Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. 
Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the 
Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, 
but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?
Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937) starred Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam in the classic man-on-the-run formula that Hitchcock had perfected two years earlier with The 39 Steps. Thanks in part to a surprise ending featuring a jazz band in blackface, 
Young and Innocent deserves re-evaluation as one of his more significant prewar films. De Marney plays Robert Tisdale, an innocent man turned preordained suspect who, after his mistress is found strangled on the beach, must chase the real killer while he himself is chased by the police. Nova Pilbeam stars as Erica Burgoyne, the young and adventurous daughter of the lead police detective and romantic interest of the fugitive Tisdale. For Pilbeam, who was just 18 at the time, this was her first adult role; as a 15 year-old she had played the daughter in The 
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
with Peter Lorre. Based on a Josephine Tey mystery, Young and Innocent was written by Charles Bennett who had scripted several of Hitchcock's U.K. films: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage (1936), and The Secret Agent (1936). Tisdale's freedom (to pursue the detective's daughter, no less) rests on finding a missing raincoat and the man with the twitching eyes. Along the way are a multitude of hats, phones, cars, a chase through an old mill, and a strange birthday party. As Paul Duncan has written, the climactic crane shot in a London hotel was one of Hitchcock's most difficult, panning from 145 feet high down into a 4 inch close-up. The opening scene of this film--a strangled woman washed upon the shore--later reappeared at the beginning of Frenzy (1972).
Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) was based on La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by Pierre Louys, an 1898 novel that was also the basis of Luis Bunuel’s 1977 masterpiece That Obscure Object of Desire. Louys is also famed for his more explicit erotica such as Trois Filles de Leur Mere, published anonymously in 1926, a year after his death in Paris. Bunuel’s version was co-written by Jean-Claude Carriere and starred Fernando Rey as Mathieu and both Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet 
in the role of the bedeviling tease Conchita. In Von Sternberg’s version, which was written by John Dos Passos, Marlene Dietrich plays the Sevillian flamenco dancer Concha Perez, a fiercely independent woman with “ice for a heart” who beguiles Lionel Atwill as “Pasqualito” and Edward Everett Horton as “Paquitito,” as she affectionately nicknames them (look for Cesar Romero in a small role as well). The film, like Bunuel’s, is told in a series of flashbacks, here to the tune of "El Gato Montes" and other pasodobles. Much of the story was told visually through the bars of iron gates and fences as well as in the presence of caged birds, 
reinforcing the theme of Atwill's imprisonment by becoming more and more elaborate as the movie progresses. As they return home together one night, Dietrich declares “Look mama I caught a fish,” holding up a goldfish in a glass bowl. Even as she repeatedly rebuffs Atwill's amorous advances, she ensnares him deeper and deeper into an intricate emotional plexus; he offers protection from worry (and cash to her mother) but she insists that she does not want a father or husband or any man to control her. Yet when he violently beats her, she returns to him in the morning happier than ever. Though difficult to accept Dietrich as Spanish, the film features the memorable song “he gives me butter and carrots and onions that no other farmer would . . . and other things that are so good.” Filmed in Hollywood, this was Von Sternberg and Dietrich’s last film together, ending a famed collaboration that included Morocco (1930), The Blue Angel (1930), Blonde Venus (1932), and Shanghai Express (1932). Von Sternberg later made the sly Shanghai Gesture (1941) with Gene Tierney and Victor Mature. La Femme et le Pantin was also filmed by Julien Duvivier in 1958, starring Brigitte Bardot and Antonio Vilar, though it plays considerably more dated and straightforward than either the Von Sternberg or Bunuel versions of the same novel.
His Kind of Woman (1951) was a kind of film-noirette set in Mexico and made by RKO, starring Robert Mitchum as the sap Dan Milner and Jane Russell as singer Lenore Brent. The production, like many headed by Howard Hughes, was filled with false starts, conflicting direction, jealousy, pride, envy, etc. The film was directed by John Farrow, better known for The Big Clock (1948) with Ray Milland and Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow's longtime wife) and Hondo (1953) with John Wayne and Geraldine Page--who is always slightly disturbing once you've seen Don Siegel’s Civil War film The Beguiled (1971) with Clint Eastwood. Farrow also wrote the screenplay to the excellent adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956) starring David Niven and Cantinflas. 
