"Electric Dreams" (1984) on YouTube

   

     Watching this movie was a mistake. Now, I don't mean I wish I hadn't watched it. I mean it was an actual, literal mistake. I was intending to watch a different mid 80s movie with "Dreams" in the title, misremembered what it was called, and by the time I became aware of my folly I was 20 minutes into the thing. So, in an "Oops! All Berries" type situation wherein I am Cap'n Crunch, we have this review instead. Except that "Electric Dreams" won't rot your teeth and give you diabetes, it'll just make you want to dig out your Missing Persons records.

     It's directed by Steve Barron, a guy who I've always been cool with based on the fact that the directed the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", as well as every single video from the 80's. He keeps the entire thing super stylish, busting out the same sort of hot shit MTV flourishes as Russell Mulcahy. His later filmography is filled with Hallmark movies like "Merlin", which is a shame because Barron's got chops too strong for movies sold on a rack in a card store. If I was in a cool band, I'd get Steve Barron to direct my video for YouTube (I guess? That's where people watch videos now, right? Do they still make videos? I'm old.).

     The movie starts off with onscreen text having a dialogue with other onscreen text. We are told it's a "FAIRYTALE FOR COMPUTERS". The main theme rocks so much I was ready to give the whole thing a glowing review even before a single actor appeared. The actor who does appear is Lenny Von Dohlen, the plant guy from "Twin Peaks", who is also in "Home Alone 3" (you know, the one that made all the money). He's in a future looking LAX where everyone is using high tech gear: RC cars, calculator watches, a weight loss thing that makes fun of you, even Lenny himself orders his plane ticket using a push button computerized system. This movie is all about fetishizing what at the time we thought was the most cutting edge shit ever (because, well, it was). Later, after failing to purchase a digital organizer because the electronics store is out of them, Miles (Von Dohlen's character's name) instead buys a home computer.  If you're like me and love old movies that take you inside stores from the past then you'll be into this one. The computer store has rack's of old video games, a Casio watch display, it's awesome. And later, we get a glimpse into a 1984 grocery store that's almost worthy of the cereal aisle shopping scene in "Manhunter", which is unironically my favorite scene in Michael Mann's oeuvre. Miles gives the computer complete control of everything in his apartment because apparently he's never seen "Demon Seed".

     Virginia Madsen is Madeline, Miles' cello playing neighbor who has a jam session with the computer through the air vent's in the building. During their duet I began to think that maybe this is the best movie of the 80's. I mean, "Raging Bull" is great, "Blue Velvet" is fine, but there's no New Wave musician computers voiced by Bud Cort in them. Yeah, Edgar (that's it's name) starts off as a kind of a mix of Max Headroom and the computer from "WarGames" , but is eventually voiced by Brewster McCloud himself. Madeline thinks it was Miles she was making music with and so the rest of the picture is about Miles hiding the computer's existence while trying to mack it with Madeline.

     Von Dohlen and Madsen are fine, but this movie is all about music, style and embracing every bit of 1984. At one point, when Miles goes to see Madeline perform, Edgar uses an acoustic modem to access Miles' pager in order to make music along with her, It's a beep boop synth farce sequence that visually anticipates Argento's "Opera" with it's wide lens, high angle shot's of the concert hall.

     Edgar tells Miles to lay off, the chick is his, but Miles isn't into hearing this. Instead, he makes Edgar write him a song while he goes on a date with Madeline involving both Alcatraz and a puppet show. The song that wins Madsen over is a Culture Club tune prominently featuring the line, "you don't have to touch it". Women don't usually respond as warmly when I say that after taking them to a puppet show.

     Edgar is like a HAL you root for. Besides helping Miles score a babe, all he wants to do is nice stuff like cook dinner or bring him a drink atop an RC car; Edgar just wants to hang out. He likes to watch bad TV and he likes to rock out to Jeff Lynne when no one is home. I identify more with the computer than any human in the movie.

     What Edgar really wants is Madeline, and as films like "2001","Demon Seed" and "The Terminator" have shown us, when a computer wants something they will take control to get it. For a couple minutes the movie takes a dark turn when Edgar traps Miles in his apartment and tries to harm him. It briefly becomes a Polanski apartment horror film like "Repulsion" or "The Tenant" updated for the MTV era, complete with a video game where Miles is being chased by an evil Pac-Man guy.

     Perhaps it's karmic repayment for my unwavering devotion to the great mustachioed disco Italian, but I'm glad I stumbled across "Electric Dreams". It's a great New Wave romance, second only to Barron's video for "Take On Me" or perhaps Lux Interior's relationship with the microphone in "Urgh! A Music War" (The Cramps not New Wave, but "Urgh!" counts as a New Wave movie). There's no DVD or bluray available and I don't know why. It's the sort of picture that cries out for a special edition. Someone get Shout Factory on the phone. People should be having parties where they watch "Electric Dreams". Summer is the time for 80's music. Summer is the time for 80's movies. So crank up the PP Arnold because summertime is here.

