RASPUTIN THE MAD MONK (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

The best line in this Hammer take on history's mesmeric madman appears early in the film, when wild country-monk Rasputin justifies his immoral activities to one of his churchly superiors:

When I go to confession I don't offer God small sins, petty squabbles, jealousies... I offer him sins worth forgiving!

I would have loved to have seen a Rasputin who fulfilled this narcissistic credo, one who honestly believed in the religiosity of drinking and whoring because it gave God sins weighty enough to be worth forgiving. However, this line seems to exist only to allow the viewer to get over the conundrum as to how this Russian priest could be so thoroughly devoted to acts of ungodliness, which the film proceeds to chronicle in lavish detail. There's no intention to "psychologize" Rasputin or any other character, which may be fortunate, but I still had the feeling that all the characters in MAD MONK were merely going through the paces given them by director Don Sharp and Anthony Hinds. (Later Hinds' script for 1970's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA would also dally with Sadean sinfulness, with better results.)

Prior to this review, only my analysis of 1941's KING OF THE ZOMBIES dealt with a case where my category "enthralling hypnotism and stage magic" applied to a film where a hypnotist or magician was the film's *focal presence,* the fictional presence around which the story revolves. Hypnotism is merely a minor effect in 1957's HOLD THAT HYPNOTIST and 1985's JOURNEY OF THE DOOMED, and a hypnotist is the major opponent for Charlie Chan in 1944's BLACK MAGIC. But RASPUTIN is closer than ZOMBIES to the classical "evil hypnotist" story immortalized by Svengali et al. Indeed, RASPUTIN is so much about the mad monk who held the fate of Czarist Russia in his hands that Christopher Lee's take on the character is really the only facet of the film that truly shines. Lee takes full advantage of his own gaunt features by bulging out his eyes when he's either performing his miraculous healing-cures or putting pathetic victims like Barbara Shelley under his aegis. It's a strong performance, but the other characters are so blandly scripted that they don't seem worthy to be in the same film with Lee's Rasputin, much less that some of them actually manage to kill him in the end. Regardless of how the film was conceived, RASPUTIN feels like a one-actor show, in which everyone else is just there to make Lee look good.

In another type of film, one could picture Rasputin's healing arts to verge into the category of "the marvelous." Here, though the film does not suggest how Rasputin's cures work (much less how he executes them, given his domineering attitude), but the default explanation seems to be that the monk's hypnotic abilities simply "jump-start" his subjects into healing themselves. Something similar may underlie how Rasputin throws off the initial efforts of his enemies to kill him with poison and stabbings, though he does prove merely mortal in the end. One Hammer producer commented that if Hammer had faithfully represented the entirety of those efforts-- that is, showing Rasputin survive death as many times as he purportedly did in real life-- the effect then would have been inescapeably comic. In this case, less was definitely more.

I should note that as with the phenomenon of hypnosis itself, the historical figure of Rasputin is one that can bivalent: "uncanny" in one work, and merely "atypical" in another work. I haven't rescreened 1932's RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS in many years, but though it too ends with Rasputin's assassins striving with might and main to execute their target, I tend to think the 1932 film would be merely "atypical" in its phenomenality.

THOR (2011) (spoilers)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*


I’m writing this review two weeks after the profitable opening of Marvel Studios' adaptation of the THOR comic book. As with Iron Man, Thor is one of those perennial features which, outside the bubble of comics-fandom, hasn’t been a name with which to conjure. But the cinematic THOR propels the character to a new level of widespread recognition, as did the first IRON MAN film, by tapping into the pre-summer blockbuster anticipation. To be sure, this isn’t the sole reason that THOR THE MOVIE is doing well, for it does present an attractive if mixed-bag package. But good points aside, the thunder-god film doesn’t earn its new fame quite as honestly as did the armored avenger.


In my reviews I generally try to explore whatever literary myth underlies a given work. THOR, however, is a “movie of many parts,” in which the different aspects, good and bad, mitigate against the film’s having any sound structure. Thus, I’m reduced to the old bullet-point approach. Readers who already saw and enjoyed the film--which seems the dominant response--may prefer just to stick with the good points.


