Gate of Hell (Japan, 1953)

After the Heiji rebellion in 12th century Japan, a samurai called Morito demands to marry Kesa. He won't take "no" for an answer even though she's already happily married to another samurai.

Filmed in Eastman color. It looks great, but the colors were so bright and the costumes, which I assume were authentic, were so outlandish that it was hard to take seriously. Maybe if I knew what they wore those little hats for. Morito didn't seem like much of a threat even after he killed a man.

Morito meets Kesa when she volunteers to act as a decoy so the Lord's sister can escape. When Kesa is lying unconscious, Morito revives her by taking a mouthful of water and doing a spit take on her. 

The other thing that stood out to me was arrows silently hitting someone or landing in the sand while samurai ride down the a beach on horses. It wasn't like in Westerns where you hear the arrows whistling through the air and hitting whatever they hit.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

THE LIVING MAGOROKU (Japan, 1943) Keisuke Kinoshita

Russia has been invaded from the west over and over for at least the last thousand years. As they geared up for war with the Nazis, Eisenstein made Alexander Nevsky about the 13th century invasion of Russia by the Teutonic Knights. I saw a World War Two British film that showed the destruction of the Spanish Armada. 

The Living Magoroku, perhaps ironically, starts with a 16th century battle between two Japanese armies. Is that how you want to present your country during war time, Japanese slaughtering Japanese?

Made in 1943. I would have assumed they had a shortage of able-bodied men to act as extras, but it looked okay. More late Kurosawa than early Kurosawa, with large armies shooting at each other with rifles and arrows and a few shots of guys killing each other with swords. A weirdly unenergetic samurai walks along casually killing people here and there.

Then it switches to then-present day Japan. We see teenagers training in the same field.

An officer berates the boys for not showing enough spirit.

"Don't cling to your life," he says. "When you die, die honorably. That's what's in the Japanese blood we inherited from our ancestors."

I wondered what I would do in their shoes. Yukio Mishima just coughed a few times and told his draft board he had TB and they left him alone. I'd want a back up plan. I'd learn typing and shorthand so I'd get a soft office job in the Army if worse came to worse.

The director himself was drafted in 1940 but lucked out and was wounded seriously enough that they let him go. He became a director the same year as Kurosawa and beat him out for the New Director Award.

While the lieutenant addresses the teens, an aging blacksmith wanders into the scene.

"How many of them will earn the Order of the Golden Kite?" he said. "How many of them will die in battle? If you think about it, you have to love them."

Later, he makes new sword for the officer.

"Cut down 20 or 30 American weaklings---it won't even have a nick on the edge."

The movie is about a superstitious family that lets a large field lie fallow because their ancestors fought the battle there 300 years earlier. Their son thinks they should grow something on it to contribute to the war effort. There's the sword-making subplot. The officer finds out his rare samurai sword is a fake and needs a new one. A young couple wants to get married but the boy is from a family of servants who worked for his girlfriend's family.

There's a guy with lung disease. It keeps him out of the army but it's murdering him.

It was a nice-looking movie with enough bizarre, pro-death Japanese fascist stuff to keep it interesting.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Five Card Stud (1968)

Awful repetitive music by Maurice Jarre. It's not every day you see Roddy McDowell pistol whip a man.

Dean Martin tries to stop them, but guys playing poker in a small town saloon drag a man out and lynch him for cheating. Although, in fairness, the guy also tried to shoot one of them when he was caught.

Now someone is killing off the men who had been in the game that night, peeling them off one by one.

With Yaphet Kotto five years before Live and Let Die.

While eating breakfast, Denver Pyle tells son Roddy McDowell that he sometimes seems like he's not human, like he was built in a factory. I would have wondered if it was a compliment, but Roddy McDowell takes it as a grave insult.

"If I was made by a machine, then you made it and you ran it!"

At one point, Roddy briefly waves a large cross as a weapon a year after Dustin Hoffman did the same in The Graduate.

With Robert Mitchum as a gun wielding nondenominational minister in the town's only church. A little like Night of the Hunter. Also like every other movie where the town has a single generic church.
 

Had the look of a typical 1960's western. The interiors were too bright to have been lit by kerosene lamps, the women's hair was too carefully coiffed and obviously sprayed in place. Their teeth were way too nice, but that's true in all movies. Dean Martin wore a polyester shirt.
 

Most of this was kind of nice for a change. Realism is probably what killed the western. 

Written by Marguerite Roberts who sold her first script in 1932.

Directed by Henry Hathaway.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

John Baxter's Luis Buñuel biography

One Christmas, my family decided we would just give each other stuff we already had. Why spend the money? I thoughtfully wrapped up all my best stuff. Then, on Xmas eve, they informed that they didn't mean it literally. We should still BUY stuff.

