In short: Shadowman (1974)

Original title: Nuits rouges

A mysterious criminal mastermind who likes to either wear silly costumes or a red ski mask, and therefore goes by the moniker of Man Without a Face (Jacques Champreux) gets wind of a way to acquire the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. While attempting to find the treasure, he tortures the uncle of sailor and obvious protagonist Paul de Borrego (Ugo Pagliai) to death, making himself an enemy who will team up with a beleaguered cop (Gert Fröbe), a “poet detective” (Séraphin Beauminon) – because this is still a French movie - as well the sailor’s sort of girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) to get at the villain’s faceless hide.

Also rather cranky about some weirdo and his henchies murdering their members and trying to steal their shit are the Knights Templar themselves, who still exist in secret and are well able to stage a commando raid on a villain’s lair when need be.

Our villain isn’t helpless, though, for apart from his own man of a thousand faces shtick, he also has a huge number of masked henchpeople, the mandatory nameless, pretty, and pretty murderous woman as his number two (Gayle Hunnicutt), and a mad scientist tucked away in a cellar who turns normal people into pretty damn hilarious zombie killers. Among other things.

Despite carrying quite a few of the hallmarks of the genre, one really shouldn’t go into Georges Franju’s Nuits rouges expecting something on the lines of Eurospy or the more comics-styled Eurocrime films. They do share a lineage with one another, obviously, but this, as was Franju’s earlier Judex, is very much an homage to the serials of Louis Feuillade, full of attempts to consciously capture the peculiar surrealism and unexpected sense of off-beat poetry of things like Les Vampires.

Usually, trying to create the air of accidental surrealism or to artificially create the strangeness that just happens to some movies is a terrible idea. But more often than not, Nuits rouges achieves what Franju is aiming for, and has an air of individual peculiarity that’s more interested in inhabiting the strangeness of this sort of high pulp realm than in making it genuinely exciting as pulp. How much any given viewer will like this approach to the material is to a considerable degree a matter of personal taste, but if it doesn’t work, Franju’s the last one to blame, for he puts all of his considerable powers as a filmmaker into his project, caring little if anyone watching it might find it misguided. It’s difficult not to at least respect this. I, of course, found myself so charmed by the whole affair, I’m now trying to find the version of this Franju somehow got onto French TV as an eight part show.

Three Films Make A Post: Entombed for eons - turned to stone - seeking women, women, women!

Her (2013): The really surprising thing about Spike Jonze’s film for me is how little of the simplistic “oh noes, the modern world is so alienated” piece its set-up might threaten is actually in it; this is not beholden to any cult of authenticity apart from that of human feeling. It’s also a perfect portray of loneliness, and longing, and sadness, and oh, by the way, it’s also a mainstream (in the broader sense of the word) SF film that isn’t ashamed of having more than two brain cells to rub together, not exactly expanding on what written SF has thought about its themes and props but putting it on a human level as good as anything I’ve seen or read in a long time.

There’s also a pervading sense of joy as well as of quotidian strangeness running through the film, some fine performances in particular by Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams, and an absolutely perfect score. Why, the film’s so good I’m even pretending not to notice it doesn’t seem to know what an OS is.

Cutie Honey (2004): Between remaking Neon Genesis Evangelion again and again and again, Hideaki Anno somehow found the time to direct this live action version of Go Nagai’s sleazy yet wondrous magical girl manga/anime, turning down the sleaze quite a bit in the process – leaving only a lot of coy and pretty good-natured shots of Eriko Sato’s shapely behind – and surprising me by how enjoyable the result is when it should by all rights annoy me to kingdom come.

Anno manages to turn elements of the original into a crazy mix of pop-art, kitsch, the grotesque and goofy humour, somehow finding just the right mixture ratio to make the film work as something beyond mere camp. There’s a sense of fun, often actually funny humour and an exuberance surrounding the proceedings that does curious things with the film’s crazy and grotesque side, turning the whole affair into one of the more charming pictures you’ll see in whatever week you watch it.

The Serpent’s Egg (1977): This is generally treated as Ingmar Bergman’s Big Failure (yes, with capital letters) but I don’t agree with that assessment at all. To me, the film seems to do exactly what it sets out to do, show the Weimarer Republik as a sort of hellish state of mind, filled with increasingly bizarre elements like the onset of the insanity that would become the so-called Third Reich. The people in the film can hardly communicate with one another, their actors only given the choice to emote either with very emphatic lacks of expression or through over-heated hysteria, which is of course no communication at all.

The film’s an often unpleasant experience, slowly dragging itself along like any good economic crisis does, only waking up for moments of ever increasing unpleasantness, sometimes bordering on the sort of thing that the exploitation movies I talk about more often would indulge in, yet filmed with a palpable sense of revulsion those films can’t afford. Nobody ever said films about people getting crushed by the wheels of history should be a pleasant experience.

