Jacktown (1962)

Forty years ago, older men would strike up conversations with me. I'd talk to them. I thought I was being kind to a lonely old person. They'd casually ask how old I was. Once they knew I was over seventeen, they'd start hitting on me. Those guys knew what they were doing.

Jacktown is about Frankie, an aging delinquent, 21-years-old, from a petit-bourgeois family in Detroit. After a quick shot of his birth, the movie opens with him clubbing a man over the head and robbing him. So you don't feel too bad later when he goes to prison for molesting a fifteen-year-old girl he just assumed was older than she was.

"Will you meet me later?" he asked the girl (Alice Gordon) who was working as a carhop at a drive-in.

"Yeah."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No, I'm serious."

She WAS serious. Grimly serious. No enthusiasm whatsoever.

The wretch is sentenced to two-and-a-half to six years in "Jacktown", Michigan's sprawling prison, then the largest in the world according to the narrator 

IMDb says the movie was 62 minutes. The version I saw on Pub-D-Hub was 57 minutes.

The documentary realism was undercut by the warden sympathizing with the sex offender to the point that he doesn't report him for escaping, stealing a car with a child in the back seat and showing up at the warden's daughter's apartment.

Patty McCormack got top billing as the warden's daughter.

Anti-statutory rape prisoners crowd Frankie.

 

Bonanza, "Bushwacked!" 1971

I finally saw this thing again. There was an episode of Bonanza. I remember my older brother and sister seeming to think it a big event when we watched it in 1971. It put the "real" into surrealism. It was the only episode of that show that I know of where the outdoor scenes were all filmed outside and not on a soundstage.

Little Joe has been shot in the back----bushwacked. Lying in bed, fighting for his life, he keeps having strange dreams where he's chased by a wagon wheel and takes refuge in a teepee.

In 1971, we thought we were witnessing television history, but I never saw it again. Until yesterday.

Joe doesn't dream of his late mother like Johnny Crawford did on The Rifleman. Michael Landon was an adult and being in the time period it was, he'd likely never seen a picture of her. He just has dreams of Lorne Greene calling him back from the abyss.

The only other thing they could have done differently is have him haunted by visions the countless men he killed over the course of the series. It makes me think of a line from a brief bit of western writing by Jack Handy:

"I'll be waiting for you in heaven----with a gun!"

I used to come home and watch Bonanza in syndication after school. And now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing any episode more than once. They used to film over thirty episodes per season and the show was on fourteen seasons. If I'm reading IMDb correctly, there were 430 episodes.

No wonder I never saw this again until now.

Paul Schrader briefly

There's something on The Criterion Channel about Paul Schrader, an interview with him with clips of movies he talks about. Some of it is well, known----the thing with the Alka Seltzer in Taxi Driver stolen from Godard and a shot in First Reformed that he stole from Taxi Driver.

He's a very good writer, which may be deceiving. He got a bad response to a tweet he posted late one night. He later attributed it to taking Ambien and having had a few drinks. If he slurred his words and made a few typos, people might not have judged him so harshly, but this affected his career. People didn't know if they wanted to work with him if they had to worry about him alienating the public on Twitter. He tweeted or posted on Facebook that Harvey Weinstein was a well-known sexual predator but his crimes against cinema were what really bothered him.

Jackie Mason

In 1989, Jackie Mason had a short-lived sit-com. In an early episode, Mason visits his Catholic girlfriend's family. There's a deer head mounted on the wall.

"You do any hunting, Jackie?" one of the men asks.

"Jews don't hunt. They shop," Mason says.

A rabbi TV critic for a Jewish newspaper denounced this as anti-Semitic. He said he was sure that hunting was as common among Jews as it was with any other demographically comparable ethnic group.

Which probably isn't true since deer aren't kosher, at least not if you shoot them. 

Jackie Mason's anti-Semitic joke was halachic.

Mason wanted to expel all Palestinians from Palestine and murder any that remained. He was an admirer of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League which is listed by the FBI as a terrorist group. Mason was known for using cute Yiddish racial slurs against Black politicians.

He died the other day at 93. 

Not the only one to notice this...

...but Jeffrey St.Clair did make a movie reference:

"Bezos’s rocket looks like it was designed by Barbarella’s workshop, a stubby white vibrator, which is the most extravagant manifestation yet of that favorite pastime of the American elite, Ostentatious Onanism."

I thought I might illustrate this with a picture of the rocket ship from the X-rated Flesh Gordon. I did an image search for it and the first thing that came up was Bezo's rocket.

David Ball's Honey (1999)

Who's that girl singer who keeps attacking her former boyfriends? What did she want from them? Was every date supposed to end in matrimony? Even if they did, most marriages end in divorce. I haven't heard any of her music that I'm aware of, so for all I know the break-ups themselves may not have been the problem for her.

