DOUBLE CROSSBONES (1951)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

My justification for reviewing this pleasant if lightweight pirate spoof is similar to the one I gave for including the nominally serious CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL: because the story touches on the unusual idea of a "pirate brotherhood." Oddly, though both movies cite assorted famous pirates who belong to the organization, both name the same three pirates that I find to be "legendary" due to their frequent use in fictional iterations: Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Anne Bonney (played respectively in CROSSBONES by Alan Napier, Louis Bacigalupi, and the rather bulky Hope Emerson). As a very small film-fan bonus, Glenn Strange of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is reunited with the director of that film, Charles Barton, though Strange only has one line-- the same as when he played the Monster.

CROSSBONES' plot is tighter than some of the other genre-spoofs of the period, possibly borrowing elements from the 1942 BLACK SWAN. Davey Crandall (Donald O'Connor) is a shopkeeper's assistant in Charleston of the 1700s, a harbor city often plagued by the pirates of the Caribbean. Davey's in love with Sylvia (Helena Carter), ward of the well-heeled governor of South Carolina, and she seems to return his feelings. But Governor Elden is a traitor, who sends the pirate brotherhood information about treasure-laden ships bound for Charleston and then fences the pirates' stolen goods for them. Elden first reveals himself as a rotter by proposing marriage to Sylvia, who emphatically rejects the older man. He suspects that she nurtures affection for the age-appropriate Davey, and when Elden stands in danger of having his treason revealed, he frames Davey and his buddy Tom (Will Geer) for the crime of fencing stolen goods.

Davey and Tom go on the run, shipping out on a vessel whose captain is another pirate. By some clever shenanigans, Davey and Tom trick the whole crew into deserting the ship. The guys encounter a sailing-ship on which Elden is traveling with Sylvia. To keep themselves from being taken prisoner, Tom and Davey first create the illusion of a full crew aboard ship and then tell everyone aboard that Davey is actually a pirate captain, "Bloodthirsty Dave," who only masqueraded as a shopkeeper's boy to suss out the defenses of Charleston. Davey and Tom pull off the deception, but Sylvia, outraged by her betrayal, swears to marry her guardian at the earliest opportunity.

Back on the pirate ship, Davey and Tom gain allies by releasing from captivity some men being transported to serve prison sentences abroad, but all aboard are still wanted men with no safe place to go. "Bloodthirsty Dave" decides to seek out Tortuga, haven of the pirate brotherhood, purely to find a sanctuary. Once there, Davey has to swordfight Blackbeard to prove his mettle, after which he arouses the interest of Anne Bonney. (As if to mirror the transgression of Elden, one pirate accuses Bonney of cradle-robbing, but she never makes a sexual pass at Davey. and ends up marrying Tom in the end.) Davey figures out that Elden is the anonymous benefactor of the pirates and tries to convince them to assault Charleston with their fleet to bring down Elden for continually cheating them. However, only Bonney votes to follow Captain Davey's plan, so he and Tom are back to square one.

In one of CROSSBONES' most amusing scenes, Davey sneaks into Charleston and crashes Sylvia's wedding party to dissuade her from marrying Elden. O'Connor is almost unrecognizable made up as an effete English lord, but he's able to convince Sylvia of his innocence, though he's captured anyway. Despite all the setbacks, Davey's pirate buddies come to his rescue after all, resulting in a big sword-battle between them and Elden's henchmen (though Bonny only uses her fists, not a cutlass), and Davey battling Elden for the hand of lovely Sylvia. An amusing end-scene has all of the pirates get pardons for exposing the crooked governor, but they just can't resist pirating and go back to their sinful ways-- except for Davey, who's guided to domesticity by Sylvia. 

O'Connor is extremely likable but only does one dance-routine, aside from various comic duels. He and Helena Carter have good chemistry, and Barton keeps the action rolling along. much more ably than most of the pirate-movies of the fifties. There is one "fallacious figment" that the audience isn't meant to take seriously: when Davey looks through a telescope, it comically elongates to mirror his surprise.

                                                

GARTER COLT (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*  

Along with 1967's LOLA COLT, the similarly named GARTER COLT stands as one of a very small handful of Euro-westerns starring tough female protagonists. Unfortunately, it also may be the worst of that small group.

The script shows traveling gambler Lulu "Garter" Colt (Nicoletta Machiavelli) as sharing the distanced manner of standard spaghetti male protagonists: emotionally reserved and super-competent. However, Lulu is never interesting, even when she shows off her skills with a pistol, routing stagecoach robbers or protecting a young maiden from rapine. Part of the problem may be that Lulu herself is never in real danger. Her projection of coolness is interrupted when she falls for a French soldier involved in the war between Emperor Maximillian and Juarez, but the lover is killed by a bandit named "Red" (Claudio Camaso).

Though most of the screenplay is filled with jokes and absurdities that go nowhere, the one thing the writers seem to be passionate about is the Red character, who is as "hot" as Lulu is "cold." For once a spaghetti villain has his own romantic arc, for throughout GARTER Red pursues a spicy young lass, Rosy, whom he may have already bedded. Rosy mostly resists Red in favor of a younger swain, but the movie's only real amusement inheres in her vacillations as to which lover to choose. Red tries to persuade her to choose him by tying Rosy above a boiling-hot, muddy spring. Also, he situates an innocent little boy upon her shoulders, so that the kid will die with Rosy if she falls in. The setup doesn't make much sense, but it's relatively original. Lulu comes along at the right minute and propels Red into the boiling spring, which kills the fiend on the spot.

Despite various ludicrous occurrences in the wandering narrative, the only thing that rises to the level of a "fallacious figment" concerns a talking parrot. After some byplay with the bird seeming only to imitate whatever human speech it hears, the creature gets caught between two gun-happy parties-- at which point the parrot cries out, "I'm neutral!"              

THE VALLEY OF VANISHING MEN (1942)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This is one of the more solid Columbia serials, not showing the tendency toward ruthless cost-cutting seen in later years, nor the barren strategy of keeping all the filmed action in one or two restrictive sets. In fact, of all the works of Spenser G. Bennett, credited with directing more serials than any other individual, I'd probably rate VALLEY in the top five.

VALLEY opens at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the amicable meeting of two field commanders on opposite sides, one of whom is hero Bill Tolliver (Bill Elliott). I don't remember if the script mentions what state Bill fought for, but the dissolution of the Confederacy frees him up to seek out his father, who's prospecting in the New Mexico territory. He and his wartime-buddy Missouri (Slim Summerville) ride west, leaving the turmoil of North and South behind (a motif also found in the classic western novel THE VIRGINIAN).

Bill and Missouri soon learn that Bill's father has gone missing, and that the nearest city is dominated by an outlaw gang run by Jonathan Kincaid (the superbly oily Kenneth MacDonald, forgotten these days except for THREE STOOGES shorts). Kincaid's gang has abducted several locals-- the "vanishing men"-- to labor as slaves in a hidden gold mine. Further, Kincaid is funneling the gold to Emperor Maximillian, supporting the French conqueror against the forces of Juarez. Two female agents of Juarez-- young Consuela (Carmen Morales) and her duenna-- seek to figure out who's sending the gold and how, but neither woman does much but provide exposition for the benefit of the main hero and his sidekick.