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Ten Little Indians (1974)

aka And Then There Were None

Under various pretexts, the mysterious U.N. Owen invites a group of people (Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Adolfo Celi, Herbert Lom, Gert Fröbe, Maria Rohm, Charles Aznavour, Stéphane Audran, Alberto de Mendoza and Richard Attenborough) into an unused hotel smack dab in the Iranian desert next to some picturesque ruins.

On their first evening, a tape message by the voice of God, or Orson Welles, accuses everyone in the house of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Usually, that would be quite enough to stop every party, but this one takes until Charles Aznavour sings a song with an invisible band to get antsy; or the sudden nervousness might be on account of his death by poisoning shortly afterwards.

Now, our protagonists find themselves trapped in the Hotel, for the desert seem rather unconquerable, and there are neither cars nor telephones around. Soon, more people die based on a free very interpretation of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, and people become increasingly paranoid, convinced the killer must be one amongst their ten.

Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians seems to be a book that brings out the best in the people adapting it, perhaps because it lacks a single annoying detective and replaces her or him with a perfect opportunity for a bunch of actors to emote, chew scenery, or something of that kind.

Dubious yet sometimes lucky British producer Harry Alan Towers loved the material so much, he made three adaptations of it, about one every fifteen years. Okay, I suspect he needed to keep making them to keep a license alive, but given that two out of these three films are actually rather good, that’s not the worst that could have happened. As far as I understand, this second Towers version uses much of the dialogue from his first version, but it still retains a character very much of its own thanks to its acting ensemble, its locations, and Peter Collinson’s direction.

Collinson, a man with mediocre as well as quite great films on his CV, clearly saw the opportunities the locations Towers acquired gave him to build a rather macabre mood. His camera finds the inherent threat in the hotel’s interiors where spacious oriental kitsch meets occidental colour-blindness, he uses spectacular staircases for playing games of the audience watching someone watching someone else while he himself is being watched without needing more camera involvement than decidedly clever placement, etc, and so forth.

The film’s visual style seems highly influenced by the giallo, the camera generally being positioned in the more peculiar and telling ways available with no conversation – and this is a very conversation heavy peace – not enhanced by direction that seeks to express the mood inside a room via its own movement and positioning even before the actors do anything at all. Like many a giallo director, Collinson succeeds in leapfrogging an audience’s scepticism towards a faintly – or very – ridiculous plot by creating a mood that suggests dreamscapes and the workings of the subconscious, making it very easy to read the resulting films in a manner where what a film’s plot has to say becomes secondary to what its mood tells us about its characters and the meaning of the world surrounding them.

I am – obviously – very fond of that approach to filmmaking, perhaps even to a fault, but I think this particular Christie novel just calls for it. This is, after all, a film about members of the upperclass and the bourgeoisie having to show and confront the truths behind their masks and the lies they tell themselves to get to sleep at night. Why, two of the more working class characters might even be called innocent, which would probably be more telling in a class-political sense if the other two weren’t just as murderous the bourgeois.

These characters are brought to life in various ways between subtlety, thespian grandstanding, and good old scenery-chewing with most of the involved well able and willing to use all three approaches, depending on what any given scene calls for. It’s all rather lovely to watch, particularly in scenes like the surreal confrontation between Lom and Attenborough with two packs of matches and a billiard table as a prop.

This all adds up to a very fine movie, even if the ending eschews to embrace the darkness of the novel and goes for a rather more normal happy end that only fits the tone of what came before vaguely. Despite the problem of the ending, Ten Little Indians is another exception to my usual “Ugh, Agatha Christie” rule.

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Three Films Make A Post: Based on the Historical Realities

Du rififi à Paname aka The Upper Hand (1966): Denys de La Patellière's crime movie is a sort of retirement home for tired looking old and middle aged actors (Jean Gabin! Gert Fröbe! Nadja Tiller! Claudio Brook! George Raft!), the kind of film that thinks just letting the actors turn their faces in the direction of the camera equals acting performances. What's actually going on is that no one in front of the camera seems even the least bit interested in the film they are involved in, which is somewhat understandable given the been there done that nature of the film's crime plot, and the script's insistence on not developing the plot's few interesting elements in any direction worth following. De La Patellière manages to make the film pretty, but doesn't provide any sense of tension or drama, and also seems to delight in the kind of "witty" dialogue only very few films can get away with. Most of those films have actors actually doing more than coasting on their mere existence, though.

