The Kid Who Would Be King

I went to the movie at the Cineplex.  The audience was elderly -- that is, my age.  I wondered why a half-dozen old couples (a big crowd in  Austin) were plunking down good money to see a British film for children.  After interminable ads and coming attractions for sex-murder movies -- odd I thought for a movie for kids -- the film started with glossy second-unit images of flowers in idyllic meadows.  These are the kind of bland eye-candy images that seem untouched by human hands.  I was surprised to see that the British film was produced by Malpaso -- I thought that was Clint Eastwood's production company.  The close-ups of flowers continued, now showing potted plants in what seemed to be a greenhouse.  An old man was working with the flowers.  To my surprise, it was Clint Eastwood.  Inadvertently, I had wandered into his film The Mule .  Alarmed, I jumped out of my seat, spilled some popcorn, and, then, hurried into the adjacent theater.  The screen showed a dark and stormy night and a boy lying atop a pile of brown dirt.   The kid stood up, approached a boulder in the center of the construction site in which a gleaming sword was inserted.  The boy, a plump happy-looking kid, pulled the sword from the stone to portentous music and a light show.  I was in the right theater watching The Kid who would be King (2019), a reimagining of the Arthurian legends set in modern-day post-Brexit England,

The Kid who would be King is targeted to young teens and it is overtly didactic.  Here are the lessons that the movie teaches:

1.  Virtue is not related to wealth or prestige or power:  it is an innate to one's character;

2.  Evil divides, goodness unites;

3.  Always tell the truth;

4.  Be courageous;

5.  Persevere in doing good;

6.  If Evil seems to win the day, do not despair -- the arc of the universe is toward righteousness and justice.

The film teaches other lessons as well, some of which I seem to have forgotten.  These lessons are worthy of being learned and should be held close to the heart for the entirety of your life.  Thus, the movie is worthy in its own right and appealing.  It's also a little bit too long and like many super-hero films has not one but two climaxes when one climax, in fact, would suffice. 

A 12-year old named Alexander goes to a private school called Dungate.  His father is absent, living supposedly in Tintagel.  The boy's mother has told him that Alexander's father "had to fight his demons."  Alexander thinks this is literal -- that is, his father was some kind of goblin-slayer.  (In fact, she means the Alexander's father was a irredeemable alcoholic.)  Alexander finds the sword in the stone, pulls it forth with no difficulty, and, then, reads a book that his father gave him before he vanished -- the tale of King Arthur.  The boy finds solace in the story and, with his friend, sets off on a quest to save Britain from the gathering forces of darkness:  these forces are both literal (an oncoming eclipse) and figurative -- that is, the current epidemic of political cruelty, greed, and intolerance.  Morgana le Fay imprisoned by roots underground unleashes hordes of demons on horseback to harry the boy and his fellow knights, Sir Kay and Sir Lancelot (both of them slightly older kids).  The round-table knights are multi-ethnic and courageous.   They penetrate in Morgana's underground inferno (she's trapped beneath Glastonbury Abbey) and ostensibly destroy her -- this is the first climax.  But she's only wounded and she reappears to lay siege of Dungate School.  Alexander knights his classmates and an apocalyptic battle occurs in the darkness of the solar eclipse.  The final battle is well-staged and the action sequences make sense -- they are choreographed so that you can see what is happening and ingeniously designed.  Indeed, the second climax's climax, the duel of Morgan le Fay who has a become a huge fire-belching dragon with a skeletal face curiously similar to the elderly Clint Eastwood, is quite exciting and, on its own terms, plausible.  England is saved and the sword Excalibur returned to the Lady of the Lake.  In an early sequence, Merlin played by a kid with preternaturally long neck (he looks like one of Pontormo's Madonnas) urges Alexander and his chum to go to a fried chicken place on Boorman lane.  This is homage to John Boorman's wonderful film Excalibur which this movie resembles and, in fact, replicates shot by shot in the final sequence in which the magic sword is returned to the Lady of the Lake and the vasty deep.  You should know that Sir Ian McClellan plays Merlin as a old wizard -- it's a reprise of his role as Gandalf, and imitates Nicol Williamson in Boorman's film, but it's always good to see the old fellow on screen. The Kid who would be King is pretty good and moving in the simplicity of the lessons that it teaches.  It's not wholly successful, but is clever, fairly funny, and means well.  There are many films released about which you can not say as much. 

Lured

Raised on TV, I grew up with Lucille Ball -- until I was 25, one of more of her television shows was in constant re-run rotation.  Lucy's persona was well-established:  she was a wacky, feckless redhead, unsuccessful in love and constantly at war with the physical world around her.  The actress was a rara avis --a female slapstick comedian as well as probably the inventor of the modern sitcom.  (She pioneered the techniques of recording shows before live studio audiences, using multi-camera systems designed by the great German expressionist photographer, Karl Freund.)  The past always presents itself as fait accompli -- that is, gradual revelation of things that are preordained.  But, in fact, no one, including herself, knew that Lucille Ball would be come one of the most powerful and, even, feared businesswomen in Hollywood and that Desilu productions would establish norms for TV comedy that are still relevant today.  Douglas Sirk's 1947 thriller Lured is a reminder that things might have taken a completely different direction for his leading actress:  in the mid-forties, Lucille Ball was improbably beautiful, a "stunner" as the pre-raphaelites would have said, and, indeed, similar in appearance to Dante Gabriel Rosetti's muse, Elizabeth Siddal:  porcelain skin with flaming red hair.  (Sirk is shooting in black-and-white but has characters refer to Lucy's hair-color at least four or five times:  at one point, there is a close-up of a metro police identification cart -- she is working as a "female detective' -- that trumpets that her hair-color is "red".)  Lucy's red hair, pale skin, and enormous eyes suggested that she should be cast as a victim, someone always about to raped or strangled and, in fact, Sirk uses her this way in Lured.  But the actress' toughness and independence is also evident -- Lucy is a pre-Raphaelite Madonna with a big mouth, a line of cynical patter, and a world-weary vein of tough-talking cynicism.