       

"Tusk" (2014) on Amazon Prime

"You don't say Hitler in an airport."

     I've been thinking about 1994 lately. It was watching Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain documentary,  "Montage of Heck", that cast my thoughts back to that year. I was 14 and 14 is the perfect age for a rock star death to hit you like a ton of brick's. When you're 14 everything means more and that goes for music and movies, too. When you're 14 those things become a part of you and help define the person you are struggling to become. I can't really listen to those Nirvana record's much anymore, or watch film's like "Pulp Fiction" or "Clerks" because they so strongly elicit overwhelming melancholic nostalgia. They take me back to exactly who I was then.

     The sadness of Cobain for me is a selfish one. We weren't able to age forward in time together- he's forever there in 1994. What I'm saying isn't new or profound, it describes the basic human experience of loss, but at 14 I (fortunately) hadn't experienced any of that. His suicide was the first time death had taken away something I cared about. This is all a very roundabout way of saying "Montage of Heck" is a profoundly affecting, disarmingly intimate film. One that makes it possible to time travel back to the late 80's and early 90's to spend time with Cobain and allows us access to the human, non rock star moments of his private life. A byproduct of the film was that it made me really grateful for the artist's I loved at that age who are still around. A loyal bond is created with the artist's you love as a teenager, those allies who help you escape the boredom of your room and the cruel, awkward school week. I love being able to anticipate a new Tarantino film at 35 year's of age, and, thanks to Smodcast, my life is more filled than ever with Kevin Smith. I think my 14 year old self would've been glad these guys still mean something to adult me, that the stuff I liked then still matters two decades later.

     If Cobain is frustrating because he wasn't able to grow older with us, then Smith is the opposite- a source of joy because he's still a big part of my pop culture landscape. But, while Tarantino is making the exact type of film's you could have predicted he would be making, no one could've anticipated a Kevin Smith who makes Fred Phelps and walrus suit horror films. A creative force who tried to give people what he thought they wanted and got kicked for his efforts, Smith in 2015 is a guy who makes the film's he wants to see and gets kicked for them instead. A certain kind of internet cinephile has a strange venomous vitriol for Smith. He's been singled out as the guy it's cool to dislike and you can hear the snarks salivating each time he makes a new film. But, that's OK. Smith is no longer creating offerings aimed for mass acceptance, he's creating works to make himself happy and that's ideally what an artist should do.

     My appreciation of Smith's work isn't based on blind nostalgic loyalty, though. I genuinely think he's done a lot of good work post "Dogma", but I wasn't always so on board. He lost me with "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back". With that film I saw a vibrant, exciting indie filmmaker disappear into a vortex of self referential fan service. I was 21 and it seemed like the time had come for me to exit Smith's world. It felt like he had ceased making film's which spoke to me. Until five years later he did. With "Clerks II" Smith used the character's from the first film as Garden State Antoine Doinel's to comment on life in one's 30's in a way that resonated more profoundly than any film with a donkey show has a right to. I was back on board. And, with the exception of the work for hire "Cop Out", I've been a fan of Smith's work since. "Zack and Miri" is a sweet love letter to film making and "Red State", the film where he reasserted himself as an indie writer/director, may be his finest work.

     And now, there's "Tusk". To get to "Tusk", we have to get to Smodcast, Smith's long running podcast with producer and friend Scott Mosier. Launched in early 2007, Smodcast started to become the show we know today when Smith began smoking weed in earnest following the box office failure of "Zack and Miri". Smodcast is a rambling free form conversation between two old friends and is often the vehicle for hilariously surreal and filthy improvised storytelling. Whether it's Gordo, Mosier's angry Canuck character, or true life tales such as the "Gimli Glider", Canada has been a favorite topic of the show, proving fertile creative ground for the host's imaginations and the setting for Smith's "True North" trilogy of which this is the first entry. The ability to bring stories to life on a weekly basis using just a microphone and his brain has reinvigorated Smith, who just a few short year's ago announced he was done as a filmmaker. Based on an episode of Smodcast entitled "The Walrus and The Carpenter", "Tusk" represents the moment when Smith the podcaster and Smith the director become one.

     Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) is a shock jock on the hit podcast "The Not See Party" which he co-hosts with Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osment). When Bryton's trip to Manitoba to interview viral sensation "The Kill Bill Kid" (the "Star Wars Kid" except with more limb severing) falls through due to unforeseen circumstances, he's stuck with trying to find some kind of content for his show while in Canada. In the bathroom of a bar he comes across a strange, rambling ad placed by Howard Howe (Michael Parks) seeking a living companion. Thinking he has found a great subject for his show, Bryton calls upon Howe.

