THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)

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



In contrast to the trope "exotic lands and customs," which I explored in WILD WOMEN,  SEVENTH VICTIM is a key example of the trope "weird families and societies." This trope deals with unusual groups that exist within the sphere of "normative" societies, rather than having their own separate, exotically-situated cosmos.

The "weird society" here is a group of Satanists who cause trouble for the "victim" of the title. Satanism, as noted on the commentary track for the movie in the VAL LEWTON COLLECTION, was an unusual subject for 1940s American cinema. Commentator Steve Haberman provides a treasure-trove of information about the film's genesis-- beginning as it did as nothing more than a title suggested by the studio-- as well as covering Val Lewton's general creative processes and those of his collaborators.

All that said, I can't claim that I've ever had any great affection for SEVENTH VICTIM. I can appreciate that it took some admirable chances with both its subject matter and its low-key approach, which, in contrast with 1942'S CAT PEOPLE, did not reap either critical or commercial success. The dour atmosphere strikes me as mannered in all but a few key scenes, and certain characters fail to impress, partly because, as the commentary makes clear, their narrative functions were sometimes changed in rewrite or deleted by studio cutters. Tom Conway's smooth-talking Louis Judd is a case in point. In some scenes he seems to be a professional exploiting his connection with "victim" Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks), as when he talks her estranged husband Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont) out of money, ostensibly to help Jacqueline (though we never see her get the money). And yet he receives the standout speech at film's end, upbraiding the Satanists for their follies.

The Satanists are, in keeping with the Lewton approach, extremely low-key villains: they finally do resort to direct violence toward the film's end, though for most of the story they forbid one another from such measures, apparently leery of some unnamed repercussions. Their primary function is to evoke a mood of sombre terror, but the script doesn't dwell on their beliefs with any great rigor.

The story's essential mythic conflict is one relating to the psychological struggle of the viewpoint character Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) as she tries to find her missing sister Jacqueline within the environs of an alienating big city. She actually gets quite a bit of help considering that she has few resources: first from a detective who volunteers his services even though she can't pay him, and later from Jacqueline's husband Gregory and her acquaintances Judd and failed poet Jason Hoag. Despite this help, it's soon evident that Jacqueline's greatest enemy is not the Satanists stalking her, since they refrain from violence until the end, but her own suicidal urges, which do make Jacqueline the "seventh victim" of the devil-worshippers. (The other six are only referenced in passing to justify the title.)

Mary does gain a measure of independence even though she fails to save her sister from the sister's personal demons. However, when VICTIM is compared with Lewton's earlier films, CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, it's evident that the last thing that the *script* wants to have happen is Jacqueline's salvation. What all three films have in common might be termed the "Jane Eyre Myth," in that all of them feature a woman who finds love with a man with a previous commitment, and in all three films the "previous commitment" ends up taking a dirt nap. VICTIM is the first film which might be interpreted in Freudian terms, since it involves one sister essentially "stealing" her brother-in-law, though conveniently the married relationship has already withered on the vine by the time Mary arrives.

VICTIM is intended to be a very morose, pessimistic film. One wonders if some of that pessimism stems from the fact that the heroine's happiness depends on the death of the sister she seeks to save...

COWBOYS VS. ALIENS (2011)

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

There isn't a helluva lot to say about COWBOYS VS. ALIENS, except that its poor box-office performance disproves the canard that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American moviegoing public.

COWBOYS, while pleasant enough to view in uncritical mode, strikes me as a wasted opportunity to play with the conventions of the western. Trouble is, given that the script passed through about nine writers, one is never sure if any of the writers know what those conventions are. I got more authenticity from any single scene of RANGO than in the whole CVA film.

The plot is so simple that it avoids the entanglement of making the main character Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) interesting. He's a walking plot-device, in that he begins the film in an amnesiac state, though he's not too befuddled to remember he's a badass when faced with some bounty hunters. Lonergan dispels them quickly with the help of an alien bracelet clamped about his wrist, but that doesn't help him figure out where the weapon came from. Not surprisingly given the title, pretty soon some aliens come along to help solve the mystery.

Most of the characters who join Lonergan in his quest are disposeable, with the exception of the love-interest Ella (Olivia Wilde) and Dolarhyde, a gruff old rancher who represents an earlier heroic generation (Harrison Ford). Ella is also something of a humanized plot-twist, and never quite becomes more than that. The writers almost manage to craft something like a three-dimensional character for Ford to play, and even though they don't succeed Ford puts much more energy into this character than I've seen in his last five films.