Filmed by Harry Wild, whose credits include Johnny Angel (1945), Murder My Sweet (1945), and Macao (1952), His Kind of Woman traces the story of loner Mitchum on vacation at a seaside Mexican resort and his involvement with Russell; Raymond Burr as mobster Nick Ferraro; Vincent Price as vacationing actor Mark Cardigan. Like all noirs, the film addresses the whims of fate and the hidden motivations behind courtship, crime, and love. Jane Russell’s name “Lenore” is nearly synonymous with young death, as it was used repeatedly in the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe (Price's presence reinforces the connection to Poe). A film that does not quite live up to the sum of its many parts, it is still a work of note for any fan of Mitchum, Russell, Price, Burr, Hughes, RKO, movies set in Mexico, or all of the above.
One of the funniest movies of the 1980s, D.C. Cab (1983) delivers hilarious comedy and first-rate social commentary at the same time in way that few films can match. As a kid, everyone saw this movie in the theater as it was Mr. T's follow-up to Rocky III and premiered during the first season 
of The A-Team. D.C. Cab was one of many "inspirational" movies that came out from 1976-1986 (look it up) but one of the very few that offered such an obvious critique of the Reagan administration by calling for collective action over personal glory (the film's locale was the first hint). Directed by Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys), the film is the story of the wide-eyed Albert Hockenberry who comes to the inner city to work at the cab company owned by Harold, his deceased father's buddy from Vietnam. D.C. Cab, 
of course, is the misfit cab company, employing the indigent, indulgent, and apathetic alike. It is also extremely diverse, from the cross-dressing Tyrone to the would-be ladies man Xavier to the Barbarian Brothers. Will this motley group band together to save D.C. Cab? The film stars: Max Gail, Mr. T, Gary Busey, Bill Maher (yes, that Bill Maher), Paul Rodriguez, Jill Schoelen, and features Timothy Carey in one of his last screen roles as well as 1980s sensation Irene Cara ("Flashdance," "Fame") as herself. The cinematography was by Dean Cundley, a John Carpenter regular who pioneered the use of the steadicam on Halloween, and who also filmed The Fog, Escape From New York, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future ,Romancing the Stone, Jurassic Park, and Roadhouse.
Barry Mahon's voyeuristic The Sex-Killer (1966) has been one of my favorite films from Something Weird Video for some time, having purchased a VHS copy from their catalog about 15 years ago. Filmed on location in New York in (what appears to be) 16mm black & white, The Sex-Killer is the surreal and strange story of Tony, a creepy and reclusive worker in a 
Garment District mannequin factory. Tony’s favorite hobby, when not trying to sneak broken mannequins home with him for “dates” at a local bar, is to utilize his high-powered binoculars from the roof of his building on unsuspecting sunbathers (there was apparently a lot of nude rooftop sunbathing in those days). The film features Uta Erickson, Helena Clayton, Rita Bennett (a Mahon regular), and Sharon Kent as Tony’s various girlfriends/murder victims. Mahon was a film producer, director, writer, and cinematographer of various mid-sixties Z-grade movies. His directorial canon 
betrays a common theme: She Should Have Stayed in Bed (1963), Bunny Yeager's Nude Camera (1963), Nudes on Tiger Reef (1965), Nudes Inc. (1965), The Love Cult (1966), and P.P.S. - The Prostitutes Protective Society (1966). His first feature, however, was called Cuban Rebel Girls aka Assault of the Rebel Girls (1959), which was co-written by and starred Errol Flynn in his last screen role, along with his 16-year old girlfriend Beverly Aadland. Flynn plays himself as a war correspondent, assisting Fidel Castro’s revolution against the Batista government. Flynn, who lived in Havana at the time, also appeared in the amazing lost-documentary 
by Victor Pahlen called "The Truth about Fidel Castro Revolution," recently released as Cuban Story. Barry Mahon, who had become close friends with Flynn, had a life story to match the tales recounted in Flynn’s hilarious autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways (also released in 1959, the year of Flynn’s death at age 50). Born and raised in California, Mahon volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1941 months before Pearl Harbor, earning an outstanding reputation as a fighter pilot before being shot down over the ocean on August 19 1942. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he was held at Stalag Luft III, where he helped dig the escape tunnels made famous by the John Sturges film The Great Escape (1963). The baseball-tossing character of Captain Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, was partly based on Mahon.
