For a man who toiled in the studio system for close to 50 years, cranking out genre quickies and prestige productions with equal aplomb, Raoul Walsh’s work remains astonishingly coherent. My grab-bag syle of viewing has made this resoundingly clear. This week I watched his earliest work, Regeneration (1915) and The Thief of Bagdad (1925) through two films he made in 1953: The Lawless Breed and Gun Fury. The above still is from Along the Great Divide, a spare, Oedipal Western from 1951. All of them, in one guise or another, deals with Walsh’s major concern, the benefits (freedom) and costs (self-absorption, loneliness) of individuality.

In Along the Great Divide (available from the Warner Archive), men are subsumed under vaulting rock formations, isolated and doomed. Kirk Douglas, in his first Western, plays a neurotic U.S. Marshal intent on protecting a cattle rustler accused of murder (Walter Brennan) from his would-be lynchers, and on bringing him to justice. He pushes his deputies as hard as his prisoners, eventually alienating all of them over a harsh drive through the desert. Douglas represses his world-devouring charisma into a bottled-up rage, unleashed only when a bemused, sardonic Brennan starts incessantly humming a tune, “Down In the Valley”, that the Marshal’s Dad used to sing, triggering unwelcome memories.

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Earlier this week, I found myself leafing through the sellsheets for those outrageous productions that straight-to-DVD companies market to Facets, hoping that we will carry them for our online rent-by-mail service or in our videotheque. I like to poke through these sheets every so often, because they are truly good for a laugh. Either the films themselves are unbelievably bad, or the sell copy is so poorly written, it was surely spit out by a committee of marketing illiterates. Since, I like sharing a good chuckle, I thought I would let my readers in on the fun.

My new favorite bad movie, which I probably will never watch, but I am amused that it even exists, is a horror film called Squeal. From what I can gather from the sellsheet, which is short on storyline but heavy with taglines, it’s a monster movie about a man-pig whose face has porcine features, including a snout for a nose. For all those women who have dating histories similar to mine, a plethora of jokes are probably running through your head, as they did for me. But, I won’t go there; just know that I can relate. Anyway, the tagline at the top of the sellsheet blares, “Terror Has a New Face,” while the tagline on the actual DVD case reads, “Meat Is Murder.” The sellsheet swears that this film is not just any bad horror flick, because it has credentials. After all, it was the official selection for the Severed Head Film Festival.

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A friend recently brought my attention to a Craigslist posting for some 16mm films that were being sold by a private collector in Denver who was offering a 16mm Kodak Pageant 2505 projector, take-up reels, plus a collection of vintage 16mm shorts. Titles listed included: Grand Hotel, Matinee, The Plumber, and Krazy Kat. It seemed like a screaming deal, so I instructed my assistant to make the purchase for the Film Studies Program and then anxiously awaited their delivery to screen some of these shorts as part of my backyard cinema series. I did, and I’m lucky my neighbors didn’t call the police. The Krazy Kat short was actually titled Krazy Kat House, and while it did hearken back to the silent-era, the only thing animated about this was the sexual libidos of the lesbians engaging in various graphic and explicit acts. Grand Hotel? This was no excerpt of the John Barrymore classic but rather the sexcapades of four people in a hotel room. Although it was hard to tell, due to the angles and the way it was shot, I’m pretty sure it did not involve Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. These women, however, were certainly ready for their close-ups, but mainly in the gynecological sense. READ MORE

As one of the movies being presented as part of TCM’s 24-Hour Tribute to the Telluride Film Festival on Monday evening, September 6th at 2 am (ET), THE CHALLENGE (1938) is a bit of an oddity. Rarely seen in the U.S. and not one of the better known films about a famous mountain-climbing expedition, it is nonetheless an intriguing bridge between the German mountain films of Arnold Fanck (White Hell of Pitz Palu, 1929) and contemporary man-against-nature survival tales such as Philipp Stozl’s Northface (2008), where two Germans and two Austrians try to scale the Eiger in Switzerland, and Kevin Macdonald’s documentary reenactment Touching the Void (2003),  the ill-fated trek by Joe Simpson and Simon Yates up the face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.     READ MORE

Opening on September 3rd and running until September 22nd, 2010, Gallery1988 in Los Angeles (in conjunction with The Autumn Society of Philadelphia) will be home to an exhibit of original artwork inspired by the classic 80s era sci-fi/fantasy/horror comedies GREMLINS (1984), GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) and THE GOONIES (1985).  Now at the quarter century mark, these one-time box office hits and pop culture milestones have trickled into the American collective consciousness, where “Who you gonna call?” and “Goonies never say die!” have become the modern equivalents of “Follow the yellow brick road” and “As God is my witness, tomorrow is another day. “  Even though the merciless Southern California sun has burnished me throughout these summer months a deep raw umber, you can color me excited!