Lucy is named Sandra in Lured and she plays a taxi-dancer marooned in a seedy London ballroom.  The customers openly solicit the women and fight over them and the girls are proudly disdainful of their pathetic patrons.  When one of the girls is killed answering a personal ad, Lucy, who was friends with the murdered woman, is recruited by the police to act as lure, bait for the psycho-killer.  The murderer taunts the police with poems based on the form and rhymes used by Baudelaire in Flowers of Evil.  The film had trouble getting approved by the Hay's Code censors and, in fact, the first half of the picture is memorably kinky.  Sandra responds to a number of salacious advertisements, putting herself in harm's way, while an older undercover cop (Charles Coburn) sneaks around the margins of the frame spying on her.  Even her audition for the part of detective is sexually suggestive -- the chief of police makes her close her eyes and, then, describe him "with complete frankness".  Sandra is used to ploys like this and, when she closes her eyes, she says something like "So now it comes" -- expecting, of course, the inevitable grope and kiss.  There's a sexual charge to Sandra's walk on the wild side and, in fact, she almost gets recruited into white slavery and shipped to South America.  These episodes don't go anywhere but they end with a bizarre confrontation with the cadaverous Boris Karloff playing a fashion-designer gone wholly berserk -- it's like a nightmare version of The Phantom Thread and one wonders whether the equally cadaverous Donald Day Lewis studied Karloff's performance in Lured.  The fashion-designer, driven mad by the plagiarism of his patterns by a competitor, forces Sandra into a stiff evening gown and, then, makes her strut in front of an audience of empty chairs, one ancient bull dog, and nonchalant-looking mannequin.  One of Sandra's wooers is a nightclub owner played with icy insolence by George Sanders.  This character answer the phone and sets up trysts with other women while embracing his current mistress -- he declares himself "an unmitigated cad."  After the buzz of its kinky first half, Lured peters out.  The mystery has to be solved and Sandra's romance with George Sanders develops into a problematic love story that leaves the viewer baffled.  Leo Rosten's script (a lifetime later he became famous for the best-seller The Joy of Yiddish)  is ornate with many flourishes and highly literate, but the pace slows with the love story and massive amounts of misdirection that Sirk has to introduce into the film's last hour primarily because the audience knows the identity of the killer at midway without any doubt.  It's always disappointing when a crime film takes forty minutes to solve a mystery that the audience has already figured-out.  Sirk gets distracted by décor:  the night club is filled with weird phallic curlicues and odd-looking pillars surmounted by lyres, smashed Corinthian capitols, and stucco antlers.  Sirk was a highly cultured man and he inserts a concert sequence involving Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony."  There are gorgeous images of London after midnight, wet cobblestones, and, during the first ten minutes, such a plethora of cleverly deployed shadows that I suspect that Sirk's intent was to parody German and film noir expressionism.  The film's problematic ending shows Sandra about to marry Sanders' night-club entrepreneur.  But Sanders is such a thoroughly unregenerate character that we really can't regard the ending as a happy one.  It's as if the snowy-complected red-head were to marry some kind of Latin-American lothario -- also, I remind, you affiliated with night clubs, perhaps, even the director of a Cuban dance band.  (Sanders is Desi Arnez with a British accent; Desi Arnez is Sanders with a Cuban accent.) 

Sometimes a Great Notion

Coastal Oregon in Paul Newman's 1971 movie adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey's immense Faulkner-haunted novel, is a clean, well-lighted place, mostly sunny and clear.  The interiors of the Gothic house where the incestuous hard-nosed Stamper clan live under old Henry's ferocious patriarchy are similarly clearly lit, tidy and neat.  A sympathetic viewer readily understands this betrayal of the generally soggy and murky milieu so carefully established by Kesey's prose:  Newman has a lot of star power in this movies and audiences are paying to see his stars in action, not their shadows and profiles dimly limned in the mist and drizzle.  Newman himself plays Hank Stamper, the psychotically stubborn leader of a group of "Gyppo" loggers (most of them family members) still cutting trees notwithstanding a union strike that has put all of their neighbors out of work.  Hank's father, Old Henry (Henry Fonda) bellows commands and obscenities at this sons and cackles demonically when the boys pitch dynamite at a union rep come to negotiate with the family.  Lee Remick as Viv, Hank's neglected wife, quietly smolders.  Richard Jaeckel plays the part of the religious cousin, Joby, Hank's lieutenant in the logging business.  And Michael Sarrazin, eyes like huge poached eggs, mutters and snarls as Lee, the family's prodigal son, returned from the East after a comically failed suicide attempt -- Lee's mother has just killed herself by jumping out a window:  she was old Henry's second, much younger, wife who left the Stamper domain twelve years earlier, after a love affair with her step-son, the fourteen-year old Hank.  At first, Lee's appearance on the scene is fortuitous -- unlike the novel, he doesn't seem to have any clear plan.  But as the film progresses, conflict arises between Hank and Lee:  although this is pretty much submerged in the movie, Lee plans to return the compliment to Hank:  Hank slept with Lee's mother and Lee plans to sleep with Viv, Hank's wife. 

