Disclosure Day

 On a level of sheer film-craft, Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day is nonpareil.  Something about space aliens and malign governmental secrecy triggers Spielberg's imagination.  He directs Disclosure Day with the vigor of his youth -- there are car chases in the picture choreographed as spectacularly as similar scenes in the director's first film, Sugarland Express, a movie that I saw as a sophomore in college 52 years ago.  Viewed objectively, the story in Disclosure Day is nonsensical.  But it doesn't matter; you can't view the movie objectively when Spielberg comes at you firing on all cylinders.  The complicated movie that is nearly 2 1/2 hours long zips by in the blink of an eye.  Although the story doesn't make sense, Spielberg keeps all the elements of the intricate narrative coherent from scene to scene and shot to shot -- if the whole thing is absurd this isn't immediately visible to an audience enchanted by the movie's pyrotechnics, whiplash editing, and emotional force.  (I had a similar reaction to Spielberg's film maudit, 1941 which is extraordinary in its details and zany mise-en-scene but, otherwise, I think empty -- it doesn't matter during the experience; but you feel a wee bit ashamed after the adrenalin rush wears off.)

Spielberg takes some remarkable liberties with his audience in Disclosure Day -- you can't figure out what is going on, even in broad terms, for about a half-hour.  The full contours of the plot aren't revealed until the last fifteen minutes of the long picture.  The audience has to accept the chaos of motion and light and color on the faith that it will all make some sense by the end of the movie.  And, in fact, Spielberg delivers on the promise -- the picture's story is, more or less, clear by the end of the film.  A close observer would notice that there are certain plot points that aren't elucidated -- for instance, we get references to mysterious "experiencers", a concept important enough to foreground in a portentous way without any shred of explanation (as far as I could see) in the picture.  But, by and large, the welter of chases, car crashes, and state-of-the-art special effects pays off in the film's climax.  The gist of the thing is that a sinister governmental agency has possession of the space aliens that crashed at Roswell, as well as other visitors from outer space -- true to space-alien lore, the creatures come in two styles, the small child-sized "little greys" and the tall, spider-like "big whites."  The government has concealed its interactions with the space men for three-quarters of a century and has been conducted cruel vivisection experiments on some of the alien pilots plucked living from their crashed vessels.  (The aliens are apparently very bad drivers and have crashed their flying saucers all over the planet.)  By reverse engineering, the government appears to have created some sort of "device" (as it is called) that imparts magical powers to its users -- the device looks like a tiny version of the monolith in 2001, a sort of detached rectangular handle.  Although this instrument is called "the device" by the characters in the film, they might as well name it "the MacGuffin".  Everyone is seeking the MacGuffin and efforts to discover and control the "device" are the main engine that drives the plot. (The "device" is the film's deus ex machina -- it gets characters out of predicaments by inducing telepathy, hallucinations, telekinetic effects, and, also, is a Tarnhelm of the kind imagined by Wagner -- if you're holding it, you are invisible  Daniel Kellner, a refugee from the evil government agency (it's called Wardex), is contacted at a professional wrestling match with information about his girlfriend Jane, an ex-nun who is held prisoner by Wardex.  Kellner rescues Jane after some adventures and flees with the Wardex convoy of big black SUVs in hot pursuit.  Kellner and Jane hide at a convent where a dignified older nun speculates on the effects that knowledge of space aliens would have on religion.  The Wardex caravan attacks again and Jane drops out of the film until its end.  Kellner goes on the run but knows, via Jane's telepathy, that he needs to end up at KCXE, obviously the call letters for a TV station but something that Kellner, a math whiz but otherwise not too bright can't figure out until the movie's last act.  Kellner is a member of a cabal that opposes Wardex -- this group of conspirators, the good guys in the movie, is led by a Black scientist, who like Kellner,is a disgruntled Wardex employee.  Twelve of the Wardex employees have called in sick as the movie begins and these people are the counter-force to the governmental agency.  Time is of the essence because the world is ending.  Some sort of nuclear crisis has occurred involving North Korea.  This has resulted in public panic -- we see convenience stores with gas pumps overrun by desperate people.  These scenes harken back to the panicked crowds in Close Encounters of the Third Kind  Meanwhile a weather-girl on a Kansas City Tv station (you got it! KCEX) is having weird seizure-like fits -- sometimes, she suddenly speaks in Mandarin Chinese and, in the middle of a weather forecast, she begins to click and pop like a Hottentot, delivering her words in the lingo of the space aliens.  She is sensitive to the space alien influences and may be an "experiencer" whatever this is supposed to mean.  The weather-girl, named something like Margaret Fairchild, has a useless boyfriend (he's planning to leave her).  She also has to flee when government agents appear and, ultimately, she hooks up with Daniel Kellner who is also on the run.  The boyfriend, like Jane, drops out of the movie although he doesn't get a cameo at the climax.  After various chases, filmed ecstatically by Spielberg, the principals converge on the KCEX studio where the weather-lady goes on the air, playing an archive of footage of government agents persecuting hapless aliens or pulling their bodies out of the wreckage of their flying saucers.  The weather-lady, who can persuade people to do things for her by calling up secret memories from their lives, faces the camera.  A wall of images from other stations shows the world on fire from the nuclear crisis.  The weather-lady's feed infiltrates all stations world-wide.  It's intimated that her message that the space people are among us will be a universal panacea and will save the world from the nuclear crisis -- all earthlings will now be brothers.  A ten-foot tall White is carried into the studio on a palanquin as if the creature is a imperial King.  The weather-lady glares sternly at the screen and orders the world to "Listen!"  And, so, the movie ends.  The bad guys associated with Wardex are led by a bearded gent named Scanlon.  Scanlon clearly is a surrogate for Spielberg, the bearded Prospero who has set this plot in motion, and, now, at the end of the movie, watches the footage of the aliens with benign impassivity, sitting in what seems to be a director's chair in the studios in Kansas City.

