Obsessione (1943)

Being a long time fan of James M. Cain, I don't know why it has taken me so long to watch Luchino Visconti's adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Obsessione. Made in 1943, it beat Hollywood to the punch, the John Garfield/Lana Turner version of the novel not coming out until 1946.

Here's the plot: Giovanna lives in a shabby restaurant with her husband, the gruff and not terribly bright Bragana (Juan de Landa). One day a hobo named Gino stops in and cons Giovanna out of a meal. When Bragana catches him, the bum offers to perform some repairs around the place. He stays and he and the wife fall for each other, hard. He asks her to run off with him; she refuses; he leaves without her. They meet again in the city, decide they can't live without each other, and plan to murder Bragana. Nothing good comes from their crime.

Neither this nor the American movie packs the wallop the novel does, but the American film comes a little closer. Visconti's seediness is seedier than Tay Garnett's seediness and the garage/hash house in which the lovers meet is certainly hot and dusty, but leads Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai, as Gino and Giovanna (Frank and Cora in the book) are not convincing as a pair so desperately in lust they are willing to do whatever it takes to stay together. Cain called it "the love knot" and it was the plot device that drags his protagonists to hell in this story and its literary doppelganger Double Indemnity, both of which were based in part on the Judd Gray/Ruth Snyder murder of Snyder's husband in 1927, a stupid crime so ineptly carried out, Damon Runyon dubbed it "the dumb-bell murder case."

Whether or not you believe in the kind of blind, ravenous passion that rips its victim's guts out is entirely up to you, but I didn't see it in Girotti and Calamai. Calamai is certainly an attractive woman and was a big star in Italian cinema of the time, but we see nothing in the way Gino reacts to Giovanna that is a convincing motive for murder.

I suspect part of the problem may be that Visconti wasn't particularly interested in the sordid crime part of the story. While Gino is separated from Giovanna he meets lo Spagnolo (the Spaniard), a street vender who preaches Marxism—but subtly enough to get around Fascist censors—and appears to have more than a fraternal interest in Gino. I sense that Visconti, a homosexual Communist, would rather have spent more time with Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo), a character who has no equivalent in Cain's novel.

The real attraction of the film is its look and feel. It is one of the earliest examples of neo-realism, the style Visconti pioneered and championed before moving on to the romantic luxury of films like Senso and The Leopard.

Violette Noziere (1978)

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Violette Noziere (Isabelle Huppert) as a character in Claude Chabrol's film is that she is so ordinary. As you can see from her photo, the real Vilolette was no beauty; as you can tell from her story, she was no evil genius. She was just a plain girl in her mid-teens who lived a somewhat awkward life with her lower-middle class parents in Paris in the early 1930s, who slipped out and pretended to be older so she could carry on with older men. She met a slick, useless young man with whom she fell completely in love and to whom she gave money and emotional support. When he threatened to leave her, she poisoned her parents, killing her father and nearly killing her mother.

Her story is the kind of sordid affair that frequently inspired fiction by James M. Cain, whose protagonists also found themselves tied up with emotional Gordian Knots. But Cain's hapless lovers/killers were snakes, beguiling us with the intensity of their stares as they looked in each other's eyes—Violette is a lizard, a colorless Gila monster crawling along from moment to moment. She fascinates us not because we wonder how she can escape her fate or what will happen when her passion finally bursts forth, but because we know that she is neither imaginative nor smart enough to avoid slouching toward the guillotine.

The film moves along with the same relentlessness. The crime is not presented in the larger than life manner of a Bonnie and Clyde shootout, but just as another episode in another day in another life of silent desperation. Mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) seems to be always on the verge of admitting to herself that something is wrong in the way her husband, Violette's father Baptiste (Jean Carmet), relates to the girl. (We see Violette and Baptiste chatting casually as she is topless and he has a hard time controlling his eyes.) Violette visits her doctor, who tells her she has syphilis. When her parents find out about it, she convinces them that the only way she could have contracted the disease was by inheriting it at birth from them. They swallow her story and what she tells them is medicine. It's the poison.

