Dark of the Sun

 For about 2/3rds of its two-hour length, Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun (1968) is an entertaining and superior drive-inn movie.  By this I mean that the picture is fast-moving, exciting, and well-made in a trashy sort of way.  The plot is classically constructed according go time-worn archetypes -- in effect, the movie is a heist-Western with Simba rebels in the Congo playing the part of the Apaches.  The film was made in an era where the notion of political correctness would have been scoffed-at and the movie is racist in some respects.  Indeed, I vaguely recall that when the picture showed in theaters, and, I think, sold a lot of tickets, some of the more enlightened viewers and critics were a bit uncomfortable with the film's content.  Needless to say, a movie with this subject couldn't be produced today, let alone devised as a rip-roaring adventure picture.  This is not to say that we are more enlightened in the year 2021.  In some ways, our present cinema is more prudish, timid, and abstract than the pop film culture that spawned this gory thriller.

Rod Taylor, who has nice buttocks and looks great in tight shorts, plays an American mercenary named Curry.  He appears in the Congo during the middle of the Simba rebellion.  The Simba are insurrectionists who specialize in hacking White people to pieces after first raping the women and sodomizing the men.  (Probably, they are meant to be savage surrogates of the Commies.)  No one really cares about the threatened colonial population.  The real stakes in the film involve diamonds, gemstones that we would now call "blood diamonds" that President Ubi needs to shore up his failing regime.  Curry is supposed to recruit a team and, then, travel 300 miles by rail through Simba-controlled country to rescue one-hundred civilians in a remote mining town -- although the ostensible mission is clearly subordinate to the plot to retrieve the diamonds and bring them back to the Capitol to Ubi.  Curry agrees to undertake this mission, which is more or less suicidal, for a mere $50,000 -- clearly, the price of vainglorious, if mercantile, courage has suffered inflation in the years intervening between this picture and today.  (I think in Zack Snyder's The Army of the Dead, which has a similar plot, the mercenaries charge 50 million dollars for their efforts.)  Curry goes to a military base and engages 40 Congolese soldiers under the command of a vicious Nazi, Henlein -- he struts around wearing a swastika, a bad sign as to his mental stability in my estimation.  Curry also recruits an alcoholic doctor to "stitch up" the wounded.  The train is equipped with .50-caliber machine guns and, at least at the beginning of the picture, seems to be the true hero of the movie -- it's a spectacular coal or lumber burning engine coupled to about five cars, pushing a mounted machine-gun nest with its cow-catcher and trailing along another sandbagged gun emplacement as a caboose.  The train has a fat Black engineer who looks perpetually startled as he chews on his fat, black cigar.  Cardiff loves this train and the hissing, steaming, smoky engine with its resourceful engineer is by far the best thing in the movie -- the train, certainly, gives the best performance in the film and, when its coupled together, the director can't resist heroic camera angles, a Soviet style montage of crashing couplers, and images that feature huge clouds of smoke rising into the light of dawn.  

All of this has a racist edge which is supposed to be ameliorated by Curry's sidekick, a powerfully-built Black man named Ruffo.  Ruffo (James Brown) is a Congolese student educated at UCLA, an over-achiever who speaks five languages, and, of course, a paradigm of patriotic virtue -- he's enlisted in the mission for the sake of the poor tribal folks living in the Congo.  (Brown delivers a big speech about how his parents, who were progressive, didn't have his teeth filed in the old primitive, savage manner customary in the jungle.)  Ruffo distrusts Curry's motives but the two men forge an uneasy alliance to execute the train-raid on the northern mining village where the diamonds are kept in a big, elaborate vault.

The journey up to the mining town is pretty thrilling.  There are plane attacks on the redoubtable little train.  The Nazi guns down a couple of little kids with whom the gentle and kindly Ruffo has just bonded -- Henlein doesn't want them squealing about the mission although raw sadism is probably his real motive.  Curry tells the Nazi to pin  his swastika back on his chest since he has "earned it" by murdering the children.  This leads to a fight in which Curry and Henlein duke it out with various weapons including a chain saw.  Curry has got Henlein's head under the wheels of the train and is bawling that the engineer should put the thing in gear.  But Ruffo intervenes and stops the incipient beheading.  (At this point, the movie's narrative becomes pretty implausible -- if your two commanders are fighting with chainsaws and locomotives, it just might be that the mission is dysfunctional and will likely run into problems in the future; however, Henlein and Curry agree to make-up -- all is apparently forgiven, including the attempt at decapitation by locomotive.  The action continues in an exciting way.  At a plantation, the Simbas have killed everyone, apparently by spectacular torture, except for a comely French blonde played by Yvette Mimieux.  Somehow, she's lost most of her clothing and, in fact, keeps getting her togs torn off her as the film progresses.  Ultimately, the train reaches the remote mountain mining station where there are a hundred terrified White people clamoring to escape by rail.  But the diamonds are in a time-locked vault and the safe won't open for three hours.  This gives Curry the chanced to try to rescue some French missionaries who, of course, refuse to depart.  (It's pretty predictable what will happen to them.)  A native woman is suffering through a breech birth and, so, Curry goes back to town, picks up the alcoholic doctor (who is drunk and has been machine-gunning booze bottles in the bar with the Nazi.) Needless to say, the doctor has to summon up his last ounce of fortitude to perform an emergency C-section, apparently while he is blind drunk.  He  saves the woman and her child and decides to stay at the mission with the obstinate priest and nuns.  All of this is comfortingly familiar to the viewer, the staple stuff of hundreds of Westerns.  Back in town, the Simbas are attacking by the hundreds.  There's a desperate fire-fight and the train, under heavy fire (and with the diamonds in the possession of Curry) escapes just in the nick of time.  But there's a scary railroad trestle to cross and a mortar shell decouples one of the passenger cars crowded with Europeans.  The car rolls back down the hill into the village controlled by the homicidal Simba troops.  Here is where the film ratchets up the violence to a disturbing level.  The Simbas drag all of the Europeans off the train and begin torturing them to death.  The diamonds were in the train compartment captured by the Simbas.  Curry is slung over the shoulder of Ruffo who, now, capitalizes on his Black skin and excellent language skills to infiltrate the town filled with intoxicated and murderous rebels.  There are lots of scenes of White folks being raped, tossed high in the air like rag dolls, and Congolese white soldiers being sodomized by enormous Black revolutionaries.  Curry and Ruffo pull out their guns, slaughter hundreds of Simbas and escape back to the train now stalled in the forest near the ruined railroad trestle.  It's at this point that the proverbial train runs off the tracks decisively.  First, Curry and Ruffo have a sort of male-to-male love aria which ends with some bizarre dialogue between Ruffo and Yvette Mimieux's character:  Ruffo says plaintively of Curry (who has just left in a jeep to get petrol for some lorries that have been conveniently commandeered):  "He won't give you that little part of himself that you need,"  "So what do you do?" asks the French beauty, directing her question to the lovelorn Ruffo.  "Hurt," James Brown says sorrowfully,"you just hurt but he's worth it."  After this bit of dialogue, perhaps, fortunately, the Nazi skewers poor Ruffo, and the bad guy, disappointed at not finding the satchel of diamonds, flees on an improvised raft down a deep river gorge full of rapids.  Curry has found the gas and hurrying back to where the train is stalled, finds Ruffo dead.  (The relationship between Curry and Ruffo has passed into Leslie Fiedler's perverse account of Jim and Huck:  "Come back to the raft, Huck honey.")  Before fleeing the encampment, the villainous Nazi has tried to rape Yvette Mimieux, half-drowned her in the river, and torn off her clothes again.  She tells Curry about what has happened and he goes berserk.  He drives the jeep through the rain forest without the benefit of a road, crashes the vehicle down about a four-hundred foot cliff to reach the gorge where the Blonde Beast is surfing a fragile-looking raft down the river to "the Uganda border."  Curry, then, drives the jeep into the river and chases the Nazi down the rapids in the vehicle -- this is idiotic and has to be seen to be believed.  Catching up with the Nazi, the two men fight in a abysmal cavernous canyon that has suddenly appeared in the landscape -- they climb down vines together fighting maniacally all the way to the waterfall plunge pool at the base of the gorge.  There, Curry bests the Nazi, smashing the bones in his arms and legs and, then, dropping the screaming villain into a deep pool where he flops around as he drowns, unable to swim because his extremities have all been broken to pieces.  A noble Black soldier appears out of nowhere and shakes his head in horror:  Who are the real savages here?  Curry, then, turns himself in and asks to be court-marshalled.  The diamonds have been saved and will reach the capitol city when the convoy comes down from a mountain pass overlooking the town.  The last twenty minutes of the movie is stupid beyond belief.  

