Alain Delon and Le Samourai (film-study note)

 

Alain Delon and Le Samourai

1.

The director of Le Samourai (1967), Jean-Pierre Melville, thought about the project for ten years.  In the course of this gestation, Melville imagined Alain Delon playing the title role.  Melville finagled an invitation to Delon’s home, brought the script with him, and began reading from it.  After a while, Delon said: “There’s no dialogue for 7 ½ minutes.  I’ll do it.  What’s it called?”  Melville told him that the title of the film would be “The Samurai.”  Delon nodded and asked Melville to come with him to a locked room in the middle of his house.  The chamber was empty except for a leather couch and a lance and samurai sword.  

2.  

The Anglo-American critic, David Thomson, in one of his books, writes that Melville’s The Samurai is a film so implacable and so relentlessly impassive, in other words, so tough that it seems comical.  Thomson compares Delon’s mask-like beauty with Buster Keaton, the other great stone-face in cinema.  It is certainly true that the film exposes a vast cleft or fissure between Delon’s elegant and ostensibly lethal assassin, Jef Costello, and his weirdly inept behavior.  You can’t decide whether Delon is supposed to be a ruthless and efficient killer or a fool pretending to be a ruthless and efficient killer.  Perhaps, we are meant to attend to both aspects of the protagonist’s personality simultaneously.  

3.

The great French director Bertrand Blier describes Le Samourai in these words: “The Samurai (is) a completely bizarre film.  There has been only one film made like this in France. And it’s so much like Delon, this film, a completely mute narcissistic role in which practically nothing happens.  Delon sits in front of a mirror for an hour correcting the position of his hat.  It has a lot of charm.  It (is) a fascinating film.  It (is) an extraordinary analysis of these two men, a formidable joint portrait of Melville/Delon.”  

4.

Alain Delon who died on August 18 2024 was born on November 8, 1935.  His father was a film projectionist who later owned cinemas.  His mother worked in a pharmacy.  When he was four, his parents divorced and, in the aftermath of their separation, the little boy was placed with a foster family.  The father of that family was a prison guard and little Alain was traumatized by his foster-father’s vivid accounts of executions in the penitentiary where he worked.  After a few years, Delon’s foster father died and, as a teenager, he was returned to his parents who shared joint custody.  This part of Delon’s life was chaotic.  He got into fights in school, beat up other kids, and was expelled.  He was apprenticed to a meat cutter in a charcuterie and worked there, as a delicatessen assistant for three years.  During this time, he engaged in petty crime, stole a motorcycle, and was involved in frequent bar fights.  In his old age, Delon said that what he yearned for most in heaven was to be re-united with his mother and father as an intact family in heaven.  

At 17, Delon joined the French Army.  After training, he was sent to Indochina (Vietnam) and, in 1954, fought in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (where the French were decisively defeated).  He was a bad soldier, insubordinate, and prone to theft and ended up with a dishonorable discharge.  Delon returned to Paris where he dabbled in petty crime and seems to have been an apprentice pimp in Place Pigalle and Montmartre.  He lived with prostitutes and met some show-people around the edges of the demi-monde.  His beauty made him attractive to women and he ended up living with the actress Brigitte Auber who had worked with Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief.  Auber took Delon with her to the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.  There he was courted by several producers including David O. Selznick.  People in the film industry were impressed by Delon’s almost supernatural beauty and, after some false starts, he went to Rome and loitered around the edges of Cinecitta studios.  Selznick, still courting Delon, offered him a contract in Hollywood if he would learn English.  Delon, then, left Rome, returned to Paris, where he promptly began an affair with the wife of the well-known French direct Yves Allegret.  This connection led to several small parts.  (Delon seems to have forgotten that he was supposed to be learning English.)  He continued to womanize and party; he was almost killed when he rolled a sports car in the St. Cloud tunnel.  