The underwriting of Dolarhyde is particularly egregious since the script contains some dramatic nuances that go nowhere. As in the Jimmy Stewart film THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, we have an old rancher who has a spoiled real son who's become a rotten kid, and a ranch-hand who, despite being no real relation to the rancher, seems much more like a son to the old man. A good dramatic arc might've been reached had, say, Dolarhyde been forced to choose between his blood-kin and his loyal employee. But COWBOYS VS. ALIENS can't exert itself to drum up this much conflict.

Most of the alien action looks pretty good, if not overly inventive (note the signature "Star Wars" moment in the illo above). CVA also works in some Indians to help the Cowboys fight the Aliens, but in a move sure to promote egalitarianism, the noble red men are just as underwritten as the white men, so that the potential sociological themes of the western lie fallow here.

ACE DRUMMOND (1936) and Q PLANES (1939)

PHENOMENALITY: both *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: both *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *adventure,* (2) drama
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

I link these two films simply because both are marginally "science fiction" (ergo, of the "marvelous" phenomenality) due to their inclusion of one of the 1930s favorite gimmicks, the "death ray," used in both films to bring down airplanes. If either film had not used a death ray, however, ACE DRUMMOND would place in my "uncanny" category while Q PLANES placed in the "atypical."

DRUMMOND, directed by both Ford Beebe and Clifford Smith, adapts the short-lived ACE DRUMMOND comic strip of the late 1930s. It's a reasonably efficient adventure-serial, in which Drummond, "G-man of the skies," investigates sinister doings in Mongolia, accompanied by a comic sidekick, a little boy-kid and a young woman looking for her archaeologist father. The scientist has been kidnapped by a mystery mastermind, "The Dragon," who's also developing a death ray with which he can zap airplanes, but the villain's main goal seems to be to force the archaeologist to disclose the location of a fabulous "mountain of jade." (One assumes that building death rays is expensive business.)

Drummond's adventures follow the roughly "sociological" pattern of the period's "soldier-of-fortune" stories, in that at times the American hero must navigate the customs of the Mongolian natives: in fact, the serial's first chapter is entitled "Where East Meets West." However, DRUMMOND doesn't develop interesting from the potential clash of cultures. The most one can say is that if DRUMMOND doesn't capture any of the allure of exotic cultures, as does 1940's THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, at least DRUMMOND doesn't go the other way and give us bad Asian stereotypes, as does 1943's BATMAN serial. Admittedly most of the "Asians" are played by Caucasian actors, notably Lon Chaney Jr before he rose to starring status.

Unlike HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS, a serial I rated as "atypical" because it lacked any metaphenomenal content, DRUMMOND does have a couple of "uncanny" devices, as the Dragon springs on the hero a few unusual gas-attacks and, most notably, the Old Room-with-the-Crushing-Walls Trick. But as with the death-ray, these don't occupy a lot of time and most of the action is efficient but mundane. The villain is never seen in costume like some of the more noteworthy serial villains.



Q PLANES doesn't have any more symbolic content than DRUMMOND, but it's much more fun. Its story opposes three heroes of wartorn Britain (flyer Laurence Olivier, his quarrelsome girlfriend Valerie Hobson, and intelligence investigator Ralph Richardson) against a plot against British air power by a Foreign Power. The enemy spies, who are responsible for using a ray to bring down several British planes, always remain fairly vague, as the Allies hadn't yet declares war on the Axis. Olivier and Richardson, with help from Hobson (Richardson's sister and a suffragette-flavored journalist), ferret out the scheme and take out the schemers.

Q PLANES also has two credited directors, Tim Whelan and Arthur B. Woods, but its 82 minutes are far more exciting than DRUMMOND's whole 13 chapters. I can't say if either director was more responsible for the jaunty, fast-paced approach of the film, but I'd tend to guess Whelan's responsible, as many of the setups feel rather Hawksian. A year or so later Whelan would again work for Alexander Korda as one of the credited directors for THE THIEF OF BAGDAD.

TARZAN AND THE SHE-DEVIL (1953)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

SHE-DEVIL is best known as the last of Lex Barker's six Tarzan films, but it's something of a negative milestone as well. While it's not the last live-action Tarzan film to feature Jane, it seems to be the last film in which the romance of Civilization (Jane) and Savagery (Tarzan)-- the romance that vaulted the ape-man to sound-era movie stardom in 1932's TARZAN THE APE MAN-- proved central to the story.