The film's script is ingenious and irritating -- clocking in at a taut 115 minutes (in my version the novel runs well over 700 pages), the film perforce leaves out most of the minor characters in the book and retains just the skeleton of the plot.  Just as the point when you feel compelled to "call out" some major deviation from Kesey's book, however, the film will suddenly adhere very closely to its source.  An good example occurs in the film's last minutes.  After an awful logging accident wipes out half the family, Hank sits in stubborn, picturesque isolation in his empty house.  Newman shows us several shots of the hero brooding and alone.  (Newman is at the height of his male beauty in this film.)  This is false to the novel -- in Kesey's book, set in 1961, everyone watches TV all the time;  in that regard, at least, the novel is realistic. (Even an old Indian living in a mud hut somewhere in the mountains is described as watching Have Gun Will Travel.  After the big calamity at the river, Hank is oddly passive, becalmed and watching Thanksgiving football on TV.)  Just as the point when the admirer of the novel decides to declare this inaccuracy, the film provides a shot of Newman, still brooding, but with a Tv screen flickering behind him.   This is an example of the backhanded, sometimes even half covert way, that the film references Kesey's book.  The novel's central theme, the incest between step-son and step-mother, is suppressed but, I think, more realistically managed than in the novel -- the book suggests that the 14 year old Hank is somehow the aggressor in the love affair.  Newman's approach is better:  he makes a point that the hyper-masculine Kesey avoids:  Hank says about the love affair:  "I was 14 and she was 30.  Who was banging who?"

Sometimes a Great Notion is, in effect, war novel -- instead of battles, we are shown raw combat between the Stamper clan and the forests that they cut down.  (Kesey often uses military jargon to describe logging operations.)  Accordingly, in the movie, logging sequences are the equivalent of battle scenes -- they are the fulcrum of action that tests the characters and upon which the plot hinges.  And Newman's portrayal of logging in the Pacific Northwest is wonderfully palpable, violent, and suitably spectacular -- we see vast clear cuts with enormous logs scattered at the bottom of deep, steep ravines.  Hank climbs a tree and tops it to set up a spar or central anchor for the operation -- we see him above the forests and when the top thirty feet of the tree falls down, the huge trunk tries to shake him off like a dog shaking off water.  Logs slip out of harnesses and topple like avalanches down hillsides and the climactic accident is truly horrific -- you may not be able to watch some of this without closing your eyes.  Among the clandestine admirers of logging porn, this film has a high, if secret, reputation -- apparently, when the film was released, people didn't much like it, although the picture was a big hit with lumbermen.  The sequences involving logging are wonderfully vivid and visceral and, in some respects, the screenplay improves on the novel by eliminating distractions and contriving a climax that is both pictorially impressive and better than the novel's ending in some ways.  (However, we are cheated out of the big fist fight between Hank and Lee that ends the book -- but Newman's final sequence is better, if more obvious, than the unresolved conclusion of the novel.)  The movie doesn't feel true to Kesey because it lacks the book's half-random sprawl, its choruses of minor characters, and the prevailing mood of squalid foggy and rainy despair.  Like many adaptation of well-known literary works, the movie occupies unstable terrain -- it's not exactly the like the novel and, in fact, deviates in many ways from Kesey's plot (the book's central symbol of the voracious Wakonda Auge river ripping up the foundation for the Stamper home is completely omitted).  But the movie doesn't stand on its own two feet either.  Adaptation of novels is tricky -- the most successful novel adaptation, Coppola's The Godfather basically required about five hours of screen time.  The viewer's interest in this film will depend upon how much manly activity a viewer can stand -- Newman's "soldier males" are literally armored against the world:  old Hank wears a body-cast and, as soon as he doffs that protective armor, he is literally ripped limb from limb.  The female roles are underwritten to the point of non-existence and a third of the movie is battle scenes -- albeit between man and nature.  The film's existentialism is direct and brutal -- there is no meaning in life but struggle and the struggle is ultimately completely futile and totally destructive.  Old Henry says:  "You're born, you eat, you fight, you shit, you keep on going on -- that's all there is."  The family's motto is "Never Give an Inch" and their banner is a severed arm giving the finger to the world -- an image much better deployed in the movie than in the book.  As a corrective to all this logging porn, I recommend several viewings of Monty Python's "lumberman's song"  -- "I'm a lumberman and I'm okay". 