We also spy on Violette with some friends of near her own age. They claim to be students but they do have plenty of time to hang out at cafes—the mall?—sipping drinks and conversing about nothing in particular. This is how she meets Jean Dabin (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the counterfeit millionaire who soon reveals his need for money and his entire lack of interest in earning it. Violette supplies it by stealing from her parents and blackmailing older men of her acquaintance.

It's remarkable that Chabrol is able to bleach all the sensation from what was one of the most sensational crimes of the Parisienne1930s and still keep us fascinated. Written by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, and Frederic Grendel, based on the book by Jean-Marie Fitere, the film is not the overheated crime, but the clinical autopsy. Director of photography Jean Rabier and production designer Jacques Brizzio remind us that things and places are not colorful and exciting merely by virtue of being historical.

There's a creeping ennui to Violette, a lethargic dullness which allows us to see life through the girl's eyes. Before she meets Dabin she feels trapped in her parents' bog of an existence and nothing really seems to matter to her. After she falls in love—if that is really what it is and not just a desire for love that is so strong because everything else is so weak—she has to follow the path of least resistance because that is the only way she knows how to go.

It's a fine and observant film, and an exhausting one.

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)

I suspect that the very first joke about marriage went like this: Two cavemen met one day and the first one said, "Who was that giant ground sloth I saw you with last night?" and the second one answered "That was no giant ground sloth; that was my wife."

Well, it used to slay the boys at Lascaux.

The movies have provided a means of relating the marriage joke from the earliest days of fictional one-reelers. The image of wife-dom usually suffered most through these quick anecdotes, which is only to be expected since men were telling the stories. The onscreen husbands, played by almost every silent and pre-code talking comedian at one time or another, were just regular guys looking for a little extra-curricular fun. Their wives were the spoil sports, taking the idea of being a civilizing influence way too seriously.

The screen's first comedy team specialized in these mini-situation comedies. John Bunny and Flora Finch made something like 100 shorts for Vitagraph between 1910 and Bunny's death in 1915. Only a handful of these pictures survive. They weren't all domestic comedies but that genre dominated their output with titles like And His Wife Came Back, Mr. Bunnyhug Buys a Hat for His Wife, Thou Shalt Not Covet, and Which Way Did He Go? (in which Bunny's character is named "Mr. Henpecko")..

Bunny, a native New Yorker, was short and heavy while London-born Finch was tall and thin. After Bunny's death, Finch stayed in movies—her last role being an uncredited bit in The Women (MGM, 1939) before her passing in 1940—but she never again achieved anything like the popularity she'd garnered as Bunny's screen wife. Her post-Bunny comic chops are on display as Aunt Susan in Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (Universal, 1927)..

Bunny and Finch mark a good place to start looking at the marriage joke in early films because in at least one way they lived the joke themselves: they weren't really man and wife, but they hated each other anyway..

In the best known of their few surviving one-reelers, A Cure For Pokeritis (1912), they are George and Mary Brown. George enjoys a weekly night out with the boys for a poker session. Their meeting place is the clichéd masculine den of impropriety: guys are sitting at tables shuffling and dealing, their shirt sleeves rolled up and ties loosened. Many wear eye shades; cigars and cigarettes are plentiful. All the place lacks are a pool table and a sinister coachman to be Pinocchio's Pleasure Island..

George consistently loses at cards. This night, he even has to borrow trolley fare home. He staggers in late, disheveled and looking like he's on the far side of a two-week drunk. Mary is sitting up waiting for him, growing angrier each minute she's forced to wait. He arrives and swears contrition. He'll never play poker again..

A week later, one of his friends comes up with a plot. George will pretend to join a lodge called "Sons of the Morning" that meets every Wednesday night. Mary believes him—not the first mistake she's made in this marriage, including answering "I do." The scheme would work well if George didn't talk in his sleep. We are to assume that a) he's never done this before, b) Mary has never noticed it before, or c) we're not to think about it..

At this point, the second familiar element of the marriage joke becomes apparent: the wife's relative. Be they lazy, inept, greedy, vice-ridden, unemployable, smarmy, or just plain stupid, wifey's relations are the stuff of domestic misery. In this case, the bane is Cousin Freddie, a dandified wuss who flutters his hands and rolls his eyes as Mary fills him in on George's skullduggery. To make all husbands in the audience like this guy even less, he enlists the aid of his Bible class in spying on George. How much less of a real man can you be than a Bible study participant?.