GOOD STUFF:

The actors, without a doubt, are THOR’s greatest asset. Chris Hemsworth makes a fine Thor for the slimmed-down, post-Schwarzenegger generation of heroes. The romance between his “god-brought-down-to-earth” and lady scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is easily the strongest element of the movie. Despite pedestrian dialogue Anthony Hopkins and Idris Elba put across the gravitas of powerful gods, and Tom Hiddleston puts emotional depth into villainous Loki--too often portrayed as a road-company Shakespearean schemer, even by creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby-- though the script makes his motivations murky at best. In contrast to the “serious” gods, the film does an admirable job translating Thor’s buddy-deities, who all have good presence even when they’re not given much to do. Non-fans will probably be puzzled to hear the three guy-warriors--Hogun, Fandral and Volstaag--refer to themselves as “the Warriors Three” even though they’re never seen apart from their unofficial fourth member, tough warrior-woman Sif. In the comic Sif became Thor’s inamorata after Lee and Kirby phased out their version of Jane Foster, but naturally this film allows for no romantic sparks between Sif and the thunder-god.


The costumes are excellent, even if the filmmakers ditch Thor’s iconic helmet for most of the film, probably because it would have been a hassle to deal with in fight-scenes. Loki and Heimdall are particular standouts.


Of the three big fight-scenes, two of them-- Thor and his buddies battling a stunning version of The Destroyer, and Thor versus Loki--are very good. Only the opening salvo, in which Thor and his allies fight a gang of CGI frost-giants, disappoints, as it follows the current trend toward hyperkinetic fast-cuts that (intentionally?) make the action hard to follow.


Finally, two of the strongest plot-elements are derived from the Lee-Kirby comic. Loki’s villainy in the film stems from the insecurity of learning that he’s an adoptive son, which plot-point riffs on a TALES OF ASGARD story in which Odin adopts the son of a slain enemy. And though Odin’s reason for exiling Thor to Earth is very different from the one given by the comic book in the seminal THOR #159, the purpose is still that of imparting humility to an arrogant warrior-god.


However, mentioning the matter of war-gods brings me to the first item of the BAD STUFF.


I don’t expect the cinematic THOR to be a perfect translation of the comic book, any more than the comic accurately adapted the complexities of Norse mythology. Yet no matter how freeform the Lee-Kirby comic book was, the creators always understood the elemental appeal of the Thor myth: the pageantry and sacral violence of a warrior ethic. Movie-THOR clumsily rewrites this key value into a nancy-boy renunciation of the glories of violence. I have only contempt for critics who analyze films as if they were direct allegories of current events. Yet, when Odin dresses down Thor for hauling ass on the frost-giants, I heard in the tedious dialogue some scriptwriter’s fantasy of George H.W. Bush reaming out Dubya for his martial misadventures.


The film pretty much craps on the “high-fantasy” aspects of the Thor comic. The Asgard of Lee and Kirby is a pop-culture mélange where magical menaces are often repelled by weapons that look like Tolkienized versions of howitzers. But even with intrusions of SF-imagery, Lee and Kirby’s Asgard is an endless vista of wonders, and thus fits Tolkien’s chief criterion for a good secondary world: “enchantment.” The Asgard of Kenneth Branagh and his writers is a dreary SF-rationalization of mythology. True, when “science fantasy” does its semi-rational versions of archaic mythology, such stories have their own aesthetic and can’t be judged on precisely the same terms as pure fantasies. But THOR’s visualizations of the only two otherworldly realms of the film--Asgard and Jotunheim--are so bland, so devoid of wonder or even functional design, that I found myself waxing nostalgic for 1987’s MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.