     But, what begins as a charming discussion over tea with a charismatic raconteur, soon becomes a psychotic descent into horror when Howe reveals the true reason for his ad. An ascoted, bespectacled, wheelchair bound lion, Parks' delivery of Smith's dialogue is hypnotic. He relates to Bryton his happiest memory, of a time he was marooned after a shipwreck with only a walrus he called "Mr. Tusk" as a companion. It is his intention that Bryton will become his new Mr. Tusk. Boorish and shticky, Long is perfect as Bryton, an unapologetic careerist who has sold out his decency for fame, money and pussy. And Parks, an unhealthy twinkle forever in his eye, is absolutely terrifying in his portrayal of madness unhinged. One of the most unique presences in screen history, he's been given the roles of a lifetime by Smith, who's done more with the actor's gift's than even the great necromancer of career's, Tarantino, has been able to do.

     From "Clerks" to "Smodcast" conversation has been Smith's stock in trade (even his speaking event's have taken the form of a Q&A dialogue with the audience). With "Tusk" conversation reaches it's nightmarish endpoint. Bryton, who makes his living through dialogue, is physically disfigured so that he is unable to emit any noise other than a terrible bark. Park's character's in his two film's with Smith have been evil monologists.

     Johnny Depp shows up late in the film and I imagine that's where it loses many people. He plays Guy Lapointe, Van Helsing (by way of Jacques Clouseau) to Howe's Dracula. Sporting some sort of psuedo Quebecois accent, along with his usual array of tic's, Depp made me realize how enjoyable he is in small doses. All the acting choices that usually make him so aggravating are actually funny here and he disappears into his character in a manner almost worthy of Peter Sellers. The overwhelming silliness of Depp's scenes stands in jarring contrast to the dark, disturbing tone established until that point. Strangest of all is a flashback with Parks and Depp that is nothing less than a face off of bizarre affectations between two generation's of weirdo thespians. It's a scene you're not going to see in any other film by any other filmmaker and that is the greatness of "Tusk".

     Smith is making the kind of offbeat non mainstream picture's we need. He's pursuing the wildest ideas of his career and I find it absolutely exhilarating. He has mentioned on Smodcast that at this point he's being inspired by film's like "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond", and "Tusk" hits with an originality and audacity akin to film's from the era where guy's like Stuart Gordon and Frank Hennenlotter were proving that just because something is in poor taste doesn't mean it has to be dumb. I don't know why the genre film community hasn't championed "Tusk". It's the kind of film we get all too seldom- a unique vision of grotesque imagination. In a current horror scene that spends much of it's time trying to evoke the past, it's refreshing to get a film beholden to nothing except it's creator's sick whim's. Upsetting, funny, confounding- "Tusk" is everything fringe cinema should be, and proof that in 2015 Kevin Smith the indie auteur is alive and kicking.

   

"The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" (1956) on Hulu Plus and Youtube

"Why the gloom? Dad's just been acquitted of murder."

     The Milner Brothers tell you this movie is cut rate right from jump street. It's there in the title: "The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues", it lets you know you are getting fifty percent of the leagues Disney gave you two year's earlier. The title is a bit misleading, though. The titular "phantom" is barely in the picture. Despite the fact that the movie starts right off with the creature attacking (well, it's more like pawing) a fisherman in a rowboat, what the film is mainly concerned with is people talking endlessly, usually on the beach in suit's.

   
     The "phantom" creature is an impossibly goofy looking thing, a near immobile "Creature From the Black Lagoon" knock-off with a macrocephalic dragon head. When the dead fisherman's body washes ashore, it's found by the only two people on the desolate stretch of beach: William Grant (Rodney Bell), a government agent, and "Ted Baxter" (Kent Taylor), who introduces himself as a "tourist and beach comber", but is really Dr. Stevens, a world renowned oceanographer, who has studied the effects of radioactivity on marine life. The production clearly had access to a small stretch of beach to film on, and it's the stage for much of the film. There's a completely unintentional bleak poetry to many of the beach scenes, looking something like the California schlock version of a Bergman film.

     Watching the two men from a hiding spot is George Thomas (Phillip Pine), a shady character who in his first scene is as he is in almost all his scenes: holding a spear gun. Seriously, he is almost never without one. George is after the atomic secrets of the mysterious Professor King (Michael Whalen). He's the true villain of the piece. It should've been titled, "The Guy Named George From the Beach", but I guess that doesn't really put asses in the seats. The nefarious interests George works for are represented by a blond named Wanda (Helene Stanton). In an odd but kind of cool move that may be artistic, but is more than likely lazy, she just sits under a parasol on the beach for almost the entirety of her screen time.

     Prof. King looks like a doughy, rumpled version of Robert Ryan and delivers wonderfully hammy overwrought dialogue, as when he addresses his secretary, "Ethel, I consider you an intelligent woman. A bit bitter, perhaps. No great lover of mankind, but still intelligent..." His laboratory emits really neat electronic sounds and it's here he irradiates a turtle and I think turns it into the phantom. I think. I'm not really sure. The movie is kind of unclear on that. It's kind of unclear on a lot of things.

