Astro Zombies

Ted V. Mikels' Astro Zombies (1969) deserves a wider audience than simply Misfits fans seeking out Danzig's inspiration for sending his Astro zombies to rape the land and exterminate the whole fucking human race. B-movie legend John Carradine and Chinese Communist spy Tura Satana (Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill) star alongside switchblade-wielding Mexicans, square CIA agents, body-painted strippers, and an ubiquitous trail of young, bloody corpses. Look for LBJ--and with him the war in Vietnam--in the background (literally) of this space age thriller.

Top 20 Westerns

Top 20 (29) Westerns in chronological order, 1940-1980

1. 1940 Santa Fe Trail d. Michael Curtiz. Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland
2. 1941 They Died With Their Boots On d. Raoul Walsh. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland
3. 1943 The Outlaw d. Howard Hughes. Jane Russell
4. 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident d. William Wellman. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn
5. 1946 My Darling Clementine d. John Ford. Henry Fonda, Victor Mature
6. 1948 Ft. Apache d. John Ford. Henry Fonda, John Wayne
7. 1948 Red River d. Howard Hawks. John Wayne, Montgomery Clift
8. 1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre d. John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston
9. 1948 Duel in the Sun d. King Vidor. Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotton, Jennifer Jones,
10. 1949 I Shot Jesse James d. Sam Fuller. John Ireland
11. 1952 Viva Zapata d. Elia Kazan. Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn
12. 1952 Rancho Notorious d. Fritz Lang. Marlene Dietrich
13. 1952 High Noon d. Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado
14. 1955 Vera Cruz d. Robert Aldrich. Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper
15. 1956 The Searchers d. John Ford. John Wayne, Natalie Wood
16. 1957 Forty Guns d. Sam Fuller. Barbara Stanwyck
17. 1957 3:10 to Yuma d. Delmer Daves. Glenn Ford, Van Heflin
18. 1960 The Magnificent Seven d. John Sturges. Yul Brenner, James Coburn, Steve McQueen
19. 1961 One-Eyed Jacks d. Marlon Brando (fired Stanley Kubrick). Marlon Brando, Karl Malden
20. 1962 Ride the High Country d. Sam Peckinpah. Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Warren Oates
21. 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance d. John Ford. Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Lee Marvin
22. 1964 A Fistful of Dollars d. Sergio Leone. Clint Eastwood
23. 1966 The Appaloosa d. Sidney Furie. Marlon Brando
24. 1966 The Professionals d. Richard Brooks. Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Claudia Cardinale
    
25. 1969 The Wild Bunch d. Sam Peckinpah. William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
26. 1970 The Ballad of Cable Hogue d. Sam Peckinpah. Jason Robards
27. 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid d. Sam Peckinpah. James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan
28. 1974 Don't Touch the White Woman d. Marco Ferreri. Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve
29. 1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson d. Robert Altman. Paul Newman, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Chaplin,
    

Jamaica Inn

Alfred Hitchcock’s last U.K. film before coming to Hollywood, Jamaica Inn (1939) was based on the Daphne du Maurier novel published three years earlier. The film stars Maureen O’Hara as the Irish orphan Mary and an over-the-top Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the corrupt country squire of the Cornish coast. Set during the 1820s, the film takes place in the isolated “Jamaica Inn,” a hideout for smugglers and pirates run by Mary’s aunt and uncle. O’Hara (Rio Grande, Our Man in Havana) and Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Witness for the Prosecution) are fantastic, and the film provides an early look at the English actor Robert Newton, who played the unforgettable, visionary, and drunken artist in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Featuring a hero dressed as a villain and a villain dressed as a hero, the film involves shipwrecks, double-crosses, hangings, sailor tattoos, eavesdropping, and meddling women, and also offers an implicit critique of the “public spectacle” of modern death on the eve of WWII, in which his native England will almost fall. The film involves many recognizable Hitchcock touches, from the lady with the goose to the gagged and bound heroine at the films denouement to lines like: “Take off your clothes off or I’ll do it for you!” O’Hara and Laughton later starred during the war in the French Resistance film This Land is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir in 1943.

Chess Fever

Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925) is a comedic classic of Soviet cinema that builds on early Russian silent cinema, not just upon the revolutionary impulses of October 1917. The film presents a domestic picture of wintry Moscow in the grip of “chess fever,” and includes both actual footage of an international chess tournament in Moscow that year as well as cameo appearances by famed chess stars of the day, such as the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca (world champion 1921-1927). Chess Fever stars Anna Zemtsova (later billed as Anna Pudovkin) and Vladimir Fogel as they prepare, in much different fashion, for their wedding day. When Fogel’s obsession with chess—shared by the entire male population of the city, including the chemist who unwittingly mistakes lipstick and poison—tears apart their engagement, Fogel and Zemstiva must each evaluate what is truly important. Will a chance encounter with chess champion Capablanca (who prefers beautiful women to chess) save the day? The 27-minute Soviet silent features chess-loving kittens, checkered socks, and an attempted suicide.