The movie is weird on many different levels.  What do the space men want?  On the evidence of the film, they want to transform our world into a simulacrum of a Hitchcock movie like The 39 Steps or North by Northwest -- that is, a witty, stylish, and exciting chase film.  There are curious hints of Freud in the movie's notion that both the weather-lady and Daniel Kellner are repressing childhood trauma relating to encounters with the aliens.  In order to free the characters from their repression, the good guys build an actual movie set, a house that simulates the weather-lady's home from which she was actually abducted by the aliens and, then, apparently, probed in some way.  In other words, the analyst, here the enemies of Wardex, must trigger an abreaction by confronting the weather-lady with an exact model of the home from which she was abducted.  (Characteristically, the weather-lady recalls singing a song from a Disney Movie before the little Greys appear to snatch her away to an operating room managed by one of the tall Whites.)  Kellner's childhood apparition involved a noble-looking stag, a fox, a raccoon, and a brilliantly red cardinal -- these friendly critters were, in fact, aliens in disguise and, as the tall White is operating on the weather-girl, the stag appears to comfort her.  There are astounding set pieces:  a car gets pushed by the villains into a freight- train and is entrapped by the train, pulled along the right-of-way at 60 mph as an oncoming train roars forward on the track a few feet away.  There are stunning car chases, fleets of vehicles dancing on the highway and the dirt roads.  The film's climax, the disclosure day, takes place in the studio of a TV station -- it's as if Spielberg is signaling us that if we are worthy of salvation, we will be saved by images broadcast to us by TV and films.  (The movie retains Spielberg's naivety about the power of film imagery -- if the "disclosure day" broadcast preempted a professional football game, there would, indeed, be riots but not based on panic or fear but rather founded in pique that that the game has been interrupted with such boring stuff as pictures of space aliens.  In the end, we aren't worthy of Spielberg's generosity -- I say this with humility and earnestly as well.  The film is miraculous, beautiful, and idiotic as well.  He remains in his old age one of history's greatest movie-makers and, like the best of them, the power of images and the camera moving on crane or tracks, makes all other considerations irrelevant.  I've been watching pictures by Samuel Fuller recently.  Everything Fuller does, Spielberg does better and with more conviction.  Fuller starts The Naked Kiss with a flurry of blows and punches thrown right at the camera; Spielberg begins Disclosure Day with a 400 pound wrestler beating the camera which is pummeled out of the ring, body-slammed, and smashed over the head with a folding chair.  Fuller's provocative beginning to The Naked Kiss is austere as Dreyer or Ozu in comparison with the frenzy with which Spielberg begins his movie.  I urge you to see Disclosure Day if only for a demonstration of what kinetic movie-making can look like.  

Edmond

 In Edmond (2005), William H. Macy, playing the title role, begins as a lonely, disaffected lawyer who leaves his wife on a whim and, eighty minutes later, has become the contented spouse of a large black inmate in a penitentiary.  Do I need to say anything more?  I assume you are now sold on this movie and will seek it out.  (It's on Amazon Prime.) The picture is based on a 1982 play by David Mamet and written by him for the screen; Edmond is directed by Stuart Gordon, the Chicago filmmaker most famous for this horror picture Reanimator based on H. P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator" -- Gordon who died in 2020 specialized in horror films.  'Nuff said -- I'm sure you are, even now, looking for a way to watch this movie:  William Macy! Stuart Gordon! David Mamet!  What more could a boy want?

Mid-life crises are troubling and dangerous.  Acting out on his mid-life crisis, Edmond experiences the night from Hell.  We first meet the buttoned-up lawyer (or accountant) arguing with his beautiful wife about a lamp broken by a cleaning lady.  Macy is married to a woman played by Rebecca Pigeon (Mamet's real-life wife) and Gordon stages the scene with the protagonist's wife half naked to display everything that Edmond inexplicably rejects.  Declaring that his life is meaningless and that he no longer loves her, Edmond is thrown out of their upscale condominium and embarks on a series of misadventures that end up with his arrest, his conviction and imprisonment, leading to his apparently happy relationship with his hulking cell-mate.  Edmond's malaise is diagnostic of a broader problem -- he is enraged by alleged injustices perpetrated against him and has collected grievances to the extent that he somehow perceives himself as a socio-cultural victim, when, in fact, objectively, he is an upper- middle-class White professional, more aligned with the oppressors than the oppressed.  Edmond's passion, as it were, begins with a stop at the local watering hole.  There he meets a stranger, an eerie demonic figure played by Joe Mantegna.  (Mantegna is the embodiment of White male rage.)  Mantegna is watching a basketball game and, enjoying his drink as he nonchalantly, observes that the Blacks (he uses a different word) have all the advantages -- the burden of responsibility in the world is borne by white men like Edmond while the African-Americans are irresponsible and, therefore, free to enjoy themselves as they wish.  Mantegna tips Edmond off as to an upscale strip club, gives him the address, and, even, hands our hero some "walking around money" encouraging him to act on his impulses with the jaunty remark:  "You'd do the same for me."  It's a very bad idea for Edmond to act on his impulses.  He goes to the strip club and ends up bargaining with the girls, trying to low-ball them on their offers for sexual services.  Edmond's obsession is less erotic than the generalized anxiety that people are trying to take advantage of him, these people being shady women and, even, more shady Black hustlers.  Ejected from the gentleman's club, Edmond goes to a peep show, the sort of place where you talk to the naked lady by phone as she presents herself for your delectation on the other side of glass wall.  Once again, the skinflint Edmond gets into a hassle over money -- he negotiates with the girl until she loses interest (in her business, time is money) and, again, Edmond is out on the street.  Edmond, then, goes to an expensive "athletic club", really a front for a massage parlor and sauna, where again he's so concerned about getting a bad deal on the sex that he is trying to buy that he finds himself ejected again.  He ventures some money on a game of three-card monte on a street corner in this hellish neighborhood -- it is nothing but sex shops, porno places and peep shows.  Predictably losing his money, Edmond gets mugged as well and the rest of his dough is stolen as is his wallet and credit cards.  Now, Edmond is truly down and out and he can't even afford the $22 charge at a noisome flop-house where he tries to spend the night.  He wanders down the street to a pawn shop and pawns his rolex watch or something of that nature.  With some of the proceeds, he buys a World War One bayonet, again very bad idea.  A pimp with dreadlocks in a clownish plaid suit lures Edmond into an alleyway, promising him an encounter with a prostitute.  The pimp threatens Edmond but before he can be mugged for a second time, our hero uses the bayonet to kill the man.  Edmond goes into an all-night cafe and, now, feels vindicated - his prerogatives as a proud White male have been affirmed and he's satisfied that he's a conqueror and a hero.  Glorying in his new found self-esteem, Edmond makes a vulgar suggestion to a waitress who, apparently, is impressed by his self-confidence and takes him home.  After having sex with her, Edmond embarks on Nietzschian harangue about Black people and homosexuals.  The girl agrees with him that homosexuals are bad news because they hate women.  The girl is an aspiring actress.  Edmond tells her that her aspirations will come to nothing and that she must proudly affirm that she is nothing more than a waitress.  This insults the girl and she tells Edmond that he is frightening her with his manic aggressiveness.  She has good reason to be frightened.  Edmond cuts her to pieces with his bayonet, a scene that gives Stuart Gordon, the old horror director, an opportunity to paint the walls and floor red with buckets of blood.  Edmond, who feels no remorse for his two murders, takes a subway or el train on which he insults a church-lady.  He, then, wanders around until he finds a church where a street preacher is ranting about hell-fire and damnation.  A cop appears with the church-lady in tow and Edmond is arrested.  He's humiliated in prison where he is paraded naked through the cell-block.  Locked in his cell, his cell-mate, a large black convict (who looks remarkably like Dave Chapelle) promptly sodomizes him. Edmond complains to the prison chaplain who says he's sorry about the sodomy but it's a prison, what can you do?  A year later, we see Edmond happily discusses metaphysics with his cell-mate with whom he now enjoys domestic bliss.  The men talk about heaven and hell and superintelligent dogs.  Then, it's lights out and the angry White man, now at peace, cuddles up in domestic bliss with his boyfriend.  

