My heart flutters as I begin my first week here at Movie Morlocks. I’ll need time to settle into my new Tuesday digs before I can work out any cinephilic kinks, so please forgive my youthful enthusiasms and wild hyperbole. I’ll settle down eventually, but not quite yet.

Let’s get the introduction out of the way. By general life expectancy standards, I’m young, so the current economic crisis hasn’t destroyed my non-existent wealth. Any previous possibility of easy living was scuttled by my decision to attend NYU to study cinema. Bad move! Now destitute, my only solace is the moving image and the multifarious pleasures it brings. That’s what I’ll be writing about here, hopefully in a lucid and engaging manner.

Speaking of economic devastation, Film Forum in NYC has recently concluded a wonderful series of Depression-era films entitled “Breadlines & Champagne”. An eclectic mix of social-realist dramas, high-society screwball comedies, and gangster operatics, it was a revelatory peek into the incredible richness and diversity of the films from that early sound, pre-code period. I received the greatest kick from Raoul Walsh’s unclassifiable 1932 experimental gangster- romantic comedy, Me and My Gal.

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Inspired by Moirafinnie’s article on Golden Age editor Margaret Booth, I thought I would focus on another pioneering woman of the film industry, actress-scenarist-producer Kathlyn Williams. A mighty presence on the silent screen — and behind it  – Williams was considered a movie star even before Hollywood was considered the film industry capital. 

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My thoughts keep revisiting the recent past like a dog chasing its own tail. It’s the whole “would’a-could’a-should’a” game. Number of players: one. Winners: none. Results so far: disorientation and nausea. In a way, these thought experiments are attempts at going back in time to right that which is wrong. But if the films I saw this week taught me anything at all it is this: even time machines can’t help you avert tragedies and, if anything, they just compound the problem. The three films in question are La Jetée (by Chris Marker, 1962), Twelve Monkeys (by Terry Gilliam, 1995), and Timecrimes (aka: Los Cronocrimenes,  by Nacho Vigalondo, 2007). READ MORE

For most true cinephiles, the movie theatre used to be a sacred place, a chapel where you could dream collectively in the dark, undisturbed. It was rarely thought of as a place that harbored killers, psychopaths and assassins – except IN the movies. Yet, every once in a while, the spell was broken and reality intruded via the news media reporting some disruptive incident in a cinema somewhere. When it did, it always made an impression on me but probably none so powerfully as the day Lee Harvey Oswald ran into the Texas Theatre in Dallas to hide after shooting police officer J.D. Tippit.     

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Universal’s HORROR ISLAND (1941) was rushed into production in the spring of 1941 to be sent to theaters as the B-picture on a double bill with MAN MADE MONSTER (1941).  The word “rushed” doesn’t really begin to tell the tale… from the start of principal photography on March 3rd of that year, only 23 days elapsed before HORROR ISLAND was being previewed for exhibitors.  Budgeted at just under $100,000, the “Universal Mystery Thriller” had a punishing 12-day shooting schedule, which required director George Waggener to push his cast and crew around the clock, shooting around existing sets with a script by Maurice Tombragel and Victor McLeod that no doubt seemed, even at the time, derivative and corny.  And yet it is precisely these shortcomings which give the thoroughly unremarkable HORROR ISLAND its undeniable charm. READ MORE

I’m digging back into my photograph collection for some fascinating shots taken during the second round of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, circa 1951.  Pictured below is director Edward Dmytryk, who was jailed as one of the “Hollywood Ten” after he refused to cooperate in the earlier 1947 HUAC proceedings.

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Amid our recent hectic news cycles, the quieter news that the month of March is Women’s History Month probably seems pretty unimportant. I know it passed me  by until a friend recently remarked that it seemed “quaint and irrelevant” to him. I must admit that I could see his point. Then I started to mull over the idea of the sometimes little known contributions of my foremothers to this world. Maybe some of the women who helped to make new pathways for all of their daughters, sisters and friends of the “female persuasion” deserve a bit of a nod.

So, during March I’ll be highlighting a few of the women in film history in front of and behind the camera who made a difference. The first of them is someone whose work you’re almost certain to have seen, though remarkably few people know her name or her story. She was Margaret Booth (1898-2002) and her influence as a pioneer film editor–for good and ill–on movies extends from her first formal credit of Orphans of the Storm (1921) to The Way We Were (1973) and beyond. In 1977, when she was in her ’70s, Film Comment magazine asked her fellow film editors (many of whom were half a century younger) to name the top editors in film history. She was Number Three and still playing an active role in the film world then. To help me place this pivotal figure’s career in some insider perspective, my friend Lynn Zook, who is a present day film editor and archivist has been of great help to me. Her comments will be laced throughout this brief look at Margaret Booth‘s career.

The year 1915 was before women had the vote, could own property in most states without their father or husband’s consent, and was a time when women’s choices were often the home, the sweatshop or the street. This is when Margaret Booth (seen in her prime, above left) began to work on silent pictures.  It wasn’t a career choice for her, it was a matter of her family’s survival. READ MORE

While having a look at the new, remastered DVD of John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), I felt a wash of renewed love for the action/horror subgenre that is the siege drama.  It’s really a no-brainer as to why these movies always work a charm – it’s part of our pioneer DNA that attracts us to tales of protagonists who must hole up, board up, lock and load up against an onslaught of (always) overwhelming forces… be they aboriginal warriors, Indian braves, Nova Scotian homophobes  or flesh-eating ghouls. In addition to vicarious thrills, siege scenarios force us to assess what is really important and what is useful when the odds are against us.  They foster teamwork and cooperation and show us the perils of acting selfishly when all-for-one becomes every-man-for-himself. READ MORE

Set your home-viewing systems for 9:45 am on March 13 (Friday the 13th) because one of my favorite movies from childhood is showing on TCM. This little comedy features one the best one-word titles in all of film history simply because it is fun to say — Zotz!

This comedy-fantasy stars Tom Poston, television actor par excellence, as Professor Jonathan Jones who comes into possession of “zotz,” a coin that has three magical properties. If the coin’s owner points an accusatory finger at an intended victim, the coin causes intense pain; another command causes everything to move in slow motion; finally, if the accusatory finger and the command are used simultaneously, the victim dies. Released in 1962 during the height of the Cold War, Zotz! is an obvious product of the times. Professor Jones tries to involve the Department of Defense in his discovery, but they think he is a madman. Then Communist agents plot to get possession of the coin from Professor Jones.

I was surprised to discover that promotion king William Castle codirected Zotz!, because with its wacky naïve professors, crazy antics, and bureaucratic government officials, this kids-oriented movie is more like The Absent-Minded Professor or Son of Flubber than Castle’s usual schlocky horror-film fare, such as 13 Ghosts, The Tingler, or Macabre. As a matter of fact, both Absent-Minded and Flubber follow Zotz! on the TCM schedule on March 13. But, Zotz! does share something with Castle’s other films — a gimmick, albeit a little one. During the initial theatrical run, the movie’s patrons were rewarded with a plastic replica of the Zotz! coin. According to the Internet (now, there’s a reliable source), the Zotz! coins are highly sought after by collectors. Well, eat your hearts out sci-fi buffs, because I own a Zotz! coin. A gold-colored hunk of hard plastic with a zany design on the front, the coin is one of my prized possessions.

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