I said earlier that the character of Loki takes on greater solidity thanks to the film’s adaptation of the “adopted evil son” motif from the comic book. However, in the comics-story the adoption takes place because Odin has slain Loki’s natural father Laufey. But the film bollixes up this plot-thread. In the film’s past, Odin finds baby Loki and believes at the time that the kid's parents are dead. But by present time both he and the audience know that Laufey is quite alive, as he’s the film’s secondary villain. One never knows at what point Odin makes this discovery, but once the audience learns it, Odin’s action of keeping Loki ignorant of his heritage begins to look less like beneficence and more like child-stealing. Loki’s “adoption” also parallels the Agardians’ theft of a mysterious “casket” from their frosty foes, which is some sort of power-source that the Jotuns want back, but this plot-device only exists to set up initial hostilities and fades out of the narrative quickly. At the eleventh hour of the film, in order to give viewers an FX-heavy finale, Loki suddenly unleashes a world-sundering menace that the film never sets up properly. Given how much effort the writers lavish on building the Thor-Jane relationship, it would have been nice if one didn’t get the feeling that they thought they could jerk the other characters around like so many chess-pieces.


Finally, I understand that the rationalization of the Thor-cosmos is an expedient way to get around whatever narrative difficulties the filmmakers had with making the Asgardians “real gods.” Aside from heading off protests from repressive religious forces, the SF-motif emanicipates (word-play intentional) the plot from the idea that these gods must be exclusively Caucasian Nordics. Thus Asgard can be multicultural, with a black Heimdall and an Asian Hogun. (In fairness, Jack Kirby did impart a vague Mongolian design to his Hogun). Yet this nod to multi-culti creates a logical problem. If the Asgardians are extradimensional aliens who enjoyed some independent existence before Earthpeople started worshipping them as gods, why have they become subsumed by Nordic culture? Prose science fantasies usually hypothesize that some advanced culture, whose representatives came to Earth sporting such names as “Apollo” or “Osiris,” come to Earth and that Earthmen copy both their mythology and their archaic culture from the alien gods. But THOR doesn’t veer into that Von Daniken-esque territory, though that may have been the intention. There’s just one scene of archaic Earth-times, in which invading frost-giants attack Earth and the gods come to humanity’s rescue. The implication I got from the scene was that the Scandinavians bestowed Nordic names on the aliens. If my memory’s accurate, then why do the multi-culti aliens keep exclusively Nordic names, instead of having a host of mythological identities? Did no one but the Scandinavians encounter these alien gods?


It’s clear to me that the original comics-idea—that the Nordic gods, whatever their origins, simply existed in some fairy-tale world—is less difficult to put across both logically and aesthetically. I’m aware that the cinematic THOR is also compromised by a grand scheme that will unite Thor and other Marvel heroes in a live-action AVENGERS movie, but I don’t think Asgard had to be purged of all of its wonderment just so that Thor wouldn’t (theoretically) outshine his more mundane colleagues. I didn’t expect Branagh’s alien gods to speak King James English, but a little grandeur in the language department would have gone a long way, as against Thor talking like a well-spoken yuppie with an extreme-sports jones.


I don’t know if other comics-fans yearned to see a cinematic THOR that translated the power and exoticism of the Lee-Kirby Asgard, which would have been fit to stand alongside the best magical fantasies of the cinema. Maybe most fans are just pleased that this Thor doesn’t look like a doofus, as did his previous live-action iteration in 1988’s THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS. But when I see such potential wasted, I’d rather watch a popcorn film—again, like the aforementioned He-Man film-- that never had any potential from the get-go.
Parting thought: the 3-D version sucks. Two dimensions are enough for this two-dimensional flick.

HOODWINKED (2005) & HOODWINKED TOO (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological


Here's the simplest way to describe the appeal of the original HOODWINKED, First creators Cory and Todd Edwards took the basic structure of the typical 1990s Disney cartoon-feature, with its focus on a young protagonist given to singing plaintive "I want" songs at the opening. Then the creators overlaid this basic structure with a variety of narrative devices on loan from Quentin Tarantino-- fragmented narrative, heavy pop-culture referentiality, and an eclectic musical score. This Quentinizing of a "tired old tale" took a few more chances than other recent fairy-tale spoofs, such as SHREK, and did well at the 2005 box-office.

