ONE ARMED SWORDSWOMAN (1972)

 PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

A lot of chopsockies emulated the internationally successful ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, so frankly I wasn't expecting anything much of this five-years-later Taiwanese knockoff. I have to hold the original producers guiltless of a screwup in the English credits: "Ching-Ching Chang als [sic] ONE ARMED SWORDSWOMAN," but I was unfamiliar with any other IMDB credits for the writer-director Sheng-en Chen. Similarly, I didn't know starring diva Chang or any of the other names, so I tend to assume the whole cast was Taiwanese, even if they were attempting to mimic the look of a Hong Kong Shaw film.

SWORDSWOMAN takes the opposite tack from SWORDSMAN in the characterization department. Whereas the viewer learns a lot about the family background of the 1967 protagonist, Chang's character Pan Yi Fung starts out as a one-dimensional "knight errant," who apparently has no other goal in life but to wander about killing ruthless bandits with her sword. Her puissance is displayed in an early scene where four bandits snare her with ropes, after which Pan frees herself and slays them with one smooth move. Then a traveling stranger comes along, praising her skills, which pleases her inordinately. More bandits appear to challenge Pan, and the stranger lends his skills to help her. But the stranger doesn't happen to kill any of the bandits and instead deals Pan a wound in her arm with a poisoned sword. The traveler reveals that he's really one of the bandit gang, and that Pan will soon perish of the poison. The noble fighter tries to take many of her foes with her, but she's clearly losing strength. But then another famous kung fu knight happens along and spirits Pan away.

The heroine's apparently able to direct her rescuer to Pan's estate, where she lives with one female servant. The savior is one Chen Peng Fei, known as the Black Dragon due to his attire: all-black robes and a hat with a face-shrouding black veil. Chen tells Pan and the servant that the only way to save Pan's life is to amputate her poisoned arm. Pan agrees to the operation, after which Chen takes his leave. Three years later, Pan has re-trained herself to compensate for her missing arm, but she's also formed an intense need to see the Dragon again. The terse script does not expound on her motives, but actress Chang conveys an immense feeling of loneliness.

She meets her black-garbed ally, who unmasks before her and sweet-talks her with homilies about the loner nature of martial artists. They have offscreen sex, but in the morning, Chen sneaks away like a dog. Pan follows him, and Chen insults her by offering her a valuable pearl for services rendered. Pan is heartbroken and returns home. Strangely, her maid advises Pan that she might still be united with the man she loves, and Pan decides to look for Chen once more, in case, I don't know, he's changed his mind about being a bastard.

Now, experienced filmgoers may foresee some shenanigans, given that Pan never saw Chen without his mask the first time, and anyone can wear an all-concealing black costume. But even if a viewer suspects trickery, Pan's next experience is unsettling, for suddenly she starts running into more black-garbed men, who, when she unmasks them, are not Chen. Then she kills-- or apparently kills-- a fifth Man in Black, after she's heard a young woman call him "Chen." Jealous, she attacks and kills the man, only to be told he's blind. She's so aggrieved that she almost lets a vengeful mob murder her. But once again, the Black Dragon saves Pan and takes her back home. There he unmasks, showing her that he's not the man to whom she surrendered herself. 

For some reason Chen and Pan fake their deaths to throw off the bandit gang, but the head guy-- Lee Ming-Tse, the fellow who deceived Pan-- sees through the charade. I don't know why Chen, divested of his costume, makes a solo attack on Lee and his goons in the bandit fortress, but the sortie ends with Chen retreating back to Pan's house, half-blinded by spears that eject streams of acid (!) Of course, the reason Chen must be sidelined is because Pan is the star, and to her goes the honor of confronting Lee and his gang, atop a mountain this time. Perhaps needless to say, Pan triumphs over all adversaries, though Lee does get in a mean jab about their romantic time together. And so the film ends with Pan alone amid her fallen foes, though in an earlier scene, the door's left open for a possible union of the two crusaders.

Chang provides a good range of emotions here, though everyone else is strictly Saturday-morning serial, and she does well in the battle scenes. As I commented in my SWORDSMAN review, the mundane removal of an arm doesn't generate an uncanny vibe for the "freakish flesh" trope, but Pan performs assorted superlative feats, particularly for being able to hurl twigs hard enough to pierce an enemy's throat. 

