1970s horror movie round-up

You may remember that an early October repeat viewing of Let's Scare Jessica to Death inspired me to see what other unseen 70s horror movies were out there that would give me a similar vibe. 

Well, unfortunately, I came up short on this -- not for lack of follow through or effort, but for lack of results. 

But on the second-to-last day I was watching these movies -- having known I planned to watch new horror on both the 30th and 31st -- I did finally hit.

My methodology in determining candidates was to google a variety of relevant search terms and see what came up that I hadn't seen. This produced a list of the following 21 titles on Letterboxd.

Blacula (1972)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
The Cat and the Canary (1978)
Scream and Scream Again (1970)
Phase IV (1974)
Prophecy (1979)
Shivers (1975)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
Day of the Animals (1979)
The Swarm (1978)
A Knife for the Ladies (1974)
Piranha (1978)
Coma (1978)
See No Evil (1971)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Trog (1970)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Jaws 2 (1978)
Theatre of Blood (1973)

Each 70s release year appears at least once on this list, and you would have thought this should have been more than enough to go on. 

I picked from this list in some cases out of pure interest, which meant a rental from iTunes, and in other cases because of availability, meaning it was streaming for free on one of my services. The latter opportunistic approach left me watching some candidates that were decidedly imperfect fits for what I was looking for ... but as it happens, I was mostly striking out with the hand-picked rentals as well. 

As I was considering my final few options, I began really scrutinizing the remaining movies on the list to try to pre-empt my disappointment. I'm sure some of the remaining candidates would have been fine, but when diving deeper into them on Wikipedia, they struck me either as too hokey, too associated with a genre other than horror, or too similar to something I had already watched. I also wanted to get variety from my movies, not just all slasher films or all monster movies. 

So as I was gearing up for the final two viewings on Thursday and Friday, I called an audible and went off the Letterboxd list. One of my final two choices was uncovered in a more traditional countdown of the best 1970s horror movies, and one was found by sheer happenstance among the list of rentals currently priced at 99 cents on iTunes. And one of these two proved to be my saving grace.

Alas, the sum total of my new 1970s horror viewings for the month was only eight. That's even with watching probably the most horror movies overall that I've ever watched in October. This can be attributed in part to getting a late start (October 8th was my first viewing), in part to saving most of my viewings for weekend nights (Thursday to Sunday), and in part because I was also trying to keep up with 2021 horror, five of which I reviewed on ReelGood. At least because the cinemas have been closed here due to lockdown, I didn't have any normal new theatrical releases providing additional competition for my finite number of available viewing hours. (Cinemas just reopened Friday night. Probably a topic to expound on at greater length in a different post.)

That's plenty of preamble. Why don't I take you through what I watched?

Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)
Watched: October 8, iTunes rental

I have a bit of a hit-and-miss history with David Cronenberg, but I generally consider his early period to be his best work, including the likes of Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone and The Fly. I thought investigating the beginnings of his obsession with body horror (which he has abandoned in his later career, to his detriment) would be a fruitful launching point for my 70s horror. Perhaps I should have gone with 1979's The Brood instead, because Shivers was a mild thumbs down for me. The setup seems to have everything I might want, as a parasite infests a state-of-the-art Montreal apartment complex and enters and exits its victims through various orifices, some of which did not previously exist. I'm not sure if I can put my finger exactly on what held me back about this one, as it does have individual moments of good body horror and even some weird deviant behavior, which I can get behind. (The parasite makes you a sex-craved lunatic. There is probably some social commentary here that doesn't translate as well 45 years later.) In the end though I felt a bit disappointed.

Blacula (1972, William Crain)
Watched: October 15, iTunes rental

Perhaps sensing that I was falling behind, it already being the middle of the month and only my second viewing, I snuck this one in on a Friday afternoon after I finished work. There was a bit of a necessary sacrifice in that, as I decided I didn't want something that would really give me the creeps, it being the afternoon at all. Blacula was perfect in that sense: It was a cool bit of period history that I probably should have made time to watch before now, and it was better than just a blaxploitation movie whose cheeky title has given it more of a humorous than frightening reputation. But as I anticipated, it wasn't scary. That's not a problem unique to Blacula -- I realize that I don't find most vampire movies very scary. Because the vampire has a sexy and urbane alternate persona, which was no less the case with William Marshall's Prince Mamuwalde, he is fundamentally more knowable than most other ghouls and goblins we might meet, leaving a deficit in his ability to terrify us. I'm really glad I saw Blacula and it might make an interesting discussion in a post unto itself, but as an attempt to give me the kind of willies I get in Let's Scare Jessica to Death, it did not scratch that itch.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976, Nicolas Gessner) 
Watched: October 15, streaming on Amazon Prime

This was a course corrective in a number of ways: 1) Time to get a 1970s horror for free, and 2) Time to see something that seemed to exist in the same world as Let's Scare Jessica, in that it represents a realistic depiction of the 1970s and contains horror elements that are more subtle than a parasite or a vampire. Unfortunately, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was subtle enough in its horror elements that I'm not even sure it qualifies as a horror movie. As I wrote about in this post, probably the creepiest thing about it is the sexual advances an adult Martin Sheen makes toward a 13-year-old Jodie Foster, and in a way, that was the kind of insidious thing I was looking for as a more psychological form of horror -- which we get in Jessica. But while Jessica does turn to the supernatural, this film remains in the purely realistic realm of a girl living by herself around whom people turn up dead, in some cases by accident and in some cases intentionally. Since this character is also our protagonist, the film is an odd duck that defies easy categorization. That said, as a movie itself, it earned one of the highest ratings for a movie in this series, 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. (And I should mention there's also something creepy about the thing that's in the cellar that you never see.)

The Cat and the Canary (1978, Radley Metzger)
Watched: October 17, streaming on Amazon Prime

And again watching a movie that was available to me for free steered me wrong. Although there are some loosely defined horror elements in this latest cinematic adaptation of a story that goes all the way back to the 1920s, this is a lot more of a comedy or a murder mystery in the same vein as something like Clue: The Movie than it is something that even has the stated ambition of scaring its audience. (I also wrote about this film here, in the context of an anachronism that appears in it.) As with The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, I liked the movie a fair bit for what it was -- 3.5 stars on Letterbox -- but what it was was not a horror movie. (I was fooled by a very convincing poster that wanted to have it both ways.) That said, there is obviously a desired connection to horror here, as the film features an actress who has been introduced to me as an iconic "scream queen" over the course of this series: Barbara Steele. They wouldn't have used her if they weren't trying to leverage her horror bonafides. (She also appears in not the next movie on this list, but the one after that.)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman)
Watched: October 22, iTunes rental

After a couple missteps the previous weekend -- a whole weekend of missteps, in a way -- I decided to course correct again. What better jumping off point than my favorite horror movie of the entire decade? The Exorcist is a stone-cold classic that makes my blood run cold every time I watch it. Its sequel is ... not. But I didn't realize until afterward how great disliked it actually is. When I went on Wikipedia, I found that audiences howled with laughter when they watched it and it had come in as high as #2 on certain prominent lists of worst movies of all time. That's right -- not worst horror movies, but worst movies period. I certainly didn't like Exorcist II but I didn't find it anywhere near that bad. It's more misguided than anything, though it's true that Richard Burton's performance as the central priest is laughable in certain spots, including one bizarre moment where he turns to speak directly to the camera. It's just kind of a dumb story in which Linda Blair does appear again, but she doesn't get twisted into a pretzel like she did in the first film, and in fact, the film doesn't seem to benefit at all from four years of progress in visual effects. Instead it focuses on the purported horror value of a swarm of locusts. Yawn.