To be sure, many of the sound-era Tarzans in which Jane has a sizeable role tend to downplay her, or even make her the villains' dupe. But director Kurt Neumann and scripting-team Kamb and Young bring back much of the romantic intensity that informed the early Weismuller/O'Sullivan pictures. Cheetah is still around but fortuitously no version of "Boy" is in evidence to dampen the couple's treehouse erotica. I'm not talking about actual sex, of course, but the way the performers communicate the intensity of a long-lived romance. Possibly the film's best scene involves Tarzan, still an animal-boy at heart, tossing Jane into a river to wake up her so she'll fix his breakfast. Jane, understandably peeved, makes a joke about going back to England, and Tarzan immediately looks thunderstruck at the very idea of losing her, leading to a swift reconciliation. Often Jane is presented as Tarzan's kryptonite in that she trusts strangers too easily. Here, the strength of the Tarzan-Jane romance is Tarzan's weakness. An imdb reviewer perceptively comments:

It is, after all, the "she-devil" who concocts the horrible idea of robbing Tarzan of his power by robbing him of his love. What man, however evil or intelligent, would ever be able to think of that?

Lyra (Monique Van Vooren), the titular "she-devil," certainly is one of the cinematic ape man's more memorable villains. She funds the expedition of ivory poacher Vargo (Raymond Burr), who naturally butts heads with the jungle lord over the question of killing elephants. It's significant that once Tarzan and Jane are alone with each other following a somewhat peaceful first encounter with the two villains, the lovers tease each other, Tarzan pretending to be interested in Lyra and Jane in Vargo.

Lyra, though not a deep character in the least, does exude more sensuality than most other villainesses in the series. She romances Vargo right in front of her sometime lover, the appropriately named "Fidel" (Tom Conway). She seems more than a little attracted to the ape-man as well. At one point, when Tarzan invades her compound to release some natives she's enslaved, Lyra sics a big beefy fellow on the hero for some one-on-one action-- apparently more for her own pleasure than to insure Tarzan's demise. Since she also interferes whenever Vargo or Fidel try to torture or kill Tarzan, it seems probable that she's meditating on keeping the ape-man around once he's served his purpose.

That purpose, by the way, is also Lyra's idea: she sends her henchmen to kidnap Jane so that Tarzan will call his elephant friends into a deadly trap. There are no "good white explorers" in this film: Lyra and her friends are all blatantly exploitative, the rule rather than the exception. Twice they enslave the men of a particular tribe, the Laikopo, to serve the expedition, rather than simply hiring some other natives, because of some ill-defined conviction that the more reluctant tribespeople are the best in the business.

On a side-note, the Laikopo tribesmen are not black Africans, and they employ (albeit briefly) the very un-African weapon of the boomerang. However, there are fleeting appearances of black characters who succor Jane when she escapes her kidnappers.

In the last third of the film Tarzan believes that Jane has died, and his mourning is so profound that he loses all strength to fight the villains, though he still refuses to lead the elephants to slaughter. Only when Jane turns up alive, and in the clutches of Vargo and Lyra, does Tarzan appear to give in to the evildoers' designs. However, Tarzan turns the tables so that the bad guys are killed, and the film ends with one last reconciliation between Savagery and Civilization.

Jane would appear again from time to time, but one might say that she was never again the same after she "died."

TARZAN'S SAVAGE FURY (1952)

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

The fourth of Lex Barker's Tarzan films is probably the most exciting of the Barker outings, thanks in large part to snappy direction by Cy (MYSTERIOUS ISLAND) Endfield and a strong script filled with rapid-fire pulp-action and some actual references to E.R. Burroughs' Tarzan books. I suspect that of the four writers credited on imdb Cyril (FORBIDDEN PLANET) Hume was the most likely to have provided these references, since he had also penned three previous Tarzan films before this, not least TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932), which jumpstarted the ape-man franchise for the sound era.