An American Ghost Story aka Revenant (2012): Derek Cole's film could be a fine, low-key ghost story, if a highly derivative one. At least, the core performances by scriptwriter and male lead Stephen Twardokus and Liesel Kopp are never less than decent, often even quite good, the camera work is atmospheric, and the film has a nice, concentrated flow to it. Unfortunately American Ghost Story suffers from a case of Advanced Jump Scare Syndrome that borders on the ridiculous. There's no quietly effective scene of the supernatural the film doesn't ruin by making inappropriate loud noises at the audience in moments that aren't at all meant to be jump scares, no scene that doesn't end up destroying its own effectiveness by shouting "boo". It's nearly like a parody of other films who like their jump scares a bit too much, and feels as if the film were afraid to just let the creepy mood it so desperately tries to build work on its audience, permanently losing faith in its own ability to function without VERY LOUD NOISES. While this technique doesn't work at all to actually make the film scarier, it ruins any mood it actually builds quite effectively, dragging the whole effort down from the at least decent to the nearly insufferable.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): I'm more than just a little surprised that this one is the film of these three I actually like, but then surprising me is what J.J. Abrams's movie did more than once: by feeling much more like a Stark Trek movie than the first one, by not just fixing the first film's dubious politics but actually consciously having and using political themes and coherent morals, by actually doing some rather great (or at the very least fun) things with the Star Trek movie it is playing with/off, and by this time around actually having something (though still not enough by far) to do for its female cast members. If the last trend continues, the next Star Trek movie might even see Zoe Saldana's Uhura as an actual female lead instead of a relatively large supporting role for Pine's and Quinto's perfectly entertaining boy's club.

As it stands, the film is still nearly up there with the Avengers or the last Batman or Pacific Rim as a film that fulfils all blockbuster demands on spectacle, yet still has the time and space for human things of one kind of the other. Most of the time, it even remembers the spectacle is there to dramatize the humanity and not the other way around.

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In short: Der Grüne Bogenschütze (1961)

aka The Green Archer

While his boss is away, the secretary (Harry Wüstenhagen) of nasty rich guy Abel Bellamy (Gert Fröbe) is earning a bit of extra money by letting tourists have a tour of Bellamy's mansion. One of the guests, clearly up to no good, is shot by someone dressing up as the Green Archer whose legend is somehow connected with Bellamy's house. This being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, the Green Archer will go on to kill more people for mysterious reasons, but the larger part of the movie concerns the attempts of Bellamy's niece Valerie (Karin Dor) to find out what happened to her disappeared mother (spoiler: Bellamy has kidnapped her and hidden her in his house for years), while her uncle and his cronies - one of them going by the delightful name of Coldharbour Smith (Stanislav Ledinek) - try to get rid of her. Fortunately, disguise-mad Inspector Featherstone of Scotland Yard (Klausjürgen Wussow), his assistant, Sergeant Higgins (Wolfgang Völz), and comedic relief reporter Spike Holland (Eddi Arent), are there to save pretty young women. The Archer is really more of a guest in the movie named after him.

And there you already have my main problem with Der Grüne Bogenschütze. Although the film includes many of the sensational pulpy delights one has come to expect from any film that is part of Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle, it does not seem to be all that interested in them. All the death traps, hidden passages, masked killers, metatextual humour and overly complicated evil plans are there and accounted for, yet the film spends just as much time on showing us scenes of cops searching various premises as on them, either not knowing what's so fun about the krimi, or wilfully ignoring it.

I blame director Jürgen Roland whose second and fortunately last Wallace film this is. At the time when Der Grüne Bogenschütze was made, Roland already had a few years of experience as a journalist and as director of German TV police procedurals - a career path he'd continue on for decades - and it's clear that his strengths lie in the sedate semi-realism of those pieces and not the excited and excitable thrill(or at least sight gag)-a-minute-joys and the glorious artificiality Alfred Vohrer and Harald Reinl brought to their Wallace films. Unfortunately, that rather static and sedate semi-realist style is of little use when adapting a Wallace plot, resulting in a movie that just doesn't feel at all secure in what it actually wants to be, a more conventional mystery or the pulp explosion all its single elements would promise it to be.

I could imagine Roland's rather bland style that works hard at making the awesome mundane and the Wallace-ness of the plot rubbing against each other and producing interesting sparks, some sort of grim and gritty version of Wallace reality. The film at hand, however, is as far from anything that interesting as possible. Instead, the film (or Roland) seems rather embarrassed by its own pulpier side yet has not much of an idea how to remove it, and so just circles around the silliness and the excitement the plot's set-up promises, ending up not showing much of interest at all.

If not for some rather entertaining acting, especially by Gert Fröbe and Karin Dor, there'd just be nothing much to keep one watching at all.

 

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