I'm sure that neither Sheng-en Chen or anyone else thought they were making a masterpiece. In the copy on TUBI, the final scene between Chen and Pan is spoiled by a sudden cut, presumably because some censor thought the romantic interlude too racy. Yet though I've seen dozens of flicks featuring kung-fu knights, even the few that address the disadvantages of a justice-seeking life, like CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, tend to underplay the emotional cost of the martial life. That cost is evident in the ease with which the disguised bandit gets Pan to turn her back on him, and her strange obsession with the real Chen, who relates to her only as patient to doctor, residing at her manor for a month just to preserve her life. Though the villain Lee never explains how he formulated his plan to sleep with her and then gaslight her, it's likely that he figured out how emotionally vulnerable Pan was, precisely because she'd tried to live a totally righteous life and found, like many others, that virtue being the reward for virtue was worse than no reward at all.  

                       

SANTO VS. THE RIDERS OF TERROR (1970)

 

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

After seeing Santo duel so often with monsters and mad scientists, it's interesting to see a flick in which he's the only metaphenomenal presence.

In some backwater part of Mexico, a local town is obliged to share the territory with a colony of lepers. The era is unclear but at this point in time the treatment of sulfa drugs has just been recently introduced, because at the film's end Santo advises the locals that leprosy can be controlled if not cured with such medications.

Prior to Santo's arrival in the area, the regular tensions between the town and the colony are exacerbated when the lepers flee their confines. Despite the enlightened attitude of the sensible lawmen and a compassionate doctor, the people fear that the lepers are highly communicable. To make matters worse, a gang of bandidos make common cause with the lepers to help spook their victims. Santo, who shares the forward-thinking views of the modern era, battles not only the bandidos but also the town's prejudice. The lepers, though they're sources of horror to the townfolk, are handled as ordinary suffering human beings.

There aren't many fight-scenes here, so that despite the pro-social message RIDERS is somewhat dull, except for the novelty of placing Santo in a relatively realistic situation. Allegedly director Rene Cardona filmed some spicier scenes for a more adult version of the film called "The Lepers and Sex," which might have added some excitement but probably detracted from the message.

DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL (1946)

 

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

DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL was the second of four low-budget features released by RKO Pictures. and the last of two films in which actor Morgan Conway played the role. Previous to this, Ralph Byrd had essayed the role in four earlier Republic serials, and he also filled the role in the last two of the RKO films, as well as playing Tracy for one season of a teleseries.

I don't know if the producers of the series knew in advance that this would be Conway's last Tracy performance, but the script almost goes out of its way to minimize the hero's role in the story, in contrast to the first flick, in which Conway is allowed to be relatively dynamic in his battle with the villain Splitface. Here, most of the narrative action is focused on the unremarkable evildoer Cueball (Dick Wessel). 

The story is another iteration of the old "gem thief on the lam" trope. Cueball, who has recently been released from prison, somehow acquires a cache of fabulous diamonds. However, one can't spend diamonds, so Cueball has to try to find underworld contacts able to translate the jewels into ready cash. It doesn't help Cueball's situation that he's a hot-tempered thug-- the kind it's hard to buy as a skilled thief-- and that he kills at least one of the contacts able to set up fencing deals. Cueball's usual method is to strangle his victims with a strap, but there's nothing unusual about either his killings or his appearance-- which is why I rate this film as purely naturalistic.

 Indeed, the most interesting thing about the film for me is the question, "what data might the script have provided about the villain's hairless state that might have given him some uncanny status?" But as things stand, there's nothing to Cueball except the sense that he may go off at any moment and kill someone. Wessel is okay in the role but the viewer will have seen tough thugs by the bushel, so he doesn't offer much fun. The actors who get the best lines this time out are Anne Jeffreys and Ian Keith as, respectively, Tracy's gutsy girlfriend and corny old actor Vitamin Flintheart. 

I am surprised to see on Wikipedia that CUEBALL was cited in 1978 as one of THE FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME. Such opprobrium is undeserved. CUEBALL is no better or worse than dozens of other B-pictures, able to dish a little minor diversion but otherwise unmemorable. I suspect the authors of the FIFTY WORST books just seized on this flick at random without making any nuanced judgment.

THE ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN (1967), RETURN OF THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN (1969)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *naturalistic,* (2) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*


So far almost every Hong Kong martial-arts film I've reviewed has earned only a "fair" or a "poor" in terms of mythicity, so at one point I wondered if any films from this period and locale could impress me in that respect. Happily, Chang Cheh's 1967 ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN scores high in that department, in addition to being the film that launched a new phase of *wuxia* movies.

