#92: Fiend Without A Face

Fiend Without A Face, 1958, directed by Arthur Crabtree, screenplay by Herbert J. Leder, from the short story "The Thought Monster" by Amelia Reynolds Long.

Some movies are brilliant from the first frame to the last. Some are irredeemable drek all the way through. And some have flashes of greatness. Fiend Without A Face falls into the last category, although it's not so much a flash as a splatter.

That's one of the eponymous fiends, the physical manifestation of a human thought, in its death throes. Yes, in this movie, human thoughts are represented as giant brains with attached prehensile spinal columns. With eyes on stalks. When shot, vast quantities of raspberry jam squirt out of them with horrible burbling noises. They eat brains. They're powered by atomic radiation. And they can fly. More or less what Pascal wrote about in Pensées, if I remember it correctly.

As awesome as flying, brain-eating brains sound (and they are pretty awesome), the fiends don't actually appear for the first hour of the movie. So the audience has to wade through the obligatory "mysterious string of deaths in a small town" section to get to the good stuff. The first hour has its compensations: a pre-Doktari Marshall Thompson is very, very serious in uniform:

And Kim Parker, as Thompson's love interest, does what she can to help with the marketing campaign:

That shower scene is completely gratuitous and not very risqué, but it was featured in every advertisement and poster for the film. So if you don't get to see women's legs or shoulders in your day-to-day life, Fiend Without A Face has that going for it. But there's only so much narrative interest you can squeeze out of a whodunnit where Kynaston Reeves' character is clearly, obviously, a mad scientist.

People address him as "Professor Walgate," though he doesn't teach! He does that fist-clenching thing that only mad scientists do! No one in town understands his research! Worst of all, he's written prop books: the ominously titled The Energy of Thought and the ominously spelled Sibonetics: The Application of Logic To Electronics.

The misspelled title, the peeling label on the spine, the fact that the spine of Sibonetics has embossed printing everywhere but the title: all of this screams "crackpot." The local citizenry can't believe one of their own could be behind the mysterious disappearances, especially when there's a more obvious scapegoat: nearby Stock Footage Air Force Base, pictured below:

They appear to be about as well-staffed as Professor Walgate's publisher; this is the most personnel in any shot, during a test of an experimental radar system:

It's worth noting that there are more personnel here than there are at the nuclear plant that powers the base:

What's more, apparently radar stations and nuclear plants are controlled with the same equipment, an early example of modular design. Note that although you need four more telephones to control a radar test, the consoles are otherwise identical.

Nobody sees a movie like Fiend Without a Face for the set design or snappy dialogue, though, and within the realm of B-sci-fi/horror, this is a fun little movie. It's certainly better than The Blob, even without Steve McQueen. Crabtree knows how to shoot suspense, especially in the sequences where the fiends are still invisible. They move around with a distinctive thumping, slurping sound that is surprisingly creepy. There are decent "stuck in the house alone with the monster" sequences (especially the mayor's death). And as on-the-nose as much of the dialogue is, it's hard not to love a film that introduces us to the main character by showing him smoking and popping pills at his desk, while his subordinate asks him, "You ever think of trying sleep instead of Benzedrine? You know, you might like it."

So, yeah, there's some goofy charm here. But the movie's not famous for goofy charm, and it would have long faded into B-movie obscurity were it not for the over-the-top gross-out fest that is the final fifteen minutes. Actually, it would probably have been famous even without the special effects, because without the "locked in a house frantically boarding up windows while countless horrors try to get in" sequence, we would not have had The Birds or Night of the Living Dead.

On the other hand, without Fiend Without A Face, we might have all been spared Gore-Met, Zombie Chef From Hell and basically any other schlock horror that ignores the uncanny in favor of the abject. Because:

And furthermore:

The fiends' deaths aren't just grosser than anything that came before, they're grosser than just about anything that came after, at least until Cronenberg. No, the stop-motion animation isn't very convincing, and yes, they're kind of silly looking to begin with, but there's something about the burbling noise they make as the goop squirts out of them that's completely stomach turning. Inducing nausea isn't enough to make a movie great (look at Salò), and this isn't a great movie. But even a cursory glance at the horror and sci-fi that followed it will show that, for better and for worse, Fiend Without A Face has cast a much longer shadow than your typical Z-grade horror. For a movie made for almost nothing by a producer whose greatest goal was to build England's answer to American International Pictures, that counts as an extraordinary success.

Randoms:

• I wasn't kidding about England's answer to American International. Producer Richard Gordon's brother Alex worked at American International and literally plucked "The Thought Monster" from their pile of rejected submissions.
  
  
• The best dialogue in the film is not the Benzedrine line, believe it or not. It's when Professor Walgate announces, "We're facing a new form of life that nobody understands. I believe it feeds no the radiation from your atomic plant, and that it's evil."
  
  
• The highly-trained professionals at the Air Force base know exactly what to do when they discover that the fiends feed on atomic radiation. Like anyone with a great deal of experience with nuclear energy would, they put as much TNT as they can find in the control room and blow the whole building up. As the scientists in the audience know, destroying the cooling system and control rods for a controlled nuclear reaction causes the whole thing to gracefully shut itself down, with no long term effects on the surrounding area.
  
  
• You can learn an awful lot about budget filmmaking from studying this movie closely, both from the missteps (like the control console noted above) and the successes. Crabtree stages his nuclear plant explosion by showing a static shot of the "plant":

He follows this by flickering a few single-frame inserts of all white:

And then cuts to stock footage of a model exploding that is clearly not the same building, if you look at the first frames of it going up:

But since the "building" is obliterated in just a few frames, and the flying debris that follows could be from just about anything:

The effect viewed at normal speed isn't half-bad. And must have cost approximatelly nothing. Which is a long way of saying I'm planning on using a lot of footage from Roland Emmerich movies in anything I do going forward.