After Hours

Martin Scorsese’s dark, postmodern comedy After Hours (1985) stars Griffin Dunne as computer programmer Paul Hackett, whose casual and nervous encounter with Rosanna Arquette leads him on a nightmare voyage through Soho’s dark and rainy streets. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Hackett’s only thoughts are of finding an illusive and elusive way home “home”-- which in his case is back at work in his corporate office. On his journey through New York’s underground, where he encounters (but does not participate in) the libidinous world of drugs and sex, he will be tempted and tormented by an increasingly strange collection of women, from the trauma-inflicted Arquette to a sexually threatening sculptor played by Linda Fiorentino, from the obsessive, beehived, and potentially-castrating Teri Garr (who has access to a Xerox machine) to Catherine O’Hara (and her Mister Softee truck), and finally to the mysterious and maternal Verna Bloom, who lives in the basement of the Oz-like Club Berlin. Also features fantastic location shooting, mis-communication, repetition, an angry mob, and a cameo by Cheech and Chong. As a fantastic portrait of downtown in the early 1980s, After Hours is best viewed in conjunction with Downtown 81 or Permanent Vacation.

Ramona (1928)

Edwin Carewe’s Ramona, which cast Dolores Del Rio as the half-Scottish, half-Indian title character of this latest adaption of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, was produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by United Artists in 1928. Carewe had directed Del Rio three times before, including her first two films Joanna (1925) and High Steppers (1926), and Resurrection (1927). The film was described by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California." Hall, who does not offer a direct comparison of her performance with that of Pickford’s, wrote that “Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Ramona is an achievement. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” In an earlier article about the film, the Times misidentified the national and ethnic heritages of both the character of Ramona, and of Del Rio herself. Writing that this is the “first time in her brief but rapid film career that Miss Del Rio has portrayed a character at least partly parallel to her own nationality,” the Times describes the character as “half Indian—half Spanish” and Del Rio as “a Mexican with Spanish blood in her ancestry.” In the story, however, Ramona is pointedly not half-Indian, half-Spanish (which would have made her ethnically “Mexican”) but is rather orphaned by her Scottish father. She is merely raised as a step-daughter by a “noble” Sevillian family living in California. As Victoria Sturtevant has shown, Del Rio’s performance in early films like The Loves of Carmen and Ramona gave her a more polished, elite, and Spanish image than Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. Her performance not only helped sustain the Ramona story’s enduring popularity, but was also a direct engagement with the growing Mexican American commercial market as a means to circumvent any forms of Mexican protest and boycott. More than simply cultivating a Mexican star, as we saw with The gaucho, the 1928 Ramona was produced during a period of the novel’s “discovery” by the Spanish-speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles. Not only had the (still-ongoing) outdoor festival known as the Ramona Pageant premiered in Hemet, California in 1923, but an elaborate ten-part Ramona play ran at the Mexican American Teatro Hidalgo on N. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles during the twenties. This play's success was in turn trumped by Mexican novelist and playwright Adalberto Elias Gonzalez's Spanish-language play entitled Los Amores de Ramona, which opened in 1927 and seated nearly two thousand people per night in its initial run. Unlike previous strategies in getting around the Mexican protest without substantively altering their largely derogatory portrayals of Mexican characters, the 1928 version of Ramona could be marketed towards a built-in Mexican American audience. The Del Rio version, additionally, continued the long legacy of marketing that has surrounded the Ramona story as well. The silent film was “really the progenitor of the modern theme song,” and prior to the film’s completion “an astute sales manager named Emil Jensen summoned to his office at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York representatives of a music publishing house. He told them he was anxious to exploit a new Del Rio film in two ways: a Ramona rose, an artificial flower, would be manufactured and sold to film fans; and he wished a song composed, entitled ‘Ramona,’ and dedicated to the star.” The sheet music for the “Waltz song with ukulele and banjo uke” was written by Mable Lane and L. Wolfe Gilbert and featured a large picture of Del Rio on the cover, though the song was not included in the film.

