#65: Rushmore

Rushmore, 1998, directed by Wes Anderson, written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson.

Wes Anderson has the dubious honor of being perhaps the most polarizing director of his (and my) generation. This is not entirely his fault. Since Rushmore, he's served as a proxy target in cultural wars that were only marginally related to his work. To be fair, he brought the first of these on himself, by writing an article for the New York Times about screening Rushmore for Pauline Kael. Apparently Kael (being treated for Parkinson's at the time) was not too coherent. Apparently Anderson's article made this clearer than was probably polite. It seems that insulting someone who mentored an entire generation of film critics is not the best thing to do if you want your film reviewed kindly; David Edelstein's piece in Slate is a decent example of the resulting fallout. And Anderson also serves as a convenient target for people who don't like people who like movies by Wes Anderson. And they have a point. My roommate saw Rushmore for the first time sitting next to an insufferable prick who kept applauding at every other line. But neither of these experiences—repugnant as they may be—have that much to do with Anderson's films themselves.

And this isn't really the place to write an account of all of his work. Anderson has a deal of some sort with Criterion; everything but Bottle Rocket is available in a Criterion edition. So we'll get to the rest of it sooner or later. For now: Rushmore, Anderson's first foray into J.D. Salinger territory. Jason Schwartzman plays Max Fischer, Rushmore Academy's most enthusiastic and least focused student. One of the film's highlights is a brief montage of Max's extracurricular activities. These start with the prosaic:

And slowly devolve toward the bizarre:

Before ending up with the wholly fantastical:

The whole thing is over "Makin' Time," by The Creation. And there you have Wes Anderson's style in a nutshell: a great British invasion soundtrack, anamorphic wide-angle lenses to the point of absurdity (there's hardly a straight horizontal line in the film—check out the front row of language booths in the French Club shot), willfully obscure allusions, and FUTURA BOLD. Lots of FUTURA BOLD. Your response to that series of stills is a pretty good litmus test for how you'll feel about the rest of the movie. If you find them pretentious and dull, steer clear. If it seems a little twee but the visual style is intriguing, stay with it; it gets better from here. If the idea of making Model UN members wear country-appropriate hats, or firing off a shotgun in a school courtyard, or keeping bees at school struck you as amusing, you're going to love Rushmore. And if the shot of the Yankee Racers reminded you how much you love Jacques Henri Lartigue...

...then odds are you're Wes Anderson. Welcome! The movie traces a strange friendship between Max Fischer and depressed industrialist Herman Blume:

Blume is Bill Murray's best version of a character he's been playing again and again for the last eight or nine years (for that matter, Max is the best version of Jason Schwartzman's screen persona). You thought Murray was unhappy in Lost In Translation? Compared to Rushmore, he was ecstatic:

Sofia Coppola was right to have Murray's wife and kids only exist over the phone in Lost in Translation; her movie was about loneliness, not misery. But the single best decision Wes Anderson may have ever made was casting Ronnie and Keith McCawley as Ronnie and Donnie Blume, Herman's terrible sons. Here, they're locking him out of his car:

And one of them is responsible for his black eye in the earlier still. "Never in my wildest imagination did I dream I would have sons like these," Herman tells Max, quite credibly.

Max and Herman don't have much in common, but they fascinate each other. Max sees Blume as an emblem of triumph in the class wars. Max's secret shame is that he attends Rushmore on a scholarship. Like Charlie Brown, his father is a barber. Unlike Charlie Brown, he tells everyone that his father is a neurosurgeon. For his part, Herman sees Max as someone who hasn't yet lost his enthusiasm for the world around him (even if he's mostly enthusiastic about a fantasy world he's creating). Unfortunately, they both become enthusiastic about the same woman, a second grade teacher named Rosemary Cross.

Olivia Williams isn't given that much to do in this role; she mostly has to react to Max and Herman as they get pushed over their respective edges. Which she does admirably well. Unfortunately, the best way to deal with someone who is trying to get your attention in inappropriate ways is to ignore them, so Williams gets less screen time than she (and I) might have liked.