I liked this movie.  (Ther's a completely disposable Tarot card prophecy scene that's best disregarded as a mistake by the filmmakers.)  The picture is blunt, offensive, and short.  Everything you want to know about White rage and how privileged White men imagine themselves to be victims is on offer in this picture.  Mamet's characteristically clipped and terse dialogue works well.  The movie is single-minded but entertaining and, I suppose, makes an important social and cultural point.  Gordon's bargain basement horror movie mise-en-scene is constantly compelling, stark, and frightening.  If you don't like this well-crafted picture, you don't like its message and theme.  And, I think, this is a valid response to a movie so vehemently outspoken as this film.  

The Damned

 The Damned (1969) is the first picture in what has been called Luchino Visconti's "German Trilogy" -- the other pictures in the group are Death in Venice and Ludwig (about the mad King of Bavaria).  Critics say that with The Damned, Visconti liberated his cinema from the constraints of 1950's morality and, in keeping with the "swinging sixties" and "the summer of love", produced a film explicitly depicting various kinds of sexual debauchery.  This sounds fun, but Visconti seems to have been a "self-loathing" homosexual and the movie is a hysterial screed against perversion.  This is part of The Damned's problem -- we can see what Visconti is repelled by, and the forms of perversion that he deplores, but it's not clear that he has any sort of sexual behavior to propose as antithetical to the dead-end erotic insanity that the film displays.  To use modern jargon, there is no sex-positive element to the movie at all -- all eros is either perverse or fatal, a theme that Visconti will pursue in his Thomas Mann adaptation of Death in Venice made afterthis film.  The Damned is beautiful to behold, with lavish sets and stunning costumes.  It is also claustrophobic with the aspect of a being a very freely filmed stage play -- three-quarters of the movie take place in the vast, seemingly endless, corridors, dining rooms, and bed-chambers of the mansion of the Essenbeck family, a depraved tribe that makes iron for German armaments.  (The Essenbecks are self-evidently modeled on the Krupp family of German ordinance manufacturers.)  As in The Leopard, probably Visconti's masterpiece from this period (it was released in 1960), the director uses a series of banquets and celebrations to drive his complex narrative.  (This technique was adapted by Coppola in his Godfather movies which are very obviously influenced by Visconti's Leopard and, to some extent, The Damned.)  The film's lavish furnishings, including its gorgeous actors, are filmed by a camera that moves around the action, gliding among the players in a mise-en-scene into which big close-ups are interpolate with languorous tracking shots..  The film uses many close-ups as punctuation and the camera is generally positioned to bring all of the spectacular interior scenery into focus.  There are a number of showy zooms to emphasize aspects of the tableaux that Visconti films.  Light is used expressionistically -- the movie looks like a picture by Douglas Sirk (or Fassbinder) with characters who are doomed or gradually succumbing to madness often stepping into strange pools of green or bluish light.  The photography isn't chiaroscuro as in film noir -- some sequences are shot in near darkness but shadows don't play an important part in the picture.  Rather, Visconti uses odd, unrealistic and unmotivated bursts of color to signify the emotional chaos that he shows on screen.  Exterior shots, of which there are only a few, features beautiful twilights over mountain lakes and shaggy ranges of peaks, "golden hour" footage, and drab, grim city streets.  A funeral in which the workers and management of the Gusseisen Fabrik (Iron-pour factory) parade through the foundry is shot at dusk, with the figures moving against scaffold-shaped arrays of iron pipes and towering blast furnaces in the gloom of what seems to be either pre-dawn or post-sunset -- an entirely surreal milieu for a funeral of this sort.  The movie is bookended by huge displays of pyrotechnics with iron being poured from furnaces in clouds of smoke and glittering sparks flung upward into the air.  Despite the beauty of the camerawork, the lavish sets and set decorations, and the lurid depravity on offer, the film seems grave, stately, an epic in the style of David Lean's more inert spectacles -- it's almost 3 hours long, difficult to follow, and moves like a funeral procession itself, a somber parade of beautiful images that marches slowly across the screen to its foregone conclusion.

The movie's plot is similar to the HBO show Succession but with pronounced Nazi inflections.  A powerful and immensely wealthy industrialist Joachim Essenbeck has called his successors and heirs together, with their wives, to discuss the crisis in German politics.  Essenbeck, who loathes the vulgar National Socialists, realizes that to survive his family must negotiate some sort arrangement with the Nazis.  It's a deal with the devil but one to which Joachim knows he must accede.  There are a bunch of people involved in this initial introductory dinner party on the occasion of Joachim's birthday:  everyone is related one way or the other, and, frankly speaking, I had trouble figuring out exactly how the characters were connected to one another.  It suffices to say that one of guests is a brown-shirted SA man who represents the Hitler regime.  An in-law Herbert is vehemently anti-Nazi together with his wife Elizabeth.  Joachim is married to a much younger woman named Sophie (Ingrid Thulin).  She is carrying on a love affair with Friedrich, an opportunist and social climber.  Friedrich is receiving counsel from a sinister Aryan mannequin named Aschenbach.  There are various sons and cousins around, nephews and nieces including one guy who plays cello, some little girls who recite a birthday poem for their grandfather, and Sophie's son with Joachim, Martin (Helmut Berger).  The highlight of the film's opening scenes and its most famous sequence comes in the first fifteen minutes.  The dinner party has adjourned to a salon where there is a curtained stage on which the cousins and nephews can perform for the dinner guests.  One son plays cello to the mild approbation of the old man.  Then, some guys haul in a spotlight.  When the curtain parts, we see a woman dressed in music-hall brothel attire-- garter belts over her plump white thighs, a corset, and a man's hat; the woman sings a bawdy song as performed by Marlene Dietrich in Der Blau Engel.  News arrives by messenger that the Reichstag is on fire.  The song is cut short and a zoom reveals that the Dietrich impersonator is Martin, Sophie and Joachim's youngest son.  He yanks off his wig to reveal his short haircut.  Needless to say, Dad looks a bit appalled and embarrassed but Sophie is thrilled at her lad's artistry.  The party, then, return to the dining room where it is agreed that the family will have to make some accommodations to the despised Nazi party.  Martin, citing Dietrich's song, says that they need:  "Ein Mann, ein richtiger Mann -- that is "A man, a real man."  (Dietrich sent a note to Helmut Berger telling him that he sang the song better than she had in The Blue Angel -- he was more like Marlene Dietrich than Dietrich herself.)  The family decides that they will have to appoint someone who can work with Nazis on munitions manufacture.  After the dinner party and news of the Reichstag fire, Sophie (who is married to Joachim) plots with her lover, Friedrich for him to seize control of the business. Sophie is simultaneously like Lady Macbeth and, then, Gertrude in Hamlet. And, thereafter, Joachim is gunned down in his bed, the chess-game for corporate succession suddenly turning violent.  The gentle anti-Fascist Herbert has to flee with the SS on his heels.  His wife, Elizabeth, played by Charlotte Rampling, helps him leap out of the window when the Nazis invade the home.  Martin, now, has become Hamlet, now sure what to do in light of his mother's complicity in the death of his father.  

