X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes

Dr. James Xavier, "X", the hero of Roger Corman's X- The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963) wants to see farther and deeper than anyone has ever seen.  So he anoints his eyes with a magic potion that increases his visual acuity and allows him to see through brick and mortar and, of course, women's clothing.  In his mania, he cries out to his girlfriend:  "I'm really seeing you the first time...you are a perfect living dissection."  But where there is hubris of this sort, so also comes retribution.  The alert viewer waits for the inevitable Bible quotation, Matthew 5:29 from the Sermon on the Mount -- something about an offensive eye being plucked out.  Corman's cheap, but extremely effective, X is a highly sophisticated entertainment.  The movie begins with its tongue in cheek as a witty parody of 1950's vintage monster movies, but, ultimately, morphs into something far more dire, and, dare I say, visionary.  Corman always made money on his exploitation pictures -- he knew in his bones what people wanted to see on screen:  nudity, gore, car chases and flamboyant acting.  And X delivers the goods but in a way that, somehow, doesn't cheapen the audience.  I think this effect is achieved because of the film's excellent script, it's poetic imagery, and fantastic brevity -- the move is only 79 minutes long but packs a universe of events into its plot.  Corman obviously knew the old Universal horror films from the thirties, also pictures that are generally between an hour and eighty-minutes long and he understands how to propel a movie from one sensational sequence to the next -- and all of this done on a low budget.   

Dr. James Xavier (Ray Milland as "X") is experimenting with eye-drops applied to capuchin monkeys, a potion that allows the little critters to see through solid surfaces.  Unfortunately, as is the case with most sci-fi movie-breakthroughs, there's an alarming side-effect:  the monkeys roll over, gaze into the heavens, and tormented by the enormity of their vision, promptly die.  X's project (funded to the tune of $27,000) faces a crisis -- the foundation paying the bills has threatened to cut off the money.  So X decides to experiment on himself to prove that there is a medical application for the magic eye-potion.  (From the outset, the film establishes implicit parallels between medical research funding and budgeting for a cheapie movie -- that miserly $27,000 budget.)  Despite the reservations of his love-interest, the formidable Dr. Fairfax (a blonde with a spectacularly leonine mane) and his long-suffering ophthalmologist. X applies the drops to his eyes and, after some wincing and grimacing, can see through things.  The concept is that our vision is calibrated to only a narrow spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation and that the eye-drops magically expand the range of radiation visible to the eye.  Notwithstanding his demonstration of the efficacy of the potion, the board members on the foundation see no application for this risky venture and X, to use his language, is "cut off like an arm with gangrene."  In the picture's brisk first act, X interferes with surgery on a sick child (he has peeked into her thorax and know exactly where the tumor is located), attends a party where he leers at all the naked women (until dragged out of the place by Dr. Fairfax), and, then, accidentally throws the poor eye-doctor, who is horrified by the experiment, out the window of an eight story building with dire effects.  All of this action is played for laughs,. except the sudden death of the ophthalmologist which signals a transition into the increasingly ominous narrative in the second part of the movie.  (Some of this stuff is very funny:  the docs letting their hair down at the wild party make "perfect" martinis with syringes full of gin and dance frenetically, doing the twist and the watusi -- Ray Milland's dancing has to be seen to be believed.  Of course, with his x-ray eyes, he perceives everyone naked although we don't enjoy the full Monty as it were -- we just get people's feet and bodies from shoulder up gyrating with prismatic diffraction-grating halos around everything.)   In the second act, X is on the lam.  He is working on an amusement pier as mentalist, not too imaginatively named, "Mentallo".  His barker is played by Don Rickles who looks like a beefy thug in this film and, of course, scathingly insults everyone.  Mentallo does his mind-reading act by looking into people's pockets and purses and reporting on the contents and his show is very effective.  Rickles' character has figured out that Mentallo is the fugitive, Dr. James Xavier, and blackmails him into offering his services as a healer with the carny taking a cut of the action.  The carny sets up X in a exceedingly grim ruin of an apartment where he sees crowds of sick old ladies and elderly men.  The imagery has become increasingly grim and surreal -- the chambers in which Rickles confronts Mentallo are decorated with swaths of gory red paint on window sills and window frames; the apartment in which Mentallo sees his customers, most of whom are doomed (they are growing cancers in their bellies and chests), is like an art installation by Edward Kienholz, all shabby genteel carpet and faded wallpaper with dark trim around all the doors, a sort of lightless sitting room from hell poised above an entirely grey (indeed, morbidly grey) backlot city street where people listlessly sit on grey stoops in front of grey, crumbling facades.  This second act concludes when Dr. Fairfax appears and rescues X from his servitude to the caustic carny.  She and X flee to Las Vegas.  By this time, fatal hubris has set in and X keeps pouring the potion into his rotting eyes.  He taunts the casino staff and, of course, wins at all of the card games that he tries (he also beats a slot-machine using his x-ray eyes).  Casino security gets wise to X (although it takes them awhile -- this seems odd because the guy is wearing four-inch thick black goggles) and they pursue him.  The police get involved and even a helicopter joins the chase -- the helicopter, of course, doubles as a location from which to shoot thrilling overhead perspectives on the chase.  By this time, X's eyes are deteriorating and everyone he sees appears to him as a skeleton.  The chase ends in a delirious sequence in which the blind X wanders around on a highway embankment stumbling down to a forlorn intersection in the desert where a tent-revival is underway.  (In this scene, Corman brilliantly suggests X's acuity of vision by shooting a desolate range of remote mountains with a telephoto lens, pushing the weird peaks and canyons close to the action, including a strangely pyramidal black summit that hovers like doom over the action.)  Of course, the moment the blind X staggers into the tent revival, the grim denouement is inevitable.  By this point, X's excess of vision  has led him to the nihilistic revelation that the universe is empty except for a vast eye at its center.  His own eyes have decayed from amber cat-like orbs with pitch-black irises to dark pits in his head.  

The movie makes the most of its limited resources.  The laboratory has a weird grid on its walls, the sets and costumes are good (particularly Mentallo's garb) and Corman's direction is fluent and imaginative.  Milland gets to chew the scenery in a satisfying way, speaking in lyric poetry about the "flesh of the world dissolved in the acid of light."  The enucleation implied in the final horrific shot rhymes nicely with an extended, almost avant-garde introduction in which we see an eyeball with a bloody fringe floating in space -- the shot lasts for about a minute and, then, cuts to an eyeball with tissue still attached to it in a lab beaker.  Corman's inventive staging always adds value to the mise-en-scene:  in the car chase, X almost smashes into a truck which turns out to be hauling chickens in cages-- of course, feathers fly.  (I think Sam Peckinpah reprises this gag in one of his car chases.)  An example of Corman's dynamism is a scene in a hospital involve a pallid sick girl.  X looks into her rib-cage and figures out what's wrong.  As he leaves the scene, departing into a nearby corridor, the sequence seems to come to an uninteresting ending, but Corman, surprisingly,re-positions the camera to show the girl turning restlessly on her pillow, that is, a disturbing motion on which he cuts.  The movie is an allegory about cinema, an art that exploits the audience's desire to see what is forbidden.  Of course, within the limitations of the era, there's a not a lot shown in the film although, at one point, Don Rickles leers that he wants x-ray vision so that he can see all the naked women he wants.  The movie makes two important points above seeing -- first, to see is not necessarily to be able to heal or ameliorate (in fact, what we see in movies can't be remedied) and, of course, there are some things that once seen can't be unseen.

