to play a significant role in the plot of the film. His detox scene was one of the best filmed.

What Have You Done to Solange?

Another important giallo was What Have You Done to Solange? (1972). Not exactly a pick-me-up film, it is laced with brutal misogyny, poor dubbing, shower scenes, rowboats, orgies, hippies, repressed memories, schoolgirls in uniform, sex-killing, imaginative camerawork, Catholic priests, and true suspense. Though one of the more beguiling and beautiful films of the early seventies, don't suggest it to your in-laws the first time you meet them. Directed by Massimo Dallamano (cinematographer on Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), What Have You Done to Solange? was set in London with an internationally diverse cast. Fabio Testi stars as a married teacher at an all-girls Catholic school who is having an affair with an 18-year old student (Christina Galbo). While row-boating with her at a suburban park, Galbo senses they are being watched and witnesses the flash of a knife (and gloved hands) through the long grass along the banks. Unable to explain why he was at the scene of the crime, Testi becomes, in true giallo fashion, suspect, prey, and detective of the murderer. Pressure mounts as other local schoolgirls become the target of a supposed sex-killer. Teachers are questioned by police and, in one of the film's best scenes, Catholic priests in full robes are formed into a police line-up at the station. Karin Baal is excellent as Testi's wife, and Camille Keaton, the grand-niece of Buster Keaton and fourth wife of Sidney Luft (former husband of Judy Garland and step-father to Liza Minelli) played the titular character Solange. Keaton went on to star in the notorious rape-revenge-sadist-hillbilly film I Spit on Your Grave, about a young Manhattan woman on a weekend trip to upstate New York that goes horribly awry. What Have You Done to Solange? was greatly enhanced by the voyeuristic camerawork of Aristide Massaccesi aka Joe D'Amato who worked in all genres (horror, western, comedy, suspense) for two decades before shooting hard-core porn in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

Dario Argento’s first film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo) was the first and most important giallo movie ever made. Released in 1970, the film established many of Argento’s visual and textual trademarks, including stunning cinematography and the plot of a foreigner involved in a crime he/she does not fully understand. Tony Mustante stars as an American writer living in Rome who witnesses an attempted murder in a local art gallery. Trapped between two glass walls, he is unable to stop the violent action before him or to escape for help. When local cop Enrico Maria Salerno confiscates his passport and warns him not to leave Rome, needing him as both witness and possible suspect, every traveler’s nightmare has come to life. Both Mustante and his English model girlfriend (played by the minor horror actress Suzy Kendall) become targets of the killer in the black leather gloves. It is only the faint sound of an extremely rare bird, one with the piume di cristallo, that provides Mustante and local police their primary clue—as Mustante’s memory of the crime and trust in his senses are blurred, faded, distorted (common in Argento’s later work). Filled with many features of the giallo, such as the special blend of lurid violence, erotic undertone, whispers, confusion, primary colors, and sadism, The Bird With Crystal Plumage was scored by Ennio Morricone and filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro—whose remarkable body of work in the seventies alone included Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and 1900; Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore (a strange film known only to Charlotte Rampling fantatics); and The Driver’s Seat (an even stranger film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol). The Bird With Crystal Plumage, while perhaps overshadowed by Argento classics such as Suspiria, remains among his very best work.

Bed of Roses

Another pre-code favorite is Gregory La Cava's Bed of Roses, made for RKO in 1933. Set on a Mississippi River cotton barge, the lackluster-named Bed of Roses starred Joel McCrea and Constance Bennett. La Cava, who later made the brilliant comedy My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard, seems to have infused his best movies with a keen attention to class differences, social climbing, and the value(s) of masquerading. Constance Bennett was superb as the wise-talking prostitute Lorrie Evans who will do anything for a life of luxury. Bennett and fellow parolee Pert Kelton (who was later blacklisted in Hollywood) leave reform school and sneak aboard a fog-lined steamer bound for New Orleans. After robbing a drunken, lecherous businessman of his money, Bennett jumps overboard rather than risk a return to jail, but loses her money in the muddy waters of the river when she is fished out by the crew of the cotton barge. McCrea (whose later work included Sullivan's Travels by Preston Sturges, Foreign Correspondent by Hitchcock, and Ride the High Country by Sam Peckinpah) was excellent as the barge captain. But Bennett refuses to settle for McCrea's catfish dinners and escapes to a posh set-up with a rich older man in New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras. Though it once debuted at Radio City Music Hall, there does not now seem to be copies of Bed of Roses available on dvd or video. I taped a copy off late night cable about 10 years ago.