The film now tracks Martin's adventures.  He is a pedophile, has been grooming a little Jewish girl, and, apparently, having sex with her.  He seems to have infected her with a venereal disease and she hangs herself.  Since the child is "a little Jewess", Martin's crimes against her aren't even acknowledged judicially as crimes although the scion of the company's behavior is generally thought deplorable -- primarily because of his intercourse with a Jew.  (The child's mother is missing; Martin has a prostitute girlfriend but her part is under written and it's not clear what she knows about her lover's sexual proclivities.)  Not content with his escapades as a child molester, Martin ends up having sex with his increasingly unstable and hysterical mother.  By this point, Martin has secured an appointment to the directorship of the family company and agrees to wholeheartedly endorse the Nazis in exchange for munition's contracts.  Poor Herman returns from exile; his wife has been murdered in a concentration camp although it seems that his children are still alive.  He confronts his family at another feast and admits that he has given up his resistance to the family being assimilated by the National Socialists.  He invites the Nazis to arrest him and, then, vanishes from the movie.  Friedrich is now engaged to be married to Martin's mother, Sophie.  Her incestuous encounter with Martin has rendered her comatose and she is kept under sedation by injections of morphine or some other equally pernicious narcotic.  Friedrich's scheme to marry Sophie and assume control the Essenbeck factories and foundries is, now, a meaningless exercise.  Martin has consolidated his alliance with the Nazis after the extermination of the S.A. storm troopers in the "night of the long knives" and Friedrich's marriage to Sophie is a macabre comedy that comes too late to restore the groom's fortunes.  Sophie is now a zombie, a staggering corpse with a waxen pale face and no affect at all.  The marriage takes place in the mansion in a salon where a group of drunken couples are sullenly canoodling while on the radio an early thirties American crooner croons -- now and then, a zombie couple rises to shuffle around in a semblance of ballroom dancing.  After the marriage, Martin marches the happy couple into a nearby room and gives them some vials of poison -- he doesn't even need to provide instructions to the bride and groom.  Returning to the room a few minutes later, husband and wife are both dead, eyes open and dead faces fixed in grimaces; the bride tilted upward with a stiff neck staring into nothingness.  Martin's black Nazi uniform is splendid; he has replaced his drag regalia with a drag costume of another kind.  The movie ends with a montage of hellish flames roaring up out of the foundry furnaces.  

The movie's centerpiece is the massacre of the SA men by the Gestapo.  This slaughter takes place in a Bavarian town with lots of polka music, bare-assed troopers swimming in the icy glacial lake, and enormous quantities of beer swilled down by Roehm's SA men.  In Visconti's lurid imagination, the SA gathering at the Bavarian resort is a homosexual orgy of the most debauched and flagrant kind.  A chorus-line of cross-dressing troopers in lingerie perform for crowds of SA officers who have divested themselves of most of their uniforms, maintaining their boots, perhaps, and a few scraps of their Nazi regalia for an additional kinky frisson.  The boys all march off to bed, staggering drunk, as frisky couples and threesomes.  Comes the dawn, and with it, the Black Shirts with machine guns and jack boots; they make quick work of the SA lads who are gunned down in their beds or herded into the town square to be riddled with bullets as the sun is rising.  The entire sequence is pure fantasy and adopts, I understand, certain calumnies about the SA (and the Nazis also) that were invented by the Communists -- the Fascists, the Leftists alleged, are just a bunch of queens and fairies.  It's baffling that Visconti adopts this imagery for his luridly anti-Fascist film, particularly when one considers that Visconti was engaged in a sexual affair with his leading man, Helmut Berger who plays Martin.  Visconti isn't good at violence and the massacre is perfunctory -- he's more interested in the spectacle of uniform and costume (as worn by his ultra-well-dressed women) and the protocols of High Society.  His sense of spectacle is fundamentally humane -- the massacre is staged in an abstract manner that seems oddly unrealistic:  he's much more interested in dinner parties and family confrontations that look like they could be part of a filmed version of Mann's Buddenbrooks, a novel that Visconti seems to have been influenced by.  Italian fascism in inextricably linked with sexual perversion in the Leftist imagination for some reason that is inexplicable to me:  this theme runs through Bertolucci's The Conformist and 1900 and, of course, reaches its apogee (some would say nadir) in Pasolini's Salo or the Thousand Days of Sodom.   

Birds of Passage

 Birds of Passage (2018) is an ambitious crime film set in Columbia between about 1969 and 1980.  The film's narrative traces the rise of the Waayu people, an indigenous desert-dwelling tribe, from an impoverished nomadic people into something approaching modernity and, then, their fall as well.  This all occurs within the span of about a decade, the Waayu's meteoric rise and fall jet-fueled by their increasingly fatal involvement in "selling weed" -- bales of industrial strength weed, cultivated from San Marcos seeds obligingly supplied by Peace Corps volunteers.  An enterprise that begins with burros ends with late model SUVs and battles fought with machine-guns and rocket-launchers.  The movie has an intriguing premise, but it has complex plot and some of it wasn't clear to me.  Nonetheless, this film directed by the Columbian filmmaker Cirro Guerra and his wife, Christina Gallego (she seems to have the contacts with the indigenous people), has compelling characters and a gritty, raw texture -- at times, the film is "magic realism" of a sort that would seem contrived if it wasn't so ethnographically motivated by the visions and customs of the Waaju.