Paper Moon

 Fifty years is a long time measured against the span of a human life.  Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon was released in 1973, well-reviewed in its time, and, in facts, a seminal picture.  (Wim Wenders hesitated to make Alice in the Cities, a prototype for his later "road movies", when he saw Paper Moon and realized that Bogdanovich had beat him to the punch -- both Alice in the Cities and Paper Moon share a common premise, that is, a man travels about aimlessly with a little girl.  Ultimately, Wenders' friends encouraged him to proceed with his project, but the German director recalls that he was discouraged by Bogdanovich's picture and thought that his film would suffer by comparision.)  To my shame, I must confess that I have let fifty years pass (Bogdanovich is dead now) before watching the movie.  Something about the film's casting and publicity campaign put me off initially.  And, of course, I'm a snob, preferring a black and white German picture set in desolate and provincial German villages to a virtually identical black and white American movie staged similarly against a desolate Midwestern background.  But, in fact, there is something slightly wrong with Paper Moon and it's not quite as good as its reputation.  Based on a novel (Addie Pray), the script for Paper Moon doesn't exactly cohere and the extremely episodic nature of the narrative prevents the picture from attaining any real dramatic force -- it's just one thing after another (as is also true of Wender's comparable film).  The acting, particularly Tatum O'Neal in the role of the ten-year old Addie, is often astonishing but there's something slightly hollow and forced about the movie.  That said, Paper Moon is an elegant, beautifully filmed example of the American art film and, certainly, not inferior to German or French pictures of this sort -- the existentialist conceit of the hero traveling from one encounter to another in a picturesque wasteland is just as good in American English as it is in German.  And, it should also be remembered, that many landmark films of the sixties and seventies are severely episodic and don't necessarily comprise a thematically consistent whole -- consider, for example, La Dolce Vita or Arthur Penn's sprawling Little Big Man.  Finally, on the level of its deep structure, Paper Moon's structure is profoundly American -- the film's core is derived from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Paper Moon begins in a treeless and barren cemetery where the ten-year-old Addie's mother, apparently the town prostitute, is being buried.  The woman was killed in a drunk driving accident (she was apparently riding with an inebriated client) and no one in the area dares come to her obsequies.  Ryan O'Neal, playing Mose, an itinerant con-man appears belatedly, nonchalantly swooping up a bouquet from another dusty grave, to deposit the flowers atop the dead whore's casket.  The long shot showing Mose approaching the pathetic little funeral (there is a pastor, the little girl, and one middle-aged woman in attendance), and, then, stealing the bouquet, exemplifies the film's casual but precise mise-en-scene:  we see exactly what the director needs us to see, but, nothing, is amplified or exaggerated for effect -- it's all loosely, but perfectly staged and deliberately de-dramatized in the best European art film manner.  (In fact, this may be the problem with the film --  it's so tastefully reticent that it never gains much emotional force.)  The middle-aged woman at the graveside wants Mose to take Addie to her aunt in St. Joseph, Missouri -- they are somewhere in the middle of Kansas -- and, in fact, accuses him of being her real father (based on the "jaw-line").  This becomes a motif in the film; Addie wonders which of her mother's admirers is her actual father -- she accuses Mose of having met her mother "in a barroom" as if this establishes his paternity.  Mose takes the child from the cemetery and confronts the man (or his father) who was involved in the accident that killed the woman.  He extorts $200 from the man and, then, plots to put Addie on a train to St. Joseph.  But Addie has heard that Mose settled her wrongful death case for $200 and demands that she be paid that money.  To placate the child, Mose says he'll take her by car to St. Joseph.  But, along the way, he needs to do some business, that is, run some cons to finance their trip.  (Mose's principal grift is to use the newspaper to identify local widows, go to their homes, and pretend to deliver specially customized -- that is, engraved -- Bibles to them.  The widows are flattered that their deceased husband had ordered a Bible in their name, although, of course, this is a fraud, and are willing to pay ten bucks or so for the scriptures.)  Addie is no fool and she quickly grasps that the "widow" grift can be exploited for better pay -- it just depends on how wealthy the widow shows herself to be -- and she masters the art of conning these grief-stricken women, jacking up the price in cases in which wealth is apparent.  Conversely, Addie has a conscience and won't implement the grift on widows with many children living in poverty.  (A lot of people are living in apparent poverty in this film set during the heart of the Great Depression).  Addie masters some of Mose's other cons, including some elaborate techniques to short-change hapless small-town merchants and, with her assistance, the two make a lot of money.  Addie keeps the ill-gotten loot in a cigar box and manages the pair's business accounts.  Pretty soon, the objective of getting Addie back to St. Joe is forgotten as the pair travel about the dusty midwest cheating people.  Mose is not too bright.  At a county fair, he picks up another hooker, Trixie Delight (played by Madeline Kahn); she's working at a sideshow as a hootchy-cooch dancer, the "Harem Slave".  Trixie has a thirteen year old maid, a much-bullied Black girl, and the two women become participants in Mose's travels.  Mose is enamored with Trixie and loses all perspective on their more profitable criminal activities.  So Addie and the Black girl conspire to get a smarmy, grinning hotel desk clerk in bed with Trixie  -- the man flashes a grill of buck-teeth that make him look like a rodent.  Mose is outraged when he catches them in flagrante delicti  and abandons Trixie and her maid (Addie has given the girl thirty dollars to get back to her people in the South).  A few months pass.  Mose observes a bootlegger working out of a small-town hotel and contrives to sell the crook's own whiskey to him for $625, a king's ransom at the time.  Unfortunately, the bootlegger is in cahoots with the county sheriff (his brother) and the cops arrest Mose and Addie.  They escape and Bogdanovich stages a superbly crafted and very thrilling chase scene.  Mose has to swap out cars to continue his escape and this leads to a farcical "wrassling" match with a very young Randy Quaid as a malign hillbilly.  (Mose cheats of course).  Mose and Addie get across the bridge into Missouri but the Kansas sheriff and his deputy pursue them in a free-lance capacity and deliver a beating to Mose (taking all their money for a good measure.)  Mose deposits Addie with her officious and kind aunt in St. Joe.  But, like Huckleberry Finn, Addie can't be tamed and isn't suited for a domestic life -- she rejoins Mose and, presumably, their adventures will continue as they "light out for the territories".  The final shot embodies the film's sophisticated sensibility but, also, its alienating effects.  Addie joyously climbs into Mose's rattle-trap truck and they roll down a hill, driving toward a vast deserted landscape where the road runs out ahead of them to the grim and dusty horizon.  The shot signifies freedom.  But it's also a "freedom that's just another word for nothin' left to lose" in the words of a song of the era.  The viewer's response to the "happy ending", accordingly, is complex with existentialist undertones -- what's ahead of the two grifters seems to be just an endless desert.