Rushmore plays out as most love triangles do, at least when one of the men is a teenager and the other is in the middle of a midlife crisis. Which is to say: unpredictably. I defy even confirmed Wes Anderson haters not to enjoy Max and Herman's revenge montage, which begins with Max letting live bees into Herman's hotel room and ends with prison. At three minutes long, it's a model of economy. Usually, montages elide scenes that would be dull if seen in full (imagine watching one of Rocky's full training sessions). In this case, however, Anderson takes scenes that would be much longer in any normal film and compresses the hell out of them. And it's not just plot that happens here; we learn a lot about Blume from his that sonovabitch smile when he realizes Max is responsible for his bee stings:

Seeing Murray's face slide from the above expression into one that says, roughly, "Max Fischer is gonna pay," is one of the film's great moments. Particularly when it's set to the music of The Who, it seems, revenge can be a terrific amount of fun.

When you get past the extraneous bullshit surrounding Anderson's films, the crux of disagreements about him reminds me of disagreements over David Foster Wallace (or Dave Eggers, or Thomas Pynchon, or even Vladimir Nabokov). It comes down to this: Are Anderson's stylistic tricks and distracting plot elements smoke and mirrors, or do they bring something unique to the stories he's telling?¹ In the case of Rushmore, I think the answer has to be the latter.

The heart of the movie, for me, is not how charming or quirky Max is (which is basically what Edelstein seems to believe). If you're paying attention, it's clear that Max's manias are fueled by unhappiness as much as narcissism. When he tells Ms. Cross that Harvard is his safety school (if he doesn't get into Oxford or the Sorbonne), he's not just trying to impress her; that's really the standard he holds himself to. And he holds himself to that standard because his mother, who encouraged him to write plays and got him into Rushmore Academy, has died of cancer. In that context, you can read Anderson's visual style in the first act (which is the most boldly colored) as something like what Max is up to: a calculated campaign of distraction from genuine pain. The colors get washed out as soon as Max gets expelled from Rushmore Academy, and they don't return to their original boldness until Herman's haircut, at the beginning of the final act. Even the filmic references get duller: you couldn't put an homage to Frederick Wiseman in the sections at Rushmore Academy, but it fits right in at Grover Cleveland High School. When Max can't keep up his tap dance over the abyss, neither can the film.

So to me, Rushmore is a movie where style and substance are pretty unified. And you shouldn't scoff at Anderson's achievement here; unified style and substance are a lot easier to do with a pessimistic film (e.g., Children of Men) than in one where the tone is something like "bittersweet optimism." Which is not to say it's a universally appealing film throughout; you either think the idea of a theatrical version of Serpico is hilarious or you don't.

I do. And I think the movie has one of the most satisfying endings in film history. Max puts on a play at his new school about the Vietnam war and invites everyone from the rest of the film. At the afterparty, they all get along like gangbusters. And everyone is in these final scenes; there's no villain who must be excluded as a condition of the heroes' happiness. The first play of Max's we see, it's apparent that he's interested in the acclaim it can bring him. The last play, he's discovered the more rewarding purpose art can serve. He's creating an environment in which all injuries can be healed, all sorrows forgotten. And of course, that's not just Max's goal, but Anderson's. It takes heroic efforts (and in Max's case, flamethrowers, dynamite, and a wildly inaccurate understanding of the Vietnam War). And it never lasts long. But it's what art can do, at its very best. In the final shot, as if in recognition of how fleeting happiness and reconciliation like this always are, Anderson uses a variable-speed camera to stretch the moment out as long as possible. The times I've felt that way, that's how I remember it.

Randoms:

• Even the best (and funniest) critique of Anderson's films so far, Tyler Burr's review of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, has some reflexive hatred of hipsters (Burr describes Anderson as the kind of person who "wears interesting socks.") Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with hating hipsters.
  
  
• Much has been made of Anderson's debt to Salinger. I think Rushmore owes more to Hal Ashby, frankly. There's clearly a straight line between Harold and Max's narcissism, just like there's a straight line between Max's slow-motion semi-sneer after his version of Serpico:

And Harold's expression after successfully faking self-immolation.