The sociological matrix of the medieval hero's existence is given far more conspicuous attention than one sees in even the better chopsockies. When bandits attack the sword-school of Master Qi, one of his servants gives his life to preserve the master. The aristocratic Qi returns the favor by swearing to raise the servant's son Fang Kang as Qi's own child. Years later, Fang (Jimmy Wang) has reached young adulthood, as well as becoming Qi's only outstanding sword-pupil. Qi, whose only true offspring is his spoiled daughter Chi Pei, fantasizes that the two young people may even marry despite having been raised as technical siblings, so that Qi's art will be passed on, even through a peasant's bloodline.

However, though Chi definitely wants Fang, he wants nothing to do with her-- less because of their familial relationship than because he sees her as a spoiled twerp. Other aristocratic students despise Fang because he comes from nowhere, but Chi wants him simply because he's hard to obtain. She challenges Fang to a sword-duel, but because Fang respects his master/father, he refuses. She manages to provoke him into a hand-to-hand fight, where it's clear that she has no game whatever, and when she gets frustrated, she snatches up her sword and slices off one of Fang's arms. (Insert Freudian interpretation here.) Fang flees, but pain and blood-loss cause him to pass out. A peasant farm-girl, Xiao Man, brings him to her home and nurses him back to health. Xiao is Chi's opposite not just in terms of class but in terms of inner nature: though humble, she wants to live a simple existence far from the world of sword-duels. Fang tries to join her (though I don't believe the two of them are seen to marry). Yet when he learns of a threat to his surrogate father, Fang forces himself to master a one-armed sword-style to rescue Master Qi. However, after completing this obligation, Fang returns to Xiao's bucolic life.

The success of the 1967 film made it impossible for Fang to remain down home on the farm, but Cheh's sequel does at least keep the basic rudiments of the swordsman's antipathy to the life of violence. However, there are numerous sword-schools that are aware of Fang's impressive past deeds, and these students turn to Fang for help when a criminal gang, the Eight Warlords, tries to intimidate all rival schools.

Though Fang's one-armed swordsmanship is as naturalistic as before, a number of the Warlords wield bizarre weapons, making RETURN a film of uncanny phenomenality. For instance, "Thunder Blade" sports a sword that can shoot smoke-weapons, "Mighty Blade" is really strong and wields an oversized sword, and leader "Unseen Blade" wields a collapsible sword. However, though RETURN has a lot of bloody battles, I didn't think Cheh succeeded in exploiting the superhero-like charm of these gimmick-laden battles. Still, the integrity of the characters of Fang and Xiao is maintained. Though Wang later played other one-armed characters-- not least the one mentioned in ZATOICHI VS. THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN-- happily Fang and Xiao are allowed to go back to their lives, and even Chang Cheh's one other sequel, NEW ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, chose to make up a new hero instead of compromising Fang Kang.

Oddly, though there are no references to Qi and Chi from the first film, Chi's nastiness is replicated in "Thousand Blade," the one female member of the Warlords (Essie Lin Chia). Though she's not Xiao's rival for Fang as was Chi, Thousand Blade still incarnates the evils of feminine duplicity, for this Warlord specializes in beguiling her male victims with her beauty and then stabbing them with one of her many hidden blades. Though she meets the same fatal end as the other Warlords, she gets much more screen time than any of them, or anyone besides Fang Kang.

HANDS OF A STRANGER (1962)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


Newton Arnold spent most of his film-career as a second-unit director, but did manage to both write and direct one flick, HANDS OF A STRANGER. Admittedly it's not a totally original work, in that the basic plot was borrowed, without credit, from the novel THE HANDS OF ORLAC, which had been adapted to film three times previously.

Like most versions of ORLAC, the main character of STRANGER is a concert pianist-- named "Vernon Paris" this time-- who loses both hands in an accident. In most iterations, a surgeon successfully transplants the hands of a dead man onto the wrists of the pianist; however, the hands were those of a murderer, and the pianist becomes increasingly distressed about the potential of his once cultivated hands to commit acts of violence.

