Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? lies perilously close to Sunset Blvd., so much so that the screenplay by Lukas Heller and the visual style by Robert Aldrich would be shameless repeats if they weren’t so rapturously evocative and explosively effective. You can call it whatever you want: a drug-addled fever dream variation on Sunset, a hysterical nightmare that Sunset had about itself, a corrosive purifying of Sunset so that all the relative cleanliness of the material had been washed away until only the abrasive sandpaper at the core remained. Ultimately, what saves What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is not how it differentiates itself from Sunset, but how it rips into the Sunset aesthetic with such scabrous gusto and full-throated commitment that it exposes the horror cinema trappings of the chiaroscuro noir-speckled visuals and wonderfully garish vulture-like acting of Billy Wilder’s venerable 1950 film, the ultimate Hollywood work on the perils of Hollywood. Continue reading →

In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 

Suddenly, Last Summer is by no means the most famous Tennessee Williams play adaptation, but no filmic version of the writer’s work is more convincing. While Elia Kazan proved a moderately persuasive choice for A Streetcar Named Desire, that film was limited by its inability to fully deluge itself with playfully sweaty, torrid visuals to strangle and suffocate its characters. It danced with danger, but it was ultimately a film of “good taste”, something director Joseph Mankiewicz clearly has no qualms about. Which is for the best; Williams’ plays are not plays for the good or the tasteful, but devilishly naughty backwoods moonshine tales of slippery Southern décor and the often grotesque humans who reside there. How do you translate this sort of high-melodrama to the film whilst retaining a sense of “good taste”? Continue reading →

In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 

It is easy to get lost in Marlon Brando’s barbarous turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, so easy that one can accidentally forget that a film lies around him. Brando here epitomized a new style of acting, “the Method”, long championed for realism but which is as unrealistic, in its own way, as the pure composure and restraint of classic Hollywood. Method acting is vastly easy to overrate, to excuse its somewhat belabored formality and emphasis on ticks and mannerisms and presentation and inhibition at the expense of impulsiveness and even the accidental successes of acting that let’s itself go with the moment. It is an acting style that has, over the years, turned into an ego-stroking talking point more often than not, often mired as heavily as “classical acting” in the conventional tools of the trade. For lack of a better term, it can be too studied, too educated, and too literate to even bring the realm of acting forward in time. Continue reading →

If Orson Welles truly did pine for the spotlight, he was nevertheless often at his best devouring all-comers while occupying the fringes. Maybe it was his passive-aggressive drive that forced him into a corner. Maybe having to struggle for his reputation was purifying for him. Maybe having his own little corner of cinema fed his ego and controlling belligerence. Maybe he needed to be left out in the cold, so he could burn even more dangerously. Whatever the case, whether Welles actively retreated into the nether realms of independent cinema or was coerced to hibernate there, Welles never let go of his dream. Becoming a Hollywood outsider, if anything, only made him angrier and more loathsome, and loathsome Welles was Welles at his most playful. His self-serving grandeur and operatic diction could take on a pompous hue when he was already at the top, but when he was picking his battles from the outside, as with Mr. Arkadin, his directorial bravura actually seemed carnivorous and challenging, even combative. Working from the outside gave Welles something to fight for, and Welles with fangs drawn ready to pounce is the only real Welles in my book. Continue reading →

Two Sam Fuller films this week for Midnight Screenings, one from the very beginning of his career and one from the mature, weary Fuller nearing his end.

You just want to feel bad for White Dog. No film should be subject to the dogged (excuse the pun) beating Samuel Fuller’s 1982 social expose was, especially coming hot on the heels of the studio absolutely decimating Fuller’s seminal 1980 war picture The Big Red One. Even a worthless production shouldn’t have to wait over a quarter-century to receive any meaningful public exposure after failed preview screenings. No film, I say, should bear this sort of weight. But especially not White Dog, one of the greatest films to even glance at racism head-on. After the film was shunned from theatrical distribution in 1982 and Sam Fuller grew disinterested in making American film productions ever again, its eventual release by Criterion 25 years late is no great consolation prize. Continue reading →

Two Sam Fuller films this week for Midnight Screenings, one from the very beginning of his career and one from the mature, weary Fuller nearing his end.

When Pickup on South Street begins, contorted, confrontational eyes are already prowling, lurking, and snapping at one another in a sweatily-packed train. We do not know who is who, and the film relies on that fact, as well as director Samuel Fuller’s acid-tinged eye for the jungle gyms of human collectivity. Scrawled into the film in harsh black-and-white lines by Fuller, a train is an accident waiting to happen, a self-immolating battering ram to the backside of the human ego. There is no community on the train. Just competing interests and faces that almost shout about how they would rather be anywhere else, or anyone else. Continue reading →

Nicholas Ray is not generally considered a canonical director; he’s a deep cuts guy, but he holds a pride of place among the faithful. His films are so unapologetic in their demonic distortion that they seem to decompose the very girders of cinema itself. The films themselves become dangerous. But Ray deserves all the status in the world, for his films were more sincere than arguably any other directors working at the time, or ever. Ray’s films lived with a pure mantra, and arguably the purest mantra of all great directors: cinema should, at its best, be a totally sensory experience, an experiential pang of emotion where story, theme, and character are transmuted into direct experience. Continue reading →