Delon’s breakthrough occurred in 1958 (he was 23) when he was cast with Austrian actress Romy Schneider in a French romance Christine. (Christine is a remake of Max Ophuls Liebelei, a thirties picture that starred Schneider's mother..  Initially, Romy Schneider (who didn’t speak French) heartily despised Delon (who didn’t speak German).  The feeling was mutual, but, as they say, opposites attract and soon enough the two were involved in a torrid love affair that catapulted Delon into the limelight at least in the tabloids.  (Romy Schneider was, then, one of Europe’s most famous actresses.)  The two were engaged but the love affair was too intense and tempestuous to survive and they were never married.  (About ten years later, they reunited with much fanfare to do another film together, La Piscine, and, possibly, renewed the affair – they were called “the eternal betrothed” or the "mythical couple" in the press; they made another movie in 1972, The Assassination of Trotsky. )  Delon always maintained that Romy Schneider was the great love of his life.  

By 1960, Delon was a major European movie star in his own right.  He appeared as Tom Ripley in Rene Clements’ Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) a version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.  He, then, worked with Visconti in two famous movies Rocco and his Brothers (1960) and later The Leopard (with Burt Lancaster in 1962).  He acted for Michelangelo Antonioni in L’Eclisse also in 1962.  For several years, he worked in Hollywood in mostly forgettable movies, playing “latin” lovers.  By this time, Delon had married the actress Nathalie Barthelmy, renowned as one of the most beautiful women in the world.  (She plays the role of Jef’s alibi witness in Le Samourai).  People have remarked that Delon and his wife look like twins; they have spookily similar faces and bone structure.)   Nathalie had a son with Delon.  The couple divorced in 1969.  Nathalie went on to have affairs with dozens of people including Louis Malle and Jessie Franco and was said to be “the muse” to the Rolling Stones. 

Around 1968, Delon was involved with underworld figures again, Corsican gangsters.  One of them Stefan Markovic, a criminal originally from Belgrade (Serbia), acted as Delon’s bodyguard.  Markovic supplemented wages paid to him by Delon by organizing orgies in rooms equipped with hidden cameras.  He used evidence of these sex parties, involving elite French officials and their wives, for blackmail purposes.  Delon may have been involved in some of these affairs.  (It was rumored that there were pictures of Delon involved in homosexual acts, an allegation that the movie star neither admitted nor denied.)  Markovic wrote a letter indicating that he believed he was about to be killed and that, if this happened, Delon would be to blame.  Around this time, Markovic was reputedly blackmailing Georges Pompidou, a politician who was campaigning (successfully) for president of the French Republic.  Markovic was said to have compromising pictures of Pompidou’s wife at these orgies.  Markovic’ was found shot to death in a garbage dump on October 1, 1968.  One of Delon’s closest friends, Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican Mafia figure, was charged with the murder but charges were dismissed – the case remains unsolved.  The pictures of Madame Pompidou never turned up and some believe that the blackmail rumors were scandal intended to oppose Georges Pompidou’s political aspirations.  

Delon made more than a hundred movies.  He worked for many of his era’s greatest directors including Jean Luc Godard with whom he made a movie called Nouvelle Vague in 1990.  He appeared on stage and, after retiring from the cinema, appeared in a popular and long-running French crime show as Inspector Fabio Montale.  As late as 2022, he was still involved in producing pictures – he interviewed Volodymir Zelenskyy in Ukraine in that year for French TV.

The actor’s final years were marred by accusations of abuse inflicted upon the old man by his children.  These allegations involved protracted litigation initiated by his romantic partner, Hiromi Rollin against his children.  This dispute resulted in a judicial guardianship enacted to conserve Delon’s estate.  By this time, the actor was fabulously wealthy, having lent his name and image to Christian Dior, various perfume and clothing retailers, and, even, a brand of customized sunglasses popular in East Asia and made under the auspices of Delon and the Chinese action star (who idolized Delon), Chow Yun-Fat who wore the shades in John Woo’s famous thriller A Better Tomorrow.  Delon also invested in real estate and promoted boxing matches.  In the last couple years before his death, Delon was charged with possessing 72 firearms and cases of ammo -- notwithstanding the fact that he didn't have valid firearm's license.