• MGM distributed Fiend Without A Face domestically, as a double feature with another John Croyden/Richard Gordon production, The Haunted Strangler (also in the Criterion Collection). It had a very nice run at the Rialto on Times Square:

In 1958, it was the place to show horror films in New York City, complete with Arclight-style lobby exhibits on the sidewalk itself:

That's the right kind of theater for Fiend Without A Face, but it's not where it premiered. The geniuses at MGM sent it for a tryout, along with The Haunted Strangler, to Detroit's Adams Theater, which was MGM's prestige house in the area. Before Fiend, it was showing Gigi, and the theater manager was less than enthused with Richard Croydon's suggestion that they promote the upcoming films by setting up a coffin with a body in it in the lobby. Things didn't go well for the theater after that; it was finally demolished just this summer, but didn't age gracefully. It did a stint as a porn theater, tried unsucessfully to go back to legitimate movies, but was finally sunk when it was the site of a homocide and a shootout (separate incidents!) in 1988. Here's the auditorium circa 2005. Which just goes to show: no good will come of inadequately promoting a Karloff picture.


• No good will come of adequately promoting a Karloff picture either; the Rialto was torn down in 1998 to make way for the Reuters building. It did its time as an adult theater too; its last incarnation was for one of those hydraulic seat attractions called Cinema 3-D. So maybe the best thing is not to have anything to do with Karloff pictures at all.

#91: The Blob

The Blob, 1958, directed by Irwin S. Yeaworth, Jr., screenplay by Kate Phillips and Theodore Simonson, from an idea by Irvine Millgate.

It's an article of faith among film critics that the schlock sci-fi of the fifties can be mapped onto the fears of the era: Godzilla is about fear of the atomic bomb, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about fear of conformity, and Forbidden Planet is about fear of Leslie Neilsen movies. So it's not too surprising that people look at The Blob and try to find a deeper subtext. Maybe it's about Communism. Or Korea. Or the Republican Party. Bruce Kawin makes the best guess, pinning the blame on post-war consumerism. You can make a case for that, and Kawin does, but I think it's probably apophenic to find too much deep cultural significance in a film that was inspired by the Sherwin Williams logo:

The Blob is, as Kawin notes, pretty unique among fifties movie monsters for being completely devoid of human characteristics. It's just exactly what you'd think it is from the title.

Found inside a crashed meteorite by a crazy hermit, the blob is a transparent goo that grows as it eats. And it eats people. It's a great idea that's kind of indifferently executed, because Yeaworth and company were as interested in making an antidote to teenage delinquency movies as they were interested in a monster movie. So for every scene of the blob creeping up behind an unsuspecting victim, you're guaranteed a scene of good-hearted teenagers trying to convince the town's authority figures that they're being honest about the monster they keep reporting. So why has the film outlived contemporaries like The Crawling Eye or The Giant Claw? I can answer that in three words:

This was McQueen's first starring role in a feature, and not a moment too soon. He was 27 when this was filmed and looked every last day of it.

I'm more likely to believe that a semi-sentient man-eating gelatin could crash-land on earth than that McQueen or his co-star Aneta Corsaut are in high school. Maybe that's smart, in terms of distracting the audience from all of the film's other implausibilities, but this was not McQueen's finest hour. He hadn't really developed the persona that made him famous, and Bullit was years away. So The Blob is a rare opportunity to see one of the coolest movie stars in film history play a dork. We're talking shirt-tucked-in-no-belt, people.

McQueen does an acceptable job of playing a guy who is not very cool by any modern standard, but he gets completely left in the dust by an actor named Kieth Almoney. Cast as Corsaut's younger brother, Almoney made the bold choice to portray him as the tragic victim of a brain parasite.

It's hard to choose a single favorite thing about Almoney's magical onscreen presence: when you deliver each line like Homestar Runner, everything you do makes an impression. His one-man toy pistol assault on the Blob is probably the high point.

Almoney's performance betrays The Blob's origins; it was independently produced by a band of amateurs, far from Hollywood. Jack H. Harris was an independent distributor fed up with trying to sell poverty row Westerns to audiences who wanted Technicolor. He put the film together for virtually nothing at Valley Forge Studios in Pennsylvania, with a director and crew trained in producing religious shorts. Kate Philips had written for television, and Yeaworth mentions hiring an experienced editor after some false starts (although no one in the editorial department has previous credits on IMDB), but everyone else was brand new to the feature world. In fact, Kieth Almoney, like several other cast members and all of the extras, was recruited from Yeaworth's church. When something's that homegrown, it's easier to forgive things like the happy grins on the faces of the crowd fleeing the Colonial Theater in terror: they're gonna be in the movies.

As far as casting the main roles goes, Harris made the financially smart decision to shell out for experienced actors in minor roles, while giving the leads to cheaper unknowns. Of course, when you luck into hiring Steve McQueen as an unknown (and pay him all of $3,000), the success of your film doesn't really depend on the audience finding Alden Chase's face reassuringly familiar.