The plot here strongly recalls 1943's TARZAN TRIUMPHS, in which the sociological quarrels of the outside world impinge on Tarzan's jungle paradise. In the earlier film, the jungle is invaded by Nazi troops, but as FURY takes place during the Cold War, the villains are Communists-- although only one, Rokov (Charles Korvin), is faithful to the cause. His accomplice Edwards is an Englishman who, under Rokov's tutelage, poses as Tarzan's cousin from England. The cousin does accompany Rokov and Edwards to Africa, for the purpose of getting Tarzan's help in securing a treasure of diamonds for England's military security. However, once there Rokov kills the cousin, so that he and Edwards can obtain the diamonds for the sake of the Communist regime. References to Rokov's politics are spotty, the best being where he sneers at Edwards' being promoted from "bourgeousie" to the aristocracy through just one bullet.

In addition, the filmmakers apparently gave some thought to giving Tarzan and Jane a new "boy," played by Tommy Carlton, who in 1952 was two years older than Johnny Sheffield was when he essayed the role in TARZAN FINDS A SON! (1939). Though Tarzan calls the kid "boy" a few times, this time the orphan has a real name, Joey. Tarzan, upon hearing the kid speak English, presumes that Joey is English, and comically insists that the boy is English even after Joey claims to be an American. Carlton gives a good performance in scenes where Tarzan has to talk him into facing his fears, and even helps Tarzan out in a climactic scene, but Joey made no more appearances (and neither did Carlton as an actor).

Many Tarzan films fall into a fairly routine pattern of perils but FURY keeps up a good variety of pitfalls. After Tarzan, Jane and Joey lead Rokov's party through a scorching desert (prefiguring Endfield's later hot-spot encounter in SANDS OF THE KALAHARI), the group has a dangerous encounter with a cannibal tribe before being taken prisoner by another tribe, the Waziris, who have access to the coveted diamonds. Tarzan leaves the village in the company of a village elder, and in his absence Rokov beguiles the natives with some wild magic tricks. (This is probably one of the few, if not the only, Tarzan films that can fit my trope "enthralling hypnotism and stage magic!") Rokov then repays the natives' trust by killing their witch doctor and stealing some of their diamonds. For good measure he leaves Edwards to die in a lion pit and then tries to drop Tarzan into the pit as well. After Joey helps Tarzan escape, Tarzan returns the favor to Rokov (as seen in the illo above) and then rushes back to the village, where he's just in time to keep Jane from being sacrificed beneath the jaws of an alligator-idol.

A word on the aforementioned Burroughs-references: in the novels "the Waziri" are the first African tribe to pledge allegiance to Tarzan, and appear in many later books as his retinue. In FURY they remain autonomous to the end, and are presented with some degree of respect. The script even suggests that Darby Jones' witch doctor may have some psychic talent, since after casting the bones he sees a vision of a diamond. This causes him to intercept Rokov in the middle of ripping off the tribe's diamonds, though the witch doctor dies for his trouble. FURY is one of the few sound films to reference Tarzan's aristocratic heritage, though for convenience the origin is rewritten so that Tarzan and his father actually lived together in the jungle for some time before the father's death. In fact, the Waziri remember Tarzan's father as a man who tried to teach them the "Good Book," but thankfully this missionary motif gets very little screen time.

Rokov probably takes his name from one of the print-Tarzan's better villains, Nikolas Rokoff, a Russian (but not Communist) malefactor who gives the apeman a hard time in RETURN OF TARZAN. Here Rokov invades the jungle not with the massive *forza* used by the Nazis in TRIUMPHS, but with *froda.* One might imagine that the guile Rokov uses in his magic performance touches on the manipulations of Communist rhetoric, though to be sure the magic tricks may've come about simply because Endfield himself was a well-regarded practitioner of stage magic. Moreover, FURY was directed roughly a year after Huac named Endfield a Communist-- which may well explain why, even though the film's villains are implied Communists, there's really very little anti-Commie rhetoric here. That said, the film does suggest, better than many Tarzan films, the fate of Africa and other third-world areas being caught up in the quarrels of two opposed "Great Powers."

TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*

While 2009's SALVATION doesn't come up to the level of either the first or second films in the TERMINATOR franchise, it's a distinct improvement over the third installment from six years previous. T3's greatest fault, however typical of a lot of Hollywood product, was at least appropriate to the Terminator-theme, in that T3 was "too mechanical."

One improvement in T4 is that director McG and the film's writers attempted to extend the mythology somewhat. This endeavor is more difficult than it sounds, for unlike many other franchises TERMINATOR's mythos depends on a lockbox concept: that in the near future an evil computer system and its robot hordes will attempt to exterminate mankind, only to be defeated by military leader John Connor-- who only exists because he sent the man who would become his father back to the past to protect (and mate with) his mother. (Talk about your major reversals on the Oedipus Complex: here the hero actually *wants* his father to be with his mother!)