The Ernie Kovacs Show

In January 2019, Turner  Classic Movies aired several episodes of The  Ernie Kovacs Show, sketch comedy that clearly influenced later shows such as Saturday Night Live and, most directly, Monty Python's Flying Circus.  The two programs that I saw were originally broadcast on ABC in the Fall of 1961 and January 1962, sponsored by Dutch Masters' cigars.  (The black and white video is hazy, as if the scenes were filmed underwater or through a dense haze of cigar smoke.)  Watching these programs as an old man, I am engaging in an archaeological excavation of my childhood.  My father admired Ernie Kovacs and thought that he was a great artist -- my father was a great aficionado of all things TV.  Growing up in the early1950's, TV was the medium of the future for my father's generation -- he liked movies but always suspected that they were a little antiquated:  for him, the box in the living room was the harbinger of great things, the first truly democratic medium, Shakespeare and Matisse for the middle-class.  I probably sat on the floor at my father's feet and watched these programs when they were brand-new, but, of course, my memory of originally seeing these 27 minutes shows is forever lost.  (I would have been six years old.)  Rather, my recollection of these programs is remote and second-hand:  clearly I am remembering a memory of a memory.  From time to time during my adolescence, the Kovacs' shows resurfaced as curiosities, memoirs of the early days of TV and, when these programs were re-broadcast, I believe I saw them, again with my father, and, perhaps, this stirred memories of my first, and childish, memories of these shows.  Like Laurel and Hardy, the Kovacs' shows inspired some sort of holy awe and terror in me.  Seeing Laurel and Hardy on TV from time to time, I find it hard to reconstruct what originally frightened me about those programs -- most recently, I think I have maintained it was probably my identification of Oliver Hardy with my father, the great lawgiver and disciplinarian.  The basis for my fear of the Kovacs' shows is much easier to ascertain.  The programs are, in fact, objectively horrifying.  Most of the skits performed by Kovacs' company are silent, often accompanied by voices singing in a foreign language -- I now know the signature piece is "Mackie Messer" or "Mack the Knife" sung is shrill, harsh German.  (To add to the viewer's disorientation, an oscilloscope wave-form translating the music into an abstract, wobbly white line is often shown in the black-outs between sketches or running along the inky bottom of the frame.)  Kovacs' stock-in-trade is masks, ridiculously flimsy cardboard sets, tiny apertures through which action is filmed, and nightmarish camera angles.  His repertoire company are also masked, although without the benefit of actually pulling anything over their features -- the actors are so utterly impassive, indeed, even catatonic, that they make Buster Keaton look histrionic.  When the actors are not staring blandly into the camera, lit starkly and in huge unflattering close-ups, they mug obscenely.  (The procession of big ugly close-ups sometimes resembles images in a Guy Madden film.)  It's bizarre and many of the images are truly remarkable but it isn't exactly funny -- rather it is a brand of surreal analysis, a kind of meta-critique of TV and its discontents, that is startling, absurd, and grotesque.  In one sequence, Kovacs analyzes TV westerns, beginning with iterations of gunfights that become increasingly weird -- at first, the gunfights, each about five seconds long, are merely filmed from strange camera angles, but, then, the imagery becomes increasingly delirious -- we see shoot-outs on Mars, shoot-outs involving Bavarian cowboys, and, finally, a shoot-out involving a colossal cowboy and his tiny adversary. By the end of the sketch, bullet holes shot through the characters frame the gunmen.  Then, at last, we see a gunslinger on an analyst's couch.  The psychiatrist, who speaks with heavy Viennese accent, interrogates the gunfighter.  The gunfighter says:  "Every one ordered me around -- it was always 'Slim slop the hogs' or 'Slim break those broncos' or 'Slim get on the posse and hunt the bad guys."  The shrink asks:  "So you felt people were dominating you?"  "Yes," the gunfighter says, "And my name isn't even 'Slim' -- it's Sam."  The show is packed with nightmarish effects:  a spidery hand playing ragtime piano is multiplied into dozens of shadowy beasts with five fingers.  Masks are pulled off to reveal other masks.  The zombie-like Nairobi Trio plays a jazz tune -- the musician are robot gorillas, often filmed in scary close-ups:  at the chorus of each tune, the drummer rotates to rap out a tattoo on the head of the central ape.  We see the ape's hideous face contorted in rage.  The skits fly by at high speed and many of them are hard to understand -- I didn't get the point of about a fourth of the sketches.  There are arcane jokes:  a Teutonic version of a cowboy show is called Der Einsam Aufseher -- a  phrase I didn't recognize until the familiar overture to William Tell translated for me:  "the lone Ranger."  In a strangely prescient image, Kovacs chomps on his cigar and mourns the fact that he has four Tv sets but only three networks -- in those days, having two TV sets was an astonishing luxury.  People are always being mangled or horribly injured:  a little man (he looks a bit like Laugh-In's Henry Gibson) approaches Kovacs wearing a grotesque mask.  Kovacs cuts off his head and is shown turning a drill embedded in the little man's skull so that his mask rotates like a  rotisserie chicken.  In the next scene, Kovacs sticks a tee in a reclining woman's mouth, sets his golf ball there and swings -- we hear a sickening thud.  Even Kovacs pastoral imagery is peculiar and disquieting:  one episode, scored to Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite follows a single drop of rain down from the stormy skies into a stream presided over by curiously robotic automaton animals, then, descending over a waterfall, through a hydroelectric turbine, into a pipe, then, a tea pot, then, rising as steam, but falling again into the tea pot to be poured into a drain.  The drop of water then goes underground into an elaborate mock-up of a plumbing system directly beneath a sidewalk on which we see people's legs and ankles passing by, some of them hopping along, others dragging their feet as if marching to their own doom.  At last the little droplet emerges into the stream where it is pecked-up by a bird that flies up into the sky returning to the initial panorama of grandiose clouds.  One sequence shows a poet drawling with a pronounced southern accent -- the poet recites two of his poems which are total gibberish and, then, laughs serenely at his own wit:  I don't know who is being spoofed here, but the sketch is quietly lethal.  Next, we see an abstract artist who happens to be a rural farm house-wife -- she crows about killing 85 pigs just before the interview.  She points to one portrait of a favorite pig -- it's a triangle and rectangle and oval shape all intersecting:  "I painted this a couple years ago," she says, "of course, he looks quite different now."  Next, we see an artist who seems to be imitating Henry Moore -- he's stuck through a doughnut hole in his sculpture.  "You seem to like holes," the interlocutor says.  "No," the artist replies in a Parisian accent, "this is obviously a mistake you fool."  Like Monty Python, the skits sometimes connect to one another:  in one episode, a mad doctor has miniaturized a motorcycle:  only he can see it.  When he touches the palm of Kovacs' hand, the motorcycle starts up and shoots off onto the floor where it zips away.  At the end of the episode, we see the mad scientist creeping about the ground looking for the lost motorcycle which he can hear but not see -- he searches the floor of a house, then, a bar, then, crawls along a sidewalk outside (it's the set with plumbing mock-up below), and, then, is flailing about on the bottom of the sea.  In the last shot, the scientist is wearing a space-suit and staggering across the plains of Mars in search of the motorcycle.