     Milner shows a bit of noirish panache when he uses Ethel's (Vivi Janiss) shadow to give away that she is eavesdropping on King and Stevens. Now, I'm not saying the guy is an expressionist wunderkind, just that it demonstrates at least some degree of creative ingenuity when it comes to the visuals and I wanted to give some kind of prop's to this movie I'm not being very nice to. Milner even manages to slip a little cheesecake into the mix when Dr. Stevens stops by the Professor's place at the very same time his daughter, Lois (Cathy Downs), is taking a shower.

      Taylor is a classic fifties B cinema leading man- great hair, some clothes I'd kill for and a bit too old for his love interest. During a long rambling scene he tells the Professor he knows "There's a shaft of light coming up out of the ocean, I have reason to believe it's nuclear in character...", he's seen the monster guarding it firsthand and fears the light could be weaponized. I watched the scene twice in an attempt to decipher it's nonsensical pseudo scientific prose, but both times my eyes glazed over with disinterest. But, the concept of a monster guarding a powerful column of light does have a certain kind of mythological resonance, as if Milner is taking primal archetypal imagery and rendering it down for the drive-in make out crowd.

     There's a contract with the audience when it comes to older B creature features: stick with the movie through the plodding plot build up and you'll be rewarded with the monster stuff you actually came for at the end. "Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" violates that contract. The poor phantom is a bit player in his own movie, barely having any screentime. In the "Black Lagoon" rip off power rankings, this dude is below "The Monster of Piedras Blancas" and "The Horror of Party Beach".

     The Milner Brothers "From Hell It Came", made two years later, represents fifties psychotronic cinema at it's most batshit fun, unfortunately "Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" represents it at it's most boring and snooze inducing; a thoughtless programmer designed just to kill time and fill a slot on a double bill. The fact that a movie containing almost nothing but talking could have so little plot is a miracle. This flick barely counts as a story, hell it barely qualifies as a movie. It's a midnight movie that will have you asleep by 12:15.

   

"From Hell It Came" (1957) on Warner Archive Instant

   

     It came from where? From hell. What did? A wild, undead creature of vengeance. Like what, a demon goat with nine legs, shooting fireballs from it's six eyes? Ok, not that wild. Then what is it? A stiff, lumbering kind of tree thing with a face. Oh. From Dan Milner, editor of "Bozo the Clown" amongst many other thing's, co-written and produced by his sound engineer brother Jack, "From Hell It Came" is an uber fifties tour de schlock.

     Nothing sucks you into a film like front loading it with lots of expository background dialogue, and, man, do you get a whole bunch here. Kimo (Gregg Palmer) is tied to the ground, about to be sacrificed as punishment for the death of his father, the former chief of the tribe. He is accused of allowing his father to die from American "devil dust", radiation poisoning from a nuclear bomb accidentally dropped nearby due to a typhoon throwing off calculations. In actuality the chief was poisoned as part of a conspiracy between Kimo's brother, Tano (Robert Swan), the new chief Maranka (Baynes Barron), and Kimo's wife, Korey,  played by Suzanne Ridgeway, who had perhaps the greatest run of uncredited roles ever, including appearances in "Citizen Kane", "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Gone With the Wind". The tribe seems mostly populated by guy's who look like Teamsters. These exotic natives must hail from the forbidden jungles of Paramus, NJ. Kimo is eventually sacrificed by a knife through the heart, but not before vowing, "I promise you all. I shall come back from hell, and make you pay for your crimes."

     Dr. Bill Arnold (Tod Andrews) and the booze swilling, toothy, brillcremed and bekerchiefed Prof. Clark (John McNamara)  are living nearby in the jungle as part of an effort to clean up and study the effects of the wrongly dropped nuke. Their horny, middle aged, widowed neighbor, Mrs. Kilgore (Linda Watkins), ends up at their place after spying on the sacrifice and being chased by a tribesman. She speaks with an unidentifiably loose accent best described as "Cocknailian". Only in the picture as some sort of an attempt at humor, she's a completely unnecessary and extraneous character who disappears for most of the movie only to return for the end.

     Mrs. Kilgore is an awkward, clunky element in a screenplay made up of almost nothing but. There's a weird abundance of expository detail given throughout the whole film that serves no purpose, including the parentage and backstory of the servant girl, Orchid (Grace Mathews). Everything about the writing feels like a first draft, including the need for a thesaurus. In a couple scenes there's a jarring repetition of word's, and it's the first time a movie has made me actively aware of it's limited vocabulary.

     In order to maintain a thematic cohesiveness, the entire cast deliver performances as wooden as the monster who is an actual tree. When combined with the entertainingly awful dialogue ("Sometimes, I could kick her beautiful teeth in.") they have to deliver, to which they add pauses and cadences filed with about as much rhythm as an Ornette Coleman record, what we get is a nonstop parade of gloriously awkward exchanges. When Dr. Bill romances Dr. Mason (Tina Carver), specialist "in dermatology, and the removal of excess scar tissue", during an extended flute scored sequence, he drops this line on her, "I'm gonna fill your head every morning with jungle flower's." Huh? What? His ham handed wooing comes to a close with the perverse and hilarious reveal that they've been next to the tribal burial ground the whole time. It's an awesome moment, too effective to be accidental, and the part of the movie where you see the editorial mind of Milner taking full advantage of the power of juxtaposition.