As with most serials the action comes down to various back-and-forth struggles between the hero and the villain's henchmen, but Bennett and his writers provide enough variety that the serial's 15 chapters don't become tedious. Elliott, a popular B-western actor, handles all the fisticuffs and riding-stunts very well, while his sidekick provides good comic relief, due to his being more of an "ornery cuss" rather than the more standard dopey doofus. In fact, the writers got into the antics of Missouri that for one episode alone, they had him talking to his horse, which answered him back a la "Mister Ed."

The limited sets of Kincaid's mine are given some cool decorations, such as a big Aztec deity-statue posed behind the bib boss's desk. Said desk has an uncanny execution-gimmick built into it: a concealed gun that "fires" any henchman who displeases Kincaid. The standout gimmick, however, was left behind by the vanished Aztecs: a giant mounted prism able to focus the sun's rays and start fires where directed. This device is used for the chapterplay's best cliffhanger: Bill tied to a stake and surrounded by flammable brush, while a weight-device slowly causes the prism to move toward Bill and his death-trap. Naturally, after the outlaws take all this trouble to give the hero a ghastly death, they decide to leave and do something else, making it easy for Bill to escape. 

In one of the serial's best touches, the credits-sequence for each episode plays over scenes of the vanished men (including Bill's dad) laboring in the mine, pushing a wheel connected to a rock-crushing press. In the last episode, Bill almost dies under the press. But not only are the hero and the kidnapped men liberated, Kincaid perishes beneath another crushing weight: that of the pagan idol in his office. The end of Kincaid's rule isn't quite on the symbolic level of the Philistine carnage wrought by Samson, but there's a little more religious resonance here than in the majority of serial conclusions.          

       

        

GONE WITH THE WEST (1969/1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In 2012 I did a quickie review of this film, but on rewatching it this year, I decided to write a new one. After I finish this one I'll delete the previous version.

By all accounts director Bernard Girard completed this western, starring James Caan and Stephanie Powers, under a different title in 1969, when the influence on Italian spaghetti westerns on American cinema was at its height. It was finally released in 1974, probably to play off Caan's rising star, and then recut with a frame story and re-released under the title LITTLE MOON AND JUD MCGRAW. Over time a lot of fans have dubbed GONE as one of the worst westerns of all time. However, while it isn't good, it did pick up on the social anomie seen in the original Sergio Leone movies, and formulated the same basic situation seen in 1973's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER-- that of a pitiless avenger destroying a corrupt town-- long before HPD went into production. I imagine there were other possible ancestors for both. not least Dashiell Hammett's 1929 RED HARVEST.

Also, GONE is not an adventure-story as I previously labeled it, but an irony, just like DRIFTER. One or two IMDB reviews complained of tonal changes in GONE, when it seemed to shift between comedy and ultraviolent adventure. But GONE is an irony, in which everything is meant to have a double meaning. I'm not saying GONE is a good or incisive irony, the way that DRIFTER is. But a lot of the tropes I identified as "fallacious figments"-- like the cutesy end-scene where Caan's character Jed shoots the film's cameraman-- are meant to convey a pseudo-artsy sense that anything-can-happen. 

The flick begins mundanely enough, with Jed being released from prison for some unspecified crime. His mental flashbacks tell us that he holds a man named Nimmo (Aldo Ray) responsible for his sufferings, as well as for the murder of Jed's wife and child. Jed makes a beeline for the unnamed town where Nimmo rules with an iron hand. Jed watches from afar while the corrupt townsfolk carry on at a cockfight, and pitilessly watch as a young Indian female, Little Moon (Powers), is raped. Later Little Moon retreats to a craggy area overlooking the town, where Jed has made his camp.

Jed watches as Little Moon washes herself in a mountain lake. He doesn't watch her nude display too long, for he announces himself by tossing a rock in the water. Moon gets dressed and attacks him, only to be dissuaded by a threatening fist. But because he doesn't show any desire to rape her, she starts hanging out with him, even though she only speaks Spanish. 

Jed makes a few opening assaults on Nimmo's henchmen. This doesn't seem to upset Nimmo, though one of his cronies seeks out the ridge-area. This guy does try to rape Moon, claiming he didn't get his chance earlier. We then get another "fallacious figment" as Jed comes down like Tarzan, swinging down on a rope attached to who-knows-what. Nevertheless, Moon gets the victory because she just happens to have a sling and kills the rapist with a stone.

The rest of the film is just, as others have said, just a smorgasbord of incoherent violent scenes, though one does have the distinction of being among the best catfights in cinema. In short, Nimmo's regular hooker-girlfriend (Barbara Werle) takes objection when another whore (Elizabeth Leigh) tries to get with Nimmo. It's a really well choreographed fight, and I like to think the participants were doing their best to boost their careers as stuntwomen with this big fight. On a minor note, Sammy Davis Jr has a few scenes as a slick gunfighter employed by Nimmo, but Davis has no real impact on the story.

Jed and Moon attack the town with rocks flung by catapults that they whipped up out of nothing. Then Nimmo's men find and capture Jed, which is the first time Nimmo even learns who his nemesis. He's tied to a cross in the center of town, but Moon comes to his rescue, riding into town and lassoing the cross, so as to drag it away. No one seems able to pursue her. Finally Moon somehow devises a kite from which she can drop sticks of dynamite (how?) on the town. This clears out all the corrupt maggots and makes possible a final fatal clash between Jed and Nimmo. Then the triumphant hero kisses his damsel before they walk toward the horizon-- aside from shooting the cameraman, that is.

Though it's naturalistic aside from the injection of "figments" you're not supposed to believe in, the arty approach still places GONE in my category of "weird westerns."      

THE NAKED TRUTH (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I often don't review films whose fantastic content consists of "fallacious figments" in the naturalistic mode; that is, where characters do things like talking to the movie's viewers (a thing that happens early in NAKED TRUTH). As of this writing I haven't even reviewed what is probably the classic in that category: 1990's AIRPLANE, which movie TRUTH falls all over itself seeking to (badly) imitate. But as it happens the only true thing about TRUTH is how well it shows how NOT to execute this sort of comedy.

Niko Mastorakis, director and co-writer of this fiasco, is largely known for his 1980s formula-flicks, most of which he also co-wrote and of which I've seen a half-dozen. I remember his oeuvre as adequate formula-productions, and I even gave a mildly positive review to 1989's NINJA ACADEMY. Though that film was little more than a riff on the successful POLICE ACADEMY series, Mastorakis and his co-writer seemed to understand what sort of wacky humor such a riff required. But in TRUTH we see the director and his collaborator utterly failing to get on board with AIRPLANE's type of humor.     

