BRAVE (2012)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological. psychological, metaphysical*

Much advance hype on BRAVE emphasized that it was one of the few animated films which focused on a young girl’s familial conflict with her mother—in this case, a 13^th-century Scots girl, Merida, and her mother Queen Elinor.  The hype is true, so far as it goes, though it’s not necessarily the film’s most interesting aspect.

Because Merida's father—an amiable goofus named Fergus-- is the head of their clan, Merida actually enjoys a fairly cushy life in their medieval palace, even if she has to put up with three bratty younger brothers.  The film depicts Merida and Elinor as having had a strong relationship in Merida’s youth.  But as Merida grows older, she began finding her mother’s attentions more restrictive.  Elinor continually insists that Merida must learn all the ways of the courtly female: proper dress, manners, et al—when Merida would rather act like her adventurous father, riding around and learning archery.  In passing I’ll note that since it wouldn’t be politically correct these days, she’s never seen using her arrows on unassuming wildlife, as one might assume real medieval archers would have.

The main conflict comes about when Elinor—who may have wed Fergus in an arranged marriage—insists that Merida must marry into one of the neighboring clans to shore up Fergus' alliance to his sometimes contentious neighbors.  Merida has no desire to be treated as a bargaining chip, and is particularly disgusted to see that all of her suitors turn out to be goofs and feebs.  So that none of the neighboring chiefs will be offended by Merida’s choice, Fergus holds an archery contest to determine which suitor wins his daughter’s hand.  Merida turns the contest on its head by winning the contest herself.  To say the least, Mother is not pleased, though Father seems to think it all a big joke, and doesn’t seem to mind the prospect of renewing hostilities with the rival chiefs.

Like many teenagers, Merida wants nothing more complicated than ton have her mother’s constant carping to come to an end.  Guided by a chimerical will-of-the-wisp, Merida locates an ancient witch, and asks her to make her mother stop the nagging.  Merida procures a potion and slips it in her mother’s drink.  Mother stops nagging, all right, because the potion changes her into a bear who can’t speak, though she still possess her human intelligence. 

As seen in other tales of this type, the childish antagonist is in essence forced to walk in the parent’s shoes for a time: trying to find a way to re-transform her ursine parent while at the same time protecting her against harm.  Said harmful influences include Fergus, who lost one of his feet during an earlier encounter with a real bear, as well as all of the neighbor-chieftains, who join forces to hunt down the invading bear no matter what.  In the process Queen Elinor learns something of the passion for independence that moves her daughter as well.

BRAVE, like many Pixar films, is replete with many amusing bits, to the extent that I’d be tempted to judge it a comedy along the lines of CARS or A BUG’S LIFE.  Yet fundamentally the struggle between mother and daughter inclines the plot more toward drama, or, to be precise, melodrama.  The ending, in which Merida must confess her responsibility for her actions in order to save her mother, shows far more alignment with the tropes of drama than of comedy.

 

In addition, Merida's plight is tied in, rather confusingly, to an earlier Scottish lord who suffered a bear-curse, and under the name "Mor'du" has devolved in total bear-hood. The seriousness of the lord's fate is used both to emphasize the potential fate of Elinor and as a last-minute physical threat to Merida and all of her loved ones.  The film doesn't make much of the behind-the-scenes role of the unnamed witch and the wills-of-the-wisp that apparently serve her, but it's worth remarking that though her potion doesn't work for Merida the way she expects, it does end with two major effects: both bringing mother and daughter together and ending the cursed existence of Mor'Du.  Whether or not the witch meant to accomplish either or both of these effects is never decisively known. 

I must admit that BRAVE, in making the mother the heavy in the matter of arranged marriages, departs from historical veracity.  In this medieval period the men were lords of their castles, and they, not their wives, were more likely to barter their daughters in exchange for political advantage.  One may suspect the ideology implied by a scenario in which the woman, the vehicle of decorum and manners, is made the proponent of the dreaded arranged marriage, while the man, the happy-go-lucky warrior-doofus, makes no demands on his little girl and would apparently be just as happy to see her never grow older. 

