Seven Days in May

John Frankenheimer directed Seven Days in May, a 1964 political thriller based on a bestseller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey III.  We had the book in the house and I must have read it when I was about ten.  I recall some sex scenes in the novel but nothing else. I have a more precise memory of the big budget prestige movie based on the book -- watching the film on Turner Classic Movies last night, some sequences seemed familiar to me, although I had forgotten the picture's plot and its "big themes" -- a lovingly detailed, although narratively insignificant sequence in which an ally of the beleagered President Lyman approaches a touring air-craft carrier on a skiff and, then, comes onto the huge boat has remained with me.  (Although now seeing the sequence more than 50 years later, I observe that it is spatially incoherent.  The vast bulk of the aircraft carrier dwarfs the little boat approaching it.  The director has no idea how the small boat somehow disgorges it's passengers on the deck seventy feet overhead.  This is characteristic of the confusion that afflicts this film at every level.)  I also remembered a bleak aircraft crash location where Spanish gendarmes wearing outlandish hats stood baffled in the smoking debris while men carrying litters, presumably laden with the dead, wandered here and there in the wreckage. 

The film's premise is that a steely right-wing Air Force general, James Matoon Scott (Burt Lancaster playing Douglas McArthur) has engineered a military coup to displace a highly unpopular president, Jordan Lyman (Frederick March).  Scott's factotum, an appealing, plain-spoken Marine named Jigs Casey (Kirk Douglas) senses that something is amiss -- there are peculiar clues scattered about and, slowly, Jigs uncovers the awful truth.  Seven days from the film's beginning (May 12), an ostensible military exercise will result in the detention of the president and TV broadcasts that Scott has seized power to save the republic.  Lyman has entered into a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Russians that the Pentagon opposes.  (Even the reasonable happy warrior, Jigs, thinks the deal is a disaster.)  Scott wants to avert the treaty and is willing to seize power to take control.  The film divides into three parts:  first Jigs figures out what the bad guys are planning, second, the President and his men try to gather sufficient proof to expose the coup before it takes place, and, third, the President and General Scott debate the merits of their respective positions.  The script is by Rod Serling and it has very snappy, elegant dialogue -- Serling's modus operandi is primarily theatrical:  he sets up dramatic confrontations between his protagonists who, then, tear up the scenery haranguing one another.  Serling is middle-brow literate and clever, but the film's action comes down to a series of conversations and debates.  The picture is shot in documentary-style black and white and it has some of the high-contrast imagery, glaringly lit, that features in Kubrick's much greater Dr. Strangelove produced a year later.  But none of the images are memorable and Serling tells the story through dialogue not pictures.  A good example of a purely pictorial sequence that goes badly awry is the opening scene:  totally silent files of protesters and counter-protesters in front of the White House march back and forth, past one another.  Finally, someone clubs another protester with his sign and fracas breaks out.  The street-fighting is chaotic and the scene goes on and on -- it's much longer than necessary and makes no point at all.  Somehow, Frankenheimer manages to make a riot uninteresting pictorially.  And the prelude to the riot, the two groups of demonstrators marching past one another is grim, stark silence makes no sense at all -- the groups would either be widely separated and shouting at each other, or, if allowed to mingle, also engaging in argument.  Other sequences don't make any logical sense.  One of the Senators dispatched to investigate a secret military base near El Paso is detained by MPs and, since he is a drunk, tempted with bottles of bourbon.  The old drunk heroically pours the bourbon into a toilet.  (We see the toilet in the background in an early shot in the sequence; toilets were not ordinarily shown in movies in 1963 and, so, it's pretty clear that the commode will have some narrative function in the movie.)  But later the old drunk is lying on a bed with two fresh bottles of bourbon on his night-stand.  Why doesn't he pour those down the drain too?  And are the MPs so stupid they just keep plying this guy with bottles of booze that he doesn't drink?  The climax of the film is completely incoherent.  If General Scott is so poised to depose the President -- and thinks he has good patriotic grounds to do this, why would he call off the plot just because it is exposed an hour or two early?  A big plot point has to do with some purloined letters:  Jigs has seduced General Scott's mistress (he has broken up with her) and taken love letters between her and Scott.  Why?  Do the letters contain evidence of the coup?  (This seems unlikely -- the megalomaniacal and paranoid Scott would not expose the plan to his girlfriend; this makes no sense).  So are the letters going to be used to humiliate Scott by exposing his love affair and sexual misconduct?  That's how the film plays the issue, although it's all ambiguous and never really explained.  Ultimately, the noble president determines the ends don't justify the means and that he will not use the letters against his adversary.  But if the risk is that a military junta seizes power and that the Soviets, then,  take advantage of our disarray to nuke us ("with, at least, 100 million dead") shouldn't the president use every means at his disposal to avert the coup.  (Today when a president's sexual exploits are front-page news, the rectitude of the characters in Seven Days in May about exposing the sexual pecadillos of public figures is both touching and naive.)  The film assumes that bringing crimes and misdemeanors into the light of public scrutiny disinfects the contagion afflicting the body-politic -- like the later Watergate pictures, the film is essentially a pro-journalism tract:  brave journalists will expose the truth and save the republic.  Jigs supports the Constitution and says that although he dislikes Lyman's politics, there is a way to register that disapproval -- it's the ballet-box in November.  Some of Serling's speechifying is effective and moving, but a lot of it is just bombast.  At one point, President Lyman tells his colleagues that the enemy isn't General Scott, but the malaise of the nuclear age.  That's completely idiotic --the whole film is devised to pivot on a climactic hand-to-hand debate between Lyman and Scott.  Of course, the enemy is the pernicious, conniving, and murderous Scott.  The final confrontation between Jigs and Scott is exemplary of Serling's style.  Scott snarls:  "Have you studied your Bible?  Do you know who Judas was?"  To which Jigs replied:  "He was a man I admired.  A four-star general who betrayed his nation."  Poor Judas is spinning in his grave somewhere.  The movie is badly dated -- after President Lyman's noble defense of the constitution at a Press Conference, the gentlemen and the ladies of the Press rise and give him a standing ovation. (There is a primitive science-fiction element to the film -- the characters confer by video tele-conference, undertaken on massive tube-operated TV sets; the automobiles belong to no known era or manufacturer). 

The film is well-acted and the secondary characters are more compelling than the cartoon-like Scott, President Lyman, and Jigs.  Martin Balsam is good as the President's political advisor -- he gets killed in the plane crash.  Edmund O'Brien is effective as the "dipsomaniac" Georgia senator, Ray Clark.  Ava Gardner is used in a cruel and unflattering way -- she plays Scott's spurned mistress who succumbs all too readily to Jigs' machinations.  Clearly, she thought the role was important and was willing to be portrayed as a faded, scheming salon courtesan, but she looks a little pathetic and her part is under-written.  A supposedly happy ending suggesting that she and Jigs will get together for a romantic interlude is just grotesque. 

The film was endorsed by President Kennedy who authorized filming the botched riot scene in front of the White House.  The Pentagon opposed the film and the curious spatial incongruities in the destroyer scene are due to the fact that the sequence was made "guerilla-style" without the assistance of the navy.  The demise of General Scott was supposed to be a car crash, probably suicidal.  For some reason, the film doesn't use that ending, although it was shot -- the picture sends Scott off-screen with the simple remark to his chauffeur:  "Take me home."  There is an enigmatic reference to a General Walker -- this is refers to events current to the movie, that are now, more or less, forgotten.  A right-wing general, Edwin Walker, made political remarks hostile to the President's Administration and was forced tor esign.  

Earth and Blood

Netflix produced this Western in 2019.  It's short (80 minutes) and stylishly made, although the plot is moronic.  The picture reminds me of an old Walter Hill flick, something on the order of  Southern Comfort or Trespass which Earth and Blood resembles in many respects. 

A half-breed with a deaf daughter lives in a  remote valley on the frontier.  In that place, the man operates a saw-mill.  Seven desperadoes besiege the isolated saw-mill.  The hero kills them all in ingenious ways, but, also, suffers fatal injuries himself.  The deaf girl survives unharmed. 

That's it:  there's no more to the film. Except that I should note that the half-breed seems to be anAlgerian Berber living on the frontier between Belgium and France.  The desperadoes are a gang of drug dealers of mostly African origin -- they are like the Indians besieging Fort Apache.  There's no acting to speak of -- just a lot of scowling and muttering threats.  The hero looks good with a shot-gun and most of his dialogue consists of ordering people to "hide" or "get down!"  As usual in films like this, your sympathy always is diverted to the indefatigable and doomed bad guys.  In this case, the object of their assault is a satchel full of cocaine -- surely a replaceable item and not worth the massive sacrifices that the villains make in terms of blood and guts.  After about the third bad guy is slaughtered in some picturesque way, any sane person would vamoose for the hills and get away from the implacable killing machine hero.  But these guys heroically keep up the attack until they are slaughtered to the very last man, of course, the big malevolent boss being spared for the end.  Since the action takes place at a saw-mill, lots of lethal industrial equipment is deployed to butcher the bad guys.  One villain gets his forearm spiked to a sliding table and his hand sawn off.  The hero hops in a huge front-end loader that looks like it weighs about ten tons.  One hapless bad guy gets involved in a SUV v. Front-end loader crash with predictable consequences.  In an early scene, a burly-looking drayhorse drags a huge log out of the forest.  As Chekhov advises:  If you show a dray horse in the first scene, that dray horse has "to go off" by the last scene.  (I'm borrowing from a Manchester Guardian review.)  In the midst of all the mayhem, the hero spends time rigging up the dray horse so that it can literally tug one villain in two .  (Generally, the special effects aren't very good and you have to, more or less, surmise that this guy gets bisected in this way.)  The head bad guy, the big chief, has a way of killing people by twisting their heads in his hands -- he's like a psycho-killer chiropractor.  At the climax, the villain decides to break the deaf girl's neck instead of just shooting her.  He approaches, lovingly caresses the terrified girl's neck and skull for a long moment, draws close and, then, of course, gets an ax smashed into the back of his head.  He falls over grunting, having no one to blame but himself and his propensity for extended murder-foreplay and bare-hands spine-snapping for his demise.  The hero, dying of lung cancer we're given to believe, takes the ax, raises it over his head, and slams it down on the bad guy's breast-bone.  This is distinctly anti-climactic:  in any self-respecting American film, even a TV show like West World, the ax would split the villain's face in two.  In fact, the film is weirdly restrained:  all of the opportunities for mayhem potentially provided by saws big enough to cut a semi-tractor in two, all of the wood chippers, bark-peelers, and aerial conveyor belts leading to fearsome blades don't get used at all. 