• I'm a big fan of 2.35:1 in general; and I'd like to go on record now as saying that 2.35:1 anamorphic, attached to a wide-angle lens (in the case of Rushmore, a 40mm lens for everything) looks fantastic. I don't know if it's the lens or the film format, but the images look sharper and denser, even on DVD, than in other films I've seen. However, if you're shooting your film in this format, please be sure that everyone in post and publicity knows how you want it treated. The DVD features an interesting joint appearance on The Charlie Rose Show by Anderson and Bill Murray—with a horribly distracting bad transfer of film clips. Here's a shot of Jason Schwartzman in the film itself:

And here's the way it showed up on Charlie Rose (uncropped, so you're seeing the full video image):

Granted, the blurriness is inevitable when you're looking at something that was transferred from a tape of a television program, which featured a broadcast of a tape of a film, which was undoubtedly transferred in a hurry to whatever format the show's producers required. But I wonder if Rose insisted that clips be in no wider aspect ratio than 1.85:1? This still is at about 1.77:1, and to get there, they've cropped the sides of the image. That's relatively normal. But they've also incompletely expanded it horizontally. Schwartzman's shoulders are skinny enough in that blazer—from which the pads had been removed—in the original still. Here, he looks like a beanpole. For all of you who couldn't give a damn about film transfers under any circumstances, I offer my sincere apologies.


• Anderson gets a lot of credit from me for discovering Brian Cox's comedic talents. Or at least for bringing them to my attention. Anderson cast him as Dr. Guggenheim, the director of Rushmore Academy, on the strength of his performance as Hannibal Lecktor (yes, that's spelled right) in Red Dragon Manhunter.² Because when you're casting "principal," you think "serial killer," not "a prince! and a pal!"

• Apparently, the real life Bill Murray hated the real-life actors who played his sons just as much as Herman Blume hated their characters.
  
  
• Finally, I recommend buying or renting the Criterion version of Rushmore because it has one of the very best extra features of any DVD I know. For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Wes Anderson directed his own versions of Armageddon, The Truman Show, and Out of Sight, as performed for high school theater by the Rushmore Players, directed by Max Fischer. They're fantastic. And in the most obscure joke on the DVD, Anderson has Max Fischer slide across the stage on a chair during the NASA scenes from Armageddon:

Why? Because Max Fischer is the director. And Michael Bay did the same slide in the same rolling chair, for just as little apparent reason, in his cameo in Armageddon.

It's a two-percenter, but I love it.

¹Actually, in the long term, the question you can have more interesting disagreements about is whether it matters; some filmmakers and writers seem to think divorcing style from substance is desirable (cf. Tarantino, Leyner). As you've probably figured out if you've been reading this blog, I am not one of them.

²Nothing's more embarrassing than being a pedantic asshole about the correct spelling of a character's name in a particular version of a film, and then getting the title wrong. And not just "wrong," but "confused with a Brett Ratner movie." I suppose the take-home lesson should be to try not to be a pedantic asshole. But we all know that's not going to happen.

#64: The Third Man

The Third Man, 1949, directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene.

The first time we see Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, the hapless protagonist of The Third Man, he's craning his head out of a moving train as it pulls into the station. He does a lot of that throughout the movie. Martins has the perpetual cocked head of a dog trying hopelessly to puzzle something out. And as the third shot of him suggests, his cluelessness isn't going to bring him any good luck:

That's Holly in a single shot: too caught up in whatever's going on inside his head to notice he's walking under a ladder. Now there's a fine tradition of films about preoccupied bumblers—mostly comedies—and you could imagine that shot in any number of movies. But this isn't The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and there's nothing charming about Holly Martin's obliviousness. As Jim Shepard points out in "Zane Grey and the Borgias: The Third Man and the 2004 Republican Ticket" (the definitive essay about The Third Man; buy yourself a copy here), the key thing about Holly is that he doesn't realize that "being in over his head might be dangerous for other people." He has the peculiar American combination of determination, self-righteousness, and ignorance that creates disasters like our current adventure in the Middle East. How ingrained is his belief in saving the day through nothing but sheer pluck and true grit? Well, he writes cowboy novels with titles like The Lone Rider of Santa Fe, and covers like this one:

There may be situations where Westerns are useful moral guides. But the Viennese black market immediately after World War II was not one of them, and unfortunately, that's where Holly finds himself.