Nevertheless, I don’t want to overstate the ideological implications, since I believe the scripters tinkered with history primarily—as the advance hype says—to make the conflict all about the mother and her daughter.  Certainly the woods are full of stories about daughters rebelling against tyrannical fathers, so no more were really needed.  Similarly, BRAVE gets points for not doing what most fantasy-films might have done: sticking one good, handsome-faced apple in the suitor-barrel among the bad ones, so that Merida would turn boy-crazy.  This would have mitigated against the script’s point, that arranged marriage was not a good thing, even if it did hook one up with a hottie. 

In order to avoid validating the custom, Merida has to find a way to circumvent it after finally returning her mother to the ranks of humanity.  The way she chooses isn’t overly believable in terms of what would have happened in the real medieval world.  But for the sake of a happy ending—which are meant to assert, “This is the way things should be”—it’s an acceptable compromise.     

 

THE SHADOW OF THE CAT (1961)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

Cats and old houses are staple ingredients of horror-films, and over the decades both have accrued many complex symbolic associations.

There’s nothing complex about John Gilling’s SHADOW OF THE CAT, however.  An old woman, owner of a ritzy country mansion and a cat named Tabitha, is murdered by a cabal made up of her servants and relatives.  The conspirators hide the old woman’s body in the hope that she’ll be declared legally dead in time, allowing them to divvy up her estate.  But there’s one problem: Tabitha witnessed the murder.

There’s absolutely no hint of the supernatural here; not only is the old woman’s spirit not in the cat, there aren’t even any significant parallels between feline and owner.  The cat isn’t even spooky-looking in any way, nor does it ever seem possessed of more than feline intelligence.  Nevertheless this common-looking housecat holds a grudge and manages to bedevil the murderers—all of whom conveniently remain in residence at the mansion—into falling down stairs, venturing into deadly marshes, and so on.  The only diversion from this main plotline is a subplot about the old woman’s missing will, which if found will confer great favor with the woman’s only “good relative,” played by Barbara Shelley, who doesn’t do anything but cluck her tongue at her relations for persecuting a poor little cat.

The best facet of this standard “punish-the-evildoers” tale—which I enjoyed on that level, even without much in the way of symbolic flourishes—is that Gilling keeps everything looking rather ordinary.  Not only is Tabitha a commonplace feline, but the mansion is, rather refreshingly, never treated as an “old dark house.”  Most of the scenes take place in well-lit areas, so there’s no visual or musical cues to warn the audience before the cat strikes.  One might fairly regard SHADOW OF THE CAT as a minor harbinger of the vogue for “naturalistic horror” in the early 1970s, though Gilling didn’t pursue this approach in his later and better-known horror-films of the 1960s, such as THE REPTILE and PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES.

    

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, cosmological*

The rebooted SPIDER-MAN franchise— ignoring everything established by the popular Sam Raimi-directed “trilogy”—proves better than one might expect.  In comparison with Raimi, the appropriately named director Marc Webb provides a somewhat sunnier take on the world’s most neurotic wall-crawler, reminiscent of the late 1960s Lee-Romita comics-version of the character.

The Spider-Man born in the early 1960s descended as much from Marvel’s misanthrope-filled monster-comics as from the traditions of the costumed superhero.  Raimi’s strength was to capture the visceral weirdness of the early Lee-Ditko feature, centered as it was upon the perennial loser-turned-hero Peter Parker.  It could be argued that Raimi took the franchise too far into the domain of the grotesque, as when he transformed the hero’s famous web-shooting devices into icky biological excretions   On the other hand, Raimi and his scripters captured the essence of Peter Parker as traumatized nerd, and even the weakest Raimi work, the third in the series, faithfully reproduces the fundamental egotism of a Nerd Gone Wild.