But that was how I happened to give away my copy of John Baxter's biography of Luis Buñuel. I finally paid a few bucks and got it again on Kindle. 

I'm to the part where he's in Hollywood after fleeing Spain toward the end of the Spanish Civil War. 

I never understood why the French New Wave didn't latch onto Buñuel. He was a great auteur who worked in the manner of American B movies. If I remember correctly, Baxter compares the budgets of the movies he made in Mexico with the Dagwood and Blondie movies of the 1940's.  

Buñuel was a minor figure in surrealism in the '20's and '30's but remained devoted to it 40 years after the movement ran its course. He hung around with the avant garde in Spain and France but didn't really do anything himself. He wasn't a writer or an artist. Directing was his only gig. I don't know what that tells you about directing.

One thing, Buñuel wealthy mother put up the money for Un Chien Andalou. Today, all the directors are rich kids whose parents put up the money for their first movies. I can't imagine someone like Roman Polanski becoming a director in capitalist country.

Roman Polanski's Frantic (1988, U.S., France)

 

Kind of weird seeing Eight is Enough's Betty Buckley in this. Polanski's not a snob like I am, I guess.

Harrison Ford as a doctor who arrives in Paris with his wife Buckley for a medical convention. At the hotel they realize she picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport. He takes a shower and when he steps out, she's gone. He tries to find her, tries to convince authorities that something has happened to her and that she hasn't run off with some Frenchman.

Years ago, I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers with an audience full of university students. They thought it was hilarious when the doctor and his co-star takes pills to stay awake so they don't turn into pod people. Seems like a pretty obvious thing to do.

In this movie, you'd think Harrison Ford would want to keep some of that small amounts of cocaine on hand to keep him awake between the jet lag and the searching.

There's a scene I found hard to watch of Harrison Ford on the roof of a Paris building. It wasn't as easy as they make it look in other movies, especially in loafers.

Polanski's a brilliant director. I avoided this movie for years because I had it confused with a movie with a similar plot called Target made a couple of years earlier, but Polanski made a monkey out of Arthur Penn.

With John Mahoney, the father on Frasier, as an embassy official.

Free on Tubi.

McCabe & Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

I don't know what I thought it was about, but my assumptions about this thing were shaped by Paint Your Wagon and Rooster Cogburn and the Lady, so I never watched or even bothered reading about it over the years. I couldn't understand why people took it so seriously, but I finally watched McCabe & Mrs Miller.

If I were in the Old West, I wouldn't go anywhere without a large amount of opium. Think of all the agonizingly painful injuries people are likely to suffer out there alone on the range, miles from any help. I'd want opium and suicide pills.

McCabe (Warren Beatty) sets up a brothel in an all-male mining community. The film made sex in the Old West look somewhat better than I pictured it. Set in 1902. Apparently you could purchase women back then. Beatty buys them from a pimp in a nearby town. Maybe the Mann Act wasn't such a bad idea after all.

A Mrs Miller comes to town, realizes that McCabe isn't that smart and starts managing the brothel for him. She's also an opium user.

Things turn bad when a large company decides to buy the place. McCabe doesn't want to sell so they send three killers.

I mentioned the European revolver used in Thomasine and Bushrod. Warren Beatty seemed to have one like it in this.

The Fortune (1975) Stockard Channing, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson

I first saw this movie when I was about 12.  It was the first I ever heard of the Mann Act which made it a federal crime to transport a woman across state lines for "immoral purposes". And "immoral purposes" was broadly interpreted. 

This came up in another movie, Walk on the Wild Side. Laurence Harvey is threatened with the Mann Act because he innocently escorted homeless Jane Fonda across the Texas-Louisiana border. 

I'm glad to see Matt Gaetz disgraced and I hope he's driven from office, but of all the things they could arrest him for, I don't know that I want him imprisoned on that particular charge.

In this movie, Warren Beatty has a pending divorce so he can't marry and run away with heiress Stockard Channing, so he has petty crook Jack Nicholson marry her. Beatty pretends to be her brother and the three of them run away to California.

I don't know if there's anyone you can really get behind in this thing. Jack Nicholson is somewhat sympathetic because his character is so dumb, then Warren Beatty gets some sympathy because he has to cope with him. It's nice that they start to get along better, but they start plotting something worse than expected.

California in the 1920's is represented by a few simple sets and locations. There's a scene of them flying in an early airliner, a Ford Trimotor.

Directed by Mike Nichols. 

Available on Amazon Prime.