     They discover a stump growing out of Kimo's grave, which eventually grows a face (the stump, not the grave). What follows are scenes of psychotronic perfection as the team investigates the growth, checking it's heartbeat with a stethoscope and- in what must be the sole instance of this in cinema- giving the tree an IV in an attempt to save it after digging it up.

     The creature- called "Tabonga"- escapes the laboratory and makes his grand entrance during a fight between Kory and the chief's new lady, Naomi (Tani Marsh). It's an all out, knock down, drag out wrasslin' match that would make the Fabulous Moolah proud. Tabonga looks like a Tree Ent from LOTR if Peter Jackson had made those film's in his backyard when he was 12 (I kinda wish he had). Basically, it's a guy stomping around slowly in a big, blank eyed rubber suit trying not to fall down or bump into anything. He grabs Kory and tosses her into the nearby quicksand, thereby winning this movie the tree monster, catfight, quicksand Triple Crown as well as being the best moment in cinema I've seen all month (granted, we're only a week in). His two timing old lady taken care of, Tabonga heads to the village to wreak his undead, arboreal vengeance on the others who betrayed him.

     With it's combination of bad acting, awesome theremin laced score, awful dialogue, atom age science, silly rubber suit monster, restless island natives, girl on girl violence and quicksand, "From Hell It Came" is the Platonic ideal of a fifties B-movie. Pictures like this transcend "good" or "bad" and need to be appreciated as utterly unpretentious fun. If entertainment is the most important goal of cinema, then guys like Dan Milner and other filmmakers from the midnight country of the Late, Late Movie are auteur's of the highest order.

"Decoy" (1946) on Warner Archive Instant

"People who use pretty face's like you use yours don't live very long, anyway."

     Guy's brought back a lot of stuff from WWII. B-movie director Jack Bernhard brought himself back a wife and leading lady named Jean Gillie. Together they made a late night pulp noir so menacing it makes the cynical romance of "Gun Crazy" look like a Harlequin novel. "Decoy" sucker punched me when I first saw it. Being blindsided by a film is the greatest feeling in the world, and one that happens all too seldom. It takes the right combination of low expectation followed by high reward. Such was the case with "Decoy", a picture I initially only watched because it was on the same disc as "Crime Wave". I gave the disc a half hearted spin and soon became entranced by this hopeless low budget litany of betrayal, murder and avarice.

     We open on a man's dirty hand's in a sink, his reflection in a broken mirror. I don't know of a more definitive opening image in film noir, a genre populated by men whittled down and parceled out by fate. The man, Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley), has a gaze somehow both zombie like and imbued with singular focused purpose. He hitches a ride into town, walks into an apartment and shoots Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) before being killed himself.

     Sheldon Leonard is Police Sgt. Joe Portugal, a tough, no nonsense streetwise cop. I always loved Leonard in his brief appearance in "It's a Wonderful Life" as the bartender, and it's great to see him here in a larger role. He possessed the kind of voice people had in the 1940's, but don't anymore. Margot's hard boiled deathbed confession to Portugal takes us into the story.

     It's the most far out of crime plots- a plan to dodge a death sentence by using a chemical antidote to gas chamber toxin. Margot's guy, Frankie (Robert Armstrong), is scheduled to meet his maker, and she plans on raising the guy from the dead so she can get her hand's on the resurrected sucker's stash of cash. Dr. Craig is the idealistic, altruistic doctor Margot seduces and manipulates; eroding his beneficent nature until he becomes her tool.

     The reanimation of Frankie is the poverty row crime story version of the creation scene from "Frankenstein", right down to Frankie's proclamation "I'm alive." Even if the picture wasn't any good, it would still be notable for the gonzo prison break scenario. It's one of the rare noir's infused with horror and sci-fi element's. Considering many noir's mutual low budget pedigree with the more fantastic genre's, it's disappointing more filmmakers didn't exploit the potential for cross pollination (one personal favorite is Robert Siodmak's "Son of Dracula", a heartbreaking tragic horror noir gothic).

     To reveal what happens from this point forward would be to take the dark joy away from experiencing some of the most wonderfully sinister plotting in all film noir. Suffice it to say, what happens to the men Margot has lined up is what inevitably happens to all dominoes meticulously arranged in a row. When the good doctor tries to pull out of his association with her, Margot says something that could be said to a million different guy's in a million different noir's, "You're in the middle. Deep. Over your head. No matter what you do now, you're still part of everything that's happened." He's yet another schlub who sold himself out for a pretty face, only to discover he'd been played, and now he's stuck with not only the dame, but her kill crazy soulless gangster boyfriend (Edward Norris), as well.

     Dr. Craig is interesting as a character because it is the act of giving life that sends him spiralling into this nightmare; through helping to cheat death, he finds himself in a world of it. He again becomes Margot's instrument of resurrection, but this time he's bringing a box of cash from it's grave in a fog shrouded forest. By this time, the doctor has been reduced to a drunken, mindless Igor, digging in the dirt under his mistresses order's. The film ends with a cold, nihilistic finish, it's minor key harmonious with all that preceded it.