Piranha (1978, Joe Dante) 
Watched: October 23, streaming on Stan

I'm forever course-correcting it seems. I'm back to movies I can watch for free, and since I didn't get the blood and guts I was hoping for in Exorcist II, I was hoping there would be some good gore in the original Piranha -- which also seemed promising given how much I liked the 2010 remake. Wrong again! There are only very few shots of maimed and mutilated bodies in this movie, as the mayhem wreaked by these swarms of fish is mostly viewed by blurry closeups accompanied by frenzied teeth-gnashing noises, and the reactions of the people above the surface of the water as their lower halves are devoured. At worst I was hoping for some good camp in this movie, but I found it lacking in that respect as well. I was glad to watch it given the careers its collaborators would go on to have, not only Dante the director but, get this, screenwriter John Sayles as well. It fits in pretty well with Dante's later work, but given the respect accorded to Sayles for a very different sort of movie down the road, I expected to find something quite literate or clever about the script. Really, I couldn't tell the difference between this and any other creature feature. Another drawback I realized only after watching: Just because a movie features (or at least promises) blood and guts, doesn't necessarily make it a good Halloween viewing. A lot of this takes place during the day and there's no "spooky" vibe at all. (Incidentally, this is the other movie that features Barbara Steele.)

Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
Watched: October 28, iTunes rental

At last! The movie that saved the whole project. (You might have already guessed from my use of its poster as the artwork.) I was reminded of Phantasm from a list of 1970s greatest horror movies that I found on the very day that I watched it. This was a movie that was on my radar from when I was younger, but I haven't thought about it in years -- I think I lumped it in with Hellraiser back in the day, which I also didn't see until about ten years ago. It's not that type of movie really although I suppose the vibe is not dissimilar. In mining the recesses of my brain, the thing I would have remembered from this was the flying silver disk that impales people's heads and drills into their brains. That would have been the thing kids talked about on the playground. Phantasm is a lot more than that, combining a variety of bizarre horror iconography that could only come from the mind of Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep). There's Angus Scrimm's The Tall Man, always striding and staring in discomfiting ways as he stalks our heroes. There's the dwarves who seem a bit like demented Jawas, and are particularly chilling when we see only flashes of them, as when they scamper behind gravestones in the opening, and we get little more than the signs of their movement. Then of course there's the animated severed finger with its milky yellow blood, which transforms into a nasty little insect. I can't believe it's taken me this long to see Phantasm, and am pleased there are a handful of sequels of surely lesser quality. 

Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento)
Watched: October 29, iTunes rental

Given how I worship Argento's Suspiria, I have no idea how I've never seen another of his movies (he has quite a few). It took randomly seeing Deep Red priced down to 99 cents for an iTunes rental to finally break that drought. Since Suspiria itself has some pretty blah passages, I wonder if part of my delay was a suspicion that the rest of Argento's filmography would be of uneven quality. Deep Red is only one other example of his work, but it does confirm that notion. There are origins here of the visual ideas I love in Suspiria, which came two years later, but they have far lesser impact. As just one example, both films contain imagery of female attack victims with their heads thrust through glass, and the bloodletting that results as their necks are pierced. As both films are obviously shot in Italy (though Suspiria is set in Germany), there's a similar reliance on piazzas to try to create an air of mystery. Plus I got a definite chill from a few signature moments, such as Argento's use of disembodied eyes hanging against a black background, and a reflection of a woman's face in a mirror that scared the shit out of me. Plot-wise, though, I found it pretty banal by comparison, maybe even a bit boring. Suspiria's highs are enough to sustain it through its own more ordinary passages; not so much for Deep Red.

Okay, this took longer to write up than I expected, as I actually intended to have this up yesterday.

While I'm here I might as well mention a few near misses that were available on streaming but I just didn't have time to see, or opted specifically not to see when I wasn't sure how well they'd fit the theme or how much bang for my buck they'd provide. Only two, actually: A Knife for the Ladies on Amazon and The Island of Dr. Moreau on Stan. Even though the former involves something plenty salacious sounding, the murder of prostitutes in a small town, it seems like more of a western than a horror, which is not the genre you would expect from the first part of that sentence. The latter seems like ... well I'm not really sure, but the image of Michael York beaming on the still they chose on Stan just put me off. I'd like to see both this and its disastrous 1996 remake (which the Val Kilmer documentary reminded me of), but maybe not in conjunction with Halloween.

I've taken up way too much of your time already (congratulations if you've gotten this far!), but I thought I'd close by giving you a small bit of context for the previously expressed opinions. This might also double as a list of recommendations, if you are looking for 1970s horror options for your Halloween night viewing.

The following are my top ten 1970s horror movies as determined by Flickchart:

10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)
9. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John D. Hancock)
8. Don't Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg)
7. Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
6. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)
5. Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
4. Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)
3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman) - ha!
2. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
1. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

Honorable mention: The Wicker Man (1973, Robin Hardy)

If you have any must-see 1970s horror movies not mentioned in this post, leave 'em in the comments. I've still got 15 more titles in my Lettrboxd list and I could definitely see myself giving this another whirl in a future October.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Unanticipated title competition

According to IMDB, there are exactly two feature-length films in history with the title Val.

Both of them came out in 2021.

(There's arguably a third that came out in 2008, but Val is only the a.k.a. title. The more common title is The Wave.)

How annoying must that be for Val Kilmer?

I watched Kilmer's Val, directed by Ting Poo and Leo Scott, on Tuesday night, as the seventh in my informal series of watching a documentary every alternate Tuesday. It's "informal" in that I don't write about most of them here on the blog, but otherwise it's quite forma, as in, I have not yet missed an alternate Tuesday since I resolved to do this back on August 3rd. (Three days before Val was released to Amazon Prime, in fact.)

I really liked the film. I had been worried it might be a vanity project for Kilmer, an actor who came of age on screen during my own years as a budding movie fan, and would rightly be considered as one of my generation's cherished icons. I never felt any particular affection for the guy -- I think I always felt there was something a little doofy about him. That analysis made me roll my eyes a bit when I heard there was a collection of Kilmer's videos over the years that had been compiled into a documentary feature.

What I didn't realize, or forgot if I had known it, is that Val Kilmer's current state is entirely free from vanity. His last six years have been marked by a struggle with and recovery from throat cancer, which resulted in two tracheotomies and an inability to speak except by plugging the hole in his neck and releasing that robotic sound in which the words can scarcely be recognized. If you listen closely you can hear what he's saying, but the film helpfully provides subtitles to make that much easier. According to Wikipedia, his voice has apparently been recreated this year using AI based on archival samples of his voice, but that has not yet happened in the timeline of Val.