STRANGER does depart from the template, though, for no one in the film ever knows the identity of the hands' owner. The audience sees how the unnamed man meets his demise. He's first seen walking along a dark street with a briefcase. A car with two men rolls into view, and the man flees from it, clearly expecting trouble. The men in the car shoot him down, get out, search him and take something from his pockets, and leave. The last thing the stranger does is to clutch at a lamp-post before he dies, and it's later said that the citizens who find him must pry his hands from the post. This is all the audience ever knows about the stranger: that he's somehow involved in criminal activity and that he has strong hands.

Cut to surgeon Gil Harding. He's an idealist who hates to see death claim its due, in that he fulminates angrily about the loss of a patient. (He also waxes very poetic, as do almost all of Arnold's main characters do, which makes STRANGER an odd experience, more like watching a stage play than a movie.) That same night, Gil also gets to perform an autopsy on The Stranger, and reports his findings to police lieutenant Syms, who makes odd comments like calling fingerprints "pictures that tell me all I want to know." Syms, a weary cynic, is impressed with Gil's idealism, though neither of them expect to have further contact.

That same night, Vernon Paris finishes a concert performance to great acclaim. Vernon's character is initially introduced by his sister Dina in conversation with his manager George. Both of them admire Vernon, and George makes a remark about Dina finding a new relationship, to which she asks him if George is "implying a scandalous relationship between me and my brother." In later scenes the script expands by saying that Dina and Vernon bonded strongly after the death of their parents, and though I've not read the original Renard novel. I suspect that this aspect of the script is original to STRANGER.

Vernon is an idealist about aesthetics the way Gil is an idealist about medicine, but the pianist is also somewhat more narcissistic, enjoying the adulation of his sister, his manager, and of many women with whom he's casually romantic. He takes a taxi alone, but the cabbie recognizes Vernon. The driver regales Vernon with stories about the guy's piano-playing son, and because he's distracted, the cabbie crashes the car. Unconscious, Vernon is taken to the same hospital where Gil works. Manager George pleads with Gil to save the pianist's hands, but they've been utterly ruined by the car-crash. And it's at that point that Gil Harding puts his Frankenstein-hat on, removing the hands of the stranger and transplanting them to Vernon. (Since this operation is unsanctioned by the hospital, it gives Lt. Syms an excuse to keep tabs on the results of the operation.)

Because no one ever knows anything about the donor, neither the aggrieved pianist or his distressed sister are concerned about Vernon having a murderer's hands. In fact, Gil is the only one who brings up the idea that the owner might have been a "psychotic," when he says that "psychotic tendencies don't transfer themselves mystically." And this seems to be author Arnold's position, too, for at no point is it suggested that the hands function as anything but transplanted organs. All the problems stem from Vernon's inability to accept the loss of his dexterous digits, and like most psychos, he begins to see other people as his victimizers: the cabbie who caused the crash (and his son), his most recent girlfriend, and eventually the doctors who performed the operation. Even inanimate objects take on sinister meaning, as when Vernon visits a carnival and becomes stressed at the sight of clowns, bumper cars, a player piano and a funhouse mirror that exaggerates Vernon's alien hands.  His excuse is another poetic rumination: "the only real enemies the world has are the enemies of beauty."

As Vernon falls, though, Dina rises, for she falls in love with Gil, the man who tried to give her brother a second chance at life. Vernon doesn't seem overly jealous of Dina's divided loyalties, which isn't surprising since any sibling fixation seems to be on her side. He only resents another volley against his ego, which leads to a final confrontation between Vernon and his perceived enemies.

It's not a great film by any means. But even Ed Wood never gave a policeman an eyebrow-raising line about having an "erotic respect for perfection."

TOWER OF LONDON (1939), NIGHT KEY (1937)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *naturalistic,* (2) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


I mentioned the Rowland V. Lee TOWER OF LONDON while reviewing Roger Corman's same-name film, noting in passing that the Lee-directed work benefited from a more rounded cast of characters. I didn't remember for certain that Lee's version of Richard III didn't see ghosts of his murdered victims, as did the versions depicted by Shakespeare and Corman, and indeed, Lee's historical-drama-with-horrific-touches is firmly naturalistic in every way.

But though I enjoyed many of the character touches of the 1939 TOWER OF LONDON, it' doesn't always manage its many characters all that well, TOWER's script isn't directly based on the Bard's RICHARD III, but it could have used some of Shakespeare's ability to imbue even minor characters with distinct emotional attitudes. Far too many incidental "royal" characters are flung at the audience, and Lee doesn't manage to clarify the political situation in the days of Plantagenet England. Sadly, like many Universal films, the emotional core of "what's at stake" is concentrated upon the fate of two dewy-eyed young lovers, neither of whom sustained my interest.

