So I just spent the whole afternoon purging this blog of the tags for both the naturalistic and uncanny forms of the former trope-category "outre outfits, skills and devices." In their place, I've substituted six separate categories, respectively the naturalistic and uncanny forms of "outre outfits," "superlative skills," and "diabolical devices."
Over the years, I began to become dissatisfied with this portmanteau category. I've done it with other categories when I thought there was a necessary connection between at least two trope-subtypes. For instant, the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ is a dream in the mind of a focal character, while the movie of PRINCESS BRIDE is a fictitious story that never pretend to be anything but such. Yet both the "delirious dream" and the "fallacious figment" work on the spectator in the same manner, IMO-- both in the uncanny and naturalistic modes.
I know exactly why, when I formulated the ten tropes back in 2009, I *thought* there was a necessary connection between uncanny and naturalistic versions of "outre outfits, skills, and devices." I saw them all as projections of a given character's power, and I'm sure two of my main models were Batman and Tarzan. The first is defined by what I now call "an outre outfit" and "diabolical devices," whereas the latter is defined by "an outre outfit" and "superlative skills." If I gave it enough thought I could probably think of a character defined by all three as well.
However, the awkwardness of linking the three tropes together is that it can be difficult to sort out which ones are being indicated. For instance, Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum" is all about a diabolical device, and that device defined the power of its villainous makers, what Poe calls "the black-robed judges," though these characters are never seen, only spoken of. And given that the compound contraption of "pit-and-pendulum" is all that defines them, it seemed increasingly inaccurate to associate such characters with characters that sported unusual attire or skills.
And that's how my ten tropes morphed into twelve. I don't intend to correct any of the earlier reviews that used phrases like "outre skills" or "outre devices," but will just move forward from now on.
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Friday, August 28, 2020
ATLAS IN THE LAND OF THE CYCLOPS (1961)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*
CYCLOPS was the first of two Maciste
films in which the hero keeps his real name, even in the English
dubbing, but is called “Atlas” only in the title. I reviewed the
other one here.
This is one of the more overtly
“mythological” of the Maciste films, not to mention its having a
somewhat better than average budget. According to an introductory crawl, the story
takes place “centuries” after heroic Ulysses’ conflicts with
the witch Circe and the cannibal cyclops Polyphemus. In the epic poem
the sorceress and the monster have nothing in common but Ulysses, and
the hero actually departs Circe’s island on relatively friendly
terms. However, the movie claims that a curse was passed down to the
descendants of Ulysses’s two enemies, obliging these descendants to
seek revenge on the line of Ulysses. Apparently Ulysses’s line has
prospered until the movie’s time, at which point Queen Capys
(Cuban-born beauty Chelo Alonso) sends an army to besiege the city
where Ulysses’s last descendants rule. The city is duly sacked and
its king slain by Capys’ general Iphitos, but the soldiers can’t
find either Queen Penope (like “Penelope,” I suppose) or her
never-named baby. (The rugrat would later grow to become none other than famed male supermodel
Fabio). A servant takes the baby into the wilderness, while Penope
hides in plain sight by masquerading as one of the women abducted and
taken to Capys’s city.
Capys plans to end the curse’s hold
on her by feeding the last spawn of Ulysses to the unnamed cyclops
descendant of Polyphemus. She keeps the big one-eyed critter in a pit
under her city, which makes him seem not a little like a Minotaur. Despite
her contemplating this dastardly deed, Capys doesn’t particularly
want to be an evil queen; she just wants to be finished with her
enslavement to Circe’s obligation. (Note: though in archaic
mythology “Capys” is usually a man’s name, the writer showed a
little mythic creativity, since both “Capys” and “Circe” can
mean “hawk.”)
Ever-wandering Maciste (Gordon
Mitchell) stumbles across the servant and the babe and immediately
decides to right all the wrongs. He chances across Capys, praying in
a temple for guidance, and she falls hard for him. He later wanders
to the city, gets in some fights with soldiers, suffers the torment
of a deathtrap, and finally gets succored by Capys. Maciste shows no
interest in Capys, though he does sweet-talk her a little for the
sake of his mission. Iphitos, though, figures out that the big hulk
is an enemy, and with the help of a black bodybuilder (whose build is
heavier than that of Mitchell), Iphitos drugs Maciste and finds out
the location of the hidden child. Though Capys is losing her
enthusiasm for the sacrifice, Iphitos, who loves her, wants to give
the child and its mother to the Cyclops to end the queen’s torment.
Eventually Maciste must seek to rescue the innocents from the
cannibal monster—filmed so as to make him look twice as tall as the
hero—and liberating the city from the villains.
CYCLOPS has no shortage of
muscleman-stunts. Maciste fights both a lion and the African
muscle-guy, and rows a huge ship across the ocean all by himself—but
the first two stunts are spoiled by listless direction. The standout
stunt is yet another one of those tug-o-war scenarios, but this time
the hero is forced to stand on planks over a pit of lions, with ropes
tied to each of his wrists—and on the other end of each rope, a
gang of muscle-guys competes, trying to pull Maciste off his perch
and into the pit. In an imaginative touch, one gang of guys is
composed only of black men, and the other, only of white men.
Mitchell acquits himself well enough
during the stunts, but otherwise he makes a very bland Maciste.
Alonso’s Capys is one of her best roles, and one almost wishes her
character had been allowed to reform—even though she’s possibly
eliminated because wandering Maciste could never be tied down.
STEEL DAWN (1987)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*
In contrast to many “Mad Max”
imitators, STEEL DAWN is ably filmed and displays an impressive
budget. However, simple competence is often not enough, which may be
the reason the movie flopped in theaters, even though star Patrick
Swayze had just gained major credits from his role in DIRTY DANCIN’.
STEEL DAWN looks as if someone, be it
director Lance Hool or writer Doug Lefler, studied the first “Mad
Max” film (the one without all the hyperkinetic stunts) and
crossbred it with 1953’s SHANE. Swayze’s tight-lipped hero Nomad
has a mysterious, tortured past, but he puts aside his loner status
to defend a small farming-community from a greedy land baron (Anthony
Zerbe).
In SHANE, Alad Ladd’s loner-hero
takes shelter with three defenseless farmers: a man, his wife, and
their young boy. DAWN keeps the young boy to register wide-eyed
admiration of the stoic fighting-man, but now there’s no husband,
for the boy’s mother Kasha (played by Swayze’s real-life wife
Lisa Niemi) is a widow. There’s a loose husband-surrogate in Tark,
a tough Meridian guy who hopes to get in good with Kasha, but though
Tark’s duly humiliated by Nomad’s heroic superiority, he doesn’t
complicate the potential Nomad-Kasha romance.
Some early scenes also present a
subplot-conflict: Nomad’s martial mentor is murdered by foul means.
By sheer dumb luck the assassin just happens to be working for
Zerbe’s character, allowing for Nomad to take care of both
plot-concerns at once.
Swayze handles the martial arts battles
and the swordfighting with aplomb, but his character remains a
cipher, as do all of the other characters despite the participation
of professionals like Zerbe and Brion James. Further, the original
story of SHANE ended with the hero leaving the community he saves in
part because he’s in love with the farmer’s wife, a married
woman. DAWN keeps the same ending, but because Kasha’s a widow,
there’s no inherent reason for Nomad to take his leave.
Both script and direction are simply
pedestrian, except for one promising scene at the opening. Nomad is
seen out in the desert, meditating by standing on his head. Three
raiders—apparently post-apocalyptic mutants, though the script
doesn’t say so—tunnel through the desert sands to attack the
solitary traveler. If the rest of the film had measured up to the
lively whimsy of this scene, Hool and Lefler might have produced
something as good as the 1979 George Miller original.
DRAGONHEART 3 (2015), DRAGONHEART: HEARTFIRE (2017)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*
There’s no shortage of film-fans who
prize franchise-sequels—BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, TERMINATOR 2-- equal
to or better than the film that started the franchise. I’m not
aware, though, of many “second sequel” films that have earned
such accolades.
DRAGONHEART 3 isn’t any sort of bold
new re-thinking of the premises of the previous two films, and its
story would’ve been difficult to envision without the previous
stories in the series. It’s just a good formula-film that executes
its premise better than the first two entries. As I noted in my
review of the other films, the first DRAGONHEART suffers from a
clumsy sort of humor, loosely modeled on the 1971 film SKIN GAME,
while the first sequel proves overly juvenile in tone.