The movie opens with a brief tour of Vienna's moral squalor during the Four Powers occupation, 1945–1955. At the time, Vienna was divided into four main zones, governed by the French, Americans, Russians, and British. In the center of the city was the inter-allied zone, rather ineffectually governed and policed by representatives of all four governments, who had no languages in common but pidgin German:

You can see a map of what the city looked like here; Europe's very own Texarkana. Enter Holly Martins, who's come all the way from America to get a job working for his old school friend Harry Lime. But Holly's barely off the train before he discovers that Harry is dead, the British are claiming he was a racketeer, and the one thing everyone (British, Russian, Austrian, even a Bulgarian) agrees on is that Holly should go home. Which is, of course, the one thing you don't tell an American to do. Especially if you're a sardonic, world-weary Brit like Major Calloway, played brilliantly by Trevor Howard.

So after getting drunk on the British delegation's dime (or pound note, I guess) and trying to punch Major Calloway in the face, Holly has the single worst idea of his life: he's going to investigate and clear Harry's good name.

This despite, as Shepard points out, the fact that "He doesn't know the city at all, and doesn't speak German. Or Russian. Or French." He may as well put a sign on his door reading "Gareth Keenan Investigates!" Holly's ill-fated venture begins with a meeting with one of Harry's oldest, dearest friends in Vienna, Baron Kurtz. He seems as friendly and sincere as Holly seems competent and restrained:

And things pretty much go downhill from there. The archetypical Holly Martins scene is his first meeting with Lime's girlfriend, Anna. She's an actress; he goes to one of her performances, and sits stone-faced and uncomprehending at the German dialogue while the audience around him roars with laughter.

After the show, he tells Anna, "I enjoyed the play very much. You were awfully good in it." She cuts him off: "Do you understand German?" Not. Fooling. Anyone. He does find one thing that the police didn't know: the reports of Harry's death turn out to have been exaggerated.

That's Orson Welles as Harry Lime, making his unexpected reappearance in one of the most famous shots in film history. But for my money, the shot that should have entered the canon is this insert shot of Calloway's file on Lime:

As mug shots go, it could have gone worse. And as photos of Orson Welles go, it did go worse. Anyway: Welles's performance is excellent, but it didn't have to be much. He doesn't appear until an hour into the film, and the first hour is spent with every character talking about him. There's an interview with Peter Bogdanovich on the DVD in which he says Welles compared playing Harry Lime to playing a character named Mr. Wu back in his theater days. (Bogdanovich doesn't identify it further, but probably Welles was referring to the play this was based on). In Mr. Wu, any time in the first act that a character says anything at all, another character says something like, "But what will Mr. Wu think about that?" or "Well, we'll have to wait and see what Mr. Wu has to say." And at the very end of the act, Mr. Wu is seen arriving in the distance, in silhouette. He has no lines. But according to Welles, at the intermission his performance as Mr. Wu was all anyone could talk about. The Third Man works more or less the same way; after the buildup Lime gets, all Welles has to do is show up.

Needless to say, the more Holly blunders around Vienna, the worse he makes things for everyone, from Major Callaway up to Harry himself. But nobody gets off worse than Anna, because Holly decides he wants to save her. She's played by the great Alida Valli, and brings shades to the part that I doubt were apparent in the script. Her complete lack of patience with Holly is one of the film's great pleasures.

When Holly tells her he's fallen in love with her (in a typically self-pitying fashion), she replies, "If you'd rung me up and asked me if you were fair or dark or had a mustache, I wouldn't have known." Holly being Holly, however, he's still dumb enough to wait for her after Harry's second funeral (trying to salvage the happy ending, as Shepard put it). Anna has the only rational response: she walks right past him without even acknowledging he's there.