With so many ill-defined "good" characters swarming about, the audience can't help but be most interested in the villains, Basil Rathbone's Richard III and Boris Karloff's fictional "Mord the Executioner," both of whom manifest the trope of "freakish flesh" in its naturalistic manifestation. As if to explain the alliance of this unholy duo, Richard's famed hunchback is given its mirror in his henchman's club-foot. Mord does all of Richard's dirty work within the torture chambers of the titular tower, and even maintains a curious "beggars' army" that he can use to spread rumors that work to Richard's advantage. Strangely, though Rathbone got better scenes than Karloff when the two actors collaborated that same year with Lee on SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, Lee's script gives both actors good scenes. Yet Rathbone, perhaps because he's made to play the usurper as both an insidious schemer and a courageous fighter, doesn't succeed in giving audiences a memorable Richard. Karloff's Mord, however, steals every scene he's in, playing a character who seems as if he's brutalized his own potential humanity through his acts of brutality-- which, in a roundabout way, would seem to be in tune with the moral of Shakespeare's play.

NIGHT KEY by comparison is very small beer indeed, Some Karloff fans have enjoyed him best when he played basically benevolent men who overreach themselves, as he did in THE APE. For my money, though, these are some of Karloff's most monotonous performances, and David Mallory of NIGHT KEY may be a low point here.

Karloff plays David Mallory, an electronics expert with a grown daughter, Jean. They live a low-income existence because fifteen years ago Mallory's last great discovery, a complex "electric eye" alarm system, was taken over by his business partner. the oddly-named Steven Ranger, in such a way that Mallory got nothing. Mallory then spent the ensuing time trying to devise an even more improved alarm-system, in the hope of lifting himself and Jean out of penury. We also later learn that Mallory and Ranger were once competitors for a woman, and that this woman became the mother of Jean, meaning that Mallory won that contest. So, given these two points of contention between Mallory and Ranger, you wouldn't think that the scientist, worried about his failing eyesight, would seek out Ranger to exploit his new alarm-system.

Yet, even with the advice of a lawyer, Mallory gets swindled again. Ranger buys the new system so that he can keep Mallory from marketing it elsewhere, perhaps in part because of his old grudge about Jean's mother-- though he never admits as much.  Mallory tries to reason with Ranger, but apparently Mallory's lawyer didn't read the contract very well. Mallory warns his old partner that he can "destroy what he created."

Just as Ranger prepares a big press event to celebrate his current alarm-system, Mallory uses a sort of "override mechanism" to short-circuit the alarm. He also frees a petty crook, name of Petty Louie, from incarceration, but does so only to embarrass Ranger. After ruining the demonstration, Mallory then uses the override device to infiltrate businesses with the system, not stealing anything but leaving behind mocking notes. Petty Louie goes along with him, providing the film with some much-needed humor when he tries to swipe things, much like the proverbial kid in the candy store.

The cops go looking for Mallory, and so does a security officer who works for Ranger, one Travers. Travers courts Mallory's daughter Jean and tries to arrange a deal for Ranger to give Mallory immunity from prosecution if the scientist will stop messing around. However, hard-core crooks get wind of Mallory's override device-- the "night key" of the title-- and capture both Mallory and Petty Louie, in order to force the scientist to open the vaults of the city to them.

The romantic subplot is not much more interesting than Karloff's befuddled scientist routine, and the crime story distracts from the nastiness of Steven Ranger, who seems a worse menace insofar as he commits "crimes" under the aegis of "good business."  I realize that a feature that's barely over an hour can't adequately comment on the evils of capitalism. I just find it more satisfying when the cheating capitalists are knocked off by mad scientists, rather than publicly chastised.

Aside from the comic moments of Hobart Cavanaugh's goofy crook, NIGHT KEY is mostly interesting for showing the status of electronics in the days before integrated circuits, much less microchips. Yet what Mallory's invention does is functionally indistinguishable from the modern "computer override," so I regard it as an "uncanny" device rather than a "marvelous" one. In John Stanley's CREATURE FEATURES the author incorrectly claims that Mallory uses a "death ray" against his crook-captors, but it's just a big showy electrical discharge, not a ray of any kind.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, cosmological*


Three years passed between Eon Productions' 1974 THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and 1977's SPY WHO LOVED ME, thanks to legal and financial problems.  Without celebrating the misfortunes that caused these production problems, the delay may have contributed to making the third Roger Moore-Bondfilm a much better film than the previous entries.