Casting an eerie light over the shows is the fact that the last program, the one featuring the life of the water droplet, was broadcast posthumously. Ten days before ABC aired the show, Kovacs was killed in a car wreck while returning from the christening of Milton Berle's child -- it was January 23,1962 and Kovacs' 43rd birthday.

BLACKkKLANSMAN

Spike Lee's 2018 BlackkKlansman is an angry refutation to President Trump's remarks on civil disorder in Charlottesville, Virginia.  As everyone recalls, Trump proposed a false equivalence between the neo-Nazi demonstrators and ANTIFA-dominated counter-demonstrators, telling the world that "there were very fine people" on both sides.  (His remarks would have been better phrased as "there were violent thugs on both sides.")  Spike Lee's movie is a categorical rejection of the concept that there were "fine people" protesting within the White Supremicist ranks, but he proceeds, as did Trump, by creating a rhetorical system that compares the two opposing groups, drawing, indeed, some equivalences.  For instance, both groups have fiery speakers, are totally segregated by race, and indulge in violent rhetoric -- both have a tendency to raise their arms or fists in the air and are obsessed with ancient grievances.  These comparisons exist however to be invidious to the Klansmen:  the Black activists are all handsome, well-groomed, stylishly dressed, intelligent, and, even, excellent dancers -- the Klansmen are scrawny rednecks or plump, slack-jawed cretins, wearing dirty and offensively-labeled tee-shirts, and all of them are morons.  It's Spike's movie and all of this is, perhaps, fair and, maybe, even, realistic.  But would it offend Lee's sensibilities if one of the feckless rednecks could dance a little.? The Black activists are lead by beautiful young women (no sexism here); the White Supremicists are verbally abusive to their women and the one wife who is allowed a speaking role is overweight and dressed in frumpy clothing.  (We have reached a level of polarization in this country that compels even reasonable-minded people to deny even a shred of humanity to their enemies.  One brilliant writer that I know has publicly decreed that Republicans can't dance -- first, because they are physically uncouth and lacking in grace, and secondarily, because no one in his, or her, right mind would dance with such bigoted  louts.  This seems to be carrying a grudge a little too far.)  These reservations aside BlackkKlansman is an exuberant polemic, filled with interesting expressionistic underlining to points already shouted to the audience both loudly and clearly.  Lee has always been an excellent filmmaker and he, generally, makes movies that turn out better than his rather cartoonish political themes might suggest.  He gets good performances, stages scenes effectively, and, for better or worse, his political agenda is clear, undisguised and lucidly presented -- you know what he's getting at, he makes his points effectively, and you can take it or leave it as you are inclined.  BlackkKlansman  is interesting, has an excellent (if somewhat chaotic) ending, and in an era of political despair leaves its audience optimistic and reinvigorated.