Yvette Mimieux also looks great in tight white jeans.  She has an almost perfectly heart-shaped derriere.  In the closing scenes, Rod Taylor has been beaten to a bloody pulp and with his face swollen, he looks just like Popeye as played by Robin Williams.  Indeed, he even sounds like Popeye. The movie is well-executed until it bursts through all bounds of credibility in its last minutes.  If vehicles could readily drive through rivers full of rapids and waterfalls, why would we ever need such a thing as a road?  And how does a couple of jerry-cans of gas pumped mid-way in the 300 mile trip provide enough fuel for a whole fleet of trucks to drive all the way to the Capitol?  And, most importantly, what happens to the handsome train and its handsome engineer? The picture was shot on location and the African landscapes are enthralling.  Interior scenes were made in the studio in London and feature some remarkably inept rear projection -- all of the images showing people in vehicles exploit this technique.  Cardiff shot some of Michael Powell's best movies and was renowned as a technicolor cameraman and the movie has a handsome burnished appearance. This is the kind of picture that would make a deep impression on you if viewed when you were about 12 -- the action scenes are realistically and brutishly violent and the plot has a pleasingly classical structure:  the so-called heterosexual journey and heist picture.  (And there are are undertones from other famous movies -- at one point, Curry's dialogue seems to quote at length from Kipling's "Gunga Din" although without seeming to acknowledge that source.)  Yvette Mimieux's not inconsiderable pulchritude is wasted in the film -- Curry is in love with Ruffo and she can't seduce the Black man due to the color bar and he's also hopelessly in love with Curry.  

Once, when I was about ten, I saw on TV an action film similar to this movie, The Flame of India.  I recalled that movie as about the best picture ever made -- it was full of train chases, massacres, elaborate fights and featured a burning railroad trestle about a thousand feet high. I imagined that movie to be a great film until I saw it again when I was about sixty.  It was, of course, appallingly bad.      

The Green Fog

 Guy Madden's The Green Fog (2017) demonstrates a quasi-theological proposition:  for cineastes, Hitchcock's Vertigo is the Holy Grail, or, perhaps, the Holy Writ of film-making, the world's greatest picture.  Madden's movie proves that Vertigo contains all films ever made in San Francisco; conversely, The Green Fog demonstrates that every movie produced in San Francisco contains,at its core, Hitchcock's Vertigo.  The name for this theorem, abolishing distinctions between Vertigo and every other film featuring San Francisco, is "the green fog" -- a poisonous-looking mist that periodically seethes over the images, blurring them into an apocalyptic viridian smudge.  The green fog is not only a name for the phenomenon that makes all Frisco films Vertigo but, also, a science fiction peril, a meteorological system that swirls over the Bay area on the West Coast, a threat that is closely monitored by a phalanx of journalists bearing notepads and observed as well by scientists and gum shoes peering at video monitors and screens on which dozens of films are projected. 

The Green Fog, a movie that is about an hour long, is comprised entirely of fragments of film and TV footage edited into a series of meditations and variations on episodes in Vertigo.  The movie is constructed chronologically -- a viewer that is familiar with Vertigo (and Madden assumes that everyone watching the picture will have this basic knowledge) can detect the narrative outline of the Hitchcock film in The Green Fog, scenes spliced into the sequence in which the story proceeds in the 1958 thriller.  For instance, Madden's prologue shows us the advance of the green fog toward San Francisco, these eerie sequences intercut with a montage of men fleeing across rooftops in that city.  (Here, Hitchcock's source material appears only as the famous shot of the hand grasping a rail that initiates Vertigo and the deadly rooftop pursuit, and, then, I think in a flash of footage a dozen cuts later that is projected in black and white -- as far as I can determine, Madden usually incorporates the technicolor imagery from Vertigo into his film in black and white format, thereby defamiliarizing imagery that would otherwise probably dominate his film.)  After the prologue, there's a section called "Weekend at Ernie's" -- this part of Madden's film shows, among other things, Joseph Cotten in a wheelchair (simulating Jimmy Stewart's convalescence in Vertigo), then, a series of shots showing cars prowling after one another on the vertical San Francisco streets (Jimmy Stewart pursuing Kim Novak in the Hitchcock movie), a series of grotesque-looking restaurant scenes, and lurid dialogue sequences, edited so that the characters seems always just about to speak or with their lips closing having finished some utterance that we don't hear.  (There's a suitably tense and jagged score played by the Kronos quartet over the footage --except for a few moments in the movie, there's no natural sound and no dialogue, although we are treated to some amplified Foley effects:  bird calls, footsteps, the hiss of wind and waves, and, sometimes, a fog horn.)   We see sequences shot in the old Mission cemetery, the picture gallery of the Legion of Honor museum with people staring fixedly at paintings, and, then, a flower shop (or a half-dozen flower shops) followed by red roses bobbing in the deadly currents off Fort Point.  This is followed by a montage of about 20 shots showing people falling into water (corresponding to Jimmy Stewart rescuing Kim Novak when she leaps off the stone pier into the Bay) -- some of this footage is weirdly beautiful, including images of bright yellow divers resting at the bottom of the sea and figures thrashing in the water.  The famous Muir Woods scene in Vertigo is refracted through images of what looks like a primitive music video shot in that forest (there's a single flash of a shot from Hitchcock), this imagery carefully scrutinized by Rock Hudson studying video monitors -- the most obvious and persistent source for Madden's found footage is the old TV show McMillan and Wife.)  A gangster dips his bread in coffee -- then, we see a dozen couples in cars that are racing along the Coast Highway.  The road ends at a lighthouse from which about ten different figures seem to fall into an abyss.  The next section in the film is called "Catatonia" and represents the interlude between the death of the woman that Jimmy Stewart loves in Vertigo and his obsessive effort to resurrect her ending in her second death, as it were, when she falls from the bell-tower at the Mission Dolores.  In this part of the movie, the green fog gradually envelopes San Francisco, sometimes, also portrayed as a huge sea beast smashing the Golden Gate Bridge into pieces.  The green fog  refers to the remarkable scene in Vertigo in which Kim Novak, remade as the hero's lost love, emerges from the bathroom of her hotel room and is bathed in a supernatural green light -- a peculiar effect in Hitchcock's film that creates a rapturous if queasy effect that is almost impossible to define. (It's hard to imagine how Hitchcock came up with this peculiar visual notion).  There is a montage of sinister weeping clowns, then, beautiful women revealed in opening doors.  A series of erotic scenes follow and, then, there is the nightmarish drive in the dark down the coastal highway again, twenty shots of men dragging women up steep steps with the apparition of the Golden Gate Bridge looming over the city in the background.  We see the lighthouse again and a nun appears suddenly on a terrace.  More bodies plunge from heights of various descriptions,, corpses landing with an unconvincing thud.  An earthquake is underway.  The fog is drowning the city.  Flames envelope collapsing buildings and green smoke billows over everything.  There's a brief epilogue of a ferry crossing the Oakland Bay and some young lovers making eyes at one another.  