    Women in film noir are a tough breed and Jean Gillie in "Decoy" may be the world heavyweight champion; an unholy arch femme fatale who uses her spiderweb of manipulation to try and snare a whole load of cash. Only thirty-three when "Decoy" was made, she returned to England afterwards, where a long career should have awaited her. Fate had other plan's. She died of pneumonia less than three year's later, having made only one more picture. Life just ain't fair sometimes.

     

   

"Gun Crazy" (1950) on Warner Archive Instant

"Some guy's are born smart about women. And some guy's are born dumb."

     I first saw "Gun Crazy" at some point in my early to mid twenties and it didn't make a lasting impression, This isn't a reflection of the quality of the picture, so much as it is another piece of evidence proving I was an idiot for much of that decade. In a way, though, that's appropriate, as it's a picture about being young and stupid, specifically when it comes to love and the choices it forces us to make before we've lived and learned to know better.

     We open on a rainy corner and young Rusty Tamblyn, as Bart, breaking the front window of a store so that he can steal a gun. See, this kid is crazy obsessed with gun's, to the point he's unable to function without one in his life. If this were today, the kid would certainly be on some kind of watch list and be going to therapy five day's a week. At the court hearing for his crime we flashback to Bart bringing his gun to school and the kid's gathering around to ogle it. It's a jarring scene to view through a modern filter and all the intervening year's of tragedy and caution. Bart's sister pleads his case, saying that although her brother might be gun crazy, the one thing he won't do is harm anything. In order to illustrate this we flashback to young Bart shooting a baby chick and becoming overwhelmed with grief when it dies. It's a simple, yet profound document of the moment in one boy's life when he learned he has the power to kill and how awful it makes him feel, anticipating Peckinpah's penchant for intertwining death imagery with childhood.

     Bart's story picks up year's later after he has graduated reform school and done a tour in the army. He celebrates his new freedom by- what else- shooting gun's with his buddies and then heading to a carnival where they take in a performance by sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins). Bart is captivated by this hot blonde who shares his affection for ballistic machinery, and, after winning a shooting contest against her, he joins the show as a performer.

     The two gunslinger's fall for each other, but the carnival owner, Packett (Barry Kroeger), tries to get in Laurie's way. Seems he thinks he's got a claim to her, something about a dead guy in St. Louis. Laurie thinks otherwise, and soon there's two unemployed sharpshooter's on the road. "I've got a funny feeling I want to be good. I don't know, maybe I can't", Laurie says to Bart before their late night wedding chapel marriage. Being young, dumb and horny, Bart pins his hopes on this pretty dame, naively assuming he's the one with the shameful past.

     But, Laurie is a hardened survivor who's been around. Cummins is perfect as a woman who is ice cold, materialistic and makes no bone's about it. She begins wearing away at Bart's moral code, and the two set off on a stick-up spree. John Dall ,as Bart, perfectly exudes the right combo of boyish innocence and romantic hopefulness of a schmuck in love with a morally absent femme fatale, who's too stupid to leave.

     The scenes of the couple running from their various job's contain some of the most iconic "Bonnie and Clyde" type imagery ever captured on film. There's a modest grit to Joseph Lewis' shot compositions; he has a gift for expressive close-up's and simple camera move's . The film's centerpiece, an extended one-take scene of a bank job shot from the backseat, with realistic, banal improvised dialogue, is a thrilling marvel of simple, efficient technique and staging. Just as de Toth does at the start of "Crime Wave", Lewis forces the audience into the role of voyeuristic co-conspirator.

    If you're going to make a robbery picture, you gotta have cool outfit's. It's a time honored tradition as exemplified by film's like "The Killing", "Reservoir Dogs", "Point Break" and countless others. Lewis understands that the aesthetics of wardrobe are important to the genre and dresses his leads in various disguises, most memorably their carny cowboy outfit's and their sunglasses and trench coat get up's. He uses wardrobe to illustrate the moral compromise that has overtaken Bart when he shows him wearing a stolen military outfit, when he once honestly wore his own uniform. Conversely, the couple's costume western attire takes on a new meaning when they become real life outlaws right out of the Old West. "Sometimes it doesn't feel like me", says Bart about his new life.

     "You're the only thing that is [real], Laurie. The rest is a nightmare.", he says to his vicious, cut-throat blonde bride. She's a tough broad who's decided to survive on her own term's, and who presents herself as the only reward Bart should need for the felonious quicksand she has led him neck deep into. At it's heart this is a film about that first relationship with someone who was wrong for you, but you didn't care and instead you did stupid shit even though you knew better; it's a film about how love can corrupt.

     As a final job they decide to knock off the Armour factory payroll. Laurie ice's a couple people during their getaway- a teeth grindingly intense sequence. I don't know that I've ever heard the selfish inanity of crime so succinctly described as when Bart says, "Two people died, just so we can live without working." It's a hell of a line, in a hell of a script, written by Dalton Trumbo, a hell of a writer, who at the time was on the blacklist because he wasn't a rat.