Harris's modest goal with The Blob was the same as every scrub at Sundance: get studio distribution. Fortunately, Paramount needed something to fill out the bottom of a double bill with I Married A Monster From Outer Space, so Harris got his wish. Yeaworth and some of the other crew seem to have believed they'd made a work of gothic horror, but the Paramount executives knew what they'd bought: the first thing they did was cut the ominous opening-credits music (over Saul-Bass inspired titles) and replace it with a novelty single called "Beware of the Blob," written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The single charted in Los Angeles, Carson made a joke about it on-the-air, Paramount gave The Blob top billing (and re-released it once McQueen was a star), and there's no Criterion edition of I Married a Monster from Outer Space. Maybe there should be.

Randoms:

• This is probably the only Criterion Collection DVD to use the word "superstud" on the back of the DVD case. The exact usage ("THE BLOB helped launch the careers of superstud Steve McQueen and composer Bert Bacharach") should piss off composers and Burt Bacharach fans everywhere.
  
  
• Superstud or no, McQueen was apparently impossible to deal with on set. Harris talks on the commentary track about having to drive from Philadelphia to the set several times to coax him back on set. Smoke drifts up incongruously over his shoulder in one shot because he wouldn't put out his cigarette while filming a close-up. He apparently borrowed Yeaworth's car (the only new car he ever owned), drove it to New York City, and returned it with unexplained scratches all over the roof. His behavior was abysmal enough that Harris, who'd signed him for a three-picture deal, released him completely.
  
  
• Many of the minor roles were cast from the performers of the Hedgerow Theatre, a repertory group based in nearby Rose Valley. The company's founder, Jasper Deeter, has one of the only funny-on-its-own-terms scenes in the film, as an aged Civil Defense volunteer and volunteer fireman who can't decide which helmet is best suited for Blob-fighting.

• Among all the inappropriately smiling extras, the gentleman in the checked shirt in this still clearly deserves some recognition for his performance. He's not only the only extra who looks unhappy, he genuinely looks horrified.

• Robert Fields, who went on to a distinguished film career of his own, contributes a pretty amusing commentary track. He would have been 19 when this was shot, and basically remembers it as "the summer I hung out with Steve McQueen and unsuccessfully tried to score with one of the actresses." Actors usually talk about their jobs at a certain remove, but Fields sounds like anyone else seeing footage of their summer job when they were 19: he remembers virtually all of it in terms of personal relationships, and clearly the experience of being rejected that summer still burns him a little. On the other hand, though he doesn't remember her name (I would bet it's Molly Anne Bourne or Diane Tabben, both of whom are credited as "Teenager" on the IMDB) he does remember that she was engaged, so it's probably for the best. Here she is, sitting next to him in pink:

• Most of the effects shots depend on plywood constructions with forced-perspective scenery, like this:

The Blob (colored silicone, in its pre-implant days) would then roll toward the camera when the set was tilted. When it works, the effect looks fine, but when anything's wrong with the perspective, things go very badly. Take a look at the M. C. Escher inspired angle on the diner stool:

• For shots that wouldn't work with forced-perspective models, the filmmakers used rotoscoping, and sometimes resorted to straight cell-animation. This is about as convincing as you might imagine:

That said, there's a single shot of the teenagers looking at the Blob enveloping the Downingtown Diner that goes right around past bad to good and ends up looking like something Miguel Calderón would hire someone else to paint:

I would absolutely buy the original.


• The DVD includes images of posters for the film from various releases and rereleases. Most use some variation of the original key art:

Say what you will about the art style, you know what you're getting. And then there's the French. One thing to remember about The Blob is that McQueen is never shirtless in the film. What's more, since it was made in 1958, there aren't any cars from the mid-60's in it. Nor are there helicopters. Or skyscrapers. And McQueen's costar is a brunette, not a shotgun-wielding blonde. So the French poster might lead you to draw some incorrect conclusions:

Ah, La France! If Danger Planetaire existed, I'd watch it more often than The Blob.

#90: Kwaidan

Kwaidan, 1965, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, screenplay by Yôko Mizuki, from short stories written by Lafcadio Hearn.

In American horror films, one of the obligatory shots for building tension is a tracking shot down a hallway to an unopened door. Jonathan Demme talks about it in the commentary to The Silence of the Lambs, and there's a version of it in just about any slasher or horror film you can name. For Japanese horror, there's an equivalent shot: a slow track in on a woman, seen from behind, with long black hair obscuring her face.

Both shots work on the same principle: vital information is withheld, while the tracking in tells us that the information we're not getting is really important, and undoubtedly horrifying. The fact that the Japanese version features a woman instead of the American hallway probably says something about Japanese attitudes toward women and American attitudes toward hallways (or American sublimation of attitudes toward women, &c.), but it's not a line of thought I'm interested in pursuing much further. I'm just too terrified by hallways. The point is, that's an iconic Japanese horror shot, and it's iconic because it works. Ringu marked its apotheoisis:

You can track in on Sadako Yamamura all you want, you're never going to see anything but more hair. Kwaidan fits squarely into the tradition of Japanese horror: its emphasis on the weird more than the disgusting, the importance of the unseen, and, of course, the idea that the dead rarely rest easy. It's an anthology film, based on the work of Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first Westerners to collect Japanese folklore. Kwaidan presents four separate stories. The first, appropriately enough, is titled "The Black Hair."

It's the story of a callous samurai who leaves his wife for the daughter of an aristocrat who can give him more money and a better social position. Of course, dating an aristocrat means putting up with ohaguro and hikimaru, neither of which was exactly fashion's finest hour:

Not too surprisingly, the samurai starts pining for his old, non-aristocrat wife, with white teeth and normal eyebrows. But a word to the wise: if you've done someone wrong and decide to make amends, and when you return to your old home, you find her just as you left her, apparently glad to see you—despite the weeds that have grown up through the floor and the caved-in roof—you should probably not sleep with her, no matter how nostalgic you both feel. You're setting yourself up for the worst coyote morning ever.