"What are we looking for?" Rock Hudson says as the Tv detective McMillan.  "I don't know," he replies answering his own question.  "but at this point, I'll take anything."  The Green Fog is comprised of probably about 400 snippets of film from pictures as disparate as Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (we see Brooks falling through the famous Saul Bass graphics of whirling spirals that comprise Vertigo's opening credits) to von Stroheim's Greed.  Madden and his team seem to have carefully studied every film and TV show ever set in San Francisco.   Obviously, they couldn't secure the rights to some pictures.  For instance, John Boorman's Point Blank is represented by the famous shot of a man's feet walking as the sound track snaps with the percussion of his heels tapping against the airport tiles -- Madden doesn't use the shot from Point Blank but cuts into the montage a similar image of boots on a floor amplifying the sound of the steps on his soundtrack to simulate the Boorman movie.  Throughout the picture, the editing is stunningly inventive -- a montage of gems and necklaces, for instances, is a surrogate for the scene in the Hitchcock film in which the hero discovers jewelry that the supposedly dead heiress once wore.  Often, Madden matches eyelines to create complex narrative schemata implying plot lines between movies that were made fifty years apart.  The famous scene of Donald Sutherland screaming as one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with alarming reaction shots) corresponds to the moment when Jimmy Stewart recognizes that he has been duped by Kim Novak's character -- the camera zooms into Sutherland's screaming mouth and, then, we are in a tunnel zooming away from San Francisco on the Coastal Highway heading toward the fatal denouement of the Hitchcock film.  The film's metaphysic is that Vertigo is somehow immanent in all movies made in San Francisco and, perhaps, in all narrative movies ever made -- there are scary towers, heights, open graves, lovers pursuing one another and erotic embraces, people try to speak but are interrupted( (they seem to stammer but no words come out). masked faces appear and vanish, the sea surges against the coast at Monterrey and under the stone steps of Fort Point, men drag unconscious women out of the foaming waves and all of this is studied abstractly by figures screening movies or watching video monitors with their ears covered under headphones as they listen to bugged conversations.  Everyone is watching everyone else, spying, eavesdropping -- it's all voyeurism while the green fog rolls in off the sea.  In Madden's account, this is the essence of narrative film:  anguished faces, an embrace, someone falling over and over again into an abyss as a camera dispassionately watches on our behalf.      

 

Everything Goes Wrong

 Everything Goes Wrong is a Nikkatsu Studios "Sun Tribe" or juvenile delinquent film.  It's a raw exploitation film directed Seijun Suzuki.  The movie has a complex plot and is very short -- it's about 71 minutes long.  The viewer spends most of the movie trying to figure out that relationship between the characters and, once this is understood, the film is pretty much over.  Japanese movies pose a problem for me for two reasons:  first, to my eyes, many of the characters look alike and, on first viewing, I can't figure out who is who; second, I find it difficult to reliably assess the age of the characters -- women, in particular, who look very young to me turn out to be middle-aged; therefore, I sometimes interpret male-female couples as lovers or siblings when, in fact, the characters are mother and son.  This leads to a misconstructions of an interesting nature. (Confusion of this sort is integral to this film in which the boys all seem to be in strangely romantic relationships with their mothers.)  When the characters are given names, they often are unfamiliar, confusing, and hard to remember.  I suppose these admissions are tantamount to racism to which I am willing to plead guilty.  