Blood and Earth is attractively mounted in wood tones -- everything looks like a tastefully paneled room even the exteriors.  The skies are muted and grey and rain falls.  There's mist in the mountains and the movie is a symphony of wood tones and pale gray colors -- even the blood looks monochromatic.  This sort of movie would be better if it were silent -- you don't need dialogue to tell this story and, in fact, the characters' speech is a just a distraction  Furthermore, I don't know why the French was dubbed -- I suppose because fans of this kind of movie don't know how to read.  Everyone speaks very clear (dubbed) American English.  Someone named Julien LeClerq directed this thing.

Leave her to Heaven

Leave her to Heaven is a 1945 movie of the genre, now discredited, of the "women's picture."  The director John Stahl specialized his melodramas targeted toward female viewers and his films from the early sound era are much esteemed, although almost impossible to see.  Since even modern women don't want to see a "women's picture", the new Criterion edition of the film is marketed as a rare example of technicolor film noir.  Film noir are currently fashionable with cinema-history academics (David Bordwell has just published an important book on the topic) and these movies, currently, have critical cachet.  Leave her to Heaven isn't a film noir under any definition of that genre that I know.  It's rather, a curiosity that fits within no known genre, a cruel and misogynistic character study on the theme that love is a battleground, the sort of nasty picture that Fassbinder would later specialize in.  The film is about the psychopathology of a jealousy so extreme that it ends up literally suicidal.

An author of potboiler novels, John Harland meets an extravagantly beautiful woman Ellen played by Gene Tierney) on a train traveling toward Santa Fe in New Mexico.  The train compartment is lavishly appointed -- it's like a cocktail lounge at the Algonquin Hotel.  The novelist, although he doesn't know it, is traveling to the same destination, Ellen's stepfather's summer cabin in the high red rock desert, a place like Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu.  At the lavish ranch, the novelist becomes infatuated with Ellen and she brashly proposes to him, kissing him so violently that he has no choice but to accept her offer.  Ellen's previous fiancee, a snarling if Byronically handsome prosecutor (played by Vincent Price) appears and there's an ugly scene -- he stalks out saying that he will always love her.  Ellen claims she is a niece raised like one of the children of the wealthy family who occupy the spectacular ranch.  She has returned to the West to "bury her father" -- by this she means scattering his ashes on the red-rock mountain ridge overlooking the oasis where the ranch house, a bit like a Frank Lloyd Wright structure, has been built.  The ritual on the mountain top, observed by Harland, is more than a little disquieting:  Ellen on horse-back gallops around the rim of a deep ravine, impassively shaking the urn back and forth -- she looks like a combination of an Apache warrior and a Valkyrie and her half-sister, the dead man's actual daughter, and his widow look on from the mounts a few dozen yards away.  This is an unsettling scene, shot on location and scored to barbaric-sounding tympani drums scored by Alfred Newman, and, when Ellen is done with the rite, she hurls the urn like a discus from horseback into the ravine.  Everyone comments on how close she was to her stepfather and, at least in this scene, she seems both feral and half-crazed.

Needless to say the marriage isn't a happy one.  Harland is very close to his little brother Danny who seems to have polio and is recuperating at Warm Springs, the same sanitarium where Franklin Roosevelt convalesced.  Danny is irritating both to the film's audience and Ellen.  Although Ellen seems voraciously sexual, Harland is pretty much celibate, preferring the company of the chirpy, perky Danny to his wife.  This distresses Ellen and so she encourages the kid to swim across an icy lake in Maine where the poor lad gets a cramp and drowns without the woman, who is nearby in a rowboat and has been shown to be strong swimmer, so much as lifting a finger.  (This is a famous sequence similar to the drowning of Shelley Winters in An American Tragedy, a signature set-piece for Leave her to Heaven.)  The mourning Harland adjourns to another family resort, a lavish home at Bar Harbor, Maine.  Ellen is pregnant at this time, but not happy.  She doesn't like the fetus' effect on her lithe figure and is afraid the child will come between her and her increasingly remote  husband.  So she hurls herself down a flight of steps to induce a miscarriage.  Harland, who is a dim bulb, begins to figure out that his wife is totally psycho.  He has finished a new novel and dedicated the book to his attractive and reasonably sane and normal sister-in-law Ruth (played by Jeanne Crain who looks like Gene Tierney but on a human-scale:  she's an ordinary human being compared to Tierney's bitch-goddess.)    Ellen, needless to say doesn't take well to the book's dedication and devises a bizarre plot to assure herself of (posthumous) revenge.  She commits suicide but makes the act look like a murder committed by her half-sister, Ruth.  Then, reaching from beyond the grave through a letter, she deputizes her former lover, the hapless DA played by Vincent Price, to prosecute the case.  There's a big, grossly implausible, trial scene, highly stylized and idiotic.  Both Ruth and Harland admit their love for one another; Ellen's crimes and misdemeanors are exposed and, remarkably, Ruth is acquitted but, somehow, Harland is convicted of being an accessory to Ruth's murder (by negligence) of Danny.  None of this makes any sense.  However, released from his two-year prison term, Harland canoes across the lake in Maine to his cabin, a place called Back of the Moon, where Ruth is waiting for him.  (The film is devised with a frame-story, also implausible, involving the family lawyer, a trusts and estate man, who somehow defends the hero against the charges lodged against him by Vincent Price's character.  The defense isn't too vigorous -- the lawyer doesn't ask a single question, probably in the interest of keeping the trial scene clipping along.  The lawyer claims to know, the full truth, although he can't possibly be privy to most of the details that the film shows us.  In the opening scene, Harland's return from prison, Cornel Wilde who plays the novelist, deftly hops into a canoe with breathtaking grace and confidence -- it's like seeing Joel McCrea in old westerns leap up onto a horse and ride away without a moment's hesitation.  The gesture is athletic and beautiful at the same time.)

Cornel Wilde is good as the dim-witted novelist with more libido for his brother than his stunning wife.  Wilde as a young man is bland and looks a little like Victor Mature without the drooping eyelids.  But the picture is about Gene Tierney and, in fact, her implacable, impassive Kabuki-like mask of a face.  She is all face -- you can't see her figure in much of the film -- and her beauty is exotic and, even, a bit repellent.  Her skull is a little too well-defined, although, of course, it's got beautiful bones and her eyes are too metallic for comfort.  (She's a typical heroine in a woman's picture -- I think most men would find her appalling.  Her perfect features are the kind that women admire but that I don't find attractive at all.)  She gives a great performance that seems, like Robert Mitchum's best work, to be doing nothing at all.

I can't warm to this movie.  It's ice-cold notwithstanding the spectacular scenery and lavishly appointed interiors.  The art decoration is stunning -- the ranch, the cabin in Maine, and the Bar Harbor house with its backdrop of pounding surf are all majestic sets.  There's a swimming lagoon location with bottle-green water cradled in the living rock in New Mexico that is a great vision in and of itself -- particularly when Tierney rises from the water in her bathing suit like Aphrodite in the desert.  The trial scene is ludicrous for any number of reasons -- for instance, the DA is wont to testify from his own personal experience about Ellen and clearly has an ax to grind against Harland who has taken his woman.  The happy ending is unconvincing.  But the film is as crazy as one of Fassbinder's concoctions and, if anything, even colder and more misanthropic.  (The Criterion disk has a commentary film essay featuring  Imogene Sara Smith that is very informative and helpful -- this is the woman whose commentary on Desert Fury was notable for the subway train interfering with the soundtrack every eight to ten minutes.  She's fantastically beautiful herself and looks a bit like Tierney.)

The Tiger King (with notes on the Show's concluding episodes)

Many years ago, a couple who operated an exotic animal zoo in a remote part of the county made an appointment to see me.  I was a young lawyer, then, and wished to represent high profile clients. At the appointment, the couple were dressed in flamboyant western attire and the woman's hands were dripping with turquoise set in heavy silver rings.  The ensemble of jewelry on her fingers looked less like adornment and more like some sort of weapon, brass knuckles with sharp protuberances.  The people were locked in a dispute with county officials about their wildlife park.  It was a dispute of longstanding duration and was described to me in terms relating the controversy to the personal characteristics of the county commissioners -- each of whom were provided with first names and a set of loathsome attributes.  The couple had sacks full of correspondence, much of it with lawyers that they had retained and, then, fired and, as far as I could see, they lied about everything.  I couldn't ascertain who owned what, whether there were corporate entities involved, or the history of the imbroglio -- although it could be reconstructed from some of the letters and court orders.  The exotic animal zoo-owners struck me as totally detestable, corrupt, and unprincipled -- later, I think the animals became too expensive to feed and the beasts were just allowed to escape into the winter night.  This provided much merriment for local law enforcement who were deputized for a brutal big game hunt. At the time that I encountered this man and woman, I was representing a child molester who had groped at four-year old girl at a trailer park.  I greatly preferred the company of the child molester to the exotic animal folks.