Now the classic folktale of "Little Red Riding Hood" was a favorite target for spoofery in the Golden Age of Theater Animation. Still, though the first HOODWINKED is as strong as the best Disneys in terms of verbal jokes and sight-gags, its real appeal was, like the Disneys, its ability to put across a simple but elemental emotional conflict alongside all the japery. Scholars like Bettleheim have speculated that the original folktale was meant to serve as an admonition young girls received from their mothers about the dangers of strange wolves in the woods. The Edwardses don't aim to get quite that profound, but I doubt it's coincidence that the central conflict of HOODWINKED is between young Red, the film's preteen protagonist, and Granny Puckett. But the Edwardses invert the folktale's lesson-giving structure. Instead of Little Red learning the perils, both to her and her granny, of messing with wolves, this Red, who yearns for a more fulfilling life than delivering goodies for the Puckett Bakery, finds out that her granny is secretly living the "extreme" life Red years for, and keeps it secret from Red for no clear reason. A probable model for this conflict may be that of Ariel and Triton in LITTLE MERMAID, where the young heroine again chafes under the heavy hand of an adult perceptor, only to bond later against a more deep-dyed villain.

The real villain of HOODWINKED, incidentally, is not handled in the Disney manner, but is hidden in plain sight along the lines of an animated Keyzer Soze. Because the film keeps the villain (SPOILERS-- the bunny did it) out of the main narrative, the script is free to focus on more hijinks with the various heroes. The Wolf (a crusading reporter instead of a hungry/lusty assailant) and his squirrel-buddy Twitchy are the "B-team" to Red and Granny's "A-team," but the two teams don't really interact in any meaningful way, which doesn't hurt HOODWINKED but does present a problem for the sequel. Other characters, such as Kirk, "the Woodsman", Japheth the Goat and Nicky Flippers (a fun in-joke derived from cinematic sleuth Nick Charles), are really just there to funnel jokes, and vary from annoying to admirable.

Having come to a rousing conclusion (though strangely, lacking a concluding song as good as the ones given Red and Japheth), HOODWINKED ends with a very unsubtle set-up for a sequel, implying that Nicky is going to corral most of these lone wolves (excepting Kirk the Woodsman-- wise choice to leave him out) and get them to work with him in a secret organization that makes sure all fairytales have happy endings. And it's this problematic idea that HOODWINKED TOO, scripted by pretty much the same people but with a new director, has to build from.




The problem inherent in this idea is that while being fairy-tale enforcement agents sounds great for the A-team, the script has to dance around the fact that it makes little sense for Wolf and Twitchy. What we have in TOO is a pale rendering of your basic "buddy action-comedy." It's not infrequent in such stories to have some super-competent enforcement-agent obliged to join forces with a character who's at best a noob and at worst a total screwup. But, even granting a lot of leeway to the motivations of cartoon animals, Wolf and Twitchy simply aren't believeable doing the crimefighting thing of their own conscious volition, rather than being, as in the first film, forced into it by circumstance.

This is particularly tough to sell because, the conflict between Red and Granny having been settled, for TOO the Edwardses opt to generate a bland "conflict" between the super-tough but unsubtle Red and the tricky but maladroit Wolf. The scenes of them carping at each other for imagined offenses are painfully dull, usually only relieved by some comic business by Twitchy.

The villains are weaker, too. Whereas the first film set up the revelation of "the last bunny you'd expect," the sequel gives away the game about halfway through the narrative. This might not be a bad thing if the Real Villains had any presence, but neither they nor their Bungling Assistant Who Later Turns Good are anything to write home about. The bad guys even turn colossal at the end, as if to signal that the writers were again cribbing from LITTLE MERMAID-- but this time, in a bad way. Fortunately, the filmmakers give us a guest appearance of the Boingo Bunny, though the bad bunny's character naturally puts the lesser fiends to shame.

There are a lot of good jokes and sight-gags (though no songs) in TOO, so it's not entirely a waste of time. And it's at least funnier than any of the SHREK sequels. But TOO won't be making very many lists of "movies where the sequels were better than the originals."