That's a pretty traditional ghost story, but it's made creepier by a wildly non-traditional score by Tôru Takemitsu. The climactic scene plays with hardly any music, only the sounds of boards and bundles of sticks being snapped in half. There should be diagetic noises of boards breaking; the samurai throws himself through a door and the floor caves in beneath him, but that happens silently. Playing the "things are so wrong and supernatural that the audio track has become unglued from reality" card is a risky move, but Kobayashi and Takemitsu make it work here, mostly because the soundtrack is creepy and startling in its own right. The Carol-Reed-style camera angles don't hurt, either.

"The Black Hair" doesn't just have the Platonic ideal of a Japanese horror film title, it's also the most frightening of the four stories in the anthology. "The Woman of the Snow," the second story, has moments as creepy as "The Black Hair," but the emphasis is on unease and weirdness rather than horror, and that's the mood for the rest of the film. As with "The Black Hair," a woman is the focus of all of the terror, but "The Woman of the Snow" is more or less the film's moral inverse; in "The Black Hair," Michiyo Aratama is playing a basically good woman who is sinned against. In "The Woman of the Snow," Keiko Kishi plays... something else.

She's a yuki-onna, an ice ghost, who freezes men to death and bleeds them dry. The sexual politics are left as an exercise for the reader, but the cinematic ways Kobayashi makes her eerie and inhuman are worth studying. The main trick is lighting:

You can see how carefully the light on her white kimono is aimed to keep her face icy blue. Also note the strange way Kishi is carrying herself; there's a shot later that uses Cocteau's technique of putting an actor on a dolly so they seem to glide along without walking. I originally believed that was being done in this sequence, but it isn't; Keiko Kishi just walks that way. This is also the most expressionistic of the stories, with completely unreal outdoor sets that heighten the sense of weirdness. For no apparent reason, there are eyes in the sky:

That kind of painterly, surrealistic set is more associated with theater than film (probably because it's built around a backdrop), and I have to confess, I love it. That's winter: eyes staring balefully at you from the sky (that's why I moved to Los Angeles). But summer doesn't look much more inviting:

Expressionism serves the second story well, but it doesn't rise to the same level of horror as "The Black Hair," simply because it doesn't have the same queasy undertones of guilt and repression. The protagonist is more or less blameless: a good-looking innocent who grows up to be a loving father and husband. If "The Woman of the Snow" has a message, it's that there are considerably stranger things going on beneath the surface of most other people than you might imagine. Which is true, but a lot more comfortable to think about than regret and betrayal.

The third story, "Hoichi the Earless," despite having the most arresting visual image, is probably the least frightening, unless you're terrified by biwa music. It opens with a recreation of the battle of Dan-no-ura that looks like a producer's nightmare.

I would have loved to be at the meeting between Kobayashi and the Toho execs where he explained that he needed to stage a 12th century naval battle, with period ships and costumes, and he needed to do it indoors. I suppose this was always seen as a prestige project, rather than the kind of exploitation we associate with horror films in the states, but still, this must have been expensive.

Which is not to say that Kobayashi didn't do it as cheaply as possible; many of the tricks in Roger Corman's playbook are on display here. You'll notice lots of medium shots and no wide shots, which means the same extras can be used more than once. In place of wide shots, Kobayashi uses the educational film trick of panning over a historical painting of the battle, which is surprisingly effective, since part of the point of the sequence is that it happened a very long time ago. I wouldn't recommend this technique if you're trying to shoot a space battle, however.

You can see that the skies are not as expressionistic as the ones in "The Woman of the Snow," but rest assured, the shots of the Emperor's attendants throwing themselves into the blood-stained sea are just as striking.

The Battle of Dan-no-ura is just prologue, however, and I must regretfully inform readers that the main story of "Hoichi the Earless" involves a great deal of biwa music. This is certainly apt: the story is about a blind biwa player who becomes renowned for his version of "The Tale of the Heike," an epic poem that was traditionally sung. Word of his version reaches the underworld, and the principles of the original battle arrange a command performance (they probably think the song is about them). So, yeah, there's diagetic and non-diagetic biwa a-plenty in this chapter, and I just don't have an ear for traditional Japanese music. The visuals nearly make up for it, however, especially at the end. Hoichi can only escape the ghosts who want him to perform for them by having prayers written on his body.

There's a semiotics thesis just waiting to be written there, if it hasn't been already.

The final story, "In A Cup of Tea," was a very odd choice for inclusion in the film. The Lafcadio Hearn version is kind of a trick story about narrative expectations, and not exactly screaming out for a film adaptaton. Hearn presents a story that—he informs us before he begins—was left unfinished. Despite the warning, anyone reading will get caught up in the story-within-the-story, about a samurai who starts seeing a ghostly reflection whenever he sees water.

All the elements of a great ghost story are there except the ending, which Hearn chides the reader Nabokov-style for expecting:

I am able to imagine several possible endings, but none of them would satisfy an Occidental imagination.