Night Nurse

1931’s Night Nurse featured Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell and was directed by William Wellman the same year as his more renown Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow. Wellman later made Lady of Burlesque (aka The G-String Murders) in 1943 with Stanwyck starring as the famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (based on Lee’s autobiographical novel). Night Nurse was a rather involved pre-code tale of high school dropout Stanwyck, who trained as a nurse in a hospital alongside her friend Blondell, where she treats a bootlegger for a gunshot wound, earning his respect and admiring eyes. After taking a private nursing job looking after a socialite’s two children, things unravel for Stanwyck, who has fallen for the chauffeur/thug Clark Gable. Gable's death at the end provided his cinematic regeneration:immediately following Night Nurse, he starred in 1932’s Red Dust with Jean Harlow, directed by Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz) and No Man of Her Own with future-wife Carole Lombard; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert followed in 1934. Joan Blondell, who went on to play in numerous prewar musicals and Broadway movies such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames by Busby Berkeley, was also excellent in the 1947 noir Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power as an alcoholic and ill-fated carny (the movie included real-life carnies and sideshow people as well). But it was the Brooklyn-born Stanwyck whose appearance in Night Nurse is of greatest note, as it is impossible when watching the film not to be reminded that Phyllis Dietrichson, Stanwyck’s greatest character, was a private nurse turned cold-blooded killer in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), starring Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, reminding you to take caution if Barbara Stanwyck is your private nurse: she will either rescue your children or kill you.

Loulou

Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) was one of the best French directors of the post-New Wave period. His unsentimental Loulou (1980), starring Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu, was a masterpiece of naturalism set amongst the minor bars, cafes, and nightclubs of modern working-class Paris. Called “the French Cassavettes” by Film Comment a year after his death, Pialat’s movies focused on the subtle charms of his downtrodden characters and were marked with the feeling of real life: however inconsistent, vague, strange, contingent that real life may be. Though he achieved greater recognition for A Nos Amours (1983) with Sandrine Bonnaire and Sous le Soleil de Satan (1987) with Bonnaire and Depardieu (as a Catholic priest), it was Loulou’s palate of muted blues and grays that helped give this film such long lasting affect--as well as the fact that it was based on his own relationship with the film's writer Arlette Langman, who left her husband to live with Pialat. Depardieu and Huppert are at their best. They had worked together before, in Bertrand Blier’s all-but-forgotten 1974 Les Valseuses (Going Places) with Miou-Miou and Jeanne Moreau. In Loulou, Huppert's married, middle-class Nelly meets Depardieu's local playboy and ex-con Louis (Loulou) on the dancefloor of a neighborhood disco. After an encounter with her insufferable, balding husband (played admirably by Andre Marchand), Nelly and Loulou spend the night fucking in a cheap hotel room, breaking the bed under Depardieu's considerable weight (this scene was probably improvised), and discussing what she will tell her husband in the morning. Nelly escapes the petty violence of her husband (his best line: "music bores me") and begins living with unemployed Loulou at a hotel which she of course pays for. Depardieu had, by 1980, perfected the role of the charming thug with an idiosyncratic nobility (Barbet Schroeder's brilliant 1976 Maitress with Bulle Ogier, for example). In one scene Loulou considers pimping his new girlfriend, but leaves the decision totally up to her. In another he offers his mother, who is a maid at an office building, some of Nelly's money. Though told from Huppert's perspective, from the beginning--when Loulou brushes off the petulant Dominique (played by Frederique Cerbonnet) to when he is knifed outside the Bar L'Oasis yet enjoys his time in the hospital (the wheelchair was fun)--the film was Depardieu's, as the title makes clear. It is at its best in its moments of random humor, particularly: the saxophone, Big-Ass Marite, the old lady with the mailbox, the stuffed tomatoes, the girl with the cat, the strange scene when housesitting a friend's apartment.

I'm Keith Hernandez

Rob Perri's 2009 documentary I'm Keith Hernandez came closer to revealing the truth about the hidden connections between neo-liberal politics, the international drug trade, and the 1986 World Series than perhaps the filmmakers intended. An intertwined story of baseball, cocaine, porno movies, rock and roll, Ronald Reagan, and the Iran Contra Scandal, it also posed as a "vehicle to discuss how male identity is shaped by TV/film, sports, advertising, and pornography," mostly through a discussion of Hernandez's trademark moustache. The filmmakers are no doubt responsible for the proliferation of "I'm Keith Hernandez" graffiti and posters around Brooklyn (and elsewhere) since the beginning of the new year. You can watch the 20-minute film free on the website below, as the movie was a strictly not for profit venture by the artist. Watch in conjunction with Cocaine Cowboys, the gritty, fantastic, surreal, (and more serious) documentary about the connections between Miami's deadly 1970-80s Colombian drug trade and the local (and national) real estate and banking industries, directed by Billy Corben in 2006. I'm Keith Hernandez, for its part, was easily the best baseball film since 1989's Major League starring Wesley Snipes, Tom Berenger, and Corbin Bernsen. Well done.

