There are rarely more than a few minutes each day in which cinema does not inform me,  excite me or speak to me in some way.   I look about and everything I see, in one way or another, reminds me of a movie or a scene or a line or just a single moment.   More often than not, this leads to other thoughts of other movies, other directors, actors and times in my life when each was experienced for the first time.   And I’ve written about that process before, elsewhere, but since the Morlocks is my primary platform for classic movie thoughts these days, I figured why not start doing it here as well.   And so, I present to you the first ever Movie Morlocks Cinema Chain Reaction, the Redwood Edition.

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The mind needs structure. So when watching films in quick succession, unexpected linkages emerge, like the strange thematic similarities between Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives (in theaters now from Cinema Guild) and The Farrelly Brothers’ version of The Three Stooges, discovered while watching them back-to-back over the weekend. The first is a critically-acclaimed art film in limited release, the second the lowest of lowbrow comedies out everywhere, and yet they are both  episodic narratives about arrested male development, albeit in different stylistic registers. The Day He Arrives uses a teasingly complex script to lay out the alternate life paths its passive protagonist could have taken, hypnotically acted out with repetitive gestures and phrases. The Three Stooges, however, are active participants in their own destruction, eager to endlessly pratfall down the same road to get the eternally recurring nyuk-nyuk inducing result. Two versions of male stupidity, touchingly rendered.

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Recovering from the TCM Classic Film Fest, which was held last weekend in Hollywood, took a few days, but it is now a glorious memory. The fest proved to be a communal experience, a learning opportunity, and a chance to reflect on the power of movies to connect us as a society and culture. Watching 14 movies in four days was exhausting but also rejuvenating.

LOST ON THE MEAN STREETS OF FILM NOIR. The fest included ten programming themes, and my friend Maryann and I managed to see at least one film from six of the programs. (By the way, attending with a friend is a must, because the urge to talk about the movies immediately after the screenings is overwhelming.) However, one theme attracted us more than the others—The Noir Style, programmed by author Eddie Muller, who is also the founder of the Noir Foundation. We watched four of Muller’s selections: Criss Cross, Cry Danger, Gun Crazy, and Raw Deal. In addition, we caught Fall Guy, a rare noir film that was not part of Muller’s program.

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What do Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen (also 1991), Frank Marshall’s Alive (1993), and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) – to name but a few worthy titles – all have in common? For starters, these are prime-cut films. Great titles no matter how you slice and dice ‘em, and ones I’ve already covered in a previous post of a couple years ago. They also touch on the taboo subject of cannibalism, and there is a reason why I’m thinking of them all on this fine April day. READ MORE

The Farrelly Brothers’ Three Stooges movie is not the first time contemporary directors have sought to recreate slapstick comedies.  This week, we’ll visit Blake Edward’s attempt to revive Laurel and Hardy in the 1980s.

You have to be careful with titles like A Fine Mess.  If it isn’t perfect (and what movies are?), you’ve just gone and handed critics an easy way to poke fun at you.  Your title just slides effortlessly into a put-down—something like “it’s sure a mess, but nothing about it’s fine.”  Go ahead—Google this movie—you’ll find endless variations on this phrase.  But it serves no one.  There’s no real value in shrugging off this movie with an empty turn of phrase—actually digging into why it doesn’t work (and what about it does) is more interesting.  On the face of it, there’s no inherent reason this movie should be such a disaster.  There are in fact plenty of reasons to have had optimistic hopes for it.

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At the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival last week I got to revisit Tod Browning’s DRACULA (1931) … and fall in love all over again. READ MORE

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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[Spoilers Abound - All twists explicitly revealed for purpose of discussing the subtext of the film]

Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) is an odd piece of mystery movie-making but fascinating nonetheless, more for its implications than the film itself.   When I started watching it, I was interested in seeing an early Hitchcock I’d not heard much about, one based on a stage play, always a red flag in film watching.  Many stage plays suffer on film as little more than static setups of monologues with little cinematic innovation.  Hitchcock has the same problem but in a different way.  That is to say, he takes shots surrounding the lengthy dialogue scenes and invests them with enough ingenuity and style that the dialogue scenes seem even more lifeless as a result.  Since there are more dialogue scenes than innovative padding, the result is a movie perhaps more uneven than it should be.  Still, Hitchcock makes the movie worth watching and the actors, especially lead Herbert Marshall as Sir John, the actor/producer who solves the mystery, do a fine job.  But by the time the movie was over, I wasn’t thinking of those things so much as social attitudes of the time and how strongly they shaped the plot.

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I had a similar reaction to Mr. Stewart when I watched Kim Novak purr her way through Bell Book and Candle, just released by Twilight Time on a gorgeous blu-ray.  He also might have been agog at Westward the Women (1951), the William Wellman femme-Western released in a well-appointed DVD from the Warner Archive, which includes an audio commentary from film historian Scott Eyman. They are two films that focus on female desire, a rare occurrence in the generally leering male gazes of post-code Hollywood (pre-code films were replete with sexually independent women – check out Baby Face (1933) for a bracing example). Bell Book and Candle is set in motion because of Novak’s uncontrollable lust for Stewart, and Westward the Women kicks off because of hundreds of ladies’ self-sacrificing desire for a better life out in California, a gender bending variation on Horace Greeley’s advice to, “Go west, young man”.

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