The movie is brilliantly shot by Laszlo Kovacs.  Much of the footage has a documentary appearance; it looks like images by Walker Evans.  (The movie was made at Hays, Kansas and St. Joseph, Missouri -- the latter place is a dying provincial city full of marble banks but with completely empty streets; this is where Mose literally runs into a dead end.)  The smaller parts are all pitch-perfect, cast with faces that will be familiar to someone of my generation -- although I couldn't identify any of these folks by name.  Madeline Kahn is excellent as the somewhat forlorn hooker -- she says at one point that she just wants to get her (famous) "tits in the front seat of the car."  She has a great scene with Addie in which she admits that she's always been, more or less, disposable and that the girl should tolerate her because, soon enough, she'll be abandoned.  The sorrowful little Black servant is very good -- she didn't have a career really after this movie.  Addie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a misnomer because she's actually the star of the film.  She plays most of the picture with an impenetrable and obdurate scowl on her face, but there are wonderful sequences in which she behaves like a little girl, including a fine scene in which she looks at a picture of her mother and imitates some of the dead woman's mannerisms.  (She also smokes incessantly and turns out to be more corrupt and avaricious than Mose.)  The picture is slightly too austere and uncompromising to be wholly successful.  But, there's no doubt that it's a highly consequential movie, an excellent film that misses greatness by just the smallest of margins.  

 

El Conde

 Netflix marketing for its new (2023)horror feature, El Conde (The Count) implies that the movie is a stylish and kinky vampire comedy.  This is misleading.  El Conde is a plunge into human and metaphysical depravity, a relentless study in evil that is somewhat like a grotesque hybrid of Ari Aster's Hereditary and Succession.  I enjoyed the picture and recommend it cautiously, but must admit that I didn't understand many of the film's references to Chile's lamentable history during the past half-century.  To fully enjoy the movie, you will need a primer on Allende, the Pinochet regime as well as its aftermath, and, even, a little background on the Falklands War. (As an example, a scene in which someone spits on the plexi-glass shielding Pinochet's corpse when it lies in state refers to a celebrated event that Chileans would recall but which will mean little or nothing to North American viewers of the film.) The movie is funny in an abstract and highly conceptual manner, but you aren't going to be laughing at loud at any of the horrors depicted.  Pablo Larrain, the director, is an important figure in contemporary film and he specializes in picture's with a symbolic structure that allegorize political subjects -- the best predicter of whether you will like this picture will be your response to Larrain's films about women entrapped by intricate webs of protocol and obligation, that is, Spencer about Lady Di or Jackie (on the subject of Jackie Kennedy's response to her husband's assassination).  Both of those films are austere, stylized, fantastically glamorous in the sort of heroin-chic style of Vogue, and, ultimately, trembling on the edge of becoming  full-blown horror films. El Conde that imagines General Augusto Pinochet as an immortal reactionary vampire, of course, crosses the threshold into the horror genre.  

From the very outset, Larrain's film is remote, cold, and alienating.  An Englishwoman with a plummy accent narrates the picture -- she sounds a bit like an old-time BBC "presenter", over-annunciating and straining for picturesque verbal effects.  It's unclear why a British politician or BBC personality is narrating the film but, for the first fifteen minutes, her voice predominates, setting up the grotesque situation that the movie will explore.  Pinochet, late the dictator of Chile, has faked his own death (he can't die except by violence -- a stake to the heart), and, so, he is able to become comatose, go into a deep sleep, and, later, revive near Puntas Arenas on the southern tip of Chili in a frigid landscape of barren fjord-like lakes and blasted heath.  (He seems to reside in a compound of buildings that were once a station for raising and shearing sheep -- it's a grim-looking collection of rotting structures equipped with a guillotine silhouetted against the foreboding skies.  The place reminds me of the decomposing collective farm in Bela Tar's Satantango)  Sometimes, the melancholy dictator flies through the air to Santiago where he engages in some desultory murders.  He bites through people's throats so that they can't scream, roots around in their thorax for their hearts which he then grinds of up in a blender with vodka like some sort of perverse "smoothie" -- this is an example of the film's humor, the vampire making heart-flesh smoothies in his blender, but it's not a concept like.y to have you splitting your sides with laughter.  The movie is shot in luminous black and white and it looks great:  brooding landscapes that always seem crepuscular and dimly,lit Santiago with its abstract flares of light, the elderly protagonists in the movie shown in unflattering and cadaverous close-ups -- the movie gives off a very palpable chill.  The vampire Pinochet has been around since before the French Revolution and, unlike the monsters in many horror films, has a sort of gruesome psychology:  he has a kind of mother-complex, and is obsessed with the execution of Marie Antoinette which he witnessed at first-hand (he licked the guillotine blade after the headless corpse was carted off); he is proud and mourns the fact that his bust has never been installed in Chile's presidential complex -- he visits the place from time to time to inspect the premises to see if he has been accorded this honor and, when he discovers that his image is not there, he morosely stands amidst the other sculptures to complete the array of the presidential heads.  Pinochet is very touchy about being called a thief, although his regime was a kleptocracy on a grand scale, he would much rather be remembered as a sadistic killer than as a thief.  Pinochet's wife, Lucia, not yet a vampire, is an aging venal whore; she is having an affair, apparently condoned by the boss, with Fyodor, a White Russian torturer who is the Count's sidekick -- he's an unpleasant fellow who is condemned to eat only animal excrement when he's not brewing up heart-muscle smoothies.  Into this hideous melange comes Pinochet's five children, all of them aging crooks.  (Some of them have been imprisoned for theft and corruption and they sometimes whine about being persecuted by "Leftist" judges and courts.)  Pinochet has forgotten where all of his ill-gotten gains are stashed -- he has a house in Aspen, Colorado, money in off-shore accounts, and Panamanian bank deposits.  The siblings who want to cash in on Pinochet's immense wealth have hired a very religious young woman as an accountant.  She comes to sheepfold in Puntas Arenas to ferret out the secret records in subterranean caches (where the Count keeps frozen hearts for his sustenance) to marshal the old villain's assets.  Pinochet is tired of immortality and desires death and has prepared a Will giving half his fortune to his nasty brood and half to his elderly whore wife.  Everyone is plotting to kill off the old dictator and, possibly, Lucia as well.  The accountant is actually a vampire-killing nun (a "nun-exorcist" -- who would have thought such things existed?) and she has been trained by the Holy Mother Church to gain the confidence of the vampire and, then, slay him.  (It seems that the nuns in her convent encourage her to have sex with the monster in order to gain access to the records necessary to account for his fortune.)  The curious thing about the movie is that the depravity is all out in the open.  The kids know the nun-accountant is trying to kill their dad which is okay with them.  They cooperate closely with her in her bookkeeping enterprise because they stand to profit from the endeavor.  Pinochet also grasps that the nun is trying to betray and kill him, but he plots to have sex with her and corrupt the woman.  Lucia is playing all sides off one another and, of course, the kids would like to see her out of the way.  There are some lengthy very dialogue-heavy scenes that document Pinochet's rapacious kleptomania -- probably, these scenes are meaningful to a well-informed Chilean viewer but they were very hard for me to follow.  Ultimately, the nun has sex with Pinochet and becomes a vampire herself.  Fyodor, the Russian sadist, bites Lucia and she becomes a vampire also.  (Spoilers will now follow.)  It turns out that the unholy alliance between the Catholic church and Pinochet has turned sour.  The Catholic Church has sent the nun-accountant to learn the whereabouts of Pinochet's wealth so that it can expropriate it.  The British narrator is revealed to be a famous UK politician who has to fly from her haunts in London to seize control of the deteriorating circumstances in Puntas Arenas.  It turns out that Pinochet's wealth has been converted to rare books (Darwin's diary, a manuscript of Hitler's Mein Kampf and so on).  Pinochet and Lucia slaughter Fyodor.  The nun engages in a bizarre sex scene and some cos-play with Pinochet.  She learns to fly and starts murdering people.  The nun acts the part of Marie Antoinette and gets hauled to the guillotine in a little wooden cart by Fyodor  She's beheaded after a series of shots in which Larrain poses her like Falconetti in Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc -- the nun is unconventionally attractive with a close-cropped head, a huge nose, and stern, angular features.  A phalanx of Catholic nuns reaches the sheep-shearing station too late -- Pinochet's wretched brood has uprooted everything that can be stolen and has departed on a boat, called the "Ark", for town.  Pinochet and the Englishwoman who is also a vampire eat the hearts of Fyodor, the nun, and Lucia who has also been killed.  This rejuvenates them and Pinochet, at the end of the movie, is a mere lad, about ten years old.  With the attractive Englishwoman, who turns out to be his mother, he is delivered to a nice private school.  (The last thirty seconds of the film are shot in glowing color.)  The Englishwoman, who has been narrating the entire film, provides us with a final voice-over that will give you a clue to her identity:  she says "If you want something said, get a man; if you want something done, get a woman to do it."  