The dénouement arrives after heaping helpings of deceit, disguise and distrust. Apparently George has learned the lesson Mary set out for him. All will end well with George and Mary embracing. What hubby doesn't know is that Mary is responsible for breaking up his poker gang by uncovering his deception and then going him one better. Each of them is a trickster and neither really has any reason to believe the other. The loving clinch at the end is merely convention. We all know that if George can come up with another trick, he'll use it to reorganize his poker night..

We're also left to ponder this question: why does Mary go to such lengths to break up George's fun? Yes, he loses every week but we see nothing that indicates his poker losses are doing anything to undermine the Browns' financial stability. He's not stealing to cover his debts. He's not contemplating taking any winnings to run off with the office steno girl. The missus seems to want to put a halt to his night out just because it is his night out. Maybe she wants to make the emasculation complete by having him take up studying the good book, like Cousin Freddie..

Just as with a stand-up joke, there is no back story to this little movie. Mary does what she does because it is in the nature of wives to prevent their husbands from having any fun that doesn't include them—which from the male point of view is no fun at all.

Sweeney Todd (1936)

The world-sweeping rage of Sweeneymania that Warner Bros. hoped for with the 2007 release of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street didn't occur. The film's mix of black humor, unhumable melodies and blood-drenched melodrama didn't attract either the audience for musicals or the fans of gore. Perhaps the DVD availability of a solid 2006 BBC production starring Ray Winstone was another trip wire on the stairway to paradise.

But there was an earlier movie version of the story, much different in detail than the Tim Burton film. Its star was Tod Slaughter, Britain's answer to Karloff, Lugosi and Hollywood's other actors of the macabre in the 1930s. The puzzlement of Tod Slaughter's films, as even his most enthusiastic fans have to admit, is this: are his peculiar performances enough to let us recommend his movies when "by any objective standard they are cheaply-produced rubbish." (britishpictures.com).

If you want to try one, Sweeney Todd should be it. The long journey of Sweeney Todd from blood and thunder stage melodrama to Broadway musical began in an urban legend. One of Sweeney's stops along the way was a "quota quickie," a movie made in England on the cheap with at least 75% of the paid cast and crew being English. These came about because of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which was enacted to help the British film industry compete with American movies at home.

Slaughter was born in 1885 so by the time he made Sweeney Todd in 1936, just his third picture, he was already in his 50s. He'd spent his early years on the provincial stage, touring England in the kind of be-whiskered melodramas much beloved by the Victorians and kept alive by shamelessly barnstorming theater companies. George King, a producer and later director of quota quickies, discovered Slaughter and decided that he would be as successful in films as he was on stage if he performed in the same kind of story, and so cast his new aging star in Murder in the Red Barn. It clicked with less demanding audiences and Slaughter began his cinematic reign of terror.

In Sweeney Todd, Slaughter plays the title roll of a demented barber in Victorian London who uses a tricked-out barber's chair to "polish off" his wealthier customers. A gentleman sits in the chair, Todd pulls a lever, and the chair and platform on which it rests swivel backward dropping the victim through a hole in the floor and into the cellar. If the fall doesn't kill him, Todd soon will.

The barber shop shares its cellar with the shop next to it, Mrs. Lovatt's bakery of meat pies. The movie never explicitly points out that Mrs. Lovatt (a deliciously pinched-face Stella Rho) cuts up the bodies of Todd's customers and bakes them into her pies, but several hints are dropped along with the corpses. In one scene, a supporting character is eating one of the pies as he ponders on why the corpses of the murdered men are never seen again. Either cannibalism was a taboo that could never have gotten past the censor or it was assumed that the British public already knew what the Todd/Lovatt connection was.

As the film opens, a solid British sailor named Mark Ingerstreet (Bruce Seton) is being greeted on his return from the sea by Johanna, his one true love (Eve Lister). Unfortunately, Mark sails for Johanna's father, one of those Victorian paters who would never consider a mere employee to be an acceptable suitor for his daughter's hand (D.J. Williams). Yes, dammee, it's too bad. We see Todd standing in the shadows, watching for a likely customer he can murder and rob. "I love my work," he cackles, slapping his hands together and wringing them. "Money!" he hisses with all the subtlety of an ocean liner hitting an iceberg when he sees a wealthy nabob come ashore.