Both of those films took place in a
vague period of medieval England. Director Colin Teague and writer
Matthew Feitshans anchor their prequel of the franchise in
ninth-century Britain, some centuries after Roman rule. Though the
Romans are gone, they’ve left behind such markers as Hadrian’s
Wall, a dividing-point between the northerly lands of the savage Pict
tribes and the lands to the immediate south, inhabited by more
outwardly sophisticated Britons. In addition to the southerners
having been schooled in the ways of the Romans and of the knightly
traditions of Arthur’s Camelot, this fantasy-history includes a
race of intelligent dragons from the stars. Rather than being opposed
to humankind as one sees in most archaic knight-tales, these
star-dragons acted as tutelary spirits to Arthurian knights, even
instilling in the early warriors the code of honor.
Main hero Gareth, an orphan of low
estate comparable to Geoff in the second film, has labored for years
in service as a knight’s squire, hoping to attain the status of
valorous knighthood. But the code of knighthood has fallen on hard
times, and the warriors that man the wall against the hostile Picts
consider it their due to extort huge sums from the humble peasants.
Though Gareth dearly wants to become a knight, he protests this
inequity. The garrison’s cruel commander casts Gareth out of the
compound into the northern wilderness, challenging the young squire
to come back with some treasure to prove his worth.
While Gareth forages in the wilderness,
a meteor crashes to Earth. Out of the meteor springs a huge dragon,
and Gareth observes that within the remnants of the meteor are nine
eggs of gold. A troop of Picts show up and attack the dragon, and
Gareth briefly considers harvesting an egg for his own purposes. A
Pict shoots Gareth with an arrow, but the dragon thinks that the
young knight has protected the egg. The dragon, later named Drago,
resuscitates Gareth by transferring a portion of Drago’s heart into
the youth’s chest.
However, the Pict tribe has a sorcerer,
Brude. He casts a spell that nullifies Drago’s power, except when
the moon is high, at which point Brude can force Drago to serve him
in destroying the southern Britons and their wall. Drago’s primary
concern is to protect the eggs of the unborn dragons, and because of
the sympathy between him and the knight, Gareth agrees to help Drago
protect the eggs. The knight receives further aid from two friends he
makes in the northern wilds: Pictish warrior-princess Rhonu, who
bears a grudge against Brude, and aspiring Druid magician Lorne, who
provides some of the comedy-relief (though, to be fair, Gareth is
sometimes the butt of Drago’s humor).
There are some fuzzy parts in the
script. It’s not that clear as to why Drago came to Earth with his
brood, since he and his kind haven’t been there for centuries, nor
why he possesses the ability to teach Gareth a skill called
“shadow-jumping,” which involves teleportation from one shadowed
area to another. Still, the story is admirably consistent to its
theme: that Gareth must find some middle way between the unreasoning
aggression of both northerners and southerners. Naturally, meeting a
comely Pictish warrior-woman does a lot to humanize Gareth’s
beliefs about the Picts, though the script doesn’t overplay the
romance at the expense of the main plot. And though the theme is
mostly about humans getting along, Drago had a much more interesting
personality than either of his predecessors, perhaps because he
mirrors the ideals of knighthood to which Gareth aspires.
The film’s only flaw is that, like a
lot of second sequels, the budget doesn’t allow for heavy FX, so
Drago doesn’t actually do all that much, even in the climactic
battle.
Unfortunately, though DRAGONHEART:
BATTLE FOR THE HEARTFIRE is set in the same prequel-era, creative
lightning did not strike a second time for writer Matthew Feitshans,
nor for the new director or the new cast of characters.
Two generations have ensued since
Gareth and his wife Rhonu united the northern and southern kingdoms
of their corner of Great Britain. With the assistance of Drago—the
dragon to whom Gareth bonded in the previous film, now voiced by
Patrick Stewart—the king and queen have managed to bring about the
rebirth of dragons. Not much is said about the restoration of an
Arthurian knightly code, and one never sees any other dragons but
Drago. However, the bonding of human and dragon is still fraught with
peril. At the film’s statt, Rhonu has perished years ago after her
dragon died, and now Gareth is at death’s door. Drago expects to
perish when Gareth does, and is surprised when the king dies and he
Drago yet survives.
Drago realizes that he still has a bond
with a human; one of Gareth’s grandchildren. Gareth and Rhonu had a
son, Walter, who fled court life and chose to live the life of a
peasant. He married some unknown woman, who bore him twins, male
Edric and female Meghan. Neither twin is aware of their kinship with
Gareth, but both have a smattering of scales on their bodies, as well
as unusual powers—Edric is as strong as four men, and Meghan can
control (but not create) any form of fire. After Walter’s death,
the siblings separated. Drago uses the bond to locate Edric, and
though Edric repudiates the bond, he doesn’t reject the revelation
that he’s now the king of this part of England.
Meghan, living in the lands of the
Vikings, hears about her brother’s good fortune and invades England
with a small army, led by Thorgrim. (Dina de Laurentis, daughter of
the more famous Dino and sister of HEARTFIRE’s producer Raffaela,
has a small part as one of the Vikings.) Meghan asserts that as
Gareth’s granddaughter she has equal claim to the throne, and when
she first meets Drago, she steals from him the Heartfire. In contrast
to the exchange of hearts seen in the other films, this theft robs
Drago of his flame-powers, and imperils his survival as well.
Meghan’s enhanced power allows her to take over and to exile Edric.
She then begins her rule, attempting, among other things, to empower
women legally and martially.
After various complications, Edric
sneaks back into the kingdom, hoping to save Drago’s life by
stealing back the Heartfire. The siblings fight, and the Vikings turn
against Meghan. Drago swoops in and saves the twins from death, but
he, now acting as reluctant parent to the duo, becomes aggravated by
their constant squabbling. He sets them down in the forest and
challenges them to fight it out. It’s not much of a fight despite
their respective super-powers, since despite their enmity neither one
really wants to hurt the other one. Some family secrets are revealed,
and the two youths at last join forces to kick out the Vikings and
rule the kingdom wisely—though during the conflict Drago meets his
maker.
The previous entry in the series took
strength from being based in the history, however fictionalized, of
conflicts between two tribes of Britons. This time, the kingdom is
just a backdrop, and the invading Vikings could be Mongolians for all
their identity matters to the story. DRAGONHEART 3 was about Gareth
and Rhonu bringing their ethnic identities together in order to forge
a stronger England. Edric and Meghan are never more than bickering
siblings, weakly characterized and given a patchwork backstory.
Writer Feitshans might have done
something better. Since he wanted the bonding to skip a generation,
apparently he decided to expend as little effort as possible upon
Gareth’s son Walter. The script gives him no solid reason for
fleeing the lap of luxury to live as a peasant; the viewer is only
told that he didn’t like the kingly life. Feitshans might’ve
crafted a situation in which he rejected the world of kingship and
dragon-magic specifically because the dragon’s death killed Rhonu’s
mother. But this avenue remains closed.
One hears nothing of the mother of
Edric and Meghan; she’s just the vehicle to bring the siblings into
the world. Clearly the scripter got rid of the mother quickly, in
order to focus on Walter, even though he remains a vague character at
best. He’s appalled by the twins’ strange powers and becomes
something of a tyrant to them, which leads to a clumsy “family
secret”—Edric thinks Meghan killed their father with her powers,
but someone else is the guilty party. Even this bit of melodrama is
botched, since the characters of the siblings are so flat and
uninvolving. The best I can say of the two lead actors is that they
fit the bland characters perfectly. Whether the franchise can come
back from this low point is anyone’s guess.
Sunday, August 23, 2020
CAT PEOPLE (1942)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, sociological, psychological*
The works produced by Val Lewton have
been so fulsomely praised that I tend to think some of his movies
have been overrated. However, I can’t say that of the film that
launched Lewton’s commercial success, CAT PEOPLE.