The Gaucho (1927)

Starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mexican actress Lupe Velez, The Gaucho was released in 1927 as “The Gaucho Starring Douglas Fairbanks” to largely positive reviews that noted, nonetheless, “a rather gruesome undertone to an otherwise gay symphony.” The film’s Argentine setting allowed Fairbanks to operate in an essentially Zorro-like adventure plot that ostensibly skirted Mexican concerns, with the Andean highlands functioning in the same manner as the fictive Costa Roja. Released a month earlier than The Dove, Fairbanks’ film contained many explicit allusions to Mexican themes and images. As a return to the hero-bandit formula that Fairbanks had helped popularize with The Mark of Zorro (and the 1924 sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro), The Gaucho pits Fairbanks against a greedy, corrupt, drunken, and ineffectual state government, ruled in this case by Ruiz, the usurper, played by German actor Gustav von Seyffertitz. Armed with an Argentine bolas that replaces Zorro’s sword, Fairbanks must the native peasants with the elite ruling class, which, in this case, is represented by the Catholic Church. The film adds the specter of infectious disease as a plot twist that differentiates The Gaucho from previous incarnations of this Ramona and Zorro theme of a corrupt state unable to protect its land, women, or gold. Infected with the “Black Doom,” a leprosy-like disease, that the state has been unable to successfully quarantine, The Gaucho finds his religious calling via a ghostly vision of the Virgin Mary (played by Mary Pickford) at the City of the Miracle. Following his miraculous cure from the Black Doom at the shrine of Mary (aka Our Lady of Guadalupe), the Gaucho leads the people against Ruiz and his corrupt and inebriated army. Like in the Zorro films, Fairbanks’ own celebrity operates as part of the narrative as well. It was not only reinforced by the apparition of Mary Pickford but by the Gaucho’s magnetic appeal to common men and women alike. Not only does Velez, as the Mountain Girl, fawn over the Gaucho’s pictures on her wall and decorate herself with make-up when he visits her small town, but when we are introduced to the Gaucho/Fairbanks he is signing autographs in a local cantina. Though the film is in many ways reflects the basic Zorro narrative, it cinematographically recalls the visual language employed by D.W. Griffith’s Ramona in 1910, as sweeping long-shots of the landscape and natural beauty of this simpler time and place are fore-fronted in The Gaucho. Compared to The Mark of Zorro, the film featured a toned-down version of the arched doorways, bleached-white walls, and ornate tile work representative of the same Spanish-style architecture and interior design that was popular in 1920s California, as modern local boosters were reshaping Southern California in this Spanish/Mexican hybrid vision by re-constructing historical sites such as Olvera Street (a Mexican marketplace billed as the oldest street in Los Angeles) and the El Camino Real. The styling was somewhat subdued in the film, in part reflecting the larger trend of 1920s set design. As Simon Dixon has argued, 1920s set design was involved in a visual discourse with celebrity homes, and film magazines like Photoplay featured lavish photo spreads on estates like Marion Davies’ San Simeon-by-the-Sea “Ocean House,” Rudolph Valentino’s “Falcon Lair” in Beverly Hills, and Fairbanks and Pickford’s own Spanish-styled house, called “Pickfair,” that Fairbanks and Pickford constructed in 1927, the same year that The Gaucho premiered, in an elite and exclusively white subdivision of Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, California. This is more than conjecture: “Pickfair” was discussed in the film’s original program book as well as in newspaper articles as the new home of the over 600 head of longhorn cattle that Fairbanks purchased for the pivotal stampede scene near the end of the film. Such discussions of Fairbanks’ extravagant spending on The Gaucho was not merely a nod to his own celebrity but were also an attempt to elevate the film’s critical appeal and cultural significance. Again mirroring the film’s official program book, newspapers lauded The Gaucho’s high production costs while, simultaneously, commenting on Fairbanks’ creativity and genius as a producer. Sections of the program called “When Fairbanks Gets An Idea” and “Things Only Fairbanks Can Do” were printed in the New York Times leading up to the film’s release, including a discussion of the construction of the massive set of the City of the Miracle, which included an 800-foot street and the development of a camera lens that “would picture such a street in a way that all parts of it, down to the pilgrims entering the shrine at the end.” The establishing shot of the village, consisting of a long backwards pan, was an impressive innovation that, according to the Times, was an example of how “Fairbanks’s fanciful notions of one sort or another in his new picture come into reality” and were “the sort of thing that has given him name for accomplishing in a seemingly easy manner some seemingly impossible technical problems.” The film’s program book that went to great lengths to explain that an Argentine gaucho was not very different from a Mexican caballero. The “gaucho of yesterday,” the program informs us, “was a romantic, audacious guerilla of the plains.” He was “tall, handsome, and lighter-skinned than the North American Indians, but with black eyes.” As “King of the Pampas,” he was an “excellent cattleman and a savage fighter . . . a fierce, uncompromising son of Spanish-Indian stock,” a “picturesque figure” in “flamboyant” clothing armed with the traditional weapon of choice, a bolas. The program then notes that Fairbanks has taken some poetic liberties with the historical presentation of the Gaucho, believing, as he does, that “’things as they are’ are never as appealing as ‘things