As everyone knows, The Tiger King (2020) is an eight episode Netflix documentary that chronicles the blood-feud between a wild cat zookeeper in Oklahoma named Joe Exotic and a wealthy woman, Carole Baskin, who operates an alleged "big cat rescue-sanctuary" in Florida.  As the film makes evident, both Joe and Carole are unscrupulous, lethal narcissists and, for all intents and purposes, there isn't an ounce of difference between their respective operations -- they both house huge felines in tiny pens, exploit the cats for profit, and aggressively promote their businesses on the internet.  Carole Baskin is slightly more vicious, at least with respect to her so-called "sanctuary" because of her hypocrisy -- she sanctimoniously claims that she is "rescuing" the tigers and lions from maltreatment and isn't actively breeding the beasts, but it doesn't seem that she is any more compassionate than Joe about the animals who are purely instrumental to her, merely a means to her self-aggrandizing ends.  Joe Exotic is a flamboyant homosexual who struts around in cowboy gear with six-guns holstered at his hips.  His big cat and exotic animal zoo is spectacularly squalid, staffed by hoodlums and petty criminals.  Joe's misfits include an butch Indian girl who has her arm pulled off by a big cat in the first episode and a hillbilly with no legs -- he ambles about on stumps in psychedelically colored prosthetics.  (Joe's hoodlum animal-keepers are refreshingly honest and direct -- they seem to be the only reasonable and trustworthy people in the large rogue's gallery that populates this show.)  Carole is trying to shut-down Joe's operation, enlisting the aid of naive animal rights activists at PETA.  Joe responds by libeling Carole and accusing her of having murdered and fed her first husband to her tigers -- something that seems probable.  Joe makes videos of a Carole look-alike (very convincing) happily feeding scraps of her dismembered husband (his head is on a platter) to her big cats.  When he discovers a photograph showing Carole's minions with dead rabbits (they are planning to feed the bunnies to the big cats), he accuses her of rabbit-abuse.  He even pickets her Florida sanctuary, dressed in a PETA bunny outfit stained with gore.  Ultimately, Joe goes too far even by the bat-shit crazy standards of exotic animal fanciers -- he steals Carole's trademark and advertises himself as the one and only Big Cat Rescue.  Amy and her husband, Howard, a saturnine fellow with the features of a small-town mortician, sue Joe and his enterprises.  Joe is too dumb to conceal his tracks and, also, too dumb to protect his assets by any measure other than the most obvious fraudulent conveyances -- he transfers his zoo to his mother and drives his aged parents into bankruptcy.  (In fact, it seems that the old woman, told to lie to the Federal judge about assets, comes very close to getting imprisoned herself.)  When it's obvious that Joe can't sustain the charade of fraudulent transfers to secrete asset against collection, he begins to film himself destroying his own property by shooting things with his revolver and blowing stuff up with dynamite.  Joe has hired a gaunt con-man to film his videos that he broadcasts on You-Tube and podcasts.  The con-man, named Kirkham, also has contracted with Joe to produce a Reality TV show that he is trying to peddle to NatGeo or the Discovery channel.  Kirkham has been subpoenaed in the Baskin v. Exotic litigation to produce to Carole's lawyers video and digital recordings and computer systems -- it's pretty clear that this evidence includes proof of the abuse of Joe's animals and other crimes as well and there's a whiff of blackmail in Kirkham's interviews on this subject.  So, on the advice of a crooked lawyer, Joe burns down his studio, boiling alive seven alligators, and melting the computers and digital/video footage into slag.  This ruins Kirkham.  Joe, then, seeks "an angel"to salvage his failing enterprise.  He's impressed by a fraudster named Jeff Lowe, a Vegas low-life who specializes in orchestrating orgies that involve tiger cubs.  Lowe has all the trappings of success, a show-girl consort, a Porsche and a penthouse suite above the glittering Vegas strip, but he's also a crook and, at the end of Episode 4, seems poised to seize control of Joe Exotic's collapsing empire.

The documentary has a large cast of bizarre and iniquitous supporting characters, but the main contours of the dramatic action are clear:  the conflict between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin drives the narrative.  And this conflict is presented in terms of social class that will resonate with most viewers:  the sanctimonious well-spoken Carole is attractive and has vast amounts of money; although she's profoundly evil and probably murderous, she represents an elite class of people with more money than sense -- she has all the advantages over the working-class Joe Exotic and his cadre of toothless hillbilly underdogs.  It's the American way to root for the underdog, Joe, the self-made man and entrepreneur versus the condescending and hypocritical Carole Baskin.  The show exploits this dynamic with merciless show-business flair. 

In Werner Herzog's great documentary Grizzly Man, the director comments on the growing insanity of his protagonist -- a man who identifies with grizzlies to the extent that he no longer fears them (with disastrous consequences) and who documents on video his interactions with the beasts:  "I had seen this sort of madness before," Herzog portentously tells us, "on film sets."  Herzog's point, pertinent to The Tiger King, is that the act of filming events controls how the events will play-out.  It's the media equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:  the act of observing alters outcomes.  Here, the level of camera surveillance is mind-boggling.  Joe Exotic has hired Kirkham to produce a series of videos promoting his operation -- these videos become increasingly deranged as the program proceeds.  Kirkham has contracted with Joe Exotic to produce a Reality TV show about the embattled wild animal preserve that he runs.  So Kirkham has another set of cameras operating behind the first set -- he notes that he is filming himself filming Joe Exotic's antics for the internet postings.  Then, behind Kirkham there is the camera team filming under the direction of  Eric Goode for the Netflix Tiger King series.  Therefore, we are confronted with as dizzying mise-en-abyme -- that is, the French term for a recursive hall of mirrors:  cameramen filming other cameramen, movies within movies within movies.  There's no doubt in my mind that the continuous surveillance turns everyone in this film into a caricature -- the hillbillies are like cartoons of hillbillies; Carole Baskin is a nightmare figure:  the worst, most narcissistic and self-aggrandizing bitch ever portrayed on film; Joe Exotic cavorts for the camera -- pointing his six-gun at the cameraman, growling, and, then, discharging the weapon in the air.  It's obvious that participants are constructing their performances and their performing personae for the camera -- everything is a lie, fictional, a pantomime for the cameras ceaselessly recording the grotesque reality that the film presents.  Of course, an argument can be made that the ubiquitous presence of the cameras makes the folks on-screen nonchalant and that we are seeing their true selves. The debate about reality TV of this kind dates back to the infamous American Family series that aired on PBS fifty years ago -- the progenitor of this form of entertainment.  In American Family, the audience window-peeped on the Loud  family and watched the marriage between husband and wife dissolve while the oldest son, Lance, admitted his homosexuality and came out to a viewing audience of millions.  Debate raged then about whether the spectacle was staged for Tv or authentic.  We've now progressed (if that word can be used) to an understanding that there's no real distinction between real and fictional in documentaries of this kind.  Inevitably, the people involved perform for their audiences and, ultimately, their performances become so reflexive and in-grained that no distinction can be made between what is true and what is contrived for the camera.  The presence of cameras (here a mise en abyme involving, at least, three layers of documentation) inevitably alters what is recorded and makes people into parodies of themselves.

Of course, Carole wearing a diadem of flowers in her tiger-print blouses and cougar slacks  and Joe Exotic costumed, as if for Halloween, in cowboy clothes and six-guns, are already parodies, already cartoonish characters.  The notion of unwitting (or witting) self-parody is on display everywhere in the film.  Joe Exotic's cautious lawyer (he's not the off-screen thug who suggests arson) is prudently lawyerly.  The hillbillies who work for Joe are like figures from a Li'l Abner cartoon strip. Other less important participants in the debacle on-film are equally bizarre and grotesque.  There's a detective responsible for botching the murder investigation as to the death of Carole's first husband who seems to have darkened his eyes with kohl or some other kind of eye-shadow:  this guy poses in a room full of monkey paraphernalia, including a plaster chimp fashioned as a full-size butler bearing upright a platter.  A woman escaped from the cult-like group sex of one big cat petting zoo still is surrounded with feline knick-knacks although she's in Ames, Iowa where it seems to be perpetually snowing. Carole's third husband, the ultra-buttoned down, Howard (the small-town undertaker guy) poses on the beach with Carol during their honeymoon apparently on a leash, squatting on the ground like a monkey.  (Carole had to fight off her abusive first husband by throwing "a potato at him.") The big cat people are beyond parody:  they are uniformly grandiose, narcissistic, histrionic and anti-social.  Doc Antle (first name Bhagavan -- which means supposedly "the Lord") makes entrances at his petting zoo on an enormous elephant.  He has, at least, five wives and runs his enterprise like a harem -- it's his big cat sex-cult that the girl in Ames, Iowa has escaped.  A Cuban big-cat enthusiast models himself on Tony Montana in Scarface -- he's a felon convicted of smuggling cocaine into the country in the guts of huge pythons that he has slit open and stuffed full of the contraband.  Lowe, the vicious Vegas hoodlum, devises orgies involving Tiger cubs:  "If you've got an big pussy, you can get all the pussy you want," he boasts as he poses with several cubs and a half-dozen beautiful young women.  (The documentary doesn't have the guts to display the thousands of hours of sex-tapes involving orgies with big cats as participants that must undoubtedly exist.)  The Vegas sub- plot casts a malign light on the scenes in The Hangover involving another thug, Mike Tyson, and his big cat.  (And the relationship between carnivorous felines and sex has always been pretty obvious -- a porno-place in Owatonna near the freeway is called "The Lion's Den" and features in its advertisements the profiles of nobly maned big cats.)   The ordinary rules don't apply to Big Cat people:  we get a peek at Joe Exotic's marriage ceremony in which he weds, not one, but two dullard husbands.  One of them is said to have "the biggest feet" that Joe Exotic has ever seen.  A dog, of course, is a kind of slave, submissive and eager to please.  Dog owners are law-abiding -- they take their pooches for walks always at the same time and following the same path.  Anyone who has lived with a dog knows that canines are creatures of habit -- they like things to be exactly the same day-after-day.  It doesn't take any charisma to dominate a dog -- the critters are naturally submissive.  But a big cat is unpredictable, imperious, feral, and savage -- if a 1000 pound 12 foot long tiger is an emperor, then, what is the man or woman who controls the power and majesty of such an animal?  You would have to be some kind of God.  The world, the show demonstrates, is full of cruel beasts of prey -- and, then, there are the actual tigers and lions.

The Tiger King was made over five years and, as I have argued, presumably the creation of the film, the camera's relentless surveillance, plays an important role in what happens (and is made to happen.)  The show is structured around an opening shot in which Joe Exotic places a call from a  jail in Oklahoma, a weird-looking structure with the appearance of a modified grain elevator.  (Even the buildings in this show are strange.)  The question that the show answers is posed in a simple enough way:  how did Joe end up in this plight?  It's a fake conundrum -- given the massive illegality documented in just about every frame of the show, the question really should be how was Joe allowed to remain at large for as long he was?

Clearly, the filmmaker began this enterprise as an attempt to document the cruel conditions existing at privately operated big cat "experience" zoos -- essentially petting zoos where people with more money that intelligence get to maul and grope hapless lion and tiger cubs.  (It's a pricy form of entertainment:  Antle's cadillac big cat ranch charges $399 a patron for an hour abusing a tiger or lion cub.) However, the director quickly realized that the really awful and compelling narrative is only incidentally about the big cats.  The people, as is always the case, are far more interesting than brute beasts.  And, so, the film shifted focus into chronicling the blood feud with Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin.  On all levels, the enterprise is founded on lying.  Clearly, the director persuaded Carole and Joe that they would be portrayed in a sympathetic light in the film -- but Carole is shown strutting about in slow-motion while people accuse her of murder and Joe is pathetic on all levels.  The abuse of trust that film inadvertently documents is also stunning -- although, probably, the principals are too vain to imagine that they are portrayed as preening monsters.  The real tragedy, which the film shows only incidentally, is the way in which the animals are tormented.  The huge felines that Carole says require a range of 400 miles are kept in tiny wire cages. (She tells us this while standing incongruously in front of a wretchedly small chicken-wire cage confining a tiger at her "sanctuary."  In one scene, a tiger is giving birth while Joe keeps admonishing the camera-man to to "film her ass" -- the tiny cubs are unceremoniously yanked away from the mother using a sort of boat-hook.  And when the Vegas crook, Lowe, stuffs a beautiful Siberian tiger cub into a Louis Vuitton suitcase to haul the little animal to one of his orgies, the only proper response is tears -- surely, this kind of thing ought to be illegal and. if regarded from the perspective of the livestock, it's all profoundly tragic.  (Schopenhauer said that animals live in a kind of hell in which human beings are the tormenting demons.)  At one point, Joe runs out of food -- he collects expired meat from Walmart to feed his animals.  His chief zookeeper, a dimwitted yokel who seems like a decent man, is horrified by the fact that the animals are starving and he has nothing to feed them.  Joe has tried to breed his way out of trouble with catastrophic consequences.  Meanwhile, the avuncular Doc Antle, running the cult up in one of the Carolinas, is said to euthanize tigers and lions by the score to inflate market prices.  Someone observes that there are more big cats in captivity in squalid exotic animal zoos than in the wild. Throughout the film, the viewer is rooting for the cats -- if these animals could savage Roy of Siegfried and Roy fame than why don't they tear apart Joe and Carole.  (The one successful cat attack from the perspective of the feline, the assault on Joe's hapless Native American zookeeper resulting in the loss of her arm inflicts injury on the wrong target -- the tough girl is one of the few sympathetic characters in the show. And I should note that this figure, a transexual Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran identifies as male -- so read "he" for the pronouns used above.)  In one scene, a big cat attacks Lowe -- you really hope that the animal will inflict some serious injuries on this guy.  But he manages to fight off the cat with only a few scratches.