El Conde's excellent photography is by Edward Lachmann, one of Hollywood's best cameramen. The film's dialogue is extremely ornate and has some elements of the Spanish style of Gongora.  Everyone speaks in poetic rhetoric.  The characters are all wholly vicious to the point of being demons and goblins.  No one expresses the slightest regret over the atrocities committed under Pinochet's rule and, indeed, the characters seem to recall those events with pride and pleasure.  The Catholic church turns out to be an institution as foul as Pinochet's death squads; all of the murders and torture are squalid and seem to be entirely incidental to Pinochet's real motive which is always to steal as much as he can.  There are obvious symbolic implications to imagining reactionary anti-Communist politicians as parasitical vampires, but Larrain isn't really interested in that aspect of the political allegory.  The evil in the movie is not social or political but radically metaphysical -- the world is haunted by corrupt murderous thieves.  There's a lot of gory murder scenes in the movie but they are somewhat abstract since the film is shot in reticent black and white.  Some sequences are astonishingly poetic and beautiful -- a scene in which the nun first flies wildly over the desolate landscape near Puntas Arenas and, then, gradually learns to control her body is gorgeous and unlike anything I've ever seen.  In fact, the special effects that simulate flight in this movie are extraordinarily convincing and lyrical.  At the end of her maiden flight, the nun is performing dainty ballet pirouettes and capers in the frigid air.  The sound track is also extraordinary and surprising -- there's an aria from Henry Purcell's King Arthur called "Cold" that is fantastically effective in context, and other musical cues by Vivaldi, Faure, and Arvo Part, among others.  Early in the picture, we hear Strauss' jaunty Radetzky March to underline the imperial aspirations of the vampires and the film ends on that note.  In one scene, the vampire and his whore-wife dance to a merry little tune played by a platoon of soldiers who strut and march like miniature figures in a music box -- are they zombies of some sort?  There's a funny scene about crimes committed in broad daylight that is redolent, in a way, of the depredations of the Trump era:  the military nationalizes a bankrupt factory and sells it to one of Pinochet's kids for a pittance; three years later, the same bankrupt factory in the same condition is bought back by the military (the placing having never been operated) for three million dollars.  Someone remarks this wasn't much profit.  But, the awful thing, is that no one even tried to conceal the theft.  The final "reveal" as to the identity of our female narrator is a little underwhelming -- it's as if George Bush (the second) were revealed to be the vampire's grandfather.  The concept is funny but a cheap shot and ridiculous as well.  

Invaders from Mars (1953 and 1986)

 William Cameron Menzies directed two pictures, Things to Come in 1936 and Invaders from Mars (released in 1953).  At first blush, one might characterize this filmography under the rubric:  "Oh, how the mighty are fallen!"  Things to Come was a British big-budget prestige film, written by no less than H. G. Wells and starring such worthies as Raymond Massey and Ralph Richardson.  Invaders from Mars is a micro-budget exploitation picture, made with unknown actors (some of them like Leif Erickson and Milburn Scott migrated to TV in the next decade), only 79 minutes long that features men in green suits running along tunnels decorated with inflated condoms.  But Things to Come is preachy, inert, and over-designed; by contrast, Invaders from Mars is a surrealist masterpiece, a bizarre film maudit that once seen can never be forgotten.  No one has shown any inclination to remake the turgid Things to Come; in 1986, Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) adapted the original script from 1953 into a reasonably amusing new version.  Hooper's version is 96 minutes long and, if you are inclined, you can watch the two films as a double creature feature.

Menzies was primarily a set designer and very accomplished at that work.  He managed sets for many silent films in his native England and, then, moving to Hollywood worked on sets for many very expensive pictures, including, it seems, Gone with the Wind, Hitchcock's Spellbound (he re-shot the surrealist dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali) and other pictures.  Menzie's sets for Invaders from Mars are brilliant and memorable and achieved with no money at all -- indeed, the austerity of the design accounts for much of the film's appeal:  in a nightmare, there are various salient elements and everything else is a luminous sinister void.  Since Invaders turns out to be nightmare, Menzies' glowing, empty sets are perfect for the film.  