In the movie Honey, two couples, one married one not, stay together even though they should probably call it quits. Starts with one couple role playing in a hotel room. The other has a terrible argument although it's in part over one of them wanting to live together.

Ray Carney called it "One of the great contemporary works of art." I wouldn't go that far, but it wasn't bad.

There's a blog for the movie with a copy of the director's "Honey Manifesto" written as a preface to the screenplay.

Director David Ball thought it could be filmed in four weekends, mentioned it being "low concept". He wasn't quite asking people to work for free, but he couldn't pay them upfront and he expressed doubts that the finished product would get distribution.

Filmed on digital video, I assume in standard definition, and the picture looked good to me.

This and a short video made a year earlier are David Ball's only credits on IMDb. I don't know if he went to work in a related field or if he decided making movies was more trouble than it was worth. It's been 22 years.

Free on Pub-D-Hub or $1.99 on Amazon Prime.

Jon Jost in Oprah territory: The Bed You Sleep In (1993)

I've always admired Jon Jost more than I liked his movies, but I've hardly seen any of his movies. I haven't seen any since he switched to digital video and that was twenty-four years ago. I saw a clip from one that looked beautiful.

Over the last several years, he's attacked Kelly Reichhardt, Werner Herzog and Jim Jarmusch; he wrote unkind things about a couple actors he worked with and he was harshly critical the movie Spring Breakers. So I don't feel as bad as I should criticizing his work.

I watched The Bed You Sleep In again on YouTube. A Russian fellow posted it, I assume without anyone's permission. Last time I looked, it was the only one of his movies available on DVD from Netflix.

It was slow cinema. A lumber mill owner in Toledo, Oregon, has a daughter in college who's joined a consciousness-raising group. She writes a long letter to her stepmother. Images flashed in her mind and now she's convinced she's uncovered repressed memories of her father doing horrible things to her as a child.

Jost seemed to have bought into the discredited belief in recovered memories. The movie could be taken as being about a guy being falsely accused, but it follows the guy's wife as she tells her friends what a monster her husband is, not the falsely accused husband consulting an attorney. 

The subject matter is so grim and it's never handled well in movies. People thought the Dogme 95 movie The Celebration (Denmark, 1998) was a comedy.

Nearly two hours long. You could cut it down to forty minutes without losing much plot. 

The actors underplayed it. They weren't screaming their dialog. Which is good. I've long believed that James Dean should have calmly observed, "You're tearing me apart," instead of screaming it like an idiot.

There are static camera shots of the town and the lumber mill. Boys walking home from school look at the camera but they keep moving and let the grown-up do his work.

The Giant Behemoth (U.K. 1959)

The opening credits were over a lovely shot of the rough ocean. It starts in an English fishing village and ends with a radioactive brontosaurus rising from the sea and running amok on London. The British troops still dressed and armed as they had been in World War Two.  Special effects by guys who worked on King Kong and Mighty Joe Young.

Living in a 1950's English fishing village looked nice if you didn't have to catch fish for a living. 

The first Godzilla movie was full of references to the massive U.S. bombing of Japan less than ten years earlier. There were a couple of giant monster movies made in England but I never got the impression that they tapped into British memories of the war which may be why they were never as big as Godzilla was in Japan. It could be a stiff upper lip thing. The British didn't let themselves be as sensitive as the Japanese. The Japanese renounced war and imperialism while the British were still murdering people to maintain their empire.

Written by blacklisted American writer Daniel Lewis James. 

Available on Pub-D-Hub.

Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973)

The movie had a gag from Mr Hulot's Holiday. Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) stops and honks at a dog in the street but it won't get out of his way. Even the dogs don't respect him. It was 1973. Marlowe's 1948 Lincoln Continental was only 25 years old.

With Jack Riley, Mr Carlin from The Bob Newhart Show, playing the movie's theme on a piano in a bar. Henry Gibson as a crooked psychiatrist. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a non-speaking role. I liked Stephen Coit as the belligerent police detective with a comb over. When anyone is hostile or threatens him, he says, "Stand in line, baby." The least cool guy in the movie still made an effort.

The movie was more coherent than the 1953 novel and it had a better ending.

 

World Socialist Website 2000 review of American Movie

The World Socialist Website is Trotskyite. I started my own "review" of this movie with an anecdote about a woman who hoped her novel would be her ticket out of poverty. I didn't mention that she was in the Communist Party, USA. That must have been forty years ago.

American Movie was a little like Of Mice and Men or Midnight Cowboy, about two friends in financial straits who have (almost, sort of) no one but each other, but are of no help at all to anyone. Borchardt was clutching at straws. I've gone through the same thing and know others who have, with no trade and no education, trying to find a way out, trying to be writers rather than filmmakers. It hasn't worked for anyone I've ever known. It did work for Borchardt, surprisingly enough. It was because of Chris Smith's documentary, not his own movie, but that counts, too.

