We are not far from Halloween, and so let's see if I can find a few appropriate films.

Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962), directed by Albert Zugsmith. Here is a shout out to Mark Bandola who suggested this film to me. Although the onscreen title refers to Thomas DeQuincey, what we see does not remind me much of the book I read years ago about an English Opium Eater. The director Zugsmith is the person behind such well known films as Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, and Psychedelic Sexualis. These titles might suggest that Mr. Zugsmith likes things lurid. The first ten minutes of Confessions will confirm this. In these ten minutes we have a ship transporting women and girls from Asia to America (San Francisco, where else?) to be auctioned for money and or opium. The women are tossed about unpleasantly when the importers of these women spot an inspection ship on their trail. Everyone flees the ship, just before the inspection ship shoots and explodes it. The survivors make their way to shore and the men begin to round up the women who are trying to flee despite their shackles. Suddenly a group of local Asian men appear and begin to do battle with, well with everyone and anyone. Near the end of this melee, one of the locals runs after a fleeing young woman who is being chased by one of the sailors. The local catches up to the fellow and the fellow catches up with the woman. A fight ensues in which the local is knocked for six and the sailor finds himself engaged with a mysterious white horse. Once the horse dispatches the sailor, we cut to San Francisco’s Chinatown where a dark clad Vincent Price seeks something or someone. Thus begins the rest of the movie that concerns the auctioning of women, a tong war between those who want to stop the auction and those who want to profit from it. Almost all the action takes place inside cavernous dark buildings decorated with objects from the East. Price, as Gilbert DeQuincey, meets a young girl whom he decides to rescue; he also meets an older female small person who helps him navigate the labyrinthine rooms and corridors and sewers of this place. Both these females are in large cages that hang from the ceiling. We have dancing girls, opium smoking men, dark hordes – all a bit unpleasant. There are some remarkable moments of slow motion and also speeded up motion, and the piece is filmed by none other than Joseph Biroc, a master of noirish lighting. The set designs are good. All in all, this is a weird mishmash.

Son of Dracula (1943), directed by Robert Siodmak. I have seen this movie more than once before, but I had forgotten how closely it follows the conventions of noir (not surprising, considering the director). It has the hero caught in a web of intrigue and danger, a femme fatale, shadows and light that enhance the gothic atmosphere, deep focus, and more than a hint of madness. It also has a vampire. The vampire here is Count Alucard (Lon Chaney, Jr.). Now spell Alucard backward and what do you get? The film makes much of this spelling. In any event, the Count has arrived in the new world where he reconnects with a dark woman he had met in Europe. The two of them conspire to gain control of the woman’s large swamp-surrounded mansion, where they plan to live their immortal (after the Count turns the woman) lives feasting on the strong blood of the locals, good American stock. At least this is what the Count thinks. Unbeknownst to him, the dear lady has other plans. She plans to become a vampire, then turn the man she really loves into a vampire, have this man get rid of the count and then the lady and her love live happily ever after feasting of those strong blooded locals. This is perhaps an unexpected gem in Universal’s cycle of horror films from the 30s and 40s. The special effects have Alucard transforming from human shape to bat, and from human shape to mist and from mist and bat to human shape. 

Night of the Blood Beast (1958), directed by Bernard L. Kowalsky. This little thriller is produced by none other than Roger Corman, and it has his imprint. The costume for the beast is the same one Corman used for his film, Teenage Caveman, filmed just two weeks prior to the filming of Night of the Blood Beast. The interest for me lies in the film’s attempt to criticize humanity’s rush to destroy that which it does not understand. In this, it might remind us of The Day the Earth Stood Still, except for the fact that Night of the Blood Beast cops out at the end. The plot mechanism here is also of interest because it looks forward to Alien (1992). In Night of the Blood Beast, astronaut John Corcoran (Michael Emmet), crash lands on return to earth. He appears to be dead, but his blood cells show signs not only of life, but of alien life. It turns out John has become the incubator for alien creatures, and he eventually rises from the dead. Meanwhile a large creature roams about causing the few people in the vicinity to become fearful and plan to kill the creature. The revived John keeps exhorting the others to leave the creature alone and find out why it has come to earth. He pleads with the others not to be so quick to destroy. By the end, the creature has managed to assimilate one of the human’s vitals so that it can communicate with humans. It does so, but to no avail since we now learn that the creature’s plan to save humanity from itself is to take over humanity. Bye bye creature, hello normal human propensity to violence. The film has a rating of 3.5 on IMDB, but this is one of those ratings that suggest bad is good. 