A ten year old boy, David, lives what seems to be an idyllic existence with his father and mother in a house that is weirdly situated under a huge dune of sand.  The sandhill, at first, appears at night like a conical bluff with a large patch of what seems to be glowing white snow forming a crescent on its slopes.  An eerie looking trail lined by barren, twisted trees and an old fence runs along the crest of the hill toward the place where the heath has fallen away to reveal the gleaming bone-white sand underneath the grass.  (The expressionistic shots of the trail with trees and fence are clearly studio-bound and redolent of Max Klinger's engravings, particularly one that shows a dead woman sprawled alongside a fence line on a trial next to a row of desolate trees.)  During a thunderstorm, David thinks that he sees a flying saucer land in the sand and, then, burrow under it.  He runs to his parents in terror and they assuage his fears.  (David's mother is weirdly wearing make-up in bed -- she has ruby-red lipstick on her mouth and eye-shadow and a complex hairdo that seems glued in place.)  Dad is some kind of scientist who works at a top-secret military base a few miles away.  Comes the dawn and Dad, who has been inexplicably wandering around outside, appears in the door as a lobotomized brutish zombie.  He strikes David when he asks where he has been.  (No one seems to regard Dad's violence as anything too abnormal -- this was the fifties when fathers ruled the roost and their mercurial moods had to be accepted like the weather, something to which you had to adapt but about which no one could do anything.)  Dad swills boiling hot coffee as if it were cold water and, then, threatening everyone to keep quiet stalks away.  David sees a little girl who lives nearby seeming to dive into the sand pit.  The film's surreal narrative doesn't explain the identity of the child when we first see her -- in the distance, a figure just drops into the sand.  Only later do we discover that this child is the daughter of the research director at the secret military complex where David's dad works.  The little girl appears lobotomized as well and sets her house afire.  David has noticed that Dad, and, then, Mom, and Kathy, the little girl, all have bright red x-shaped wounds on the back of necks, right at the base of the skull.  David goes to the cops but the Chief of Police has become a zombie as well.  The child is thrown in a typical 1950's film noir jail cell, all criss-crossing shadows of bars cast on the boy's face and body.  A kindly female doctor, made up with ruby-red lips and wearing a huge abstract and scarlet boutonniere (she's an eerie clone of Mom who is now running around knocking people out) interviews David and immediately believes his story.  She helps him escape the malign zombie authorities and they go on the run.  Meanwhile Kathy, the little girl has mysteriously dropped dead -- in the autopsy, Dr. Blake, the lady-doctor who is assisting David, discovers that a steel needle with a kind of tiny bomb at its tip has been inserted into the child, controlling her and, later, destroying her brain when she is no longer needed.  David and Dr. Blake have sought the assistance of another scientist, an astronomer who explains that the secret military facility is developing a missile with a nuclear warhead and that the Martians, a race of aliens who live underground since the surface of their planet is dead, are alarmed.  The Martians have sent a flying saucer to destroy the earthling's nuke.  In order to accomplish this task, the Martians have evolved "mew taunts" with the accent on the second syllable -- these are green giants with slit-eyed green masks working as "slaves" for the "ultimate human intelligence", a creature that turns out to be a bronze mask in a huge green light bulb with some weird tentacle-like appendages, also made of sculpted bronze on both sides of the monster's immobile face.  (This artifact is one of the great designs in cinema history, beautiful, comical, and strangely frightening -- the monster can't express anything because, after all, his burnished face is made of bronze and so he simply moves his eyes rapidly to the right and left, peering out of the corner of his eyes since he's got no neck and can't otherwise move the elegant metal mask of his face.)  With dreamlike efficiency, the military is convinced by this weird, and improbable, story that the nuclear base is under attack.  The army deploys a thousand tanks to the site and, inexplicably, begins to shell some part of the terrain that has nothing to do with the monsters.  (I think this is to distract the critters in their condom-lined underground tunnels).  The soldiers dig into the Martian's (except they aren't Martians but "mew-taunt" humans) anthill.  People get sucked into the white sand, slipping underground in funnel-shaped vortices and David with Dr. Blake end up underground.  Dr. Blake, who faints at the sight of the "mew-taunts" is poised on a transparent operating table and a spinning drill-bit with the mind-controlling needle is poised to penetrate the woman's neck.  In the nick of time, the Marines battle the "mew-taunts" who are repeatedly shone loping through the tunnels.  The sides of the tunnels are covered with vaguely breast-shaped orbs (these are the condoms) -- this is supposed to simulate bubbles of glass formed when the monsters drilled out their passages using an infra-red heat ray, but the grape-like shapes dangling everywhere look like testicles or the breasts of the mother-goddess Artemis of Ephesus.  The green giants get machine-gunned but they fight back with their brilliantly red glowing ray guns.  A bomb is set to detonate.  Dr. Blake is rescued just before the needle goes into her first cervical vertebrate and a huge explosion blows the monsters up.  David then wakes up to find that he is returned from Oz -- it was just a nightmare caused by the thunderstorm of the night before and his precocious interest in astronomy.  But, then, he sees the flying saucer again lurking in the sky.

A bare account of the plot, which makes no sense, doesn't convey the luminous strangeness of this film.  Poverty results in many of the sets, particularly the police station and observatory, as being pale glowing voids in which a couple of outsized props are installed -- the station has two night-court pillar-like lamps, for instance, a surrealistically tall desk and nothing else.  The film is shot in over-saturated, unreal and vibrant colors -- the blood-red ray guns melt red holes in the sand, the women have blood-red lips extravagantly painted, the green monsters are bathed in emerald radiance and the bronze brain glows with supernatural burnished amber light.  As Dr. Blake lies unconscious on the operating table, her hand is open under her face like a lily and the sinister drill approaches in a beam of brilliant violet light.  Although the movie is only 79 minutes long, it seems immensely padded with repetitive shots that don't really match the rest of the film.  For instance, the deployment of the army tanks seems to be shown in some kind of army training footage with dozens of vehicles rambling along dirt roads with the film manipulated into greyish day-for-night -- the soundtrack plays jaunty variations on "'The Caissons keep Rolling Along" and the scenes go on for minutes at a time, showing us nothing of any significance.  There's a huge bombardment, also shown in military stock footage, with big explosions but it has nothing to do with the movie.  When David and Dr. Blake go to the man of science to complain about the strange events, the huge astronomical observatory is shown slowly rotating and opening its doors, a long sequence of repetitive shots, and, at last, the telescope isn't raised to the heavens but lowered to the horizon to show the rocket with the nukes that the Martians are trying to disable.  The acting is terrible which contributes to the sinister dream-like effect.  Everything is overwhelmed by Menzies' astonishing sets which are made from cellophane, inflated condoms, and swaths of weirdly glowing light.  Scenes of vehicles racing here and there are cut with mismatched shots -- the cars turn left but are, then, seen  roaring off in the opposite direction.  (It turns out that these effects were achieved by optical printing that just reverses the direction of the motion -- this accounts for the nightmarish sense of a terrain that makes no sense at all; similarly, the effects of the space ship eating its way into the melting sand were achieved by pushing the space-ship model up out of the sand and, then, printing the footage in reverse.)  The film is one of those pictures that truly deserves the description "marvelous."  

