Three Films Make A Post: The Business Of Killing Just Got Personal

After Blue aka After Blue (Paradis sale) (2021): At times, Bertrand Mandico’s pretty bizarre women-only weird science fiction epic is one of those films that just too desperately want to be a future cult item, putting so much effort into being out there it becomes more than a little exhausting and off-putting, suggesting a pose of eccentricity more than genuine one.

At other times, this is the weird, candy-coloured, gender-fluid and ever so lovingly messed-up freeform science fiction epic of my dreams. It is certainly of beautiful artificiality throughout, and not a film that should ever bore anyone.

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992): Why you'd dig up the old franchise eight years after the first movie only to then come up with this abomination is beyond me. As it stands CotC II: TFS could as well have been called "Generic 90s horror movie". The film takes all the cool and interesting elements of the first movie and throws them away to then become something encapsulating all that was bad about 90s horror. So you have the bad yet boring acting, creepy kids who aren't creepy at all, a teenage love story that makes you want to bleach your brain, boring protagonists, a boring series of supernatural deaths which are neither as funny nor as clever as they seem to think they are, and a plot delivered with so little panache you can't help but start thinking about plot holes and continuity errors between this and the first film. On the positive side, that way lies at least madness instead of the boredom David Price's film offers without it.

The Devil’s Mask (1946): I didn’t find this second movie after the I Love A Mystery radio show quite as entertaining as the first one, which I wrote up ages ago. Sure, Henry Levin’s direction is pacy, often moody, and surprisingly elegant, but the film’s mystery isn’t as crazy and convoluted as that in the first film, leading to the always tiresome situation where the audience has long figured out what’s going on and why, yet the supposedly crack detectives still stumble around in the dark, following the wrong suspect. It’s also a bit problematic that the film’s favourite wrong suspect is one based on classist resentment that probably was easier to buy for a 1946 audience, and that our heroes’ reaction to him makes them look like authoritarian asshats instead of intrepid adventurers.

Still, thanks to Levin’s efforts, there’s more than a modicum of fun to be had here; it’s just a bit of a disappointment after the very pleasant weirdness of the first film.

The Unknown (1946)

Some nasty business has been going on in the old Southern Martin family about two decades ago, leaving daughter Rachel (Karen Morley), and sons Edward (James Bell) and Ralph (Wilton Graff) in thrall of their dominating mother Phoebe (Helen Freeman) and in various states of mental un-health; the only sane member of the family is their black butler Joshua (J. Louis Johnson) - who is also one of the few black characters in 40s movies I’ve seen neither there to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the white cast, nor to provide the kind of comic relief that makes a boy want to slug the filmmakers. The interactions between said white cast and him are of course still rather painful to watch. Of the family, particularly Rachel is bad off, hearing the cries of her long lost baby daughter and having lost track of minor details like what decade it is quite some time ago, living in a kind of perpetual young womanhood.

Things change when the matriarch dies and the mysterious benefactor who financed her schooling orders young Nina Arnold (Jeff Donnell) to go to the reading of Phoebe’s will on the old Martin plantation. Nina, it turns out, is Rachel’s long lost daughter. Fortunately for Nina, her – still mysterious – benefactor has hired international men of adventure and private detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) to help and protect her, for there’s something very wrong in the house even if you ignore the whole decadence and madness vibe. The baby noises Phoebe hears seem to be quite real, for example, Nina’s new uncles are nasty old men beyond expectation, and somebody who likes to dress like a proto-giallo murderer is sneaking through the dark trying to kill our heroine.

The third and final Columbia movie based on the popular radio show I Love a Mystery, again directed by Henry Levin, changes up tone and style quite a bit, turning from the two-fisted charms of the pulpy mystery to the melodramatic joys of a – still pulpy so don’t worry – Southern Gothic old dark house tale.

One’s appreciation of this development will certainly depend on one’s sympathy for the type of melodrama that’s generally part and parcel of Southern Gothics, or rather, on one’s tolerance for the film’s broad application of it. The acting of everyone involved except for Donnell, Bannon and Yarborough – fittingly given their position as outsiders – is as broadly melodramatic as a film can get away with, more than just bordering on areas some viewers will read as camp and/or will feel decidedly uncomfortable with.