View the movie here:

http://www.imkeithhernandez.com

Rehearsal for a Crime

Luis Bunuel's Ensayo de un Crimen (1955) (aka The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz), starring Ernesto Alonso, Miraslava Stern, and Rita Macedo, was one of the three masterpieces of Mexican cinema that he made while living in Mexico City, along with Los Olvidados (1950) and El (1953). While Alonso, who had appeared in Bunuel’s Abismos de Pasion (Wuthering Heights) in 1954, went on to a long career in Mexican television production, the female leads met more tragic fates. Like Bunuel, the Czech-born Miraslava Stern (who was doubled in the movie by an exact replica mannequin that she, oddly, exchanged clothes and underwear with in one scene) fled the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Most of her adult life was spent in Mexico, where she dated bullfighters in real life and appeared in The Brave Bulls with Anthony Quinn in 1951 as well as the documentary Torero (released 1956). She committed suicide just days before Ensayo de un Crimen's premier in 1955. Rita Macedo, who was once married to the writer Carlos Fuentes, committed suicide two days before her 68th birthday in 1993.Typical for Bunuel, the film’s obsessions recalled themes he addressed twenty years earlier and predicted those he would address twenty years later. Rehearsal for a Crime updated the particular coitus interruptus of L’Age d’Or (1930), where the consummation of two lovers’ desires were continually thwarted by the conventions of religion, middle-class society, and the state, into a kind of murderus interruptus for lead actor Alonso, whose childhood fantasy-memories of murder were rekindled by the discovery of his mother’s long lost music box. Similarly, the double flashback structure (almost none of the movie takes place in real time) brings to mind the I-had-a-dream-within-another-character’s-dream configuration of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Not only does the preoccupied, wealthy Alonso serve as a prototype of the Fernando Rey character of Tristana (1970) and Cet Obscur Objet du Desir (1977), but the leg that breaks away from the Miroslava Stern mannequin is undoubtedly the origin of the prosthetic leg that Catherine Deneuve later wore in Tristana (and which Hitchcock raved about). An often-overlooked homage in this movie was the music box and its diabolically sweet tune that announces the arrival of the murderous impulse in Archibaldo de la Cruz, much as Bunuel’s idol Fritz Lang used the Peer Gynt whistle for Peter Lorre’s character in M (1931). Ensayo de un Crimen is typical of Bunuel’s Mexican movie career in many other ways—low budgets, small production companies, familiar obsessions, and a cast, crew, and source material with which he had worked before—including cinematographer Augustin Jimenez who had filmed El Bruto (1953) and Abismos de Pasion (1954) and novelist Rudolfo Usigli who had written the books on which Susana (1951) and Una Mujer Sin Amor (1952) were based. Bunuel’s Mexican films seemed to infuse, if not undermine, European social realism by his reliance on dream imagery, sexual obsession, and de-romanticized lead characters. His social-surrealist influence on New York street photography can be seen in the work of Helen Levitt, who worked with Bunuel during the filming Los Olvidados and returned to the United States with the wonderful book Mexico City. Her later work maintained a sort of surrealist nod to the playfulness and wretchedness of children.

Les Levres Rouges

Though rumors of new Erzebeth Bathory movies have appeared with regularity over the last decade, Harry Kumel’s Les Levres Rouges (1971) remains one of the finest films about the Hungarian Blood Countess ever made. The Antwerp-born Kumel (who later made the strange Malpertuis, featuring a bed-ridden Orsen Welles) utilized an isolated hotel in the mysterious city of Bruges to set this classic in magical realism/horror. The medieval canals and blood red lips foreshadow, in a way, the Venice of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Le Levres Rouges (aka Le Rouge aux Levres, Blood on Her Lips, Daughters of Darkness) featured Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) as Countess Bathory and Andrea Rau (a television star from Stuttgart in a Louise Brooks wig) as her charming and masochistic servant Ilona. A Belgian-French-German-U.S.-Italian production, co-written and dubbed into three languages, the film's cast and aesthetics set it apart from other 1970s lesbian vampire movies such as those by Jean Rollin, Jesus Franco, or Hammer Films. In place of the campiness of The Vampire Lovers, for example, Les Levres Rouges was marked with an enigmatic eroticness inspired by the isolation of its surreal setting and mood.

Deadlier Than the Male

Among the highlights of MOMA's Julien Duvivier retrospective last month was his 1956 Deadlier Than the Male (aka Voici le Temps des Assassins) starring Jean Gabin and Daniele Delorme. This underappreciated noir featured Gabin (Grand Illusion, Pepe le Moko) as a successful chef who, though warned by his mother, quickly married the young daughter of his (supposedly deceased) ex-wife only to be caught in a web of lies, murder, drug abuse, betrayal, suicide. Duvivier's unrelentingly dark gray vision of postwar Paris and surrounding countryside was reminiscent of his 1950 Sous le Ciel de Paris (which also played at MOMA) and doubled as a subtle critique of the aging bourgeois male, still fighting against his mother's control of his personal life yet still running to her for help. From Bosley Crowther's review for New York Times, October 9, 1957:

"To look at this fetching young lady (Delorme) with her doll's face, her slightly crossed eyes and her air of innocent enjoyment . . . you would hardly suspect she had in her . . . the venom, the sang-froid and the contrivance of a (Catherine) Corday. Yet that's what she gives us in this picture—a beguilingly beautiful girl with an utterly ruthless aggression against the whole category of males."