Tobe Hooper's remake is campy, but expensively made with impressive special effects.  It's not a work of genius like Menzies' hallucinated film, but okay and it holds the viewers attention.  By contrast with the 1953 version, Hooper favors "jump scares" -- that is, shots in which something startles the viewer -- and he inserts one of these shocks into the film at about five minute intervals. (Most of the jump-scares are pointless, but there is one truly frightening image involving Louise Fletcher that is memorably alarming.)  Hooper's adapts the 1953 script without much variation from the original.  Instead of the sojourn with the police and the zombie police chief, the ten-year old boy. here also called "David Gardner", is persecuted at Menzies Elementary School where his teacher (played by Louise Fletcher) is conducting "frog week" -- this involves dissecting apparently living frogs.  Louise Fletcher is a mind-controlled zombie with a bandage on the back of her neck and, when she gets hungry, she munches on frogs, swallowing them whole.  Fletcher's zombie teacher knows that David is aware of the Martian's scheme to destroy NASA's rocket ship and, so, she relentlessly pursues the lad.  The role of the kindly Dr. Blake is assigned to the School Nurse, here played by Karen Black in a bizarre part in which she seems to regard the ten-year old boy as her romantic partner -- he defends and protects her (she's prone to hysteria), not vice-versa.  Instead of the sandpit, there's an open pit copper mine behind David's  house and the aliens are powering their laser guns with copper wire.  All of the explanation as to the Martian's motives (and the stuff about "mew-taunt" humans) is eliminated.  The "supreme human intelligence" (that is, the bronze head with tentacle shoulders) is relegated to the boiler room of the Menzies Elementary School, glimpsed among disused relics of old school plays and pageants.  There's a cigar-chomping Marine who proclaims that the Marine's aren't afraid to kick Martian ass and some firefights in the Martian's underground sanctuary beneath the sands of the nearby open-pit copper mine.  Dan O'Bannon was recruited to tinker with the script (he was one of the creator's of Ridley Scott's blockbuster hit, Alien) and he supplies some interesting creature effects.  Gone are the men in bulky green giant suits -- here the aliens reside in the skeletal chambers of a subterranean space ship; the interior of the place is full of xylophone-like stairs that seem to be made of some keratinous material and fluted gristle columns.  The monsters are weirdly endearing -- they look like critters imagined by Maurice Sendak (for instance, in Where the Wild things are):  they're toothy hippos that are sometimes bipedal and, other times. roaming around like bison on all four legs; the tooth-monsters who always seem to be grinning, carry eye-ball shaped ray guns that also dispense a brilliant red-light and melt through the rock to create bore-holes.  The leader of the Martians is a small football-sized talking hemorrhoid who, of course, lives in a sphincter and moves around on the tip of cartilagenous tongue that is about twenty feet long.  Explosive charges are set in the Martian's space-ship with a timer poised to detonate the bombs in five minutes (it was six minutes in Menzies' version) and everyone has to hurry to get out of harm's way.  

Hooper didn't know whether to play the movie for comedy or horror (all the jump-scares) or suspense and so the tone of the pictures is all over the map.  O'Bannon clearly admires Menzies and tries to one-up the master set decorator with his effects -- and O'Bannon's sets and creature design are probably the best thing in the movie; the film retains a couple of shots of the ghostly trail with the fences along the trees that was prominent in 1953 film.  Hooper's movie doesn't provide much explanation for the events underway, but, somehow, seems far more prosaic and less surreal than Menzies picture.  In fact, where Menzies' movie seems like the progenitor of a long line of future pictures (most notably Invasion of the Body Snatchers in both 1956 and 1976 versions); Hooper's picture is self-consciously decadent -- it comes at the end of this line of movies and has no recourse but to make fun of what preceded it.  Menzies' picture redeemed its trash origins and ridiculous plot; Hooper's strategy is to make fun of its origins and to ignore the plot entirely substituting lurid special effects for narrative.  (Bazookas, for instance, blast tooth-monsters and spray their entrails all over everything.)  But Hooper's film is an estimable effort:  a major actor of the era, Timothy Bottoms, plays David's dad and Larraine Newman of Saturday Night Live is cast as mom -- this strange choice is motivated by the fact that Larraine Newman is famous for playing the "Cone-heads" in the sketch comedy show and, several times, she reverts to her monotone "Cone-head" voice to create sinister, if funny, effects.  Karen Black as the school nurse seems always on the verge having sex with the adorable David (Hunter Carson famous from Wender's Paris, Texas released two years earlier).  Menzies' film created the conventions used in innumerable other movies of this genre; Hooper simply winks at you, utilizing those conventions for kitsch effects.

I must have seen the original Invaders from Mars when I was about six or seven.  The movie has haunted my imagination all my life, particularly the scenes involving the drill-bit embedding needles into the flesh of the victims of the mew-taunts.  (However, until I watched the movie last night, I didn't recall what it was named.)  I saw the movie on TV and in black-and-white.  So I would have missed the effect of spectacular technicolor.  But the picture would have scared the hell out of me.  Contemporary critics remarked that the movie seemed to be made for children but was much too scary for them.

Spencer

Pablo Larrain's 2021 Spencer is a gloomy bio-pic chronicling three days in the life of Diana, the Princess of Wales, espoused to Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.  (Spencer was Diana's maiden name.)  The film is set over a the period between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day in December 1991, that is about six years before Diana's death in 1997.)  The film's opening titles tells us that the movie is a "A Fable from a True Tragedy".  The term "tragedy" is appropriate in this context:  tragedies involve people of elevated stature whose sufferings are exemplary in some larger scheme of things.  Often, the protagonists in tragedies are kings and queens and, of course, Diana holds this status in the film. Literary critics will remind you that the genre of tragedy involves a high or lofty style and that events are depicted in a solemn and dignified manner.  This is true, perhaps to an excessive level, of Larrain's Spencer -- the movie is resolutely humorless and morose.  Further, the picture is exquisitely shot in a languorous style on bleached 16 mm footage -- the movie's images seem grainy, as if a pervasive winter mist envelopes all of the principals and the dim, low-wattage landscapes through which they move.  Sometimes, the movie's stylized camerawork, with its morbid-looking symmetries and motionless armies of retainers and lackeys looks a bit like Last Year in Marienbad.  There are swooning tracking shots along grey canals and through ornamental gardens and, of course, the camera glides through the halls of Sandingham House, the royal residence where the Queen and her family are gathered to celebrate Christmas.  The interiors of the vast palace are shot like the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's The Shining and much of the movie resembles that picture, a high-toned and deliberately paced horror movie.  As the film progresses, Diana becomes increasingly alienated and, in the words of one of the lackeys, seems about to "crack up" -- she's severely bulimic and retreats to the marble and lustrous tiled toilets to make herself vomit out the nauseatingly rich food served to the royals by a literal army of servants.  (In an early scene, we see military men in a convoy carrying huge ammunition boxes into the draughty palace; when the soldiers open the ammo boxes, they are shown to be full of creams, lobsters, bloody cuts of beef and the like.)  Apparently, Diana has been confronted with her husband's infidelity and someone has helpfully put a book about the unfortunate Anne Boleyn at bedside in the chambers to which Diana retreats to sleep.  In English history, there are precedents for  how discarded wives are treated -- this seems to be the message embodied in the book and, lest we miss the point, one of the rooms in the residence is adorned with a huge portrait of Henry VIII (a copy of the famous Hans Holbein painting showing the massive King standing with legs boldly spread in his full royal regalia).  Diana has only one friend in this whole ghastly haunted house; this is her lady-in-waiting and royal Dresser, Maggie.  But the other Royals seem intent on gaslighting Diana into full-blown madness and so Maggie, the Princess' confidante is sent back to London.  Diana's psychological well-being deteriorates and she begins cutting herself, ripping out a chunk of her bicep with some frightening wire-cutters that she wields (the Royals have decreed that Diana's windows be sewn shut so that she will not display herself there to press photographers with telephoto lenses) -- Diana cuts apart the curtains to let in the light of day.  Later, she uses the same wire-cutters to breach a barb-wire fence around her father's manorial house -- it turns out that the Spencer family estate is located about 250 yards from Sandingham House.  