Melodrama’s the watch word not only for the acting: The Unknown’s plot and mood are just as melodramatic, which makes complete sense when you see both as an expression of the genre-mandatory decadence and madness (the beautiful twins, the film would probably call them), the feeling of a world moving on outside while the Martin family inside can’t – or won’t - move with it. In this context, it can hardly be an accident that Rachel specifically is trapped in a perpetual past. It also seems rather poignant to me that Nina’s addition to the family, as someone who is young and very much not part of the noble tradition of come-down slave-owning shits by anything but blood, is the thing that might drag at least some family members back to sanity and the world, unless they manage to drag her down with them.

Levin tells this tale with his usual professionalism but also a good sense for the appropriate shadowy mood. While you can’t exactly feel the decay of the house (40s low budget filmmaking in general being not really up to that particular task independent of the talent of the directors involved), Levin provides the film with its fair share of cheap yet effective Southern Gothic thrills, and never loses control of his scenery-chewing cast, unless you think letting them chew the scenery is already losing control of them.

It’s not what I expected of the final I Love a Mystery film, but The Unknown is a very pleasant surprise as a film that knows very well what it’s doing and does it well, too.

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In short: I Love a Mystery (1945)

What caused San Francisco society man Jefferson Monk (George Macready) to lose his head in a freak accident? And whatever happened to his head? Private detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) know the answer to at least one of these questions because they started working on the highly mysterious case of Mr Monk a few days earlier.

About a year before the detectives came into play, Monk, you see, was quite disturbed by a prophecy made by the high priest (Lester Matthews) of a Mysterious Oriental Cult™ saying he’d lose his head a year later. Oh, and might he be willing to sell it then, for Monk looks like the spitting image of the cult’s founder whose mummy is unfortunately starting to rot?

By the point Monk meets the detectives, he’s worked himself into quite a panic regarding the whole matter, particularly after a friendly letter from the cult leader prophecies his wife Ellen (Nina Foch) “becoming an invalid” and Ellen actually losing control of her legs just a few days later. Then there’s the fact that a mysterious guy with a peg leg carrying a valise “just the right size for a human head” keeps following Monk around. Clearly, Packard and Long have their work quite cut out for them.

I Love A Mystery is the first of three Columbia productions based on the eponymous popular radio show written by Carlton E. Morse, and going by what I’ve read about it the show – there’s horrifyingly little of it available to actually hear of it in old time radio fan circles – the film’s mixture of seemingly supernatural occurrences, preposterous yet also awesome and pretty clever plot twists and an all-around air of anything goes is quite typical of it; it’s also quite typical of things I describe as “awesome”.

And awesome Henry Levin’s film indeed is, at least if you like your mysteries weird and somewhat two-fisted, and aren’t too annoyed by the whole “Oriental Mysteries” business – though there’s a fun twist to that aspect of the film too, so we’re not talking Fu Manchu style yellow danger racism here. The film’s script is even clever enough to not annoy me despite explaining most of the potentially supernatural occurrences away. That might have something to do with the plain (and pleasantly preposterous in a good sense) weirdness of the whole tale even without prophecies and curses actually existing in its world, or with Levin’s fine sense of how to pace the telling of said tale. At the very least, there are neither dithering nor detours here, with every scene fulfilling an actually important function in the plot and at the same time also containing at least one element of clever pulpy fun.

Fun seems to have been the film’s watch word, even though the plot is, if you think about it, actually as dark as that of the darkest noir, and a very fun time I Love a Mystery turns out to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,mystery,pulp,henry levin,jim bannon,nina foch,george macready,barton yarborough,in short

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

Freshly knighted Scottish geologist Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) more or less stumbles upon the last words (and pointer to an exciting adventure) of the Icelandic geologist Saknussem, who disappeared while trying to find an entrance to the centre of the Earth decades ago.