The show is justly celebrated.  It's very funny and horrifying.  My fear is that viewers are taking away the wrong message from The Tiger King.  Donald Trump Jr. appeared on TV recently remarking that he was surprised that you could buy a big cat for about $2000 dollars and that he was considering acquiring a few.

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I have now watched the entire seven-part series.  A few additional comments, perhaps, are in order.

 The fifth episode is the most bizarre and, therefore, the most compelling.  Episodes six and seven contain the obligatory prosecution and trial sequences and seem to me to be somewhat rushed, uneven, and confusing.  Sinister new characters become predominant and, because cameras are not allowed in Oklahoma courtrooms, the visual element of the show suffers -- the pathetic and majestic large cats are mostly offscreen and Goode has to illustrate the complexities of the government case with reprises of earlier footage, courtroom sketches, bland TV news clips, and cliche flow-charts featuring maps, arrows, and mug-shots of the usual suspects.  The trial outcome is never in doubt.  Although the lady-prosecutor is appropriately steely and scowls at the camera, the proverbial 'ham-sandwich' could have convicted Joe Exotic on all counts -- as we have seen, everyone was filming everything and there were mountains of evidence against him relative to all charges.  Furthermore, the prosecutors enlivened their case with 15 indictments relating to animal cruelty.  As we all know, most Americans don't care about crime when its victims are adult humans (you choose your associates and if you choose wrong there are consequences), but torture of animals is a "hot-button" and the feds accused Joe of shooting five tigers execution-style and burying them on his property.  He was also convicted of trafficking in exotic animals -- there was no doubt that he was guilty on this count.  The controversial allegations involved Joe's scheming to murder Carole Baskin.  But, if one ignores the broader context as required in a trial. Joe was obviously guilty of those charges as well.  If you want to swim in the sewer of this series (which I recommend), spoilers follow.

Joes' best defense would have been some variety of insanity plea.  Episode 5 establishes that Joe is probably bipolar with a grandiose manic phase interspersed with periods of despair, torpor, and impotent rage.  Not merely queer, Joe was crazy as a coot.  The fifth episode is replete with weird disclosures -- Joe's two husbands are revealed to be drug addicts and not homosexuals.  Their attraction to Joe was based on methamphetamine supplied to them in tooth-enamel dissolving quantities and the various toys that gave them as gifts, most notably ATVs, trucks, machine-guns, and high-explosives -- after all, what more could a boy want.  Joe admits that he has married two men who are "straight."  (One of these guys even gets the receptionist at the zoo pregnant.)  One of his husbands, the guy with the huge feet, kills himself.  Like everything at the zoo, this is filmed live although the poor fool has stepped off-camera momentarily when he pulls the trigger. We see the aghast response of Joe's campaign manager, a character who would be regarded as seriously deranged in most contexts but here seems relatively sane and sober.  Joe has a campaign manager because he runs for governor of the State of Oklahoma -- apparently, he got 19% of the vote. By this point, Joe has lost control of his zoo.  The sinister Jeff Lowe has taken control of the enterprise and recruited two other thugs to assist in the operation. These men are characters who seem to have wandered over to Oklahoma from the criminal enterprises featured in the Netflix show Ozark.  One of these guys is a fat strip club owner who is always identified in the titles flashed under his interviews as a "businessman."  The term needs to be inserted in quotes, because it's highly unclear what business this guy actually operates -- we see him sitting under a huge sign that reads "check-out" in a store-front on one of the dismal, abandoned main streets in small-town Oklahoma.  The store has metal shelves on which miscellaneous stuff is sitting -- it's unclear if the stuff for sale or rent or what.  Can you rent a can of previously opened paint or a blender?  (Maybe the place is a pawn-shop although it's certainly the spookiest and most depressing pawnshop that I've ever seen.)  This guy, Garrettson, is not only a felon, but a snitch.  The government recruits him to work with Jeff Lowe to engineer the entrapment of Joe Exotic on murder-for-hire charges.  Scarier than Garretson is Glover, a fellow with the hardened demeanor of a professional criminal (he's also a felon) and has a little tear-drop tattooed under one of his  eyes.  Glover is deemed to be an assassin, although, in fact, he's just a crack-head with a shaved skull and a tough-guy swagger.  There's no honor among these crooks and they quickly agree to become confidential informants against Joe.  The idea seems to be to oust Joe from the zoo as quickly and decisively as possible by having him imprisoned.  Glover is supposed to kill Carole Baskin, but he takes the $3000 fee from Joe and squanders it on drugs.  This complicates the government case since the murder-for-hire efforts are farcically incompetent.  Doc Antle, who seems to know about these things, scoffs that you can't hire a competent murderer for $3000 -- you would have to pay, at least, $30,000 he says with a wink and a nudge. Joe has embezzled funds from the zoo to finance his political campaigns.  When he senses that Jeff Lowe and his henchmen are about to drop the 10,000 pound shit-hammer (to use Hunter Thompson's phrase) on him, he flees.  We see him transporting hapless tigers in front loaders into nasty-looking trucks to hide the creatures at some undisclosed location in Oklahoma.  Joe plans to re-institute his zoo at that place. But the net has closed around him and he ends up in jail.  A lot of this is confusing:  we don't know if Joe is released on bail or not.  (If not, why not?  The show implies that he's trapped in the jail during the entire pre-trial  period -- undoubtedly a year or more.)  We don't know what happens to the animals or the zoo that Joe plans for some "undisclosed" place in Oklahoma.  He re-marries and his new husband is pathetically loyal to him -- the film represents him as genuinely loving Joe.  The remaining husband from his earlier polygamous marriage is shown in a tattoo shop getting the tat on his belly that reads "exclusive property of Joe Exotic" replaced with a snarling big cat.  There's a confusing coda in which we see a young Joe Exotic talking about animal conservation in seemingly sincere terms.  At one time, he, at least, persuaded himself that he was acting in the animal's best interests and his pitch is identical with Carole Baskin's publicity about her operation.  (Carole and her husband open a bottle of champagne and scarf down shrimp cocktails when Joe is convicted.)  Jeff Lowe and his buddies have a falling out over their zoo, intended for the backyard of a casino on the Texas border -- it's not clear whether that place is ever built or opened.  Jeff Lowe's girlfriend, Lauren, is pregnant and the loathsome Lowe colludes with the mother of his child to retain a pretty nanny that they can both fuck.  There's a heartbreaking scene in which Joe, imprisoned now in a cage himself, muses about his two chimpanzees -- he kept them in tiny separate cages for ten years.  When the chimps were rescued and taken to a large-ape sanctuary, we see the poor beasts embracing and kissing.  "They were just loving on each other," Joe says, "and I kept them from being what they were, chimpanzees."  This is very tragic, although Joe's sincerity is always in doubt, and the show lessens the impact of this revelation by surprising us with the fact that Joe even had chimpanzees.-- we've only glimpsed the primates a couple times in the preceding seven hours.

If a Martian came to earth, that being would conclude that tigers are creatures bred to be pets for human sociopaths in Florida and Oklahoma and other warm states.  The Martian would conclude that a few of these cats have escaped and gone feral.  There are as many as 10,000 tigers in captivity and about 4000 believed to live in the wild.

Drunken Angel

In a Tokyo slum during occupation, an alcoholic doctor treats patients suffering from tuberculosis.  At the slum's center, a enormous cess-pool breeds mosquitoes, black mud blistered with gas-bubbles.  Akira Kurosawa directed Drunken Angel in 1948 and the picture is influenced by American film noir of the period.  Of course, the filthy, rotting lagoon at the center of the squalid village-like slum is symbolic:  the cess-pool represents moral decay at the heart of Occupied Japan.  Prostitutes dressed to attract GIs line the mud alleys around the fetid swamp.  The signs are all in English:  No. 1 Dance Hall, Bolero, and The Social Center of Tokyo.  Kurosawa's point is clear:  The Americans are part of the moral rot and, perhaps, its guarantors.  Although American censors prohibited any criticism of the regime by the Japanese, Kurosawa was allowed to use the signs because they were already there and not part of a set manufactured for the film.  American influence is dramatized by its overt absence from the film.  In fact, the entire movie is fundamentally American in genre and form.  At this stage in his career, Kurosawa (never the most subtle director) was heavy-handed in his application of moralizing to his films.  As always, however, his imagery carries the day and manages to suggest, with its horrific close-ups of the rotting garbage in the bog, a metaphysics of decay.  The pustulent lesion in the slum is equated with the moral rot represented by the gangsters and this malaise, in turn, is symbolized by tuberculosis,  the "big hole" in the gangster's lung that the doctor detects when he first examines Matsunaga (the yakuza played by Toshiro Mifune in his first role with Kurosawa).

A wise-guy, Matsunaga goes to Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet yanked out of his hand.  Sanada, who detests gangsters, performs the necessary surgery without anesthesia.  He tells the gangster that he suspects that the man has tuberculosis.  The gangster is outraged and strangles Sanada half to death.  Sanada gives as good as he gets -- he pitches crockery at the yakuza and rages at him.  Sanada is an alcoholic curmudgeon (we see him drinking the clinic's medicinal alcohol) -- "curmudgeon" is too mild a word.  The doc's bedside manner consist of growling at his patients and throwing things at them when they defy his orders.  Nonetheless, he is revered in the slum as the "drunken angel" who treats the poor without expecting that they pay him.   And Dr. Sanada states one of the film's morals -- that is, the application of scientific reason, as opposed to irrationality, to human problems is sufficient to defeat them.