Reportedly Lewton’s bosses at RKO
merely wanted the producer to come up with something to poach off the
1941 box-office of Universal’s WOLF MAN. There’s no way to know
how dutifully writer DeWitt Bodeen studied the Curt Siodmak script
for WOLF MAN, but it seems likely that he chose to build on Siodmak’s
general approach. The earlier film sets up the viewer to believe that
werewolf-transformations are real as soon as Bela Lugosi implicitly
turns into a wolf. Yet, throughout much of the film, Siodmak
carefully builds up the conflicting emotions of the characters as
they strive to cope with their encounter with the impossible. Bodeen
approaches CAT PEOPLE in a similar manner, but avoids confirming that
woman-to-cat transformations are possible until the end of the film.
Bodeen also reverses Siodmak’s “fish
out of water” situation vis-à-vis the protagonist. Larry Talbot,
the quintessential “ordinary Joe” American, finds himself
overwhelmed by the weird beliefs of pagan Europe, as represented by
the gypsies and transmitted through the Christian residents of a
Welch town. Here, the protagonist is Serbian-born Irena, who has
emigrated to America, living there for years without making any
friends or becoming in any way Americanized. A chance encounter at a
zoo brings her friendship with, and later marriage to, an “ordinary
Joe” named Oliver. Like Irena, Oliver seems curiously frozen and
devoid of real history, marking himself as an “American innocent”
when he claims, “I’ve just never been unhappy.” Indeed, without
even realizing it, he has a “work-wife” relationship with
co-worker Alice, and she’s evidently been comfortable enough with
that status that she’s never tried any womanly wiles upon Oliver.
But Irena moves Oliver to new levels of emotion, and thus the two
are married—though the script tiptoes around the implication that
they are husband and wife in name only.
Irena’s sexual reticence traces back
to her roots in Serbia, which boasts a distant pagan heritage
overruled by more recent Christian conquest. When Oliver first visits
Irena’s apartment, he’s stricken by a Serbian sculpture, showing
a panther being speared to death by a Christian warlord named King
John. Irena explains that in some towns, pagan practices went on,
including that of human beings changing into feral cat-creatures.
Irena, apparently as ambivalent about Oliver as she is about her
adopted country, nurtures the belief that if she has sex with a man,
she may turn into a panther and kill him.
During the early months of marriage,
Oliver becomes less and less reconciled to his exotic wife’s
peculiarities, and Alice finally professes her love to him,
implicitly wanting to compete with Irena at last. Thus Oliver
consults a psychiatrist recommended by Alice, one Doctor Judd. Irena
consents to being psychoanalyzed by Judd, but she does not like him,
noticing that he bears a coincidental resemblance to Serbian King
John, slayer of “cat people.” For most of the film, the viewer
never sees any direct confirmation of Irena’s superstition, though
Irena does have a brief encounter with a strange woman who seems to
know her, even though the stranger never appears again. The viewer
soon learns that Doctor Judd is not a selfless representative of his
profession, but his ulterior plans lead him to re-enact the battle of
King John and the panther—but to Judd’s detriment, since only
here does one see the superstition confirmed.
Many critics have claimed that the
indirect Lewton approach proves scarier than the direct approach of
most Universal horror-films. I find CAT PEOPLE psychologically
interesting, but not frightening, even in the vaunted “swimming
pool” scene. But the film does deserve its reputation for
attempting a new approach in American horror cinema.
BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS (2008)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
This Bat-anthology, with scripts from
American authors and Japanese animation, proves once again that
quantity is generally not superior to quality. In the space of ninety
minutes, the producers sought to squeeze six stories—some of which are close to being vignettes. Possibly due to the constrictions of
time, five of the six stories lack strong resolutions.
“Have I Got a Story to Tell You”
consists of three street-kids who all claim to have witnessed Batman
in action. Given that an episode of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES
already plowed this shallow ground, this one is the most disposable.
“Crossfire” starts out well, from
the POV of two experienced Gotham cops assigned to convey a prisoner
to another location. One cop abhors Batman as a vigilante, while his
partner is more ambivalent, unsure of the crusader’s motives but
believing that the city has markedly improved from his influence.
During the prisoner transport the cops get compromised by a pair of
gangs. Batman rescues the officers, and—I guess that solves the problem?
“Field Test” involves Batman
testing a Lucius Fox invention that deflects bullets, but the device
doesn’t work to best effect during the hero’s next crime-busting
operation.
“In Darkness Dwells” attempts to
stuff two famous Bat-villains into one tale, even to the extent of
rewriting Killer Croc’s origin to involve the Scarecrow. Batman, on
the trail of an abducted Cardinal, descends to Gotham’s sewers to
rescue the holy man from the Diabolical Duo. The re-designs of the
two villains are poor and the action is incoherent.
“Deadshot” features Batman seeking
to prevent the titular master assassin from claiming another victim.
The only bright moment is a snatch of dialogue in which Batman,
despite his distaste for guns, admits that he can understand the
attraction of such weapons.
Only “Working Through Pain” has
both a strong premise and resolution. Batman, suffering from a
gunshot-wound while waiting for Alfred to rescue him, flashes back to
an early period in his preparations for a crime-fighting career. As
Bruce Wayne the hero journeys to India to learn the fakirs’ secrets
of pain control. The fakirs refuse to teach him, but Wayne meets a
young woman with the non-Indian name of Cassandra who persuaded the
fakirs to teach her their secrets, and who accepts Wayne as a
student. Cassandra, who has her own tale of tragedy, has an almost
psychic awareness of the emotional pain Wayne seeks to master in
addition to making preparations for the violent life of a
crime-fighter. When some rowdy youths attack Cassandra, Wayne whips
their butts in the video’s best fight-scene. This altercation, for
vague reasons, spells the end of Wayne’s tutelage by Cassandra, who
opines that his emotional pain is too deep for either her or him to
banish. The story’s only flaw is a rather pat ending.
Though Kevin Conroy again voices the
crusader as he did in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, the anthology’s
vision of Batman does not follow the earlier teleseries in showing
the hero as capable of humor and compassion. These are hardboiled
crime stories with an obsessed vigilante-hero, which is certainly a
viable element in the Batman universe—but not one that receives good
treatment here. Only “Working Through Pain” adds an interesting concept to the overall mythos, but that one tale is not enough to
give the whole anthology more than a “fair” mythicity rating.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
In my review of the first FANTOMAS
book, I gave the novel a rating of high mythicity. However, this was
less because of the character of Fantomas than in response to the way
other characters reacted to his criminal capers. Based on the first
book, and on the handful of films I’ve seen, I don’t really see
that particular supercrook’s appeal.
I have not read any of the original
DIABOLIK comics, but the 1968 film-adaptation—at least partially
based on original comics-stories—is a very different story. Of all
the European feature-films that either adapted comics-features or
just flirted with elements of the medium, DANGER DIABOLIK is the most
successful.
It’s also one of the most successful
films by director Mario Bava, who’s also credited as a scriptwriter
on the project. Bava’s excellent design-sense wasn’t always
matched by the scripts he either wrote or inherited. But even though
DANGER was derived from three separate Diabolik stories—the film’s
script never seems choppy or forced. I surmise that Bava, or someone
else involved with the script, chose to use stories with a common
theme: the attraction of money.
Of course, all films about thieves,
gentlemanly or otherwise, involve money as a goal. DANGER, however,
invokes “money as a myth.” Diabolik (John Philip Law) flies in
the face of the thief who tries to avoid detection by committing at
least some crimes in a cowl and bodysuit—but he never seems
motivated merely by sheer gain. After Diabolik’s first crime, when
he rips off a shipment of cash, he takes the loot to his underwater
hideout. Then he and his cohort/girlfriend Eva (Marisa Mell) spread all of
the bills onto a bed and make love amid them. It’s the adults’
version of Uncle Scrooge swimming through his horde of coins and
cash, and there’s no mention as to what either Diabolik or Eva will
use the cash for—if indeed they use it for anything but lovemaking.
One interesting consequence of
Diabolik’s scandalous success is that his nemesis Inspector Ginko
(Michel Piccoli) receives extraordinary powers to bring the master
thief to justice. This power allows Ginko to put pressure on real,
hardened criminals, so that he can extort one of the worst, Valmont
(Adolfo Celi), into capturing Diabolik. The gangster uses his
contacts to find and capture Eva, the better to maneuver Diabolik to
his demise. However, in a dramatic turnabout Diabolik forces Valmont
to come with him in rescuing Eva. Valmont tries to escape, but even
when Diabolik shoots the evildoer, the master thief works money into
the equation—for he shoots Valmont full of stolen emeralds, and
later harvests the loot from the crook’s dead body.