It's a nice little bit of metafiction, and it works pretty well on film, but Kobayashi, maybe sensing that this finale would be something of a letdown for an audience that had been watching Kwaidan for the previous three hours, makes a critical change to Hearn's structure that I don't think works. He doesn't do the worst thing: he doesn't resolve the story-within-a-story any more than Hearn does. But he does attempt to link that story and its framing device, in a way that plays like a traditional ending. I can understand the impulse, but if he wanted to have a satisfying narrative conclusion to his anthology (the sort of conclusion that Hearn derides as being typical of the "Occidental imagination"), then maybe "In A Cup of Tea" wasn't the best story to end with. It seems perverse to tack a sort of metafictional resolution onto a story that is very deliberately about (and against) the desire for narrative resolution. Of course, if you haven't read the story, all you'll notice is an ending that's a little too clever for its own good.

So how does the whole thing play, in all it's sprawling glory? Not badly at all, although the stories seem to be arranged in order of diminishing emotional affect. Anthology films can be hard to judge in their entirety: does the creepiness of "The Black Hair," or "The Woman of the Snow" make up for the slow pace of "Hoichi the Earless?" Clearly, "In a Cup of Tea" is an attempt to tie the whole enterprise together by making the movie about storytelling itself. That's all to the good, except that "In a Cup of Tea" doesn't quite have the courage of its own convictions. We're left with two excellent ghost stories, one average one, and one that doesn't quite work. Two out of four ain't bad.

Randoms:

• Lafcadio Hearn led an almost comically adventurous life. Born in Greece to Irish parents, he was raised in Dublin, became a reporter in Cincinatti, Ohio, scandalously married a black woman, lived in New Orleans for ten years, where he was one of the early recorders of Creole cuisine, lived in the West Indies on assignment for two years, moved from there to Japan, changed his name, married a Japanese woman, became a citizen, and collected Japanese folklore for Western audiences for the first time. He has more than a little to do with Asian culture's exoticism in the West, but my main reaction to his biography is envy. If he'd lived till the 1960s, he would probably have become an astronaut.
  
  
• A 1907 edition of Kwaidan is available on Google Books. It begins with an introduction from an earlier edition explaining the importance of Hearn's work in light of the Russo-Japanese war and ends with a truly insane essay about Herbert Spencer and the possibility of a human society modeled on ant colonies, wherein "a more highly evolved humanity would cheerfully sacrifice a large proportion of its sex-life for the common weal, particularly in view of certain advantages to be gained." So we can give Hearn credit for not only Kwaidan, but also Equilibrium.

A Winner Is Everybody!

So you're no longer reading the Criterion Contraption, a blog by Matthew Dessem. Say hello to the award-winning Criterion Contraption, an award-wining blog by award-winning blogger Matthew Dessem. That's right; thanks to your votes, the Criterion Contraption was named the Best Cult Blog in the www.totalfilm.com Movie Blog Awards, 2009. The official award logo will be up as soon as I'm back at a computer with Photoshop, but in the meantime, this will do:

Thanks for your votes! Next up: Kwaidan.

It's An Honor Not To Make The Obligatory Joke About It Being An Honor To Be Nominated

The Criterion Contraption has been nominated for a Totalfilm.com 2009 Movie Blog Award in the "Cult" category. So shave your heads, dear readers, and let's get ready for that sweet, sweet flying saucer to heaven. I'll make kool-aid. In any event, I'm currently running a respectable second place. With seven votes. If you'd like to be lucky number eight, you can vote here, until January 25.

As long as you're going to Total Film anyway, I recommend their roundup of the 17 worst movie posters of 2009. They're based in the UK,¹ so I hadn't even seen some of the posters.

¹Which raises the question of how their readers could watch Criterion Collection DVDs anyway...

#89: Sisters

Sisters, 1973, directed by Brian De Palma, screenplay by Brian De Palma and Louisa Rose, story by Brian De Palma.

When is a travesty not a travesty?

When it's a De Palma movie.

Actually, the right answer is when the travesty succeeds on the same terms as its model, no matter how over-the-top and exaggerated it is. That's what makes Starship Troopers a parody of dumb action movies and an effective summer blockbuster; that's what keeps the soundtrack to This Is Spinal Tap on the shelves. And that's what makes Sisters so enjoyable to watch, even if it's a travesty of Psycho: it's also creepy and suspenseful in its own right. Here's Brian De Palma on his obvious debt to Hitchcock, circa 1973:

I have found that people who like and are knowledgeable about Hitchcock also like Sisters—they know the references I am making to his films and they seem to appreciate it all the more for that. Which is good, because you could so easily be attacked as a tawdry Hitchcock rip-off.

The question isn't whether or not Sisters is a tawdry Hitchcock rip-off, the question is, why does De Palma think that's an attack? Sisters is certainly tawdry: it's about siamese twins, one of whom has the unfortunate habit of stabbing men in the crotch with a chef's knife.

And it may be that De Palma learned to hide his debt to Hitch a little better as he got older, but Sisters contains entire sequences lifted entirely from Rope, Rear Window, and most obviously Psycho. He even got Bernard Herrmann to score it. So a Hitchcock rip-off: sure. But that doesn't mean this nasty little movie isn't a lot of fun.

"Fun" is not the same thing as "subtle," though, and anyone looking for a delicate touch would be well advised to steer clear. The first sequence isn't from Hitchcock, but from Penthouse Letters: Lisle Wilson plays a man changing clothes in the locker room when a blind woman stumbles in the wrong door and starts undressing. As luck would have it, that blind woman is Margot Kidder, who has somehow managed to combine nurse and schoolgirl fetishwear in one outfit:

"I never thought it would happen to me..." But Penthouse Letters wasn't racially charged; and remember, this is 1973: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination was more recent than September 11th is today; the Boston bussing riots were still to come. Just as things are getting interesting, we pull back to reveal that we're watching a game show called "Clumsily Implicate the Viewer":

The show answers a pressing question we all face, many times a day: "What does a fella do when a pretty girl starts taking off ALL HER CLOTHES, right there in front of him?" It turns out the woman is an actress; the man is the victim of a Candid Camera type setup. The host introduces the couple (Philip and Danielle) to the audience and to each other and gives them their fabulous prizes: a set of cutlery for her:

And a free meal at an appropriate restaurant for him.

