With All Hallows Eve just a day away, I thought I’d reverse the bitter tone of last week’s post and embrace my inner MonsterKid… and talk about the things that put the Happy back in Happy Halloween.  Better than talking, I’m going to sing about them, to the tune of that immortal Richard Rogers classic of undying gratitude… READ MORE

Careening across the countryside in a gypsy wagon, a lovesick hunchback cries out piteously for release from his twisted form. A hardworking Jewish-American father tries to appease his young son on his birthday, seeking to interest him in a baseball bat rather than an expensive violin.

A tired general on the Western frontier finds a few moments of solace in soldiers’ singing. An Italian soldier, willing to do anything to get back to his wife and baby, is stranded in the war-torn desert. A stoic Indian chief joins a wild west show, finding a way to keep his dignity despite his reduced circumstances. A broken matador tells an up and comer some hard truths. A Mexican dictator regretfully but decisively goes to war. A Japanese editor tries to correct his American-educated son’s corrupt Western ways.  And a half-monkey, half-man broods endlessly about his plight, especially since he’s stuck being an unpaid houseboy for his creator.

What do each of these diverse (and sometimes pretty outlandish) characters and at least 200 more have in common? Character actor and changeling J. Carrol Naish (1896-1973). I can’t possibly touch on the range of Naish‘s roles in this blog, but his remarkably productive career includes an enormous range of characters, far beyond the roles as heavily accented types he is often best remembered for today.

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Today finds me further entrenched in The Samuel Fuller Collection, a seven-disc box set which comes out today from Sony Pictures Home Entertaintment and the Film Foundation, and for which I had a hugely entertaining interview with Christa Fuller, Sam’s wife. Before I get to her exuberant personality, a few more notes about the movies…

An auteurist’s delight, the set traces Fuller’s career from assembly-line scriptwriter to writer-producer-director tyro. The leap from the innocuously pleasant It Happened in Hollywood (1937) to the delirious noir Underworld U.S.A. (1961) is fascinating, and the drips of his personality discernible in his screenwriting work from Hollywood through Shockproof (1949) and Scandal Sheet (1952) is something of a revelation. Fuller’s blunt-edged prose is handled deftly by Phil Karlson’s hopped-up realism in the latter, while Douglas Sirk’s gleaming surfaces and detached irony are an odd, endlessly fascinating fit for Shockproof, which should be some kind of auteurist case study.

Then there is the full-on eau de Fuller with The Crimson Kimono (1959) and Underworld U.S.A. Kimono is a nuanced take on inter-racial romance shot through with Korean war guilt and stunning location photography of L.A.’s Chinatown. Underworld U.S.A. is all clenched fists and close-ups, documenting the all consuming revenge kick that takes down Cliff Robertson and anyone near him. His tormentors are thrown up as shadows on an alley wall, his own brick-screen idols that he’ll track down one by one with bitter ferocity.

Below the fold is the interview with the delightful Christa Fuller, Sam’s wife for over thirty years and a great thinker and actress in her own right (her film debut was in Godard’s Alphaville), about her late husband’s career in newspapers, the Army, and Hollywood.

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Inspired by the season, Chicago’s alternative movie venues are celebrating Halloween by showcasing a wide range of horror films, from the silent classics to contemporary gore fests. Recently, the Silent Film Society of Chicago showed The Bat, a 1926 mystery thriller that continues to intrigue me long after the initial screening. At first, I was fascinated by the striking visual style of director Roland West and his set designer, William Cameron Menzies, because I recognized that it must have been an influence on the character and visual design of Batman. While I was researching The Bat, I discovered that it was once on the list of permanently lost films before a copy miraculously popped up in Idaho, of all places. And, finally, after pondering the name Roland West, which seemed familiar to me, I realized he was involved in the mysterious death of actress Thelma Todd, though he was married to Jewel Carmen at the time, who actually costarred in The Bat. What a film; definitely Morlocks material.

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“So much about this movie and its characters should be annoying, but the sensory disorientation climaxes in a freakout that wipes all troubles away, as well as anything else in your head.” (The Village Voice)

“…without a doubt one of the most intriguing and well-crafted low-budget horror films in recent memory.” (Fangoria)

“It’s akin to an acid trip, actually. Take a hit right as the movie starts up, and chances are as soon as the acid kicks in, the movie starts twisting at the same time.” (DreadCentral.com)

“I Can See You heralds a splendid new filmmaker with one eye on genre mechanics, one eye on avant-garde conceits and a third eye for transcendental weirdness.” (The New York Times) READ MORE