At first, viewers may think that they have stumbled into a film nicely shot and edited for a college anthropology class.  A young woman, Zaida, has been in isolation in a hut made of branches and wattle for a year.  We don't why but she is commended by her formidable grandmother, Ursula, for her patience and fortitude. (The Waaju are apparently matrililneal, with matriarchs establishing the traditions by which the tribal people regulate their lives; the film is like The Godfather if all the "men of honor" weren't elderly Sicilians but old Indian women.)  Zaida dances with potential suitors, wearing a bright kimono-like garment with winged sleeves.  The dance seems to imitate the mating rituals of birds -- the bride struts in her plumage and the male darts backward as she advances toward him.  At first, Zaida dances with a boy called Leonidas.  Although we don't understand this until much later, Leonidas is the male heir of one of the leading matrilineal lines and his grandmother wants him to be the war chief, or male leader, of tribe.  Leonidas is just a kid and he embarrasses himself by falling over backward as the bride chases him.  Another man, an older youth called "Rapayet", dances with her -- she can't cow him and he announces that he will make her "his woman."  This sets up a fundamental conflict in the tribe between Rapayet who aspires to leadership and the ostensible heir to power, the ineffectual Leonidas.  

Rapayet has to acquire a prohibitively expensive dowry to marry Zaida.  (The dowry seems to have been designed to deter him from the match.)  Rapayet, who is not to be deterred, goes into the mountains with his best buddy Moises, an Aljuna (someone not in the tribe), a half-black hoodlum with ties to the drug trade. Moises, who is a shady guy, has a Landrover and he is smuggling contraband coffee.  Rapayet buys up Moises' coffee and the two of them negotiate with Anibal, an Uncle who lives in a Western-style house in the hills.  Anibal is a dope farmer.  Trading the coffee for marijuana, Rapayet sells the weed to American Peace Corps volunteers, seen sybaritically frolicking half-nude on a beach.  He raises enough money for the dowry, paid in goats and cows, and is allowed to marry Zaida.  A series of evil omens presage trouble:  there's a huge green locust that appears creeping through the desert gravel and sand  and a longlegged crane of some kind (we see only its insect-like and unearthly feet as it stalks through the sleeping quarters.). Rapayet and Moises eliminate some middle-men and begin trading with Americans who transport the weed on small airplanes.  There's s double-cross and Moises, who is a hotheaded thug, shoots a couple of Americans.  They dig huge holes and bury the dead men in their planes.  A third plane is allowed to depart to send warning that the Columbian Waayu mobsters are not to be trifled-with.  The Americans, apparently with Moises' connivance, retaliate by killing some Waayu.  As we have expected for a good fifteen minutes, Rapayet must take revenge on the man who was his best friend.   Rapayet goes to Moises' village where the Narcos are partying -- Moises' gang of crooks all speak Spanish and not Waayu.  Rapayet finds Moises having sex and guns him down

The movie is divided into cantos and the saga is represented as being sung by a lone Waayu shepherd tending his herd of goats in the barren desert badlands.  Each canto represents a shift in time.  In the next canto, Rapayet lives with Zaida, his son, and his daughter, Indira in a Hollywood-style modernist house incongruously set in the middle of the empty desert.  The old women are having nightmares that prophecy doom.  Rapayet and most of the desert tribe go to a "second wake" at his uncle Anibal's place in the hills.  The "second wake" is a ritual in which the casket of a dead leader is opened and the bones, ragged with strips of rotting flesh, are lovingly washed anointed with liquor spat out by one of the old women with magical powers, the, disarticulated skeleton, then,, bundled in white linen to be buried again.  This custom isn't viewed as morbid by the tribe and, in fact, is an occasion for a lavish party at Anibal's place, a nice hacienda now equipped with a swimming pool. (This lengthy and ornate scene is the equivalent of the wedding in The Godfather which, in turn, derives from a similar scene in Visconti's The Leopard) The old women are conducting some sort of puberty ritual with regard to Anibal's nubile daughter.  The men all get drunk and there's a horse-race that Leonidas, who can't do anything right, loses to Rapayet's son.  Leonidas who is now a teenager offers to marry Anibal's daughter but he is rejected.  In a rage, Leonidas humiliates one of Anibal's bodyguards by paying the man to publicly eat dog shit.  (He funds the exhibition with a big bundle of cash he was going to use for his dowry payment.)  This leads to a big quarrel that the elderly women are unable to mediate.  Leonidas gets drunk again and returns to Anibal's hacienda where he rapes the man's daughter (and, possibly, kills her).  Anibal sends his men out to ambush a group of Waayu drug mules and slaughters them.  Anibal's dope fields have been burned and he has lost many of his men. A "speaker" or mediator is sent with a talking stick to try to buy-off the feud but Anibal, who is a furious rage, shoots the man violating the rules of the tribe.  (On Rapayet's side, there are simiilar breaches of ritual protocol -- Rapayet and his henchmen are storing weapons in caskets in their graveyard supposed to be full of corpses awaiting their "second wake." Anibal sells the last of his marijuana in Medillin and uses the money to recruit some mercenaries.  They attack Rapayet's lavish modernist home and blow it up with grenade-launchers.  Apparently, Zaida and Rapayet's son are killed.  Anibal all alone now, and leading a burro, representing the last of his wealth, comes to Rapayet's ruined compound and kills Rapayet.  Indira, Rapayet's daughter, wanders off herding a couple of goats -- the nomadic tribe has returned to poverty and shepherd's work after their decade-long and disastrous foray into drug-dealing.  The shepherd singing the last canto says that he made the song because he had met a young woman herding a few goats in the desert and observed that no one had taught her the shepherd's trade -- she didn't seem to know what she was doing.  (He is referring to Indira.)