Characteristically, Delon’s funeral was inflamed by scandal.  In his Will, Delon specified that his beloved ten-year old Belgian Malinois, Loubo, be euthanized and buried with him on his estate.  The French version of PETA and the Brigitte Bardot animal protection society intervened and the hound was spared.  The funeral was conducted behind closed gates at Delon’s estate and said to be rather grotesque due to the obvious acrimony between Delon’s partner and his children.  Cell-phones were collected at the gate and not returned to mourners until they had left the premises.  The heat was oppressive and about a half-dozen people passed-out during the funeral Mass.  Like Frederick the Great, Delon was buried alongside his dogs – over his life, he owned more than 30 Belgian Malinois.  The Estate was said to be poor repair, dilapidated and the electricity is supposed to have failed several times in the hours before the ceremony.    

   

5.

Jean-Pierre Melville was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach in 1917, the child of Alsatian Jews.  His father was a rag-picker and recycled clothing.  Melville studied American literature and worshiped Herman Melville.  When he joined the French Resistance movement, he chose the name Melville as his nom de guerre and, then, continued using the name throughout his professional career.  Initially, Melville was a member of the Communist party (an elder brother was a well-known Socialist journalist) but abandoned the cause when Stalin made common cause with Hitler by way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.

During the War, Melville enlisted in the French army and had to be evacuated to England from the beaches of Dunkirk.  He returned to France where he joined the Resistance and was involved in a number of terrorist attacks.  With the Gestapo in hot pursuit, Melville fled across the Pyrenees into Spain.  He returned again to the Front as a member of the Free French army and fought at Monte Cassino in Italy among other battles.  Melville’s brother was captured by the Germans and tortured to death, something that he didn’t learn until after the war.  (This event has many echoes in Melville’s work, particularly in his signature film, Army of Shadows about the French resistance made in 1969, immediately after Le Samourai.)

Melville’s first film is a masterpiece, The Silence of the Sea, a love story shot like a Universal Pictures horror film.  The movie is about a cultured German officer who is billeted with a French bourgeois family who have vowed to never say a word to this German interloper.  The picture was made in 1947 - 1948 but released in 1949.  Melville, then, directed a brilliant adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible premiered to great acclaim in 1950.  The production of the movie was fraught; Cocteau had been a leading collaborator with the Germans and the two men clashed repeatedly on the set.  Melville’s film noir Bob le Flambeur (1956) invented many of the practices that later characterized the French nouvelle vague (New Wave).  Both Godard and Truffaut declared that Melville was their master – Melville appears in a bit part in Godard’s Breathless (1961).  

Melville was a difficult man and he refused to cooperate with the French film industry.  He founded his own studio in Paris and shot his movies there until a fire burned the place down in 1967.  His first famous gangster picture was Les Doulos (“The Wolves”) released in 1962 and one source for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).  Including Les Samourai, Melville made five crime movies, including the epic Zen-Buddhist heist picture La Cercle Rouge (“the Red Circle) released in 1970. All of his pictures originate in horrors that he experienced during the German Occupation and his movies all culminate in Army of Shadows, a harrowing picture about the French Resistance – it’s full of  torture scenes and noteworthy for a graphic, and extended, murder sequence in the first half-hour in which Resistance fighters kill one of their own men suspected of collaborating with the Germans.  Themes of loyalty, resistance, coercion and duress and radical uncertainty which play out in Melville’s crime movies (in particular) are all explored in terrifying depth in Army of Shadows.  (The subject of the French Resistance is a particularly vexed and problematic subject in France and French movies and Melville is probably the greatest exponent of this subject.

Melville died of an aneurysm at 55 in August 1973.  He was an admirer of Americans and America who wore a cowboy hat on his sets and drove a huge Cadillac with streamlined fins and hood ornament.  As shown in Les Samourai (and many other pictures as well) he revered American jazz.  Although not as well-known as he should be, Melville is one of the most influential film makers in cinema history.  He is the “father of the French New Wave” as acknowledged by its masters. His influence on Robert Bresson is obvious and he has been admired (and his films cited) by Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog - Way of the Samurai), Tarantino, Michael Mann, John Woo and, even, directors such as Aki Kaurismaki and Nicholas Winding Refn.  The John Wick cycle of ultra-violent action films repeatedly cite Melville’s films.    