DANGER is replete with other fine
set-pieces, to say nothing of sporting one of composer Ennio
Morricone’s best scores. But nothing surpasses the ending, in which
the forces of law and order appear to triumph, and Diabolik is
apparently entombed in a deluge of liquid gold. Yet the film
promises that the apparently dead thief will rise and rob again—and
though there were no Diabolik sequels, the character remains as alive
as the viewer’s fantasy of stealing with the utmost style.
FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971)
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
FOUR FLIES is commonly deemed the third
of Dario Argento’s “animal triliogy.” There’s no small irony
in the fact that actual animals are not important to any of the
stories. There is a bird in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, but the
actual creature is only important as a mnemonic device. There’s no
feline in CAT O’NINE TAILS, and the idea of a multi-thonged whip is
just a metaphor for the story’s complications. Similarly, the “four
flies” also don’t come on stage: they exist only as an image
concocted to make sense of chaos.
In my review of CAT O’NINE TAILS, I
opined that Argento might have been aiming for a more upscale, less
ultraviolent type of thriller than he’d executed in PLUMAGE. FLIES,
though, feels like a return to the heavy violence and meandering
storylines of classic giallo. Certainly Argento and co-scripters Luigi
Cozzi and Mario Foglietti pay a lot more attention to the killer’s motivations here
than the scripters did in CAT. For good measure FLIES seems to be recycling
many of Argento’s story-tropes from the previous two films:
insanity spawned by violent trauma, incestuous encounters, and weird
societal outliers who may or may not help the hero triumph.
To be sure, one thing Argento does not
recycle from PLUMAGE is a likable hero. Roberto is a drummer for a
professional band in Rome, married to a relatively wealthy woman,
Nina. Roberto doesn’t seem to have any serious problems in life, but
suddenly he notices a strange man watching him during practice, or
following him in the streets. One night he overtakes the stranger and
demands an explanation. The man draws a knife, and Roberto attacks.
In the scuffle the stranger is apparently dealt a fatal wound, and
before Roberto can think what to do, a second mysterious stranger,
face concealed by a doll-mask, takes a photo of the homicide. Later,
Roberto and Nina start receiving letters harassing Roberto,
threatening to reveal the crime, though no blackmail money is
demanded. Roberto absolutely refuses to go to the police, fearing
that he’ll be put away for manslaughter, particularly after local
newspapers have carried the story of the man’s death.
Though in theory Roberto might seem
sympathetic given all of these ordeals, he comes off as petty and
self-concerned. He’s certainly not remorseful about a man’s
death; he’s just scared of being punished for it. He’s so freaked
out by the fear of retaliation that after a friend at a party tells a
tale about a criminal getting his head chopped off by an executioner,
Roberto keeps visualizing the execution in dreams. Further, Roberto
doesn’t appear to be very smart. Given that his meeting with the
pesky stranger was being watched by a person ready with a camera, a
reasonably intelligent individual might suspect a set-up. But
although Roberto hires a detective to find the quasi-blackmailer, at
no time does he wonder if the manslaughter might’ve been phony.
The viewer learns this in jig time,
though. One of the maids in Roberto’s household figures out the
blackmailer’s identity and tries a little blackmail of her own,
which paves the way to her death. Later it’s revealed that the
supposedly dead stranger is still alive, though Argento never
explains how the newspaper-reports were faked. The faker complains to
his employer about getting involved in a murder, so Phony Corpse soon
becomes Real Corpse. The detective—a particularly flouncy gay
fellow, but relatively good at his job—learns some clues about the
villain, but not in time to save himself. Nina, distraught over the
threats, leaves, and her cousin Dalia moves into the house. Roberto
easily seduces Dalia, which shows another of his character-flaws, but
as soon as Argento raises the possibility that the cousin may be the
plotter, she too gets the axe.
Given that the script doesn't provide other suspects, process of elimination leaves only the
distraught wife, who fills in the blank for “insanity brought on by
trauma.” In Nina’s case, her father abused in one way or another,
causing her to spend some time in a loony bin. But he still left her
all of his money when he died, and she apparently decided to marry a
man she considered to be just like her father, so that she could
torment and execute him. This contrived psychology doesn’t make
much more sense than the significance of the “four flies,” which
is supposedly an image recorded on the corneas of one of Nina’s
victims. Still, just because Argento brings so much perversity into
his schema, I give FOUR FLIES’ mythicity as high a rating as that
of PLUMAGE, if only for the synchronicity-like significance given to
Roberto’s execution-dream at the conclusion.
Many reviews complain about Argento’s
use of humor here, and while I didn’t find much of it funny, it
didn’t bother me in most cases. The one big exception is the
distracting presence of huge Bud Spenser as one of Roberto’s
confidantes. The actor might have been able to put across a credible
character had he been given one by the script. But Spenser’s
character is inserted so clumsily that one can’t help suspecting
he’s just there to appeal to the actor’s fans.
ALL-STAR SUPERMAN (2011)
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological*
In 2005-08 Grant Morrison, in
collaboration with artist Frank Quitely, authored a twelve-issue
Superman series, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. Though the name may have been
suggested by one of DC Comics’ most notable Golden Age
anthology-titles, ALL STAR COMICS, there may also be some knowing
irony on Morrison’s part. Though the comic-book series is very
episodic—seeming to be an amalgam of “Grant Morrison’s Favorite
Superman-Concepts”—the overall arc is concerned with Superman’s
conflict with the very star that gives him most of his super-powers.
Writer Dwayne McDuffie prunes away any of the
comic-book narrative that doesn’t contribute to the OAV’s
story—which, incidentally, means eliminating my favorite segment,
BEING BIZARRO. But the omissions are to the overall narrative’s
benefit. The setup is that Superman’s most persistent enemy Lex
Luthor finally succeeds in dooming his Kryptonian antagonist,
poisoning the hero through his connection with Earth’s sun. The
film, like the comic, is a little vague about how Luthor brings this
doom about, though it has something to do with his having contacted
an alien being, Solaris, who desires to get rid of Earth’s sun and
take its place at the center of the system. However, the method is
not as important as the effect: what does the world’s greatest hero
do when he’s convinced his death is inevitable?
Revealing his identity to Lois Lane, of
course, tops the list, though as in the comic the romance of Lois and
Superman is not especially compelling. A little more levity comes in
when two super-suitors from the future, Atlas and Samson, arrive to
court Lois, much to the hero’s chagrin. That said, Superman’s
main mission is that of finding out what Luthor did and what the
villain’s long-range plans are, once his old nemesis is no longer a
threat. The film’s strongest section has Clark Kent visit Luthor in
prison, which allows the viewer to see how narcissistic Luthor’s
personality is. At times, the film,like the original comic, strains
to sell the hero as the opposite: the true-blue boy scout who would
never consider peeping on a woman with X-ray vision. Yet toward the
end of the series—and the cartoon—the viewer is given a plausible
reason as to why Superman is so incredibly good-hearted.
Even before the highly publicized
“Death of Superman” storyline, there had many DC stories which
presented readers Superman as dead or dying. Most such stories sought
to capitalize on the incongruity of seeing the world’s most
powerful hero reduced to common mortality. I tend to think that
Morrison wished to do his own unique take on heroic mortality, and
thus both series and cartoon end ambiguously: Superman disappears
into the sun, but Lois promises that he’ll return once he’s done
“fixing” it. Thus Morrison’s Superman remains a myth even after
being rendered mortal.
I’m not sure how possible it would be
to translate Frank Quitely’s somewhat decadent art-style to an
animated OAV, so I don’t fault the animators for largely taking a
more basic storytelling stance, while only using a few visual
“Quitely quotes.”
Sunday, August 16, 2020
BATMAN: “THE CAT’S MEOW” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
Here, courtesy of
Stanley Ralph Ross once more, we have the first episode in which
Catwoman is infatuated with Batman from the start, and he with
her—which is how things started out with the duo in the comics.