Birds of Passage runs 125 minutes but because of the abundance of action packed into the picture, seems to be a longer film. My summary is probably inexact and inaccurate.  Parts of the movie are hard to follow and it's difficult to determine who, if anyone, has any agency in the plot.  Rapayet seems rather passive and is acted upon as opposed to acting.  The old women, rival grandmothers, apparently are controlling the action, although, obviously, things spiral into chaos.  Notwithstanding the rather Shakespearian level of violence, the killings mostly take place off-screen and are depicted only by their outcomes.  The movie doesn't dwell on violence but shows it in a matter-of-fact way.  The Waayu are fiercely proud and have never been subdued by outsiders.  But they are prone to internecine blood feuds.  Rapayet is named after a forebear who was the sole survivor of a feud.  In the end of the movie, the film's Homer, the shepherd seen in profile against a setting sun, sings mournfully that their gods no longer speak to the Waayu through dreams as was once the case.  It's not outsiders (the despised aljunos) that destroy the Waayu but their own rivalries and inter-clan feuding -- all driven to a fever-pitch by the easy money involved in the drug trade.  The picture is elegantly made and extremely interesting.  The subject matter is exotic to the point that I wasn't able to identify with the characters, but I am able to see that the picture is epic in scope and recommend it.  But it's hard to follow:  at one point, one of the formidable grandmothers goes to Anibal's compound to retrieve a corpse wrapped with a white sheet -- this is clearly a key scene, but I didn't whose body was in the tightly wrapped bundle.  (I think this confusion was intended, but I'm not sure why -- from reading plot summary, I now know the wrapped corpse was that of Rapayet's son.)  I wasn't able to reliably distinguish between the grandmothers in their colorful batik gowns and this may have led to my confusion as to this scene.  Although there's a lot of exuberant gangster movie stuff in the movie, the things that will stick with you, I think, are the opening scenes involving the dance imitating birds and, then, the "second wake" at Anibal's hacienda -- although the tropes of a gangster film are obviously employed in the picture (particularly in the assassination of  Moises' episode), the movie suggests something strange and incommunicable on the basis of its ethnographic detail.  This picture is far better than Cirro Guerra''s 2015 Embrace of the Serpent, a highly acclaimed movie but one that I thought was overwrought and simplistic.  Guerra was hired by Amazon to produce a mini-series with an all-star cast called Cortes about the fall of the Aztec empire.  Covid intervened and the film was never made.  Guerra's Tv series Green Frontier (2017) was beautifully shot but impenetrable to me -- it was another movie about indigenous people living, this time, in the Columbian jungle.  Guerra doesn't seem to have made a film since 2019 when he released Waiting for the Barbarians, a movie with a distinguished cast that was poorly received.  

Another Year

 Another Year (2010) is a two-hour film by Mike Leigh, the celebrated British director.  In recent years, Leigh has specialized in comedies of humours, that is, dramas in which the director illustrates with didactic vigor the way in which people afflicted with a temperament governed by anger, or melancholy, or manic joy interact.  Although Leigh's urban Brits don't think in terms of black bile or excess of blood (if you are sanguine), they act under the influence of these humours even in the context of efforts of modern-day counseling and psychoanalysis. In Happy-go-Lucky (2008), Leigh shows a woman in the grip of manic exuberance; everything makes her happy, including events that are disastrous.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the inverse case -- the heroine in that film is afflicted with anxiety and interprets everything as a personal insult.  Naked (1993) shows us a case of intellectual logorrhea with a co-morbidity of sexual sadism.  Life is Sweet (1990) is about an existence dominated by an eating disorder.  Another Year follows the seasons on their diurnal round:  a couple who are phlegmatic and sanguine (nothing troubles them much) interact with characters who are doomed to desperate, unremitting sadness.  I have called these films "comedies" because the extremity of monomania shown in the pictures is grotesquely comic -- but the pictures are mostly about very unhappy people.

Tom and Gerri are a happily married couple who have been together for 37 years.  They have one son, Joe, who is a lawyer or paralegal with a legal aid society.  Tom is a geologist who assesses the soil conditions for tunneling projects.  We see him inspecting core samples with a jeweler's loupe.  Gerri is a psychologist and counselor.  (In the first scene, we see her meeting with a gloomy insomniac played by Imelda Staunton -- she was the protagonist in Leigh's Vera Drake.  The woman is hostile and sullen and we are given the clear impression that nothing can be done to help her.  She is invested in her misery.)  Gerri's secretary is named Mary.  Mary is an attractive woman in her late forties.  She is desperately needy, searching for a boyfriend.  She drinks too much, becomes morose, and throws herself at men who aren't interested in her.  Tom's friend, Ken, is a fat alcoholic who smokes too much and is also hopelessly miserable -- he seems like a heart attack waiting to happen and he is also desperately searching for companionship.  Although Ken is interested in Mary, she is repulsed by him and, when he tries to embrace her, she beats him off and tells him that they can't even be friends.  The film has little plot.  The picture basically chronicles Tom and Gerri's interactions with their friends, particularly, the morose Mary and poor Ken.  Mary flirts with Joe; he is certainly much too young and cheerful for her.  Midway through the film, Joe turns up with a pretty, vivacious girlfriend.  This torments Mary who is overtly cruel to the young woman.  In the film's last third, Tom's older brother, Ronnie, loses his wife.  We see the funeral service of Ronnie's wife, whom he seems to have mistreated, and, then, a catastrophic encounter with Ronnie's son who is enraged by his father and, in general, mad at everyone.  Ronnie is too grief-stricken to care for himself and, so, the ever- generous Tom and Gerri take him into their comfortable London home.  While Tom and Gerri are cleaning up the tools and harvesting the last vegetables at their allotment, Mary appears at their home.  Mary has previously been neatly dressed and attractively made-up.  Something terrible has happened to her and she wears no make-up, seems pale as a ghost, and, since it is winter-time, is half-frozen, trembling with the cold.  Ronnie is suspicious of Mary, but warms to her slightly when they smoke outside the house.  Tom and Gerri return to find Mary desperately flirting with Ronnie who remains half-comatose with grief.  Tom is outraged at Mary's impudence at showing up at their house uninvited.  Apparently, there has been some sort of falling out with her, although we don't know exactly what has happened.  Nonetheless, Tom and Gerri make food for Ronnie and Mary and, then, Joe and his girlfriend appear as well.  The film ends with happy banter at the dinner table while the camera focuses on Mary who seems miserable to the point of suicide, grimacing in agony as she sits with her glass of wine and her food before her.  In many of Leigh's pictures, the characters are given an enterprise as a subplot that exemplifies their emotional dilemma -- most notably, in Life is Sweet about bulimia, there is a subplot involving a character's attempt to start an upscale restaurant; Timothy Spall plays the grotesque restauranteur whose business fails hopelessly.  In Another Year, Mary scrapes together all her resources to buy a car.  But she has purchased the car from two crooks and the vehicle doesn't work and her efforts at upkeep of the vehicle destroy her.  By the end of the movie, she has sold the car for the cost of towing and twenty quid; thieves have broken into the car and she is emotionally ruined by the experience.

