Alexx's Journal

I meant to write about this film after Kestrell and I watched it together several months ago, but was distracted by Life. But now seems like a more important time than ever to talk about the power of Art to inspire Deeds.

As you might have guessed from the title, the plot is loosely based on The Scarlet Pimpernel. But instead of Revolutionary France, we are in Nazi Germany. Leslie Howard (who also produced and directed the film) stars as Horatio Smith, an English archaeology professor who is using the cover of an archaeological dig in Germany to rescue “intellectuals” and smuggle them to safety. (Heroic archaeologist versus Nazis – was this an influence on Indiana Jones?)

It’s an exciting and suspenseful adventure film. You could call it a propaganda film, which is accurate, but misleading. The characters are moral, but not preachy. There is a bit of speechifying at the end, but as sovay points out:

…this is no comfortable re-enactment of settled history. The film is set in 1939, made in 1940—Britain is under the Blitz, America is not yet even in the war; there are no hindsight assurances. So it must be prophecy … sympathetic magic, summoning. Imago. And Howard's ghost is still speaking out of that dark.

But the real reason that I feel compelled to write about Pimpernel Smith today is to point out the inspiring effect it had on one person in particular. Quoting Wikipedia:

When Pimpernel Smith reached Sweden in November 1943, the Swedish Film Censorship Board decided to ban it from public viewing, as it was feared that such a critical portrayal of Nazi Germany could harm Sweden's relationship with Germany and thus jeopardise the country's neutrality in the Second World War. Raoul Wallenberg did, however, manage to see it at a private screening, together with his half-sister, Nina Lagergren.[11]

She later recalled that on their way home after the screening, "he told me this was the kind of thing he would like to do."[12] Since 1941, Wallenberg had made frequent trips to Hungary, and knew how oppressed the Hungarian Jews were. He travelled as a representative and later joint owner of an export-import company that was trading with central Europe and was owned by a Hungarian Jew.

Following the mass deportations that had started in April 1944, Wallenberg was sent to Budapest in August 1944, as First Secretary to the Swedish legation, assigned under secret agreement between the US and Swedish governments to organise a rescue programme for the Jews. By issuing "protective passports", which identified the bearer as Swedish, and housing them in 32 buildings that he rented and declared Swedish territory, he managed to rescue tens of thousands from the German death camps.

Tens of thousands saved. Leslie Howard didn’t live long enough to hear about it, but I’m sure it would have pleased him.

Pimpernel Smith is available on Youtube. I highly recommend it.

Kes wanted to see this movie because it seemed to be in the sub genre “evil trees”. It wasn’t EXACTLY that, but it satisfied, nonetheless.

A young English couple moves to a remote forest in Ireland, to help prepare for an upcoming logging operation. The locals warn them that these woods belong to “The Hallow”, fearsome faery-like beings. Our protagonists, sadly, do not appear to have any genre-savvy, and write this off as rural superstition. Viewers who ARE genre-savvy, especially fans of real-world biological horror, will see a lot of what’s coming as soon as the word “Cordyceps” is uttered.

Plot-wise, there aren’t a lot of surprises, but the direction and acting are excellent. Stylistically, the film moves through a half dozen or so classic horror sub genres, frequently adding a new bit of spin to what our not-so-heroic protagonists have to deal with. It starts calm and slow, but there’s some truly disturbing body horror by the end of it.

Speaking of ends, if you do watch this movie, stay for the very end of the credits. Several of the last few credits are amusing in and of themselves. And in the final 90 seconds or so, music plays over them which slyly re-contextualizes the entire film that came before it. Recommended for horror fans.

Originally posted by kestrell at Movie review: "The Last of Sheila"

Alexx adds:
The mystery is not just surprising, but surprisingly Fair. I noticed about half the important clues as they happened, but didn't put them all together until the reveal(s). I also recommend this.

I really like this indie horror film (though Kestrell was “meh”). It’s sort of a mix of M.R. James’ “Casting the Runes” and an 80s slasher flick. The protagonist is being followed by an implacable monster that is guaranteed to kill them unless they passed this curse on to someone else first – by having sex with them. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a sexually transmitted CURSE.

I thought it worked well on a number of levels. It’s a scary horror movie, obviously. It’s also in some ways a meditation on inevitable mortality, and the ways in which we try to avoid it; In a move that reverses the 80s trope that sex equals death, in this film sex is the only mechanism by which you can (temporarily) avert death. And it’s a great example of rules-based storytelling.

Being who I am, I feel compelled to analyze the rules in some detail. Naturally, this involves heavy spoilers.( Read more... )

Kestrell and I recently watched a 1973 British horror film starring Christopher Lee. Most of it is set on an island off the coast of Scotland. A policeman comes to the island, gravely concerned about the fate of a young girl, and with fears of ritual murder. In his investigation, he badly misunderstands almost everything that happens, until the apocalyptic revelatory sequence during a holiday celebration filled with fire, song, and the laughter of children.