Quick, name three of George Raft’s greatest films in which he is the top-billed star and are considered as iconic and in the same league with any top three classics by his contemporaries, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney? I realize I’ve just stumped myself because most of the Raft movies that come to mind that I like don’t feature him as the star such as Some Like It Hot (1959) and Scarface (1932). Even in such well regarded Warner Bros. crime dramas as Each Dawn I Die (1939) and They Drive By Night (1940), it’s his co-stars who outshine him – Cagney in Each Dawn I Die (it’s really HIS movie) and the Bogie-Ida Lupino combo in the latter. No, Raft seems forever overshadowed by the triple threat trio of Bogie, Robinson and Cagney and films like RACE STREET (1948) are the reason for his second place status.      READ MORE

I sometimes wonder why I’m a horror fan.  Can I be the only MonsterKid, the only TerrorGeek, the only FrightFreak who thinks 95% of every title included in the genre is crap?  That’s how it seems on some days, invariably after I’ve watched something new.  My wife and I were very excited to get Sam Raimi’s DRAG ME TO HELL (2008) from Netflix last weekend and we saved it for Saturday night, after the kids were in bed – the closest thing we’ve got to a date night these days.  If you aren’t familiar with the movie, it marks Sam Raimi’s return to the slam-dunk horror game since his EVIL DEAD triptych (1981-1991) and deals in many of the same themes – ancient curses, long-withheld secrets, and an unwitting modern day victim who is forced to rise above his or her fear to become either a desperate wretch or a mythic hero (depending on how you look at it).  So, we were psyched… yet within five minutes we knew we were in trouble.  The overreliance on CGI (to depict the fires of Hell), rather obvious wire work and a screenplay as generic as an airport lavatory sign came together to put our shared guard up.  We looked at one another, we arched our eyebrows and furrowed our brows, and one of us might have harumphed. We sat through the thing and, while not hating it, while not being enraged by its shortcomings, we both felt that DRAG ME TO HELL was  about on par with an episode of THE GHOST WHISPERER, with a slightly more downbeat ending.  READ MORE

Gladys Cooper was a bit of a snob.

Not in the usual social way that you may infer from that remark, but as a working woman she had an attitude that hers was a job, like any other, a way of making a very good living at times.  Sometimes it meant acting in The Letter, or The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, or even Peter Pan at the age of 35. She was unacquainted with idleness, revelations of inner torment, and too many expressions of emotion off stage, taking pride in her toughness and the pleasure she derived from her work and her family.  Wearing Molyneux gowns and hawking some bloody face cream with her name on it was all part of the game, giving her an independence that very few women of her time would ever know. It also gave her a chance to do much more than the average woman as well–including bringing up her children, helping her extended family and friends, and having some very good times indeed traveling and indulging her greatest pleasure of creating a comfortable home wherever she was at the time.

At other, more meager times, being an actress was a discipline to be endured and “gotten on with” rather than analyzed or draped in much mystery. As a result of this refreshing no-nonsense attitude and the fact that she was her own producer for so many years when she ran her Playhouse in London, challenging plays and classical roles were not in her background as they were for her contemporaries Sybil Thorndike and Edith Evans. Her fellow actress, Dame Edith once confessed envy of her peer, commenting that she used to stand in the wings just to watch her face under the lights on stage, transfixed by Cooper‘s youthful beauty that was, she claimed, essentially unphotographable but  “enough to stop a bus”.

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For the next two weeks I’ll be knee-deep in The Samuel Fuller Collection, a seven-disc set being released on October 27^th by Sony Pictures, in association with Martin Scorsese’s heroic film preservation organization, The Film Foundation. It’s a doggedly auteurist production that traces the contours of Fuller’s entire career, presenting five of his writing gigs (It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Adventure in Sahara (1938), Power of the Press (1943), Shockproof (1949) and Scandal Sheet 1952)) along with two lesser-known directorial efforts (The Crimson Kimono (1959) and Underworld, U.S.A. (1961)). In this marketplace it’s downright courageous to release these later subterranean slices of Fuller, and just about saintly to include some of his early writing jobs. As the juvenilia of other great artists like Picasso are studied in the context of his life’s work, so should the early scribbling of this brusquely unique American. Without an institution like the Library of America to preserve and present a director’s work in the proper context (instead of being thrown to the wind in various star-themed sets), it’s up to studios to flog their geniuses, and their priorities clearly lie elsewhere. So much of the credit to this release must lie with Scorsese and his Film Foundation, who also released the essential Budd Boetticher Collection last year, and produced the Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics set due November 3rd.  In convincing Sony to release these films in cleaned-up masters, he’s keeping the spirit of serious film appreciation alive.

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