Danielle asks to come along for his dinner, and it is here that De Palma strays from the admirable subtlety he's displayed thus far. Here's the first shot of the restaurant's interior.

And in case that wasn't obvious enough, here's one from a little later:

Won't someone protect our vulnerable white women?

This is the point where you expect to hear someone behind you in the theater whisper "Perfectly dreadful!" in a voice that's just a little too loud. So, as with Wes Anderson, Caveat Emptor; you have to have a particular sensibility (in this case, a taste for over-the-top exploitation) or this won't be any fun for you. If that's your bag, though, De Palma has all kinds of sick sideshow pleasures in store. There's William Finley as Danielle's ex-husband, the sallowest man in the world:

There's Philip's fatal mistake; not that he has sex with Margot Kidder, but that he decides to buy her and her sister a birthday cake:

There's the fake red paint and bad prosthetics only found in the very best exploitation films:

There's an imaginitive use of split-screen while William Finley cleans up the murder scene as the police draw near, like the grossest Mr. Clean ad ever made:

There's a mini-version of Rope that makes imaginative use of a sleeper sofa:

And that's not even the best Hitchcock recreation in the film. That award goes to De Palma's version of Rear Window, where the role of Grace Kelly:

Is played by (who else?):

Charles Durning!

All that and I haven't even talked about the bulk of the film or introduced the main character, an intrepid girl reporter named Grace Collier, played by Jennifer Salt.

Her defining characteristic is a complete inability to get anyone in the world to take her at all seriously. Her mom is trying to marry her off to a veterenarian's assistant, her career has stalled ("I'm having lunch tomorrow with an 80-year-old ex-con who's just carved an entire replica of the Danbury Penetentiary out of soap," she complains) and her editor won't let her investigate the murder she's witnessed without hiring a private detective to babysit. Her counterargument in its entirety is "I know karate!" so you can kind of see where he's coming from; still, making her ride around in a van with Charles Durning solving mysteries seems a bit excessive.

There's no talking dog, at least. Anyway, cataloguing the film like a freakshow makes it seem like a much worse movie than it is, because here's the thing: for all its crudeness, just about all of this movie works. The split-screen cleaning sequence is stylish, well-made, and tense; as much as De Palma telegraphs his surprise ending, there are still some twists that aren't predictable, and De Palma brings some things to the table Hitchcock didn't. A darker sense of humor, for one thing: not just morbid but politically charged. And a taste for squick. It's hard to imagine that North by Northwest or To Catch a Thief would have been improved by adding Robert Melvin, the Man with Two Faces or Sealo the Seal Boy to the cast, but they're right at home in Sisters.

The optical effect used in that shot is a low-budget version of the central effect in Dead Ringers—I think Cronenberg owes De Palma more than is usually acknowledged. They share a Swiftian disgust at the body, and Cronenberg is the only other director I can imagine finding quite so much monstrosity in the Lennart Nilsson photographs that run over the opening credits.

There's a complicated case you can make for Sisters as an exploration of voyeurism and Nabokovian twinning, as Bruce Kawin does here, but I think any such argument is going to be more complex and elegant than the film itself. It may be the case that De Palma's later work either justifies or requires that kind of defense; I haven't seen any of his other movies in years. De Palma himself seems to have bought that hype: about ten years after making Sisters, he told Martin Amis, "I use Hitchcock’s grammar but I have a romantic vision that’s more sweeping and Wagnerian." Well, none of that sweeping Wagnerian romance is on display in Sisters: it's a blunt instrument through and through, despite its gleaming knives and scalpels. Finding depth beneath its surfaces is gilding the lily, so long as you accept that the lily is a crude, blunt, sick, and terrifically fun exploitation film. Here's to tawdry Hitchcock rip-offs.

Randoms:

• De Palma, one-time science fair winner, comes at film from a perspective that's pretty alien to an English major/screenwriter like myself ("Unfortunately, most movies derive from a literary rather than a visual intent"). This probably explains why so few of his characters are three-dimensional. But it also means that there are a few scenes that would never work on the page, but succeed on film for strictly visual reasons. Here's one of the best: De Palma opens with this framing of Jennifer Salt being questioned by a police detective.

She answers his questions kind of robotically, and then the camera starts tracking left:

Go ahead: try to write that joke out on the page in a way that's as creepy as the filmed version.


• De Palma got the idea for Sisters from a Life magazine article about Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyopova, Soviet cojoined twins. Here's the picture that got De Palma thinking:

One of the twins looks relatively happy, the other, relatively insane. It pretty much writes itself from there!


• De Palma tells the following story about working with Bernard Herrmann. After screening a rough cut, Herrmann complained:

  "Nothing happens in this movie for forty minutes!" And I said, "Yes, that's the idea. There is a slow beginning—you know, like Psycho, where the murder doesn't happen until about 40 minutes into the picture." And he shouted at me, "YOU are not Hitchcock; for Hitchcock they will WAIT!"