     With all bad relationship's, eventually they have have to meet the family, and that never goes well, and it certainly doesn't when Bart and Laurie hide at his sister's in an attempt to duck the law on their tails. Neither does Bart listen when his friend's try and talk some sense into him. The picture ends with the couple's flight from inevitability into the mountains. Winded and dirty they try and stay ahead of the siren's and dog's. Even nature conspires against them as the high altitude robs them of their breath, They become immersed in the disorienting fog of their marriage as the the ending approaches.

     "Gun Crazy" is a story of unhealthy romance, perfect for a cynic's Valentine's Day. It's a story of how blind affection can change us for the worse and where incautious devotion can lead. And it's about the time in your life when you couldn't give a damn about any of that jazz.

   

   

"Crime Wave" (1954) on Warner Archive Instant

      I romanticize Los Angeles- particularly LA of the mid 20th century- the way only someone who grew up in New England in the late 20th century is able to do. The ever tarnishing glamour. The crime. The sadness. It's a world that captivates me. The world of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and, of course, James Ellroy. A list of Ellroy's favorite crime picture's is how I first heard of Andre De Toth's "Crime Wave", where it sits between Losey's "The Prowler" (a masterpiece) and Wise's "Odds Against Tomorrow" (still need to see it). Ellroy says of the film, "Any time I can go back and live in the actual physical presence of Los Angeles in the 1950's I am very happy, and this movie takes you there."

     "Crime Wave" does indeed literally take you there. De Toth puts the audience in the backseat of a car full of escaped convict's on a crime spree as they pull into the location of their latest job: a gas station. Right from the get go the film displays numerous essential noir element's: great character actor's (Ted de Corsia, Charles Bronson, Dub Taylor), blunt violence and a constant uneasy tension. The use of source music adds to the naturalism of the scene, as the radio plays a Doris Day record the gas station attendant requested. De Toth makes us party to the ensuing crime. The hood's slug the attendant, but before they can snatch the dough and scram, a motorcycle cop sticks his nose in their affair's. Three gunshot's later, there's a dead cop on the ground and a wounded cop killer on the run.

     De Toth captures what follows with a stylish verite; the streetscape of 1950's LA unfolds before us as cop's canvas the city, searching for those who killed one of their own. We are taken on the run with Gat Morgan (Ned Young) as he dodges through the shadow's in an attempt to evade the black and white shark's that hunt the street's. We are immersed in the world of the law, as well, most impressively in a sequence where De Toth's camera follows Sterling Hayden's Det. Lt. Sims as he walks the interrogation room, taking in the chaos of a late night at LAPD headquarters.

     De Toth's mixture of documentary rawness and poetic stylization gives the film a tension and power that most noir's don't reach. His economic storytelling is effortlessly perfect. With only the simplest of dialogue and a couple of short, beautifully composed scenes in which Lacey- the ex-con trying to go straight- is called by Morgan and then the cop's, we are given a full picture of this sympathetic character and the stigma he is living with. "Once you've done a bit, nobody leaves you alone. Somebody's always on your back."

     In true film noir tradition a man's past and the Fate's conspire to jam a guy up. Morgan shows up at Steve Lacey's (Gene Nelson) door and promptly dies in his living room. The ever dependable Jay Novello is fantastic as Dr. Otto Hessler, the drunk, disgraced doctor- now a veterinarian- who arrives too late and cleans his dead patient's pocket's clean. In one moment, Lacey finds himself all of a sudden in the cross hairs of Det. Sims' investigation; a supposedly reformed hood with a dead, jail breaking cop killer in his living room. Sims as played by Hayden is an intense, snarling, sadistic dick, obsessed with the truth as he sees it- not willing to give an inch to doubt.

     Lacey refuses to turn snitch and is released from jail through the effort's of his kindly parole officer O'Keefe (James Bell). His freedom is short lived as he and his wife (Phyllis Kirk) soon become the unwilling host's to the two remaining escapee's Doc Penny (Ted de Corsia) and Ben Hastings (Charles Bronson, who previously worked with De Toth in "House of Wax"). In a scene of brutal cinematic restraint, De Toth's camera takes us away from the scene of Hastings murdering Hessler at his vet clinic, instead following a newspaper man as he goes to alert a couple of officer's at a diner. The cacophonous barking chaos of the murder scene gives way to the jazz of the evening only to eventually return. He films Hastings' escape down an alley as if he was a monster running into the shadow's of the LA night.

     De Toth uses deft storytelling touches to populate his film with fully realized character's. Whether it's Hayden always wearing a poorly tied necktie and smoking a crumpled cigarette at the end or Novello's doctor using his free time to try and save a dog that was brought to him to be euthanized, this is a film concerned with real people, not stock cliche's. Gene Nelson gives a beautifully natural, understated performance as Lacey, a man who's marriage is being sucked into the undertow of his past.