Randoms:

• There are a lot of great performances in this film. Trevor Howard's Major Calloway is nearly perfect. He gets most of the best lines (e.g., "I don't want another murder in this case and you were born to be murdered.") And then there's this scene:

Holly is on his way out of town, and he won't help Calloway catch Lime; Calloway says he has to make a stop on his way to the airport. The "stop" is to the children's hospital where some of Harry Lime's victims are living (Lime has been diluting and reselling penicillin). We never see what's in those cradles, but watch Calloway's face as he explains, "It had meningitis. They gave it some of Lime's penicillin." That it.


• The final chase scenes through the Viennese sewers are justly famous for their cinematography and staging. Two examples:

Two things I didn't know about this section of the movie: first, you know those weird cops in jumpsuits that show up out of nowhere? Vienna had an actual squad of police whose beat was the sewer system, and those are their uniforms. The DVD includes an old Pathé newsreel with footage of them in action. Here they are:

The other thing I didn't know is that Orson Welles's shots in this section are all on a soundstage, because he refused to shoot in the actual sewers after the first day.


• Trivia everyone knows: Orson Welles wrote the monologue about Italy under the Borgias himself. So he may be the only person on the planet who has written something better than Graham Greene did.
  
  
• Trivia not everyone knows: Carol Reed worked nearly 24 hours a day on The Third Man all throughout the production (three units were shooting simultaneously). His secret? He was a Benzedrine achiever.
  
  
• More trivia everyone knows: the entire score of The Third Man was performed on the zither by Anton Karas, who Carol Reed heard playing in a restaurant and insisted on hiring over the objections of everyone at the studio. If you've ever wanted footage of Karas playing, this is the DVD for you:

What I didn't know was how a zither actually works: it's the kind of instrument you hear about more than you actually see. It's sort of a mix between a harp and a guitar:

If you think about the Harry Lime theme from the film (and if you don't know it, see the movie—it will be stuck in your head for weeks), you can see how it works; the right hand plucks the bass line on the non-fretted strings and simultaneously plucks the treble strings with the thumb pick; the left hand frets the upper strings. That's why the score has relatively simple bass lines, particularly when the melody gets rolling.


• Last thing, and something I didn't notice until this viewing (and only then because Roger Ebert mentioned it). It's part of the subplot involving Holly Martins delivering an ill-advised address to a cultural reeducation society. The organizers mistakenly believe he is a significant novelist; it's a humorous version of the "Holly out of his league" disasters that move the main plot along. But what I didn't notice was that the head of the reeducation group almost always is accompanied by his mistress, who he maneuvers out of the way before talking to anyone:

Once you see her, you'll notice that she's almost always with him; his performance is a case study in guiding a companion to the sidelines of a conversation; Crabbin does it reflexively. In the shot above, he's about to pull her between himself and Sergeant Paine and off to the side, without breaking eye contact or otherwise acknowledging her. Crabbin's first line is to her: "I can't very well introduce you to everybody." It's a nice counterpoint to the way Anna Schmidt is manipulated by the rest of the characters. So: old British men looking to avoid social scandal, take note!

#63: Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Souls, 1962, directed by Herk Harvey, written by John Clifford.

I write a lot about comedy as though it were the great neglected genre. And it's true; comedies don't get a lot of critical acclaim. But nobody gets less respect than horror movies. Except for B-horror movies from the sixties. And the only films that get less respect than B-horror movies are B-horror movies made in Lawrence, Kansas, by filmmakers who never worked on another feature. So what is Carnival of Souls doing in the Criterion Collection? I'd love to report that it's a brilliant film, a lost gem of incalculable worth. Well, it's not. But it's not quite a B-picture, either. The filmmakers got a lot wrong; the sound is laughably badly mixed, there are some terrible performances (and some passable ones), and a great deal of the movie, particularly toward the end, just isn't very frightening. But in the weeks after you see it, you will find yourself remembering some of the strangeness of the film, its odd tone, its uncanny images.

And even if you don't, you'll remember the movie because of its strange pedigree. Variety's review began, "Occasionally a feature film emerges from the midwest..." John Clifford and Herk Harvey were both employees of Centron Studios, one of the big three producers of educational and industrial movies (the other two were Coronet and Encyclopædia Britannica). And like any good social guidance film, it opens with young people making a terrible decision. In this case, they agree to drag race, which ends pretty much how you would expect.