Death is a Number (1951), directed by Robert Henryson. A British film that mixes numerology, especially the number 9, with a Romany curse that dooms a family to end its line after the 9^th generation. Somehow an ancient non-existent Druid window also plays a part here. Told in a series of flashbacks that use stock footage, still shots, and some action sequences, the film tells of young man and racing driver John Bridgeman (Dennis Webb) who is cursed by the number 9, that number figuring in all sorts of ways in his life until he perishes in a racing car crash, the racing car that has the number 9 on its bonnet (hood). The special effects work here is experimental and not without interest. Note the ghostly outline of a mysterious figure, for example. The whole thing is perhaps a tad hokey, but coming in at just about 50 minutes, this short film will hold your interest. I found the bits about numerology at the beginning fascinating. So if you are looking to while away some time and find numbers of interest, this one just might be for you.

Count Dracula (1970), directed by Jess Franco. Once again, we have Christopher Lee playing the Count, and he does this well. As the film proceeds and he drinks more blook, he grows progressively younger looking. The narrative stays fairly closely to Bram Stoker’s novel, and we have the usual suspects doing what they do. Arthur Holmwood is missing, but Quincey Morris is here, along with Jonathan Harker and both Mina and Lucy. Herbert Lom takes a break from the Pink Panther films to play Van Helsing, and – one for the books – Klaus Kinski is on hand to play a mostly silent Renfield. All the players receive generous close-ups that become predictable as things go along. Special effects are minimal, but we do have those plastic bats swinging by strings outside Lucy’s bedroom window. As for the wolves, these are clearly quite lovely German Shepherds. The locations and sets are serviceable. All in all, this is a watchable version of the well-known and oft filmed story. 

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), directed by Jean Epstein. Amazing. This is a film that draws on previous films by the likes of Murnau and Weine and Lang, but it is entirely itself. Based on Poe’s story, the film has Allen setting out to visit his friend Roderick Usher in the Usher mansion way out in anywhere land. Tod Browning must have watched this film closely because what we have anticipates Browning’s Dracula (1931) in many of its compositions and effects. Allen’s opening trip to the Usher mansion is laced with warnings of the strangeness to come with shots of bogs, and bare trees touching the sky and toads practicing piggyback, and mists and strange lights. Inside the Usher house is equally strange as Roderick obsessively paints his wife Madeleine as she pines and fades away. She appears to die, and the funeral procession just has to be watched to be believed as the coffin makes its way through a forest and bog to a cavernous crypt with large stairway into the depths. All along as the pallbearers makes their way we have an overlay of candles, a premonition of the fire to come perhaps. The camera shots are surreal as well as expressionistic. Luis Bunuel worked as Second Assistant in charge of interiors here, and I suspect he learned much from the experience. Perhaps a tad ponderous, the film nevertheless is quite simply amazing.

Vampyr (1932), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. This is a vampire film that delights in the uncanny, in shadow and light and mist and mystery. Long, even astonishing, tracking shots emphasise the depths of consciousness, the seemingly endless strangeness in which our protagonist, Allan Grey (Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg here known as Julian West, a non actior who funded the film), finds himself. Disorientation is the order of the day as Allan tries to find out what or who is perpetrating acts of horror such as the sucking of the blood of young Leone (Sybille Schmitz) or the killing of her father. Behind all the terror is the ancient vampire Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gerard) and her helper, a fellow known only as Doctor (Jan Hieronimko). Everything is filmed in a grainy fog, and the action is slow as if in a silent film. This simply adds to the creepiness. Whatever else this film may be, it fits alongside a film like Bunuel’s Le Chien Andalou in its exploration of both cinematic effects and the unconscious. We have establishing shots that fill the screen with gothic paraphernalia, crosses, coffins, shadows, skulls, poison bottles, ominous spaces, a scythe and fellow who may just be about to cross Styx. We have close-ups that register terror, fear, dislike, eroticism, and the uncanny. We have shadows that act independent of that which casts the shadow. We have a dreamscape. We have a film that offers a vampire film like no other.