In fact, the Val of Val is quite a figure of pity. Having gained and lost fortunes over the years, he had been on his way out as an actor even before he lost his voice, and one suspects he's not likely to go in front of a camera for a paying gig any time soon. Val shows him signing autographs at Comic-Con and living a lifestyle significantly reduced from what he had been accustomed to.

I think I gained a new appreciation of Kilmer in this film. The four decades of footage he had shot at various stages of his life is a really colorful way of assembling that life and giving us a clearer picture of it. However much I personally may have enjoyed him -- and to be sure, I periodically did -- he had an extremely diverse and interesting career in which he played multiple major icons, from Jim Morrison to Doc Holliday to Batman. And off screen, as I learned, he also played Mark Twain in a one-man stage show that the film characterizes as the realization of a career-long desire. It was also the last role he was playing before he got sick.

And so I now also have additional sympathy for Kilmer, learning that there is another film released in 2021 called Val.

This Val is directed by Aaron Fradkin and stars Misha Reeves, with the logline "A criminal on the run breaks into the home of a high-class escort, only to realize nothing is as it seems." It only dropped earlier this month, as IMDB says it had a "theatrical" release on October 1st, though that seems doubtful to me. October 5th is listed as the next release date, with a November 9th BluRay premiere.

Assuming you don't have an extremely specific title like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there's a decent chance your movie title has been used by someone else in the past or will be used by someone else in the future. Because the commercial appeal of the title is usually of paramount importance -- your Eternal Sunshines notwithstanding -- you're willing to make the sacrifice, knowing that the year in parentheses after the title will differentiate yours from others who went the same route.

That's not possible with Val, both of which will have the release year 2021. This may actually be more annoying for Fradkin and Reeves than it is for Kilmer. By having the far more prominent Val, Kilmer will probably know that his title does not require clarification, and that his collection of home movies will be the first thing most people think of when hearing the title. But it's got to be really annoying for the makers of the smaller film, who will have to keep saying "No, not the one about Val Kilmer."

Maybe it couldn't have been avoided. Kilmer's Val wasn't one of those movies delayed by the pandemic, at least as far as I can tell. IMDB shows it having a premiere at Cannes in July, at which point Fradkin's Val would have basically been done and dusted. I mean, maybe there's a way to cross-check films in production to figure out if your title is in use, but I kind of doubt it. A forehead slap was probably their only available reaction at the time.

The coincidences don't end there.

When two movies have the same title in the same year, IMDB differentiates them by a roman numeral after the title, as in Val (I) (2021). In fact, roman numerals come in quite handy on IMDB for people with the same name, and given the millions of names in the database, the roman numerals can sometimes rise up into the twenties. (Much higher than that, actually. When I looked up the name John Smith just now, one of the most prominent matches had the number CCLXXII after it. I had to google it to be sure, but that translates to 272.)

While Kilmer's Val does get the roman number I, Fradkin's Val does not get II. Actually there are three movies named Val in 2021, including this one with roman number II:

Fortunately, Ursula Monteiro's Val is a short, meaning hopefully both Kilmer and Fradkin can rest easy ... even if Fradkin may get a serious case of roman numeral envy.

Rob Zombie is the new James Gunn

No, I'm not going to rip on James Gunn again today -- I am only going to refer to past instances of me ripping on him.

And this time it's got a Halloween theme of sorts, at least.

It seems like every couple months I have to come on here and whinge (to use the Australian word) about MovieWeb and the twice- or thrice-weekly emails it sends me compiling the latest "stories" written for the site. I put "stories" in quotation marks because my biggest complaint about these "articles" is that they are about stupid things like casting speculations that are based in no reality except maybe something some fan tweeted, or some random thing some actor said they would "love to do." Because he's so active on Twitter and loves talking about himself, James Gunn has appeared in an inordinate number of these MovieWeb stories over the years.

Lately, though, it's Rob Zombie getting all the attention.

If you didn't know, Zombie is making a version of The Munsters. I know because MovieWeb has mentioned it ... (pauses to count) ... 137 times.

Here we go:

6/10/21: "Rob Zombie Reveals Munsters Logo, Confirms he's Directing"

6/19/21: "The Munsters Movie: Rob Zombie and Butch Patrick Celebrate with a Ride in the Koach"

7/15/21: "Rob Zombie is Building an Exact Replica of The Munsters House for his Movie"

7/17/21: "Rob Zombie Reveals The Munsters Bedtime Wardrobe Designs for Herman & Lily Munster"

7/22/21: "All of Mockingbird Lane is Being Built for The Munsters, Rob Zombie Shares His Plans"

7/24/21: "Herman Munster Design Teased by Rob Zombie for The Munsters Movie"

7/24/21: "WWE's Kevin Nash Wants to Play Herman Munster in Rob Zombie's Munsters Movie"

9/25/21: "The Munsters Mockingbird Lane Lives Again Thanks to Rob Zombie"

10/2/21: "The Munsters House Looks Ready to Move Into as Rob Zombie Continues Set Construction"

10/14/21: "Rob Zombie is Back on The Munsters Set to Unveil Finished 1313 Mockingbird Lane"

10/21/21: "Rob Zombie Reveals First Look at The Munsters Reboot Cast"

Not 137. But 11 different times in the past four months and change, including two different "articles" on the same day back on July 24th. For a movie that does not even have a possible release date listed on IMDB. 

October 2022 would be a logical guess ... which means we really might get to 137.

Can movies set in 2020 be COVID-free?

I saw what may be my favorite new 2021 horror on Wednesday night. It's the latest in the Welcome to the Blumhouse series on Amazon that began last October with four entries, and has another four this October. I don't know that I'll get around to seeing and reviewing all four like I did last year, but Black as Night encourages me that maybe I should give the others a chance.

I won't go into too much detail about it since I plan to review it and link my review to the right as I always do. However, I'll tell you that it's a vampire movie set in New Orleans, but with a welcome twist: Unlike the vampire Lestat and his cohorts in Interview With the Vampire, almost all the characters are Black.

What I do want to discuss is that the film is quite clearly set in 2020, yet COVID is nowhere to be seen.

Of the new movies that appear to have been conceived in toto since the pandemic began, they tend to fall into two categories: they're either set in an indeterminate time period, or they are about COVID itself. Now, I can't say for sure that the origins of Black as Night don't go back further than the start of 2020, though I can say that parts of 2020 make their way into the plot.

The movie has a lot to do with race, more than you might expect, but also carried out without a particularly heavy hand. And Maritte Lee Go's film knows its history, as Hurricane Katrina is a touchpoint discussed a couple times, particularly the effect it had on the local Black population.

Another reference to race, albeit brief, is by one of the more powerful vampires, though I won't tell you which in order to keep the surprise and because it's not necessary for the current discussion. In rattling off a list of years in which racial intolerance reared its ugly head, this character finishes with the year 2020. He doesn't go into specifics, but we in the audience know this was the year that several deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police galvanized the Black Lives Matter protest, most prominently the death of George Floyd.

We in the audience also know that this was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, an improbable but powerful diversion of our attentions from the thing you would have thought would be the only thing anyone was talking about in 2020. 