“Meow” provides
a textbook example as to the proper use of science-fiction doohickies
in a BATMAN episode. The Princess of Plunder somehow obtains a device
which can steal people’s voices—and though Ross is not consistent
about the device’s nature, the voice-stealer requires much less
suspension of disbelief than the Joker’s time-stopping box.
Catwoman also seems to be using a lot of sound-related weapons
throughout the episode, but their presence doesn’t seem obtrusive.
As with many super-crooks,
Catwoman can’t resist showing off how smart she is. She’s
released on parole, and pretends to have formed a singing-group with
her henchmen and henchgirl, just to help her get intel on the arrival
of famed English duo Chad and Jeremy. Then she promptly queers the
whole deal by stealing Commissioner Gordon’s voice over the phone
after he reveals to her the location of the singers—BEFORE she’s
had her chance to ambush them. Though Chad and Jeremy are supposed to
stay at Wayne Manor—making for some comic interactions with dithery
Aunt Harriet—the villainess’s precipitate actions insure that she
never has the chance to attack them at Wayne Manor. So she uses the
voice-stealer to swipe the duo’s dulcet tones during one of their performances—which she could have done a lot more easily, had she
not broadcast her intentions.
Of course, had she
played it cool, she might not have had the chance to lure the Dynamic
Duo into one of their best deathtraps: a gigantic echo-chamber,
designed to reduce their brains to mush. It’s the perfect deathtrap
for a villainess who really wants her nemesis alive and kicking, and
the narration has fun with the idea that both Batman and Robin will
be turned into love-slaves, respectively, by Catwoman and her
henchgirl Eenie.
West and Newmar
milked the “will-they-won’t they” vibe for all it was worth,
and this may be the aspect of the comic book mythology that non-fans
remember best. Here, and in the remaining Newmar episodes, Batman and
Catwoman become embodiments of lawfulness and criminality, opposites
that eternally attract one another. And, in contradiction of the
usual narration, “the best was yet to come.”
BATMAN: “THE PENGUIN’S NEST” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
Though “Hizzoner
the Penguin” is the best Penguui script, “Penguin’s Nest”
boasts the best Burgess Meredith performance. Meredith captured
perfectly the Bird-Bandit’s enormous ego, and thus “Nest” is
full of scenes in which he has his plans thwarted, resulting in
numerous slow burns and squawking rants.
Once again the
pompous bird has insinuated himself into high society, having managed
to launch an expensive haute cuisine restaurant. Then the criminal
genius makes what seems to be a dumb move: lifting a jeweled bracelet
from Harriet Cooper’s wrist, right in front of her relations, as
well as Gordon and O’Hara.
Bruce/Batman quickly
deduces that, since the Penguii is not a clumsy crook, he must have a
special reason for wanting to be sentenced to the state penitentiary.
The reason, when revealed, is rather a thin reed on which Lorenzo
Semple hangs all of Penguin’s other machinations. However, in this
case I can forgive the thin plot, simply because the Penguin gets so
many good scenes of frustration and fiendish counter-plotting. As
Batman, Adam West gets to constantly counter Meredith’s furious
complaints with dru wit—the climax being when he incarcerates
Penguin not in the state pen, but in the city jail for a misdemeanor.
“Think upon your petty sins, you bush-league bird!”
However, Batman’s
jibe forces Penguin to up his game. Not only does he escape jail with
Chief O’Hara as hostage, the wily bird sets up a double-deathtrap:
a machine-gun ambush for the Dynamic Duo and death by electrocution
for the Chief. Semple resorts to phony science to preserve the
chief’s life, but it’s such a lively outcome that one can’t
much complain.
Though Batman can’t
prevent Penguin from being arraigned on serious charges this time,
the villain comes up with a cockeyed defense of his actions, and a
soft-headed judge lets him go free—much to the villain’s disgust.
Semple also pokes fun at liberal do-gooder Warden Crichton, and
Batman comes this close to telling him what a permissive dolt he is.
Sadly, the episode
is then compromised with another needless insertion of Detective
Alfred, who tries to pose as a criminal forger despite the fact that
Penguin encountered Alfred back in “Fine Finny Fiends.” Penguin
recognizes the butler, kayos him, and then comes up with a goofy plan
to extort money from Bruce Wayne by baking his butler into a giant
pie. By this time, it’s not even certain that Penguin is still
attempting to get himself jailed, but it provides another excuse to
use the Wayne Manor set, which is where Penguin and his
goons are defeated. However, Bruce Wayne makes certain that when
Penguin goes into stir, his grand plan for a prison hookup will come
to naught.
Penguin’s moll
Chickadee deserves mention as one of the most vicious henchwomen in BATMAN '66. Not
only does she take a pot-shot at the Dynamic Duo, she threatens both
Chief O’Hara and Aunt Harriet with her pistol before the
redoubtable Harriet conks her. Perhaps needless to say, Batman
doesn’t bother to give Chickadee a lecture on female decorum.
ADDENDUM: I belatedly learned that this TV script was partly based on a 1946 BATMAN comics-story written by Alvin Schwartz-- which story bore the same name, though naturally Semple added a lot of material not in the original tale.
BATMAN: “COME BACK, SHAME” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
It’s Stanley Ralph
Ross up to “bat” once more, and he presents Bat-viewers with yet
another sophomoric villain, the western-themed owlhoot “Shame.”
Any viewers who didn’t guess that the villain’s name spoofed that
of the hero of the 1954 western “Shane” would be clued in by the
way Ross tediously spoofs the film’s signature line “Come back,
Shane” throughout the episode.
Neither Shame nor
any of his henchpeople have any particular reason for affecting a
western theme, though early in the episode Batman credits the villain
with a “bravado” like that of old-time outlaws. (However, the
same could be said about most Bat-villains.) Like Riddler and
Penguin, Shame has a case of Batmobile-envy, since in a previous
outing Batman outraced Shame with the Batmobile’s superior engines.
Thus one of Shane’s main aims in the episode is to build a better
Batmobile—though this project doesn’t really have much effect on
his big score: that of ripping off a herd of priceless breed cattle.
In order to put
across a western vraisemblance, Shame makes his hideout in a defunct
film studio, with a standing western set. While Shame and his men
attempt to make their super-car, they meet an eight-year-old boy,
Andy, who dresses as a cowboy but gets a disconcerting taste of
real-life outlaws. After Shame swipes the boy’s radio, Andy spends
a lot of time wandering around crying, “Come back, Shame”-- and
though this routine gets old fast, Ross does make it pay off a little
at the end, when Andy forswears cowboy-fantasies in favor of
Batman-style superheroes.
Though the episode
is slackly plotted, it does have a number of pluses, beginning with
Cliff Robertson’s ornery perf as the guest villain. In the first
fight-scene, when the heroes square off against Shame, his two
henchmen and his henchwoman Okie Annie, Shame describes them as
“three-and-a-half against two.” However, it’s the “half,”
Okie Annie, who knocks out the crimefighters by dropping a chandelier
on them: a rare feat of direct violence for a female character on
this show. Both this fight and the concluding one get
better-than-average choreography, possibly because western films were
so famous for elaborate fisticuffs. The latter fight features an
exchange in which the audience laughs with Batman rather than at him.
Laughing Leo, a cheery car-saleman who’s been working with Shame,
tries to avoid being hit with the old standby, “You wouldn’t hit
a man with glasses, would you?” Batman astutely points out that
Leo’s not wearing glasses, slugs him, and adds the insult, “Laugh
that one off, Leo!”
“Come Back” is
at best a mixed bag, but Shame did indeed come back for one more duel
with the Caped Crusaders, though not until the third season.
BATMAN: “MARSHA, QUEEN OF DIAMONDS” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
In Stanford Sherman’s creation of
original villain “Marsha,” we see a harbinger of the out
of-control silliness that would dominate the third season. I noted
that Ma Parker was invented to play to Shelley Winters’
acting-strengths, but at least she played the role, however minor,
with verve. The Queen of Diamonds was apparently designed to play to
the sultry qualities Carolyn Jones brought to her most famous role,
“Morticia” on TV’s ADDAMS FAMILY. But Morticia had style, and
Marsha is just a bundle of man-killing clichés.