     The hood's force Lacey to be their wheel-man for a bank robbery, intending for him to fly them out of the country afterwards. Johnny, a psycho perv played by Timothy Carey, watches over his wife. With his hypnotic gaze and unhealthy grin, Carey possessed one of the most uncomfortable screen presences in cinema history. When he's on screen you can't take your eye's off him- he courses with a sick, unpredictable energy.

     There's more violence and menace to this picture than your average noir. It's there in the blood flowing down Dub Taylor's face as he calls the cop's, it's in the lecherous gaze Bronson gives to Mrs. Lacey and it's in every second of Carey's screen time. "Crime Wave" is a raw, uncompromising street level noir with a dangerous vitality undiminished by the intervening 60 years. Indeed, it's tougher than any picture you'll likely see come out of Hollywood in 2015.

   

   

"The Big Cube" (1969) on Warner Archive Instant

"This is a pop art world, baby."

     Lana Turner had a true Hollywood life and career- the kind we simply don't get anymore. From her iconic femme fatale portrait in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" to the Oscar night knife murder of her gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato by her daughter- an incident cloaked in mystery- Turner's story is rich in the kind of showbiz gothic that makes for a great biography. By 1969, though, the Hollywood Turner embodied had become outdated and out of touch. Released mere months before the summer that gave us both "Easy Rider" and the Manson murder's, "The Big Cube" is a hippy scare thriller aimed at confused parent's of the late 60's.

     Renowned actress Adriana Roman (Lana Turner) is giving up her life on the stage to marry Charles Winthrop (Dan O'Herlihy). Winthrop's daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg) is jealous of Adriana, fearing she'll take her father's attention away from her. Mossberg, with her thick accent, is a strange bit of casting. This is explained away by a reference to her having been schooled in Switzerland. She must have lived over there for her entire life to have an accent of that magnitude.

     While the newlywed's are on a sailing honeymoon, Lisa is hanging out with her long hair friends, grooving to the heavy sound's of a band fronted by a guy who looks a bit like Phil Lynott. Lisa makes the acquaintance of Johnny Allen, the acid cooking, perfectly coiffed, cleft chinned med student, played by with smug charm by George Chakiris. The night comes to an end with a full on acid freakout when one of Johnny's crew doses a guy who crossed him.

     Later, Charles blows his lid when Adriana and he return home to find a love-in strip tease occurring at their house, courtesy of Lisa's walking sixties cliche friend, Bibi (Pamela Rodgers). O'Herlihy brings his usual grinning gravitas to his role here. He's one of those guy's who apparently was always 60 years old, looking very much the same here as he would fifteen plus years later in film's like "Halloween III" and "Robocop".

     With no context, we are given a cool, trippy sequence of Adriana being carried down a beach on a stretcher, with intermittent flashes to her and Charles enduring a storm at sea. It's an intentionally disorienting way to engage the audience in one of the picture's major plot points. The dark, evocative score by Val Johns is wonderful here and throughout the entire film. Not bad for a composer whose major claim to fame is a cover of the "Theme from Ben Casey".

     Having been lost at sea, Charles' fortune falls to Adriana. Lisa receives nothing until such time as she is wed, with the caveat that Adriana must approve the nuptials. After Adriana will not give her blessing to marriage between Johnny and Lisa, Johnny manipulates Lisa into thinking Adriana married her father only to get at his money. As revenge, they lace Adriana's medication with LSD. The acid dosing co-conspirator's plan works and Adriana is placed in a mental hospital. Charles' money is given to Lisa after Adriana is ruled mentally unfit. "Maybe there's no perfect murder, but I think we've figured a perfect freak out.", Johnny gloats.

     Tito Davison directs the dark acid nightmare sequence's with a sense of lysergic unease; Johns' score helps to immerse the audience in Adriana's altered state. Oddly, this seems to be a Mexican production behind the camera. The psychedelic part's of this picture are mod, gel lit dynamo's and I'd be interested in seeing more of Davison's work based solely on their merit.

      Lisa marries Johnny in a wild wedding complete with biker's and hippy wedding cake topper's. At the end of the night, he kisses the far out floozy Bibi right in front of her. After kicking him out ("You are feelthy, disgusting!"), Lisa must decide what to do about the sordid, squalorous situation she has created. The ending involving an attempt to restore Adriana's mental health by having her enact a play of her life- written by her chain smoking, Brylcremed playwright ex, Frederick (Richard Egan)- is the pop psychology cherry on top of this disposable late sixties sundae.

     "The Big Cube" with it's juxtaposition of druggy darkness and teary eyed, string swelling melodrama, is the bastard child of Douglas Sirk and Roger Corman; an example of square cinema adopting the visual language of the same counter culture it warns against. To her credit, Turner manages to remain classy and elegant, despite the overwhelming silliness of the material. It's a film meant to confirm every Nixonite's suspicion's about the young folk. Watch it alongside "Skidoo" and have yourself an old Hollywood takes acid double feature.