The New Orleans in this film, though, is not one where anyone is wearing masks. There's no social distancing. And the only people who are sick are those who have been bitten in the neck.

If you want to know when in 2020 it takes place, it's the summer, because our main character, who also narrates -- Shawna, played by Asjha Cooper -- talks about it as if she's looking back on it from a future date, referring to it as "the summer I killed vampires." We also know that she visits the tombstone of a character who dies early in the movie, and the tombstone lists the date of death as late July of that year.

No COVID though.

Does this matter?

I'm thinking no. That may especially be the case a few years from now, when we'll still obviously remember that 2020 was the first year of COVID-19, but when maybe we'll be lucky enough not to have that fact be the first thing that jumps to our minds.

It's an interesting question though. The other surrounding years may blend into each other, and we may have difficulty remembering whether something occurred in 2017 or 2018. At the very least, those years were not defined by the most radical change to our daily lives probably since September 11th. But filmmakers will always have to consider how they choose to portray 2020 on film, and whether they acknowledge the elephant in the room if they do.

Of course, there's always the argument to be made that vampirism itself is a metaphor for COVID. Like COVID, it's contagious, though unlike COVID, it does require actual physical contact. 

I think this might be a stretch though. If Black as Night is about anything from 2020, it's about social justice, and far be it from me to suggest that COVID has to worm its way in there to get an equivalent level of the viewer's attention, even if only for the sake of "realism." If you are making a movie about vampires, "realism" is probably not your first consideration anyway. 

It may be that this is only a "problem" right now, when movies are being set in "present day," and that encompasses the year 2020. A few years from now, a movie will only be set in 2020 if someone specifically wants to evoke that year -- which would probably be because their subject is either COVID, Black Lives Matter or the presidential election.

I suppose if Shawna is remembering 2020 in a future year, the fact that she spent it fighting off vampires will certainly be the most memorable part to her. 

An adjective and a noun, not a noun and a verb

Have you ever realized you got the meaning of a movie title completely wrong?

Not because you thought about the movie for longer and realized the title had untold depths and secret secondary interpretations. No, I'm talking about because, grammatically, you simply never understood it correctly.

I always thought the title of Ben Stiller's movie Reality Bites was a sentence unto itself. It was while listening to the Slate podcast Decoder Ring -- one of my favorite podcasts out there, by the way -- that I learned the error of my ways.

If you've never discovered it, Decoder Ring is hosted by Willa Paskin and it digs into cultural mysteries. Examples? Past shows have explored the rise in popularity of throw pillows, the Cabbage Patch Kid fad, and why we think we need to hydrate so much. Whatever the show concentrates on, it's always something good.

As a way in to the topic of selling out, and how it has gradually stopped feeling possible to do so, Willa (I call podcasters by their first names, even though I don't know them) talks about the movie Reality Bites, one of whose main focuses is the attempt by the characters to maintain their ideals and values -- to not sell out. As almost a throwaway comment, she mentions that the title is a variation on the common term "sound bites," and how instead of providing little snippets of audio, the script written by Helen Childress would provide its viewers little snippets of reality.

Um ... what?

Never in the 27 years that movie has existed did I, for a second, think the title meant anything other than the fact that reality is sometimes disappointing ... that it bites. Reality Sucks would have made an almost perfect replacement title.

It turns out that isn't what Helen Childress meant at all.

"Reality" was not a noun, but an adjective, and "bites" was not a verb, but a noun.

Who could have guessed?

Obviously, Childress would have recognized and benefitted from the title's secondary meaning, the one I -- and I suspect most people -- thought was the primary meaning. But did most people think that? Willa doesn't even mention this as part of her interrogation of cultural mysteries. Her explanation is straightforward and without any acknowledgement of this other meaning.

The funny thing is that this also means we've been pronouncing the title incorrectly.

It's the same two words no matter what they mean, but I would argue that they are not pronounced in the same way. 

If you are saying them as a sentence, you say "Reality BITES," with an emphasis on the second word. However, if you know that "reality" is an adjective, it changes the inflection. Now you say "Re-AL-ity bites," with the emphasis on the second syllable rather than the fifth.

I guess I needed to read the Wikipedia page ages ago. Reinforcing what Willa Paskin told us, it states the following:

According to Childress, the title of the film isn't meant to be interpreted as "reality sucks." During the run-up to the 1992 United States presidential election, Childress kept hearing references to "sound bites," which made her think of Lelaina's recorded vignettes of her friends as "little bites of reality."

And the funny thing is, that's a lot less of a sell-outy title. "Reality bites," the comment on the quality of our reality, is a lot more like something Bart Simpson would say, a snappy slogan that would actually be sort of corporate in its attempt to commodify twentysomething disaffection. "Little bites of reality" is a lot more independent in spirit, less commercial. Which is certainly what Helen Childress felt at the time, as the podcast touches on how she was resistant to the very potential success of her own script.

I'll continue to say it as "Reality BITES," since that's what I've been doing for 27 years. In a way, though, the dual meaning of the title is sort of the perfect example of a viewer taking away what they are inclined to take away from a piece of art. The artist can tell us what it means, but if we took it some other way, it just speaks to the dimension of that object of art.  

Easily disprovable anachronisms

When you see an anachronism in a movie, usually it's something minor, like the watch you can see on the wrist of one of the extras in The Age of Innocence -- something that resulted from an oversight, a failure to scrub all the modern conveniences from a film that takes place a hundred years before the movie was made. (Apparently that wasn't actually The Age of Innocence, as I can't now find anything about it online.)

Sometimes, though, it's central to the plot, and the filmmakers either didn't notice or just didn't care.

I watched 1978's The Cat and the Canary as my latest in a month of trying to watch 1970s horror movies. Like the most recent film I watched, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, it's hard to say that this film's genre was primarily horror. I guess that's what happens when you cast your net using various google search terms. Not all the fish you catch are actually worth eating.

The Cat and the Canary was worth eating, but it's much more a murder mystery than a horror, and despite the presence of death in both types of movie, they are genres that barely overlap. This is a lot more like Knives Out than it is like a serial killer movie, even though the movie promises a "flesh-rending maniac" present in a house full of heirs gathered to read the will of their deceased relative. The poster above is pretty suggestive of delicious period hororr as well. (Though if I'd read a little more closely, I'd have seen it was described by a critic as "amusing" and by the poster itself as a "classic tale of mystery and suspense." It was free on Amazon Prime, so I didn't look too closely into it before watching.)

No matter. I enjoyed it, despite it not really fitting my theme.

I'm actually surprised I didn't know more about this story, given that this is at least the sixth time John Willard's 1922 play has gone before the camera, including a 1939 version starring Bob Hope. And as this play surely inspired numerous other similar stories we have seen, from Clue to Knives Out, its details felt instantly familiar to me.

The story is basically this. A rich British man named Cyrus West dies in 1914, and because of the presence of greedy relatives who want to get their hands on his fortune, he leaves instructions to delay the reading of his will until 20 years after this death. Those greedy relatives are just as money hungry two decades later, so six of them appear to lay claim to his fortune, apparently knowing that only one of them may be named. 