Webb’s Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) has none of the original character’s repressed egotism or tendencies toward a martyr complex.  In contrast to the bookish Raimi-version this Parker bops around on a skateboard, showing athletic abilities long before getting spider-powers.  Raimi’s version is the school punching-bag; Webb is just barely bullied by jock Flash Thompson and even has a certain standing on the high school campus as the class photographer.  Still, while Raimi’s version skimped on the character’s passion for the physical sciences and his clumsiness with girls, Webb’s version does capture these qualities somewhat better.  This Parker’s fumbling encounters with Gwen Stacy recall the comic book’s characterization of the proto-hero as a “wallflower,” though to be sure, a lot of that early clumsiness dropped away following his ascension to heroic status.  The passion for science is stronger here, though to be sure it is, as in the first Raimi film, tied into the hero’s acquisition of super-powers as well as his encounter with the person who will become his first super-villain.  But whereas Raimi apparently thought his audiences wouldn’t buy the idea of a high-schooler managing to design artificial web-shooters to match his newly acquired spider-powers, Webb totally goes with the original comics-fantasy of the hyper-inventive teenager.

One thing Webb’s version shares in common with Raimi’s?  Far too much time devoted to Uncle Ben and Aunt May, less to support developments in the narrative proper than to give the high-profile actors more to do.  I would much rather Webb had spent less time with them and more with introducing J. Jonah Jameson, who represents a sort of “bad comic father” to Parker, but I assume he’ll appear in some subsequent entry.

Whereas Raimi chose the first Spider-villain to be the Green Goblin, possibly due to that villain’s symbolic status as an “evil father-figure,” Webb chose the Lizard, more or less a reptilian variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme.  Curtis Connors (Ryan Ifans), who will become the monstrous man-lizard, functions as a mild scientific mentor-figure to Parker, but his main purpose in the story is to change into a monster and tear stuff up real good.
 

      The best character-additions to the franchise are this film’s versions of Gwen Stacy and her father police captain George Stacy.  Gwen, a creation of the middle 1960s in the comics, appeared in the third Raimi movie but wasn’t given much of a characterization therein.  Webb’s film does something the original comic didn’t: it actually gives Gwen—whose only career in the comic was being Parker’s girlfriend—her own professional interest, in that she works for Connors’ research project.  As for Captain Stacy, he makes for some good scenes as the overprotective parental figure.  Unfortunately the script shuffles him off the mortal coil, which seems a waste, given that he would’ve made a good foil (as in the comics) to J. Jonah Jameson.

Garfield makes a decent but far from exceptional Spider-Man, and there are an awful lot of times he shucks his mask during his crimefighting, as if the actor were insecure that his face was getting sufficient camera-time.  But the script here allows him more humor in the persona of Spider-Man than I saw in the “trauma-drama” Raimi hero, particularly a scene in which Spider-Man taunts a small-time hood before webbing him up easily.

On the whole, the Webb SPIDER-MAN comes off much better than many such franchises as they’re passed from talent to talent. 

But a second film comes to pass, the omission of J. Jonah Jameson would be incredibly remiss.

 

HER HUSBAND'S AFFAIRS (1947)

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

This mostly forgotten sci-fi comedy, penned by Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht, anticipates some of the devices the two writers would use on the justly more famous MONKEY BUSINESS (1952).  But though AFFAIRS is just a routine comedy programmer teaming marquee stars Lucille Ball and Franchot Tone, it's not without some significant mythic/symbolic content.

Though the title is calculated to sound racy, the "affairs" of the title refers to the separation of "the husband's business" within the sphere of a marriage as separate from "the wife's business."  The film opens by depicting young marrieds Margaret (Ball) and William (Tone). William has a good job with an ad agency, but he and Margaret both lust after the attractions of Easy Street.  To this end William makes minor investments in the scientific work of European emigre Emil Glinka, though as yet none of the professor's inventions have made money.