The vehicle for Lee's political and social screed is a peculiar but true story -- Lee inserts a title to the effect that this "crazy shit" is "sho nuff" true.  A Black man named Ron Stallworth applies for work with the Colorado Springs police force.  He is warned that he may suffer racists taunts from other cops and, indeed, some of the police persecute him.  But, by and large, he is treated reasonably and, in fact, recognizing his intelligence, he is assigned undercover work.  His first assignment is covering a rally in which a Black activist, Kwame Ture, the man formerly named Stokely Carmichael, speaks to the college Black Student Union.  At the rally, Stallworthy meets a beautiful young activist and she supplies the romantic interest throughout the film -- Lee isn't really interested in the relationship and gives it short shrift on screen:  it's perfunctory, but does supply a damsel in distress subtext late in the film.  On a whim, Stallworthy calls the local Ku Klux Klan and volunteers himself for service.  To his surprise, the local Klan is enthusiastic and encourages him to join.  (Stallworthy has inadvertently given his real name.)  The police force, happy to infiltrate the Klan, conscripts a Jewish cop, Philip "Flip" Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to impersonate Stallworthy.  Flip goes to Klan meetings and is a big hit with the bigots -- notwithstanding his somewhat Semitic appearance, Flip impresses everyone with the vehemence of his hatred for niggers and kikes.  Hitler used to claim that he could smell a Jew and one of the yokels in the Klan seems to have this ability as well so that he immediately suspects that Flip is an informer.  There are some close-calls but, by and large, the charade is successful.  Ultimately, the hillbilly develops proof that Flip is an imposter.  David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the Klan has come to town, primarily, it seems to welcome Stallworthy into the ranks of the Invisible Empire.  The counter-protestors at the Student Union have invited Harry Belafonte to give a talk about lynching.  He provides a horrific account of a lynching, complete with poster-sized photographs, while the Klansmen, with Duke at their center, watch The Birth of a Nation and cheer for the on-screen hooded knights as they murder and terrorize Black people.  These two events are cross-cut and the action becomes increasingly delirious as the wife of one of the Klansmen attempts to plant a bomb, threatening Stallworthy's activist girlfriend.  Stallworthy thwarts the bombing and tackles the fat white woman carrying the C4 explosive.  But the local cops come to the woman's rescue, and, in an alarming scene, beat up Stallworthy.  Flip comes to Stallworthy's rescue.  There is a coda involving the arrest of the racist cop who has been tormenting Stallworthy.  Lee wants his audience to leave the audience electrified and, so, he saves his big effects for the finale -- there is a knock on the door and Stallworthy and his girlfriend with guns drawn advance down an expressionistically imagined corridor to a window through which they see a KKK cross burning.  The film, then, shows us the cross-burning and the Klansmen in rapturous positions raising their open arms to the flames.  Lee, then, cuts to the fighting between protesters at Charlottesville, shows Trump making his idiotic remarks, and, then, dedicates the film to Heather Heyer, the woman killed in that demonstration.  Throughout the film, Lee insists on the power of movies to make a difference -- if, as he correctly tells us, Griffith's Birth of a Nation, revived the moribund Klan in the twenties, then, so, he implies his film may be it's death knell.  The picture is stylishly directed and takes on the characteristics of an allegory or fable -- Harry Belafonte is very recognizably Harry Belafonte and his appearance in the movie establishes the sense that the issues addressed are timeless in American history:  racism always exists and is always more or less the same.  The dance scenes early in the movie are gratuitous to its point but they demonstrate the grace and athletic beauty of the Black people -- everything is shot in warm red light in a disco and the sequence is filmed in slow-motion at times:  it's an ecstatic account of community solidarity and the notion that "Black is Beautiful."  (Lee has previously dramatized this in a series of gorgeous portrait close-ups during speech at the Union.)  Lee isn't really interested in action and the car chases at the film's end seems merely obligatory.  He plays homage to the Blaxploitation films of the period -- the movie is set in 1971 on the basis of campaign posters for Nixon and Agnew that decorate the Klan meetings (some of Lee's points aren't too subtle.)  At the end of the movie, Stallworthy and his girlfriend are magically transformed into Black avengers, action heroes who are both armed as they glide surrealistically down the long hallway to the door overlooking the faraway cross-burning.  As with all of Lee's movies, the film has a majestic soundtrack by Terence Blanchard -- in one scene, we watch Klansmen blasting away at targets with their shotguns and 45s.  The scene is staged so that we never see what they are shooting.  After the Klansmen depart the firing range, Stallworthy appears in the autumnal forest.  The music swells to a powerful and grave threnody.  At last, we get the reverse shot:  the men have been shooting holes in silhouette pickaninnies mounted in a row against the golden and yellow trees:  the pickaninnies look like Kara Walker cut-outs and the music imparts a powerful sense of both sorrow and defiance to the image.   Lee ends the film with a ballad powerfully performed by the late, great Prince.  Although most of the film is political comedy, the movie also displays a powerful undercurrent of grief. 

Macao

After the debacle of His Kind of Woman (1951), RKO producer Howard Hughes lost interest in exploiting the on-screen chemistry between Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.  His Kind of Woman was over-budget, too long, and inadequately profitable.  Hughes had Joseph von Sternberg, the great director of films such as The Blue Angel and The Scarlet Empress, under contract for two pictures and so he cast Mitchum and Russell in a low-budget sub-B picture about criminals and gamblers in Macao, commissioned a largely incoherent script, and ordered von Sternberg to direct the film.  Von Sternberg's poetic style, moonbeams refracted through the shadow of Moorish filigree, clashed with the exuberant, cartoonish sexuality that the two leads projected and, apparently, the shoot was contentious and chaotic.  Von Sternberg had no facility for directing action (it is said that his greatest interest was showing wisps of shadow and light moving across a beautiful woman's face) and he botched the film's climactic fistfight.  Nick Ray was recruited to re-shoot the fisticuffs and other elements of the film that Hughes disliked.  Unfortunately, the film starred Gloria Graham in a secondary part -- Graham was Ray's wife at the time but they were involved in nasty court proceedings at the time:  Ray had caught his wife in bed with his 13 year old son, Tony.  (Tony Ray and Gloria Graham actually were married briefly during the early sixties.)  One can imagine the fireworks that this created between the alcoholic Ray and his equally alcoholic soon-to-be divorced wife. 

