Following the phenomenal success of United Artists’ early James Bond films many Hollywood studios tried to mimic their crowd winning formula. One of the most successful attempts to cash in on Bond’s appeal was OUR MAN FLINT (1966) starring a tall, lanky and laid-back James Coburn. The film was produced by Saul David for 20th Century Fox and although it spoofed the Bond films with a knowing wink and wide smile, it also had its own kind of charm and wacky appeal. OUR MAN FLINT was followed by a sequel (IN LIKE FLINT; 1967) and there were plans to make more Flint movies but unfortunately they never materialized. Today the Flint films aren’t as popular or well known as the Bond films but they were wildly successful during their day and they’re credited for making James Coburn a star. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the popularity of the Flint films led to them being spoofed as well.

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“I didn’t know you could mix Santa Claus and horror movies,” my son Max told me this morning (y’all met him last week when he guest blogged on my behalf). He was referring specifically to his and my current obsession, a movie that has been inaugurated as a holiday viewing tradition in our home: Jalmari Helander’s looney cult flick Rare Exports.

Never heard of it? Well — as Max said, it is a (mildly gory) horror movie about Santa Claus.

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I love those comedies from the Swinging 1960s that are part farce, part caper movie in which a huge international cast sashays through Europe in an incomprehensible plot. The cinematic equivalent to a 1960s discotheque, with its trendy music, jet set movie stars, mod costumes, and fab hair styles, this subgenre not only includes breezy examples such as Casino Royale (1967) and What’s New Pussycat? but also atrocious bombs like The Happening and Skidoo! My favorite has always been After the Fox, which I recently saw again after many years. I was delighted to discover that After the Fox not only held up for me this time around but that there was more to the film than I realized.

After the Fox failed with the critics and at the box office in 1968 when it was first released, and few have warmed up to it in the interim. The odd assembly of creative personnel is frequently cited as one of the film’s weaknesses. Comic actor Peter Sellers and beefcake movie star Victor Mature appear alongside perennial starlet Britt Ekland in a film directed by Vittorio De Sica and written by Neil Simon. While Simon, who is famous for his very American, middlebrow comedy, and De Sica, who was the acclaimed neorealist director of The Bicycle Thief, do not generally come up in the same conversation, I found nothing disastrous in their collaboration.

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It’s no great surprise that the two movie genres that gripped me so thoroughly when I was a little kid and which continue to dominate my love of cinema to this day (as I careen towards geezerdom) are horror and comedy.  They are much closer than they might superficially appear.  I’ve been to plenty of comedy films that induced in audiences gasps of awe and terror, and horror films that provoked in audiences nervous laughter.  Drawing a line between the two involves splitting hairs and other forms of killjoy pedantry.

And so, in honor of Halloween, I’d like to tip my hat to one of the most venerable tropes of classic gothic horror, which also happens to be a slapstick mainstay: the old dark house!

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I’m not going to assume that you know French and Saunders, that is, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, but I bet that you might.  Even if you haven’t ever caught their eponymous comedy series and specials via some means (they’ve been doing them for British TV since the late 1980s), perhaps you know Dawn French in the title role of The Vicar of Dibley (frequently seen on PBS stations), and Jennifer Saunders as the creator and co-star (as Edina Monsoon) of Absolutely Fabulous.  Both French and Saunders are funny and fabulous, and one of the frequent features of their work together were parodies of popular movies, old and new, with both ladies playing all parts, often male and female, and having a riot doing it. 

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I wonder how many people remember the first film they ever saw in a theater. I remember mine vividly: It was Visit to a Small Planet (1960) starring Jerry Lewis. I was about five or six years old, and my cousins took me to a double feature at the Bula Theater in my hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio. The other film on the double bill was Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas, which also made an impression on me, but it was not nearly as long-lasting. I recently watched Visit to a Small Planet again, and while its weaknesses were apparent to me, I laughed out loud and thoroughly enjoyed it. And, I was surprised that I could recall certain scenes and jokes so well.

In Visit to a Small Planet, Jerry Lewis stars as a young space alien named Kreton who is studying the planet Earth in school. He is so fascinated with earthlings that he repeatedly visits the planet against the better judgment of his teacher. On yet another trip, he hopes to land in 1861 so he can study the Civil War directly. However, he miscalculates and lands in contemporary America, circa 1960. Kreton quickly befriends the Speldings, a suburban family in Manassas, Virginia, who are amazed at the alien’s special powers, including a peculiar kind of mind-reading, the ability to control another’s speech, and levitation.  Kreton becomes attached to the family, particularly daughter Ellen Spelding, which breaks one of the cardinal rules of his teacher. Eventually, Kreton returns to his home planet after discovering that 20^th century Earth is one crazy world. The story unfolds through the aliens’ point of view, which serves as a distancing device so that viewers can see the fads, issues, and trends of 1960 as Kreton and his teacher see them—as ridiculous and. . . well. . .alien.

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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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Last week I saw 20 films in five days at Sundance. With just over 200 films listed in the index, that means I barely covered 10% of the slate. Documentaries are a Sundance forté, so it’s not surprising that almost half of the films I screened fall into this category. Similarly, as most docs these days never get transferred to film that accounts for why about half of all my screenings were digital projections. Happily, despite many rumblings by industry pundits regarding the eminent death of 35mm film, most of the narrative features were still on celluloid. Huzzah! READ MORE

That’s a lot of Van Dykes. This rather frightening menagerie was arranged by Norman Lear, who wrote and directed the slapstick satire Cold Turkey in 1971. A cult item that used to circulate solely on out-of-print VHS tapes, now MGM has released it through Amazon on a burned-on-demand DVD as well as through their video-on-demand service (rental is $2.99, purchase is $9.99). It’s amazing how quickly a film can go from rare to ubiquitous these days.

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