  

6,

Le Samourai is exquisitely shot in a nearly monochromatic palette of greys, very light scuffed blues and greens, with streaks of yellow suggesting sunlight in some scenes.  The movie looks like a concrete block, heavy and impenetrable.  Roger Ebert said the picture suggested to him the first light of dawn “on an ugly day.”  The movie cuts unpredictably between scenes and sports a literary flourish in wipes that are almost all executed from left to right.  As with Robert Bresson, the movie demonstrates an obsessive concern with showing how things are done in real time – if someone walks across a room or down a corridor, Melville typically shows us the entire action without cutting.  The effect is to produce a documentary style sense of reality presented without edits and through shots of long duration that invite the viewer to carefully scrutinize the details of the image.  The movie’s pacing is very deliberate.  By modern standards, the film is extremely slow, with protracted sequences that are presented without montage and cutting.  Actual duration is essential to the film – it depicts the last two and a half-days in the life of its titular assassin.  The effect of the movie is one of relentless paranoid pursuit.  The hero, Jef Costello, is on the run for most of the picture.  Although the chase scenes occur across vividly depicted Parisian locations, the overall mood of the picture is one typical of film noir (and central to Melville’s war and resisaence movies): an overwhelming force of destiny bears down upon the movie’s characters and destroys them.  

Several of Melville’s movies depict heist scenes filmed in long, silent takes.  (Such scenes are central in La Cercle Rouge and Melville’s last picture Un Flic – that is, “A Cop”) Le Samourai contains several extended set-piece sequences, also shot mostly without dialogue.  The film’s first 18 minutes is a nearly silent depiction of Jef’s plans to kill Martey and his execution of that crime – a weirdly flawed endeavor in which just about everyone in the night-club sees his face and, later, can be enlisted by the cops to identify the killer.  The line-up sequence in which Valerie, the Jazz pianist (who has clearly seen Jef) inexplicably refuses to identify him is also protracted far beyond its narrative necessity – the scene runs for 18 to 20 minutes.  Accordingly, the first half of the movie, about 47 minutes, takes place in a continuous sequence beginning with Jef’s resting in his one-room apartment with his caged bird (a symbol of the enclosed and imprisoning nature of the film and the destiny that it depicts), his preparation of this alibi, the murder, and, then, the line-up sequence which concludes when Jef returns to home-base, his apartment and the caged bird.  There are two rigidly symmetrical sequences involving the removal of licenses on get-away cars that bookend most of the action – these episodes (each about two minutes long) are filmed with analytical rigor and are like scenes in an austere Bresson film.  Another block of film is devoted to the pursuit in the subway – this is an eleven minute sequence.  By this point, the movie has evolved into a double-chase, a narrative device most famously deployed by Hitchcock in several of his films – Jef is pursued by the police led by the indefatigable Commissioner (who acts like a Gestapo commandant in some scenes) and, also, by the gangsters who hired him to execute the hit on Martey.  The film is laconic in the extreme: we are given no dialogue to explain why the gangsters want Martey killed; the relationship between Martey and Valerie is ambiguous and never explicated.  I don’t understand the picture’s last five minutes.  Do you?

Throughout the movie, Melville declines exposition and provides only a bare minimum of narrative information – the viewers are left to work out the relationship between the parties.  We have no backstory as to the assassin.  In fact, there is no backstory provided with respect to anyone.  In Hemingway fashion, characters are defined by how they act.  The film is an existentialist exercise par excellence, also a feature arising from post-war trauma as to the Resistance.  No one has any essential character – the way that people act under circumstances of stress or duress (for instance, under interrogation) is all that matters.  

The film grammar in Le Samourai is simple, basically two-shots cut together.  There is only one conspicuous camera movement in the film, the last image dollying away from the bandstand in the nightclub after Jef has been gunned down.  (There is another upward shot before the final image beginning with a low angle, somewhat heroic framing of Valerie that, then, resolves into a higher angle as the camera is moved upward.  This is the film’s penultimate image.)  I believe there are some hand-held camera shots, but they are mostly unobtrusive.  As noted before, much of the film eschews editing to present action in real-time – for instance, when Valerie walks through the house where she lives with Martey (apparently), the camera follows her in real time: the sequence is about 90 seconds.  