One of the first indications of Mastorakis's cluelessness is the naming of his two young male heroes: Frank and Frank. This conceit might have been slightly funny had there been any character differences between the protagonists, like one was daring and the other timid. But no, both are fast-talking slicks aspiring to write for the movies. The only real reason there are two of them is that later they will fall afoul of a murderous drug-dealer and will hide from him the same way Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon did in SOME LIKE IT HOT, by pretending to be women. Mastorakis botches this comedy-model as well, but in fairness he's not really making HOT his primary pattern.

Appropriately, one of the movie's first crummy attempts at an AIRPLANE-style non-sequitur joke takes place on an airplane, while the two Franks are en route to the destination where all the hilarity will ensue. Frank One (not that one can tell them apart) sits in his airline seat asleep, apparently enjoying his dreams. Seventy-year-old stewardess Zsa Zsa Gabor tries to wake Frank, then shakes him and slaps him. When Frank wakes, she tells him she couldn't allow him to have a "dirty dream" about her because she's a "feminist." Now, unlike most of the dumb jokes in TRUTH, the audience is supposed to find this funny because of a real-world event: Gabor being charged in 1989 with having struck a traffic cop -- which resulted in at least one other bit of stunt-casting for Gabor, in the opening scene of the 1989 NAKED GUN sequel. But that bit was over and done in less than a minute. By comparison the TRUTH joke, though milking the same event, lasts too long and fails to deliver a decent punchline.

That said, Gabor at least got a scene focused on her. Most of Mastorakis' previous films starred unknowns and only worked in a few scenes of more prominent actors, which was and is a standard practice in B-movies. But here the director apparently got the idea that the appeal of the Abraham-Zucker movies was that they used a lot of celebrities, particularly in AIRPLANE. So the director worked in blink-and-miss-them cameos by name-actors, where they usually weren't even doing anything funny. Thus one can find in TRUTH the following performers whipping out a few minutes that probably translated to no more than a day's shoot for each: Lou Ferrigno, David Birney, Spice Williams, Alex Cord, Norman Fell, Yvonne deCarlo, Ted Lange, Erik Estrada, Little Richard, Dick Gautier and Bubba Smith. Their appearances are so desultoty they aren't even worth the effort of "star-spotting."

The only half-decent joke in the flick takes place near the end. After the two dudes have escaped various murder-attempts by the drug-dealer (Herb Edelman), they and their FBI contact (Courtney Gibbs) find themselves in a jungle. The drug-dealer corners them, but the good guys are rescued by a gang of LA cops, led by Bubba Smith, who surround the crook and begin beating him with truncheons a la the contemporaneous Rodney King incident. (All of the cops, incidentally, are Black.) The slightly funny part comes at the end, when someone puts up a banner reading, "Police Brutality Tape-- Do Not Cross."

I'd be remiss not to mention that during the Franks' totally tedious female imposture, they get involved with a beauty pageant, and this allows the filmmakers to cast a lot of smokin' babes, including Andrea Parker of THE PRETENDER. But despite a little bit of upper-body nudity, there are dozens of films in which one can find sexcapades superior to those of the (mostly clothed) TRUTH.                               

BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

On this blog I generally review either metaphenomenal films or isophenomenal films that are in some way relevant to metaphenomenal tropes. For that reason, I've hesitated to review my favorite film by Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who passed away this week. Zany as it is, I'm not sure how much I have to say about the comedy-western THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING, wherein Cardinale teamed up with French legend Brigitte Bardot (as of this writing still among the living). However, four years later Cardinale teamed with another Italian luminary, Monica Vitti for a film originally called "Here Begins the Adventure." The English title for this comedy-road film, BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER, may be better in that it suggests the allure of adventure that Moreau's leather-clad motorcyclist holds for homebody Cardinale. However, director/co-writer Carlo di Palma does bring in elements of irony here, given that Cardinale's character is in some ways much more dynamic, even though BLONDE is primarily one of the many knockabout comedies that the Italian film industry so often produced.     

For the first ten minutes BLONDE almost does look like a precursor to the over-fifteen-years-later drama THELMA AND LOUISE. Claudia (Cardinale) works in a laundry while her barely-seen pig of a husband sits on his ass. Later there's a line about how Claudia's husband beat her, but the English translation doesn't say this right away. Claudia encounters the leather-clad, motorcycle-riding blonde Miele (Vitti). After hearing some of Miele's stories about her adventurous life, Claudia begs Miele to take her away from her drudgery. Miele, preoccupied with making a rendezvous with her fiancee up north, initially takes Claudia a little way, leaves her flat, and then changes her mind, rescuing the laundress from a lothario.

It's soon evident to the viewer, though not to naive Claudia, that Miele is a complete bullshitter. The next half hour is pretty boring, as the two women tool around the Italian countryside. Miele carelessly loses the motorbike and whines ceaselessly about making her appointment. The ladies try to steal a car and end up almost kidnapping a kid, but that action quickly peters out. 

Still on the way to the northern city, the girls stop in Naples, where the film's best scenes take place. The heroines help an old woman get back her money from one of the local gangsters. In return she gives them a magic charm that may or may not have real power. A few scenes later, the girls end up at a casino-- one where, curiously, the gangster-owner punishes his subordinates with an electrical torture machine. The girls break the bank, which sounds like the charm at work, though technically, Claudia is shown invoking the power of the charm AFTER the ladies start winning. However, the casino's gangster-boss lures them into another game. The girls lose but accuse the gangster of cheating and try to leave with their dough.

Now, the charm is never mentioned again, but it would be the only explanation for what happens next. As gangsters surround Claudia, Miele tells her that since her husband used to beat Claudia, Claudia ought to do the same to the thugs. And so the slim Cardinale proceeds to slug her way through a dozen men as if she had become Bud Spenser, the bulky colossus from the TRINITY films. (This might have been an intentional reference since one of those films is seen airing in a theater at the film's climax.) Miele, supposedly the big adventuress, does little to contribute to the fight, but though the girls get free they lose their money and are reduced to hiking north once more. They have another adventure on a train (where the director briefly emulates a silent movie with B&W photography and undercranking). They both have Edenic dreams wherein Claudia hooks up with a devil while Miele does the same with an angel, and both beings are played by the same actor. They eventually quarrel and part, only to come together to get Miele to her goal. Only after parting again does Claudia find out just how much of a fake Miele is. Yet Miele redeems herself by kicking her own bad boyfriend to the curb, and the two hit the road again, getting more of a happy ending than Thelma and Louise.

BLONDE is too whack-a-doodle to be credited with strong sociological intent, feminist or otherwise. But I was never completely bored, given that even the slow first half-hour spotlights the stunning looks of the two costars. BLONDE certainly doesn't deserve to be listed with the many more serious movies in Cardinale's repertoire. But in contrast with her LEGEND-ary costar Bardot, I never felt that Cardinale's vivacity was best served by sober dramas. She possessed one of the screen's most infectious smiles, and so I tend to like her comedies better than her serious stuff. And as I said, BLONDE is also one of the very few times Cardinale dabbled in any kind of fantasy-story.   