The Devil’s Hand (1961), directed by William J. Hole Jr. Edgar Ulmer was the first director signed to this picture, but for some reason he dropped out or was replaced. The flim has something of the Ulmer sensibility dealing with the occult and dangerous goings on with an erotic angle. The plot has Rick Turner (Robert Ada) dropping into a doll shop thinking to buy something for his girlfriend, Donna Trent (Ariadne Welter). Here he meets shop owner Francis Lamont (Neil Hamilton), who happens to be a cult leader and voodoo specialist. He likes sticking needles into dolls, dolls that are the spitting image of actual people. Anyway, Rick sees a doll that clearly resembles Donna, and he decides to buy this, but Francis says it is not for sale and pitches another doll that depicts a beautiful blond woman, a blond woman who begins to turn up in Rick’s dreams for several nights until finally he meets her in real life. She is his neighbour in the apartment building where he lives. What a coincidence! She seduces Rick and brings him into the cult as a follower of Gamba, the Devil-god. The place where the cult followers meet has a nude statue of the beautiful blond woman whose name is Bianca Milan (Linda Christian, whose actual statue of herself is used in the film; it used to be in Tyrone Powers’s garden when Christian was married to him). This place also has an irritating drum/bongo player, two lithe and sexy dancers, and a roulette wheel of sorts with wobbly daggers hanging from it. Oh, and I neglected to mention that Lamont, at the beginning of proceedings, has pierced the doll of Donna with a long needle and she has ended up in hospital. 

The She-Creature (1956), directed by Edward L Cahn. Here’s a strange one, a mixture of so many things, low budget, yet capable cinematography, a cast of familiar actors (most prominently, Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders), a blending of genres (monster movie, occult thriller, romance, morality play about the evils of money), and a study of science vs the unknown. This mixture adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The creature of the title looks like a female version, badly assembled, of the Black Lagoon creature we all know and love. She appears to wear flippers, have straggly hair, and prominent breats, along with the flapping bits up and down her back. Chester Morris plays Dr. Charles Lombardi, hypnotist extraordinaire, who puts the beautiful Andrea (Marla English) into a state of regression into her deep past when she was actually a wild creature who emerged from the sea. Lombardi’s adversary is the good Dr. Ted Erickson (Lance Fuller) who has eyes for Andrea and dislike for the crazed Lombardi. Lombardi’s only motive in his weird ways seems to be fame and money. Rich businessman, Timothy Chappel (Tom Conway), also sees a way to make a buck by promoting Lombardi and his hypnotic ways. Chappel’s daughter, Dorothy (Cathy Downs) is Dr. Erickson’s fiancé, but she seems unperturbed when he ogles Andrea, and she quickly turns her attention back to her ex-boyfriend and inebriate Bob (William Hudson who is perhaps best known for The Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman). All of this is mildly amusing. The film ends with the words, “She’ll never be back, will she” followed by a large question mark. In other words, what Lombardi calls the “transmigration of the soul” just might be possible. Wow.