It’s unclear from the outset whether
Marsha is a known criminal, or merely a celebrity known to be
obsessed with diamonds (a “diamond-dizzy dame,” one cop calls
her). The police set up a cordon around a diamond exchange as if they
think she’s going to rob it. But when she strolls in with Chief
O’Hara on her arm, no one tries to arrest her for taking a
priceless diamond. Though she apparently has a reputation for
enslaving men, neither of the main heroes seem to know anything about
the way she does so, and she easily enthralls Commissioner Gordon as
well, keeping him, O’Hara and some other victims in her vaguely
Eastern habitat.
Batman and Robin pay a call on Marsha,
and the villainess reveals her secret: darts infused with
love-potion. She uses one on Batman, who almost becomes as
ensorcelled as the other men, but he overcomes the potion by strength
of will alone. However, while Batman and Robin fight Marsha’s gang
of Turkish-themed servitors (including an imperturbable Woody
Strode), Marsha manages to infect Robin, and he becomes her instant
slave. Batman finds out that Marsha has a fierce, Goldfinger-like
desire for all the diamonds in the world, and that she wants the big
industrial diamond that powers Batman’s Bat-computer. Even for the
sake of Robin, Batman won’t grant Marsha access to the Batcave,
from which he’s supposedly forbidden all visitors (quite forgetting
Commissioner Gordon’s little sojourn in “Death in Slow Motion”).
Marsha then ups the ante by inducing Batman into marrying her—and
for once, the brilliant crimefigihter can’t figure a way to escape
the “deathtrap” of wedded bliss. Only a clever ploy by Aunt
Harrier and Alfred saves the crusader from the matrimonial meance.
Temporarily free of Marsha’s demands,
Batman manages to infiltrate her hideout and de-program Robin. Why
didn’t he do that before? Who knows? All this folderol is bad
enough, but as icing on this foul confection, it’s revealed that
Marsha doesn’t even make her own concoctions, but gets them from
her aunt Hilda, a crazy old chemist who dresses like, and believes
herself to be, a witch. Hilda also tries several times during the
episode to turn the heroes into mice or toads, and she’s
persistently unsuccessful, just as the script is unsuccessful in
getting any laughs from Hilda.
Still, Estelle Winwood gives the slight
role of Hilda her all, which is more than one can say of Carolyn
Jones. Apparently the basic idea behind Marsha was that of the femme
fatale who could mesmerize men with the mere promise of sex, even
without giving up anything. But Jones, though attractive, had no such
entrancing qualities, and her character’s hauteur is no substitute
for actual sex appeal. Regrettably, the character wasn’t consigned
to the bin of one-shot opponents, but actually made a return
appearance.
BATMAN: “THE IMPRACTICAL JOKER” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
The best one can say about Thompson and
Hoffman’s script for “The Impractical Joker” is that Cesar
Romero gives one of his most vivacious performances as the
Joker—though he doesn’t exactly get any competition from anyone
else.
For some reason, the villain decides to
become obsessed with keys—largely because he now has a bizarre
key-operated device with weird properties. The scripters move the
goalposts several times in the story. Does the device merely
hypnotize people, as when the Joker immobilizes Batman and Robin by
turning the key? Or can it actually change the flow of time, causing
people to “run backward” in time or even making Joker’s moll
Cornelia turn into a little girl?
While the concept of Batman in any
medium is not innately hostile to the tropes of science fiction and
fantasy, the Joker’s magic box is far too far-out to fit an
earthbound program like BATMAN. At no time is it convincing that the
Joker, at home with joy-buzzers and trick streamers, could come up
with such a bizarre technological innovation, even if the script
suggests that he cobbled it together by accident. Moreover, the box’s
existence takes up all the narrative oxygen. Eventually the viewer
finds out that Joker’s main plot is to introduce a hallucinogen
into Gotham’s reservoir, but by that time, who cares?
This time Batman and Robin get separate
deathtraps, and they’re both big and colorful—though Batman
escapes his trap thanks to the villain’s usual short-sightedness
about removing his utility belt. Joker doesn’t hang around to watch
the executions, but this time he does leave his minions behind,
resulting in a good fight when the Cowled Crusader has to battle all
three stooges by himself. There’s also a funny moment in which
Bruce and Dick tune in “The Green Hornet” in a blatant bit of
cross-promotion, and moll Cornelia stands out from the pack by
constantly preening in a mirror. Joker’s memorable response:
“Vanity is a waste of time. I never look at myself.”
But even the agonies of the magic box
are mild next to the torture of watching Alan Napier attempt broad
humor. Evidently behind the scenes he was stumping for the chance to
do something more than play faithful Alfred, so the writers obliged
by giving the butler a lookalike cousin, “Eggy,” who happens to
be the security guard at the Gotham waterworks, and whom Alfred
impersonates to stymie the villain. In the first season, Alfred’s
few outings as a detective proved relatively restrained. But every
moment of Napier’s attempt to be broadly comical feels like it
takes an hour—so that Napier, even more than the scripters, is guilty of wasting the viewers’ precious time.
BATMAN: “GREEN ICE” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
“The Devil’s Fingers” and
“Hizzoner the Penguin” provided the second season’s high
points. There were one or two above-average episodes to come, but
there were more episodes that were mediocre or pointlessly absurd.
“Green Ice,” Max Hodge’s second
outing with Mister Freeze, proves one of the mediocre ones. Though
the actor who plays Freeze is no longer the same, Hodge’s script
does make a few attempts to give the icy evildoer some of the same
traits seen in “Instant Freeze.” The first Mister Freeze wanted
to put the Dynamic Duo through a series of defeats before killing
them, and one strategy included the creation of mass confusion by
unleashing doubles of Batman and of Mister Freeze upon Gotham. This
time, the most interesting aspect of Freeze’s scheme is that he
seeks to sully Batman’s reputation. One part of the scheme involves
persuading the gullible Gotham press that Freeze is paying off Batman
to gain immunity, and in another angle, Freeze has impostor-versions
of Batman and Robin show up at a swanky party (at Wayne Manor, no
less), so that the “heroes” seem to be deliberately incompetent.
Once again, many Gothamites are seen as being all too eager to turn
upon the heroes, even though Batman is almost saintly in his
forbearance toward the yellow-dog journalists.
Freeze’s big score, however, is more
or less tossed into the episode’s second part, in that he threatens
to send all of Gotham back into the ice age. Though the viewer does
see the villain turn Commissioner Gordon’s office into an icebox,
nearly extirpating both Gordon and O’Hara, the episode never gets
around to demonstrating that the cool cruel criminal can actually
carry out his threat. In a similarly unsatisfying B-plot, Freeze also
kidnaps beauty queen Miss Iceland with a harebrained scheme about
makig her into “Mrs. Freeze.” Despite the fact that Freeze was
changed by a sudden immersion in dangerous chemicals, for some reason
he seems to believe that he can gradually convert Miss Iceland into a
being like himself by gradually exposing her to greater degrees of
cold. Although the beauty queen is given a modicum of courage,
repeatedly telling the villain to return to his frozen hell, the
B-plot isn’t any more compelling than the A-plot.
Otto Preminger replaced George Sanders
in the role of the frosty fiend. Bald-headed, huge-eyebrowed
Preminger is the most imposing of the three actors to play Freeze on
the series, but the actor performs the part as if he thinks
everything is a big joke, lacking any of the emotional tone of
Sanders’ rendition. And whoever thought it was a good idea for
Freeze to repeatedly claim that everything happening was “Wild”
was wildly mistaken, since the catchphrase makes Freeze sound like a
looney bird.
The episode’s best camp moment
appears when a little boy, convinced that Batman has turned bad,
stands in front of a Batman-portrait and says, “Boo, Batman.”
Bruce and Dick happen to be present, and Bruce aggrievedly claims
that nothing in the world ever hurt him as much as “that little
boy’s boo.”
BATMAN: “HIZZONER THE PENGUIN” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
Stanford Sherman’s script for
“Hizzoner the Penguin” provided the strongest story for the
Birdman Bandit in the show’s three seasons—though, very
atypically, the master crook doesn’t have a hidden agenda. It’s
as if Penguin, having observed how easy it was to fool Gothamites
into believing he’d reformed in “The Penguin Goes Straight,”
decided to apply that lesson to his foray into politics. As he tells
the Dynamic Duo, “I can use all of my lowest, slurpiest tricks—and
they’re all legal!”