Everything Goes Wrong is the story of a promising young man who is tempted into criminality.  This boy, Jiro Sugati, lives with his mother, a secretary at an insurance firm.  Jiro's mother, Masayo, has been the mistress of a Japanese industrialist for ten years.  The Japanese industrialist, Mr. Nambura, is married and works for a firm that built tanks during the War.  Jiro's mother is war widow and the boy's father was killed in New Guinea when a Japanese tank (built by Nambura's firm) ran over him.  The movie begins with the delinquents watching an earnest-looking Japanese war film Fight to the Last Drop of Blood.  The kids come out of the movie, blinking in the hot light of Tokyo mid-afternoon, and, in several long virtuosic shots wander around an urban landscape rife with sleazy bars, cluttered disreputable alleys, and sex hotels.  At first, there seem to be a welter of plots and subplots although the film fixes on three narratives:  Jiro's troubled relationship with his mother, Jiro's friendship with a boy who is not a good student and has had to drop out of school to work in the Mitsubishi factory, and Etsuko who is pregnant and trying to raise money for an abortion.  Etsuko has been living with a callous student named Ono but he has now abandoned her.  The kids are all vaguely affiliated with a gang that shakes down couples coming from the Sex Hotel, blackmailing them for chump change.  There are two kids who wear panama hats (confusingly) who seem to be car thieves.  From time to time, cars owned by Europeans or Americans get hijacked and, apparently, chopped  up for parts.  A nearby American military base is also a source of various kinds of corruption.  Jiro fights with his mother over her relationship with Mr. Nambura who the boy regards as a war profiteer.  He runs away from home and spends an afternoon with his old elementary school buddy now working at Mitsubishi.  The boys go on rides at an amusement park but Jiro, who is intensely proud, thinks his friend is being humiliated by his work at the factory and so flees from the kid in horror. (Jiro is also particularly horrified that the kid's mother is a retired geisha -- that is, a woman with a tarnished background.)  There's a tavern decorated with music posters -- it's bizarre:  Coleman Hawkins shares space on the wall with a French poster advertising a concert of the works of Faure.  Some local boys sing doo-wop in the joint and there's even a girl group that sounds a little like Martha and the Vandellas.  Juvenile delinquents use the bar as their headquarters and engage in lots of underage drinking and cigarette smoking.  The delinquents have molls who have been initiated into the gang by (literal) gang-rape.  One of these girls, now ruined by her association with gang, seduces Jiro.  He goes to her squalid digs and has sex with her, afterwards pitching a handful of coins on her bed.  The girl, Toshimo, is outraged -- she may be the plaything of the coltish gang of delinquents but she's no hooker.  At the bar, a cynical  journalist exchanges quips with the weary hostess; he's writing an expose of the juvenile delinquent gangsters.  As the title of the film overtly advises, everything goes wrong.  Mr. Nambura searches the mean streets for Jiro with whom he is hoping to reconcile.  But, instead, of finding Jiro, he runs into Etsuko who is desperate to earn enough money for her abortion.  Etsuko tells Mr. Nambura that Jiro is hiding out at the beach.  Mr. Nambura goes there with him and is sighted by Jiro.  Jiro runs back home and advises his mother that her boyfriend is two-timing her.  Then, Jiro takes his mother to the beach where Mr. Nambura is with Etsuko, who has now taken off her shirt and is frantically trying to get the businessman to have sex with her.  This reveal backfires on Jiro.  Jiro's mom, who is a bit of a door mat, takes the blame for Mr. Nambura's apparent sexual infraction (in fact, Nambura has virtuously rejected the girl's advances) as evidence of her own failings as a woman.  She falls on her knees and begs Nambura to take her back.  This sickens Jiro who hurries downtown where he picks up Toshimo, kisses her frantically, and, then, steals a car.  Meanwhile, poor Etsuko, still without cash for her abortion, hurls herself down a flight of steps leading to the subway, thereby inducing a miscarriage. (A student denounces Ono, Etsuko's callous boyfriend and pronounces the moral of the film: "Today good will can't exist between people any more."   Meanwhile, Mr. Nambura happens on the joyriding couple of Jiro and Toshimo and makes the mistake of hitching a ride with them.  The couple go back to Toshimo's miserable digs where they are about to have sex in front of the nonplussed Mr. Nambura.  (Nambura, by this point, has admitted that he was a war profiteer but claims he was forced into that enterprise by his greedy wife, the daughter of a prominent member of the military industrial complex.)  Out on the streets, a bunch of kids are protesting Japan's militarization and the H-Bomb.  Toshimo admits that as the moll in the gang, she's been complicit in securing other girls for the delinquents to rape.  She attaches her face to Jiro's cheek by a strand of adhesive chewing gum while the lad smokes disconsolately.  At last, Jiro takes a wrench (earlier brandished by Toshimo to threaten a malevolent gangster) and beats in poor Mr. Nambura's head.  Spattered with blood, Jiro goes to the stolen car and, with Toshimo pleading with him to stop, drives wildly through the crowded streets.  With a motorcycle cop chasing him, he crashes head on into a truck, thus killing himself and poor Toshimo.  In her apartment, Jiro's mother hears the sirens.  The hapless Mr. Nambura is still alive, although barely, and we see him wheeled into surgery.  At the bar, the cynical journalist says that he probably has enough materials for a pretty good story and says he'll make sure he mentions the sad, world-weary barmaid.  

The film resembles American movies like Rebel without a Cause.  As in that movie, the picture posits a world of feckless, emasculated middle-age men who are useless as role models for their sons.  (The hero's father in Rebel without a Cause wears an apron around the house as he does chores.)  The Japanese men are the victims of World War Two, literally defeated and traumatized.  There are no viable models for masculinity, the film seems to assert, and so young men fall into the trap of becoming gang-members -- at least, the violent gangs are run by men who don't seem to be passive eunuchs.  As in the American films, the pop-sociology is questionable at best and, at worst, pernicious hokum.  Everything Goes Wrong relies upon a half-dozen coincidental meetings -- in a city of many millions, Mr. Nambura keeps running into the young characters whose mishaps provide the motor for the plot.  The climax involving the car chase is cheaply shot and unimpressive -- it features some unconvincing rear-projection footage with inserts of the supposedly pursuing and implacable motor cycle.  The picture wants to blame the entire malaise in post-war Tokyo on World War Two, which may be convincing if simple-minded.  Suzuki's direction in this film is pretty restrained -- often, his films are very expressionistic and over-the-top.  The movie is probably better than it looks but I'm not persuaded that it's anything other than mediocre.  

The Firemen's Ball

The story goes that Czech film maker, Milos Forman, left Prague to finish a movie script with which he was having difficulty.  Forman holed-up in a small village in the country to work in solitude on the script.  One night, he attended a lottery and charity ball fundraiser for the local volunteer fire department.  The affair was so bizarre and corrupt that Forman could think of nothing else.  He abandoned his previous project and with Ivan Passer sketched a scenario for a satiric comedy based on the experience.  The resulting film, The Firemen's Ball was premiered in 1967.  Predictably, Czechoslovakian fire fighters protested the movie and called for it's boycott.  Nonetheless, the short film -- it's only 74 minutes long -- was a big hit in Czechoslovakia, sold 750,000 tickets and, then, was re-broadcast to much acclaim on Czech State TV in 1969.  Critics are accustomed to consider the film an allegory about the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, but Forman denied that intention and, indeed, the movie was never censored or suppressed by the Czech government, notwithstanding the violent Soviet-backed crack-down in 1968,  Forman wasn't being disingenuous.  The film's satire is general, corrosive, and applicable to pretty much any human polity.

The Firemen's Ball begins with the camera following a small ceremonial fire-axe that is passed from hand-to-hand.  A committee of about ten older men, most of them fat and homely (one has a Hitler moustache) are planning a charity ball and intend to bestow the ornate little axe on their former chairman, a handsome and dignified older fellow (he's 86) who is dying of cancer.  The action takes place in Socialist Palace of Culture in a small town.  A man perched on a tall ladder is foxing the edges of a big ornate banner showing firefighters heroically engaged in putting out a savage-looking house fire -- the home has big red flames surging out of its windows and the firefighters are clambering all over the structure in their rooster-comb hats carrying hatchets and hoses.  The man foxing the edges of the huge banner is using a torch for some reason and, of course, he lights the decorative scroll on fire.  It burns as he dangles in the air.  The firefighters try to put out the blaze but their extinguisher doesn't work and the thing burns to ashes.  (The fate of the firefighter dangling twenty feet in the air is left to our imagination.)