They'll find out who that is via a film Cyrus made before dying, in which he will reveal the heir over the course of a dinner with the gathered family. That's right, he's left instructions with his loyal housekeeper to prepare the same dinner for them that she prepared for him when he was making the film, so that the screen on which the film is projected could be set up at the far end of the table, allowing him to "join" them in the meal from beyond the grave. He's even drinking the same wine, though he notes it's too fresh for him to truly enjoy at the time. It'll be perfectly aged 20 years later. 

The twist is that there is a second film that's to be shown if the conditions of the first film cannot be met, which is that the heir needs to live through the night without being declared insane to claim his or her fortune. And since insanity runs in their family, this outcome cannot be guaranteed. A second heir will be revealed, if needed, in the second film; if the conditions of the first film are met, though, the second film is to be destroyed unwatched.

This is a lovely premise for a film. Of course, in its finer details, it is also complete bullshit.

The film takes place in 1934, 20 years after Cyrus West's 1914 death. Of course, West may not have made the film in 1914. He apparently made it after becoming aware of a terminal illness, but that means it could have been made in 1913, 1912 or even earlier.

Which, as we know, is a good 15 years before the technology of the time was able to marry sound and image.

The first film to ever have sound was 1927's The Jazz Singer, as audiences gaped in amazement when Al Jolson opened his mouth and a song came out. Even that film mostly has on screen titles, though, as Hollywood was not yet capable of making a complete film in which sound was synchronized to the images.

The Cat and the Canary, on the other hand, posits that this technological advancement might have existed around the same time that the Titanic sank. 

Not only that the technology might exist, but that Cyrus West would be so comfortable with it as to use it in really clever ways. For example, he pauses in spots to give his potential heirs a chance to respond to something he's said, for each other's benefit if not for his own. He's also envisioned exactly how the table might be set up and even when and where his loyal housekeeper should walk in order to "disappear" into the side of the film as she goes to do something for him, and "reappear" out the other end at just the precise moment to create the illusion of the same person becoming 20 years younger before returning to her current age. (This trick was probably my favorite part of the whole movie.)

Now, because the play dates back to 1922, the filmed will is obviously not original to the source material. Whether it appeared in any previous version I cannot say for sure, though the Wikipedia plot descriptions do not suggest it.

The filmed will is undeniably a good way to modernize the story, as it allows West to be a character in the film -- a pretty cheeky one at that, who openly loathes his avaricious relatives. Why then, I wonder, didn't they just push the story forward 20 years? Have him die in 1934 and have the will reading in 1954? Sure, you have to sacrifice some of the 1934 design details of the story's present day, but to be honest, the way the characters relate to each other feels pretty anachronistic for 1934 anyway. Besides, the story is set entirely within West's mansion, a holdover of an older time, so whether it's actually 1934 or 1954 makes no difference in that respect. 

The ultimate answer, though, is that it just didn't matter to the filmmakers that the film contains a glaring anachronism. Films are rarely meant to be confused for the real world, perhaps most especially in a melodramatic genre like the murder mystery. Who cares if the technology is ahead of its time?

The Cat and the Canary does contain a sort of awareness of the anachronism, whether for better or for worse. At one point in both of his will films -- spoiler alert, the second one does get watched -- he declares his will in written form by holding up poster boards, which are about the size of the cue cards that would have been used on live television. He does this as a precaution in case of "sound failure."

Or maybe in the case of sound not yet existing?

The casual teenage nudity of the 1970s

One of the first actresses I ever had a crush on was Brooke Shields. All I needed was a glimpse of her in The Blue Lagoon and I was smitten. I would have been no more than ten, which is maybe early for starting to notice the opposite sex -- maybe I was ahead of my time.

It might be that all I got was that glimpse, as my official records don't show me as having seen the whole movie. I'm pretty sure I caught Blue Lagoon, parts of it anyway, on cable at a friend's house, so it may be time to add it to my lists. But Brooke in skimpy clothing -- it's one of those movies where their nudity is covered by coconuts and well-placed hair, if I remember correctly -- was enough to send me down a Brooke Shields rabbit hole, resulting in a viewing of the considerably more adult-oriented Endless Love around the same time. (Didn't think you could go down rabbit holes in the early 1980s? Apparently you could.)

I still wanted to see more, and I sure did see more of Brooke Shields in the earliest of those three films, 1978's Pretty Baby. I don't remember much about Franco Zefferelli's film, but I remember one scene with absolute clarity: Brooke Shields, who would have been about 12 at the time of filming, jumping up and down on a bed, fully naked. 

You might think this is what I wanted, what had been teased in the comparatively chaste Blue Lagoon two years later. But even as a ten-year-old I remember feeling skeeved out by it. Here is this girl, who would have been only two years older than I was at the time she filmed it, jumping up and down in her birthday suit, without any breasts or pubic hair to speak of it. It wasn't right.

I was reminded of my Pretty Baby experience last night while watching my latest 1970s horror this October, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1977). 

Before we get into genre quibbling, I'll say that Nicolas Gessner's film might be more comfortable in the thriller or mystery genres than horror, but I went by the poster art above to decide it made a good viewing for the month leading up to Halloween. The movie's opening scene also takes place on Halloween, which doubles as the birthday for the main character, played by Jodie Foster.

Whether it's a horror or a thriller or a costume drama has no relevance for what I want to talk about today, which is another instance of teenage nudity, and a very matter-of-fact inclusion of themes related to child sexuality on the whole.

In that opening scene, when the movie is barely five minutes old, we see Martin Sheen's character perving on the 13-year-old Foster. He's come to visit her house under the guise of trick-or-treating, but his children aren't with him -- he's run on ahead of them, perhaps for the very opportunity to perv on Foster's Rynn Jacobs. 

After he invites himself in, first we can't tell if he's calling her pretty and touching her hair just as some kind of overly forward attempt to be charming, something that would have been more common back then and would have fallen away in the decades since. Pretty quickly, though, his advances become unmistakeably sexual, and are confirmed when he gets called out on it and quickly scampers out of the house before his own children have a chance to arrive. (They're stepchildren, we later find out, which makes more sense.)

The fact that Martin Sheen is casually a pedophile in this movie is interesting for a couple reasons. For one it reminded me that before he began playing almost exclusively good guys later in his career, Sheen could be a real weirdo on screen. He played sort of a psycho in Terrence Malick's Badlands in 1973, a few years before this, and a few years after this, he's the sinister presidential candidate in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. Playing a pedophile would not have made anybody blink at that time.

But the thing that's really strange about it is how it forefronts the sexuality of a 13-year-old girl. Foster was born in 1962, so when filming took place, presumably in 1975, she would have actually been 13 -- maybe only 12, as her birthday is late in the year. Wikipedia doesn't say exactly when filming occurred, but the movie was ready for Cannes in 1976, its general release delayed until 1977 due to the sorts of controversies I'm writing about here.

Not only does Sheen treat her as a sexual object in his every interaction with her, but the film itself does as well. She's also got a relationship that becomes actually sexual with a teenager a few years older than her, played by Scott Jacoby, who reminded me so much of Matthew Modine that I had to check to make sure it was not actually him. The existence of that relationship alone would not be enough to posit a perviness on the part of the filmmakers, but the following is.