In some ways Macao (1952) is a reprise of His Kind of Women, featuring a good cast playing grifters and hoodlums in an exotic resort.  But whereas His Kind of Woman was long, Wagnerian in its aspirations, and wildly violent, Macao turned out to be understated, even vaguely listless, a short 80 minutes, and not particularly violent.  Both films feature yachts piloted by rich criminals, a motif for the yacht-loving Hughes at that time in his life.  In each film, there is an attempt to recreate the "lightning in a bottle" ambience of Michael Curtiz' Casablanca.  The film's are set in warm climates and everyone sweats profusely -- there are expressionistic sets meant to supply an exotic atmosphere on a low budget and the leading lady sings a couple songs to the raffish hoodlums gathered around her:  "all the usual suspects" are hanging around the gambling den and saloon.  In Macao, a pianist who looks like Diego Rivera, fat with bulging eyes and a limp, is called Gimpy and he tickles the ivories for effect -- he's like Sam in Casablanca. (The set for the gambling hell, two-tiered with people using baskets to fish collateral for gambling debts out of the lower level, is similar to more atmospheric set von Sternberg contrived The Shanghai Gesture in 1941). The film's plot has something to do with diamond smuggling although I didn't exactly follow the twists and turns in the story.  A bad guy is holed-up in Macao, running a gambler hell with his moll played by Gloria Graham.  Mitchum, a petty criminal on the lam, has trouble at customs -- in a shipboard encounter Jane Russell, playing a jaded adventuress and courtesan, has picked his pocket, taken the dough from his wallet, and cavalierly thrown wallet and ID into the sea.  The gangster, through a comically corrupt cop, gets Mitchum through customs and plans to use him as a mule to smuggle contraband (diamonds, I think) to Hong Kong.  The heavy-set William Bendix appears as another smuggler -- he's trafficking in nylon stockings (which gives Russell a chance to show off her below-the-waist assets) and, also, obscurely involved in the intrigue.  Bendix turns out to be a cop also sent to Macao undercover to lure the bad guy outside of the three-mile limit so he can be extradited to the U.S.  The gangster employs a couple of Chinese thugs skilled with throwing knives and they have already murdered a cop previously sent on this mission.  Mitchum woos Russell and they go on a sampan tour of the harbor in the moonlight.  This kind of scene is the sort of thing where von Sternberg could work his magic, but the budget was too low and the film doesn't even attempt a day-for-night ambience:  Russell and Mitchum are shot against unconvincing rear-projections of the daylight Hong Kong harbor.  Nonetheless, the chemistry between the two stars is real and they do manage a significant erotic charge in some of their scenes together.  Von Sternberg's talents are on display in only a couple of scenes:  there is a labyrinthine harbor set that is all floating flat-bedded boats, shadowy wharves, black water luminous with Hollywood light and everything draped in a dense,  picturesque spider-web of netting.  The set is like school-yard jungle gym -- it's got lots of opportunities for climbing and walking on narrow planks.  The whole thing is bathtub-sized and so the pursuit that von Sternberg stages in this little tangled landscape of bobbing boats, black water, obscure-looking pylons and shadowy wharves is convincingly nightmarish -- it's like one of those dreams in which you run and run and seem to get nowhere:  the set is so small that you have the sense of the characters spinning in circles as they hack their way through the dense, picturesque webbing of hanging nets.  In the end, one of the Chinese henchmen throws a knife that spears William Bendix (dressed in white suit and panama hat that is identical to Mitchum's get-up).  Bendix croaks out a few words exculpating Mitchum form minor crimes committed in New York and, then, dies.  The bad guy is readily seduced by Jane Russell to travel on his yacht too far out to sea.  The ending is anti-climactic with an imperfectly fierce fist-fight.  The cops catch the bad guy and Mitchum laconically notes that their undercover agent didn't make it, resulting in a comically nonchalant response from the police on their yacht.  You can't say that this movie is any good, although I know efforts have been made to rehabilitate it -- by any objective standard, the film is cheap and pretty wretched.  But it's oddly entertaining, moves along at good clip, and you get to see Jane Russell in her full glamor-girl regalia singing Harold Arlen's song,"Make it one for my baby (and one for the road").  There's also a nicely expressionistic stone stairway filmed from above that looks like something from a Max Reinhardt production, a nice solid if roughhewn set that stands in vivid contrast to the cardboard and shadows of the rest of the film.   

The Fly and The Return of the Fly

Kurt Neumann, an émigré from Hitler's Germany, directed The Fly (1958).  Neumann's first assignments in Hollywood were making German versions of American films for distribution in Europe -- he apprenticed as a sort of cinematic translator-copyist.  Neumann died of a heart attack a few weeks after The Fly was released -- the rumor-mill immediately produced gossip that he had committed suicide, unable to live with himself after perpetrating the horrors of The Fly.  And, in fact, The Fly is convincingly horrible in conception, an ingenious metamorphosis film that claws at the subconscious, much like some of Ovid's more garish tales.  The film is oddly inept, however, in its execution.  Nonetheless, it delivers one of the horror cinema's great shock sequences and, so, is memorable for about 15 seconds of its 80 minute length.