Todd invites the man into his shop for a close shave and before dropping him through the hole in the floor, he sends his young apprentice Tobias (Johnny Singer) next door for a pie. As fate, and melodrama, would have it, Todd knows Johanna's father and wants to invest in his next voyage. Of course, he also has his beady eyes on Johanna and determines to win her either through wooing or through skullduggery, preferably the latter. (I am reminded of the fella in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man who asks Larson E. Whipsnade (W.C. Fields) if he wants to earn an honest dollar. "Does it have to be honest?" Whipsnade replies.)

Weeks pass and Mark sets out on the very voyage in which Todd has invested. The film now offers a diversionary segment in which the captain of the ship is killed by rampaging natives and Mark assumes command. When he returns to London he has with him a sack of pearls (hence the story's title, The String of Pearls, in its original penny dreadful incarnation in 1846).

Todd sees him disembark, lures him to the shop and attempts to kill him. This time, the fall doesn't "polish him off" and, after Mrs. Lovatt spies Todd stealing the pearls so he won't have to divvy up with her, she helps Mark to escape. Mark then decides to disguise himself as an old country farmer and goes back to Sweeney's shop. He's dropped into the cellar again and with the assistance of another sailor he figures out exactly how Todd performs his evil deeds.

Now we get to the wild-as-a-March-hare conclusion. Johanna discovers what Mark is up to so she disguises herself as a young boy and goes to Todd's in case she needs to rescue Mark. Todd figures out who she is, knocks her out, and locks her in the closet. He has already killed Mrs. Lovatt, offstage, and in order to cover up his crimes, he sets fire to the shop. Back rushes Mark and smashes his way into the building to look for Johanna. As he pulls her from the closet, Todd returns to kill him. Todd ends up in the blazing cellar, Johanna ends up in Mark's arms, and the ill-gotten gains end up spilled in an alley.

It's been said that if the Victorians could have made movies, the product would have looked like Tod Slaughter's pictures. Obviously, there isn't much in the plot to attract anyone born after 1902 and the production values (except for the costumes) are laughably low. The acting from the supporting players is actually a notch above what you find in poverty row American films of the era—but then there's Slaughter.

He's so hammy his performances should have been condemned in Leviticus. His smile is so wide you know his characters have to be faking their bonhomie, and the smile is never reflected in his eyes, which are unmoving and dead. He does a great deal of acting with his hands, double gesturing, wringing, and rubbing palms together. He often speaks in a throaty, raspy whisper that makes him sound like the host of a radio horror series. He doesn't seem to have figured out that you don't have to play everything so broadly in front of a camera.

But there's no denying that Slaughter is a one-man time machine. Watching him transports you to another era. In fact, you may find yourself hissing the television. I suppose, though, that the real pleasure comes from watching a performer who seems to genuinely love what he's doing. I know a critic shouldn't try to slide by with saying, "I can't explain it any better than that," but hell, I can't explain it any better than that.

Let me go out quoting britishpictures.com once again. "A new generation of fans have stumbled onto his work [seeing it on late night British TV] and asked the question 'What the bloody hell was that!'"

What indeed. So is this version of Sweeney Todd's gruesome journey a good movie? Oh, hell no. As a work of cinema, it's abysmal. Okay, do I recommend it? I just can't. I want to, but I can't. But if you've read this far, you know I recommend Tod Slaughter. Forget what I say and read what I mean. Seek him out.

Bubba Ho-tep (2002)

"Come and get it, you undead sack of shit."

If your taste runs to oddball concepts but away from horror movies, go with this one anyway. There isn't that much in it of a horrific nature—there's a re-animated mummy who sucks the souls out of aging convalescent home patients through their assholes (yes, another one of those movies), but the soul-sucking takes place off screen. Bruce Campbell stars as an old Elvis Presley, probably, although he could be an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff, and Ossie Davis co-stars as Jack, who thinks he's John F. Kennedy dyed black and hidden away in an East Texas nursing home by Lyndon Johnson. When the home both men live in becomes besieged by the mummy, these guys know they have to protect the defenseless.