There's randomly a scene that shows Foster stripping down naked to get in bed with Jacoby's character. We see her from behind and from the side, but her rear is fully visible and there's a very clear side view of her 13-year-old breasts, which have enough hang to them to qualify as adult breasts. There's absolutely no reason this needed to be in there, except that, according to Wikipedia, a producer wanted there to be "sex and violence" in the film. Yikes. 

At the time I was watching the film I did not know this, but it's not actually Foster we see in that shot. Her older sister Connie did a nude double for her, and Connie seems to have been 21 at the time. I'd like to go back and watch that shot to see what trickery they did to create the illusion that it was Jodie rather than Connie, because I certainly didn't suspect I was looking at anything other than Jodie Foster in that shot. However, whether the actress was of legal age or not is besides the point. The film wants us to believe we are seeing a naked 13-year-old girl. Apparently, this was not something we minded at the time -- and perhaps even something we were supposed to like?

It must have been weird to be Jodie Foster at that time, as she also made Taxi Driver, where she plays a child prostitute. That film, released in February of 1976, would have been released concurrently with the production on The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, but you'd think principal photography would have already been finished if the film were set to appear at Cannes in May. So it appears that multiple filmmakers imagined something sexual about her even when she was just a 12-year-old. And that apparently, this was not universally scorned. (Thank goodness Freaky Friday was released between these two films to give her public image some additional dimension.)

We are so nervous about these issues today that not only would you never come close to child nudity in a film today, but you'd barely even suggest anything related to child sexuality. We don't want to make films in which pedophiles appear even if it is absolutely 100% clear that that character is the scum of the earth. 

In reading up a little more, it seems that these choices were controversial even at the time, not just in hindsight. Regarding Pretty Baby, Wikipedia states:

Pretty Baby received an R rating in the United States, an X rating in the United Kingdom, and an R18+ rating in Australia, for nudity and sexual content. Continuing controversy over Shields' nude scenes resulted in the film being banned in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan until it was repealed in 1995. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett called the film "child pornography", and director Louis Malle allegedly was portrayed as a "combination of Lolita's Humbert Humbert and (by that point) controversial director Roman Polanski".^[1]

Okay that seems pretty clear. Although the delay in the release of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was due to a court case over distribution rights, the controversy over the nude scene is listed in Wikipedia's opening two paragraphs about it, as word got out that Foster had a conflict with producers about it and actually walked off the set. I guess her older sister eventually had no such qualms. (The nude scene was removed for the VHS release but restored for the DVD release.)

So in the subject of this post I made it sound like this sort of thing happened all the time, but maybe I've just stumbled across two of the more egregious examples. The fact that I cannot immediately recall any other examples, despite seeing my fair share of films from that era, seems to support the relative scarcity. 

The funny thing is, apparently even The Blue Lagoon, which I thought was comparatively chaste, has a number of scenes that might qualify as nude scenes, some involving body doubles for Shields, who was still underage at that time. Reading up on the parental guide on IMDB, I found that you can clearly see Christopher Atkins' penis at a couple points, and there's even a masturbation scene, which must have been really confusing to me at that time. Atkins would have been 18 or 19 at the time of filming, at least. The other scenes where they appear without clothes are obscured underwater, so maybe not as graphic -- which is also maybe why the more in-your-face scenes in Pretty Baby shocked me so much.

Nowadays we won't even do infant nudity on screen. Back then, on the other hand, I don't believe that a young naked Clark Kent in the original Superman (1978) even raised any eyebrows, because everybody knows that a naked child under the age of three is not sexual -- we would hope. (Apparently there is also a naked baby in the later portions of The Blue Lagoon.) 

Today? The naked underwater baby who is portrayed as reaching for a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind has filed a lawsuit alleging "child sexual exploitation." I suppose neither extreme is particularly useful for society.  

All's Well That Ends Welles: F for Fake

This is the penultimate installment of my 2021 bi-monthly series finishing off the feature films of Orson Welles that I had not previously seen.

F for Fake (1973) is the film I might have been looking forward to most in this series, as I'd heard more acclaim about it than any of the various other Welles misfires I hadn't gotten to yet, which this series has helped rectify. And the film did not disappoint -- with some important caveats thrown in.

F for Fake reminded me in structure of one of my favorite documentaries of the 21st century, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop. Of course, it would be appropriate to reverse that order of causation and say that Exit reminded me of F for Fake, but I saw Exit a decade earlier, and subjective impressions all have to do with which film you see first. 

Both films deal with the issue of what constitutes art and how we measure the authenticity of the artist compared to the acclaim/financial remuneration he/she receives for his/her work. Both films also feature two main characters who are kind of each other's foils, that being Thierry Guetta (a.k.a. "Mr. Brainwash") and Banksy himself in Exit, and art forger Elmyr de Hory and the journalist who writes about him, Clifford Irving, in F for Fake. 

Of course, if you know the history -- which I didn't -- Irving was also a faker, having written a book based on a meeting with famed recluse Howard Hughes that never actually happened. This was the basis for the Richard Gere vehicle The Hoax, but I didn't put that together until after I'd finished F for Fake and was going down various internet rabbit holes related to it.

The content that's here is very interesting, especially since Welles is in peak playful form as a kind of master of ceremonies throughout. We keep coming back to him for commentary and little sleights of hand to remind us that on some level, all film is an illusion. He doesn't seem as corpulent here as he had seemed in some of his more recent films that I watched for this series -- perhaps needing to retain a certain fitness level for his newish love interest, Oja Kodar, who has a significant role in this film -- and he doesn't at all strike you as a person winding down in his career. In reality, though, this was the final feature-length film he completed before his death in 1986. 

(I should note that I am excluding for this series a documentary he made in 1978 called Filming Othello, which I suppose supplants F for Fake as the last completed feature. It runs 84 minutes. But because a film someone makes about their making of another film does not seem like an essential part of their filmography, more like a glorified "making of" feature as a DVD extra, I am comfortable excluding it from his official filmography.)

What I found disorienting about F for Fake, though, is the frenetic editing of the material, a shortcoming that I first noted in my least favorite film so far in this series, Mr. Arkadin. The way that film slathered on information with great rapidity really put me off, and some of that same feeling creeped in as I was watching F for Fake, even though the actual content of this film was something I enjoyed much better. It's like he's layering information in a montage, which is almost chronological in its progression, but loops back enough and is just abstract enough to push you off balance. After any particular five-minute stretch of F for Fake, you've consumed the information Welles wants you to take away from that section, but you feel like he's organized it in a deliberately roundabout fashion that's designed to tease you and troll you. To the extent that it ultimately achieves its goals, it seems sort of clever -- while at the same time remaining this close to causing you to question the filmmaker's competency. 

It was interesting also to learn about this master forger, Elmyr (he's referred to that way rather than "de Hory"), who was capable of producing near perfect imitations of the works of various master painters -- not only producing them, but dashing them off quickly before lunch. He made lots of money selling these and fooling experts, though eventually, the police were only a few steps behind him. It's interesting content for me right now, having just come off of watching Tim's Vermeer, which involves a non-professional painting a Vermeer with a lot more time, labor and precision, and a lot less attempt to deceive.