      

SERENADE FOR TWO SPIES (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              SERENADE is one of the few West German Eurospy films that has a strong Germanic character, though Italy had something to do with the production. Most of the major characters are played by German actors, with only minor contributions from "names" like the American Brad Harris and Italian Tony Kendall, and even though large parts of the story take place in the United States, it's very much a European's treatment of "America as exotic locale." The rambling narrative even wanders from San Francisco to Nevada just so that the hero can contend with guys in cowboy hats.                                 

  The story begins in a farcical mode as John Krim, Agent 006 1/2 (Helmut Lange), gets his assignment, with lots of daffy references to James Bond and Goldfinger. But SERENADE isn't really a comedy with lots of joke-setups, but what I consider an irony, devoted to loosely satirizing the tropes of the superspy genre. Director/co-writer Michael Phlegar doesn't come up with a very pointed satire, but I have the impression that he was focused on inverting just one major superspy trope: that of the spy as a Don Juan who never gets tied down to one woman. To counter this favored trope, the story puts Krim more or less in the hands of the mystery girl Tamara (a radiant Barbara Lass). Is she an ally who keeps giving Krim romantic overtures, but still plays coy, or a foe working for the villains? She seems to want to vex and confuse the hero, and there's even an amusing scene in Nevada where Tamara dresses up like a cowgirl and lassos Krim, just to mess with him. Since Lass's Tamara is so central to the plot-- essentially a co-star to Lange's Krim-- I'm not giving much away to say that she's one of the good guys. But her real threat is not that she's going to murder him, but to marry him, and the goofy ending implies that Krim's going to get hog-tied by matrimony no matter what. A lot of spy-flicks loosely end with the secret agent bonding with his leading lady, so that there's at least the possibility of connubial bliss, but few if any really show the hero getting dragged to the altar.                                                                             

  There's also another duplicitous damsel whom Krim names "Goldfeather" because she never mentions her actual name. She shows up in his hotel room as a maid and delivers him an exploding breakfast roll (which is the most uncanny thing we get in the film). But it's not clear that she knew the roll was really a bomb, and later on she saves Krim from death, so maybe she's one of those bad girls who turns good due to the hero's sex appeal. It's almost impossible to follow who the villains are, and though they're said to be pursuing some sort of "laser rifle" tech, we never see so much as a prototype, so I think the script just threw in a laser reference because there was a laser in the GOLDFINGER movie. Though Krim doesn't have any secret agent devices, he can fight passably well, though an early sequence shows him running from a rumble with a bunch of garishly clad henchmen. Toward the end there's a hallucinatory scene in which Krim and a few allies seem to be standing around on the floor of a lake with no ill effects, shooting it out with enemy spies, but this is clearly just the director's brief visit to Surrealism Alley, with no relevance to the main story. I can't say I found SERENADE as funny as I think its creators thought it was, but I have to appreciate that this is one time the male spy doesn't get to be the cock of the walk-- though Goldfeather does get a pretty good look at an unclad Krim in his bathroom.               

HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though HEY GOOD LOOKIN' was released in the early 1980s, in its original conception it would have been released as the fourth of Ralph Bakshi's "urban cartoons" of the early seventies, following FRITZ THE CAT, HEAVY TRAFFIC and COONSKIN. According to this Wikipedia article, Bakshi initially filmed a version of LOOKIN' with a similar plotline, but in a format that combined animation with live action. Warner Brothers became antsy over the film's potential box office, in part due to negative publicity for COONSKIN, and refused to give Bakshi the funds to complete the movie. About seven years later, Warners became bullish on animated projects again. The sequence of events seems unclear, but apparently Bakshi decided at some point to rework LOOKIN' into a more traditional animated film, using money from other projects to fund the second version. Thus he managed to release the new LOOKIN' in American theaters, to lukewarm response given that the cultural moment had largely passed for "adult animation" in the United States. But LOOKIN' still became a cult film through video and cable release, though it's not clear if Bakshi esteems the finished version.

My estimation is unambivalent: I think it's Bakshi's finest feature-length work. All of Bakshi's features have an episodic feel-- the result of the famed director having honed his craft in gag-oriented cartoon shorts. But in Bakshi's attempt to capture a semblance of his experience in urban Brooklyn of the early 1950s, he captured a "myth" far more substantial than his attempts to render Tolkienian fantasies-- a myth I like to denote as "the clash of civilizations."

The first twenty minutes of LOOKIN' don't seem to reference any major sociological myths. Most of the setup follows the antics of two Brooklyn guys in their early twenties, who don't do anything but drink, hang around poolhalls, and talk about women: Italian-American Vinnie Genziani and Jewish-American Crazy Shapiro. Neither one seems to have a job, so there's no telling where they get money for booze (though it would be easy to buy Vinnie as a pool-hustler). Vinnie apparently has no relatives, while Crazy has just one: his father Solly, an overweight hulk who has no compunctions against shooting at his son when annoyed, and who can get away with such actions because he (Solly) is a cop. The audience also sees that both smooth-looking Vinnie and geeky Crazy are members of a gang of white youths, the Stompers, but the only consequential event in those first twenty minutes is that Vinnie enjoys a "meet-violent" encounter with a girl he used to babysit years ago: Roz Featherschneider. Roz is definitely not a little girl now, as evinced by how all the guys ogle her ginormous hooters, and Vinnie begins thinking seriously about dating her, though he's too cool to give away his feelings. As for Roz, though she's initially stand-offish, she falls hard for Vinnie, at least according to what her hormones tell her.

The clash of civilizations-- or at least, of cultures-- looms large when night falls, and Vinnie and Crazy, tired from their escapades, sack out on the nearest beach. In the morning Crazy gets himself in trouble, and Vinnie panics, deserting his boon companion. (To be sure, Crazy extricates himself from his difficulties on his own.) But Vinnie's loss of coolness carries a harsher penalty. In his fear he runs past the boundaries of "the white part" of the beach and enters the forbidden terrain of "the black part." Vinnie finds himself surrounded by big black beachgoers, many of whom wear leather jackets at the beach and are members of the Black Chaplains, an urban youth-gang with which Vinnie's gang has frequently locked horns. Vinnie also meets the Chaplains' leader, the implicit pimp Boogaloo Jones. Boogaloo incarnates for the period "The Great White Fear," in that he's a clever, smooth-talking conniver. As soon as Boogaloo sees Vinnie, he wants to renew old hostilities just for the sake of sheer nastiness. He smooth-talks Vinnie into setting up a rumble between the two gangs, and adds that if the Stompers won't fight, the cool Italian will have to battle all the Chaplains by himself.

At the same beach, Vinnie not only locates Crazy, he also stumbles across Roz and her girlfriend Eva, though romance is no longer Vinnie's main concern. Roz and Crazy are particularly hot to fight the Black Chaplains, and the four seek out the other Stompers-- who could care less about Vinnie's crusade. Eventually, though, the white gang gets fired up to attack the black gang, when the former get provoked by one of Boogaloo's actions. So on the surface, Vinnie's problem is solved. 