Quick Personal Note

Many of you have been wondering where I've been—thank you for those of you who wrote with concern or just telling me I should get back in front of the computer. The short answer is I've been all over: I got a new job, a new apartment, some new furniture, wrote a couple of new screenplays, and on and on. Today is the first day that I've had a reliable internet connection that wasn't at my office since early December. And there may be worse places to try to write about movies than an office cubicle, but I've never been to them. But now I'm back, and here's the thing: the new place has space for me to write. So as soon as I get settled and stop living out of boxes, expect the pace to pick up. It's about goddamned time, right? Happy New Year to you all.

#88: Ivan the Terrible - Parts I & II

Ivan the Terrible, 1945–1946, written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

I was wrong about Sergei Eisenstein. What I'd seen of his work had led me to believe he was only of historical interest: a master of technical innovations that have since been so thoroughly absorbed into cinematic grammar that they no longer seem remarkable. The person who invented the wheel undoubtedly changed the world of transportation forever, but that doesn't mean you'd like to spend two hours cruising along in Caveman Ug's first cart. Watching Ivan the Terrible was a bit like discovering that, just before he died, Caveman Ug also built a Ferarri. So: I was wrong about Sergei Eisenstein. The Ivan the Terrible films are masterpieces.

Not all masterpieces are things you want to see every weekend, however, and I'd recommend not popping these in when you're looking for a bit of lighthearted fun. Ivan the Terrible is a claustrophobic nightmare, the biopic reimagined as horror film by way of Disney and German Expressionism. Usually when someone says "You've never seen anything like this!" they really mean, "I haven't seen any of the hundreds of similar films, and I'm hoping you haven't either!" I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but I'll say with some confidence that you've never seen anything like the Ivan the Terrible films. They don't seem to have been made by the director of Alexander Nevsky. Actually, they don't seem to have been made on this planet. The first adjective that comes to mind is diseased. Most viewers won't make it through the long, slow opening scene. That's a shame, because the second adjective that comes to mind is indispensable. There are more insightful films about the way power corrodes those who would wield it, or the dangers of giving oneself away to an abstract idea, or even Russia and other totalitarian regimes. But there's something about these two films; they burrow into your head and stay there. And I do mean burrow; the movement of the film is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into. Every frame the film advances moves its characters closer to a point of absolute malignant stasis. And in virtually every scene, Eisenstein undercuts the traditional tropes of heroic biography, creating one of the most unsettling movies ever made.

The first scene is as good an example as any; Ivan, Prince of Moscow, is being crowned Tsar of All Russias. It's a giant set piece of imperialistic pageantry, and Ivan, wearing the crown for the first time in his life, looks as idealistic and regal as we'll ever see him. It doesn't hurt that he's being portrayed by Nikolai Cherkasov, who audiences would be primed to think of as a straightforward hero, thanks to Alexander Nevsky.

This scene is in dozens of movies, in one form or another. But Eisenstein keeps cutting away from the ceremony to reaction shots of the crowd, of which a few examples will suffice. Notice how carefully composed these images are; the only other film I can think of where every shot is so visually striking is The Passion of Joan of Arc:

Beautiful photography, all in the service of making a viewer ill at ease. I'll go ahead and say it: this movie will make you paranoid. Or in my case, even more paranoid. Even Mikhail Nazvanov's Andrei Kurbsky, nominally one of Ivan's close friends, seems less than pleased by the ceremony.

Eisenstein doesn't give us any context for these disconnected shots of malice and contempt at first, just plunges us into Ivan's landmine filled court. Ivan seems pretty indifferent to the hostility that surrounds him; he just stares off into the distance in the manner of someone who's above it all. Which is literally true, naturally. His first speech at the coronation ceremony has three main planks: he's going to end the "pernicious power of the boyars," he's forming a standing army and giving citizens a choice between conscription and taxation, and he's ending the church's tax-exempt status. Yep: it's basically how Hugh Hewitt imagines Obama's Inaugural Address. The point is not the specifics of his platform, so much as the fact that he's immediately asking his citizenry to sacrifice in the name of the Russian State. You can see in his eyes that he's the kind of person who dedicates himself to noble goals. Or at least that's what he tells himself. We get to see one more moment of pomp and circumstance for Ivan, his wedding to Anastasia Romanovna.

Once again, Ivan is surrounded by people who aren't even trying to conceal their contempt for him, with one exception, his cousin Vladimir Staritsky. Vlad doesn't have an evil bone in his body, mostly because he's a complete moron. Here, he's yelling "Kiss her!" to Ivan, with a mouth full of food.

Naturally, Vladimir is the patsy that the boyars want to put on the throne in Ivan's place. They're led by his charming mother Efrosinia, played by Serafima Birman as almost comically untrustworthy.

Ivan's wedding ends in classic Russian style: Moscow is burned to the ground, the peasantry storm his castle, Kazan declares war on Russia, and Ivan leads an army off to war. Presumably, the royal wedding planners were all beheaded. From here on out, everything moves downhill and inward, although the early scenes are actually relatively open and broad. The battle of Kazan features some large-scale exteriors that are positively sweeping:

Of course, what we're seeing there are the artillery and troops led by Kurbsky. The battle is won because Ivan relies, instead, on a team of sappers:

As elsewhere in the film, it's all about digging in. The leader of the sappers is one Malyuta Skuratov, who begins the film as a bit of a dunce, a man of vigorous passions and actions; he's always doing things like wiping the sweat off his brow, or enthusiastically rallying people to Kazan:

Ivan senses potential in Malyuta's dumb obeisance before power, and promptly employs him to run his intelligence-gathering operations. The work isn't good for his working-class vigor; by halfway through the first film, he moves through the courts like a wraith, just taking everything in.

Note that only one eye is in the frame: long before Sauron, Eisenstein had figured out the sinister effects of disembodied eyes.