The film has little in the way of a plot.  Rather, it's a psychological tone-poem, a poetic revery on loneliness, alienation, and increasing madness -- as the movie progresses, Diana sees the ghost of Anne Boleyn and begins to talk to her.  After being inexplicably lost (she was raised in this part of Norfolk), Diana shows up late to the family Christmas festivities.  She's stalked by the Queen's Equerry, Major Gregory, a retired member of the Black Watch played effectively by the opaque and saturnine Timothy Spall.  It's not clear whether Major Gregory, an army veteran of the troubles in Northern Ireland, is sympathetic to the doomed princess or part of the scheme to gaslight her into insanity.  (He seems to have placed the monitory volume about Anne Boleyn on her bedside table.)  There are several sumptuous meals served -- a sole note of humor arises here in that Major Gregory announces the menus at these feasts, food featuring "organic" and "locally sourced" fruits, creams, and vegetables.  On Christmas Day, the Royals go to church where services are attended by Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles' mistress, an encounter that sends poor Diana more around the bend.  The cadaverous and brutally arrogant Prince Charles taunts Diana about her bulimia and plots to indoctrinate his two sons (Harry and Charles) into the rite of shotgunning pheasants as they are driven out of the wintry woods by a horde of lackeys.  (It's not really hunting but some kind of perverse target shooting and Prince Charles admits that he didn't like the exercise when he was young, but it's one of those things that Royals have to do; a shot early in the movie shows us a pheasant as road kill with a convey of military lorries driving over it; the birds are bred to be slaughtered in the "hunt" and these scenes in the film are redolent of the rabbit massacre in Renoir's Rules of the Game).  Concerned about Diana's fragile mental health, Maggie is summoned back to Sandingham House. She and Diana abscond to the sea coast for a brief respite from the insufferable royals and, on the tidal flats, Maggie confesses that she is in love with the Princess.  This cheers up our heroine to the point that she can mount a tentative rebellion against the overbearing House of Windsor.  She invades the pheasant massacre, takes custody of her two boys by charging directly into the line of fire, and flees to London.  In the city, she orders some Kentucky Fried Chicken, giving her name as "Spencer" to the fast food jockeys, and, with her boys, chows down on the KFC on the banks of the Thames.  

The movie is rigidly designed to make its points through symbolic apparatus.  Stated bluntly, everything in the movie is symbolic or some kind of metaphor.  The problem with the film is that the stakes are too low to support the cumbersome, if effective, machinery of symbolism deployed here.  And the symbols are, unfortunately, blindingly obvious, superficial and trite.  Consider, for instance, the opening pre-title sequence:  Diana is alone in an expensive sports car and lost.  This episode is wholly implausible but, of course, makes an important point about the protagonist's mental state:  it's not clear though why she is allowed to travel without guard or escort (is British security really so lax?) and how she could possibly be lost in her familiar childhood haunts only a few yards, it seems, from the manor where she was raised as a girl?  (The car that she drives is necessary for the film's denouement.)  She retrieves her father's coat from a scarecrow and, then, has  conversations with the highly freighted and symbolically charged garment.  Charles has given her a pearl necklace identical to a necklace sported by Camilla and the "choker" becomes a literal leash by which she is bound.  (In a fantasy sequence, she swallows pearls and, later, when she goes to her father's abandoned estate next door to Sandingham House, she rips the necklace off to establish her liberation from the Windsors.) The Royals, who are chilly people, keep the palace freezing cold; the poor pheasants stand in for miserable Diana.  Fried chicken contrasts with the luxurious victuals served in the palace and so on.  It would be tedious to enumerate the entire symbolic structure of the film but, in fact, this is more or less the only structure apparent.  There are other weaknesses in the movie:  the scenes on the beach romping with Maggie are a time-worn and kitschy cliche; and the whole notion of the poor little rich girl with middle-class tastes (she likes The Phantom of the Opera and pop tunes) seems glaringly inauthentic and contrived; if I'm not mistaken, Princess Diana came from one of the wealthiest families, themselves peers of the realm, in the United Kingdom, and her protestations of middle class values are a little like Clarence Thomas declaring himself happiest in Walmart parking lots, that is,a completely specious and inauthentic claim.  Whatever you think of Meghan Markel, Princess Diana was nothing like Prince Harry's really middle-class consort.  But it's a beautiful movie, with gorgeous visuals and a swooning movie style, and Kirsten Stewart as Princess Diana is apparently pitch-perfect in the part.  There is a stunning shot of her sprawled on the floor in front of a toilet into which she is disgorging her most recent royal feast and her white gown is spread out on the floor so that Diana looks like a spectacular fallen flower.  And the Royals aren't so bad:  someone says that they spend their time drinking and chortling about scandals amidst family and friends and it's only when Diana enters the room that the fun all stops.  From the film's mise-en-scene, this seems probable.     

Dark Command

 Two drifters, a frontier dentist and his sidekick, a big handsome lug, slip into Lawrence, Kansas.  It's a few months before the Civil War and the townspeople are divided between supporters of the slave-owning South and the abolitionist North.  Politics doesn't concern our two protagonists.  Their grift is to stir up brawls in which the big thug damages people's teeth with his fists.  This creates a market for the dentist's services.  Raul Walsh directs Dark Command (1940) in his typically nonchalant, casually cruel style -- a lot of the comedy in the first reel arises from people's pain as the dentist yanks out their teeth with a greasy-looking pliers.  The big lug, played by a doe-eyed John Wayne, complains that Kansas is unimpressive and not at all like Texas from which he hails and that he wants to lay his eyes on the mountains of the golden West.  But, then, he gets a look at Mary McCloud, Lawrence's resident beauty and the spoiled daughter of the local banker, and decides that there are attractions in Kansas worth attending to.  Wayne's Texas cowboy, called Bob Seton in this movie, immediately proposes to Mary.  Of course, as a self-respecting frontier belle, she rejects him.  Indeed, she's betrothed to the town schoolmaster, Mr. Cantrill, a handsome brutish fellow with a sleek, waxy handlebar moustache  Bob Seton, who is illiterate, decides to remain in town, even after his partner, the much older Dr. Grunch, the dentist, has exhausted most of Lawrence's possibilities with respect to pulling teeth, the only therapy he can provide except for some desultory tonsorial work.  There have been breaches of the peace in town and the place needs some law enforcement and the sheriff's job is vacant.  Bob takes lessons from Cantrill who teaches him some rudimentary reading and writing.  Then, he and Cantrill square-off in the election for Sheriff.  Cantrill, an eloquent fellow, preaches to the crowd that he will apply the laws of the territory as written and bring order to the place.  Bob's pitch is less subtle:  he says that too much law hampers law enforcement and though he can't spell too well, he can "smell out cattle rustlers" and, instead of applying the law, will enforce swift frontier justice on malefactors.  It's the perennial duel in American politics between the subtle literate sophisticate who promises competency and adherence to statute and the rough-and-tumble gunman ("Dirty" Harry, for instance) who promises to exterminate the bad guys.  Needless to say, John Wayne's Bob Seton wins the election.  Cantrill vows revenge to his dour housekeeper who turns out to be his mother and, surprisingly, she says that she's had three sons turn to outlawry and that, if her last boy, schoolteacher Cantrill becomes a criminal, she'll gun him down herself.  It's to no avail; hellbent on revenge Cantrill rides out of town, assembles a private army, and begins pillaging and looting across the Kansas-Missouri border.  Cantrill doesn't care about the rift between North and South; first, he impersonates a figure like John Brown,  liberates some slaves, but, then, sells them to buyers in Missouri. (("You can get killed running slaves like that John Brown feller",he proclaims.) Then, he has his men don some captured Confederate uniforms (the War between the States is now in progress) and, in that guise, continues to pillage the villages along the border.  Historically minded viewers will grasp that the story is a heavily fictionalized account of Quantrill's raiders and their depredations in Kansas, inexorably leading to the savage guerilla assault on Lawrence.