Except that Crazy is, well, crazy. He's not just the amiable geek he usually seems to be, as when he becomes irate at Vinnie and puts a knife to his friend's throat. That night, while the four youths are farting around, Roz sees a car in a white neighborhood, driven by two Black Chaplains. Crazy's triggered by the "jungle bunnies," chases them down in his car. Then, over the feeble objections of Vinnie and Eva (the latter protesting, "I don't understand. Negroes are like people, too"), Crazy shoots both men dead. Unlike Crazy and Roz, who are jazzed by the incident, Vinnie knows that this is serious shit. (We don't know what if anything Eva sees or thinks, for she disappears from the story after the shooting.) Vinnie then separates himself from his friend and his potential lover.

With atypical swiftness, the NYPD sends one of their best men to investigate: Solly Shapiro. He interrogates Boogaloo, and though the pimp has no way of knowing who killed his followers, he makes the Iago-like suggestion that Solly ought to ask one of the Stompers about the crime-- such as Solly's own son. During what seems to be the exact same night as the shooting, Roz gives herself to the flustered Crazy, precisely as if she deemed herself a hero's prize. But then Solly shows up, driving Roz off as the corrupt cop beats the hell out of his son. The beating is so brutal that the average viewer can't help but pity the ignorant youth despite having seen him murder two people. Crazy then breaks the code of the streets, telling his father that Vinnie killed the victims.

Vinnie doesn't know of the betrayal but packs his bags to leave town, apparently the next morning. But he manages to run into the very area where the Stompers and Chaplains have arranged to hold their rumble. Solly shows up there as well, happy to frame Vinnie for the crime. The real killer, though, has some sort of mental breakdown. Crazy gets up on a roof overlooking the rumble, dressed up in a wacky superhero-costume, and begins firing down on everyone in the street. Both sides shoot at each other until one of the white guys is slain, at which point it becomes too real for both groups, and they fade.

The weird psychedelia in Crazy's head could justify a couple of paragraphs of explication, as the mad youth seems to be warring on the city in which he was born while encountering various grungy versions of Jungian birth-imagery. Bakshi then works in one non-psychedelic threat, for the all-knowing Boogaloo shows up on the roof. But instead of directly taking action against the murderer-- say, by pushing him off the roof-- Boogaloo confines himself to breaking into Crazy's frenzied reverie with the odd words, "You ain't got no rhythm, baby." For some reason, this has the same effect. Crazy launches himself off the roof, unintentionally making up for his betrayal by landing on Solly, killing both of them instantly. And Vinnie is left to a joyless existence without his closest amigo.

Well, except that all of these events take place within a frame story. The first half of the frame shows a sketchy middle-aged dude approaching a fat, middle-aged tart on the New York streets, offering to tell her the story of Vinnie and Roz. Then the other half of the frame concludes by revealing that the two old farts are Vinnie and Roz. Old Roz berates Old Vinnie for his past cowardice but gives him one last chance to redeem himself.

Although Bakshi as author clearly denounces the meaningless violence and racism of gang-culture, he manages to do so without becoming in any way preachy. For example, when the Stompers and the Chaplains meet for the rumble, the black gang-members perform a big flamboyant dance-number (rotoscoped from real performers) while the white bangers advance in a march, looking like goose-stepping Nazis. Yet Bakshi certainly doesn't make the Chaplains into sinless angels. The racism of both groups implicitly stems from both their poverty and resulting ignorance, and one of the songs Bakshi chose for LOOKIN' argues that despite all the claims about masculine honor, "the truth is, we were bored."

This may be the only film I've reviewed so far that I've categorized as having both the uncanny and naturalistic versions of the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. That's because all the "figment-tropes"-- such as Crazy inexplicably being able to massacre about a dozen men, just for the sake of a joke-- don't violate the naturalistic content of the narrative. However, Crazy's breakdown-fantasy has a coherence that goes beyond the bounds of naturalism, and so Crazy's mad dream projects HEY GOOD LOOKIN' into the domain of the uncanny.

IL MONACO DI MONZA (1963)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I've now watched two subtitled comedies starring Italian comedian Toto. I find his humor too dependent on the nuances of the Italian language, which may be a lot funnier to natives of his country.

Still, there's potential in this parody of a popular melodrama, THE NUN OF MONZA. Poor widowed cobbler Pasquale (Toto) has twelve kids to feed, but local officials try to tax every dime out of him. He sees that the local monks are always well fed, so he and a companion masquerade as monks, while the kids pretend to be their retinue. 

They happen across the castle of the Marquise Don Egidio (Nino Taranto). He's holding as captive his beautiful sister-in-law Florenza (Lisa Gastoni), and their dialogue implies that Egidio arranged for his brother's death in order that he could marry Florenza. However, at some point Florenza cohabited with a lover, Don Emanuel, and is now pregnant. Through her window Florenza sees the phony monks and sends them a message, promising riches for her rescue. The phonies insinuate themselves into the Marquise's confidence, who wants Pasquale to officiate over his wedding to Florenza. Pasquale informs Florenza of his true intentions and proceeds to find ways to stall the wedding, so that Egidio becomes increasingly irate. He mentions that he once punished a false friar by entombing him behind a wall in his dungeon.

Toto's antics get pretty tiresome, so that I welcomed it when Edigio pretended to be dead (even looking a little like a vampire at one point) in order to learn the monks' true intention. When he learns the truth, the evil Marquise has Pasquale and Florenza bound, each to opposing wall-slabs. Some sort of piston-device will drive the slabs together, crushing the two victims into one another and between the stone slabs-- which is certainly a novel take on the "moving wall" from Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum."

Pasquale's companion seeks help from a local convent, looking for Don Emanuel. Instead he finds the Don's sister Virginia (Moira Orfei), who is (or is pretending to be) the head nun of the convent. She rouses a dozen other nuns from the order, some or all of whom may be simply young women who took the veil to avoid the attentions of lusty Edigio. The nuns attack the castle, at one point trampling over three henchmen and reducing them (somehow) to skulls and bones. Then the martial monacas engage in battle with Edigio and his guards and beat them roundly, with Virginia both punching and swordfighting Edigio. Don Emanuel only shows up when all the fighting's done, and to Edigio's horror, he's almost the spitting image of Pasquale (naturally, he's also played by Toto).

Since I didn't find Toto that amusing, the high point for me is that for once Moira Orfei is in a period film where she's not playing a villain, gets some brief combat scenes, and even remains alive at story's end. 

SEVEN NUNS IN KANSAS CITY (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Getting the phenomenality matters attended to first: in the opening scenes two prospectors are riding on their mules, and the mules talk to each other. I think the miners understand them, but the sequence is so short I rate it just a minor deviation from consensual reality.

As for the rest of this comedy-western-- right in the tradition of the knockabout slapstick flicks that the Italians prize so much-- the real puzzle is not, why is it bad, but why isn't it bad in the usual way?

Knockabout comedies only require a loose, often goofy premise that provides ample opportunities for various heroes and villains to get into big honking fights. A toss-off flick like THE STORY OF KARATE, FISTS AND BEANS may be formally bad, but it was bad in the way its audience wanted it to be bad, and so that's an accomplishment of sorts.

