Brian De Palma made a career out of sequestering the erogenous zones of Alfred Hitchcock’s high-class gutter-trash and cheekily admitting to and perverting the suspense-maestro’s more titillating habits. He scrubbed Hitch down to the bone, leaving the material wide open for its more adolescent fixations to rush in. He was always accused of lessening Hitch’s provocative exploration of the internal human mind in external camera space. He was accused of turning Hitch into misogynist smut. The complaint holds water; one would not stack Dressed to Kill, or any of De Palma’s films for that matter, up against Vertigo and expect a fair fight.

But it also misses the broader point, De Palma’s point: Hitch was a smut peddler too. A magisterial one, a beautiful one, a perfect one, but a smut peddler no less. De Palma knows – he idolizes Hitch for it, but he also interrogates him – and Dressed to Kill is a dare: admit to ourselves that we know it, or suffer the consequences of sterile, dishonest criticism and the perpetual need to rub away the immediate urges that guide audiences to all manner of films, not only the uncomfortable, disreputable likes of De Palma. Dressed is a reminder, queasy and necessary, that we do not only hide our eyes at the first whisper of Bernard Hermann’s nervous panic attack score to the shower scene; we also watch because cinema caters to our reptilian brain. Continue reading →

And another Midnight Screening, because I had it prepared this week anyway, and because it celebrates the 25th anniversary of a personal favorite. 

Once upon a time, Tim Burton loved cinema. He loved everything that cinema had been and everything it could be, thus his penchant for reworking cinema’s history into warmly inviting, devilishly cunning new wholes. It is also why he fell for characters who, in one way or another, resembled himself. In his masterpiece, Ed Wood, it was the titular character – a warped conjurer of perverse kitsch and American lore – who Burton no doubt saw in himself. In Edward Scissorhands, though, Burton’s proxy isn’t the titular character, but the gentle old inventor, played with loss in his eyes by Vincent Price, finding an avuncular warmth struggling to survive the cryptic winter of the life of an outcast inventor known only to his creations. His life is an attempt to meld a friend for himself, a gentle, sweet variation on the mad genius myth of so many horror films long past, and a tacit reflection of Burton’s undying sympathy for his material. Continue reading →

It is with a heavy heart that I post this Midnight Screening on the occasion of horror maestro and professional boogeyman Wes Craven’s untimely demise. But what better way to honor his legacy than with a review of his best film?

 Once upon a time, Wes Craven was a wandering journeyman horror director of the micro-budgeted exploitation cinema school, wielding a fancy for American genre cinema and European art-house works (his debut remains cinema’s most demented Bergman remake, after all). He spent five years struggling up the funds to direct his second feature, 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes, after unleashing one of the most controversial features of the modern era in 1972: The Last House on the Left. As important as that film is, however, The Hills Have Eyes is a superior effort in every way. More impeccably crafted yet more divorced from the respectable doldrums of “prestige” that craft often carries with it, Hills is the Wes Craven film that feels most like tetanus. Continue reading →

I decided to write a regular Midnight Screening for Friday this week anyway, because I couldn’t resist the opportunity to immediately discuss Gun Crazy…

You are excused for thinking Gun Crazy was released in pre-Hays Code 1932, post-Hays Code 1968, or in Europe in 1950, the actual year of the film’s release. Sure, Gun Crazy isn’t brutally violent or pornographically sexual or anything. Director Joseph H. Lewis, an auteur among B-movie directors, relies on suggestion and implication more than overt expression, but all of this unstated terror and innuendo only makes the film naughtier and nastier. None of it hides the essential truth, revealed right in the film’s opening act when the main character’s older sister informs a judge that “something else about guns gets him, not killing”, that Gun Crazy is dripping with sexual metaphors and an indifferently Freudian, but nonetheless sharp and incisive, commentary on how violence and sexual gratification are intimately linked in modern American culture. Not exactly fair game for Hollywood in 1950, but then, that is the privilege of motion pictures produced on the cheap: they don’t have to appeal to a majority of Americans, and they can fly under the radar of “respect” by the brain and the heart and drive right into the gut. Continue reading →

Our two Midnight Screenings, both cult films from the ’70s, come early this week. Enjoy!

It ain’t easy remaking one of the greatest and most influential French films of all time. But after laying down the law (and critiquing it with a stern eye) with The French Connection in 1971 and unexpectedly repopularizing the horror genre with the pre-blockbuster success of The Exorcist, William Friedkin had virtual carte blanche to do just about whatever he wanted, and what the genre-film director and aficionado wanted was to pay homage to one of his heroes, Henri-Georges Clouzot, by remaking one of his most widely respected films: The Wages of Fear. Continue reading →

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 →