Walsh's movie is well-written and packed with violent action and the meandering plot takes some interesting twists and turns.  The film was Republic Picture's biggest budgeted movie and didn't do well at the box office (I think the plot is too complex and politically problematic) -- Republic owned Roy Rogers and the actor plays an interesting character, Banker McCloud's son, a dandy impersonating a cowpoke and Rogers, who often seemed to have minimal acting chops, does a good job with the part.  The film didn't really please anyone and bankrupted Republic, a studio that specialized in low rent Westerns.  Dark Command is full of ambushes, gun battles and wild horse chases with, at least, two spectacularly dangerous stunts and it features an army of cavalry, in fact, several armies.  Although the picture uses montage sequences with crowd shots seemingly lifted from other movies, it's still an impressively ambitious production and some of the action sequences are pretty thrilling.  The film is notably ambivalent about the Civil War.  The viewer's first impulse is to ascribe the movie's equivocating stance on the War between the States as a cynical attempt to curry favor with both North and South -- after all, Republic wanted to sell tickets in Boston and Atlanta as well.  But, on closer inspection, the ambiguities are pretty much baked into the narrative and, I think, reflect some legitimate quandaries arising in this historical context.  After all, the War was a Civil War, pitting brother against brother, and the movie perceives the situation in terms of a domestic, even bourgeois, family conflict in which kinfolk find themselves on opposite sides of various battle-lines.  For instance, Mary McCloud's father, the town banker, is apparently sending money (or so it is alleged) to the South to support the Confederacy -- although this may just be a malicious rumor.  This starts a run on McCloud's bank, a near-riot that is stanched by Bob Seton, the Texas cowboy's, intervention.  John Wayne's character is caught in the middle in various ways -- his politics are never articulated, an ambiguity that arises from the character's near illiteracy and apolitical disposition.  Bob courts Mary, who is Cantrill's fiance (an alliance that the old banker strongly endorses since Cantrill is ambitious and a man of some means).  Mary's brother, Fletch (played by Roy Rogers) is a would-be Southern cavalier, although this is merely one of the greenhorn's affectations, and, when he gets in a brawl with a Northern sympathizer.  Fletch impulsively guns the man down.  Bob has to arrest Fletch, who idolizes him as a real cowboy, and puts him in jail pending trial.  Mary offers herself to Bob if he will release Fletch and let him escape.  But Bob, who loves Mary, does his duty and rejects her blandishments.  This results in a trial in which the silver-tongued Cantrill persuades the jury (who have been intimidated and terrorized as well) to acquit Fletch, even though the man is guilty of the homicide.  (In the midst of the trial, word arrives that the South had seceded and that there is War, but Bob Seton keeps the information to himself to assure that Fletch gets a fair trial -- in fact, the trial is only notionally fair because Cantrill's closing argument is nothing more than a naked appeal to pity.  The film understands that in situations of this sort there are winners and losers and, throughout the movie, the murdered man's widow keeps popping up demanding vengeance for her husband's death.  Everyone is tangled up in complex webs of loyalty and betrayal.  Fletch joins Cantrill's raiders and becomes an outlaw.  When her father is killed, Mary makes a marriage with Cantrill, although immediately after the ceremony, the guerilla chieftain departs for the field where his marauders are burning towns and stealing everything that can be looted.  (When Mary comes to Cantrill's sordid guerilla camp -- everyone drunk with prostitutes brawling -- her husband gives her a whole box of pillaged finery:  brooches, rings, and necklaces thieved from murdered townsfolk.)  Bob Seton is captured after a bloody ambush, but Cantrill in an elaborate display of courtesy offers him wine and dinner with Mary (while plotting to have him killed).  Bob escapes with Fletch who is badly wounded -- it's the second of two chases in which a hundred mounted guerillas pursue a wildly careening wagon from which Bob and Fletch gun down the pursuers with unerring accuracy.  At the climax, the film cuts between three opposing forces:  a local militia affiliated with the North rides to the rescue of Lawrence, Kansas; the townsfolk in Lawrence erect barricades and herd their women and children into a church preparing to defend the town; and Cantrill's raiders in a force of several hundred riders storm across the dark prairie toward the town.  All of this is effectively staged with the action funneling down to the deceased banker's ornate mansion in Lawrence where Mary's two suitors, Bob and Cantrill, converge for a final duel while Dr. Grunch, the corrupt dentist, undertakes surgery on the unconscious Fletch to extract a bullet that is, apparently, killing him.  There's war in the streets with the townsfolk fighting with Cantrill's raiders and the town is set afire -- flames surge out of all the buildings as Lawrence is reduced to ashes.  True to her word, Cantrill's ferocious mother (Marjorie Main) tries to kill her reprobate son; she gets shot down but Cantrill is also killed by Bob.  Fletch comes to, surprisingly cheerful for all the mayhem surrounding him, and cites Shakespeare:  "All's well that end's well" but there have been a thousand casualties and Bob Seton has never heard of a guy named Shakespeare:  Was he from Texas?  The movie is notable for two stunts devised by Second-Unit Director Yakima Canutt.  In the first, a wagon chased by an army of cavalry lunges off a rock cliff plunging about fifty feet into a lake, a spectacular shot showing the poor horses falling head first into the water as the men drop through space and the wagon explodes on impact.  During the fight in Lawrence, Bob gets between two horses, drops down onto the ground, and gets dragged under a wagon through the battle lines -- another spectacular and obviously dangerous stunt.  

The movie has a blithe, rambunctious surface and, like many Hollywood productions of its time (and today for that matter), the narrative reduces serious political issues to a romantic rivalry between two robust and aggressive leading men.  But the picture has dark undertones.  Fletch is acquitted due to Cantrill's nihilistic eloquence, but, also, because the raider has bullwhipped jurors and told them that their families will be murdered if Fletch is convicted.  So Fletch's weird jollity at the end of the movie rings more than a big hollow.  Killing on a mass scale requires lots of capital -- hence, the central role of the banker in the film.  War breeds outlaws.  The principled dispute between North and South, exhibited in a montage in the opening scenes, has spawned a pure predator, Cantrill -- a man who exploits the chaos of war for his own grim benefit.  Local politicians are cowardly.  The Banker wants to play both sides against the middle and is killed as a result of his machinations.  At the climax, Cantrill's own mother aims a shot gun at her son, calls him a devil and says something like:  "I guess I birthed a snake."  Walsh's direction is eerily without affect.  It just takes all of this in stride.  The Civil War is embodied in violent, even homicidal, conflicts within the family.  This is one of those movies that is better that it seems -- individual sequences feel flat, sometimes, even inert, but the movie's cumulative effect is bigger than the sum of its parts.