If the movie had been directed by Sid Davis, that would have been the last shot. If it had been a Highway Safety Foundation production, that wouldn't have been the last shot, but audiences would have wished it was. In Centron movies, though, things always tended to be a little murkier. And speaking of murky, the car crash isn't as tragic as it looks, at least for one of the passengers.

That's Candace Hilligoss playing the sole survivor, Mary Henry. She remembers next to nothing about the wreck, but we see her haunting the bridge soon after, staring into the water. We don't see anything of her life in Kansas, where the movie begins, except for a brief scene of her practicing organ on the assembly floor of the Reuter's Organ Company:

She's not always shot from such a distance, but she is consistently apart from everyone else in the movie. Apparently on the theory that a change of scenery will do her good, she leaves town as soon as she can, to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. Asked to "stop by and see us the next time you're in," she replies, "Thank you. But I'm never coming back." She's as good as her word.

On the drive west, her radio goes on the fritz: whatever channel she turns it to, all it picks up is organ music in minor keys. In the distance, she sees a hulking building across the salt flats:

And almost immediately she runs off the road to avoid hitting a gaunt apparition who looks suspiciously like the director wearing grease paint:

And there her troubles begin. For the rest of the movie, Hilligoss keeps seeing this guy, and finds herself strangely fascinated by the strange building she passed on the highway. That building is the movie's secret weapon, and I believe it is the reason it has survived so long. On his way back from a vacation in Los Angeles, Herk Harvey passed the same hulk of a building off the freeway, and was curious enough to pull off and check it out. What he found was the wreckage of a grand experiment in Mormon entertainment, created while the church was distancing itself from its first grand experiment in Mormon entertainment, "celestial marriage."

In 1893, the Church of Latter Day Saints built a resort on the edge of the Great Salt Lake to provide wholesome entertainment for young families called Saltair. It featured salt water bathing in the lake and a grand pavilion on piers over the water, and was remarkably successful:

Believe it or not, you're looking at one of the most famous tourist attractions of its time. In 1925 the whole thing burned to the ground and was rebuilt on a slightly less grand scale:

Notice that the large central tower is missing, as is the second level of the promenade. You can also see the park's roller coaster and the railway tracks leading in near the road. The centerpiece of Saltair's second incarnation was the enormous dance pavilion. I believe this photo is of the second dance pavilion, at its time one of the largest in the world:

In the late 30s, the salt lake receded away from the pavilion, leaving it on a great muddy plain, which proved to be somewhat less appealing to vacationers. Still, they limped along until 1958; so when Harvey shot there, it had been closed for about three years. Here's what he found:

That's the wreckage of the main pavilion. Here's its interior:

It would be hard to do a bad job shooting such an evocative location, and the scenes at Saltair are the best in the film. And I think there's something about using an actual abandoned resort that gives this section moments of creepiness that a more calculated film wouldn't have had. For instance, imagine how you would create a deserted carnival for a horror film (or play a few hours of Carnevil). Then ask yourself if you would have included anything as sad as a long-abandoned Barrel of Fun:

Or as uncanny as the bad advertising art on the wall here (the sign is for Salt Water BATHING, but the woman's face seems to be an advertisement for Inter Family BREEDING):

No set designer could come up with anything as weird, sad, creepy, and appropriate as Harvey and his crew found in the wreckage of Saltair. I admit it. I'm a sucker for abandoned places, and I would have been perfectly happy with two hours of footage of what was left of Saltair. The film offers other pleasures as well, however, most notably Sidney Berger's performance as Hilligoss's lecherous neighbor:

His character is a type of person you don't see too much of in film. He's fiercely anti-intellectual, but in kind of a charming way, starts his day off with whiskey in his coffee, and comes on to Mary Henry full speed ahead from the moment he sees her. In fact, his pursuit of Mary Henry is the focus of the middle third of the film, which is kind of strange because it isn't supernatural in the least. In the horror movies I'm used to seeing, by the end of the first act most subplots are subordinated to whatever the main horror of the film is, but this one doesn't intersect with Mary's other problems at all until the end of the second act. It's a strange choice, but actually, the scenes between Berger and Hilligoss are some of the best written and fastest moving in the movie.