This changes when Glinka reveals a rather macabre sounding project: a chemical that will allow dead people to be changed into "statues of glass."  Neither William nor anyone else thinks that this is either a good or profitable idea, but William does like the effects of a by-product of Glinka's process: a chemical cream that works as a depilatory, allowing men to cream off their beards without the effort of shaving.

It's hard to conceive that even in the 1940s any company would have invested in a new chemical product without extensive test-trials, but for comedy's sake Hecht and Lederer posit that William's company repeatedly markets products without such tests.  Thus the first complication ensues when men who use the cream find their beards growing back at ridiculous rates.  Margaret then gives William the idea to market the chemical as a hair-growing tonic, and once again, customers have weird reactions, particularly a man who gets a glassy sheen on his bald skull instead of hair.  Yet another application gives William the idea to market the goop as a flower-preservative, and so on.

The thing that gives this programmer a little extra moxie is that many of these comic adventures spawn an added conflict whenever Margaret attempts, in her well-meaning way, to come to her overconfident husband's aid.  Margaret isn't especially smarter than her husband, but whenever she succeeds in helping him, he resents the help to the depths of his 20th-century patriarchal soul.  Though the film ends with Margaret apparently choosing to obey William's credo that she should stay out of his "business," even the most hidebound audience-member would have to acknowledge that Margaret comes up with some good ideas.

The spirited quarrels between Margaret and William will certainly remind many people of similar quarrels in the 1951-57 teleseries I LOVE LUCY.  However, Margaret is not nearly as much of a scatterbrain as the Lucy character, and she's not constantly trying to show off her entertainment-abilities.  Rather, she's merely trying to be a good wife in all respects, and there's some choice irony in the fact that William is so insecure that he regards this as a threat.

THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS (1980)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological. psychological, metaphysical*

Disney's THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS feels like a standard haunted-house plot at times-- supposedy one of the publicists called it "Disney's EXORCIST"-- but in keeping with the novel its true core is a story of alien possession, albeit a benign one.  To further complicate the matter, the Disney studio seems to have been antsy of having its name associated with anything too racy or visceral.  Thus WATCHER’s thrills are kept to a low level.  Nevertheless, there are some enjoyably spooky moments here.

As with many haunted house stories, this one deals with an entire family moving into an unfamiliar domain.  Here it’s an American family, the Curtises, who rent a country house in England from an eccentric old widow, Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis).  Though the family includes two parents and two daughters, the parents are negligible as characters, and the preteen daughter Ellie only serves minor plot-functions.  Teenaged Jan Curtis (Lynn Holly-Johnson) is the focal character here. When she first enters the rental house, she sees a figure in the mirror that resembles her, but one wearing a blindfold.  In addition, every time she ventures into the surrounding woods, something strange happens.  She sees the image of a circle in a pond, but an electrical flash startles her into falling in, and she almost drowns.  Yet later the same strange force in the woods intervenes to prevent Jan from being struck by an out-of-control motorcycle, and to divert a truck from running down Ellie. 

Mrs. Aylwood later tells Jan that thirty years ago the widow lost her own teenaged daughter Karen.  Karen was playing some ill-defined “game” with three other teens in an abandoned chapel, but lightning struck the building.  The other three teens fled, but Karen was never found. 

 

Note: I have not read the novel, but based on summaries, this does not appear to have been the novel's reason for Karen's disappearance, but may have been an invention for the John Hough-directed film, which was plagued by many rewritten scripts.

 

Mrs. Aylwood believes that she still senses strange presences in the woods.  She becomes convinced that both Jan and to some extent Ellie have some mysterious rapport with her vanished daughter. Jan makes it her crusade to find what happened to the vanished Karen.  She enlists the help of local swain Mike, whose mother was one of the three teens who escaped the cataclysm.  The mother, now middle-aged, won’t talk about the incident, nor will one of the two middle-aged men.  The second man, who lives in the forest (one of Disney’s many woodspeople-characters), shows him to be more traumatized by Karen’s disappearance.