Sanada's nurse is fearful because her old boyfriend (who beat her up and gave her a dose of syphilis for a good measure) has been released from jail.  The thug's name is Okada and he's a "made man" under the protection of the "big boss."  Matsunaga becomes Sanada's patient -- he is, in fact, suffering from tuberculosis.  The two men fight whenever Matsunaga comes for a consultation -- he can't admit to himself that he's sick and views his infection as a weakness.  He's also obviously terrified of the disease and conceals his fear behind a facade of toughness.  But the facade is cracking and for the last half of the film, Matsunaga is spitting up blood and staggering around with cadaverous, almost Kabuki-like make-up that gives him the appearance of a ghost or reanimated cadaver.  Okada, the yakuza just out of jail, makes a move to displace Matsunaga as the neighborhood's wise-guy. There's a gang-war in the offing and the big boss plans to sacrifice Matsunaga, who is doomed anyway, in the conflict.  It's Matsunaga's habit to pluck a flower from a vendor's display each time he passes the shop.  This is tribute that the businesses in the neighborhood offer to him.  But, near the end of the film, when he takes a flower, the shop-girl runs after him and asks him to pay -- the local businesses are now under the protection of Okada.  Matsunaga goes to Okada's lair and is killed in a knife-fight. (Kurosawa's films are full of violence but he resists glamorizing killing -- the film's big knife-fight involves a bucket of paint that is kicked over and makes the floor so slippery that neither of the combatants can do anything but writhe around in the muck.  This is an effect similar to Kurosawa staging the last big battle in The Seven Samurai in a rainstorm that has made the ground a sea of mud.)   Before his death, like many doomed thugs in American films, Matsunaga has dreamed of escaping the slums and living a clean life in the country -- Sanada's nurse is now his girlfriend and has been caring for him in her home, and she offers him this chance to become a new man.  But he's killed and in the final scene, the nurse plans to take his ashes with her to the country, an idyllic rural place that we never see and can scarcely imagine.  Dr. Sanada's favorite patient, a plucky school girl arrives with news that her x-rays show that her tuberculosis is cured.  (Throughout the film, Sanada has outraged Matsunaga by repeatedly telling him that the little girl has more courage than the gangster.)  No one drains the swamp.  In fact, draining this particular swamp is unimaginable.  (A few years later, in Ikiru, the dying bureaucrats drains a similar swamp, turns the waste-land into a playground, and, famously, dies in the snow seated in a children's swing.)

The film is closely modeled on American film noir -- there's even a sequence in which someone wields a weapon reflected by three mirrors, a trademark of American movies of this kind, mirrors featuring most notably in Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai made the same year.  American influence is ubiquitous -- the signs tell us that the slum profits from American soldiers who support its vice and criminals.  The sleazy dance-halls play caricatures of American blues and jazz.  At the "Number One", the band seems always performing a properly funereal if decidedly plodding and square version of "St. James Infirmary."  In one scene, a Japanese singer, wearing extravagant feathers, performs a song called "Jungle Boogie" -- she growls and wails saying that the is a "she-panther."  The  number is startling and the censors must have been asleep to ignore it's obvious, and rather brutal, parody of American jazz.  The woman yowls like a demented Yma Sumac, and Sumac's mambos were already a parody of a  parody.  In the climactic confrontation, Sanada abuses Matsunaga has being an unwitting victim of "a feudal system" that demands absolute fealty -- "the Japanese," he says, "have already made too many pointless sacrifices", a statement that is clearly an indictment of the Japanese military and its Emperor.  I presume that these lines were injected into the script by the American censors, although this is just surmise on my part.  It would be like an American DA lecturing a mobster on the fact that the bad guy has brought "Sicilian feudalism" to the Bronx.

The Color out of Space

Richard Stanley is a horror film director famous mostly because he was fired from the one great prestige picture on which he was employed.  Now 25 years ago, Stanley, regarded as a promising genre  film maker was hired to direct The Island of Dr. Moreau, a  big-budget studio picture with A-list actors.  Things went horribly wrong.  Stanley couldn't get the effects that he was attempting to achieve and kept pouring money into the picture in an effort to correct problems that were, apparently, irremediable.  He was dismissed from the film which was completed, inadequately, by another director.  As with Terry Gillian's efforts to make Don Quixote, a documentary was produced about the debacle, an indictment of economics of making movies that is more famous now than the rather poorly received science fiction picture itself.  (The documentary is called Lost Soul:  the doomed journey of Richard Stanley's The Isle of Dr. Moreau released in 2014.).  Like Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim, Stanley has the reputation of an auteur too uncompromising to work within the system -- a cinema poet maudit.  Therefore, horror film devotees were excited when Stanley directed and released 2019 a film called The Color out of Space starring Nicholas Cage and based, loosely it appears, on H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story.  On the evidence of the film, Stanley's reputation is better than his work -- we are more impressed by his legend, I think, than his talent.  (It's interesting that Stanley, who is from South Africa, is a direct descendant of the famous explorer of the same name who was rescued by Dr. Livingston.)

The Color out of Space is very standard stuff.  An eccentric family lives in big Victorian mansion in the middle of a wild, gloomy forest.  (This is supposed to be some place in Massachusetts, but the locations were shot in Sintra, Portugal -- a place where you can hire first-rate film craftsmen without paying Hollywood Union salaries.)  Dad is a dreamer who has devoted himself to raising alpacas.  In the first, and best part of the film, there's a priceless scene in which Cage milks an alpaca much to the bemusement of a visiting hydrologist.  Although the film botches the narrative, from watching deleted scenes, I understand now that the entire gloomy forest is at risk.  A big dam is going to be built that will ultimately drown the hero's estate and the various monstrosities spawned there.  (Stanley is so slipshod with his plot that he doesn't really explain this in the theatrical version of the film.)  One night, a meteor lands at the mansion's front step, a few yards from a spooky ancient well.  The meteor smells bad and pretty soon the water in the aquifer is contaminated.  The meteor glows hot pink and exhales picturesque purple and pink fumes that everyone inhales.  Odd flowers sprout on the lawn and foot long praying mantises emerge from their chrysalises to fly around the premises.  The sky glows with an unearthly neon-pink.  The last two-thirds of the picture feature, as one might expect, the characters making a series of increasingly bad decisions.  First, when mom dreamily amputates a bunch of her fingers, dad takes her to the hospital in Arkham about an hour away and on the other side of the dense impenetrable woods.  He leaves his daughter and two sons at the family manor -- this turns out to be a bad idea since monsters are now roaming around causing people to melt into flayed, oozing blobs with terrible agonized faces.  When dad comes back, things get even worse -- mom is fused with her five-year old son and melts into a lump of bloody blubber.  This is before she sprouts eight-foot-long spider legs and with her son's face embedded in her furry back prances around the attic where dad has confined her -- presumably in the hope that she'll get better somehow.  (The sorts of changes that she suffers seem irreversible as far as I can see.)  The alpacas get turned into another pustulent blob of goo, albeit with horribly scalded looking alpaca heads braying at the camera.  A squatter on the premises, played memorably by the pot-head Tommy Chong (a vigorous and amusing 83 when the film was produced) uses a reel-to-reel tape recorder to cut a few tracks of the monsters whining and howling underground.  The teenage daughter, a devotee of the Necronimicon (which has nothing to do with the movie), mutilates herself while chanting weird incantations inside of a bloody pentagram.  Oddly enough this seems to protect her from the evil forces that have now turned the whole lawn into a carnival of monstrous insects and bloody-looking scarlet flowers.  Her brother decides to crawl down into the well to retrieve the family dog who has also been turned into one of the pulpy goo-monsters.  This also is a very bad decision.  Finally, Dad has had enough, gets out his shotgun, and decides to finish off some of his family members who, by this time, are in a very bad way.  A visiting deputy gets yanked up into a tentacle tree and constrictored to death.  The visiting hydrologist finds himself sprawled on the law which is now sprouting innumerable pale white fingers.  And so on and so on.

Cage is funny and has some amusing understated lines.  Of course, he also gets to go berserk and stick his daughter, who has used a razor to slice pentagrams into her skin everywhere, up in the attic with mom, now metamorphosed into a kind of gory-looking tarantula.  By and large, the film is adequate, but not memorable.  Some of the creature effects are okay, but Stanley shoots the critters in bad light and in very close shots as if a little embarrassed by his monsters.  The film is reasonably creepy, but I scare easily.  It's all obviously derived from the really alarming and horrific gold standard in this kind of horror -- John Carpenter's version of The Thing from Outer Space.  If you want to see a movie of this kind, and one that is actually very intelligent, well-scripted, and beautifully made, see Carpenter's film and avoid this picture.  That is, unless you want to hear, Cage talking about how his wife's breast cancer has, somehow, made her more attractive to him, a nasty subplot in the film, and, then, later deliver these immortal lines:  "It's the cancer smell, Like when my father died.  The cancer ward.  The rotting milk smell.  (addressing this to his wife)  But you would know this better than anyone."  Repeatedly, Cage says:  "Don't worry.  Everything will be okay."  And also a variation on what Trump has said about the coronavirus:  'Everything's under control."  Well...not really.

Unseen Cinema -- the Mechanized Eye

Unseen Cinema -- the Mechanized Eye is a compilation of about 15 short films, loosely designated as avant-garde.  Ostensibly, the 100 minute film is part of seven DVD package, restorations released through the Library of Congress.  The package of films shown on Turner Classic Movies doesn't match play-lists on individual DVDs in the set and, so, I'm not sure how the sequence of short pictures as shoqn on the network relate to the actual discs in the the series. 

