The new issue of Cinema Retro arrived in my mailbox this week and I immediately made some time to flip through its glossy pages. The cover features an image of young Malcolm McDowell staring out from under the brim of his black bowler hat with a wicked openmouthed grin on his face. It’s taken from one of my favorite films, which I referenced just a few short weeks ago, Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1970). If that imposing image doesn’t grab your attention than the cover text will. This is the magazine’s last issue of the year and its focus is on films that are “pushing the boundaries.” It offers readers a nice dose of unconventional film criticism, fascinating insights and surprising anecdotes about some of the best and most controversial films made during the ‘60s and ‘70s including Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS (1971) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972).

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Every star started out small.  Depending on the time and era of any given star’s ascendance they may have done time on stage, television or played bit parts in films working their way up the ladder.  The stars that everyone knows, the ones of which even the most casual filmgoer is aware, from Bette Davis, James Cagney and Katherine Hepburn to Peter O’Toole, Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, are the ones that had not only the talent, not only the charisma, not only the charm but, crucially, the right roles at the right time to make an impression, a big one.  Think Dustin Hoffman.  A talented actor who, were it not for The Graduate, may have labored as a character actor for years before stardom or, perhaps, never achieved it at all.  I think he would have anyway but what do I know?  I only know his career from the trajectory it took so any speculation I may have on whether or not he would have become a star without The Graduate is severely biased by that pesky little thing, reality.

But there are other actors who were given the lead role, not once, not twice, but several times and every time, they came up short.  Oh, not necessarily in their performances, mind you.  The audience simply didn’t respond to them, for whatever reason.   They were given the opportunity to become a star.  They were pushed by the powers that be to hit the big time but they never did.  These actors, the stars that never shone, are the actors that fascinate me, at times, more than the stars.  What must it be like to get so close only to be pulled away by the unblinking forces of gravity, always tugging, always willing to bring the starry-eyed back down to earth?

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The 49th New York Film Festival begins this Friday, September 30th, with a main slate of 27 features and an abundance of sidebar and retrospective screenings, including a massive survey of Nikkatsu Films. All of my favorite entries so far share an obsessively detailed sense of place, locations that subsume central characters and emerge as active agents of memory, myth and fate. Dreileben, a group of three features made for German television, is set near the Thuringian Forest, folkloric heart of German culture, and former home to Wagner, Schiller, Bach and Goethe. Ancient fables are invoked as templates for the tragic circlings of the unlucky few who come in contact with a man-made monster.  The Turin Horse utilizes a perpetually wind-thwacked dust bowl as a bluntly metaphorical vision of the barren, anxious souls of its poverty-stricken leads, while Two Years at Sea follows the hermit and former merchant seaman, Jake Williams, as he goes his silent bearded way in the beatific and lonely Caingorm Mountains of Scotland.

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Last Friday, the ABC soap opera All My Children aired its last episode on television after a 41- year run. In January, One Life to Live will broadcast its last episode, and though, it hasn’t been formally announced, General Hospital will follow suit in September 2012. Soap fans are angry and disappointed that their shows have been canceled from television after decades on the air. ABC declared that ratings dictated their demise, citing dwindling audiences and changing times as the reason. All My Children was replaced by a cooking show called The Chew, which airs its first episode today. General Hospital will be replaced by Katie Couric’s new program. Good luck with that, Katie. I am sure millions of GH fans can’t wait to watch NBC’s and CBS’s former golden girl try one more time to make her mark, this time with a talk show—a type of programming already glutting the airwaves.

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Both are English, but the title is a trick question. To be more accurate, it would read: “What should H.G. Wells and Wallace and Gromit have had in common?” Around the mid-1990′s a very interesting project almost saw the light of day: a faithful film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that was to fuse the talents of Aardman Animations and director Alex Cox. “It would have been the biggest project I’d ever done,” says the director. Sadly, the whole enterprise was torpedoed by one musician. I recently sat down with the director for more details to this story.  READ MORE

Let me start with an anecdote: when I was producing my DVD compilation of the restored films of Harry Langdon, I had gone to my bank to take out a loan to help finance the project.  I sat down with a banker and started to explain what my company did, and what this specific project entailed.  She listened, and nodded her head politely.  But she was puzzled.  “Silent comedies?  How does that work?  How do people hear the jokes?”

Every once in a while I find myself getting dragged into some arcane argument with other slapstick nuts like myself (the sometimes controversial stances I take in this space should clue you in to why that happens to me a lot).  And when the arguments get heated–over such trivia as the proper frame rate for silent comedies, or whether that’s really Mal St. Clair as “Deadshot Dan” in Buster Keaton’s The Goat—I like to remember that as passionate and fanatical as we can get, there are a great many Americans who don’t understand how a silent comedy could even exist.  How d’ya hear the jokes?

And they outnumber us.

And it is at times like that when I curse the nostalgia merchants.

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For years, I was unsure as to whether SH! THE OCTOPUS (1937) was a real movie. Long before the IMDb, when all I had to go by was the odd reference book and the occasional muttered remark, I convinced myself that this Warner Brothers-First National release was bogus, the celluloid equivalent of urban myth. Maybe I got that idea because the Medved Brothers had sneaked a fake movie into their Golden Turkey Awards; another contributing factor was that the title was stupid – SH! THE OCTOPUS made about as much sense as, I don’t know, WAGONS, HYPERSPACE! or LIZA! A TALE OF THE CHRIST. In time I found out that it was in fact a real movie — the gray market video tape outlet Sinister Cinema offered a dupe — but I never wanted to gamble the lucre to prove how good or bad it was. I assumed it was awful. Nobody said it was a lost gem or even worth seeing and I kind of got the feeling that even the genre history books that did deign to mention SH! THE OCTOPUS were sort of dancing around the tune, name-checking a movie the authors hadn’t actually seen. Well, all of that is academic now that SH! THE OCTOPUS has been made available on DVD, in a great collection of Horror/Mystery Double Features from the Warner Brothers Archive Collection. READ MORE

“Though I wait for thee a thousand years,
Through waiting will I love thee yet the more.
And though I fill an ocean with my tears
My joy will thus be greater than before.
And this my prayer for evermore will be
That in the end thou will come back to me.”
- from A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN (1945)

Autumn officially arrives tomorrow. It’s my favorite time of year and I eagerly look forward to cooler temperatures and longer nights. As summer gives way to fall my appetite for things that go bump in the night becomes almost insatiable and nothing’s quite as satisfying as a good ghost story. I’ve been reading a lot of spooky Victorian tales lately, which inspired me to revisit Bernard Knowles’ supernatural thriller, A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN (1945).

When I first watched A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN a few months ago I wasn’t fully engaged with the film and it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I knew I had to watch it again before I shared my thoughts on it and I’m so glad I took the time to reconsider this fascinating little British movie.

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Kevin Lee of the Keyframe Blog at Fandor, the subscription internet video service, is holding an important event this week — “The Maddin-est Blogathon in the World” – celebrating the dazzling idiosyncratic Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. I had to put my two cents in.  Especially after a very hot and sultry Florida summer, thinking about the sometimes frozen climate of Canada offers a much-needed and pleasing contrast, and I can think of no better, stranger, more magical journey into cold Canada than through a viewing of Maddin’s magnificent fever dream of a tribute to his hometown in My Winnipeg, from 2007.  

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