I suppose living in a surveillance state makes one particularly sensitive to questions of observation, particularly when you're making a movie about another surveillance state. Eisenstein takes every opportunity to shoot his characters with one eye obscured, using props, costumes, and lighting to make cyclopean monsters of his cast.

The shots don't seem to have any significance to the film's internal mechanics: a one-eyed shot doesn't have much relation that I could see to a character's moral status at that point in the film. Instead, the cyclops shots are just a pervasive image that Eisenstein goes back to again and again, heightening the paranoia the films are steeped in. It's worth mentioning at this point that one of Ivan's signature achievements was the creation of the Oprichniki, Russia's first secret police squad. They're led by Malyuta, and they get the same faraway look in their eyes Ivan does when he talks about the Russian State. Here's Fyodor Basmanov, a representative sample:

He's looking pretty happy for someone whose father has just disowned him so he can join the Oprichniki. In the Ivan films (as in life), anytime someone's looking off into the distance, you'd be well advised to stay the hell away from them. When you're looking long-term, a little bloodshed in the here and now isn't worth losing any sleep over. Here's the trifecta:

There's exactly one character who doesn't become more and more corrupt every time we see her, and the narrative treats her just about as kindly as Efrosinia does.

That's Lyudmila Tselikovskaya as Ivan's wife Anastasia, the only character who seems more or less blameless (though like all women in the film, she's been kept from any real power—but leave the question of virtue without agency for another post). Anyway: Anastasia is the film's repository for positive values. She doesn't make it out of the first movie. She asks Ivan for water; he finds a conveniently placed poisoned goblet, and that's that. Efrosinia is to blame, although it should be noted that Malyuta, the "Eye of the Tsar," is looking in exactly the wrong direction when Ivan finds the poison.

The problem with surrounding yourself with people who worship you is that they'll kill your wife (or do nothing to stop her murder) if they think it will bring the two of you closer. And Malyuta, it should be remembered, quite literally kneels at Ivan's feet panting and slavering like a dog.

Things just keep getting grimmer, more constricted, and above all more paranoid. By the opening of the second film, Eisenstein has abandoned any pretense that he's making a biopic. Kurbsky's betrayal of Ivan and surrender to the Poles pretty clearly takes place in some kind of homoerotic fairy tale, not sixteenth century Europe.

Eisenstein had originally planned for his film to open with the murder of Ivan's mother and a lengthy sequence of Ivan's rule as a child, manipulated by the boyars. Mosfilm told him he had to start with something uplifting (the coronation), so Eisenstein used the footage he'd shot in the second film, which is where it belongs. Like Kurbsky's surrender, it's from the world of fairy tales, where parents are lost and guardians are wicked.

The film works better by slowly degenerating into a fairy tale; starting there would have been a mistake. The may be the only instance of a Soviet bureaucrat making a decision that improved art. Except for one other: they gave Eisenstein some Agfacolor stock that the retreating German troops weren't using any more. So at just about exactly the time the film hits the bottom of its moral abyss, Eisenstein gets to use color. He rose to the occasion, and so did Prokofiev: "Dance of the Oprichniks" is the best part of the score. Ivan the Terrible, Part II is the only film besides The Producers to feature a showstopping musical number with a chorus line of mass murderers.

It's not played for laughs. Like Lolita, Ivan the Terrible is filled with "travesties of familial feeling" (Martin Amis's phrase), and Ivan's revels are no exception. Here's the dancer the choreography is built around:

Fyodor in a mask is a pretty obvious example, but Eisenstein goes so far as to create travesties of earlier scenes in his own film. In doing so, he asks more of viewers than most directors. It's impossible to overstate the sheer visual craftsmanship on display throughout these movies. When you see Vladimir—drunk to the point of stupefaction—rest his head on Ivan's lap:

You're meant to think of an earlier shot of Vladimir and Efrosinia:

But that shot was already a travesty of the Pietà. See what I mean about knotting into? Does Eisenstein go all the way back around to sincerity? Well, shortly after Vladimir passes out, we get this:

That looks an awful lot like Ivan as a boy, down to the eye movement; which doesn't bode well for Vladimir. Eisenstein's not done with the Pietà just yet.

Beyond the painstaking visual craftsmanship and the relentlessly self-devouring narrative structure, the staggering thing about Ivan the Terrible is that it's only two-thirds complete. What could Eisenstein possibly have done in the third film to continue Ivan's decline? Well, the historical Ivan beat one daughter-in-law into miscarrying, tried to rape the other, and bashed his son's skull in, so Eisenstein had room to play with. Or rather, he would have, if Stalin hadn't decided that perhaps Eisenstein's portrait of a diseased survelliance state and its batshit crazy, megalomaniacal autocrat wasn't the kind of Russian mythmaking he was aiming for. But even incomplete, Ivan the Terrible is an unqualified masterpiece, a perfect union of form and function. Every scene, every shot, every frame presents a unified vision of humanity in which everyone is a jackal, an imbecile, or both. Happy New Year, everybody!

Randoms:

• Ivan the Terrible, Part II features probably the best subtitle in the entire Criterion Collection. I'm not really sure how this even happened:

• Eisenstein had clearly given some thought to the question of how to make the third film even more unsettling than the last, as a few surviving fragments make clear. For one thing, he'd cast Mikhail Romm, then the chairman of the Film Union, in the role of Queen Elizabeth. Cate Blanchett eat your heart out.

I think it's safe to assume that Ivan the Terrible, Part III would have been as unnerving as its predecessors.