DICK TRACY (1990)

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


"If deformity and disfigurement were not to be worn as stains, then what indeed was punishment?"-- Jay Maeder, DICK TRACY: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY, p. 57.


Warren Beatty's DICK TRACY, for which he wore two hats as star and director, makes an interesting study in contrasts.

For my AUM system the original Chester Gould comic strip is an important exemplar of two major tropes of the uncanny-metaphenomenal. In TRACY "outre outfits skills and weapons" usually comes down to unconventional but not-quite-marvelous weapons, sometimes used by police but more often by criminals. But the TRACY strip is far better known for the trope of "freakish flesh" in that Gould created a host of bizarre villains with all manner of peculiar deformities: Flat Top, the Brow, Little Face, the Mole, Pruneface, and even a man who apparently had no face at all: the Blank.





The Beatty film technically reproduces both tropes, though the only really weird weapon in the film is the Blank's method of dosing the hero into dreamland with sleep-gas flowers. As for the freaky villains-- well, they are there, though the script by writing-team Jim Cash and Jack Epps crams so many TRACY villains into the mix that hardly any of them score well on the strange-o-meter. The Brow, Pruneface, Littleface and others are often relegated to minor player-status, and aside from the Blank-- who merits special attention-- the only Gould villains who come off particularly well are Flat Top and Itchy, who are simply hired muscle for the chief villain, Big Boy Caprice. Caprice was TRACY's first major villain, but he like most of the early Gould-ghouls was not freakish in the least. Cash and Epps attempt to make him "fit in" by giving him a hunchback, but the film's Caprice is played by Al Pacino more for borscht-belt comedy than for grotesquerie.


SPOILER ALERT


In the comic strip the Blank was simply a contract killer who had a maimed, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA-style face and chose to make a new name for himself by covering that face with a cheesecloth mask. However, the film's Blank is revealed to be that femme fatale Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), a chanteuse who works for (and maybe under) Big Boy but who plans to usurp Big Boy's crime empire by setting him up for a fall. Breathless also plans to use Dick Tracy to accomplish her ends, but wants to seduce him to a life of crime as well. Ironically, in Warren Beatty's take on Chester Gould, the strongest villain is one of the "beautiful people." (It's also Madonnna's best film-performance-- which I know isn't saying much, but still.)

Jay Maeder comments that the element of physical deformity in DICK TRACY gives Chester Gould's world a note of savage cruelty, one which was often reflected in the (literally) hardnosed POV of the strip's protagonist. Beatty's TRACY reflects none of Gould's cruel rigor in either the film or the hero, though as it happens one year after TRACY Beatty would play Bugsy Malone with exactly the sort of noir nastiness one finds in the Gould Tracy. Beatty's version of the Gould-verse has clearly been influenced by the earlier success of Tim Burton's BATMAN. Hence, Beatty's Tracy is something of a tough but often bemused idealist not unlike Burton's Bruce Wayne, and Beatty's decision to emphasize brilliant pastels as a backdrop to Tracy's city, while enjoyable, is also more Burtonesque than Gould-esque. One need not even comment on Beatty enlisting Danny Elfman, hot off Burton's BATMAN, for TRACY's score.

The strongest myth-symbolism here is one seen in many allegorial Renaissance myths: the hero's struggle between Virtue and Vice. Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headley), Tracy's pretty but homespun girlfriend-- to whom he'd like to propose, but can't quite get there-- is obviously "Virtue," even if her demeanor sometimes suggests
she'd rather not become the de facto "mother figure" to "the Kid," a street kid who more or less "adopts" Tracy as his new dad. Madonna's Breathless musters all the glamors of "Vice," and though Tracy is too straight-arrow for her to manipulate him, Beatty at least shows the hero being sorely tempted.

I don't exactly dislike the Beatty TRACY. Still, I'd like to see the real world of Chester Gould come to cinema some day-- preferably with only one or two featured villains, the better to give the full effect of their freaky glory.

HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS (1938)

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

SPOILERS alerts as the ending is discussed in detail.

HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS makes an interesting contrast with the earlier serial TARZAN THE TIGER in that it shows how the trope "outre outfits skills and weapons" can be rendered in a mundane fashion so it lacks the quality of strangeness-- even though HAWK is unquestionably patterned upon the success of the ERB Tarzan books, and even has one of the film-Tarzans essaying the role of the main hero.

Aside from one short story I've never read the William L. Chester novels on which the Republic serial is based. I don't imagine there are any serious divergences. Whereas ERB's Tarzan is raised by apes, the foundling Lincoln Rand Jr. is cast from a sinking ship (on which his parents perish) and ends up on an uncharted volcanic island inhabited by an Indian tribe that's never known white civilization. The Indians raise Lincoln as one of their own, naming him "Kioga" (Herman Brix). But though Kioga becomes a mighty hunter he makes some enemies, such as the war-crazed Yellow Weasel (frequent film-villain Monte Blue).

Then an American expedition travels to the island via a hired ship, seeking to learn what happened to the Rand party. The expedition members include middle-aged Doctor Munro, his pretty young daughter Jill, a black "comedy-relief" servant named George (Fred "Snowflake" Toones) and a somewhat upper-crust fellow named Allen. Unfortunately for the expedition, the crooked sailors manning their ship get the idea that the doctor and his friends are after treasure.

Kioga befriends the (mostly) white visitors. However, most of the serial concerns his efforts to defend them both against the warmongering people of his own tribe as well as the piratical sailors. As with many Republic serials this leads to a good number of well-staged fight-scenes. Brix's lean athleticism works to good effect throughout these scenes, though in less action-packed scenes he fails to convey the charisma of a Crabbe or Weismuller.

Apart from the sheer kinetics of the battles, HAWK is a sociological myth about an encounter between whites, Indians, and a white man who dresses and acts like an Indian. (Interestingly, ERB himself mined this trope in two "white Indian" novels written prior to the success of Tarzan.) Usually the serial doesn't dwell at all on the culture clash, though there's one amusing exception. Kioga, talking to one of his Indian friends, is perturbed to find himself attracted to Jill, in spite of the fact that she doesn't look strong enough to do the average women's chores. Clearly Kioga's Caucasian "nature" triumphs over the Indian tribe's "nurturing," so that he rejects their standards of attractiveness.

Toones' black servant "George" deserves a little attention. The best thing one can say about George is that he doesn't evince too many anti-black stereotypes, aside from the usual default of being scared to muck about with burial grounds, spooks and the like. George isn't particularly bright, but that in itself doesn't have to denote a racial characteristic; most comic servants are funny for being dim. However, in one chapter George, captured by hostile Indians, almost gets a chance to enjoy heroic action. Despite having had his hands bound behind his back, George seizes a chance to escape and head-butts not just one but two of his captors into dreamland. He then loses his chance at glory by mistaking a totem pole for a third adversary, and so knocks himself out.

The best sequence takes place as Kioga and his allies seek to repair a small plane to escape the island, even as they're being pursued by both bad Indians and greedy white men *and* while the local volcano is about to blow its stack. When Doctor Munro announces that the plane can't carry the whole expedition, plus Kioga, his two friends and his dog, the spirit of cooperation becomes strained. Jill staunchly determines that they will all leave together, but Allen-- hitherto a minor character-- suddenly decides to get rid of the dead weight. He makes an attempt to "accidentally" kill one of the Indians, and when Kioga catches him, he rants against "dirty Indians" even though Kioga is his own race. In the exciting wrapup both Allen and one of Kioga's allies are killed by the vengeful Yellow Weasel, whom Kioga then executes. Following this drastic reduction of the fugitives' party, the plane successfully takes off with all the heroes, and the volcano goes off, implicitly killing off all the villainous Indians and white men.

Though Kioga is a strong hero, he has none of Tarzan's unique skills, and even his going around without a shirt carries no strong associations beyond the notion that "that's how Indians dressed." In contrast to the exotic societies portrayed in both TARZAN THE TIGER and WILD WOMEN, the Indian tribe seen here is a pretty conventional one, and thus never realizes its potential for "strangeness" through the trope of exoticism.