As has been my practice here, I reread the Fleming novel before rewatching the film.  Though film-producers in general have a habit of not following their source material, here the Eon producers can't be faulted, for their contract forbade them from using anything but the book's title.  They still managed to find inspiration in the Fleming work, though, and probably concocted a work more pleasing to moviegoers than any straight adaptation of the novel.

SPY the novel has a entirely naturalistic phenomenality, and diverges from the rest of Fleming's series in that the narrative unfolds from the first-person vantage of Vivienne Michel.  This young woman, lured into an insurance scam, has her life endangered by two professional thugs, only to be saved by the chance intervention of James Bond.  The two thugs, "Sluggsy" and "Horror," are close to being DICK TRACY grotesques, with one described as having steel-capped teeth while the other as suffering from congenital hairlessness.  However, like some of the "freakish" hoods in the earlier DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER novel, these mundane hoods never convey the sense of "strangeness" that marks the phenomenal mode of the uncanny. They're just plain ugly.

Sluggsy's steel-capped teeth, however, inspired writers Richard Maibaum and Christopher Wood to create one of film-Bond's best sparring partners, the titanic, steel-toothed Jaws (Richard Kiel).  If the Jaws character were the only metaphenomenal aspect of SPY, his strength, near-indestructibility and steel teeth would qualify for the trope of "outre outfits skills and devices." 

As it happens, though, the SPY-film falls into the category of the marvelous by virtue of its main villain, Karl Stromberg (Curt Jergens) as a sort of demi-Nemo who is devoted to the beauties of the ocean.  He also plans to bring about armageddon in order to make a new start for mankind.  The "mcguffin" in the plot is a mundane submarine tracking system, but as Bond and his female lead chase after the device, they uncover Stromberg's plot, which includes his having constructed his own underwater city whereby to survive the cataclysm. 

Stromberg is certainly the reason I didn't like this film much the first time round.  His love for the sea ought to make him a very dynamic Bond-villain, given that two of the best Bond-villains in the books, Emilio Largo and Mister Big, carried nautical associations.  But though Curt Jergens does his best with the character, the Stromberg character is never more than the sum of his parts.

Both the book and film serials starring James Bond have often been accused of being demeaning or condescending to women.  I've disputed this in other reviews, but SPY WHO LOVED ME is a definite improvement over MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, where the lead female was played as a ditz.  The heroine who was "spy-loved" in the novel was not entirely defenseless-- she was at least able to use a gun-- but the film's female lead is much more formidable.  In tune with the era's appeals to ideological compromise between Western democracy and Soviet Communism, Russian spy-girl Anya Asamova (Barbara Bach) is played as Bond's opposite number on the other side.  The script never condescends to Asamova, who outmaneuvers Bond on a couple of occasions and shows herself able to defend herself against normal opponents.  I would have liked to see her be a little more dynamic at the film's climax, but this wasn't a deal-killer.  Bach's romance with Bond-- who, we learn early on, has accidentally killed Asamova's lover-- is handled intelligently; she certainly doesn't fall into 007's bed at the crook of Bond's finger.

Finally, though I felt Roger Moore never found a decent take on Bond in his first two films, the script gives Moore a much more centered role.  The Bond of LIVE AND LET DIE is effete despite his skills, and the Bond of GOLDEN GUN is frankly clownish.  But in SPY Moore's Bond seems far more the professional spy-- and killer-- than he had seemed to be in any of the Eon Bond-films since THUNDERBALL.

BLACK DRAGONS (1942), FIRST YANK INTO TOKYO (1945)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*

BLACK DRAGONS, a WWII film directed by William Nigh (who had previously directed star Bela Lugosi in 1935's MYSTERIOUS MR. WONG) is a so-so blend of wartime themes with the horror-movie tropes characteristic of earlier Lugosi films.  The film's main interest for me, however, is how it illustrates a particular subset of my "freakish flesh" trope.  Nine out of ten times, anything I label with this trope connotes a narrative in which someone has some natural physical characteristic culturally deemed to be "freakish" in some way.  Here the physical characteristic is one created by advanced surgery.