The Criterion edition features two cuts of the movie; the original theatrical release (which features some cuts in the final third) and the original version. In both cuts, a lot more could have been sliced without being missed. There's a recurring scene where Mary Henry becomes invisible to those around her: it's very well done the first time. But the second time it drags on to the point of parody. One of the moments of sheer pulse-pounding terror, for instance, is that she is unable to hail a cab:

And she has even worse problems at the bus station. Needless to say, transportation problems aren't the stuff of nightmares. But despite all the goofiness towards the end, Carnival of Souls has some moments of inspiration that transcend its Z-movie roots. Even Herk Harvey in greasepaint has one moment of being truly horrifying, rising silently from the salt lake towards the camera.

Randoms:

• If that last shot of Harvey looks familiar, it should. Francis Ford Coppola stole the shot (and the creepy, lifeless way Harvey rises out of the water) for Apocalypse Now. Carnival of Souls may be more famous for the later, better films that stole from it than it is great in its own right. George A. Romero has admitted modeling his zombies in Night of the Living Dead on Harvey and the other ghosts in this film. And although there's no direct link, I can't help but think that the Overlook Hotel in The Shining has a little bit of Saltair about it; look again at the picture of dancers in the main ballroom in the place's heyday. Whether or not Stephen King was familiar with the movie, I have no doubt that Kubrick was, because there's a scare shot that's identical to one he used in The Shining. Mary is in her room with John Linden; he leans close behind her and kisses her neck:

When she looks up at their reflection in the mirror, however, she finds Herk Harvey's character leering back at her.

The idea is better executed in The Shining, but there's no mistaking its origins. It's a strange kind of cinematic glory, to be a well that many more gifted filmmakers have drawn from, but it's better than nothing.


• Harvey and cinematographer Maurice Prather had a great eye for mathematically precise compositions. You can see it in that great shot of Mary at the organ above, and in the following stills, all with very strong diagonal layouts. Notice how precisely the building's shadow defines the frame below:
  
  

Of course, organs are naturally pretty mathematically precise:

This last one is symmetric, not diagonal, but is probably my favorite shot in the film; it's from inside the dance pavilion looking out on the salt flats:

• Virtually the entire crew had a long career at Centron both before and after Carnival of Souls. The DVD includes a lengthy section of excerpts from Centron films. Here's a younger Herk Harvey in one of them, Star 34.

Star 34 is about a couple from some unnamed large city who inherit a significant amount of money from a distant relative, provided they tour the state of Kansas and learn about its many attractions. Guess which snobbish-at-the-beginning-of-the-film couple fall in love with Kansas? But despite having a clip from Signals: Read 'Em Or Weep, the DVD unaccountably omits Shake Hands With Danger, Herk Harvey's closest thing to a Sid Davis movie, in which construction workers meet disaster after disaster by ignoring workplace safety. Here's a sample:

What really makes the film, though, is its bizarre soundtrack, by a Johnny Cash sound-alike. Sample lyric:

Shake hands with danger
Meet a guy who oughta know
I used to laugh at safety,
Now they call me... Three-Finger Joe.

• As easy as it is to snicker at educational and industrial films (and not just easy, but fun), it bears remembering that they were big business in their day. The best, and as far as I know only, source of information about them is Ken Smith's excellent Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films 1945–1970. I can't recommend this book enough. Other invaluable resources are Skip Eisheimer's Educational Archives series of DVDs (the source of the Shake Hands With Danger stills above) and the Prelinger Archives.
  
  
• I can't think of another film that was inspired by a single location the way Carnival of Souls was, but I can think of some locations that should have inspired films. My pick would be Heritage USA, the remains of Jim Bakker's criminal empire. Check out the "Take a Tour of Heritage" to get a feel for the place. You could do a lot of interesting things shooting in the Grand Tower. If anyone else has great location ideas, leave them in the comments.