End-0f-the-world movies? Yes, there is one I long to view after seeing images from it and reading about it for years, even though no one has made any claims of it being a great film.  DELUGE from 1933. 

This is a continuation of a blog in which I listed some long sought-after films not available on Netflix and, in many cases, not available on any format in the U.S. The first post featured eight titles including the lost Pre-Code title CONVENTION CITY and Nagisa Oshima’s BOY. Here are seven more oddball MIAs, totaling 15 “Not on Netflick” suspects.

9.   DELUGE

I’m a sucker for end-of-the-world apocalyptic tales and will watch everything from ambitious no-budget talkfests like This is Not a Test (1962) to overproduced special effects actioners like I Am Legend (2007) to bleak art house fare like The Road (2009). Somehow DELUGE (1933) has eluded me even though I’ve seen stills and footage from it since I was a kid. According to all of the descriptions I’ve read, in the first seven minutes of the movie, New York City is destroyed by an earthquake and tidal wave while news reports announce that the West Coast has sunk into the sea. The East Coast crumbles as well but after all that excitement the movie switches to a character-driven narrative in which survivor Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer of Rosemary’s Baby) thinks his wife (Lois Wilson) and family are dead and becomes romantically involved with a famous female swimmer  (Peggy Shannon) who needs his protection in the chaotic new world order.

According to Dan North, who covered DELUGE in his blog Spectacular Attractions, the film was considered lost for years until a print turned up in Rome. This Italian dubbed version with English subtitles was available on VHS for years (Amazon still sells copies of it at a going rate of $150!!!) but I want to hold out foolishly for Blu-Ray or something better.

It is a known fact that the spectacular disaster footage from this movie was sold to Republic Studios and recycled in many of their serials over the years. On a visual level DELUGE looks as intriguing as two other innovative set design/art direction curios from its era – Just Imagine (1930) and Things to Come (1936). It was the feature film debut for Felix E. Feist , who went to direct some solid, respectable B-movies like This Woman is Dangerous (1952), with Joan Crawford, and Donovan’s Brain (1953); my favorite effort by him though is the unsung film noir The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) with a dynamic performance by Lawrence Tierney as the frightening psychopath protagonist. On the basic of that, DELUGE is certainly worth a look.

9.    1 P.M.

Sometime in 1968 when Jean-Luc Godard was deep into his Marxist-Leninist political phase he came to New York City to make a movie about the political and social upheaval in America that was in full bloom. The movie, 1 A.M., was never completed but Godard’s cinematographers on the project, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, assembled their own version of the footage and entitled it 1 P.M. It was screened at the Whitney Museum in 1971 and sounds like an amazing time capsule of the period with participation by Eldridge Cleaver, Tom Hayden, Rip Torn, Godard’s wife Anne Wiazemski, LeRoi Jones (now called Amiri Baraka) and the Jefferson Airplane, who stage a Manhattan rooftop jam until the police put an end to it, prefiguring the climax to The Beatles’ Let It Be (1970) by a few years.

Roger Greenspun’s review in The New York Times was not exactly favorable. At one point, he stated, “the film is less an essay in radical politics or in Godardian esthetics or, Heaven forbid, in the useful craft of documentary, than it is homage to the zoom lens – an optical contrivance that in the hands of bad cinematographers to whom it mostly appeals, keeps things artificially jumping, and, at least in this case, 60 per cent out of focus.” Maybe 1 P.M. is a pretentious, self indulgent bore but I still want to decide for myself.

11.   THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE

Burns and Allen were one of the great comedy teams of their day but Gracie Allen alone is a comic challenge for some people. Is it because she’s taking the stereotype of the ditzy housewife to absurd extremes or questioning men’s superiority to women in her own cockeyed way?  Her particular shtick of beating down and confusing the listener with her mindless babbling actually had a crazy logic to it once your resistance was worn down. While some people might find her annoying without her perfect straight man (and husband) George Burns, I am partial to her inane chatter; Gracie’s comic riffing can be just as surreal and hilarious as The Marx Brothers in their prime.

THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE (1939) is a true oddity since it is actually a Philo Vance mystery. According to these notes from the Columbus Museum of Art, “S. S. Van Dine, the author of the Philo Vance mystery novels, was a fan of Gracie Allen and wrote the original story for her. Critics were often annoyed by Vance’s intellectual arrogance and demanding logic and the film may have been Van Dine’s rebuttal to his detractors. In THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER MYSTER, Vance remains coldly deductive, even when faced with Gracie Allen’s puns and farcial comedy. It is not surprising that The Gracie Allen Murder Case has become a major cult film at repertory theaters.”

What I especially love about this film’s central premise is that it pairs Gracie, playing herself, with William Warren in the role of Philo Vance.  Warren is one of my favorite actors of the thirties and usually plays slick, cunning sophisticates in many a Pre-Code movie where his villainous characters are often quite seductive and likeable. Of course, as Philo Vance, Warren is operating in Sherlock Holmes mode, playing a dispassionate human calculator and I can only imagine what Gracie Allen will do to his deductive reasoning. This film (originally released by Paramount) is available on DVD from some outfit called Nostalgia Home Video which looks dubious in terms of image quality. But Netflix doesn’t carry it and I’m holding out for a remastered edition.

12.   NIGHT OF FEAR

The shameless rollercoaster documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008) fired up my interest in a number of obscure and relatively unknown titles which never seemed to get a U.S. distribution deal or just went direct-to-VHS during the gold rush years of the VHS boom. While I was an early convert to full-throttle action/fantasy epics like The Road Warrior (1981), probably the greatest Aussie exploitation film ever made, and bizarre, over-the-top genre showstoppers like Razorback (1984), there were plenty of Down Under rarities that I missed along the way like Next of Kin (1984), a gothic thriller set in a senior citizens’ home, and Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens (1971) by director Jim Sharman (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) that visualizes alien visitation as a reality or a state of mind – you decide. The one that sounds the most compelling to me though is NIGHT OF FEAR (1972), a minimalist horror film that clocks in at under sixty minutes and is virtually dialogue free.

Here is a brief excerpt from the review site DVD Holocaust by Kami: “…this atmospheric flick predates a certain chainsaw massacre and all its bastard sons by a good couple of years. With Norman Yemm as a demented, crippled madman living out [in the] bush with his rats and feral cats in a ramshackle put-together house of hell and Carla Hoogeven as the young girl/victim who stumbles into his rat trap, this movie is truly unique…just mood music, screams, grunts, the sounds of the woods, the house, the animals…what else do you really need? The girl is hysterical, the killer is relentless…Well ahead of its time, this really does hold together well, despite the dated look of some of the clothes and cars…Banned at the time for its “indecency and obscenity,” this is finally getting the credit it deserves.”  Let me see it, I pray thee.

13.  SEASON OF THE SUN

Crazed Fruit, Ko Nakahira’s erotic and moody melodrama from 1956, was a revelation to me when I first saw it a few years back, thanks to the Criterion Collection release.  Its portrait of aimless, well-to-do teenagers indulging in casual sex, gambling, partying and anti-conformist behavior was a natural reaction to the demoralizing after effects of World War II. The film had a raw energy and freshness to it and heightened the central conflict – two brothers vieing for a young married girl – by staging it against stunning natural locations. What I learned later was that Crazed Fruit was considered the key film in a brief genre craze known as the “Sun Tribe” films, all of them dealing with youthful rebellion and serving up an endless holiday atmosphere of sun, surf and hedonism.

But the movie that really launched the whole “Sun Tribe” fad was Takumi Furukawa’s SEASON OF THE SUN (Japanese title: Taiyo no kisetsu), starring Yoko Minamida, Hiroyuki Nagato and Yujiro Ishihara in his film debut; he also appeared in Crazed Fruit as Natsuhisa, the older brother who betrays his younger sibling (Yujiro Ishihara) and sets in motion a tragic revenge. SEASON OF THE SUN, according to Wikipedia, “tells the story of a group of high school boxing team members who spend their days drinking, sailing and chasing girls, and who more often than not spend their nights getting into brawls. In particular, it focuses upon Tatsuya, a sullen young man, who falls in love with Eiko, a proud upper-class girl.” The film made a star of Yujiro Ishihara, who became a favorite teen idol of Japanese schoolgirls. The “Sun Tribe” films were quite popular with the upcoming French New wave directors, especially Francois Truffaut, and undoubtedly had an influence on their movies.