 A scattering of films.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrik. It has been 60 years since this film premiered. It was sobering then, and it is sobering now. Perhaps even more so. The array of phallic images throughout, and the nearly all male cast give us a world in peril because of a bunch of lunatic men, soldiers and politicians. Testosterone runs the show. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), with his thrusting cigar and then ejaculating machine gun, represents the paranoia we see at work today, a paranoia that opens itself to conspiracy theories. Ripper fears that our “precious bodily fluids” are being tainted by the country’s water supply that has supposedly been poisoned by those darned Ruskies. Meanwhile we have B-52 Bomber pilot, Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens), donning his ten-gallon hat and riding off to doomsday with a hip and a holler, reminding us of America’s love of the Wild West and its willingness to exterminate peoples – in this instance all peoples. Names such as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson (George C. Scott) and Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano (Keenan Wynn) remind us of the scatological theme at work throughout. Then we have the mixing of forces: Communists, Fascists, Democrats, all nutty and bull-headed and given to violence. In the world this film depicts, no one is safe and friendly fire is serves as prelude to world annihilation. We do not see a lot of Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) in the film, but he is the epitome of the mechanical man with a fantasy of a world in which beautiful women outnumber men 10 to 1. Sellers, by the way, plays three roles, Dr. Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a German Nazi, the American President, and an English officer. This three-way role is a reminder of the replication of idiocy across national boundaries. This satire is vicious, funny and disturbing, a reminder that when things look bleak or bleaker than bleak, laughter is perhaps the only way to cope. I say cope, not survive. Dr. Strangelove and Kubrik’s Paths of Glory (1957) are two of the finest anti-war films that we have.

 

Prisoners of the Mountains (1996), directed by Sergei Bodrov. This is an updated version of a story by Tolstoy. It tells of two Russian soldiers fighting against Chechnyan rebels, one a hardened soldier Sacha (Oleg Menshikov), and the other a fresh young recruit, Vanya (Sergei Bodrov), who find themselves captured by the rebels. The man who has them prisoner in a small mountain village is Abdul-Murat (Jamal Sikharulidze); he wants to exchange these soldiers for his son who is a prisoner of the Russians. As things move along, we come to know a few of the villagers, including Abdul-Murat’s daughter Dina (Susanna Mekhraliyevah), the tongueless Hasan (Aleksandr Bureyev) who likes to “sing,” and Vanya’s mother (Valentina Fedotova) who is a teacher. The two prisoners find ways to interact with the villagers, and even become friends with some of them. Vanya fashions a clever bird mobile for Dina, and both soldiers enjoy the company of Hasan. This is, however, war, and we can expect things to take a sour turn. They do. War is hell. The filming location is in Dagestan (bordering the Caspian Sea), and shots of the village and surrounding mountainous terrain are impressive. The rocky environs are bleak, underscoring the harshness of life and the bitterness of war. As anti-war films go, this one works well. We get to know these people well, if not intimately. This is a worthy film, although it skirts the ugliness of war somewhat. 

 

Adoption (1975), directed by Marta Meszaros. This film communicates an intimacy rare in film. It consists of close-up shots of faces, mostly the faces of women, ordinary women. We have workers in a wood factory caked with sawdust, the girls from the Children’s Home, and of course the two principal characters, Kata (Katalin Berek) and Anna (Gyongyver Vigh). Kata is a 43-year-old widow who is having an affair with a married man. She has decided that she wants a child, but her lover Joska will not hear of this. As for Anna, she keeps running away from the Children’s Home, and she wants to marry her boyfriend, Sanyi (Peter Fried). Kata becomes something of a surrogate mother to Anna, allowing Anna and Sanyi to tryst at her place, and helping the two lovers convince Anna’s parents to consent to their wedding. The relationship between Kata and Anna, then, has something to do with motherhood, and Kata becomes convinced she can be a good parent. Once Anna is married (a marriage that Meszaros hints will not be successful), Kata sets out to adopt a child. The film deals with child abuse, emotional stress, parenthood, and relationships, both those between lovers and those between friends. The film is shot in a lightly misty black and white, giving the people and their actions a delicate feel. The focus is on the lives of women, their strength and resilience in a patriarchal Hungary. If there is any influence here, it is to the French New Wave, and Kata’s lover, Joska is played by Laszlo Szabo, an actor who appears in at least five films by Jean-Luc Godard. I also think of Cassavetes’s Faces (1968). The feel for human desires is palpable in this remarkable film.