The ball ensues and takes up the majority of the film.  The Committee have gathered various items as prizes for a lottery.  Apparently, the people attending the Ball, which is packed to overflowing,, have purchased lottery tickets with the proceeds to benefit the local fire department.  The Committee also plans a beauty pageant with the notion that the winner will bestow the ceremonial axe on the old man as the guest of honor.  Everything goes wrong.  First, the Committee can't find any girls willing to participate in the humiliating beauty pageant.  Second, everyone gets drunk and people (including the firefighters) start stealing the lottery prizes, a motley assortment of objects such as toys, china figurines, and comestibles in the form of plum brandy, head cheese and a ham.  The beauty pageant is a calamity:  the girls, most of them definitely not conventional beauty queen candidates, refuse to go on-stage.  When the processional march is played for the beauty pageant, the old man who is very deaf thinks it's for him and he prematurely strides up to the stage to accept his honor.  Meanwhile, the homely girls have fled to the women's toilet and won't come out.  The Committee members, then, drag a half-dozen young women at random up on stage -- the girls are like the Sabine women: they have to be hauled kicking and screaming over the shoulders of the firefighters who drop them on the stage.  Before the beauty queen can be selected, a fire breaks out at a farmhouse near the ballroom.  The firefighters fail to put out the blaze.  All the guests at the Ball use the opportunity to evade paying their drink tabs.  (The bartenders from the Palace of Culture try to recoup their losses by selling wine and beer from a folding table next to the huge, blazing fire.)  The old man who lives in the house is saved as are a few chickens and goat. Later, the Committee gives the victim of the fire all of the lottery tickets as a donation,  But this also turns out to be futile.  When the crowd returns to the ball room, most of the lottery prizes have gone missing.  This is an outrage and so the Committee shuts off all the lights and asks people to show some decency and put back on the table the prizes that they have stolen.  When the lights are turned-on, only one person is trying to put his ill-gotten goods on the table -- this happens to be one of the Committee members who has stolen the head-cheese.  All of the remaining prizes have now gone vanished -- so the unfortunate farmer just gets a couple of baskets of ticket -- "these are just worthless craps of paper," he exclaims.  In an attempt to salvage the evening, the old man is invited to the dais to receive the ceremonial axe.  The old man delivers an eloquent and dignified speech thanking the committee for the honor.  But, when he opens the wooden casket, the ceremonial axe is missing.  The film ends with an overhead shot of the burned-out house.  The old farmer's bed is sitting outside in the snow.  One of the Committee members, who seems to be senile, crawls into bed with the farmer as it begins to snow.  

The film is grotesque and very funny.  The filmmaking is very fluent and self-assured -- almost all of the participants are non-professionals,  just town folk in the village where the movie was shot.  Although the film has an allegorical aspect, it's not exactly clear what Forman is referencing other than human cupidity and folly in general.  Accordingly, the picture stands as a convincing symbol for corruption of any kind you want to imagine -- open-ended enough that the film will mean different things to different people.  (If you want to see the movie as an allegory for the corruption of Trump's regime, for instance, the film can certainly be interpreted according to that rubric.)  The notion that the firefighters are vigorously stealing from one another at a Ball meant for their fiscal benefit and that their depredations occur at the same time a very real building is burning down has a nightmarish quality.  Kafka, it must be remembered, was Czech himself and there are certainly aspects of the story consistent with his mordant vision of human life. 

Army of the Dead

 Army of the Dead was released streaming on Netflix on Friday, May 21, 2021.  The big-budget zombie film streams in about 20 languages.  After watching the film, I counted the credits for versions in Indonesia, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian, and about a half-dozen Asian languages with characters that I couldn't recognize.  The film's closing titles show several LIDAR operators.  This is a data-capture specialty not previously credited -- at least, in movies that I have seen.  (Apparently LIDAR is used to collect data points by reflecting laser beams off objects that are scanned.  The data points can, then, be downloaded into a computer and accessed to make three dimensional models of complex sets or, even, figures -- technicians, for instance, sometimes LIDAR animals so that they can be convincingly recreated by CGI.)  The movie credits identify two dog and wolf wranglers -- but I didn't recall any dogs or wolves in the movie (maybe, that footage was cut).  Zack Snyder directed but had two second-unit directors and each of these directors had several assistants.  The film was shot in LA, New Jersey, and Las Vegas.  A credit thanks the people of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico for their cooperation -- although none of the film takes place in New Mexico, presumably some of the impressive desert sequences may have been shot on the reservation.  When one of the co-stars on the film was accused of sexual misconduct, Snyder and Netflix replaced the actor with Tig Notaro, a Lesbian comic, and, someone with impeccably politically correct credentials.  (Snyder notes that it cost Netflix several million dollars to fix the problem --I assume that the actor accused of bad conduct had to be bought-out on his contract and that Notaro was able to demand a premium for her services.  A number of scenes were shot with the bad guy, but Snyder says that he was very careful, used lots of green screen processes, and so was able to substitute Notaro for the other actor without having to do much re-shooting.)  A movie like this is not really photographic -- it's essentially a complicated computer program in which actors pose against backgrounds manufactured out of pixels.  The CGI artists and operators occupy about two minutes of end-credit, densely printed blocks of type scrolling by on the screen.  It's all really marvelous but, perhaps, ultimately futile in some way that I can't quite define.

Army of the Dead has a pleasingly classical plot.  It's like Oceans 11 rebooted as a zombie film.  Las Vegas has been overrun by zombies -- I take it that there is a vestige of satire here.  The city has been walled-off by ramparts of storage containers ringing the spectacular ruins.  For some unknown reason, a prison camp holding immigrants and, possibly, political dissidents has been built right next to the zombie-infested city.  The US President has given orders to drop a nuke on Las Vegas on the 4th of July.  A sinister Japanese businessman plots to send of team of mercenaries into the city for the purpose of removing 200 million dollars stored in a casino vault -- the casino has two towers named Sodom and Gomorra.  The Japanese gangster recruits an ex-soldier named Scott Ward to lead the team planning to sneak into Las Vegas, evade the zombie hordes loitering around Sin City, and extract the fortune from the casino.  The first quarter of the movie involves building the team of renegades and outlaws crazy enough to undertake what may well be a suicide mission.  This part of the movie is redolent of The Seven Samurai -- Scott Ward looks up old war buddies and persuades them to join his team.  In the end, Scott has put together a motley band of ten warriors -- a fierce Latina named Cruz, Peters (Notaro), a crack helicopter pilot, Vanderrohe, a handsome and sardonic Black soldier, Mikey Guzman an internet sensation, famous for killing zombies on videos posted on-line -- Guzman comes to the party with two associates a punk girl and boy (a third guy backs out); these people are obviously just cannon-fodder.  The Japanese businessman sends one of his thugs with the team to keep an eye on them.  A German kid named Dieter is retained to do the safe-cracking.  There's a subplot involving a Coyote who smuggles people in and out of the zombie-town -- Coyote is also named Lily and she's a Frenchwoman.  Lily has smuggled an Indian immigrant into Las Vegas but, then, lost her in the chaos.  The immigrant, Gita, is friends with Kate, Scott Ward's estranged daughter and Kate insists on joining the Mission to hunt for her missing friend.  (Kate's presence allows Snyder to slow down the action for dull and maudlin scenes involving the girl's troubled relationship with her father.)  A prison guard at the Camp is recruited as well -- he's a wicked fellow who sexually harasses the female prisoners and he gets his comeuppance about five minutes after the wall around the city is breached by our heroes -- Lily feeds him to the buxom and shapely Queen Zombie in exchange for something like safe passage.  In zombie films, bad guys get to be spectacularly killed two times -- first by the zombies and, then, by the human heroes when the bad guy is reincarnated as a bloodthirsty member of the Army of the Dead.  Of course, our heroes have to operate under time pressure -- the city is going to be nuked in a day and, later, when the President decides it's bad taste to bomb the zombies on the 4th of July, he moves up the date for the holocaust.  Instead of 24 hours, our heroes now have only about forty minutes to complete their mission -- not coincidentally this is the last forty minutes of this two-hour and 28 minute gore-extravaganza.  

