So after several months of faffing about I got back to some of that cinematic literature Bullitt recommended to me. I read Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Movies by David Saunders... and immediately wished that I'd started reading it sooner. Firstly, this is the most awesomely written book of all time. Why can't every text contain such crafty prose?
There was just line-after-line that made me grin and grin again. I can't overstate how enjoyable Saunders type of evocative writing is.
But man, those were some excellent and hard-hitting analyses as well. He really had some deep-thoughts on Arnold's career and how it intersects with society at large. Like Bullitt mentioned, the
Predator write-up was really eye-opening. I've been aware of that movies explenation as a liberal analog for the failures of Vietnam... but Saunders take on it as a "do over -- to set things right", by returning to more primal, bodily displays of action, fit really neatly into the story I felt. Something also clicked in me when I read his take on
Total Recall, how it tells it's Mars-bound narrative using old tropes of orientalist adventure tales to construct the story. That's... probably one of the reasons it's one of my favorite Arnold films. The chapter that I cocked my eyebrow the most at was probably the
Terminator one. Saunders spends a lot of time examining the diffrences between T-800 and Reese when part of the interest lies in the dualism between the two, how in fighting machines Reese has taken on machine-like qualities himself (resistance to pain, inability to think of a life outside of war, etc).
Saunders made some really good overarching points about Arnolds appeal as well. Like the fascist allure of perfect, "pure" bodies that underscores society and births the opinion that everything from virtue to intellect should steam from having healty muscles. Or how Arnold benefited from the mythic trope that a Hero is always for the People, but almost never "of" the People. How Arnold's almost superhuman "otherness" and his self-awareness of this fact made him a perfect fit to play of these age-old mytic structures.
So yeah... a thoroughly fascinating book! Though I am a bit suprised that Bullitt would recommend a movie that throws as much shade on Sylvester Stallone as this one.
Well I can't talk about Arnold forever. So I guess I'll just squeeze in another mega-post of movies watched while I'm here. This one is dominated by the more obscure though, containing more curiosities and hidden gems than usual.
But lets start with the famous stuff: Kurosawa! I watched
The Bad Sleep Well and... I found it one of his weakest pictures. The storytelling is just so opaque, brimming with exposition and laborious to follow. I think it's a testament to just how much I love Kurosawa's sense of direction that I actually liked it quite a lot still. The dude just had such... skill! Dat composition, bro! The actors inhabit their characters really well too. Mifune plays it very reserved than usual, letting his inner strength bring the dynamism to the scene, through it's contrast with every one else who is more outgoing, but it works.
Speaking of Shakespear adaptations... Cagney did one! I am of the opinion that if those two names should clash then I should be forced to watch it. Sadly, I was fooled into thinking he was a main character. But the play is an ensamble so I should really have seen that comming.
Said adaptation is
A Midsummer Nights Dream, brw.
Well it was one whimsical and frivolous little romp. That's sort of it's weakness and strength. All the actors really submerge themselves in the sheer outlandishness of their roles... even the children! (the madcap nature of their performences got me a bit worried). Cagney's part is really so rambunctious that you get to find out excactly how many muscles in his face that he can stretch at once. Visually it's pretty cool to look at -- yet nowhere near as striking as some of the stuff from the silent age.
Having been denied a proper Cagney-dosage, I went online that same night and saw what other famous folks had done in the year 1935. Ended up seeing
Whipsaw with Spencer Tracy. He plays an undercover cop on a roadtrip with a female thief played by Myrna Loy. After a rather tip-tap start they became quite a dynamic duo -- trading cool lines and black-and-white stares back-and-forth. Myrna kind-of got the star-treatment in how the filmmaking went, but Tracy kept up with her.
As an desert to the Noir-banquet that I went on last mega-post, I saw
Impact. It's a very good movie, finely-told, engaging in that pure, classical sense. It concerns a wealthy industrialist, a tiger at work yet a kitten with the wife. Said wife and her lover attempts to have him killed. They world thinks him dead yet he survives and in his despair at the marital betrayal settles anonymously in a small midwestern town.
I know that the question of "best femme fatale" is brimming with notables but gosh-darnit Helen Walker throws her hat into the ring with her two-faced performance in this movie. The contrast between her solemn sorrow and giddy excitement for murder is great to watch. Ella Raines is splendid as the good-girl as well (I remember her being a real firecracker in
Tall in the Saddle to boot). Are these two ladies on some sort of "most underrated actresses of the 40's/50's" list or what?
Just to milk the Noir-angle for all it's worth, I saw an interesting and surprising hybrid,
Siren of Atlantis. As mentioned I spend most of my cinematic worshipping among the B-picture pantheons, and Maria Montez is a consistent source of real fun in that regard. This was one of those lost-civilization, adventure flicks. But, suprisingly, it escaped genre-conventions and played out in a more Noir-ish style instead. The blend was quite seamless actually and really good.