It felt like the material on Clifford was considerably less well documented, such that it took me a long time to actually determine what he was guilt of, in part because the film holds that close to the vest for a while. As the two men are introduced as the film's dual focal points, the fact that Irving doesn't come to life the way de Hory (or Elmyr) does feels like one of the film's demerits.

In the end, though, the takeaway from F for Fake is a really thoughtful consideration of art and artifice, one which seems like a real extension of many of Welles' career-long interests. It's easy to see why he was intrigued by Elmyr de Hory, as he's a larger than life personality (like Welles and many of the characters he played) given to throwing lavish parties, while also containing an essentially unknowable quality. 

There's also a bit of Welles the horndog in here, as the aforementioned Oja Kodar is ogled at by the camera in two different passages of the film, sometimes without any clothes on. It's not entirely clear how this relates to the other themes -- it's supposed to have something to do, I believe, with secretly observing people whose eye is drawn by the woman's curves, and how this has to do with the role of art on the observer. Neither does it really detract from the film, but it does contribute to it feeling more diffuse, more of a dump of similar subject matter than one cogent argument seen through from beginning to end. 

Along those lines, I see F for Fake described more as a "film essay" than a documentary, though "docudrama" is often used in connection with it as well. (Because not everything in the film is actually true, though I will respect Welles' careful wording and not give away the parts that were fabricated to illustrate a point.) That term "film essay" also ecompasses its more free-form aspects, as the film is designed to promote thought about its themes more than it is designed to present a narrative that is easily tracked from point A to point B to point C. 

The final film in this series comes in December, and it was the one that sort of prompted me to set out on this journey in the first place: The Other Side of the Wind, Welles' incomplete film that was patched together and released on Netflix in 2018.

Buried under an avalanche of unavailable new movies

 As the release of No Time to Die comes and goes in the U.S., I am again reminded of how much work I'll have to do once this damn lockdown lifts.

It has now been more than two months since I last saw a film in the theater. It was Nine Days, Edson Oda's interesting existential experiment about souls jockeying for a chance to be born, which is a lot better than that description might sound. I watched it on August 4th without any knowledge, according to my recollection, that cinemas were about to enter a lengthy shutdown. We'd had a number of little week-long lockdowns which arrived and ended with equal suddenness. The one we're in now arrived that suddenly, but hasn't entered nearly so quickly.

The goal is no longer to get down to zero cases, which was actually something we've been able to do here in Victoria for the majority of this pandemic. The goal is now to reach a certain vaccination rate, 80% for those eligible to receive them, which I believe we've already done. Nonetheless, retail stores and cinemas are still set to remain closed for the rest of this month, if I'm understanding the current timeline correctly. 

Honestly, I've kind of given up paying attention to the little changes at this point. When my kids start to go back to school maybe I'll snap back to it. Until then, I know that catching the cavalcade of new releases in the U.S. is just a pipe dream.

This wasn't a problem last year. Last year, movies weren't coming out anywhere. In fact, our cinemas were open here a lot of the time that they weren't open in the U.S. That didn't necessarily mean we were getting new releases -- if they weren't coming out in the U.S., they certainly weren't coming out here -- but there were things trickling in that qualified as "new to us." That was enough.

This year, it's completely different.

Here is a list of things that I haven't had any access to seeing, but really feel like I would/should see before the year comes to a close:

No Time to Die

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

The Suicide Squad

The Many Saints of Newark

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Candyman

Reminiscence

The Card Counter

Dear Evan Hansen

and less essential but still

The Addams Family 2

It's not uncommon for there to be a delay between the U.S. release of more independent films and awards contenders and their Australian release, but the blockbusters are usually within a day of each other -- and that day usually favors Australia as movies actually release on Thursdays here.

One film that's maybe already gone from cinemas in the U.S., but still hasn't been available here, is Free Guy, the film whose advanced screening I was scheduled to attend the following week when the last lockdown started. As an indication of how long it's been since we've been able to go to the movies, Free Guy is already available for streaming on Disney+. The family and I are likely to watch it this weekend, at which point I can finally review something that's not just another new mediocre Netflix or Amazon movie.

It's probably no coincidence that I'm now just feeling kind of deflated about movies in general. At the end of each month, I take stock of the best and worst movie I saw that month, something I record for posterity in a special area of my Microsoft Word document in which I record my new viewings. The best movie I saw in September was a documentary called Tim's Vermeer, which I finally watched after being unable to get it in time for the end of my 2014 movie year (as discussed in this post). It was one of only two September movies I gave four stars on Letterboxd, the other also part of my Documentary Alternate Tuesdays series, that being Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary. To give you some sense of how this feels like a reduction in my normal level of enthusiasm, usually I'm choosing between at least two movies I gave 4.5 stars. Of course, it could also just be a mediocre month, which does happen as well. 

The choices for worst? They were plentiful, but none better than Sweet Girl, a truly awful and truly idiotic Netflix thriller with a super dumb twist. 

It's not that I think the latest MCU movie, the latest Bond movie or a Sopranos prequel is likely to provide better candidates, and in fact, if the first Venom is any indication, a Venom sequel would be a better bet for my monthly worst. But The Card Counter is directed by Paul Schrader, the guy who made my #1 movie of 2018 (First Reformed).

More generally, without this interplay of new theatrical releases and new streamer releases, the experience of consuming new movies has just left me feeling lethargic and indifferent. At a time of year when I have usually long since shifted to prioritizing new releases over older films, this October I'm doing a deep dive into the horror movies of the 1970s. Which has its own sort of excitement associated with it, but not the type I'm accustomed to as I get within three months of finalizing my year-end list.

The good news, I suppose, is that I do appear to be getting out of this movie jail in about three weeks, and at that point, it may never return. Reaching the desired vaccination percentage means that lockdowns will be a thing of the past, in theory, since we acknowledge we can no longer contain COVID. If people choose not to protect themselves from it, that's on them.

In the meantime, I do have some options for not falling completely off the map in terms of new releases. Candyman, for example, is available for $19.99 rental on iTunes, and as it makes a perfect movie for the month of October, I will probably avail myself of that option at some point. The latest Saw movie and a new Netflix movie called There's Someone Inside Your House will both help me celebrate the month of Halloween and move me closer to my usual total number of films seen before I close off my list.

But I can't deny there's been something lost in this whole experience. Not only am I behind on the movies, I'm behind on the conversation about the movies. The inability to see the new releases has also made me less likely to listen to my movie podcasts, which are essential in situating me within the movie zeitgeist. I don't feel like I'm able to live in the moment of the end of the 2021 movie year. We'll see if I have enough time to find my way back to that.

Knowing Noir: Laura

This is the tenth in my 2021 monthly series watching classic film noir.

When taking my notes on Otto Preminger's Laura -- something I don't normally do while watching movies, but do in this series so I don't forget any choice noir nuggets in my monthly write-up -- I switched from doing it on my phone, as I had been, to scrawling on a notebook in the dark. I'm not sure if the disorienting nature of my choice caused me to write down less about Laura, but write down less I did.