The movie is good for its genre with impressive sets and special effects.  The action sequences although confusingly edited are over-the-top with lots of exploding heads.  Zombies are killed with spikes through the skull, bashed to death, machine-gunned by the thousand, set on fire, crushed to pulp, and blown into scraps of bloody meat.  Predictably, the thug planted in the team by the Japanese businessman has a secret agenda and ends up betraying his colleagues.  One by one, the people on the team are killed and turn into zombies themselves.  Time runs short.  The City is nuked.  And so on.  The ending, supposedly surprising, is wholly predictable and doesn't make any sense.  There's some mildly sardonic dialogue, but the picture isn't bitter Swiftian satire of the kind that we find in George Romero's cycle of zombie films.  There's some joking reference to current events, but the film is made for everyone on the planet and, so, has to be denatured to the point of being accessible to the lowest common denominator -- everything in the movie has to be instantly understandable in rural hamlets in the Ukraine or in Hindi-speaking suburbs near Mumbai or the mountain villages of Indonesia.  The international casting is intended to pander to audiences in Germany, France, Mexico, Japan, and India -- the heroes include African-Americans, a lesbian played by a famous Lesbian comedian, and other minorities.  Predictably, the two human bad guys are whiter-than-white Caucasians.  

The film roars ahead with shootouts, hand to hand combat with the zombies, and all sorts of other mayhem.  It's mildly amusing and I thought the film was fairly entertaining.  It's garbage, of course, and doesn't make any sense even on its own idiotic premises.  Gita who is confined by a zombie king who rides a zombie horse is just kept in an open room with her two colleagues and she makes no attempt to escape when the army of the dead is summoned from the premises to fight the intruders.  Why doesn't she run away?  The team infiltrates the zombie metropolis and immediately goes into a cellar where about five-hundred zombies are hibernating -- of course, the zombies wake up with gory consequences.  Why in the world would our intrepid heroes go into the cellar when they can just walk around the place outside and avoid getting up close-and-personal with the monsters?  The zombie economy makes no sense --what are the zombies eating?  They don't seem to be cannibals so how do they survive?  Bly Tanaka, the Japanese businessman who has set this whole plot in motion, is shown morosely drinking a scotch and water as Las Vegas is bombed.  Then, he's out of the picture.  Surely, he deserves a more showy demise.  The helicopter flying the surviving heroes out of the city is caught in the thermal blast of the nuke.  But the radiation and fire doesn't seem to burn anyone.  For some reason, the zombies have developed into an upper caste apparently capable of thought and planning who lord it over the shamblers, who just stagger around waiting to be shot in the head.  If the upper caste zombies are capable of planning and thought, how come they don't simply scale the walls of Las Vegas and escape?  They can use tools -- we see this when the King Zombie impales someone with a spear.  So why are they just passively waiting around to be slaughtered.  As one might expect, in this year of Covid, the movie implies that the zombies are a department of defense experiment that has gone awry.  With the clock ticking with regard to the nuclear attack, the characters inexplicably pause to express their intense and sentimental feelings for one another.  The hero, Sam Wood, has almost no forehead.  He seems to be what was once called a "pinhead"-- it's hard to warm to this guy since he looks so strange.  (The character is played by Dave Bautista who specializes in roles involving much grunting and muscular tossing of characters to and fro.  Snyder is particularly fond of shots showing people thrown about forty feet and rebounding off concrete walls or pillars without any noticeable adverse effect.  There's a zombie tiger in the movie, one of Siegfried and Roy's spawn, that has gone to the dark side.  Instead of mauling it's victims, it simply grabs them in its moldering jaws and pitches them against walls and ceilings.)

The film's first fifteen minutes, the best part of the movie, promises wildly garish and comical action, ridiculous situations, and spectacularly violent and clear fight scenes -- under the credits, the heroes take on zombies with rockets and chain-saws and each poses silently with his or her congressional medal of honor for taking down hordes of the undead.  Snyder stages the opening of the safe, a device called the Goetterdaemmerung to Siegfried's funeral march and this gives the scenes involving the safe-cracking a false, mock-heroic gravitas.  Bits and pieces of the movie are engaging but pretty soon it devolves into run-of-the-mill gore.  I suppose that this film cost about 250 million dollars.  The Army of the Dead features Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" and "Viva Las Vegas".  I wonder what it cost to procured the screen rights to that music.  

Born to Kill

 "Most men are turnips," -- so declares Lorie Palmer, a beautiful and promiscuous girl in Robert Wise's 1947 Born to Kill.  Lorie extols the advantages of her new beau, Sam Wild, a man with shoulders a yard wide and a notably fierce demeanor.  Drinking with her boozy, one-eyed landlady, Lorie says that if you cross Sam, "he'll kick your teeth down your throat."  "Ain't that wonderful?" the old landlady says enthusiastically.  A little later, Lorie goes out with a callow, skinny hoodlum in an attempt to make Sam jealous.  She succeeds:  he beats both the boyfriend and Lorie to death in the kitchen of the boarding house.  No turnip he.  

Born to Kill wants to be conventional and, even, staid, but the movie is based on delirious crime novel, Deadlier than the Male and, notwithstanding its upper crust pretentions (it's set among the super-wealthy in San Francisco), the film quickly reverts to its pulp fiction roots.  Lawrence Tierney play Sam Wild, a violent criminal, obsessed with dominating others with a hair-trigger temper that he never expresses except by uttering imprecations as he cuts someone's heart out -- "you can't  just go around killing people," says Sam's boyfriend, Martin Waterman (played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in the sort of sexually ambiguous role designed for an actor like Peter Lorre --- Lorre was under contract to Warner Brothers; Born to Kill is a RKO picture.)  But Sam is a psychopath and has no control over his impulses and, of course, ends up killing half the principals in the movie.  