CHARLIE CHAN IN EGYPT (1935) and BLACK MAGIC (1944)

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

Mystery SPOILERS ahead.

In contrast to my earlier review of CHARLIE CHAN IN HONOLULU, which I judged to be "atypical," here are two Chan-flicks-- one starring Warner Oland, the other Sidney Toler-- which fall into my category of "the uncanny."

EGYPT, one of Oland's films for 20th-Century Fox, is one of the better films involving a detective investigating a death supposedly caused by a curse-- in this case, an archaeologist who may have died due to the curse of the Goddess Sekhmet, after the man profanes an Egyptian tomb. Twice Chan and the archeaological party witness odd manifestations of the goddess: a beam of light from a mummy-coffin, or a strange glittering figure in darkness. The archeologist's son puts it down to the fact that Egypt is a land of "decay and death," but Chan naturally ferrets out a very human murderer. In addition to impersonating Sekhmet, the murderer also knocks off his victim with a complicated device: an ampule of poison gas, placed within the victim's violin in such a way that it will shatter when the violin hits a certain note. I should note that even if the film included no impersonations of a supernatural figure, this complicated device would move the film into the realm of "the uncanny" just by virtue of its farfetched nature.

The sociological mythology of the Earl Derr Biggers books comes through a little more in EGYPT, especially in the sequences that involved the son and daughter of the deceased archeaologist. Both seem upper-class types who are affronted at their father's having dragged them to this primitive land, which is a good correlate for European attitudes toward North Africa in that time. Naturally in 1935 no one would have questioned the right of Europeans to take away the treasures of ancient Egypt, but perhaps one can read a certain Euro-guilt in the fear of Egyptian curses as a whole. Interestingly, though Steppin Fetchit appears in his usual role of comedy relief, the script establishes that he came to Egypt because a fortuneteller told him that his ancestor came from Egypt-- a concept which a later generation of African-Americans would pursue in more earnest. And though Fetchit also must conform to the stereotype of the "black scaredycat," always concerned with "hants" and the like, one sequence does give Fetchit a little more heft, albeit still in terms of stereotypes. At one point the lights go off, and Fetchit finds himself struggling with what he thinks is some "hant," though it's only one of the white guys in the archeological mission. The lights come on, and Fetchit is at least poised to defend himself with a huge straight-razor! Again, the scene is still comic and plays with a routine stereotype, but it's a slight improvement over dozens of more demeaning "scaredycat black" schticks.

BLACK MAGIC is for the most part an average Monogram Chan, and in contrast to EGYPT its black comedy relief, the redoubtable Mantan Moreland, doesn't come across so well, lacking the wit he shows in other Chan outings. But MAGIC has one distinction in that it's one of the few films to seriously put Chan's life at peril. The film's "uncanny" motif centers around the power of a mysterious hypnotist-- later revealed to have been a stage magician in the past-- to cause people to walk off the tops of buildings. In the film's best scene Toler's Chan is victimized by the hypnotist, who puts Charlie under by shining two beams of light around the detective's eyes-- a much more visual concept than swinging a watch, to be sure. Chan comes very close to taking the big plunge himself, but squeaks out of it at the proverbial last minute.

As a side-note, this time out Chan is accompanied by a "number one" daughter instead of a son, played by an actress who shares the same name as her character, Frances Chan. Sadly, though she's just as determined as any Chan-son to emulate her famous pop, the young girl doesn't really do anything of note. (Frances appeared two years before in CHARLIE CHAN'S GREATEST CASE, where she was billed as "youngest Chan daughter.")