Despite his seeming unworldliness, Lindenbrook does not take too long to decide that giving fine lectures in Edinburgh is well and good, but finding an entrance to the hollow Earth would be something quite more exciting, so he makes his way to Iceland, accompanied by his insufferable favourite student Alec McKuen (Pat Boone, doing a Scottish accent about as authentic as his music is rough). Please ignore the romantic subplot about Al and Lindenbrook's daughter (Diane Baker).

After some to and fro, Lindenbrook actually finds the entrance to the planet's hollow core, and goes on his adventurous way accompanied by Alec, Carla (Arlene Dahl), the widow of his former rival Professor Göteborg (please ignore the subplot about Göteborg's mildly evil shenanigans, too), and a large Icelandic gentleman (Peter Ronson) of the peasant persuasion who has an unfortunate and clearly illegal relationship with a duck. There will be wonders, dinosaurs, and the mad great-great grandson of Saknussem (Thayer David) waiting for them.

Henry Levin's adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is a bit of a weird one: despite some horrible flaws in its early parts and a bloated running time, the quality of its second half turns the film into quite an admirable peace of 50s SF/adventure movie. One only needs patience to get through a first hour that could have been cut by about thirty minutes without actually losing anything of interest.

Especially the romance sub plot between Boone and Baker is horrible, seeing as it gives Boone an opportunity to musically mangle a Robert Burns poem, and provides the film even more opportunities for cutesy and desperately unfunny humour regarding the couple; later on, Jenny is used to cut away from the actually interesting parts of the film to give us some peeks at her looking sort of depressed. This would be bad enough with an actual actor playing the student, but Boone's acting is as atrocious as his Scottish accent, and it's utterly impossible to believe that this slick, emotionless guy is a poor Scottish student in love with a girl and science.

Because the film wastes so much time on this sub plot and other "funny" business, it takes nearly an hour until the extraordinary voyage it is supposed to be about actually begins. Fortunately, once the voyage does begin, the up to that point tiring movie turns into something that is a joy to watch. There is a sense of wonder and joy about scientific discovery and strange adventures running through the film's second half that is completely in the spirit of Verne's less pessimistic phase, the kind of feeling that turns the simple discovery of a glowing part of the underworld into a moment of beauty, and that lets the film's sillier moments glow with a sense of fun.

Journey's excellent set design certainly makes a large contribution to the film's mood and sense of awe; as unrealistic as the effects work might look to the modern eye, there is such a sense of excitement on display the question of realism just doesn't seem to matter, as is only proper for this sort of movie. Sure, the dinosaur attack scenes do suffer from the "dinosaurs"' reality as poor reptiles (animals were, alas, harmed during the making of the film) with glued on fins, and can't help but produce the wish somebody in charge had hired Ray Harryhausen instead, but a dinosaur attack is an intrinsically excellent thing in a movie, even if it looks less than probable and is morally dubious.

On the characterization side I was pretty surprised by two things. Firstly, the open way a film from the conservative 50s treats Hans's very alternative lifestyle, as if being in a (clearly sexual) relationship with a duck were no big thing; okay, the film just isn't realizing it argues for bestiality, but one can't help being surprised.

Secondly, an quite a bit more seriously, the film does manage to show Carla Göteborg as a headstrong, intelligent and independent woman without feeling the need to permanently dismantle her. If you're dreading the horrible scenes every 50s SF movie with an actual woman character has where she has a complete breakdown and surrenders to the alpha male forever, rejoice, for that scene doesn't actually come; I suspect after the way Dahl holds herself for the whole of the movie, nobody would have believed that sort of scene anyway. Of course, Carla still isn't allowed to do quite as much as her male companions, but for 1959, her role is quite a satisfying one.

The script, she, and Mason even salvage the usual "two people permanently at odds with each other must be in love" romance between Göteborg and Lindenbrook by actually managing to give a lot of their squabbling the feel of coming from two persons too stubborn and set in their ways to easily fall in love, and by not confusing romance and love with forever giving up one's personality. That's not too bad for an adventure movie that begins with Pat Boone pretending to be Scottish.

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