The plot is complicated and ultra-lurid.  After murdering Lorie Palmer and her hapless suitor, Sam takes the night-train from Reno to San Francisco.  Joining him on the train is the film's female protagonist, a distaff version of Sam, Helen Brent.  Helen has been living in the boarding house with Lorie in Reno, but when she finds the corpses in the kitchen, she coolly calls the train station, accelerating her departure from Nevada  and, in so doing, encounters the murderous Sam also hastening out of town..  (She has previously admired him while shooting craps in the casino where Lori flirts with the doomed suitor to rile up Sam.)  Of course, Helen is smitten with the Sam and, probably, has sex with him on the train although this is implied not shown -- there's nothing like a good murder to rev-up the sex drive.  We learn that Helen is a foster sister to a Frisco newspaper heiress, Georgia Staples.  Helen is engaged to the mild-mannered Grover, another male turnip who is wealthier than God as a result of a mining fortune.  When Sam barges into the mansion where the women live, Helen tries to have it both ways -- continuing her exciting affair with Sam while retaining her financially lucrative engagement with Grover.  Sam doesn't like being in second place, romantically or otherwise, and so he marries the newspaper heiress after a whirlwind courtship.  But, of course, he also continues his affair with Georgia.  Meanwhile, the boozy landlady from Reno, Mrs. Kraft, has come to Frisco intending to avenge the death of poor Lorie, her drinking buddy.  Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett, a German private dick, to hunt down Lorie's murderer.  Arnett plays the role that would be cast with Sydney Greenstreet in this movie (Greenstreet was also a contract player for Warner Bros.)-- he's fat, slovenly, and a gold mine of aphoristic quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible.  Arnett closes in on Sam Wild.  Like everyone else in this movie, Arnett is cheerfully amoral.  Perceiving that Helen loves Sam, Arnett blackmails her -- he threatens to turn Sam in to the authorities for the Reno murders unless she cuts him a check for $15,000.  Sam's boyfriend, Mark Waterman has also been installed in Georgia's palatial mansion.  So,  under one roof, we have Sam and his wife, Georgia (the newspaper heiress), Helen (Sam's lover) and Mark (Sam's boyfriend) -- it's a cozy situation for all.  Mark, who hopes to improve his relationship with Sam, freelances by trying to kill the beer-loving landlady, Mrs. Kraft.  But she's too tough and escapes.  Sam, who thinks that Mark is messing with Helen, carves out his heart on the beach where the unlucky boyfriend has been trying to kill the old lady.  When Sam isn't sufficiently attentive to the psychopathic, Helen, she calls Arnett to renege on her agreement to cash the PI out for 15K.  Arnett drops a dime on Sam with predictably dire consequences.  Shuffling out of town, the cynical Arnett buys a newspaper, reads the headlines that describe the film's denouement, and, then, remarking "The way of the transgressor is hard", throws the paper away as he strolls toward Union Station.  

The movie is directed in a manner that is completely pedestrian and unremarkable -- it's overlit and visually unimpressive.  (Some expressionistic sets representing the beach where Mark tries to murder Mrs. Kraft and, then, gets killed  himself are somewhat atmospheric -- however, this picture doesn't otherwise traffic in mood or atmospherics.)  Lawrence Tierney is inexpressive and has some of the specious glitter of a silent movie star -- he has a great profile and acts by not acting at all.  He has a curiously high-pitched voice and is a beautiful dreamer, a sleepwalker as David Bordwell has called the femmes fatale in forties and fifties movies.  He's filmed like Hedy Lamarr, a fabulous, inexpressive mask, and gets all of the glamor shots in the movie.  Arnett played by the aptly named German William Slezak is excellent.  The most memorable performance in the film is Esther Howard who plays the former glamor girl and elderly alcoholic, Mrs. Kraft.  She seems to have one glass eye that doesn't exactly track right and that is paralyzed into a perpetual glare.  Her dogged allegiance to her dead drinking companion is touching and a scene in which the evil Helen intimidates the old woman into silence is particularly effective and, convincingly, establishes the female protagonist as wholly vicious.  The good folks in the movie, the feckless Grover and the newspaper heiress are ciphers -- they look good but their just mannequins.  Of course, the film belongs to its villains.  At one point, Arnett surveying the City of San Francisco observes that this is a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile." (The quote is from Reginald Heber's 19th century "Missionary Hymn" -- the song that begins "From Greenland's icy mountains...") The film is a potent brew of lust and violence, competently directed, but Robert Wise, who is a cautious director, unfortunately plays it safe.  (Although tame by today's standards, the film was widely denounced for its depravity and censored by the Motion Picture Association; the picture was cited as an inspiration for a particularly heinous murder and withdrawn from circulation.  Lawrence Tierney claimed that he resented being cast as homicial thugs and that he was really just a "good guy" -- but there's no evidence for this self-characterization:  he was violent alcoholic who was imprisoned more than 12 times for bloody barroom brawls and once drew a knife on Jerry Seinfeld.)  

The Honeymoon Killers

Leonard Kastle's fetid The Honeymoon Killers is like something growing under a flat rock -- it's not something you want to look at, but it has its own relentless vitality.  If nothing else, the film never swerves from its grisly perception of corrupt human nature.  The picture is a freak show of cruelty, in some ways a black comedy so bleak that it dares you to laugh with it.  Simply stated, everyone in The Honeymoon Killers is repulsive to a greater or lesser degree; the film's strength is that it doesn't forbid you from sympathy for its repellent characters -- in fact, some scenes achieve considerable, if nightmarish, force  from our concern for the victims of the murderous protagonists.  The 1969 picture, shot in black and white that somehow manages to seem garish (as if comprised of tabloid photographs), the film's plot is simple and pitiless:  a fat woman and a smarmy Latin lover haphazardly murder lonely middle-aged women that they have swindled into marrying the man.  The couple, who are lovers, pose as brother and sister.  They don't really intend murder until the end -- rather, they sort of drift into killing the victims of their heartless fraud.  This can't end well and it doesn't.

Martha Beck is a vicious nurse, a sort of Uber-Nurse Ratched working in a hospital where, for some reason, explosions seem to be common.  Her neighbor Bunny, an officious interloper if there ever was one, encourages her to join "Aunt Carrie's" Lonely Hearts Club.  Through this club, she meets Ray Fernandez, a wannabe gigolo who preys on middle-aged women.  He writes them love letters, then, travels to seduce them, bilks them of their money and jewels and, then, vanishes.  At first, Ray thinks that Martha has something worth stealing.  This turns out to untrue, although he consoles himself with having sex with her before vanishing.  Martha is both possessive and resourceful.  She tracks down Ray and has Bunny call  him with the claim that the poor nurse is half-dead due to an attempted suicide.  Ray is weirdly flattered by this -- presumably, no one ever cared enough about him to display any real emotion, let alone an attempted suicide at being jilted.  Martha joins Ray and becomes his accomplice.  Pretending to be his sister, Martha accompanies Ray on his criminal forays and, in fact, encourages his thefts.  Martha's only rule is that Ray must remain sexually faithful to her -- he's not allowed to consummate the phony marriages that he contracts with the hapless women from whom he is stealing.  Martha is remorseless and efficient.  She deposits her owns elderly mother in a nursing home (and, probably, doesn't pay fees for her care) and helps Ray with his criminal enterprise.  Invariably, however, Ray's victims demand sex with him and, although he tries to hide these encounters from Martha, he's generally willing to make love to his victims.  Ultimately, Martha can't control her jealousy and, after another feigned suicide attempt, she revenges herself on Ray by turning him into the police.  This is self-destructive and both Martha and Ray die in the electric chair on March 8, 1951.  (The story is based on facts and has been filmed, at least, two more times -- in 2006 as Lonely Hearts with Jared Leto and Salma Hayek and in a notable version directed in 1996 by the great Mexican film maker, Arturo Ripstein, Deep Crimson; there is a Belgian version as well and, no doubt, several additional iterations are in the works right now.)