He reveals that the three of them brought Karen to the chapel to be initiated into their “secret club.”  In a more adult-oriented work, one might rightly assume that some sexual hanky-panky lurked behind this ritualistic endeavor.  But in WATCHER it seems to have been nothing but an adolescent version of, say, Tom Sawyer and his young comrades playing pirates.  Slowly Jan begins to learn the nature of the force that abducted young Karen, and to understand a way to re-enact the ritual of an elder generation so as to end the haunting.

Though the script lathers on some science-fictional explanations, what WATCHER delivers is akin to a mélange of motifs borrowed from (1) stories of fairy child-theft, including the wrinkle of the faeries leaving behind one of their own kind in the human child’s place, and (2) the haunted-house poltergeist, which continually bedevils humans for trying to live on the site of a past tragedy.  Though the alien force turns out to be essentially benign, its ambivalent actions strongly resemble the descriptions of alien-abduction, in which the alleged aliens act no less chimerically than Old World faeries.  WATCHER’s emphasis on circle-imagery springs from a functional root, in that Jan must decipher one such image in order to re-enact the ritual during a fateful eclipse.  But circles also connote wholeness. Ironically, Karen is severed from her people by an innocent ritual meant to connote her “becoming one” with the other teens in her culture.  It remains for Jan, heroine of another generation and from another country, to achieve true wholeness by uniting the past with the present, and to liberate from their guilt those who are only guilty of an innocent transgression.

The official ending of WATCHER on the current Disney DVD never shows the nature of the alien force, but the DVD contains two long-unscreened alternate endings.  In one the alien being—a gruesome thing with bat-wings—appears to spirit Jan off like some “demon lover,” yet allows both Jan and Karen to return.  In the other ending, Jan is actually seen freeing Karen in the abstract-looking alien dimension.  I’d say Disney’s official ending is the strongest, for it involves the alien force using Ellie as its mouthpiece, thus bringing the possession-theme around to “full circle.” 

 

INNOCENT BLOOD (1992)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


On the face of things John Landis' INNOCENT BLOOD sounds like a high-concept winner.  Exotic Anne Parillaud plays Marie, a moral vampire who only sucks the blood of destructive scumbags.  She happens to pick on the Pittsburgh-based gang of Sallie "the Shark" Macelli (Robert Loggia).  Normally she needs to break the spines of those she feeds on, so that they won't rise again, becoming like her nearly-invulnerable *nosferatu.*

At the same time Macelli's gang-- which includes crooked mob lawyer Manny Bergman (Don Rickles)-- has been infiltrated by undercover cop Gennaro, who's hot to bust Macelli.  The mob finds out his true identity and puts a kill order on him, but Gennaro refuses to go into hiding and keeps trying to bust the gang-leader.

Marie kills one of the gang without undue incident, but her next encounter goes wrong.  She fangs Macelli but one of his hoods interrupts before she can break Macelli's neck.  As she flees she runs into Gennaro and stuns him with evidence of her vampire powers.  Later, the undead Macelli rises and, once he gets some sense of his new powers, gets the idea of convert his whole gang into super-powered vampires.  Marie and Gennaro team up to become "fearless vampire hunters."

INNOCENT BLOOD's FX-work is first-rate, and Loggia gives a visceral performance as the foul-mouthed Mafioso out for blood, literally.  Famed comedian Don Rickles acquits himself well in a completely straight role as the harried attorney trying to rein in his manic client.  And yet BLOOD is a little too by-the-numbers to ever "stir the blood," so to speak.

The failure of Michael Wolk's script is that  focal character Marie remains too much a mystery to make her interesting, and supporting character Gennaro is merely a standard dedicated cop.  Except for the ferocious Macelli, all of the gangsters are just one-note brutal goofs.  There's a lot of slick blood-and-gore, but without the hook of engrossing characterizations, the heroes' efforts don't take on any special resonance.  For that matter, even the fight-scenes aren't always consistent as to just what force is needed to take out the undead.