No, I am *not* actually talking about The Wicker Man, but its strange mirror universe twin, Nothing but the Night. In this film, Christopher Lee plays the *policeman* (ably assisted by Peter Cushing), not the evil authority figure. Rather than a daytime Mayday Festival, the climax happens after dark on Guy Fawkes. And where The Wicker Man is a clearly told story full of moral ambiguity, Nothing but the Night is, unfortunately, a rather clumsily told story whose morals are never in doubt.

I would class it as a “fascinating failure”. Although it has a lot of problems, it also has a lot of good points, and a riveting finale. I wish people would make remakes of films like this, that have a lot of untapped potential, rather than retelling stories whose originals were so good that the remake seems pointless.

Snatching a few hours sleep at an odd hour, my subconscious served up a surprise: a previously unseen collaboration between Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre, The Deep Underground.

It’s one of those films where the setting (and set designer) is of equal importance to the actors and director. It is set in an old, never-named city, located on the side of a steep mountain. Streets are all switchback and the sidewalks are stairs as often as not. Shadows fall swiftly down the slopes. Night comes early here.

Like all old cities, it has another city beneath itself. Basements, sewers, ancient tunnels of secret and unknown purpose, all interconnecting in a labyrinth. But this labyrinth has a famous difference from many others. Usually, if one is lost in an underground maze, one can escape by always trying to go up; “up” is reliably towards the surface. Not so, here. In the deep underground, you could climb upwards for a mile, always within 100 yards of the outer world, but never actually reaching it. It’s a threat used to keep little children out of the underground, but it’s true for all that.

In this nameless, steep city, Peter Lorre is a denizen of the underworld in two senses: a petty criminal, and someone who has spent much of his life exploring the deep underground. Another criminal recruits him for a job. He has found the existence of a treasure vault, guarded well – on the surface… If Lorre can get them close enough to drill in from beneath, they can share a fortune.

As they travel through the deep underground, sometimes Lang uses shots from street level. You’ll hear just a snatch of clear dialogue echoing up through a sewer grating, accompanied by the merest flicker of torchlight, indirectly reflected below

The exact details of the plot evade me (as is typical in dreams). The treasure is found, there is betrayal in the dark, Lorre survives and emerges with a double handful of jewels. Jewels that are SO valuable, that he cannot immediately convert them to currency…

Later, there is an investigator. He probably would have found nothing on his own, but Lorre is seized by that classic hubris, and offers to guide the investigator through the underground. After all, the underground is HIS domain, and he is proven himself invincible within it. He’s already effectively hidden one body down here, another should prove no difficulty. Down in the dark with a soon-to-be-dead man, Lorre can show off his mastery, and boast of the cleverness of his crimes.

In the inevitable climactic fight, Lorre is blinded by an errant torch. The investigator escapes to the surface, with a solution, if without a prisoner.

Lorre, master of the underground, discovers that though he knows these spaces better than any other man, he does NOT know them blind. Lost, he begins to struggle upwards in montage. Daylight filters in, but he can no longer see it. On the surface, little children sing a nursery rhyme about how when you’re lost in the deep underground, going up will not save you. The rhyme echoes through the underground halls; Lorre hears it, but cannot identify its direction. He struggles frantically upwards… and inwards, away from the light. Fade to black. The End. Credits.

A few days ago, kestrell decided that she was finally up for watching The Night of the Hunter (1955), so we did so. I am happy to report that she liked it about as much as I do. In fact, I like it better on a second viewing than I did on the first. So, though I wrote about it then, I find I have more to say now.

It’s probably Robert Mitchum’s greatest performance, and it was certainly Charles Laughton’s greatest directorial job – okay, okay, it was his ONLY directorial job, but it would’ve been an extreme high point for even a lifelong directorial career. For all that, when released it was a commercial and critical failure. Why? One answer is that the studio failed to give it much marketing push. But that’s just one symptom of what I think is the underlying problem: the film has no interest in sticking to a genre formula. You could call it a Crime Drama – but there is very little of either crime or punishment actually shown. You could call it Horror – but there is no blood and no cat-scares. You could call it Americana – if you could overlook all the tributes to German Expressionism. So much of the emotional tone is carried by characters singing that you could call it a Musical, except that it clearly isn’t THAT. Many reviewers use the phrase Fairy Tale, which isn’t 100% wrong, though certainly not how it was marketed. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to name one single genre that this movie is, I’d say Children’s Movie…

Yes, Children’s Movie. Easily 90% of the movie is through the viewpoint of one child or another. The film’s thematic concerns are largely about how marginalized people cope with the existence of powerful oppressors – with the ultimate examples being children and adults. Its message, both shown and told, is that though they are oppressed, children yet have power that adults lack. Of course, that’s not a message that most parents are really gonna be happy with…

I suppose you could make a good argument that the genre here is Suspense; the film certainly contains a great deal of that quality. But there is very little Mystery in it. You know almost before he appears on-screen that Robert Mitchum is a serial killer. There is a hidden MacGuffin, but it’s only hidden for about half an hour, and revealed almost offhandedly. On first viewing, I thought that an odd and clumsy directorial choice, but since then I’ve changed my mind. I think Laughton hides MacGuffin, not to create mystery, but to properly PACE his suspense. If we knew the location of the MacGuffin too early, we would worry about it being accidentally uncovered during scenes in which Laughton wants us concentrating on other matters.