NUNS has the simple premise. After one of the old sourdoughs gets killed in what is supposed to a funny manner, the other discovers gold and makes a map of the location. Somehow two separate outlaw gangs start looking for the map. I forget how the crooks get the idea that two roving cowboys-- coded gay, because they wear pastel-colored shirts-- possess the desired item. The rhinestone cowboys go on the run. All of this setup is standard for this type of film.

Up to the first big slapstick set-piece, the film has been slow, but not without incident. The gay guys seek sanctuary in a Catholic convent, inhabited by something like a dozen nuns. One outlaw gang follows their quarry into the convent, and a fight erupts between the outlaws and the nuns. Apart from the usual comedy antics, like hitting the outlaws with clubs and fruits, the nuns are fairly beefy women and use their fists pretty well. The fight lasts about six minutes, which might some sort of record for female-male fights, at least in Italian cinema. 

And then the gay guys run off, the outlaws chase them, and seven of the nuns give pursuit-- and nothing happens.

Or rather, most of the same things happen, lots of shots of people riding around, one or two scenes of people shooting at each other, and no more slapstick combat. That's what I mean about the film not being bad in a way its prospective audience would have wanted, because it looks like a knockabout comedy, but it barely is one. Oh, and the two swish-kabobs end up dressing like women and joining a dance-hall to escape their pursuers, The End.

Calling them "swish-kabobs" is specifically directed to the types the actors portray, for the two cowboys are swish-types all the way, possessed of no other characteristics. Yet, while one might expect a 1973 comedy to toss out a lot of demeaning jokes, NUNS really does not do that, any more than it makes the two guys-- the default stars of the show-- admirable in any way either. It's the most neutral depiction of gay characters I've ever seen.

Though production values look reasonably high, I knew none of the actors. I theorize, for what little it matters, that director Marcello Zeani-- who has only one other credit on IMDB-- was just handed a certain amount of money with which to take a crew to the Italian countryside and shoot enough footage to make a quickie release. And if it weren't for the ambivalent blessings of streaming TV, this mostly dull farrago would never have crossed my path.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S LOADED WEAPON 1 (1993)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

In my review of the three NAKED GUN movies I noted that all of the "extra diegetic" nonsense-elements had to be disregarded when judging the phenomenality of the films. Once one excludes all the outright nonsense, the question becomes: do the diegetic elements fall into one category more than the others?

The closest thing to a coherent plot in this broad spoof of the LETHAL WEAPON films is the idea that evil mastermind General Mortars (William Shatner) is plotting to flood the country with Girl Scout cookies laced with cocaine. I consider this a "bizarre crime" along the same lines as non-comical films about villains unleashing Black Plague germs on an unwitting populace. So though Mortars' plan is given an absurd tone, its content aligns with the uncanny.

Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson play inspectors Colt and Luger, modeled loosely on the characters from the WEAPON films, though Luger seems to suffer from some of the PTSD of the Mel Gibson figure. (Something to do with a crossing guard incident.) Strangely, the one element of the WEAPON films that LOADED doesn't copy is that of adverse feelings. Here the two buddy-cops hardly ever utter a cross word to one another, much less being "mismatched." Maybe director/co-writer Gene Quintano was too busy trying to figure how many celebrity cameos he could shoehorn into the story (close to twenty by Wikipedia's count). Not that one expects deep characterization in a silly farce. But sometimes the irreverent imitation of high seriousness can yield good jokes.

Are there any good jokes in this farrago? A few, but in most respects it seems like a predecessor to the lazy spoof movies of the 21st century, with the main exception being that LOADED made fair money in 1993-- though not enough to garner a real sequel. Kathy Ireland plays a henchwoman for General Mortars who's patterned after the Sharon Stone character in BASIC INSTINCT, but the script fails to do anything with the idea and defaults to the "good girl" schtick. Tim Curry probably comes off best emulating the "Mister Joshua" character from the first WEAPON film, though F. Murray Abraham does nicely with his spoof of Hannibal Lecter. The pseudo-Lecter, being a cannibal like the original, is the only reason LOADED includes the trope "perilous psychos."

LINDA LOVELACE, SECRET AGENT (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Before I knew the alternate title of this dopey spy comedy, my main comment was going to be that it was about the *softest* softcore film I'd ever seen, given that it displays only scattered scenes of upper-body nudity, while the simulated sex scenes are as off limits as they would be in a Doris Day film.

And then I found out that LOVELACE was originally marketed as DEEP THROAT II, making it a cash-in on the famous hardcore sex film, which also starred the titular Miss Lovelace. It's even weirder that unlike the original THROAT, this extremely tame flick was directed by another big name in both hard-and-soft sex flicks, Joe Sarno. 

There's no doubt in my mind as to how this movie came about. DEEP THROAT began to make big money, and so distributors wanted a follow-up, tout suite. So some producer gave Sarno a few thousand dollars and a week to churn something out. I won't pretend that a lot of the sexploitation movies of the sixties and seventies were produced under much better conditions. Yet in my review of a 1966 spy-sex comedy, THE GIRL FROM SIN, I remarked that it at least had a rough plot, which LOVELACE does not.

Nurse Lovelace (guess who) works in the office of sex therapist Doctor Jayson (Harry Reems, the only other graduate of the previous THROAT job). When Lovelace and Jayson aren't getting it on with each other and with the receptionist (Tina Russell, another big name in seventies hardcore), the nurse administers tender loving care to all male patients while the doctor takes all the females. The sex clinic becomes the focus of various American and Russian agents because Dilbert, one of the male patients, is employed by the American government. The Americans ask the nurse to be their "inside girl," while the Russians prowl around, not doing much of anything. Chris Jordan plays a sort-of Natasha Fatale type who threatens Nurse Lovelace with a knife and whacks Jayson in the balls.

Most sexploitation flicks have a vaudeville-like structure, with just one aimless gag after another, and LOVELACE is the same, but with a lot fewer nude scenes. In one nonsense-scene, an American spy follows the Russians to a scrap-yard, hides in an old car in order to listen to them, and then a crane tosses the car and its occupant into a crusher. The crushed car emerges with the spy's head poking out, just like in a Jerry Lewis film, but a dozen times less funny. There's also a silly pie fight at the end, and it doesn't even use any double entendres.

Sarno does work in one slightly nasty touch. Dilbert lives with his aunt (Russell in a granny-getup). Nurse Lovelace thinks Dilbert's got an Oedipal problem that inhibits his sexual activity, so her solution is to dress up like his aunt and encourage Dilbert to rape her. I guess that's why they call her "therapist."

Aside from the dubious fantasy-sequence of the agent surviving the crusher, the only metaphenomenal content is that Dilbert works on a supercomputer with the capacity to assimilate new levels of information, which makes said computer a "diabolical device," albeit a really dull one. Two other names in the cast are Jamie Gillis, another hardcore veteran, and (in a tiny role) Judy Tenuta, who went on to become a mainstream comedienne.