HOP (2011) and RANGO (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2) *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


These two animated films make a perfect diptych. Neither could be said to be exceptional enough to “break the mold,” and in comparison with even a work that hits on all cylinders, like Pixar’s THE INCREDIBLES, one might call both of them somewhat “average.” Yet there’s a line of quality between the two, in which the first of them is “depressingly average” while the second is “pleasingly average.”
HOP concerns the adventures of E.B., a young talking rabbit who is both the son of the current Easter Bunny and the destined inheritor of the Easter Bunny tradition. But though his name pretty well reinforces his destiny, he flees the hidden “Easter Bunny workshop” where Daddy Bunny and his assorted assistants (a handful of other rabbits and dozens of baby chicks) prepare the eggs for Easter morning. E.B. seeks out the human world in order to gain fame as a drummer. He latches on to Fred (James Marsden), a young guy who not only lacks a job but any sense as to what his destiny might be. While E.B. tries to pursue his dream, his father sends a trio of ninja bunnies to bring him back, while Carlos, the rebellious, Spanish-accented leader of the chicks, plots to take over Easter from all the bunnies.
The animation in HOP is pleasing enough, and James Marsden does yeoman service in countless reaction shots to assorted cartoon wonders. But HOP is too pleased with its high-concept idea to bother crafting even half-decent jokes. In one sequence E.B., fleeing the ninja bunnies, tried to get help from Fred while Fred is being interviewed at an office for a job. One expects E.B. to bring about some major chaos so that Fred gets kicked out, but all that happens is that E.B.’s presence makes Fred so nervous that he blows the interview—offcamera! But the visit to the office does serve a clunky plot-point: while there, E.B. finds out how he can audition at a talent-contest supervised by David Hasselhoff—which leads to even more egregiously unfunny shenanigans.

HOP’s near-jokelessness may pale before the fact that its high concept is really no concept. The United States inherited the tradition of the Easter Rabbit and his eggs from Europe, where it seems to have descended from archaic pagan rituals. But whatever deeper meanings the Easter Bunny may have for Europe, in the States the Easter-egg ritual is little more than a ritualized game. The filmmakers try to give the Easter Bunny tradition a semi-sacred resonance by borrowing tropes from Christmas, including having the Bunny deliver eggs in an “egg-sleigh.” But the resonance simply isn’t there. It’s true that both Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are extra-Christian traditions that became associated with Christian religious occasions. But Santa really does incarnate a quasi-sacred quality that makes his raison d’etre credible even in the worst Santa movies. It might not be impossible to rethink the superficial tradition of the Easter Bunny so that it took on a deeper symbolism. But HOP can’t even begin to jump up to that challenge.

RANGO is the story of a city-boy lizard who must take on the persona of a fearless gunfighter to save a town full of Western talking animals. But though RANGO is a comic take on the Western genre, it comes far closer to imparting to its genre that “semi-sacred resonance,” even though the Western descends not from archaic myth and religion but from relatively modern history and literature. Yet despite these secular origins, the Western has often attained the stature of archaic legend for contemporaries, though less so in this century than in the previous one.

RANGO, in addition to having a fair quantity of good jokes and exciting action-sequences (no live-action tedium here), does seem to understand the psychological tone of the Western better than most live-action Westerns of the last twenty years. The lizard-- who’s never given any other name than “Rango,” his made-up name --becomes the archetypal “stranger in town” who becomes the town’s secular savior. In a trope possibly borrowed more from CHINATOWN than from any western, the town is dying due to the stranglehold that the evil turtle, the Mayor, has on the available water-resources. Even though the film is funny, the seriousness of the water-shortage is never played for comedy. Thus Rango’s transformation from fake hero to real hero becomes real as well, even to the point of his undergoing a sort of Campbellian “hero’s death,” in which he “dies” and is borne away on a catafalque made of beetles.

The filmmakers populate the town with assorted funny-animal takes on Western character-types, with emphasis on Rango’s destined girlfriend, feisty Miss Beans. True, not all of the characters are, strictly speaking, necessary to the plot. Still, the filmmakers seem to have taken an effusive joy in coming up with as many weird frontier-types as they could. If they err, it’s on the side of doing too much, in contrast to HOP, which does too little. And the film’s secondary villain, “Rattlesnake Jake,” may go down in history as one of Western animation’s best villains.

Both are in essence sociological myths, in that they deal with heroes who realize their destinies in order to maintain the social order.