This is far from the only such example. Laughton’s storytelling is extremely straightforward on the surface, but deceptively complex beneath. The basic point of every scene and character would be immediately clear to a typical eight-year-old*. But re-watching, with an eye towards the storytelling mechanics, you can see how almost every scene in the first half is doing at least double duty and often more; helping reinforce or foreshadow plot traits and characteristics that will be important later in the film.
(* The one exception is, tellingly, a scene where the young boy viewpoint character has just been woken from a sound sleep in unknown and threatening circumstances.)

The movie also has a fascinating relationship with religion. On the one hand, Robert Mitchum is a preacher who is also a serial killer. Late in the film, the “good Christian people” whom he has preached to become a vicious mob, howling for his blood – arguably, embracing religion the same way that he always has. So you might think this movie was opposed to religion. But then, you have Lillian Gish’s character, an ACTUAL good Christian: an old woman who takes in and cares for unfortunate orphans, and reads Bible stories to them. She would be treacly – if she wasn’t also a terrifying crone! And yet, beneath her hardened exterior, she has a true understanding of Charity. At one point, she sees a pair of young lovers canoodling in the marketplace. (Pause while I look up the quote…) “She'll be losing her mind to a tricky mouth and a full moon, and like as not, I'll be saddled with the consequences.” On the one hand, she clearly disapproves, but on the other, she IS willing to be “saddled with the consequences”. Indeed, she has already proven so: at least one of her “wards” has a loving mother who works near that marketplace – by implication, a single mother who is unable to care for her own child by herself. A little later in the film, Gish surprises us again with her reaction(s) to one of her girls having gotten in trouble (another of those scenes where the eight-year-olds are probably going to miss some of the complexities).

Despite the top level of the film being (or at least seeming) completely straightforward, it’s full of surprises. Not surprises of plot, but of image, or moments of character. Things I had never seen before, nor even realized that I might see. I’m very glad I did, though. Very Highly Recommended.

Majorkestrell and I recently re-watched Bell Book and Candle (1958). It’s a mostly fun, if problematic, romantic comedy with Jimmy Stewart essentially playing Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak playing a sophisticated modern day witch who casts a spell on him. Also a great supporting cast, including Jack Lemmon (on the bongos!), Elsa Lanchester, Ernie Kovacs, and Hermione Gingold.

The major problematic aspect is that, by the rules of this movie, witches are literally “not human” and are incapable of love. If a witch does fall in love, then she loses all her witch powers and “becomes human”. Naturally, lots of Wiccans and Wiccan-friendly people take offense at this. The offensiveness actually gets worse, in my mind anyways, once you realize that “witch” is a wafer thin metaphor for “homosexual”. Though I admit it does lead to some very funny moments, such as when Ernie Kovacs (playing an alleged expert on magic) confidently tells a room full of closeted witches that he can “just tell” if someone is actually a witch.

As we watched, I often felt myself strongly reminded of another movie which on the surface looks very different, but actually isn’t: Chasing Amy (1997). Both of them are about a straight white guy who has troubles with his romantic relationship, because she’s queer. They even both feature scenes where the woman loses support from her queer community due to her new relationship.

Of course, the endings are quite different. In 1958 Hollywood, the only possible “happy ending” to such a story is for the queer woman to become a normal straight woman. Chasing Amy has a more honest ending: the relationship ends up failing because the straight white guy, despite having a somewhat-raised consciousness, is fundamentally unable to cope with someone so outside his experience.

I do like both movies. But they do make me long for more stories that show the possibility of happy relationships between two people who celebrate their differences. Season two of Sense8 can’t come soon enough!

Kestrell and I recently watched "Alex and Emma", a romantic comedy directed by Rob Reiner. We enjoyed it, and I wanted to recommend it to a wider audience based on three factors:
1) Much of the location filming was done in Boston, with recognizable landmarks.
2) It's a meta-story, with a bunch of interesting material about the process of creativity.
3) It's loosely based on Dostoyevsky. No, not a *novel* by Dostoevsky, but actually based on his life, which turns out to have had some sigmonificant romantic comedy elements.

I think Peter Lorre <i>would</i> make a great Abe Sapien :-)



More such images to be found at http://comicsalliance.com/joe-phillips-silver-screen-heroes/