DRAGONS' title plays loosely off wartime America's knowledge of the super-patriotic Japanese group known as the Black Dragon Society.  However, the crux of the script asks the question: what if the Japanese could become fifth-columnists working to undermine America?  Germans could do so with impunity, but one would expect the Asian features of the Japanese to prevent them from "blending in."

Surgery proves the solution, though this isn't revealed until late in the film.  For half the film one only knows that a mysterious killer, known as Monsieur Colomb (Lugosi), is killing off prominent political or social figures in Washington D.C.  Agent Dick Martin (LONE RANGER immortal Clayton Moore) centers his investigation of the killings upon Colomb, the guest of a local luminary named Doctor Saunders, but the G-Man cannot initially prove anything. Saunders' niece Alice (Joan Barclay) also occupies the residence and seems determined to vamp the mysterious Colomb, despite the fact that he's about thirty years her senior.

Eventually the complicated truth comes out.  Colomb is actually a Nazi surgeon named Melcher.  He travelled to Japan in order to perform operations that transformed six members of the Black Dragon Society into identical doubles for the prominent citizens.  Once the citzens were replaced-- the film is murky as to how this was done-- the camoflagued spies took over their identities in order to somehow destroy America's war effort. 

The Society's leaders, however, made a mistake, for they decided to imprison and execute Melcher so that he could never reveal the secret.  Melcher escaped execution and voyaged to America, no longer interested in serving the war effort and seeking only revenge upon the "monkeys" who betrayed him.  Thus it comes out that although Melcher/Colomb is evil, he's been working to the benefit of the Allies by killing Japanese spies.

Heroes and villains alike receive only the flattest of characterizations, and the American/Japanese conflict receives no insight beyond the usual propangandistic tropes.  Only Alice seems to be a little
unusual in her pursuit of Colomb, but it eventually comes out that she too is an agent of some intelligence unit, so that she was only pretending affection for him.  The only moderately interesting dialogue appears between Moore and Barclay as he tries to figure out why she's interested in the old geezer Colomb.

As a last horrific touch, Melcher doesn't simply kill his final spy-victim, but mutilates the man's face so that he looks a little on the ghastly side (though not too ghastly). 

Just to cite how an entirely naturalistic film approached the same trope, I point to 1945's FIRST YANK INTO TOKYO.  This film reverses the racial masquerade, in that an American officer with the very vanilla name of "Major Steve Ross" (Tom Neal) accepts a unique undertaking.  In order to find a man being held in a Japanese prison camp, Ross allows the alteration of his features and skin-color so that he will appear to be a native of Nippon.  In this guise he successfully infiltrates the Japanese army, which gives him every opportunity to see the unregenerate scumminess of the people, both at home and at war.  Despite the suspicions of one Japanese officer, Ross succeeds in making it into the prison, gathering vital information from the internee, and transmitting it to his people. In addition, Ross just happens to stumble across his former fiancee working in the camp as a nurse.  She thinks Ross is dead, and when she sees him altered into a man who looks like her people's enemy, she comes close to wishing him dead.  Ross gets her clear of Japan as well, and stays behind, pledging to join the Koreans in their battle-- implying that even if his surgery was reversed, he's been in some sense polluted by even wearing the image of a hated Asian.

DEAD RINGER (1964), THE BLACK ROOM (1935)

PHENOMENALITY: (1)*naturalistic* (2) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1)*poor*; (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

It is believed that twins are able to bestow happiness,
health and prosperity upon their family. However, since
they can also bring about disaster, disease and death, they
will be treated with all due respect, loving and care. Their
upbringing is therefore far more permissive than that of
other children (Stoll & Stoll, 1980).-- from this website.

I chose to pair these two films in review because they respectively show naturalistic and uncanny takes upon the real-world phenomenon of twinship.

That phenomenon is not readily associated with the popular conception of "the freak," as is the related phenomenon of "conjoined twinship," even though the same basic biological processes give rise to both entities.  But in terms of fictional narrative, twins can be used isophenomenally (as in Paul Henreid's DEAD RINGER) or metaphenomenally (as in Roy William Neill's BLACK ROOM). Both films turn on an identical plot-idea-- a sibling murders his/her twin in order to take the twin's place in society-- and both stories are star vehicles in which the star naturally plays both roles through the use of film illusionism, with the emphasis naturally centering on the murderer and his/her attempted deception.