Borchardt made his film in 16mm before digital video took over. He wanted to sell 3,000 copies. I read at the time that he sold fewer than a hundred until the documentary came out, then he sold over 4,000. 

Some think digital video has made things worse, that the world is awash in zero budget movies, but Borchardt's initial experience trying to sell "Coven" seems to disprove that theory.

If he shot on video, selling 100 copies might have been enough to turn a profit.    

 Questions about Chris Smith's American Movie

Emanuele Saccarelli

31 May 2000

...We are faced at once with genuine human hope and with a degrading coping mechanism; with a pressing and continued consideration of matters of social justice, and with the renewed legitimization of the grotesque inequalities of capitalism. Borchardt provides a poignant reminder of the absurd and nevertheless real power of the American dream.

...

Mark's brother states in a resentful tone that Borchardt really ought to abandon his illusions and work in the local factory. This is the other side of Borchardt's American dream. The fuel of Borchardt's artistic drive is not simply ambition, but fear that he may never get out of his present condition. Borchardt's early remark that “The American Dream stays with me each and every day” assumes its more properly dark tones once we plunge more deeply into his existence. His condition is tolerable to him only to the extent that becoming a rich filmmaker remains even a remote possibility. Borchardt bitterly complains about having to clean filthy bathrooms at the cemetery. He repeatedly forces himself to confront his personal condition, “Is that what you want to do with your life—suck down peppermint schnapps?” But this merely serves to fan the flames of the unlikely dream that sustains him.

As the Green Bay Packers are shown winning the 1997 Superbowl on the TV screen of his parents' small and messy living room, a mildly intoxicated Borchardt storms out of the house ranting against the “motherf___ing factory workers.” “Never” he exclaims with a raised fist (!) as he vows not to remain trapped in the conditions of working class life. These kinds of contradictions emerge with occasional vividness in Smith's documentary. Amidst the cheap laughs and trivial moments, Smith's work reveals flashes of the tragedy of a man trapped not just in the harsh reality of his social condition, but, more importantly, in its ideological negation.

Read the whole thing here.

Orson Welles' mistake

“I think I essentially made a mistake in staying in movies but it’s a mistake I can’t regret because it’s like saying I shouldn’t have stayed married to that woman but I did because I love her. I would have been more successful if I hadn’t been married to her, you know. I would have been more successful if I’d left movies immediately, stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written, anything. I’ve wasted a greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox which is a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It’s about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.”

--Orson Welles

Coleman Francis's The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961, 54 minutes)

There was a naked lady in the pre-title sequence.

Silent with narration and a few voices dubbed here and there. Tor Johnson as a Soviet scientist who's come to the U.S. with Soviet documents. Two Soviet agents understandably want the documents back. They drive a lovely 1961 Plymouth Valiant. They shoot it out with Tor Johnson's American handler.

The Soviet guys chase them into Yucca Flats just before an atomic bomb test is carried out there. The briefcase bursts into flames and Tor Johnson becomes a homicidal maniac.

All this happens in the first nine minutes.

Tor Johnson strangles a couple driving a Renault 4CV who stop on the side of the road. The car is rear engine so the wife faces forward and doesn't see Tor Johnson strangle her husband as he monkeys with the engine.

After that, I didn't pay that much attention. There are two guys with rifles, there are two boys, sons of the director, who are lost in the desert. Guys in a plane shoot at another guy running through the desert.

My guess is that they normally wouldn't have credited the kid who appeared briefly selling newspapers but they were padding the credits, and it's nice for the kid to see his name on screen, although I'm not sure they'd let him see a movie with a naked lady.

Graham Stafford as the News Boy.

Noah (2014)

It really was hard to miss that this thing had an all-white cast. And they were such generic white people. The Godfather's gimmick was that the Italian characters were all played by Italians. This thing might not have been so bad if the cast had all been known to be Jewish or Italian. 

I saw a silent Italian version of this story, by the way, and there was an astonishing amount of male nudity.

It's a little strange that no one else back then owned a boat of any kind.

Available free on Pluto.

Robert Downey, Sr, RIP

Robert Downey, Sr, has died at age 85. Parlayed work in underground film into a Hollywood career. Introduced his son to marijuana at an extremely young age. Putney Swope, Greaser's Palace and Up the Academy are perhaps his best-known films.

I remember seeing those movies at the video stores, but it was only in the last several years that I saw any of them.

He appeared as an actor in Boogie Nights and To Live and Die in L.A. among other things.

Several of his earlier films are available on the Criterion Channel.

Bert I. Gordon's WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST (1958)

Standard Bert I. Gordon thing. He made a lot of movies, most of them about giants.

Sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man which was about an Army guy who is exposed to radiation and turns giant becoming more and more unhinged as he tries to come to terms with his new condition. In this one, he's disfigured to conceal the fact that they had a different actor playing him.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which Gordon had nothing to do with) had the lurid subplot going for it. While doctors try to find some treatment for the fifty foot woman, her husband takes advantage and becomes a swinger. His brassy giant alcoholic wife goes out looking for him.

In this movie, there was nothing. The giant guy's wife still loves him even though he's fled to Mexico where picks up trucks transporting food and eats everything.

Today, it could have a drug cartel supplying the colossal man with food and drugs while using him to terrorize the locals and keep the military and police at bay.

In the '50's, locals could use him as a weapon in the struggle for land reform. Maybe they could enslave him and make him do all the work.

I liked the scene with the bratty junior high kids he almost massacres.

Available on Pub D Hub, which means it's public domain and probably available on other channels as well.

 

American Movie, 1999

There was a time---I didn't know whether to be shocked or impressed. I knew an impoverished, unemployed woman who said she wanted to hurry up and finish her novel so she could make some money. I don't know how serious she was. She was a very good writer but as far as I know, if her novel were published, it'd be her first. 

American Movie is a documentary about Mark Borchardt. He's in dire straits financially, owes money to the IRS and to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue; he owes money to his father and owes back child support. Bankruptcy won't get him out of it. He works as an adult paperboy and does light maintenance at a cemetery.

He sets out to solve his problems by making a movie. All he'll have to do is sell 3,000 video cassettes at $14.99 each (about $24 in today's money) and make enough to finance his next movie that would be his salvation.

I know I've written about this before. I think I contrasted him with Robert Rodriguez who made El Mariachi in Mexico with the idea that he could "fail quietly", and I may have compared it with Project Greenlight. Borchardt got the worst of both worlds, trying to make a movie with almost no money AND doing it with a film crew recording his every move.

I guess I'm not giving anything away. Borchardt really did triumph once it was all over, but not in the way he planned.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

The wreck in the opening credits to the Six Million Dollar Man

I haven't seen that show in decades. It came on TV on some streaming channel and I didn't immediately get up to turn it off.

It bothered me for years. I recognized the experimental aircraft in the opening credits of the show from a book on jet aircraft in my old school library. The film of the thing crashing was real. For years I assumed someone died in it.

But don't worry. I looked it up on Wikipedia. The pilot survived. They rushed him to the hospital and he fully recovered but he got a staph infection in the hospital and lost his sight in one eye.

 

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

The movie starts with a model of a little European town. Later, there was a lovely shot of a model train crossing a high bridge in the mountains and of a model train engine, the wheels turning as it speeds through the countryside. That's not criticism. I'm pro-model. It was part of its charm.

I liked the movie better than I thought I would although parts of it seemed long, maybe because I watched it on streaming video. It starts with travelers stranded in a hotel that was unprepared for so many people. They run out of food and have to share rooms.

Once on the train, a young woman (Margaret Lockwood) hangs around with a middle aged British nanny (May Whitty). When the nanny disappears, passengers and crew deny the woman ever existed.

I liked the shootout. It was a different time, when ordinary people would gun down a few cops if they had to.

I watched it on Pub D Hub which was stupid since it was available on Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel among other places.

 

Bill Cosby free

I was worried about how Bill Cosby would cope in prison. I worried until he went to prison, then I forgot all about him. 

As it happened, the inmates had no problem with him in spite of the nature of his crimes and the fact that he sent his illegitimate daughter to prison years earlier. 

Now he's free. Time goes by faster as you get older. I'm not nearly as old as he is and I was surprised it's been two years. He probably feels like he just got there.

The prosecutor in his case publicly announced that weren't going to charge him so he couldn't invoke his fifth amendment rights when he testified in a deposition in a lawsuit against him. Then prosecutors charged him with Aggravated Indecent Assault anyway and used that testimony against him. That's why his conviction was overturned.

He was sentenced to three-to-ten years, so he served most of the minimum sentence.

That "America's Dad" thing was already rather perverse. Is that what people want in a father? His TV show triggered a wave of discipline-oriented family sit-coms including the one that made Kirk Cameron a star. If Cameron's maskless Christmas caroling "protests" had become super-spreader events, Cosby would have been indirectly responsible.

Well, if I were Cosby's neighbor and his wife was out watering the plants and she enthused that Bill was coming home, I would just smile and nod. No point in telling her that her husband's a monster who was right where he belonged. 

I assume she's happy. Who knows. I can't imagine that a dangerous sexual predator is a perfectly pleasant person otherwise. She's had a taste of freedom for the last two years. She never even visited him in prison. She may decide to dump him.

A thing he tweeted. He thinks he still has fans and supporters.