SALVATION's attempt at adding a new mythic personage involves reversing the pattern of the original TERMINATOR: for the first time, a human being from our present is propelled into a future dominated by the war of man and machine. Marcus Wright is a convicted murderer who volunteers to let science use his body once he's been executed, but he wakes to a future (roughly 2018) which promptly has him raging against lots of machines. He also meets a young version of Kyle Reese, whom the audience knows to be the man who will eventually go back in time and spawn John Connor. Connor knows it too, and is desperately trying to find and protect Reese while also juggling a major military offensive against the malevolent mechanisms. Wright thus becomes very valuable to Connor, but Connor must also deal with the possibility that Wright may be a pawn in this future conflict without even knowing it.

Sam Worthington pulls off the best performance as Wright, balancing human confusion with the necessary toughguy ability to survive incredible falls and blow up stuff real good. By contrast, Christian Bale's Connor is dull, but the script does use the two of them to make some telling points about the nature of humanity in a machine-dominated world. Their respective dramatic agonies keep the impressive FX from overwhelming the storyline, as arguably occured with T3. Some of the repeated tropes from the earlier films in the series may be wearing a little thin-- I could stand never to hear "I'll be back" again-- but I had to smile at the sequence in which the filmmakers match Connor against a *doppelganger* of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I call this a "cosmological" film because this is the category Campbell assigns to myths which address the nature of mankind's physical reality-- the movements of the sun, the habits of animals, and (here) the sentience of the very machines mankind builds to make life easier. As in James Cameron's two TERMINATOR films, the noisy shrieks and groans of metal are everywhere, while robots with metal skeletons stand as a perverse revision of the human skeletal form.

In terms of assigning the TERMINATOR films the best possible category of Fryean mythos, I've concluded that the first three films, for all that they use many tropes of the adventure mythos, are structured more like horror films than adventure stories-- and, as I've often remarked on my ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE blog, horror dominantly follows the form of the drama-mythos rather than the adventure-mythos.
SALVATION may come the closest of all four films to the structure of an adventure-story, but I tend to feel-- in large part because of the fate suffered by Marcus Wright-- that drama is still a better match than adventure for this TERMINATOR as well.

ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN (1937)

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

Prior to this my only entry for the trope "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" has been BLACK SWAN, because its protagonist's insanity caused her to have hallucinatory waking nightmares. However, the much lighter-themed ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN deals with dreams of a different sort, in which almost the entire story takes place in the protagonist's head.

BABA stars Cantor as a goony movie-fan journeying to Hollywood to collect autographs. That's really all the viewer ever knows about him, because his main function is to become an extra on the set of a Hollywood "Arabian Nights" fantasy, where he promptly falls asleep and dreams himself in ancient Bagdad. As in Twain's CONNECTICUT YANKEE Cantor quickly becomes revered as a sorcerer by the local sultan (Roland Young) and his people, while rousing animosity from evil conspirators Gypsy Rose Lee and Douglass Dumbrille.

The film's pace is lively but I suspect most of the jokes will prove tough sledding for contemporary viewers, particularly some hard-to-follow rimshots at the then-current politics of the New Deal. Similarly, some viewers will look askance at the political incorrectness of this particular "clash of cultures:" as in Twain's YANKEE, the first thing Cantor wants to do when he encounters another culture is to remake it in terms of his own. In one of the script's wittier twists, Cantor's attempt to get the sultan to become a popularly-elected president backfires when the people try to elect Cantor instead of the sultan. Winning the election, then, means that he loses his life, probably by being "berled in erl" (boiled in oil.)

And yes, Cantor does don blackface, but for what it's worth, it's part of a musical number in which everyone else in the number is really black, which calls some attention to the artificiality of blackface. Cantor did at least one other movie (whose title I can't remember) in which he donned partial blackface in the presence of real blacks, who look at him like he's the world's biggest ass. Finally, though some would object to the "language" of Cantor's black performers-- consisting of nonsense-riffs from Cab Calloway-- I found it pretty harmless, and think it at least *possible* that some black people of the time might've found that funny.

The best scene in BABA appears at the end, when Cantor has to fight Dumbrille aboard a flying carpet. Despite the expected use of rear-projection, it's still an exciting scene, during which Cantor injured himself and was voted an "honorary stunt man."