The melancholy events in the story are moderated by the wisdom and nonchalance of Tom and Gerri and the happiness of the couple, Joe and his girlfriend.  Leigh's longtime D.P., Dick Pope shoots the movie unobtrusively.  The film is exceedingly subtle and, I think, would repay several viewings.  One aspect of the film's sadness involves the inevitable round of the seasons and how the passage of time is reflected in the activities of the gardeners at the allotment.  Tom and Gerri, and Ronnie together with Ken are all at the ends of their lives.  Tom, reading in bed with Gerri, says that, when he was younger, he never cared much for history but now history interests him.  Gerri says that this is because they are becoming "historical".  We have the sense that Tom denies his interest in history when he was younger to make a point about time passing -- actually, he probably was always interested in history.  Gerri is attuned to his sadness and makes explicit what he has implied.  I highly recommend this movie but it's not for all tastes -- nothing happens and the film ends without any sort of climax or, even, resolution.  That's the essence of most lives and their tragedy:  nothing much happens. 

Shy People

 Director Andrei Konchalovsky has made films in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Russia.  He is highly respected but, with a few exceptions, seems to never have achieved the excellence to which he aspires.  In the United States, he was largely the victim of low budgets and bad scripts.  However, his 1987 film, Shy People is based on his own screenplay and seems to represent on film his intentions.  (The movie was conceived years earlier when Konchalovsky was directing his magnum opus, the Siberiade in the Soviet Union.)  The film's somewhat primitive and simple-minded premise is that of a City Mouse (played by Jill Clayburgh) visiting her Country Mouse cousin (Barbara Hershey); the contrivances required to set the plot in motion don't really work and many aspects of the film are implausible -- but the situation is sufficiently rich for Konchalovsky to engineer a compelling, if histrionic, story that allows for its actors to deliver "over-the-top" performances.  The film bears certain resemblances to one of Konchalovsky's masterpieces Runaway Train (1985), an action film based on a similarly ludicrous and overwrought script by no less than Akira Kurosawa.  Both movies exploit a ridiculous premise executed with no irony and total conviction -- both movies feature an exotic location (Louisiana bayous in Shy People and the Alaskan wilderness in Runaway Train -- and both films end with a final quote somewhat pretentiously displayed before ending credits.  

In Shy People, a pampered lady journalist (she writes for Cosmopolitan) contrives a trip to the remote bayous of Louisiana to write a story about her country cousins.  (Her grandfather was brother to the grandfather who is the progenitor of the primitive clan in the swamps.)  The journalist, named Diane, has a daughter who is about 17 and a spoiled brat.  The daughter uses cocaine and flaunts her promiscuity -- her boyfriend is a forty-year old junkie with whom the Diane may have had a fling.  Diane is surprised that her daughter Grace is willing to make the trip (it involves flying first class) to Louisiana to visit the country cousins.  It's obvious to the viewer that Grace is a ticking time-bomb.

In Louisiana, Diane hires a backwoods boatman to ferry her into the swamps to place where her cousin's wife lives -- a large Victorian house nicely appointed on a levee in the middle of nowhere.  There was once a town around the house but a flood has swept everything away but the big, airy manse.  The family living in the house is an example of the Southern Gothic carried to a hysterical extreme:  Ma, Ruth, was a 12-year old bride to the sinister Joe, a patriarch of the kind that Burl Ives used to play in his vicious villain mode.  Joe has vanished, but not before brutalizing everyone in the family.  Ruth has four sons:  one of them Mike runs a strip club and bar in the nearby town, a nasty place dependent on trade from oil rig roughnecks -- he has a pencil moustache and looks like smarmy small-town used car dealer.  Mark has his own child bride, the plump and pregnant Candy.  He's a swamp rat, fishing for crabs and shrimp in the muddy backwaters of the bayou.  Tommy is some kind of psychopath that Ma keeps locked in a shed.  He's handsome and friendly but something is wrong with him and he seems to be glad to remain out of trouble in his barred cell out in the yard.  The youngest son, Pauly, is a half-wit, the product of his father, Joe's well-placed punch (or two punches) to his mother's belly during the flood that swept away the town around the house.  Pauly is slavishly loyal to his mother and the baby of the family.  Joe has fled from the revenuers into the inaccessible swamps and is either dead or a malign spirit hiding in the lagoons; he is represented in the movie by a lurid surreal portrait showing his glaring white face emerging from the black canvas.  The portrait hangs over his empty chair at the dinner table that is kept vacant for him.  Joe had the habit of hanging ma upside down and beating the hell out of her and the sons, needless to say, are a bit ambivalent about him.   

A poacher named Jake has assaulted Mark in the spectral swamp, draped in fog and vines and with stumps standing in water like tombstones.  Ma is encouraged to make a complaint to the law in a nearby town.  With Diane and restive, discontent daughter-in-law, Ruth makes a trip to town, using her boat's outboard motor to power her way through a vast colonnade of opposing concrete columns -- it's the underpinning of an enormously long bridge crossing a tidal lake: the image of the boat making its way between the columns, lit by slanting sunlight is the film's signature image, a scene that illumines the rather squalid proceedings with classical splendor -- it's as if we are seeing a Greek myth unfold.  In town, a hellscape of trash, men toting alligators like sacks of potatoes over their shoulders, detritus of beer cans and candy wrappers and junked cars inexplicably being dumped in the lagoon, Ma reluctantly appeals to the sheriff.  He refuses to do anything for her.  So, while the daughter-in-law and Diane are shopping for a battery-powered TV, Ruth goes to the local strip club, a decaying barn-like building, and shoots off Jake's hand.  The strip club is run by her son, Mike, and, when he remonstrates with her, she goes berserk, becomes a temperance crusader, and trashes his bottles of booze, terrorizing the hapless strippers.  Meanwhile back at the ranch, Grace has twisted through the bars to Tommy's cage and seduced him.  Pauly reports the transgression to Mark.  Mark is enraged and threatens both Tommy and Grace.  So Grace decides to soothe the savage breast with copious doses of cocaine offered to all three  boys.  This leads to what Maurice Sendak called "a wild rumpus" including Mark's rape of Grace in thick puddle of spilled honey.  (Konchalovsky goes for supersize effects.)  There's lots of fighting, grunting and shouting and Grace departs from the orgy in a canoe which gradually sinks in the alligator-filled swamp.  Ma returns and tells Mark to discipline Tommy with some kind of iron rod.  Tommy is beaten to a pulp and ends up comatose.  Now, Diane, horrified at the enormity of the "wild rumpus", flees the compound and also ends up marooned in the swamp with her pontoon boat spinning around in forlorn circles.