Simon of the Desert was Luis Bunuel's last film made in Mexico, released in 1965. One of the few movies based on an original story by Bunuel, its source material was the life of Saint Simeon Stylites--a Fourth Century hermit who spent 37 years atop a 60-foot column outside of Aleppo (modern day Syria). In My Last Sigh Bunuel wrote that he was first introduced to Simeon Stylites by Federico Garica Lorca, who had given him a copy of Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Column (written circa 1260-1275), 
a kind of a cult-book lives of the saints that was very popular in Medieval Europe. The book detailed Simeon's diet and excrement, which amused Bunuel and Lorca when they were students in Madrid. The rest of the story was researched at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Though many scenes of the film were cut (or never shot), the film won 5 awards at the Venice Film Festival including the Special Jury Prize. At 45 minutes long, the film (still rarely shown in movie theaters) stars Claudio Brook as Simon and Sylvia Pinal as the trickster Satan, arriving to tempt Simon in various disguises including a bearded Jesus carrying a lamb, 
in a self-propelled coffin, and as a school-girl in a sailor suit complete with stockings and suspender belt. Pinal, a popular Mexican actress who had starred in Bunuel's other two last Mexican films, the brilliant Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), was excellent as the temptress devil, revealing her legs, exposing her breasts, and caressing the beard of the implacable Simon del desierto. Shot by Gabriel Figueroa and edited by Carlos Savage, the film presents the absurdity of Catholicism while at the same time exposing Bunuel's basic belief in a higher ascetic lifestyle. Motifs, of course, abound as well: women's legs, ants, solitude, the dual nature of freedom/enslavement. The most shocking aspect of Simon of the Desert, upon rewatching, 
is how closely the film prefigures many visual and narrative elements of his later work in France (usually viewed as a stylistic break from his Mexican films). The shots are so similar that you could dissolve from Silvia Pinal's legs directly onto Jeanne Moreau's in Diary of a Chambermaid and wind up in another century and country. Of course, that is exactly what happens in Simon of the Desert as well, as Pinal takes Simon (via airplane) to the very bottom depths of hell (for Bunuel): a Greenwich Village disco where the kids dance the last dance aka the "Radioactive Flesh." Simon, his beard closley trimmed, idly smokes a pipe as he sits alone amongst the pre-hippy crowd. The overhead shots of the East River and Manhattan skyline were perhaps Bunuel's only filmed of New York (I cannot think of any others). Simon of the Desert's disjointed narrative/fantasy structure (which he had not used in this way before) also foreshadowed both Belle de Jour (1967) and The Milky Way (1969). The column used for Simon was too heavy to move and remains today in the field in Mexico where they filmed the movie.
Though far from perfect, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen (2008) deserved much better than the moralistic and pejorative reviews that awaited its premiere at the Quad Cinema last winter. Written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also starred as Edmond, the film featured Angela Winkler as the Madame and Maximilian Schell as Edmond's friend Kogi. 
Glowna, best known for Desperado City (1981) and Nothing Left to Lose (1983), adapted the script from a 1961 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Yasunari's real-life suicide figures into the tale of unmitigated grief and the inescapability of dreams, for, haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter who have died in a crash fifteen years earlier, Edmond is a lonely man in modern day Berlin with nothing left to live for. Nothing, that is, until his friend Kogi tells him of a secret brothel where elderly men can stay all night with heavily-sedated girls who will not awake no matter what you do to them (the clients are presumed impotent by the Madame). Vadim Rizov, writing for the 
Village Voice on November 11, 2008, called the film "laughably somber" and "one of the year's worst releases." Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times, taking the morality up a notch, wrote on November 14, 2008 that an "odor of fusty smut" clings to this "clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence," and that its "whisper of necrophilia is impossible to ignore." And Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 9, 2009, complained "it's discouraging to see a movie where the women sleep through everything. They don't even have the courtesy to wake up and claim to have a headache." He continued, condescendingly suggesting that House of the Sleeping Beauties "offends not only civilized members of both sexes, 
but even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness." He then states that "obvious questions arise" in the film, such as how does the Madame "find the women? Who are they? Why do they seem to sleep peacefully instead of as if they are drugged? How do they keep their hair and makeup impeccable?" Some points raised by these reviews (and others) were well taken, and Edmond's soliloquies are pretentious and poorly written and the film is filled, in unexpected places, with bizarre religious imagery. But as for the film's implied necrophilia, its unsettled nature, its mysteries, its shortcomings, its matter of fact attitude toward the death machine of the sex trade (for which both prostitute and john are disposable), and its utter disregard for modern middle-class morality--they make it all the more worth watching. The underlying message of the reviews last winter seems to be that there is nothing erotic or nice or proper about severely-drugged girls or creepy men who pay top dollar to fondle them in their sleep. What is the world coming to?
