In the third and final short film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Vanquished (I Vinti, 1953), a youthful British strangler walks out of a double bill at The Saffron theater. The headliner is the Esther Williams musical comedy Skirts Ahoy (1952), with Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown (1950) as the “B” picture. Aubrey (played by Peter Reynolds), is the fame-seeking young poet exiting the cinema, ready to commit his so-called perfect crime. But did perky Esther Williams or the avuncular Joel McCrea make him do it? I encourage one and all to stage your own version of this twofer and see if any homicidal rage bubbles up. Please report in the comments. But alas, Antonioni doesn’t answer this pressing question in The Vanquished itself. What is undeniably true is that both The Vanquished and Stars in my Crown both received recent DVD releases, from RaroVideo and the Warner Archive, respectively. It’s a dreamlike bit of capitalist coincidence, and one of those secret joys of cinephilic pursuits.

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I’m not a fan of contemporary animated feature films for a couple of reasons. First, the various types of computer-generated animation—from motion capture to Pixar’s three-dimensional photorealism—lack the formal artistry and painterly beauty of hand-drawn animation. With its flat, generic colors, computer animation looks mechanical, creating imagery devoid of atmosphere and style. Second, the writing in contemporary cartoons has been dialed down—way down—to a child’s level, with some notable exceptions. At best, animated features seem to be sentimental tales of lost toys and wayward children that are peppered with monotonous Randy Newman songs; at worst, they are hackneyed stories with forgettable characters that are peppered with cringe-inducing one-liners about bodily functions.

A rare exception among today’s generic rubble is Rango, the animated feature directed by Gore Verbinski currently in the theaters. Verbinski directed the original trio of the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, a franchise that I found rich in imagery and rife with references to films of the past. Johnny Depp reteamed with Verbinski to provide the voice of Rango, a bug-eyed, scrawny-looking chameleon in search of an identity. Verbinski cowrote and directed Rango, and it was his name that pulled me into the theater to see this clever cartoon that works on one level for adults and another for children (though this cartoon is not for pre-schoolers). Studios are prone to advertising their animated features as being “fun for the whole family,” which is marketing speak for “adults could probably tolerate this cartoon and not want to gouge their eyes out.” And, some parents have tried to nudge me onto the Pixar bandwagon by confessing how much they related to films like Toy Story 3. But, “relating” to a cartoon is not the same as enjoying one that has been scripted on two levels. Those of us who grew up with such Warner Bros. masterpieces as Duck Amuck or The Rabbit of Seville, which cleverly wrap the intellectual depth of high art within the entertaining framework of low art, understand the difference.

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In my last blog post I transcribed the first half of an informal interview I had with Repo Man director Alex Cox a couple weeks ago. In this second half of that interview we talk about movies he’d select for TCM if he were a guest programmer, what it’s like to work on the other side of the camera, some specific thoughts about Walker (his radical western starring Ed Harris), along with discussing other directors from Jim Jarmusch to John Carpenter. READ MORE

Where are the Nazis in CLUNY BROWN?

I know this isn’t a question that’s probably been burning inside much of anyone else besides me, but I recently suffered me way through the awkward and disappointing biography of Ernst Lubitsch by Scott Eyman, a book I’d only bought because I wanted to see how a scholar steeped in Lubitsch would address this very question.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s a question that cuts to the very heart of what Lubitsch was all about.  And Eyman missed the point entirely.

I could build a time machine and travel back to 1993 to write an angry letter to Eyman, but that seems a misuse of resources.  Once I finish work on my time machine the first thing I want to do is go back to the 1920s and collect some prints of films like HEART TROUBLE and HATS OFF, so I’m not wasting any of my time machine’s battery power just to berate some poor biographer, even if he did fluff the shot something awful.  So, instead I’ll just unload my rant here—and maybe we can have some fun digesting what made Lubitsch the genius that he was.

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The Horror Dads reconvene for a roundtable discussion of Tobe Hooper’s 1979 miniseries SALEM’S LOT, an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Stephen King about a vampire plague in a quiet (and growing steadily quieter) New England town.  We’ve got the whole band back together today: Jeff Allard, Dennis Cozzalio, Greg Ferrara, Paul Gaita, Nicholas McCarthy and yours truly.  We bid you welcome… READ MORE

Note:  Please read fellow Morlock Kimberly’s wonderful appreciation of Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor who died today, Wednesday, March 23, 2010, at the age of 79.  Her post is beautiful!  But since Morlocks clearly think alike sometimes, I also did a post at just about the same exact moment as Kimberly, and here it is: 

Whether you thought she was a great actress or just a movie star, you have to admit she was THE movie star for a generation of moviegoers.  From her debut as a little girl of 10, through her star-making MGM years, then into the years of crazy international stardom and oodles of publicity for her colorful and passionate off-screen life, Elizabeth Taylor held a fascination for the public nearly unequalled even today.  It was a different time, of course, when Elizabeth Taylor ruled the headlines, a slightly more genteel time when beautiful movie stars maybe stole husbands from each other, but refrained from publicly exposing themselves quite the way it’s done today. 