I've had a Hitchock dry-spell these last handful of mega-posts. Clearly this is an error in need of fixing. So I dug into his really early career and saw
Sabotage and
The Lodger.
I don't have a lot to say about
Sabotage, except that it was another splendid Hitchcock showing with his boss-level directing and storytelling. And how about that Sylvia Sidney lady, eh? That woman can emote sadness like something primal. I noticed her excellent mastery of these emotions in Fritz Lang's
Fury and she brough an A-game to this picture as well. That's a woman whom can tug on heartstrings when she's down.
The Lodger was more cool than emotional, and while not as good as
Sabotage it was still a high-quality flick. Hitchcock manages some pretty iconic images in this picture, like the chandelier swinging back-and-forth as the protagonist stomps around on the top-floor, or his introduction with the scarf. It was also fun to see the genesis of some of Hitchcock's personal ticks. Like his fascination with "The Wrong Man" scenarios (though my foreknowledge of that sort of ruined the suspense).
Speaking of film-masters whose absence have been too great for my mega-posts, King Hu! I saw my fifth flick of his,
Raining in the Mountains. It's about a score of characters that journey to a Buddhist monastary where a succession is about to take place, many of them yearning to steal said temples holy scroll.
First, this is a pretty picture, a real pretty-faced one. King Hu integrates the beauty of nature into his composition better than ever before. Second, it's relatively light on the punch-y, kick-y stuff. Instead an air of black humor dominates the flick. It's all rather reminiscent of Hu's earlier stuff, holding-off on the Wuxia, a fascination with Buddhism and it's rites and orders, an abundance of diffrent characters... and so on. It's also fun to see the stable of actors that he uses return in every film.
Uhh... what else? Oh I saw a movie about bullfighting,
Blood and Sand from 1941. It was one of those rise-and-fall, rich-and-poor, Samson-and-Delilah type of stories. It was also one of those movies that was kept afloot by that glossy, old-school Hollywood-Epic type of feeling those movies can inspire. It was better visually than narratively so to say (the opening 30 minutes is mostly some of the most overt macho posturing you'll ever see). The afromentioned Delilah-character is played by Rita Hayworth (I had just watched
Gilda so I wanted more of her). Her scenes of being a cold-blooded spider-woman that drains the main character of all his machoism and spunk are great and stand-above the rest of the film. Like... there is a scene where the protagonists wife comes over and humbly begs Rita to leave her husband alone, and Rita responds to this by summoning said protagonists as if summoning a bull and has him kiss her in plain view of his wife. Then as he realizes what she's made him do she smugly strolls away like a well-fed cat. That was just... DAMN!
I've also seen the 1922 version with Rudolph Valentino, but I didn't find it very memorable.
Lastly -- just for the weirdness of it all -- Uncle Europe is going to tell you guys about one of the luniest sci-fi films of the 50's that I've seen,
Red Planet Mars from 1952. It's about an American scientist that develops a radio-transmitter which can communicate with Mars. Simultaniously, the Soviets have an ex-Nazi finished with similar tech. Communications are established and the Martian side starts devulging information about their society and techology.
Now, in normal sci-fi films of the decade, this is the preqursor to invasions by saucer-men, humongous insects, or strangely earth-like amazon-women. Instead, this film focuses on how Martian natural resources ("cosmic energy") causes the Western economy to collapse, since it'll render coal and oil obsolete. Naturally the Soviets with their state-control economy and information-secrecy take this development with good humor. They watch with glee as the West eats itself up from the inside over these revelations. Until... and I swear I'm not bullshiting here... The Martians reveal that their Supreme Leader is GOD himself -- and that they are Christian Martians! The reveal sends shockwaves through the atheist empire that sees the communists overthrown and the Patriarch of Moscow installed on the throne instead. America feels mighty fine about itself in this moment. But then the ex-nazi in question arrives at the protagonists house and unveils that he was the puppetmaster behind it all... which convinces the protagonists wife to suicide-bomb themselves (rather sexily) in order to save this new religiosity that has swept through the world from disenchantment by the truth. And then, of course, God actually arrives through the radio-device in the end.
Man... instead of tackling belligerent saucer-men the movie decides to use this premise to explore themes of Mars, the Cold War arms-race, Religious fevour, Free-market capatalism vs a State-run one, the influence of Ex-Nazis, and how the Communist east can be overthrown with faith. It's one of the most bizarre concoctions that I've ever seen when it comes to involving real-world politics and issues of the day. And it's all delivered with that straight-faced 50's earnestness -- which serves to make it feel more unreal. Holy hell that was a weird flick.