 

A couple of recent films: The Velvet Underground and The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Velvet Underground (2021), directed by Todd Haynes. This documentary captures the spirit and the style of its subject in a stunning manner. Rather than a behind the scenes look at a band, this film is an exploration of an art movement, an explosion in the New York City art world of the 1960s and 70s, especially the former decade. The split screen, and multiple split-screen echoes the Warhol films that are an essential part of that 1960s art scene. Even the close-up interviews with various people close to the band have a colour reminiscent of the time and place. This is a film to go alongside Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and of course I’m Not There (2007). 

As for Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Coen, this is a film that offers a feast to the eyes, a homage to such film makers as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Cocteau. The lighting and cinematography are fabulous. The acting is fine. Denzel Washington’s Macbeth communicates a world weariness appropriate for the character, and Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is subtle and very effective. My only disappointment is that the line, “What, you egg? Young fry of treachery,” is gone from the script. Obviously, they did a bit of trimming. In any case, both these films are well worth seeing. Oh, and the witches in Macbeth, especially the one who speaks, are extremely effective.

 

Salt of This Sea (2008), directed by Annemarie Jacir. When I lived in Reading, England, I knew a man and his family who were Palestinians from Syria. This man became a friend. He told me of his family who had, prior to 1948, lived in Palestine. Upon the establishment of Israel, however, this family and many other Palestinian families, had their homes confiscated by Israeli forces and turned over to Israeli people. My friend had papers stamped with the word “stateless,” as I recall. In any case, this film deals with the after-effects of that time of dislocation for some. It is a polemic, and as a polemic it carries intensity. As a dramatic film, however, Salt of This Sea falters. It begins well with the arrival of a young Palestinian woman from Brooklyn to Israel. This woman, Soraya (Suheir Hammad), has ostensibly come just “to visit.” Her actual intention is to find her ancestral home. From this opening at the airport the film moves on to become a love story (of sorts), a tour of various places such as Ramallah, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, a heist story, a road movie, and a two for the road film. The film’s intentions are clear and even laudable, but as a film of just over 100 minutes, it takes on too much. Perhaps the most telling part of the movie comes when Soraya visits the home of her grandfather. The present occupant is a young Jewish woman who is kind enough to invite Soraya and her two male friends into this house. The visit results in Soraya demanding that the current occupant acknowledge that the house belongs to her, Soraya, and that the Jewish woman can stay because Soraya allows her to stay. We have here a knot difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. This is a film that will divide viewers. It works best, I think, when the camera gives us shots of oranges or gates or walls or streets or panoramas of the countryside. Such shots communicate with more subtlety than much of the human interaction does.

The Ascent (1977), directed by Larisa Shepitko. This is Shepitko’s last film, and it is intense. This is a Russian film with much of the sensibility we have come to associate with Russian literature and film. It is an anti-war film to set alongside such films as Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front. Filmed in winter, The Ascent gives us a screen filled with white, the white of snow and sky. The story involves two Soviet partisans who are trying to find food for the ragged band of people they have left in the snowy forest somewhere in Belarus. Danger in the form of German soldiers lurk all about. At the outset, one of these partisans, Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) appears to the stronger of the two. The other man is a teacher of mathematics, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), and he receives a wound early in the action. As the film proceeds, Sotnikov emerges as the stronger of the two, refusing to provide information after he and Rybak are captured by Germans. Rybak, on the other hand, collapses. The film is about survival, sacrifice, betrayal, and patriotism. The most impressive aspect of the film for me is the cinematography, the snow-filled vistas and the intense close-ups of faces (something we might think of as a specialty of Soviet cinema from the beginning), and the fluid camera working in such harsh conditions. Things do not end well for the partisans, reminding me of the fate of the three soldiers in Kubrik’s Paths of Glory. Both films use black and white cinematography to emphasize the coldness, the sharpness, the flatness, and the starkness of war. The title might indicate an attempt to show the fate of the people at the end as a spiritual ascent, and we have images, especially that of Sotnikov’s still face, that clearly invoke iconicity (icon in the original sense).