Bastard's Crossing (2021)

 

A western for the pandemic. A guy never leaves his primitive store. A freight company brings his supplies. He only sees people briefly. His first act violence seemed somewhat justified. His customer was becoming belligerent and he was on his own in the middle of nowhere. Then he has the dead guy's wife to contend with. It came across as a historical drama since it wasn't really an action film.

A low budget western. According to the opening credits, they made or set out to make 12 westerns in 12 months, and, I didn't count them, but looking at the director and producer credits on IMDb, they seemed to have done that.

The movie was almost entirely one location. They had horses, wagons and a stage coach pass by. It all looked pretty good. The actors were older guys. There was an accidental death early on and a couple of homicides later.

96 minutes. I hit pause part way through and was surprised I was already halfway through it.

Filmed in Mississippi. Available on Amazon Prime.

Ken Burns, Hemingway, briefly

I never thought about it, but I heard some criticism of Ken Burns' documentaries. The guy has been at it for decades, but his style and manner of working hasn't changed one bit over the years. I don't know if it means he's playing it safe. There's thesis and antithesis---maybe, by the time any of us heard of him, he had already achieved synthesis. I don't know what he should do differently.

So why did Ernest Hemingway ever think that dying in World War One was for a good cause? Not everyone did back then. I had a couple of great uncles who were disappointed that the war ended before they could enlist and everyone else in the family thought they were idiots.

Creation of the Humanoids (1962)

The first time I saw this, it claimed on the box in the video store that it was Andy Warhol's favorite movie. Mike Kuchar mentions it in the DVD commentary for Sins of the Fleshapoids (1966). 

It was obviously cheap, but it was beautiful, in color, beautifully lit. The cinematographer and make-up artist were major figures in their fields but on their last legs in Hollywood. A beautiful wide-screen color movie full of static shots. Rather stagey and talky, but that's okay.

Most of mankind has been wiped out in a nuclear war. Radiation has rendered many of those left unable to reproduce and humanity's days are numbered. They're doing pretty well, though, being served by a race of humanoid robots. 

But there's a violent, Proud Boy-like "conservative pressure group" targeting the robots. They wear Confederate Civil War caps. Their leader is outraged to find his sister cavorting with a robot.

It raises the issue people talk about now about the transporter in Star Trek. Does the transporter kill you when you're transported? The person that appears at the other end thinks it's you, but is it really?

Directed by Wesley Barry (1907-1994), a silent film child actor who later worked mainly as an assistant or 2nd unit director. 

Dudley Manlove was the only actor I recognized. With Don Doolittle, Don Megowan, Erica Elliott, Frances McCann.

Available on Amazon Prime and Pub-D-Hub.

Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) Doris Wishman

Director Doris Wishman either never learned or never bothered to record live sound. The dialog is dubbed. But she didn't want to go through the trouble of getting the lip synch right, so we mostly hear the dialog when we can't see the actors' mouths. Which makes it look interesting. The camera pans around the room while people talk, or it cuts to whoever's listening. People mocked her for that, but it worked pretty well. It was better than showing two people standing there talking. Non diegetic music covers up the lack of sound effects.

Bad Girls Go to Hell was what they called a "roughie", a grim mix of sex and violence. A married woman is raped by a guy in her apartment building so she packs a bag and flees.

She meets a nice guy who turns out to be a Dr Jekyll & Mr Drunk. There are Lesbians. She rents a room from a married couple and is attacked by the husband. She goes from place to place, fleeing each time she's assaulted. She never heard of calling the police.

Objectionable but a lot better than anything Ed Wood or Herschell Gordon Lewis could do.

Filmed in New York City. Black & white. 64 minutes.

Available on the Criterion Channel strangely enough.

The Nightcomers (UK, 1971) Marlon Brando

Regarded as a low point in Marlon Brando's career, one year before he was back on top with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. Made as a prequel to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Critics complained that the prequel destroyed the ambiguity of the original story.

I didn't want to watch it because I was creeped out by The Innocents and other movies based on or inspired by that story, but this turned out to be a sex movie rather than a ghost story. I turned it on the Criterion Channel the last day it was available there, but it looks like you can still watch it elsewhere on streaming video.

A brother and sister (Christopher Ellis and Verna Harvey) have moved in with their new guardian on his country estate. They haven't been told that their parents are dead. Their guardian takes off and leaves them in the care of their governess (Stephanie Beacham), a housekeeper (Thora Hird), and Marlon Brando as an Irish handyman.

Brando goes for the governess. Bondage was a thing even back then. The kids know what Brando and the governess are doing and start imitating it which is one reason the 12-year-old sister was played by a 19-year-old actress.

A ghastly scene of a dead body in rigor mortis. 

Never let yourself be isolated in the country with English children.