Everything in the episode takes this
broad approach to political satire, but Sherman’s script is clever
enough to keep from repeating its barbs. As in “Penguin Goes
Straight,” the Avaricious Avian has his confederates pretend to
commit crimes, which he then foils—and the Gotham public eats the
whole show up. After Penguin declares his candidacy for city mayor,
the beleagured Mayor Lindseed asks the Commissioner to summon
Batman—for the mayor feels that only Batman can best the villain at
the voting-booth. After many modest blushes, the hero agrees to enter
the political arena.
The sober-sided crusader attempts to
run a clean campaign devoted to “the issues,” while Penguin
relies on lots of ballyhoo, giving out free campaign and engaging
the service of pretty girl performers (including the famed ecdysiast
Little Egypt). Both campaigns use the services of three pollsters who
generally tell each candidate whatever he wants to hear, and who
carry briefcases that show their two-faced nature, with each
briefcase reading one candidate’s name on one side, and his
opponent’s on the other. (Near the episode’s end, they reflect
that although they’ve washed out as pollsters, “we can still get
jobs rating TV shows!”
Vile villain that he is, Penguin wants
to be rid of the Duo more permanently. Thus a gang of his henchmen
pretend to be a fraternal order who want to hear Batman speak, and
when the crusaders show up, they get ambushed and stuck in a
deathtrap. To twist the knife, Penguin shows up, but pretends to be a
good citizen, waddling off to summon the police. However, the
henchmen have no reason not to watch the heroes get dipped in an
acid-bath, so their absence at the beginning of the second part is
less explicable. But because they’re absent, it’s easier for
Batman-- who happens to be wearing an acid-proof costume—to slip
into the acid bath while shielding his face, and to free himself and
Robin.
The highlight of the campaign is a
witty parody of political conventions and the reporting thereon.
During the candidates’ debate, they’re told that a large gang of
thieves has attempted to hold up a jewel convention. Batman, Robin
and Penguin charge into the building, but the heroes get the worst of
it while Penguin looks golden, thanks to the fact that all of the
thugs are on his payroll. During the battle, the reporters keep score
of each candidate’s successes, all of which make things look good
for the villain.
Nevertheless, Batman maintains an
ironclad faith in the sensibility of Gotham’s citizens, and once
again the Cowled Crusader is proven right. The episode’s only flaw
is that Penguin doesn’t really have a backup plan when his primary
scheme fails, and so his pathetic attempt to obviate the election
results seems uncharacteristic of his intellect.
BATMAN: “THE DEVIL’S FINGERS” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
Though Lorenzo Semple’s adaptation of
a comic-book story produced one of the series’ worst episodes in
“Zelda the Great,” the same writer recycled elements of the
earlier script to produce one of the series’ best outings, at least
in terms of playing up the camp aesthetic.
As noted in my review of “Zelda,”
the titular villain was a performer who turned to crime in order to
pay off a secondary villain, who supplied her with the devices she
needed for her career. Here, famed pianist Liberace plays famed
pianist Chandell, who engineers crimes on the sly in order to pay off
his criminal twin brother Harry (also Liberace). Harry is the only
one who knows that when Chandell gave a command performance for the
President—a performance that made Chandell a celebrity—the pianist
had injured his hands, so he used a player piano to fake it.
At the start of the episode, it’s
implied that Chandell has paid blackmail to his brother for some
time, by having his three henchwomen—Doe, Rei, and Mimi—commit
crimes in the cities where he Chandell is playing. In this trope
Semple is parodying the tendency of other Bat-villains to broadcast
the type of crimes they plan to commit. But whereas the Joker and the
Penguin are indelibly associated with their “theme-crimes,”
Chandell professes to know nothing of the strange women who follow
him around and commit “music-crimes.”
The over-the-top melodrama of the
blackmail-plot is further enhanced by Chandell’s plans for ending
the relationship by gaining control of the Wayne fortune. Here too
one can see some indebtedness to the “Zelda” script. The
comic-book story on which “Zelda” was based did not involve Aunt
Harriet or anyone comparable, but Semple’s script for the episode
worked the venerable dowager into his narrative to provide a
cliffhanger ending. This time, Aunt Harriet is far more
crucial to the plot—to say nothing of providing actress Madge Blake
with something more substantial than fretting over Bruce and Dick.
When Chandell—said to be a “ladies’
man”—meets Aunt Harriet at a benefit, the pernicious pianist
perceives that she’s infatuated with him. Thus he lays plans to
knock off Bruce and Dick, so that Dick’s aunt will inherit the
entire Wayne fortune. However, no one, least of all Aunt Harriet,
ever really takes issue with Chandell’s murder-plot.
Semple also de-stablilizes the usual
situation by starting off the episode with Bruce Wayne out in the
country (hunting muskrats!) while Dick Grayson seems to be having his
first-ever date with an age-appropriate young lady. But Bruce just
happens to be listening to a recording of Chandell’s command
performance—and, though he knows nothing about the criminal
goings-on in Gotham, his detection of false notes in Chandell’s
performance moves him to return to Gotham and to summon Dick away
from his date. Batman and Robin seek to interview Chandell about the
robberies, but he directs them to Brother Harry’s piano-roll
factory—where the Duo are inevitably overcome by Harry’s thugs
(with some help from the henchwomen, who use their feminine wiles to
distract the crimefighters during the big fight). Harry then puts the
Duo in one of the series’ wildest death-traps: a conveyor-belt
leading the bound crusaders into a piano-roll punching-machine.
Batman’s method of escape is likewise one of the best, less in
terms of probability than of pure absurdity.
Having survived the deathtrap and
guessed Chandell’s plans, Batman and Robin fake the deaths of Bruce
and Dick, apparently willing to take chances with traumatizing poor
Aunt Harriet in order to draw out the villain. Chandell’s
relationship with his henchwomen up to this point seems to have been
all business, but suddenly the three girls resent Chandell dropping
them to turn straight and marry for money, so they kayo him with a
sonic bagpipe (also one of the episode’s outstanding gadgets).
Harry takes over romancing Aunt Harrier, though his only plan is to
ransom her. (Interestingly, this was also the role Aunt Harriet
played in “Zelda.”) The amazing aunt-woman deduces Harry’s true
identity, since he just can’t be as charming as his brother, but
Batman and Robin arrive in time to zap Harry, his henchmen, and the
ladies, with the classic line, “And you, you nasty old man! Have a
whiff of Bat-gas!”
The coda shows Aunt Harriet, Bruce and
Dick in Commissioner Gordon’s office as she receives a citizen’s
award. Semple goes all out with the typical bromides (“And isn’t
that what makes America great?”), but he eschews any mention of the
old lady’s reaction once she learned her closest relations faked
their deaths without telling her. Aunt Harriet’s sentimental
infatuation plays equally well as pathos and comedy, and the episode
ends with showing Chandell in prison-garb (but with Liberace’s
notorious sequins!) as he plays a piano for his former cronies in
crime. Harry gets the last word, as Liberace does a really bad Edward
G. Robinson impersonation.
I’ve omitted many of Semple’s witty
lines and characterizations here, but suffice to say that on its own
terms, everything works in this episode. Back in the day, I wasn’t
crazy but having a Bat-villain based on Liberace, of whom I knew next
to nothing. I did not know—as indeed many of the pianist’s female
fans did not—that various fan-magazines had alleged that he was
homosexual. In life, Liberace never admitted this sexual proclivity, even after a very public palimony suit. Still, Semple was working in
Hollywood, so he probably knew all the rumors. I don’t
know to what extent Semple was aware that the art-style known as
“camp” was associated with homosexual parody of hetero forms of
melodrama. But even if the writer had such awareness, Semple
certainly did not load “The Devil’s Fingers” with the sort of
references to gayness that many current scholars love to ferret out
in pre-Stonewall pop culture.
BATMAN: “AN EGG GROWS IN GOTHAM” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
The first appearance of original-to-TV
villain Egghead credits the story-idea to Ed Self, and the teleplay
to Stanley Ralph Ross. Like most of Ross’s scripts, this one is
full of self-conscious, often cornball humor rather than following
the light touch of the camp approach.