as we would like them to be.” That the program comments on the light skin of the Argentine gaucho is rather surprising considering the dark make-up that Fairbanks wears in the film. But, as Paula Marantz Cohen has written, Fairbanks’ skin tone was one of the many closely controlled aspects of his on and off screen image that he and Pickford adeptly and closely controlled. Fairbanks, who was a quarter Jewish, had skin “far darker than that of the conventional leading men of the period,” and negotiated this darkness in his earlier roles by lightening his skin with a heavy layer of white make-up. But in his later films set in “exotic” Mexican, South American, or Arabian locale (such as The Gaucho), Cohen argues that Fairbanks pioneered the use of sun-tanning his skin even darker to not only to connect his character with the illicit and foreign persona he is portraying, but also to navigate his own darkness by “normalizing a look that would otherwise have marginalized him in mainstream culture.” Neither The Gaucho’s narrative and visual connections to Zorro and Ramona, nor the use of its pointedly non-Mexican setting as in The Dove, nor its focus (like Zorro) on Fairbanks’ own celebrity were the most significant aspects of the film to our understanding its complex and ambiguous response to the heightened Mexican pressure of derogatory depictions in Hollywood films. Perhaps most crucial to the way the film engages with Mexican protest was in the film’s cast, with the introduction of Lupe Velez in her first starring role. Of course, it should be noted, Velez was not the only Mexican in the film. Indeed, as the New York Times wrote, “most” of The Gaucho’s “cantankerous bandits . . . are Mexicans, to whom the bolas was as unfamiliar as croquet to an American Indian or baseball to an Eskimo.” Velez, who was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico and educated in Texas, inaugurated an exaggerated version of the “Mexican Spitfire” character she was most known for. Although Dolores Del Rio had broken into Hollywood movies two years earlier, it was Velez’s portrayal of the star-struck/love-smitten Mountain Girl whose performance inaugurated the stereotype of the hot-blooded (and specifically) Mexicana whose uncontrollable passions are, in the end, subdued by a dominant man. Velez’s passion smolder as The Gaucho literally intertwines the pair with his bolas in a suggestive dance in the cantina where they first meet, but are aroused to their fiery fullest as a rival appears for the affections her “Gaucho mio.” Velez, who was quick to fight women rivals, other men in the Gaucho’s gang, or even the Gaucho himself (often biting or slapping him and getting bitten or slapped back in an extremely casual presentation of domestic violence in which love, anger, and passion are intertwined), was praised in film reviews. She was acclaimed for her performance as a peasant girl who, even when civilized in fine clothing, does not overcome the hot fervor of her station. She was perfect in the role of the Latina “termagant, quickly fired to anger. Whether she is in rags or laces she gives blow for blow to the men who get in her way or incur her anger . . . never heeding for an instant that she is arrayed in silks and laces.” Even the reviewer noted that although “Miss Velez gives a capital characterization . . . it does seem strange that she is so suddenly tamed in the end, when she becomes the bride of the Gaucho.” As Carlos Cortes has shown, the pairing of a Mexican female character and Anglo man had long been an acceptable pairing in Hollywood films, as long as the white man was successfully able to tame his Mexican or Indian bride. The casting of a Mexican actress to serve as Fairbanks’ onscreen bride was an important development in Hollywood’s response to ongoing protests. The development of a Mexicana star not only reflected a calculated decision in ethnic marketing that reflected the increased distribution into the Mexican and Latin American markets as well as the growing purchasing power of Mexican American audiences. It also served to inherently temper Mexican criticism, as a film featuring a Mexican movie star could be popular even if the character portrayed presents a negative or derogatory stereotype, the feature at the very heart of Mexican complaint about Hollywood films dating back a decade. As Laura Serna has written, when The Gaucho premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, theater magnate Sid Grauman attempted to exploit the Mexcana star’s popularity with the Mexican American population in Los Angeles and “organized a special event in honor of Velez, who had just signed a five-year contract with United Artists, called Fiesta de Mexico in the English language advertisement.” The event, though a blatant attempt to connect Mexico with the film’s Argentine setting, was a failure. Velez, however, proved to be extremely popular with both Mexican and Anglo audiences and critics alike. In fact, two years later, in a less than stellar review of a Lupe Velez film that paired her with Gary Cooper, the Times laments the loss of some of the passionate temper than Velez displayed in The Gaucho. “The exotic and curiously attractive Mexican actress,” they wrote, “…is now to be seen as a more placid but not wiser young woman” in a film called Wolf Song (1929). Velez had not been Douglas Fairbanks’ first choice for The Gaucho. After seeing Dolores Del Rio in Edwin Carewe’s Resurrection during a private screening for Mary Pickford and her mother, Fairbanks had inquired as to her availability. Carewe informed the swashbuckling star that the twenty-two year-old Del Rio was already signed to star in Carewe’s remake of Ramona, which would go into production at the end of the year. The role of the Mountain Girl then went to Velez, who had arrived in California the year before following many Mexican stage roles, and was, herself, originally considered for the lead in The Dove the year before.