The portraits of Ray and Martha's victims are the best thing in the movie and this material is very disturbing indeed.  The victims are all repellent in one way or another and the film doesn't attempt to sentimentalize them.  The foibles of Ray's prey are obvious and, even, disgusting, but by virtue of those flaws these women are humanized to the extent that their murders are actually extremely troubling.  Everyone wants to be loved not  in spite of, but, indeed, because of our flaws and these poor women are ridiculously enamored with the sleazy Ray.  Ray's modus operandi  before emboldened by the more ruthless Martha, was to love 'em leave 'em.  But Martha's jealously leads to far more dire consequences.  Ray's first victim in the film is a spinster school teacher, a scrawny old maid who chortles "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in her bubble-bath.  She and Martha bicker over the fat woman's protective and intrusive relationship with Ray.  The couple don't kill her but simply leave with all her money and jewelry.  Ray, then, hooks up with a lecherous Southern belle who needs a husband so that her unborn child will have a father -- she got knocked-up by a married traveling salesman.  This woman schemes to get Ray in bed with her.  Martha gives her a handful of sedative pills that poison her.  Ray puts her on a Greyhound bus to Little Rock and, in the first of several really ghastly scenes, leaves her to die as she pleads with him for help.  (We see her sprawled on the bus seat with her eyes protruding and her tongue sticking out of her rigid jaws.)  Martha and Ray, then, go to Massachusetts where a athletic-looking widow runs a boarding house catering to musicians performing at Tanglewood.)  When Ray makes love to her at a picnic by a lake, Martha swims out into the deep water and tries to commit suicide.  The widow senses that something is amiss in the relationship between Ray and Martha and, apparently, escapes.  Next, Ray goes to Albany and seduces an older woman, a pious Catholic widow.  (The woman is miserly and vicious in her own right.)  Ray and Martha lure the woman to their cheerless home, tract housing on Long Island, where they beat her to death with a claw hammer.  We have every reason to despise this woman who is vain, extremely cheap, and a religious bigot.  But when she hears Martha calling Ray by his real name and discovers that she is trapped and in the clutches of vicious killers, we feel some real horror at what occurs -- the old woman pathetically begs to be allowed to leave the house, but Martha is remorseless.  After beating her to death with a claw hammer (and strangling her for a good measure using the handle of the hammer and nylon stockings as a garrot), Ray tosses his underpants on the dead woman to cover her face and, then, naked walks into the bedroom to have sex with Martha.  Then, Ray and Martha proceed to Michigan where Ray is corresponding with a war widow.  (She has a small daughter and they celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday complete with a cake and candles.)  On Valentine's Day, Ray goes out to buy a puppy for the little girl.  Martha, who learns that the woman is pregnant with Ray's child, flies into a rage and poisons the woman.  She's paralyzed and can't move, listening as Ray and Martha plan to "get rid" of the little girl.  Ray shoots the war widow in the head and Martha drags the screamng child to the basement where she kills her.  Then, Martha calls the police.  In the final scene, we see Martha being lead to Court by a nasty-looking prison matron.  Ray has written her a letter from Sing Sing in which he expresses his undying and eternal love for her.  A title tells us the date of couple's execution.  

The movie is very unpleasant but effective, a grim work of art that I'm not willing to watch again.  Everyone is vain.  Ray's victims are emotionally needy and whine in an irritating way.  There are many poignant or sardonic details.  One of Ray's victims gets him a hairpiece, a toupee because he is losing his hair over his temples.  Later, when Ray courts a much older woman -- she is 65 -- Ray puts some dye in the hairpiece, creating ersatz stands of grey in his black hair.  (It doesn't occur to him to just lose the hairpiece, which Martha hates anyway -- just before turning him into the police, she pulls the toupee off his head and announces that "(she) never liked it.")  The pious Catholic widow has pictures of Jesus of the most tasteless sort on her wall and, when she's killed, Ray and Martha throw the images into the hole in the basement where they are burying her.  When Martha quits her job at the hospital, she bellows "Hitler was right about you people" to the Hospital Administrator.  The two murder scenes in the last third of the picture are extremely harrowing -- we have the sense that the victims are completely at the mercy of people who have no concept of mercy whatsoever.  This creates in the film a particularly lonesome and forlorn atmosphere.  Everything is scrupulously mean, cheap, and in poor taste.  The houses are decorated with ghastly art.  When the widow from Albany splurges, she takes Ray and Martha out to a dismal cafeteria and bickers with the fat woman when she orders veal cutlets as opposed to the much cheaper pork chops.  Manny Farber, the renowned critic, invented the concept of "termite art", a disorderly improvised way of making films that devours itself and leaves no trace except evidence of its "unkempt activity."  Farber is highly acclaimed although much of his writing is deliberately unclear I think -- but The Honeymoon Killers is claimed as exemplary of "termite art' in his understanding and one can see the vivid, squalid energy in the film that aims at making no grand statement but simply and relentlessly proceeds down its appointed path.  (Farber thought that films like The Honeymoon Killers were best thought of as archaeological artifacts,  unintentional evidence of the sensibility and aesthetics of the time in which they were made.  Certainly, the dismal interiors in the film and the ugly furniture creates a strong impression of lower middle class life in the 'fifties.  In one scene, the characters are in twin beds with big backboards that seem to made of polyvinyl plastic -- one of the backboards is torn and the rip in the fabric creates a strange point of emphasis in the compositions, never exactly central but a troubling defect that marks the images and makes them indelible.)  There is an esthetic of ugliness just as there are are canons of beauty.  The elderly widow aspires to be a hat-maker and to sell her creations in Manhattan.  A bulbous white hat, pimple-shaped, and sporting a few bird's feathers worn by the widow when she is killed is one of the most hideous things ever seen in movies.  Shirley Stoler became famous for her performance as Martha.  Tony Lo Bianco plays the weak, corrupt Ray Hernandez -- he speaks with an accent and claims that he was raised in Spain.  All performances in the film, including the hapless victims, are memorable.  Leonard Kastle, the director, made only one movie -- he used to say that "he never made a bad movie" after The Honeymoon Killers.  The film was financed, just barely, by Warren Steibel the producer of Public Tv's Firing Line with William Buckley -- the movie was intended as a sort of neo-realist riposte to what Kastle and Steibel regarded as the specious glamor of Bonnie and Clyde.  Kastle was an opera writer and professor of music in upstate New York.  He took over direction of the film, after writing its script, when Martin Scorsese proved to be too exacting and slow in his approach to making the movie.  (Scorsese later admitted that his firing was probably warranted).  Kastle died with three unproduced scripts in his files that sound interesting.  You can read his obituary on-line.  He played organ at an Episcopal Church until a few months before his death.  Francois Truffaut claimed that The Honeymoon Killers was his favorite contemporary American film.