As one might expect, the group of films is a mixed bag, some of them fascinating and others utterly dull. The first samples shown are simply very old movies, moving pictures that date back to 1894 and, also, just before the turn of the last century.  As is always the case, when watching these pictures, you have sense of straining your vision very hard because the images are rarities, street scenes in some cases that show a world that no one living can recall.  Even damaged ancient films like these have a certain authority and mystery.  A German strong man filmed by Edison in 1894 grimaces as he poses almost naked for the camera -- the pictures have an intense sculptural quality.  In Paris, around 1900, just about everyone seems to have carried a parasol against the sun.  Some of the pictures of the Eiffel tower are distorted by damage and look like black and white paintings by Derain.  The more "artistic stuff" on the program is generally dull.  There's a picturesquely shot one-reeler of a young poet who falls in love with a dyad, that is a tree-nymph who is the spirit of a cedar on what seems to be the Monterrey coast.  Scored to Debussy, it's pretty much insufferable.  A dynamically edited collage of skyscraper shots is similarly dull and there's a ten minute homage to oil that represents industrial film-making at its absolute worst -- it's a failure as a documentary, dull as cinematic poetry, and, more or less, inexcusable.  (I don't know why this picture was conserved -- it's  terrible.)  An abstract color film by Norman McLaren features schematic spooks and goblins flying around in time to music -- it is, in fact, an early music video and was shown for years as a kind of Entr'acte at the music hall where the Rockettes performed.  It's interesting and has a certain brazen elan but a little bit of this kind of stuff goes a long way.  A bizarre collage by Joseph Cornell pieced together between 1930 and 1970 contains snippets of big cats, flying birds, an old Melies peep-show with figures vanishing and reappearing and a cartoon that is printed to run both in its normal aspect and upside down in a single frame.  It's interesting but the movie is only as good as its archival sources -- Cornell has picked out some strange footage and its very interesting, but what he does with it seems, more or less, random; for the most part, he just splices the disparate stuff together and supplies a rinky-tink sound track:  the film is called Thimble Theater.  A very early one-reel "comedy" shows a man fitted with a prosthetic arm that seems to have a life of its own -- the thing wriggles away from him and steals things from people.  The picture made around 1910 is very convincing, essentially a record of magic tricks involving the artificial arm, but its both macabre and funny at the same time. After World War One, Douglas Fairbanks made a series of ineffably weird two-reelers.  Some of them feature special effects that are supposed to simulate drug trips -- apparently marijuana and cocaine were both popular after the Great War.  In the film shown in the program, Fairbanks is sadistically fed horrible food and, then, experiences nightmares due to indisgestion.. The nightmares include a fiend shot through a distorting lens who is genuinely creepy and, then, a bunch of acrobatic running and leaping by the immensely athletic and powerful-looking actor.  One scene in which the hero walks up walls and, then, strolls upside-down on the ceiling is fantastically effective -- and I have no idea how this seamless effect was achieved.  Some montages by SlavkoVorkapich, who later worked in mainstream films producing the same sort of hallucinatory short sequences, are shown --they're interesting but nothing special.  A city-scape shot with distorting lens, the work of a "loony cameraman" is also interesting and has some very disturbing images of distorted faces.  It's supposed to be funny but the disfigured heads are monstrous and some of them look like mutilated war veterans.  Charles Vidor's The Bridge is an early adaptation (1920) of the famous story by Ambrose Bierce Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge -- it's very good, intense,and the plain style in which the movie is executed adds to its success.  The real find in the program is Orson Welles' juvenile effort, Heart of Age.  Welles made the short film when he was 19 or 20 -- it's shot at a Boy's Academy in Woodstock, Illinois that Welles attended.  The picture is an imitation of expressionistic cinema -- made in 1934, Welles later claimed that he made the movie as a joke, to imitate Werner Krauss in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Be that as it may, the film is very spooky and enigmatic.  Welles appears as a figure in a topcoat and wearing an pretentious hat -- he's obviously intended as a grotesque of the kind one might encounter in E.T.A. Hoffmann and his stark make-up is alarmingly hideous.  In fact, Welles seems to have hopped right over The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to dive into its source material, the macabre grotesque of the German Romantics, particularly Hoffmann.  The movie is dream-like and ambitious -- Welles prints some of the footage in negative and,even, I think solarizes some the shots.  An old woman, her face literally lined with age, squats on a big bell and by rocking her hips causes it to toll. (The rather plain-looking young woman made-up as a crone was Welles' first wife.) The bell's tolling is over-determined since a man in black face also is tugging at a rope and causing a bell (another or the same?) to toll as well.  The woman's movements as she straddles the bell are unmistakably sexual and the whole thing is distinctly kinky, a bizarre mix of sexual innuendo and surrealism.  Welles pretended to be ashamed of the film, but I think this was an act -- the little picture is memorable and the best thing on the program. 

Cry of the City

A two-bit wise guy from Marty Scorsese's old neighborhood at Mott and Vine lies in the hospital, riddled with bullet wounds.  He's gunned down a cop and will certainly be sent to the electric chair.  A beautiful young girl visits him just before surgery and pledges her love.  A couple of homicide detectives badger the wounded man -- they want him to confess to the torture and murder of an old woman named de Grazie; she was killed for her cache of jewelry.  The cop-killer (Richard Conte) is lots of things, all of them bad, but he doesn't torture and kill old ladies and so he indignantly denies the rap. After his surgery, the cop-killer is released to a prison-hospital.  He escapes, although his wounds torment him and, periodically, cause him to pass out.  (He's limping on a leg that's festered and rotting.)  The hoodlum is searching for the girl who kissed  hlm before his surgery and, in a desultory way, trying to clear his bad name with respect to the torture-murder.  A virtuous cop from the same Italian neighborhood, Candella (Victor Mature), fanatically pursues the escaped killer -- he's appalled that the wise-guy is admired in the old neighborhood and runs the risk of corrupting kids living there.  In particular, the cop-killer's kid brother admires the older man as a kind of Robin Hood.  The film tours the underworld for about 90 minutes exhibiting some vivid supporting players. Like the wounded IRA man in Carol Reed's The Informer, no one really wants to hide the badly injured criminal on the lam -- he bounces from one villain to another, becoming increasingly delirious and desperate.  In the end, the obsessed Candella gets shot, but, he too escapes from the hospital to hunt down the bad guy with an obligatory scene in a Catholic Church where the girl appears (and won't flee with the wise-guy) and where the wounded cop confronts the equally wounded criminal with predictable consequences.  Thus, the premise for Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City a 1948 film noir with an intelligent and complex script, good acting and, generally, forgettable. 

Siodmak shot the picture on location in Little Italy, but most of the scenes (with a couple notable exceptions) could have been produced on a Hollywood back lot.  In fact, once I toured Paramount's soundstages and outdoor sets and there is, in fact, a city alley and street ensemble that looks like most of the movie.  (Exceptions are a couple of grandiose city-scapes with streets slanting into neon-lit intersections and the climax in the church and, then, the street oozing with mist where the final shoot-out occurs.)  There are semi-documentary style subway scenes and some interesting interiors of tenements in Little Italy dripping with religious icons and memorabilia, but. by and large, the scene-setting isn't too memorable.  Siodmak, a alumnus of the late phases of German expressionism, directs capably, but, except for a couple of brilliant set-piece suspense scenes, most of his work is perfunctory.  He doesn't use shadows for expressionist effects, but instead deploys them as part of the narrative -- shadow-images actually advance the plot.  The two best sequences in the film are a thrilling if low-key escape from the prison hospital full of false starts and apparent perils and a scene in which the cop-killer menaces a seedy lawyer and ends up stabbing him death (and, also, participating in the shooting of the man's secretary -- it's the attorney's gun that goes off).  The film is populated by a savage rogue's gallery of crooks -- the nasty lawyer stands out as does a pathetic Viennese or German doctor who can't practice medicine (he has no license) but, nonetheless, offers his services to the wounded criminal.  This guy, with his poached- egg eyes is particularly memorable -- it's the kind of part that Udo Kier would have been given in a quarter of a century later -- and the corrupt doctor, who has a sick wife at home is both sleazy and sympathetic.  (Apparently, New York was full of European doctors without licenses after World War Two providing abortions, I suppose, and other useful services -- the cops know them all and round them up as "the usual suspects" in the film.)  A giantess, a hulking ugly masseuse, is particularly startling -- she's the woman who, in fact, tortured the old woman and delivers an excellent speech about her detestation for her elderly, wealthy female clients.  The vicious masseuse, the terrifying Hope Emerson, is twice the size of the poor cop-killer and three times as brutal.  Siodmak stages her first appearance with real flare:  the wounded hoodlum rings her doorbell and she approaches, moving toward the door through about four different glass ante-rooms, each time looming larger and larger - it's an ineffably weird and scary visual effect.  I have no idea why the shot is staged in this way -- each anteroom is differently lit and so we see the monstrous Amazon in different ways as she approaches -- but it's really remarkable and the best thing in the movie.  The picture has a nightmarish aspect and it works a subtle kind of ju-jitsu on the viewer -- at first, we admire the brazen arrogance of the criminal and are rooting for him to makes his escape.  But, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the man is vicious and that the true hero is the indefatigable (literally, many scenes take place early in the morning at diners and on the empty streets) Candella His partner says:  "This is becoming a vendetta for you" -- and it's obvious that Candella is dangerously obsessed with the chase, becoming, in a way, a mirror for the wounded criminal.  At the film's climax, both characters are so badly hurt they can barely stand.   Mature generally played bad guys until this feature and his heavy-lidded eyes make him odd-looking -- he blinks at the camera like a drowsy iguana but he's good in the film.  Siodmak detested filming on location:  "you've got no control," he lamented.  Shelley Winters has a small, but pivotal, role as a dame who procures the services of the corrupt doctor -- this was her first Hollywood role.

This sort of picture reminds me of Ozu's string of domestic melodramas, films with names like Early Summer, Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon -- the names are all alike becomes the films are all closely similar.  Cry of the City is just a place-holder name; all of these late forties film noir are essentially the same -- they're all mildly entertaining but without a scorecard you can't tell them apart and they're uniformly lurid, but abstract names don't help in distinguishing them.

The Seven Year Itch

Many years ago, I drove onto Manhattan island in the late summer during a heat wave.  The city was suffocating, like a sauna in which the red hot stones had also been used to cook cabbage.  The entries to the subways were infernal and, when I looked upward  I expected to see the skyscrapers melting like tallow candles.  It's this sort of heat that drives the negligible plot of Billy Wilder's 1954 comedy, The Seven Year Itch.

An uninteresting Everyman played by Tom Ewell deposits his wife and son at the train station.  They are fleeing the heat of the Summer for Maine.  A prologue to the film shows the Indians on the island also engaging in the custom of exiling wife and children to the cooler north woods and the movie purports to be sociology -- this is what inevitably happens when married men are set free during the height of the summer heat.  Ewall's character is the editor of books sold by their salacious covers.  (His firm's version of Little Women shows half-naked damsels on the cover and purports to be the truth about life in "a women's dormitory.")  Ewell is assigned to edit a copy of something like the Psychopathia Sexualis written by Kraft-Ebbing and, alone at home, he imagines all sorts of liaisons with sexy anonymous women.  His upstairs neighbor turns out to be Marilyn Monroe in a role so archetypal and suggestive that she doesn't even get a name.  Ewell meets Monroe's character when she drops a tomato plant in an iron pot and almost kills him on his back terrace.  She comes down to his apartment and he haphazardly tries to impress her -- he's too abashed to make any attempt at real seduction.  She's friendly and the relationship develops into something that looks to the world like spectacular adultery, but is really chaste.  Meanwhile, Ewell, also, fantasizes that his wife is having an affair with the hunky Tab Hunter-like, Tom McKenzie.  Monroe's character moves into Ewell's house to take advantage of his air-conditioning.  More comical misunderstandings ensue, although the film really isn't very funny.  When Tom McKenzie shows up, he can't believe that the feckless and dull hero has a beautiful woman living in his house:  "What do you want me to believe?" he sneers.  "That you got Marilyn Monroe in your kitchen."  In fact, Marilyn is in the kitchen making cinnamon toast.  Ewell, suspecting his friend of seducing his wife, sucker-punches the man and knocks him unconscious and, then, flees the seductress for the Maine woods, departing with such alacrity that he forgets his shoes.