It all turns out okay once the two women learn life-lessons from one another.  Diane learns that she needs to discipline Grace, albeit not with an iron rod, and become her mother and not her best friend.  (Konchalovsky, like most Russians, I think is very conservative as to family and domestic matters.)  Ruth comes to terms with the malign influence of the ghostly Joe, who has been hanging around and watching the affray through the fog.  The movie is lurid nonsense but beautifully made and effectively acted.  Konchalovsky wrote the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's first movie, Ivan's Childhood, and much of the imagery from that film has seeped into Shy People -- most spectacularly, the wilderness of water and forest in which there seems to be no solid ground and people and objects appear to float in the misty chaos.  (This is the landscape where the boy-soldier, Ivan, spends his hellish childhood.)  The swamp in Shy People has an enormous foggy menace and Konchalovsky suggests that his "shy people" (a local euphemism for wild critters who engage in murderous blood feuds) are formed by the chaotic watery soup in which they live.  The movie has a strange moral that makes no sense to me, but I'm not a Russian.  In the Book of Revelations, the Messiah says that he will save those who are hot and cold but will renounce those who are lukewarm.  Being hot and cold here means possessing strong and savage emotions of love and hate.  The film suggests that true humanity resides in the passions and that reason and civilization are merely veneers that we use to persuade ourselves that we are not nothing more than beasts.   

The Yellow Canary

 Not all films that have been lovingly restored are worth the effort.  Consider The Yellow Canary (1963), a low-budget crime movie directed by Buzz Kulik, carefully restored under the auspices of Eddie Mueller's film noir foundation.  The movie sounds promising and had gone missing until a camera negative was discovered about a year ago -- in 2024 or 2025.  The film stars Pat Boone, the crooning pop star from the late fifties and early sixties, the epitome of straight Christian virtue and as far from the burgeoning hippie and beatnik scene as imaginable.  (There's a rumor that is said to be true that Pat Boone baptized Bob Dylan in his Hollywood swimming pool --reported in the New York Post in February 1979).  Boone is playing a misanthropic cad, again acting against the wholesome type that his publicity projected, a crooner very much similar to the star himself but meaner and more callous and sexually unfaithful to his wife, a thankless role acted by Barbara Eden.  (She was later to disport herself in a harem slave costume on the TV show I Dream of Jeannie.)  What's more, the movie was written by Rod Sterling, the reliably cynical and ingeniously effective creator of the Twilight Zone and the author of a number of respectable film noir including Requiem for a Heavy Weight.  With this kind of cast, a director who proved himself later in the TV market, and Rod Serling as screenwriter, The Yellow Canary was optimistically imagined as a lost masterpiece.  It's nothing of the kind and has nothing, except novelty, to recommend it.  Furthermore, the movie was made cheap and looks cheap.  In fact, the money ran out and Pat Boone, who hoped the vehicle would be his ticket to serious roles in Hollywood, had to finance the completion of the film with his own money -- the weird credit telling the audience that Cooca Mooga Productions made the film is a cover for the fact that "Cooca Mooga" is really just Pat Boone funding the movie with his own money.  

Pat Boone playing a glorified lounge singer, Andy Paxton, is a bad man.  He despises his thousands of teenage girl fans, cheats on his luscious wife, and ignores his infant son.  He bullies his assistant, Bate, a weakling with whom he grew up, and, even, taunts his muscular bodyguard, Hub, who, in turn, despises him.  At a show, Paxton is planning to cheat on his wife, but, when she attends, with his 11-month baby boy, someone snatches the child, killing the infant's nursemaid.  Paxton is asked to pony-up $200,000 for return of the kidnapped infant.  A detective, well played by Jack Klugman, is assigned to the case.  There are various poorly staged twists and turns as Paxton tries to figure out who has snatched his child.  (Klugman is left with very few things to do other than to bemoan Paxton's refusal to cooperate with the cops.) It turns out that the kidnapping is an inside job.  The long-suffering Bate gets strangled and, then, picturesquely hanged from the back wall of Paxton's Hollywood mansion.  A money-launderer who has nothing to do with the kidnapping has to be found.  The loathsome Hub, the muscle man, tortures a prostitute to find the money-launderer.  But when Paxton and the cop go to the man's apartment, he has been stabbed to death.  (Why? he had nothing to do with the kidnapping plot.  And by whom?)  Paxton finally figures out what the audience grasped about two reels before the climax.  The crooner is spectacularly dim-witted and his wife is even worse.  The crooner rescues the baby and tosses the kid to his waiting wife.  Then, the script (or the script girl responsible for continuity) forget all about the baby who mysteriously vanishes from the end of the movie -- kidnapped again?  The happy ending is Paxton whispering sweet nothings to his wife and shaking hands, at last, with Jack Klugman's dogged, but ineffectual, detective.

The movie is cheap and its economy shows.  Things go to hell about 10 minutes into the movie when there is very long scene, all dialogue, and staged as a motionless master shot in which all the characters are visible.  The scene is horribly dull.  When something goes wrong with the shot, Kulik cuts away to an optically printed close-up from the master shot.   The movie is made in cinemascope black and white, and the inserted shot isn't adjusted for the anamorphic lens -- the image doesn't even remotely match the scene in which it's embedded and seems oddly squeezed in dimension.  Sets are flimsy and seem ready ready to fall over.  A juke box is made of cardboard and when Pat Boone brushes against it, the thing almost topples.  Boone slips and falls or trips himself about four times in the movie but the errors are not corrected.  Barbara Eden has next to nothing to do other than loudly wail and bitch at her useless husband -- her part is severely underwritten.  With the exception of a few hardboiled lines and exchanges, Serling's script is awful -- it starts out okay but collapses in the long scene, presumably shot after the movie lost funding, in one continuous, if botched, take.  The acting is very bad.  Boone himself has no idea what he is doing and can't even hit his marks without stumbling over his own feet.  The only bonus to the film is that we do get to see the performance by Boone of a couple of songs, morose tough guy ballads, that sound like Frank Sinatra as sung by a twerp.  Boone has a pretty voice and his singing in the mode of a callow punk Sinatra is the best thing in the movie.  In film noir, there's always a scene in which a tough guy is thrown in jail to cool his heels until someone bails him out so that he can continue to get used as a punching bag by the bad guys.  These jail shots are characteristically showy, filmed with moody bars shadowing the imprisoned man.  The cameraman in The Yellow Canary can't figure out how to light the jail scene and its falls completely flat.  Indeed, the whole movie is shot in the sourceless, slightly surreal and indistinct white light that characterizes TV shows from the early sixties -- somehow, light, which is the agent and protagonist in film noir has been stripped of its glamor.