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Elizabeth Taylor has always been one of my favorite actresses. She was an incredible natural beauty. Arguably the most beautiful actress Hollywood ever produced but she was also a brilliant performer when she wanted to be. She dominated almost every film she ever appeared in even when that film wasn’t particularly worthy of her larger than life presence. Taylor was a complex woman with a rich inner life who enjoyed living and one look into her deep violet eyes told you this. Inside of Taylor there seemed to be a volcanic mountain of pent-up emotion just waiting to explode. Her appetite for life was voracious but her heart was huge, open and warm. These are rare and wonderful qualities that you seldom find in today’s Hollywood stars.

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“I want it all quickly ’cause I don’t want God to stop and think and wonder if I’m getting more than my share.” – Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944)

A blur of thousands of words and pictures began to tumble out of every medium as soon as news of Elizabeth Taylor’s death at age 79 was announced on March 23rd. I know that the most noteworthy features of this performer’s life are the many adult roles she played with skill (on screen and off), her remarkable beauty, durable, often deliciously excessive glamour, the ups and downs of her not-so-private life, and ultimately, her pioneering charity work to assist those with AIDS. People will naturally mention her two Oscars. One was awarded for her tart with a heart in the often ludicrously steamy Butterfield 8 (1960)–making up for the Academy’s neglect for her fine work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)–and her well-deserved Best Actress Award for the harrowing and truthful characterization in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

To me, however, Elizabeth Taylor is cherished in memory for her extraordinary work near the beginning of her career, when she gave herself completely and unselfconsciously to the role of Velvet Brown, a dreamer, whose love of horses seems to border on a pagan devotion deeper than civilized analysis can ever explain away. All of the entertaining blather surrounding this “last great star” falls away when watching National Velvet (1944), a beautifully crafted product of the studio era at its height. This role prompted the already accomplished rider (Elizabeth Taylor’s father had taught her to ride at the age of 4) to train rigorously each day and, with the guidance of her ambitious mother Sara, prompted the tiny girl to try to grow three inches to be an acceptable height for producer Pandro S. Berman (lifts in her shoes and some natural growth helped a bit).

Bewitched by the equestrian allure of the Bagnold story, Taylor plastered her room with horse-related images and paraphernalia. The slight girl also sustained a back injury during riding for this movie that would plague her for the rest of her life. Despite any of the background pressures, this film appears to be one of the last times that the then 12-year-old actress seemed so blissfully unaware of her own “rapturous beauty,” as critic James Agee acknowledged in his review of the film at the time of its first release. Perhaps the openness of Taylor‘s heartfelt performance in this movie was the result of careful tutoring or simply reflected her own well-documented love of animals, but I suspect that it may also have been because, as an outstanding part of a strong cast, she was treated for what she was rather than for how she looked, allowing her inner spirit to soar on screen. As an adult Taylor later tried to explain it, “National Velvet really was me.”

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When two deeply affecting films are viewed in quick succession, they start to speak to each other. This weekend I watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Love Affair (1939), both for the second time. They have a radically contrasting approach to narrative, but both use visual patterning to pursue a kind of naturalized transcendence. In both, an idealized vision or emotion is brought down to earth, made approachable and concrete. Love Affair takes the melodramatic conceit of romantic love, based on separation and a purely spiritual longing, and places it in reluctant bodies, who squirm and flirt and have to work for a living.  Boonmee flattens the space between life and death, man and animal, ancient and modern. Ghosts are as natural as the oxen in the woods, and its characters react accordingly, with benign acceptance. In their own way, both films convey what my late, great undergraduate Philosophy professor, M.C. Dillon, wrote in Beyond Romance:

We are our bodies. Including the traces that other bodies have visited upon ours and the traces our bodies deposit in the world as marks of its passage. It is as bodies that we are and are known. In that broad sense, all our knowledge of each other is carnal knowledge.

Boonmee takes the supernatural and makes it tactile, while Love Affair brings romaticism into the intricate choreography of actors’ hands. I previously wrote about Boonmee here, so the following incoherent ramblings will focus on Love Affair.

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