Though Egghead doesn’t have a
backstory as such, he takes on a little more literary life, given
that he claims to be the smartest man in the world, though Robin
considers the villain second best to his masked mentor. In contrast
to many actors who had no experience in playing villains, Vincent
Price had specialized in creating various fiends since getting
“typed” as a horror-icon in the 1950s, and he had a particular
genius for oily, mustache-twiddling villainy that perfectly fit the
camp aesthetic pervading BATMAN. Egghead’s bald pate,
yellow-and-white outfit, and habit of citing innumerable
“egg-scrutiating” egg-puns make him one of the most memorable of
the series’ original creations. He’s also the only villain who
correctly deduces that Batman is Bruce Wayne, which leads to a trap
designed both to kill Batman and to expose his secret.
In addition, Ross also come up with a
better-than-average “big score” for the villain, even if it
happens to be rooted in a form of chauvinistic humor no longer
acceptable. For decades, Americans made jokes about how colonizing
Europeans had hoaxed American Indians into ceding the rights to
Manhattan for a pittance. Gotham City’s charter is barely more
geneous, for the city’s founders gained the land from the local
Native Americans in exchange for nine raccoon pelts, to be paid every
five years to the tribe. However, by the time of BATMAN, the tribe
has dwindled down to just one little Indian, Chief Screaming Chicken
(Edward Everett Horton)—and since his tribe was that of the
Mohicans, he is (wait for it) “the last of the Mohicans.” The
most one can say of the jokes built around Screaming Chicken is that
they probably were not intended to be mean-spirited. The writers’
main concern was surely to exploit the idea of Native American
ownership of Gotham in order to complicate things for Batman and
Robin. And though even Batman is a little hard-nosed about expecting
the chief to remain faithful to the letter of the agreement, he does
tell Robin a little story about how some citizen committed the faux
pas of telling the chief to “go back to his own country.”
Since at the episode’s start Gotham
is due to make their payment to Screaming Chicken, Egghead plots to
block the payment, partly by offering the chief a better deal. The
villain succeeds, and for some time local cops are unable to keep
criminals from ravaging the city, contenting themselves with handing
out parking-tickets. Egghead also bans the caped crimefighters from
the city, but Batman reads the fine print in the charter, revealing
that convicted criminals cannot administer Gotham. The crusaders
arrive too late to keep Egghead from looting the Gotham
Treasury—though the heroes manage to head off the villain by
anticipating his need to stock up on eggs.
On a minor note, though Egghead seems
to have something going with his henchwoman Miss Bacon, she’s more
sophisticated than the average moll, being employed to record the
villain’s exploits for posterity. When Batman chastises her, a
woman of breeding, for falling in with a criminal, she merely
comments, “Just lucky, I guess,”
BATMAN: “THE CLOCK KING’S CRAZY CRIMES” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
For comics-fans it would’ve proved
gratifying had the one BATMAN ’66 episode co-scripted by a bonafide
comics-writer numbered among the best of the series. But such was not
the case. In collaboration with writing-partner Charles Sinclair,
Bill Finger—unofficially credited as the co-creator of Batman,
aswell as of much of Batman’s mythology—only turned out a
middling episode of the camped-up character.
The Clcck King, essayed by Walter
Slezak, is another in a long line of series-villains who has no
particular reason for plotting crimes around a particular theme. All
the viewer knows is that in his hideout Clock King surrounds himself
with clocks, that he uses clock-devices to commit crimes and that he
makes a lof of “time” puns. As it happens, prior to this episode
Bill Finger had created at least three “clock-themed” villains
for DC Comics—two for Batman tales, and a third for a solo Robin
series—but Clock King doesn’t seem based on any comic-book
original. Still, since this is a second-season episode, he does get a
lot of nifty gadgets to play with—including a giant hourglass that
serves as the obligatory deathtrap for the Dynamic Duo.
Script consultant Lorenzo Semple may
have encouraged Finger and Sinclair to follow some of the dominant
trends of the time, such as the tendency to play up Batman’s
celebrity in Gotham, thus mirroring his sudden prominence on the TV
screen. Thus “Crimes” includes a draggy scene in which Batman and
Robin take a lunch at a burger joint that serves “Batburgers.”
Far better, though, is the episode’s spoof of the phenomenon of Pop
Art.
Though the artistic movement itself
hearkens back to the 1940s, Americans tend to associate it most with
such 1960s developments as Lichtenschtein’s appropriation of
comics-panels for his paintings. The idea of Pop Art, if not its
substance, may have played a minor role in the producers’ decision
to spotlight an ironic version of a comic book hero. In “Crimes,”
Clock King performs a heist at a traditionally art-gallery, where a
news-announcer informs viewers that the gallery has always been
devoted to “art that has stood the test of time,” but that the
gallery has capitulated to modern sensibilities by holding an
exhibition of Pop Art. Clock King enters the gallery, disguised as a
well-known Pop Artist, though the fictional artist just happens to
bear a striking resemblance to real-life surrealist Salvador Dali.
And though Clock King brings in a clock-device designed to immobilize
bystanders, he also takes time to mock a painting, showing cartoony
versions of Batman and Robin surrounded by melting clocks, also a
reference to Dali.
Clock King also becomes one of the many
villains to stage a raid on Wayne Manor, which doesn’t have that
much impact on the plot but undoubtedly saved the expense of building
an extra set. Finger and Sinclair produced a decent enough episode,
not one of the series’ best, but certainly not among the worst.
BATMAN: “THE GREATEST MOTHER OF THEM ALL” (1966)
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
The double-entendre implicit in this
episode’s primary title is almost the only thing that distinguishes
the debut of one-shot villain Ma Parker. As with the Archer, one
can’t help but suspect that the Parker character was designed with
the flamboyant talents of Shelley Winters in mind—though Winters
certainly comes off better playing this role than Art Carney did with
his faux Robin Hood.
About six years later, Winters would
play a fictionalized version of alleged crime-boss Ma Barker in the
1972 BLOODY MAMA. Many ciime-buffs tend to doubt the FBI’s claim
that the old woman was any sort of criminal genius. But the legend
had long outlived the reality, and so Henry Slesar concocted “Ma
Parker,” whose family consists of three sons and a daughter whom
she trains in theft—though, in a weird moment of gender blindness,
Parker complains that her daughter is a lousy criminal due to her
being just a girl. All of the guys are named after famous
criminals—Mad Dog, Pretty Boy, and Machine Gun-- and even the
daughter, whose nickname “Legs” would seem to denote her comely
limbs, may have been named after male gangster “Legs” Diamond.
Parker is distinctly low-tech in her
approach to crime; her biggest gimmick is a smoke-bomb in her
motherly bun, and her weapon of choice is an old-fashioned chatter
gun. Clearly Slesar was attempting to send up old gangster-flicks in
roughly the same way that “Death in Silent Motion” sends up
silent movies, but the gangster-motifs in Slesar’s script never add
up to anything more than “trope-quotes.” Parker’s big plot
involves having the heroes send her and all of her gang to prison,
because through some legerdemain, she’s managed to fill the prison
with crooks obedient to her will. The idea of using a prison as a
base of criminal operations sounds good the first time, but since the
scheme unravels pretty quickly after the attempt to off Batman and
Robin, it doesn’t seem all that well-thought-out. In a scene where
Ma Parker addresses the prison-inmates and lays out her plans, Julie
Newmar appears as Catwoman, clad in costume rather than in
prison-gear. Since Catwoman has no effect on the story, I imagine
that the actress simply had a little extra time to do a quick
guest-bit—and so she did.
Twice in the episode, one character or
another makes the statement that Ma Parker’s daughter is more
dangerous than her brothers. The script never gives evidence of this,
since Legs can’t fight, shoot, or even figure things out when the
crimefighters play her for a pigeon. Maybe Slesar was thinking of
Legs having the power of sex appeal, since in one telling moment,
Robin confesses to Batman that he’s found himself ogling the
henchgirl’s comely limbs. Indeed, the Boy Wonder even compares
Legs’ legs to those of Catwoman. Batman’s response, while
cryptic, suggests a touch of resentment that his junior partner would
be growing up so fast as to notice the appeal of female
villains—particularly one that the Cowled Crusader may now have his
sights on.