For some reason, The Fly is set in Francophone Montreal -- perhaps, this is a nod to the original short story published in Playboy and set in that place.  Dalambre played by Vincent Price gets a call that his brother has been killed by his wife.  Dalambre goes to the family factory that he managed with his brother and discovers a corpse with its right arm and head crushed into nothingness in a 50 ton industrial press.  The dead man's wife admits to the killing and seems weirdly elated, even nonchalant.  The only possible surmise is that she is insane.  The woman continuously asks how long flies live and seems obsessed with capturing a fly "with a white head and strange leg" -- her little son, Phillipp, has seen the creature buzzing about the garden.  The accused murderess is persuaded to tell her story and the film, then, proceeds in flashback.  The dead man in the power press was a great scientist.  Working in the basement of his suburban mansion, he invented a machine allowing for molecular teleportation -- the subject of the experiment is disintegrated into a stream of atoms and, then, reintegrated in a glassed-in cubicle a few feet away.  The scientist demonstrates this to his wife -- he teleports a piece of china successfully, but the words on the back ("Made in Japan") are mirror-reversed.  This alarms him and he scribbles more formulae on his blackboard and, even, makes calculations while attending the ballet. (We see part of the colorful ballet which seems a non sequitur nod to the wide-screen Technicolor format in which the film is shot.)  Dalambre corrects the problem and tries to teleport the family's cat -- this fails:  the cat meows sadly in the void but can't be found anywhere.  Next, he teleports successfully a guinea pig.  Of course, his last experiment, involving his own teleportation, goes horribly wrong.  A fly gets into the teleportation machine with him and he ends up getting his atoms scrambled with the bug.  Dalambre emerges from the machine with a fly's head and arm -- conversely, a fly equipped with his face and arm buzzes around the house.  Dalambre demands that his wife catch the fly on which his head is mounted, but the insect eludes capture.  Despairing, Dalambre gets his wife to crush his head and right arm in the industrial press.  After telling this story, the criminal inspector determines that the woman is, indeed, mad.  But while sitting in the garden, he hears a faint whisper:  "Help me!"  It's the fly with Dalambre's head crying out from a spider's web.  There's a shocking close-up of Dalambre's white, contorted face with red, weeping eyes, a close-up of the spider's jaws, and, then, the inspector, with Vincent Price watching, picks up a rock and smashes both spider and fly.  Vincent Price tells his nephew, Phillippe, a little boy that his father perished in the pursuit of truth and that "the search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous."  The little boy vows that he too will search for the truth -- a vow that sets up the sequel The Return of the Fly (1959).  In that successor exercise, Phillippe  grown to manhood tinkers with his father's teleportation equipment, now located in the family factory.  The feature of the machine that sometimes disintegrates forms into the void is used to "store" bodies as corpses pile-up (or would if they were not dematerialized) as a result of a dimwitted subplot involving spying and industrial espionage.  After some grotesque mash-ups (a guy ends up with hamster feet and hands), Phillippe enters the teleportation cubicle and gets hybridized with -- of course -- a fly.  As half-man and half-fly, Phillippe staggers around killing the bad guys responsible for his condition.  Ultimately, he returns home, the fly with his head and members is caught and, somehow, the hero is successfully reintegrated, emerging from the teleportation booth as a dapper, handsome young man.  (We don't see what happens to the fly).  There's yet another sequel (produced in 1965) that seems to have been a low-budget excuse to create half-man and half-animal monsters, a bit like the creatures on The Island of Dr. Moreau.  I haven't seen that picture.  David Cronenberg re-invented the concept twenty or so years later with his version starring Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum (as Brundlefly a homage to Phillippefly, as the monster is called in The Return of the Fly.)


Kurt Neumann's initial film is shot in extremely wide-screen cinemascope, a format that he doesn't know how to use and that results in two-thirds of the screen being crammed with distracting tchotchkes and knickknacks.  The 1958 Fly was relatively big-budget and, also, shot in Technicolor.  The film is odd in that it doesn't look anything like a horror movie -- it is all over-lit and pastel without any dark shadows or gloom.  Despite it's odd appearance, the first film is reasonably good -- it delays the entrance of its monster until about ten minutes before the close, a good strategy because a guy limping around with a rubber fly mask on his face is not exactly frightening and, indeed, more risible than horrifying.  Neumann's fly wears a floppy bag-like shawl over his head and fly-hand -- he looks like the elephant man in David Lynch's film and, until the reveal, he is actually pretty scary.  (We see him sucking up milk doctored with rum, head covered, apparently through his proboscis.)  The reveal is in the vein of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, the beautiful heroine snatches off the baggy covering over the monster's face and shrieks spectacularly -- in a moment of witty, pure genius, the film shows us the fly's point-of-view with the scream dissolved into a cloud of prismatic facets.  The scenes involving the industrial press are mismanaged -- we can't tell how the press works or what is happening.  The only part of the picture that is really frightening -- and this is genuinely nightmare-inducing -- is the short sequence where the tiny fly with a human face is menaced by the spider:  that part of the movie, although totally ridiculous, packs a punch that you can't shake.  Vincent Price is basically wasted in both films -- he's just someone to whom a story is told.  The heroine in the first movie, Patricia Owens, is scary-looking in her own right -- her eyes are so widely spaced that she seems somewhat grotesque herself.  The second film, made by a hack, Edward Bernds, is lower budget, shot in extremely wide format but, at least, in black-and-white.  During the opening scenes, involving the funeral of the Fly's wife (and Phillippe's mother), the movie looks like a horror film -- there are bolts of lightning in the sky and the rain pours down on the graveyard.  When Phillippe enters his father's dusty and smashed-up laboratory, the picture is reminiscent of the old Universal sequels -- for instance, the Bride of Frankenstein -- nicely atmospheric with menacing shadows.  But the picture is astonishingly dull and the rubber mask for the fly-monster is even more unconvincing than in the earlier picture -- the actor playing the monster has to stagger around under what seems to be an enormous weight of bulbous rubber.  His shadow shows his silhouette as a huge animate mushroom.  In the first film, the wealthy Dalambre brother played by art connoisseur Vincent Price has a Modigliani on his wall.  In the second film, the family seems to own a Renoir painting of a woman combing her hair. Like archy in the archy and mehitabel poems, the fly can't use the shift button on his typewriter and so he writes in all capitals (archy, the literate cockroach, I think, wrote in all lower case and without punctuation).  Vincent Price says in The Fly -- "we must act now before his mind is taken over by the murderous brain of the fly."  Although repulsive to me, I've never thought of flies as murderous.  Some of the gory Liebestod imagery of the Cronenberg re-make is faintly suggested by the fly's scribbling "I love you" in badly distorted handwriting on a blackboard before his wife takes him to the factory and the 50 ton press.   What are these late-fifties pictures about:  people have to sue heavy-duty radiation goggles to watch the teleportation which involves a flashing proto-computer display, reel-to-reel tape, and a brilliant burst of light.  One of the secondary actors in The Return of the Fly is the spitting image of J.  Robert Oppenheimer -- we see him smoking his pipe, brooding, and waiting for the fly-man's appearance.  It seems that the films, like other pictures of their time, have something to do with the nuclear menace.  Radiation causes mutations and the industrial press is equipped with a huge misshapen red button, the sort of device, one suspects that might be used to launch missiles.