There's nothing to the movie and it lags seriously.  The film was based on a Broadway play by George Axelrod and it's obvious in the mise-en-scene.  The picture seems claustrophobic and the two leading characters (the show must have been a "two-hander" on Broadway) are caricatures that strike only one note and that repeatedly.  Everything about the film is prosaic and limited -- even the famous scene where Miss Monroe has her skirts blown over her head by a subway train passing under a grate doesn't really work in the movie.  Viewers will recall the scene from an iconic promotional photograph -- the image doesn't look that way in the film and the actress is shot from an angle in which her upper body is not visible.  Indeed, the sequence looks anonymous in the movie, leading to the surmise that a body double has been used and we're not even seeing Monroe's real knees and thighs.  (The promotional shot is much more revealing.)    The picture works on  your imagination, fraudulently seeming to be more salacious than what we're actually shown.  The girl refers to a photo-shoot in which we imagine her to be naked.  In fact, when we're shown the picture, it's nothing special -- Monroe is wearing a bathing suit.  Similarly, Monroe tells a story about getting her toe caught in the bathtub drain while bathing (in icy water because of the heat).  For some reason,
Wilder inserts a shot showing the actress in the bath tub, but she's chastely posed with bubbles covering her entire body -- an image that's inconsistent with the account of the ice-water in the bath.  Monroe is beautiful, but what she promises throughout the film's 90 minute running time is inaccessible and, certainly, unfilmable.  If she were to really embrace the sad sack Ewell (who looks a little like Art Carney), the film would combust and the movie would melt before our eyes.  So it's all tease with no follow-through.  Ewell (who played similar roles with Jayne Mansfield) is wholly without any kind of charisma.  He's supposed to be impersonating every horny husband suffering the titular "seven year itch", but the man is dysfunctional as a romantic lead, dull, and without a trace of comic instinct.  He's simply not equal to Monroe's breathy cream-colored apparition is silk pajamas or slinky evening gown and, so, as if by perverse design, the film can't go anywhere interesting.  Monroe is playing against a homely mannequin and, although she can do lots of things, she can't kiss the life into Tom Ewell.  Imagine how great the film would be if Ewell's part were played by an actor like the middle-aged Buster Keaton or, even, the man proposed for the part the young Walter Matthau.  It's like a forcing Monroe into a romantic role with Karl Malden.

Targets

By far the scariest thing in Peter Bogdonovich's maiden film, Targets, is the interior decorating.  A product of the late sixties, the film's characters  live in rooms painted faint purple, strange tones of aquamarine and baby-shit yellow.  The rooms are sparse, but adorned with lights shaped like the coronavirus (balls studded with weird wart-like protuberances) and the color of marigolds.  In the master bedroom, the blue sheet on the bed matches a blue lampshade.  In the kitchen, where the formica is spotless, the roll of paper towels is also a kleenex-blue color.  Even the home of the wealthy hero, Byron Orlock (played by the elderly Boris Karloff) is a kingdom of schlock with pink coral highlights and awful kitschy furnishings.  At one point, Bogdonovich, imitating Hitchcock, aims his camera at a nasty-looking beige carpet, full of mismatched seams, and, then, tracks for a half-dozen yards finally tilting up to expose a madman's note, typed in red print.  The note is less alarming than the carpet and this seems to be the point of the showy shot.  This trash aesthetic extends to the exteriors:  when Orlock rides to a public appearance at an outdoor movie theater in Reseda, the car traverses a Hades of new and used car lots, one after another on a gruesome commercial strip.  The camera surveys the carnage as Orlock exclaims "God, what an ugly town this has become!"  (The scenery reminds me of old Highway 12 west of Minneapolis where the road passed several miles of up-scale car dealerships before reaching the Pompeii-red and round as a storage tank Cooper Cinerama -- a neighborhood that my peckish German teacher at College described as "quintessentially American.)

Bogdonovich, who began his career working for Roger Corman's American International, a purveyor of low-budget horror films as well as bikini girl and motorcycle pictures, was told by the boss to make a picture that used Karloff (under contract to the studio) for two days.  Other than that there were no constraints except for budget, which by the look of things, was microscopic.-- Bogdonovich mostly shoots on location without much in the way of professional lighting.  The scenes at the drive-in movie theater are very, very dark -- he didn't have the benefit of modern film stock or digital processing that allows today for realistic tones and contrasts in night shots.  Bogdonovich cast himself as Sammy, a young director working for a studio like American International -- when he was about 25, Bogdonovich was just about handsome enough to make a convincing leading man.  The film is wonderfully efficient and well-crafted, indeed, an enjoyable minor classic with some indelible images.  There's a double-plot that comes together at the climax; it's absurdly contrived but filmed with such conviction that you don't notice the deficiencies until after the closing credits.  Corman also told Bogdonovich that he was supposed to intercut footage from Karloff's previous movie for the studio, a ghastly thing appropriately called The Terror.  Targets begins with Karloff/Orlock stalking around in one of the studio's cardboard dungeons -- there's a young girl who has swooned and is scantily clad, a surfer-boy hero, and a flood that rips down walls while the scene keeps cutting away to a raven flying through the sky.  The film-within-a-film ends --"The End" the titles tell us -- and, then, Bogdonovich's picture begins.  We're in a screening room.  Orlock (Karloff) announces that he's retiring.  (He was 79 or 80 when the film was made.)  This upsets Sammy who has written a script just for the old man -- in it, Orlock gets to play himself.  (Presumably, the script is Targets).  Orlock has an Asian-American secretary who is having an affair with Sammy -- the stuff about Chinese proverbs and the girl teaching Orlock Chinese has not aged well.  Orlock, who is playing Karloff, is the "monster man", famous for his portrayals of monsters and maniacs in horror movies.  Of course, he's a polite old English gentleman with a taste for Scotch whiskey.  Orlock is humiliated that he has to appear at a drive-in in Reseda to promote The Terror and he tells  his secretary to book a flight to New York and a boat trip to London -- he's going home after thirty-five years in Hollywood.  Meanwhile, a spookily polite young man named Bobbie is buying guns and ammunition.  He's not doing well -- with his pretty wife, the young man lives with his parents.  Whenever, he addresses his father he calls him "Sir."  The young man is like Beaver from Leave it to Beaver! grown up and armed to the teeth.  When he and his father go out target shooting (the kid is an ace), he trains the gun on his domineering father and almost shoots him -- when the older man turns his face to his son, the young man is cowed. Sammy and Orlock get drunk after watching Howard Hawk's 1931 The Criminal Code -- in that film, Karloff plays a menacing figure.  "My first big role," Karloff says.  Sammy, as a cineaste like Bogdonovich, praises Hawks' ability to tell a story with pictures.  Karloff tells a story with words, delivering a spectacular rendition of the old chestnut "Appointment at Samarra".  Across town, the young man shoots his wife and everyone in his family and, then, buying more ammunition goes out to tank farm, a facility with big fifty-foot high white cylindrical tanks.  He takes a sniper position atop the tallest tank and murders a half-dozen motorists driving by on the freeway.  (While laying out his arsenal atop the tank, he nonchalantly sips on a coca-cola and eats a Twinkie -- in those days, Coke came in 8 ounce bottles that you had to open with an opener and was something that you didn't gulp, but demurely sipped.)  After a police chase, the kid hides inside the screen of the outdoor movie theater, poking a  hole through the white canvas so he can slaughter the people in their cars come to see Orlock and the picture.  Orlock is a trouper and has decided to make his appearance at the theater.  Thus, the film has contrived to hinge-together the two plots with a dramatic confrontation at the outdoor movie drive-in.  In the final scene, we see the drive-in lot at dawn -- everyone has gone except for the killer's car still parked alone in the big field of posts for the speakers and parking lots.

Bogdonovich stages the sniper scenes with exciting aplomb and relishes the chaos at the out door movie theater.  The picture has an excellent sense for time -- we can measure the sun setting and air turning blue and, then, dark at the outdoor drive-in.  There are fascinating and poetic documentary style shots at the Drive-in -- we see the peculiar sociology of these places, now almost entirely extinct:  the playgrounds, the projection booth, the kids necking in cars, the concession stand, all of these things are lyrically represented.  In an early shot, the camera pointlessly tracks with Bobbie as he walks from his car into the family house.  You wonder if Bogdonovich hasn't yet learned that you can edit out footage that doesn't communicate anything much -- but there's a method to his madness:  later, during the massacre of the family, Bogdonovich relentlessly tracks the killer in long takes and, then, ends the sequence with bravura survey of the carpet.  The camera's obsessive focus on the sniper (modeled on Charles Whitman, the University of Texas killer) is signified by this seemingly meaningless extended tracking shot early in the film. 

The famous film critic, Manny Farber described "termite art" as low-budget, unassuming entertainment that inadvertently documents the era in which it was made.  "Termite Art" can't afford to create a seamless imaginary world but, instead, continuously allows the surrounding reality to seep into the picture.  Targets is a classic of Termite Art.

(Bogdonovich supplied commentary on the showing of Targets that I watched on TCM on April 4.  He doesn't look well.  His trademark goggles looked as if they were smeared with vaseline and he was wearing some kind of soft brace or cast on one of his forearms.  He appeared by Skype and, when asked by Joe Mankiewicz about his father's reaction to Targets, began to weep.)