One of the other reasons I wrote less, though, was that the 1944 film did not scream out "FILM NOIR" to me, even though I know it is considered one of the most illustrative examples of the form. Sometimes I wonder if just having a guy in a fedora and a trenchcoat -- Dana Andrews' appearance for pretty much the entire movie -- qualifies a film as an example of noir.

I guess I consider Laura more of a murder mystery, which I don't think is the same thing as noir. Yes, there's a detective investigating the details of the case, yes there are suspects, yes there are surprises, and yes, I suppose things happen that could qualify as double crosses. Still, noir did not occur to me as the immediate identifying genre assignment for this film, even with Andrews delivering clipped noir patter, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and wearing the hell out of that fedora.

SPOILERS FOR LAURA TO FOLLOW

I suppose I've come to think of noir as being signified most by the presence of a fatale, femme or -- as we saw last month -- homme. Laura does not have such a character, not really, even though the beautiful Gene Tierney certainly looks the part. As a side note, Tierney is yet another iconic actress I am only encountering for the first time this month, though I was certainly familiar with her name, if only because I feel like it should be "Jean" not "Gene." When I think of Gene Tierney I think of this guy:

(That's Lawrence Tierney, known to us young'uns from his role in Reservoir Dogs. No relation, obviously.)

Anyway, it's hard to be a femme fatale in a movie when you are dead from the opening scene. That's why we needed a spoiler alert for Laura, though. Her character is not, of course, dead, but rather, presumed dead because a corpse with a face full of buckshot was found in her apartment, meeting her general description. The casting of Tierney might have tipped audiences off  that she wasn't dead, as they would not have needed an actress of Tierney's stardom just to pose for the portrait that hangs in the living room of her apartment, where most of the action takes place. There are a few flashback scenes, but I'm wondering if audiences at the time guessed that she would be returning from the dead before it even happened.

But does she actually return from the dead? 

The detective played by Andrews -- Mark McPherson -- falls in love with Laura as he investigates her death, with the portrait serving as a constant catalyst for his increasing affections. At a little way past the movie's midpoint, he falls asleep in an armchair in front of the portrait, and the camera zooms in on him. When it zooms back out, he is awakened by Laura returning to her apartment after a sojourn in the country, where she had gone to consider whether to marry a useless playboy she'd been dating (Vincent Price, showing no signs of his sinister future typecasting).

In today's cinematic parlance, this camera movement would unambiguously indicate that what follows is McPherson's dream. If he has indeed fallen in love with Laura, naturally he would be conjuring a scenario whereby they could still be together, and such a scenario would only be possible in his dreams. Interestingly, the movie never pushes this theory any further than what the viewer chooses to interpret, as the rest of the film plays out realistically as though Laura was really never dead. We've seen this trick enough in modern day, though, that I couldn't help but conclude that this might be the most valid interpretation of the second half of the film.

That ambiguity is probably the most interesting part of the movie for me, and it alone elevates the film. At this writing I think I have to think about it more before I decide whether to give it 3.5 or 4 stars on Letterboxd. Although I was never bored, I did spend a fair amount of time being underwhelmed by Laura, perhaps having built it up in my head a bit because I knew its reputation. Because so much of the action takes place in Laura's apartment, the film does feel a bit inert from time to time in terms of its dramatic action. However, especially if that ambiguity about its second half is intentional, that earns it a lot more points. 

Another thing going for it was the clarity of its plot, which I could always follow even though it does contain some twists and turns. The narrative complexity, especially the clumsy narrative complexity of a film like The Big Sleep, has been a big barrier of entry for me in past noirs, and Laura avoids all of those pitfalls. It's clean and it has some really interesting characters, notably the effete writer played by Clifton Webb, Waldo Lydecker, a snob who prefers typing his newspaper articles from his bathtub.

The Waldo Lydecker character is particularly interesting as he starts out as our narrator -- perhaps writing a newspaper column -- but he does not stay in that role throughout the film. In fact, there are a number of scenes where he is not present, so if he's telling the story, he would have no way of knowing what was happening in these scenes. I'm not sure if this is a bit of intentional misdirection on Preminger's part, or more like carelessness. If we're seeing him as an unreliable narrator, that's usually a narrator who is telling us about events at which he or she was present, before we ultimately learn that we cannot trust his or her perspective on those events. Narrating events at which you were not present is a different kettle of fish, and I'm undecided on whether it totally works or not.

One more comment on the cast. It was great to see Judith Anderson appear, even if she didn't make nearly the impression she made as Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca. 

In doing a quick search just now related to how widely the second half of Laura is interpreted by its audiences as a dream -- and let's just say there don't seem to be as many people writing about that as I would have thought -- I also hit upon questions about whether Laura herself is considered to be a femme fatale. The conclusion by one particular writer is that yes, but not because she tempts men to their doom. Rather, it's because her presence indirectly causes death. I like that secondary definition of what it means to be a femme fatale, and that has helped Laura settle in better among the other movies I would more clearly define as noirs in this series.

Okay, only two months left on the calendar. Think I've got my final movie in December picked out, now I just have to choose between a half-dozen other finalists for the November slot. 

Let's Scare Jessica to Death turns 50

That subject is a bit of a joke. When using the wording "turns xx," where xx equals some number of years, in a headline about a movie, you're usually talking about something much more central to cinema history, whether it's a Star Wars or a Casablanca or a Titanic or a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A semi-obscure horror movie from the early 1970s does not fit the bill.

But I've been wanting to rewatch this movie ever since I first saw it on Halloween of 2009, and it was just a coincidence that that desire reached critical mass in October of 2021, when John D. Hancock's 1971 film turns half a century old.

We're actually six weeks past the 50th birthday. While nowadays it would be smart to release a movie like Let's Scare Jessica to Death at the beginning of October, to capitalize on viewers' newly reawakened desire for horror content, August 27th seemed to Paramount the best date to release it back in 1971. Of course, this was still four years before Jaws codified some of our modern understandings about when to release big films to maximize their impact on the audience and at the box office.

Saturday night, twelve years after my first viewing, it still scared the shit out of me. This is not a horror movie of big gestures or grand guignol kills. It's eerie in the little details, only occasionally building toward something more graphic, and it's all the better for it. It's soaking in glorious 1970s atmosphere and has some really chilling performances at its center -- from both the sinister characters and the innocent ones, making it confronting and complex as well.

As I was watching, and thinking generally about the great horror of 1970s cinema, I asked myself the following question: What other Let's Scare Jessica to Deaths are there out there?

Surely there are other semi-obscure 1970s horror movies I could name that I've already seen, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm interested in those I haven't.

So I'm going to use the 26 remaining days before Halloween to try to dig up some great gems that might give me that Jessica vibe. Even if it means -- gasp -- renting them on iTunes, rather than just relying on what's available on streaming. (Kanopy would probably be the best resource for this but it can be a bit hit or miss.)

At first I thought I would watch only 1970s horror to scratch this October's horror itch, but since then, I've already noticed at least one new release that I want to watch within the next few weeks. So instead I'll just lean toward that goal, which will be easier to do, given that I've already scraped the bottom of the streamer barrel for horror movies worth watching from the past decade.

I can't wait to see what movies I find. I hope they scare me to death as much as Jessica did.