Written for the screen and directed by Don Coscarelli, and based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, the picture is as peculiar as it sounds, but it isn't a horror satire a la The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It's mostly humorous, but it's also a study of aging, missed opportunities, and the shabbiness of pop culture celebrity.

Both leads are terrific and they work together wonderfully. Davis was 84 when he made the film, which alone proves the movie's point about the retention of value in old age, and Campbell is so good as a grouchy King it makes you wish the guys who hand out acting awards weren't such clutch-butts.

Re-Animator (1985)

"Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow."

I don't know what was in the water in 1985, but I could sure use a glass of it now. Come on, August 16 brought us RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and two months later RE-ANIMATOR came along. Laugh? Brother, you'll just die.

Herbert West is a third-year student at the Miskatonic University Med School. His specialty is death—or more correctly, the reversal of same. His roommate Dan Cain agrees to help him with his experiments but things get out of hand and pretty soon the rest of the cast is killed and brought back to life, and killed again, and so on.

Jeffrey Combs became a horror icon as West, Bruce Abbot is a wonderfully frazzled Dan, Barbara Crampton enters the Scream Queen Hall of fame as Dan's girlfriend (the Dean's daughter), and David Gale becomes the maddest scientist of all time.

Written by Dennis Paoli, William Norris and director Stuart Gordon, the film has everything from a dis-embodied head going down on a bound, naked coed to a cameo by James Cameron's father. It's a high-gore-level gumbo of sick humor and creepshow parody served up by those mad missionaries from the Church of Splatter Day Saints.

Fans of ZOMBIELAND should definitely check it out, but don't think that the relatively tame gore of the newer film will in any way prepare you for the floor-to-ceiling ick of this masterpiece. And there's the added bonus of the scrumdiddilyumptious good-sport nudity of Ms Crampton.

Five Star Final (1931)

The newspaper business took a beating on stage and screen during the late 1920s and early '30s in plays and films like Ink, Man Bites Dog, Front Page Woman, Chicago (remade in 1942 as Roxie Hart), and most famously The Front Page. The height of the press' infamy was epitomized by the ghastly snapshot of murderess Ruth Snyder dying in the Sing Sing electric chair on January 12, 1928. Working for The New York Daily News, reporter Tom Howard strapped a cheap camera to his leg. Just before the juice hit Snyder, Howard bent forward, pulled his pant leg up and clicked the pic of the husband-murdering 33-year old sighing "Goodbye, cruel world." James Cagney's Danny Kean pulls the same stunt in Picture Snatcher (1933).

One of the angriest of the yellow-journalism productions was Louis Weitzenkorn's play Five Star Final. Time reviewed its opening on Broadway like this, in an unsigned piece dated January 12, 1931—interestingly, three years to the day after Ruth Snyder's execution: "Five Star Final is this season's newspaper play. But, unlike its more cynical predecessors, it is an earnest paean of hate directed against tabloid journalism. The play has undeniable vitality and provides a good deal of technical information on the inner workings of a gum-chewer sheetlet."

The play and film should be technically accurate. Author Weitzenkorn was at one time editor of the New York Evening Graphic (nicknamed by more responsible journalists the Porno Graphic). The Graphic was the most sensational of all the tabloids during its brief existence between 1924 and 1932. It went out of business because an editor tried to clean up its image and New Yorkers quit buying it. Weitzenkorn began his career as a reporter for the New York Times in 1919. He died in 1943 when he managed to set himself on fire while making a pot of coffee—a tab story if there ever was one.

Five Star Final was adapted for the screen by Robert Lord and written by Byron Morgan. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, it was nominated as Best Picture of 1931 (losing to Grand Hotel).

In the movie, the Evening Graphic has become the Evening Gazette. The picture opens as a pair of goons on the paper's staff trash news kiosk because the owner refuses to put the Gazette on the top of the newspaper stack. These guys are not aiming to help win a Pulitzer. In the Gazette offices, the paper's owner Bernard Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel, who appeared in 163 films from 1929 to his death in 1938) complains about Editor-in-chief Joseph W. Randall (Edward G. Robinson) printing cables from the League of Nations instead of featuring photos of girls in their underwear. "We're losing the bubble gum trade," Hinchecliffe snaps, and Randal responds by calling his publisher the "Sultan of Slop." The argument is ongoing and seemingly without end.