NINE 1/2 NINJAS (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

The ninja craze had mostly wound down by the late 1980s, resulting in a smattering of ninja comedies like 1989's NINJA ACADEMY and this oddball combination of ninja-spoof and (very slight) satire of the 1986 erotic drama 9 1/'2 WEEKS. In fact, the parody scenes of WEEKS are pretty much overwhelmed by a non-stop barrage of dopey gags.

NINE is more like a spoof of a typical rom-com, but one where the two leads can take off from their day-jobs indefinitely in order to play ninja games. Endlessly perky young woman Lisa (Andee Gray) is astonished to find that she's going to be evicted illegally from her apartment. She has a meet-cute with tuxedo-wearing mystery man Joe Vogue (Michael Phenicie), who gives Lisa scant sympathy until he learns that he, too, is about to get booted from his precious apartment. Then he declares war on Arnold Gruber, the real estate magnate responsible for the evictions. Gruber, who is implicitly an evil guy even though he doesn't really have an evil plot beyond foreclosures, retaliates by summoning a bevy of goofy ninjas to assault Vogue. For the most part they don't even use that many exotic weapons, but simply keep engaging Vogue (who wears polka-dot ninja gear at one point) with cheesy martial arts. I wondered for a moment if I could count some of the rapid-fire costume changes as some sort of magic, but I decided such tricks were just "fallacious figments" in the naturalistic mode; that is, they just violate natural law because the story says they can.

Anyway, sulky Vogue is obviously attracted to sprightly Lisa, and she to him, but he's been romantically hurt in the past. He prolongs their association by teaching her ninja skills, claiming that she's in danger now that Gruber knows of their association. Lisa never really gets good at fighting, but the sexual tension continues to build between the two of them. One of the ninjas hired to kill Vogue becomes an ally or sorts: Vogue's own mother Gladys (Magda Harout, who plays her character like a nagging Jewish mother). Gladys keeps encouraging Vogue to break down his reserves and commit to love, and if he won't, she'll beat some sense into him.

Since the name of this ninja-game is more or less that of vaudeville-- if you don't like one joke, there'll be another one along in a moment-- I suppose it's silly to fault the film for not making clear just what Vogue's mission as a ninja was, before he got into his tiff with Gruber. Perhaps needless to say, Vogue conquers his foes and Lisa conquers Vogue's reluctant heart.

I found a few random jokes funny, but it was tough sledding getting to them. I will spoil one such gag just because it was rather timely, since NINE came out two years after the 1989 BATMAN. In one mostly tiresome scene, Vogue tries to build up his own cadre of ninja aides. But all of the interviewees are losers, especially one fellow in traditional ninja-gear, except for having little bat-ears on his cowl. Vogue's response: "No. Just-- no."

THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

At the time Russ Meyer made this shoestring production, the oddball genre of the "nudie-cutie" was still in ascendance. The Hays Code still forbade the depictions of naked bodies in film, but court rulings made an exception for movies that depicted the social activities of nudist camps. Thus exploitation filmmakers whipped out a few dozen flicks in which the denizens of nudist camps gamboled about playing volleyball and other innocent activities. As long as the naked bodies weren't involved in sexual activity per se, grindhouse theaters could get away with screening such fare.

Purportedly Meyer was the first to transfer the nudie-camp experience into a modern urban environment, which would become the dominant format for 1960s sexploitation films (counterpointed somewhat by rural sex comedies). Though Meyer did get some legal pushback, TEAS made a lot of money, in part because the film didn't show any carnal activities, just like the cuties. I'm sure the titular protagonist is not the first cinematic appearance of a sexual voyeur, a fellow who likes pretty women but doesn't want to do anything but look. But the voyeur became a major figure in 1960s grindhouse productions, and Teas is, if not the first of his kind, an extremely influential type.

TEAS was also given the title of MR. TEAS AND HIS PLAYTHINGS, but the "play" exists entirely in the protagonist's mind, and it's almost entirely focused on the pleasure of looking at nude women. As in most nudie-cuties there's no dialogue-track here, just voice-over narration. But whereas the nudist-camp "documentaries" affected a professorial tone in order to justify the subject being filmed, the script for TEAS-- credited to both Meyer and narrator Edward Lasko-- intentionally burlesques such intellectual diversions, as the narrator spends a great deal of time discussing abstruse but irrelevant subjects like the origin of guitars. Teas may have been modeled on the example of popular French comedian Jacques Tati, showing how the protagonist meanders from one low-key absurd situation to another. However, whereas the narration is pretty funny, the vignettes themselves are lackluster, since their only real purpose is to place female cleavage on display.

Teas works as a deliveryman dealing in dental technology, though this is a bare excuse to send him stolidly plodding from one vignette-location to another. Most of the people he encounters are busty women, but though Teas sneaks peeks at their "peaks," he's so self-effacing that none of the females even notice his ogling. Then, something happens that breaks down some reserve on his part, and he spends the rest of the movie vividly imagining women walking around with full or partial nudity-- though without direct genital exposure.

What happens to Teas? Some reviewers had the notion that when Teas visits a dentist's office to have a sore tooth pulled, the anesthetic endowed him with the ability to see through clothes-- albeit only the clothes of gorgeous, stacked women, since Teas doesn't see through anything else. There's no evidence that any drug gave Teas X-ray vision. Yet the dental visit does serve as a demarcation point between Teas looking without daring to imagine what he can't see, and Teas suddenly feeling free enough to fantasize about what all the busty women would look like, if they were just going through their normal routines sans clothing. Possibly the advocates of the "X-ray theory" were fooled by the scene that transpires as soon as Teas leaves the dental office, for he immediately looks through a window and sees a woman un-self-consciously displaying her boobs. For the first and only time in the film, Teas goggles at the sight-- but then, for the rest of the movie, he just goes with it. One might hazard that Teas's mental transformation was meant to suggest the one that a movie-patron undergoes when he enters a movie. Said patron is initially aware of the restrictions of normal life, but as the movie makes clear that nothing bad can happen from enjoying the fantasy, the patron also just "goes with it."

At no time does Teas appear sexually turned on. His surveillance of female nudity-- mostly of the mammary-variety-- just mildly intrigues him. Only toward the end does he make anything like an attempt to get access to one of the busty beauties, in a comic bit where he tries to catch a girl with a fishing-line but only snags her bra. At two points he becomes mildly concerned about his new propensity and visits a psychiatrist. But he selects a hot lady shrink (first seen reading a book collection of the Feiffer cartooon "Sick Sick Sick"), so Teas imagines her nude as well. However, in the film's last scene he visits the shrink again, and the film ends with him ogling the naked doctor while the narrator rationalizes that "it's OK to be sick."

The visual inventiveness of Meyer's oeuvre is on full display here, particularly in the dream Teas has when he's under the anesthetic. The standard "whirling dissolve" as Teas falls asleep becomes a scene in which the dentist is powering his drill by pumping a wheeled device with his foot to generate electricity. Meanwhile patient Teas reclines in the dentist's chair, significantly holding his straw boater over his genitals, while to one side stands the dentist's big-breasted nurse-- but for the first time, Teas imagines her fully nude. One might say that the whole dental experience breaks down Teas's reserve, so that he can fantasize freely. There's one bit of metaphenomenal imagery in the dental dream, for the tooth that gets removed looks big enough to fit some dinosaur's mouth. But this is such a piddling fantasy that it falls within the sphere of the naturalistic.