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I haven’t had the chance to do much reading this year and that’s been really frustrating. Like many people, I often enjoy catching up on my reading during the summer months when the hot weather makes it difficult to do much of anything except lounge around in a comfortable chair or on a sofa and thumb through a book. Last weekend I finally decided to set aside some reading time and found myself engrossed in Mike White’s Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection.

Mike White started writing about film in the 1990s while self-publishing his own small press movie magazine (or zine) devoted to cult films and Hollywood hits called Cashiers du Cinemart, which was a creative play on the title of the respected French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. The book compiles many of the best articles from Cashiers du Cinemart, but it also contains some new material and updates for the book release. Contributors include Mike Thompson, Leon Chase, Chris Cummins, Skizz Cyzyk, Andrew Grant, Rich Osmond, and Mike White’s wife, Andrea White but a large portion of the book highlights Mike’s own writing and personal insights. The book also features a great forward written by film director Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast; 1963, Two Thousand Maniacs!; 1964, She-Devils on Wheels; 1967, The Wizard of Gore; 1970, etc.) and a funny introduction from author Chris Gore (Film Threat, The Ultimate Film Festival Guide, The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, etc.)

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My  hopscotching education in Raoul Walsh skitters on this week, with five gut-punching thrillers. I’m jumping through his career haphazardly, watching whatever I can easily acquire. Last week led me from 1930 to 1955, but today I’m mired in the 1940s, thanks to the Warner Bros.-TCM box set, Errol Flynn Adventures (feel free to ignore this post if you think the TCM branding compromises my objectivity).  Along with Lewis Milestone’s Edge of Darkness, it includes the Walsh-directed Desperate Journey (1942), Northern Pursuit (1943), Uncertain Glory (1944) and Objective, Burma! (1945). I supplemented these with the Warner Archive disc of Manpower (1941).

The images at the top present two communities of wisecracking men, and Marlene Dietrich, sending off one of their own. They are from Manpower and Desperate Journey, two mournful studies of male camaraderie. Manpower takes the love triangle (and Edward G. Robinson) from Howard Hawks’ Tiger Shark (1932) and moves it from a fishing village to the road crew for a power company. It’s there that Robinson and buddy George Raft tell tall tales about their amorous accomplishments with fellow boozers Alan Hale, Ward Bond and a group of other grinning mugs. Walsh packs the frame with group shots, of leering, laughing and impulsive men. They gather in semi-circles to trade quips, and end the film in the same group formations saying their final goodbyes.

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Each year I look forward to the Silent Summer Film Festival at the Portage Theater, one of Chicago’s few restored movie palaces. For six consecutive Fridays, the Silent Film Society of Chicago (SFSC) presents a variety of well-known and unknown silent movies accompanied with live organ and sound effects by professional “photoplay organists” Dennis Scott and Jay Warren. This year’s lineup included: The Freshman starring Harold Lloyd, the original Ben-Hur, The Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks, the comic-strip comedy Harold Teen, and Pollyanna starring Mary Pickford. Though the festival isn’t over yet, I have already selected my favorite: Lon Chaney in The Penalty.

Over the years, the SFSC has presented several Chaney films, and I have seen them all, becoming a major fan of this unique star. I had seen film stills and clips of the actor in his most famous roles, but I had never viewed a Chaney movie in its entirety until I saw The Phantom of the Opera a few years ago in all its glory on the big screen with live musical accompaniment. The experience was a terrific introduction to the work of this intense actor whose films are highly recognizable but little seen and whose image is famous but whose real life was overshadowed by publicity.

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I was reading The Onion and took a peek at my horoscope. It said “You will make medical history this week as the first person to recover from smallpox only to die from a never-before-seen strain of enormouspox.” My actual fate was not so dire, but that printed and malignant prophecy did manage to land in the ballpark of my reality. Last Friday several doctors confirmed that what I thought was a cluster of spider bites along my neck, cheek, and head was, in fact, shingles; a painful rash of blisters that can flare up in anyone who’s ever had chickenpox. At the moment, I feel like a sparkler on the 4th of July, all dancing pinpoints of fire and itchiness. I’m trying not to scratch at anything as I type, and had to cancel plans to attend both a birthday party and a Fruit Bats concert. As I pose a risk to anyone who has either never had chickenpox or is pregnant, I’m under self-quarantine and feeling very much like a freak. And as I try to think of cinematic comparisons to describe my state, I’m surprised to realize that only a few titles come to mind. READ MORE