"There's some guys who furnish the manure and some guys that grow the flowers."

Soon a reporter-hopeful comes to Randall. She's Kitty Carmody (Ona Munson, Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind), a sexy little trick from out of town. "He knows I've had a lot of experience in Chicago," she boasts to Randall's secretary. Miss Taylor (Aline MacMahon ) glares back "Yeah, you look it."

The next time editorial meets to plot out where they want the paper to go in the days ahead, the subject of a recent love nest murder comes up, which reminds someone of the 20-year old Nancy Voorhees case, in which a cute young stenographer fell in love with her boss and ended up pregnant. When he refused to marry her, she killed him. Randall agrees to run a serial rehash of the case as a cautionary tale. If a girl gets into trouble, it's decided, the paper should interview her mother. If the mother had told daughter the facts of life, this will be a warning to daughters. If she hadn't, it's a warning to mothers. Either way, the paper has performed a good deed for society.

Randall wants to introduce every installment of the story with a few paragraphs from a clergyman, so he calls on the Rev. T. Vernon Isopod, and this is where Boris Karloff enters the picture.

Isopod is one of Karloff's most unusual characters. He now works for the paper but was once a divinity student who got kicked out the seminary for sexual misconduct similar to that of Nancy Voorhees' old boss. He wears a black suit and hides behind empty eyes. "You're the most blasphemous looking thing I've ever seen," Randall tells him. "It's a miracle you're not struck dead." He's oily and unctuous, as sincere as a cut-rate mortician, but can hardly keep his eyes off of Kitty Carmody's legs. (Later, the two of them will share a ride and Kitty tells Randall, "I rode in a taxi with him and I darn near don't have any skin on my knees." Randall asks sarcastically if the two were praying together.)

Passing himself off as a real minister, Isopod talks his way into the apartment of Nancy Voorhees, who is now Nancy Townsend (Frances Starr). When he enters the flat, his eyes dart around as if he's trying to memorize every detail. He's not sure why Nancy and her husband Michael (H.B. Warner, who played Jesus in the silent King of Kings) agreed to see him, but soon figures out that they think he's connected to the wedding of their daughter Jenny (Marian Marsh, Trilby in Svengali) to the socially elite Phillip Weeks (Anthony Bushell, Ralph Morlant in The Ghoul) the next day.

Isopod solicits information from the Townsends they would never willingly give a reporter, and even makes off with a photo of Jenny. As soon as he leaves, the parents realize what they've done. They know that if Nancy's past is publically dredged up, it will ruin Jenny's chances for marriage and happiness. No one, not even Jenny, knows Nancy's story.

When Isopod returns to the office drunk, his eyes are heavy and deader than ever. His lisp is slurred. "This murderess," he manages to get out, "is marrying her daughter to an innocent boy. I was shocked!"

Pleading on behalf of the two newly-weds-to-be is of no avail and Nancy and Michael can't face the future. Isopod, who is corrupt to his core, comes up with the idea that the Gazette can pay Jenny for permission to turn her mother's tragedy into a faked "My Story by Nancy Voorhees" 1st person narrative.

The film's final shot is of a copy of the paper, bemucked in a gutter.

Karloff is in the opening credits as the eighth lead, but his significance to the plot and general atmosphere of newspaper hypocrisy and sleaze is invaluable. His patented gauntness and Uriah Heepish servility—repeated 15 years later as Master George Sims in Bedlam—add a touch of genuine creepiness to an essentially realistic story. You come away from the film not only despising the paper for what it's done to the Townsends, but for hiring people like Isopod to make certain it gets done. This is one of, incredibly enough, 16 movies Karloff made in 1931, including a 12-part serial, a Wheeler and Woolsey farce, and that little monster flick over at Universal. And to think that some folks don't even watch 16 films in a year.

"My wife has good taste," Karloff once told the press. "She has seen very few of my movies." Hopefully, Five Star Final is one of the exceptions.