ALIAS JESSE JAMES (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In my college years I remember harboring a liking for Bob Hope's comedies, but for the most part I can't remember particular scenes or routines that made me laugh. It's entirely possible that I simply liked Hope's persona-- the cowardly nebbish who always got the hottest babes-- more than any specific Hope schtick.

All that said, ALIAS JESSE JAMES-- which was not one of the films I saw back during my modest Hope-fandom-- is almost completely laugh-free. Hope had trod this sort of western-spoof material in 1948's far superior THE PALEFACE, and his director for that film, Norman Z. McLeod, was probably selected for JAMES because of those credentials. Hope was also reunited with a previous leading lady, Rhonda Fleming, who doesn't have to do much more than look beautiful and feed the comedian his straight lines.

The concept: a prologue informs viewers of the noble role played by insurance companies in the winning of the American West. One such insurance salesman, Milford Farnsworth (Hope), is a total failure at his vocation until he has a chance encounter with famed bandit Jesse James (Wendell Corey). Upon meeting Milford, Jesse comes up with a scam, signing up for an expensive policy and planning to fake his death to collect a big payoff. Jesse departs for his Western haunts, and when Milford finds out he's insured an outlaw, the hapless salesman pursues the outlaw in the hope of reversing the policy. 

Eventually Milford overtakes Jesse, but the outlaw sees in Milford a "body double" he can use to complete his scam. However, Jesse's girlfriend Cora Lee (Fleming) quickly falls out of love with Jesse and in love with Milford, with barely any effort on Milford's part. Assorted jokes make use of fantasy in the naturalistic "fallacious figments" trope. like Milford's hat inflating when he drinks strong alcohol, or outlaws moving in slow motion when they're fed loco weed.

The only notable feature of JAMES is a gimmick at the conclusion, where Jesse's gang is beaten not by the incompetent Milford, but by eight familiar western heroes, mostly from the small screen, except for Gary Cooper, more or less essaying his "High Noon" character. Tonto is one of these heroes, though there's no Lone Ranger, and the ranks even include Davy Crockett, who would have been about a hundred years old by Jesse James' time. Sadly, even this appealing bit is stultified by yet another unfunny Bing Crosby cameo. 

SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Just to get the classification thing out of the way: though there is a mention of "mental telepathy" in SCARED TO DEATH, as well as a schtick in which the film is partially the flashback of a dead woman, I discount both of these as indicators of any "marvelous" content. The narration is not unlike that of SUNSET BOULEVARD three years later: a mere narrative device, not a delving into how unquiet spirits occupy themselves.

Coincidentally, workhouse director Christy Cabanne died the same year of the release of SUNSET BOULEVARD. Cabanne directed dozens of Hollywood films from the silent years up to 1948, but I would guess that the only films in his repertoire that are watched today are this film and 1940's THE MUMMY'S HAND. The latter initiated a short run of Mummy-films that crystallizes the figure of the bandage-wrapped boogeyman for modern audiences. In contrast, SCARED TO DEATH seems to be more like the final nail in the coffin of the spooky murder-mystery.

Of course, such mysteries continued to appear throughout the fifties, so SCARED was not the last of its kind. But the script, by a two-credit writer named Walter Abbott, seems to go out of its way to pile coincidence upon coincidence, as if having fun at the expense of this type of "mellerdramer." (Abbott's only other Hollywood credit was a comedy entitled STOP THAT CAB.)

After the brief introduction of the framing-device, in which we see a female corpse on a slab start to flash back to her recent past, all of the action takes place at a sanatorium run by George Zucco's character, Doctor Van Ee (could the scripter have meant to write "Van Eyck" and gave it up because of the difficulty of spelling the name?) Also residing at the building-- which looks like nothing but the usual Hollywood mansion-- are the doctor's son Ward and his wife Laura, an ex-cop named Bill, serving as bodyguard to the doctor, and a nosy maid, Lilybeth. The central conflict is swiftly presented: Laura is estranged from Ward but won't give him a divorce, and for some unknown reason Laura suffers from some sort of hyperactive nervous condition. Since Laura is the dead person on the slab in "real time," it's not hard to guess that someone is going to do Ward a big favor and get rid of his annoying wife, much in the vein of 1943's CALLING DOCTOR DEATH, which looks like a classic horror-film next to SCARED.

Quick as flies to a picnic, the Van Ee estate starts getting visitors. First is Professor Leonide (Bela Lugosi) and his dwarf-accomplice Indigo (Angelo Rossito, teaming with Lugosi for the third time, though he gets almost nothing to do). Conversation between the professor and the doctor establishes that they are cousins, and there's some dark secret they share, though it really doesn't amount to much of anything for Doctor Van Ee. However, husband Ward takes advantage of Leonide's visit to probe him about a mysterious photograph Ward just happens to have found somewhere, showing two dancers in masks. Ward doesn't exactly say that he thinks the dancer is his wife, or that he's hoping to find something in the photo that might get him out of his unhappy marriage, but that seems the only reason to approach a virtual stranger on the subject. (Ward knows Leonide from a youthful encounter but the two don't have any history together, as Leonide does with Ward's old man.)

Then a green-masked figure shows up, though only for the audience's benefit. Laura gets gaslighted when someone sends her a package containing the head of a female dummy (I never did get the supposed significance of this.) Abbott's script does eventually reveal the source of Laura's hypertension and the reason why she never wants anything covering her eyes, but it's certainly a lot of work to little effect.

Also visiting the house are Terry. a nosy reporter, and his girlfriend. His visit is at least a little more believable than Leonide's purely coincidental appearance: Laura calls Terry because of receiving the dummy-head, hoping she can make a case against her husband or her father-in-law for trying to drive her mad. In reality, it's the guy in the green mask who's the source of the head, and he also happens to be a master hypnotist, for he puts the nosy maid into a death-like trance for a time. (I couldn't follow the reason for this, either.) The reporter more or less picks up the role of viewpoint-character to suss out the identity of the mysterious figure, though for once he isn't a serial killer. He only executes one character in the whole film, and that's Laura, who is-- yes, here it comes-- "scared to death."

The movie has the distinction of being Bela Lugosi's only color film, but since it's a pretty cheap-looking color process, there's little to no aesthetic merit to said distinction. Lugosi is fine, playing what I think is his last "red herring" role, but most of the actors, including character actor Nat Pendleton as the dumb flatfoot, just put in their time without distinction. Only Molly Lamont does well with the thin material, for she has to put across Laura's frenetic condition while keeping her unlikable. Interestingly, two years prior to SCARED, Lamont played a character in 1946's DEVIL BAT'S DAUGHTER, a Lugosi-less sequel to Lugosi's 1940 DEVIL BAT.