14.  SERAIL

A different kind of haunted house movie for art cinemas, SERAIL was first released in 1976 but only played a few select markets in the U.S. before disappearing. Also known as Surreal Estate, the film marked the directorial debut of Argentinian screenwriter Eduardo de Gregorio who contributed to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem and Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating.

Even since I first read about it in a review by David Bartholomew for Cinefantastique, it’s been on my track down list. The basic storyline introduces a writer (Corin Redgrave) who is looking at real estate properties and comes across a rambling old mansion in a state of decay, A strange girl named Arianne (Bulle Ogier) invites him on a tour of the house but then flees from the premises in the middle of their inspection. Intrigued, the author decides this strange development might be the seed of a new novel and returns to the house later for further inspiration. The house begins to slowly lure him into its maze-like structure and therein lies the tale.

Bartholomew wrote that SERAIL “trails its roots through a myriad array of “haunted house” movies ranging from The Old Dark House , The Cat and the Canary and the Roland West/Chaney The Monster. The old spun cobwebs, and scurrying rats have disappeared, but the creepy, lurking characters remain, if modernized. The best of these films all share one sage trait in recognizing that the house itself, whether it can think for itself, as in SERAIL, or not, is the dominant, most flamboyant star.”  David Cairns in his online column, The Forgotten, had an equally compelling take on the film, writing “SERAIL draws from both Henry James’ rarely-admired The Other House and the Alice novels of Lewis Carroll, but this movie also seems to use Celine and Julie itself as an urtext, down to casting Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier as occupants of a strange, not-quite haunted house, sliding in and out of an obscure period backstory…What follows is a Russian Doll structure in which Redgrave investigates the puzzle and comes up with not one solution, but a whole series, each new explanation exposing the previous one as a ruse…What emerges is a much stranger yarn, one which never fully coalesces into an “explanation.” Depending on one’s inclinations, this is either less or much more satisfying than the initial Scooby Doo plot.”

15.   LIFE SIZE

Films about men with a fetish or obsession with life-like female dolls are more plentiful than you’d expect which is sort of a sad commentary on the human condition. While many of these are indeed porno or softcore films in the Japanese “pink film” tradition, several movies with this same basic theme – a lonely man seeks love, companionship and sexual fulfillment with a fantasy object – have been art house fare like Arne Mattsson’s The Doll (1962), a Swedish film starring Per Oscarsson, or offbeat indie efforts like Lars and the Real Girl (2007) with Ryan Gosling.

The one I have always wanted to see though is LIFE SIZE (1974, aka Grandeur nature), directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga, the Spanish filmmaker who is best known for his black comedy, El Verdugo (1963, aka The Executioner). Here is a capsule review of LIFE SIZE from the TimeOut Film Guide: “Piccoli, as a chic dentist, forsakes his ‘liberated’ but arid marriage for a new love. His job slides as he devotes himself entirely to her; they marry, but soon their bliss becomes contaminated and he tries to kill her. What makes Life Size a suitably bizarre project for Piccoli in his running battle with the bourgeoisie is that the object of his affections is a lifelike doll, complete with mucous membranes. Best are the ways in which the film tackles the problems of fantasy in an apparently permissive society, and how the doll takes on a symbolic importance beyond Piccoli’s conceptions. Slightly less successful: the running gag of women as living dolls (apart from one extraordinary sequence where Piccoli’s wife behaves like one in order to attract him back), and the intimations of social apocalypse at the end.”

While I am not expecting a masterpiece, I still feel that this rare-to-find Berlanga satire is worth digging up just to experience the brilliant Michel Piccoli, who is no stranger to offbeat and challenging film projects. Other unique and stunning films on his resume include Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) & Belle de Jour (1967), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik (1968), Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead (1969) & The Grande Bouffe (1973) and Claude Chabrol’s Wedding in Blood (1973).

Other articles you might enjoy:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2157 “The Forgotten: The Other Other House” by David Cairns

http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/things-fall-apart-deluge-1933/  “Things Fall Apart: Deluge” by Dan North