Show Boat

Show Boat is one of those rude beasts that lie at the center of American popular culture.  (And does America have any culture other than the "popular"?)  Edna Ferber's novel, a blockbuster in the twenties, was adapted into a musical and then, made and remade as a film three times.  It's as if Hollywood was struggling to get it right, but whatever was wrong about Show Boat was too irremediably wrong to ever be put right.  The film is about race even when the Black folk are pushed to the side and mostly invisible, as during the movie's second half.  People "pass" for White in the movie until it's necessary to speak (or sing) from the heart or entertain the public.  Then, you can "cork up" and be a "coon-shouter" like Al Jolson.  The 1936 film version is the most raw, and, therefore, the most true version of an archetypal American story, a heart-breaking collision between profound empathy for the Other and the crudest sort of racism.  The director, James Whale, knew about "passing" -- he was a gay man in ostensibly straight Hollywood and, although he never concealed his sexual orientation, he lived among those who did.  The messages in Show Boat are so incredibly mixed that the film threatens to collapse into chaos.  But Whale was a great director and, somehow, the material coheres in the 1936 version.  Both the 1929 and 1951 versions lacked Whale's courage -- both of them duck the theme of miscegenation central to the material.  In Whale's film, someone declares that a "drop of black blood" in your body makes you a Negro.  By this criterion, the film shows that we are all Negroes  -- our culture throbs with Black blood as does the body politic.  Early in the film, a couple performing in the melodramas that the showboat peddles to its paying customers is accused of miscegenation, a crime in Natchez where the paddle-wheeler is docked,  When the sheriff comes to arrest the couple, the White husband of an octoroon, passing for Caucasian, draws a knife and slits the finger of his wife.  Then, he sucks some of  her blood. The scowling sheriff makes his accusation and the man replies:  "I can swear on a Bible that I have black blood inside of me."  The witnesses to his act swear to this as well.  By this stratagem, obviously conceived in advance of the accusation, the White man has made himself Black.  Later, the heroine smears black soot on her face, paints her lips zinc-white, and performs a minstrel song.  But it doesn't work -- she's singing the lyrics to the tune, "Galivantin'" in a warbling contralto, the timbre used in operetta, not the Blues.  The heroine, like the man sucking Negro blood, has made herself Black -- but it's a sinister transformation, not homage but something like vampirism.  In the economy of the film, real Blacks are sacrificed so that the White folks can prosper -- but it is the Black characters who ultimately understand the meaning of the sprawling epic in which everyone is trapped.  This is dramatized by the musical's them, "Ole Man River", a song about the pain and tragedy of existence -- life is a great muddy river that just keeps rolling along, indifferent to our suffering and sorrow.  In 
Show Boat, in obedience to the song, (the film's last shot is great expanse of the river in moonlight), even ostensibly happy endings are profoundly problematic. 

Whale's version of the film begins with the show boat docking in a squalid-looking Southern river-town, Natchez.  There's a parade, but the show people, who proclaim themselves to be "one happy family" are quarreling and discontented.  Julie the leading lady who is passing as White, is unhappy with her Caucasian husband and may have had an affair.  For reasons that seem unclear in the film, the spurned lover tells the sheriff about her race, triggering an accusation of miscegenation.  After the blood-sucking incident, Julie and her husband depart from the company -- the good folks of Mississippi will not authorize Black performers to share the stage with White actors.  Captain Andy, the proprietor of the showboat needs to find another couple to headline the primitive melodrama performed on the boat.  His daughter, Magnolia, has played piano for the company and knows the show and so, notwithstanding the objections  of his comically monstrous harridan wife, Parthenia, he gives the girl the role of the heroine.  Hence, we see at the outset that a Black woman, Julie, is displaced by a White ingenue, Nola. as Magnolia is called.  A handsome riverboat gambler, Gaylord Ravenal is passing through town.  He sees Nola on the boat, wants to seduce her, and so joins the company as the leading man --dissembling is easy for him and acting is just another form of lying.  The inevitable romance follows and Nola is successful on-stage.  Against the objections of her mother, Parthenia, Nola marries the riverboat gambler now her leading man.  She gets pregnant and, when the baby  is born, the raffish, irresponsible Gaylord Ravenal, her husband, is playing poker on shore.  There's a tremendous storm and the loyal Black servant risks his life in the tempest to find a doctor to attend to the laboring woman.  A baby girl is born.  The spat between Gaylord and Parthenia is terrible and the couple, with their small child, move to Chicago.  There they take a room at the grand Palmer House and live far beyond their means.  The child. little Kim, is sent to a convent to be educated.  (Although this is unclear from the film, apparently, Nola and Gaylord are living off proceeds paid to the wife as her share in the showboat.)  When the money runs out, the feckless Gaylord simply decamps, after saying goodbye to his little girl, in a painfully moving scene.  Nola, abandoned by her husband, is without resources.  However, a couple who performed on the Cotton Queen, as the showboat is named,  coincidentally encounter Nola as she is being evicted.  (The little girl remains at the Convent on the last of the family's money.)  The couple, who have a comedy routine and are hoofers, are performing at the Trocadero and they suggest that Nola, who can sing like an angel, seek employment on-stage with them.  At the Trocadero, the octoroon, Julie (now also alone) is the revue's prima donna and has become an alcoholic, but she can still sing.  She croons a song and, then, retires to her dressing room with a bottle of rum.  Nola sings to audition for a role but she's rejected by the mean, strutting impresario.  Julie recognizes Nola's voice and learns of her situation from a cynical Black janitor, a wise-guy whose got the number of all the people around him.  Julie, recognizing that she's washed-up, and that Nola is desperate for the job, walks away from the Trocadero never to be seen again -- it's the second time, Julie is sacrificed in favor of Nola.  The vulgar impresario listens reluctantly to an African-American song performed by Julie and says that she can perform in his revue as a "coon-shouter" -- that is in Black-face.  On New Year's Eve, Captain Andy has come to Chicago with his wife -- they don't yet know about the reversal of fortunes that has made Nola homeless.  Parthenia goes to bed with a headache and Captain Andy, giddy in the company of three prostitutes, goes to the Trocadero.  There Nola is singing a heavily vibrato version of "After the Ball" and the revelers aren't impressed -- they are hooting and mocking her.  Captain Andy recognizes her voice and, then, her face and stands up in the drunken crowd directing her performance with tears in his eyes.  (The film is fantastically effective as a melodrama).  Nola rallies and complete the song to a standing ovation.  Emboldened by this success, she goes onto to become a great Broadway chanteuse and actress.  Her career takes her all around the Globe.  By this time, Nola's daughter, Kim is grown.  Nola trains her to become an actress and she too is soon famous on Broadway -- by this time, twenty years, at least, have passed, although Captain Andy and Parthenia who seem to have been born old, don't really age.  Nola is visibly older; her hair is grey and she has  retired from the stage.  Captain Andy, Parthenia, and Nola attend a musical in which Kim stars.  (Curiously, in a sort of mise en abyme, the musical is about the ante-bellum South featuring plantation ladies in crinoline and dancing darkies, something akin to the musical Show Boat from which the film derives.)   Gaylord Ravenal, now old and sick, is working as a stage-door manager at the theater so that he can be close to his daughter, Kim, who doesn't recognize him.  He hears Kim singing and creeps up to the corridor outside the fancy boxes to spy on the stage.  Nola sees Gaylord, recognizes the erring husband, now absent for a quarter of a century, and invites him into their box overlooking the stage.  Kim, taking her bows, calls for her mother to sing with her.  Nola begins to sing one of the film's saccharine operetta numbers and Gaylord joins with her -- then, Kim also begins to sing on stage as well.  It's the film's end and there's not a dry eye in the house -- except that, viewed in a cool retrospective light, this isn't really a convincingly happy ending.  Julie is gone, presumably dead from alcoholism, the Black folk are still impoverished and oppressed, and there's not much hope that Gaylord will really be forgiven for taking a powder and deserting his family for 25 years - this seems just a wee bit implausible.  If the characters, Nola and Kim, can forgive him, the film's audience can not.

Readers will notice that the plot summary doesn't really mention the two pivotal characters in the film, Jim and Queenie (Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniels). The Black characters, although integral to the film's first half, are fundamentally marginal -- they don't figure in the picture's second half and are invisible at Show Boat's denouement.  But emotionally, Jim and Queenie cast a shadow over the whole film and they are most present, in fact, when absent from the movie.  Jim and Queenie represent the sole happy marriage in the film and are exemplars of the way that people should behave toward one another -- they aren't idealized and bicker incessantly but they seem to love one another and are forgiving of each other's flaws.  The film's greatest technical defect (which it shares with the musical) is that the best number is in the first act, and, indeed, only about ten minutes into the action.  This is the show-stopper "Ole Man River", a transcendent bass song, that is both enormously effective and, also, profoundly racist -- in Mozart's time, noble voices sang high, even in the range of the countertenor, and the lowest register was reserved for old men and buffoons.   Similarly, the deep and low notes in "Ole Man River" are stereotypically reserved for the big buck Negro -- it's a pernicious caricature that persisted through the deep voices in Amos 'n Andy and remains today, for instance, in the basso profundo tones of the spokesman for Allstate on Tv commercials.  But what Whale does with the song is astonishing.  He recognizes that the number is the emotional center of the film, that the score will play variations on the tune throughout the movie, and that he has to make the performance indelible.  So Whale audaciously rotates the camera in a tight circle around Robeson who is sitting on a dock, then, swoops in for a close-up -- then, he cuts away to stylized expressionistic shots of Black men toting enormous bales of cotton or rhythmically hoeing in fields, reverting to vignettes of Robeson drunk or confined in jail.  The song continues as a chorus of shabby, bedraggled Black singers assembles with Robeson and comes to a thunderous conclusion in which the show tune is elaborated into both an anthem and lament for lost freedom.  The effect is tremendous, shattering and there is nothing approaching the emotional power of this scene in the rest of the film.  In a very real sense, Robeson's performance and Whale's majestic camera movements have seized the film, dismissed its melodrama, and rendered the plight of the African-American characters central, marginalizing, as it were, the White performers.  This is evident from the way that the blood-sucking scene is staged -- as the loathsome White sheriff accuses Julie of miscegenation, Jim stands high overhead and the action cuts away to show him looking down on the scene as somehow superior to it, both a witness and a judge.  The ebb and flow of life in the sprawling film (it encompasses three generations) is embodied in the image of the Mississippi, the film's old man, and Robeson's performance, with that of Hattie McDaniels anchors the film and provides its subtext even when the plot moves to Chicago and leaves the African-American characters behind. 

Thematically, Whale constructs the film around dichotomies.  The romance sequences are coded:  when the camera is facing the river, shown in luminous moonlit rear projection, the theme is love and the style is poetic.  The reverse shot showing the river town is conventionally prosaic and realistic.  The Blues tunes, which are brilliant, collide with whiter-than-white operetta numbers -- this happens sometimes in the same song ("Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly", for instance, rendered in various styles, as an opera song and, then, ragtime.)  In one of the film's most startling numbers, Julie is singing a blues tune and Nola begins to dance -- she writhes and undulates in a spooky wa; it's like a kind of seizure..  Of course, this is a staid white woman, Parthenia's daughter, imitating Black dance.  It doesn't work and looks foolish, even disturbing, but you can't look away and when Nola emerges on the deck of the paddlewheeler still dancing with Hattie McDaniels behind her and waving the palms of her hands in the air like Al Jolson singing "Mammie" we're in some dark and vicious place that, somehow, also represents the divided soul of American culture and the best that we can ever do.