In RINGER, Bette Davis imparts an sympathetic air to the travails of Edith, who lost the love of her life to twin Margaret.  Margaret bamboozled Edith's rich suitor into marriage with a pretended pregnancy, leaving Edith to cry in her beer for the next 20 years, during which Margaret's husband passed away and left all of his wealth to the scheming twin.  When Edith-- suffering in comparative poverty-- finds out about Margaret's deception, she arranges to kill Margaret and assume her identity.  To do this, Edith also has to fake her own death, much to the chagrin of her friend police sergeant Hobbson (Karl Malden), who unbeknownst to Edith has been in love with Edith for years.

Naturally, the road to riches doesn't go smoothly for Edith, particularly when it develops that Margaret had a boyfriend who regularly drops in, expecting "Margaret" to welcome him.  RINGER doesn't contain any real surprises, and in tone feels like many of the crime melodramas Davis made twenty years earlier.  In time Hobbson begins to suspect "Margaret" of committing the murder of "Edith," resulting in a typically ironic conclusion. 

Davis and Malden acquit themselves best, particularly when Hobbson comes this close to suspecting what really happened, and when Davis realizes that she wasted years of her life not being with the ardent detective.  In 1964 Davis was still a few months away from debuting in her first all-out horror-work, HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE.  (I don't rate BABY JANE as horror at all, merely as a macabre thriller.) RINGER is simply another thriller that avoids anything spooky or macabre about the twins and their relationship.  To the extent that one can regard "twins" as a manifestation of the freakishness of birth-processes, RINGER stays firmly within the boundaries of the naturalistic. 

In contrast to Davis, whose association with horror-films was yet to come, the star of 1935's THE BLACK ROOM had become America's "poster boogieman" for the genre.  Even if one discounts everything Boris Karloff had done prior to 1931's FRANKENSTEIN, eight of the sixteen films he did up to appearing in ROOM were metaphenomenal in nature, if not always strictly in the horror-genre.  Yet Karloff also did several films throughout his career that are much like Davis' RINGER: thrillers with no metaphenomenal content.  So the question arises: would BLACK ROOM qualify as a metaphenomenal film if an actor with a more mundane resume played the role?

In contrast to RINGER, I believe ROOM does play off the "strangeness" of the twin-phenomenon.  It helps that the twins in the film are such broadly-drawn opposites.  Gregor, baron of some Tyrolean province by virtue of being born first, is an absolute rotter, while younger twin Anton is a soulful angel, despite the fact that he, unlike Gregor, was born with a deformity: a paralyzed right arm.  In addition, both twins have been somewhat haunted by a prophecy.  Their noble line began with a pair of twins, who fell out.  The younger murdered the older and dumped his body in a dungeon called "the Black Room," so the prophecy asserts that the baronial line will die out the same way.  The main body of the film begins with Gregor inviting Anton back to the palace after an estrangement of many years.  Anton accepts, having no knowledge that Gregor is both a tyrant to his people and a libertine who has caused many women to simply "disappear."

Anton finds out soon enough.  Gregor takes Anton to the long-sealed Black Room, shows him some of the corpses he's dropped into the dungeon, and callously murders his brother there.  Then Gregor, knowing that his people plan to rise and oust him from his position, feigns to cede his office to Anton-- planning to masquerade as Anton (complete with a pretense of a paralyzed arm) for the rest of his life.

Gregor is such a clever cad that one almost expects him to pull off the deception.  His libido proves to be the heel's "Achilles heel."  He fancies young Thea (Marian Marsh), who is both the daughter of a political opponent and the fiancee of a young soldier, so he connives at a marriage between Thea and "Anton."  This forces him to take more chances and commit more murders before ultimately, unlike the Bette Davis character, Gregor is exposed in public.  A rousing chase-scene follows, leading to a climax in which, as the prophecy suggests, the younger twin does slay the latter.

Prophecies which seem to come true, but are not actually dispensed by gods or psychics, I deem "uncanny" under my category of "phantasmal figurations," in that their provenance is questionable at some time during the story.  But even without this aspect of the film, Neill confers a sense of  "strangeness" to the proceedings.  It's certainly possible that another filmmakers might have taken the same plot-elements and rendered something more naturalistic, along the lines of Joseph Mankiewicz's DRAGONWYCK.  But in BLACK ROOM the twins by themselves make a very strange pair, at once (as the myth-quotation above has it)  capable of bestowing both beneficience and malevolence equally-- while in RINGER, both twins are just two eccentric human beings.