I've seen a lot of reviews that call INNOCENT BLOOD a comedy.  I think John Landis does have a lot of oddball scenes that have the feel of deadpan comedy, as when Bergman bashes Macelli with a shovel just to get his attention.  But in my opinion BLOOD doesn't have the tone of a real comedy.  So I term it a drama-- specifically a melodrama in which the monster-hunters are evenly matched with the monster, which is the basis of my terming it a "combative drama."  The interested may find this concept elucidated somewhat more on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE. 

MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN (1939), SOS COAST GUARD (1937)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, metaphysical*


Here we have two serials that follow the normative pattern of their species: a hero, generally without special resources beyond sheer athleticism, finds himself pitted against a mastermind who commands a small group of thugs and at least one super-scientific device.

MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN achieves this paradigm at the cost of its original model, though.  The character spawned by the 1934 Lee Falk-Phil Davis comic strip is said by some fans to have possessed real magic powers at the strip's outset.  Whatever the truth of this, Mandrake's most popular incarnation has been an "uncanny" one, in which the hero's only magic consisted of advanced hypnotism, of being able to convince his victims that they had been transformed into ducks or umbrellas or whatever.

Perhaps Columbia-- a late competitor in the serial market-- thought that this hocus pocus would have been too sedate for serial fans.  Perhaps the company didn't want the FX-budget associated with massive hypnotic illusions.  For whatever reason, the Mandrake of the serial, played by Warren Hull, only resembles the comic-strip version in being a professional magician.  When his involvement in a government experiment puts him at odds with a masked villain, Mandrake wades into action with both fists flying.  Only a few times does he use his magician's talents to escape handcuffs or the like.

The Wasp, the masked villain in question, has got hold of a "radium-energy" projector with which he can send deadly beams against any enemy.  As usual in such serials, both heroes and villains are constantly after some needed power-element that keeps the plot boiling.

The action in MANDRAKE is lively but pedestrian.  As is often the case in such serials, there's a minor mystery about who the costumed villain is in reality, but as the Wasp's costume is the most interesting thing about him, the revelation is an anticlimax.

Another change: the comics-Mandrake was assisted in his crimefighting by a giant African manservant named Lothar,  who was certainly one of the few black characters in the period who got the chance to go around beating up white guys, albeit only those of a criminal nature.  The serial substitutes a "Lothar" manservant who gets into only a couple of scraps and who is played by Hawaiian actor Al Kikume.

SOS COAST GUARD, while nothing special in the scripting department, benefits greatly from the presence of a more pleasingly diabolical villain-- Bela Lugosi playing "Boroff," foreign spymaster-- and from the much livelier direction of Alan James and William Witney.  Given that James' directorial efforts without Witney are just adequate, I suspect Witney's eye for spectacle informed the better sequences of this serial.

SOS starts with a bravura sequence: Boroff, who has invented a "disintegration gas" which he plans to sell to hostile powers, infiltrates America to find the physical elements he needs to produce more of the gas.  When the Coast Guard tries to stop Boroff, he shoots down one of the men.  The victim's older brother Lt. Terry Kent (Ralph Byrd), also of the Coast Guard, dedicates himself to tracking down Boroff and his gang.  Like a lot of "federal men" types of the time, he's almost never seen reporting to a superior or justifying his actions.

Boroff is a simple, straightforward fiend of the type Lugosi did well.  In addition the script invokes a few touches at the actor's horror image, such as having him smuggled in on a ship called the "Carfax" (as in DRACULA's "Carfax Abbey."  Boroff also has a master-slave relationship with a huge muscular servant named Thorg (Richard Alexander), who at the climax turns on his master in approved monster-movie tradition.

Thanks to Witney's directorial skills and Lugosi's sinister presence, SOS is well worth catching, while MANDRAKE is really only for hardcore serial followers.