The film’s imagery and themes involve entrapment, betrayal, various mechanisms of surveillance, and a struggle against oppressive forces that have overwhelming resources to coerce and spy.  This imagery is clearly an outgrowth of Melville’s experiences with the Resistance and would be foregrounded in his next movie Army of Shadows.  

    

7.

Melville said that he didn’t show women in mini-skirts in Le Samourai because he wanted the movie to be set in an eternal dream-time.  This is also why the men all wear fedoras or other types of hats.  “I’m not interested in realism.  All my films hinge on the fantastic,” Melville said, “A film is first and foremost a dream...and it’s absurd to copy life... I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”  David Thomson, who reveres this film, says that the Jazz pianist is the figure of Death.  She selects Delon when he sees her in another car in Parisian traffic.  White and black signify death.  (Jef puts on white gloves when he purports to menace the Black musician.)  Valerie, Thomson thinks, is Death calling the already ghostly Jef, isolated and hermaphroditic, neither male nor female, to her realm.  

8.

When Le Samourai was being shot Melville’s studio burned down.  The director darkly hinted that this was intentional, arson by his enemies in the French film industry.  At this time in his life, Delon (then 31) was tangled up in the Underworld again and had criminal associates.  Possibly, these relationships were involved in the fire.  But the truth has never been established as to why this fire happened.  

  

Rage

"Collateral damage" is a military term for harm inflicted that is incidental to the intended target.  One might argue that the 30,000 women and children killed in Gaza are "collateral damage" to the Israeli Defense Forces campaign against Hamas.  (I think this argument is probably wrong -- the massacre in Gaza is a war of  revenge for the October 2023 cross-border attack and the killing of civilians seems to be the whole point of the exercise -- that is ethnic cleansing.)  If  you fire a missile at a terrorist target and, inadvertently, kill ten non-combatant bystanders, they are "collateral damage."  The concept arose in Vietnam, although I'm not sure the term was used at that time:  "We had to destroy that village to save it."  George C. Scott's 1972 Rage - he stars in the picture and directed it -  is about "collateral damage"; this was not widely understood when the movie was released to bad reviews and flopped in '72.  In fact, the picture is considerably more thoughtful than advertised and worth watching on that basis.

Dan Logan (played by Scott) is a widower who owns a sheep ranch in Carbon County, Wyoming somewhere near Rawlins.  (Curiously, the movie uses the names of real places in Wyoming although the landscapes look more like Nevada or the Great Basin (or the Mojave desert) than Wyoming to me.)  Logan's ranch is apparently adjacent to a military base, although, like most of the exposition, this isn't revealed until later in the movie.  (The narration is oblique; for instance, we don't learn that Logan is a widower until he makes a casual remark about that status half-way through the picture.)  Logan is tending to his ranch, herding sheep and teaching his 12-year old son, Chris, to drive his pickup truck when the two of them see a helicopter coasting by overhead.  They camp out for the night.  The next morning, the boy, Chris, is unconscious with blood coming from his nose and urine-soaked pants.  Logan takes the child to the hospital where the boy is admitted and the father placed in quarantine.  Several hundred sheep are dead on the ground and Logan's German shepherd bleeds from the nose and also dies.  In some cut-away scenes, we learn that the military has been testing a nerve gas agent, MX-3, and accidentally sprayed the ridge where Logan and his son were camping.  The doctors and bureaucrats with the army understand that Chris will die and that Logan is a "dead man walking" -- the agent has a cumulative effect and kills within ten days.  Government bureaucrats and representatives of the nerve gas callously plan to study the effects of the toxin on Logan and his son.  Military physicians separate Logan from his son who dies in a harrowing and brutal scene -- the child perishes gasping for breath and making a strange, high-pitched keening moan.  Of course, the military personnel all lie and cover-up their error and the collateral damage it has caused.  Logan's condition deteriorates but he is still ambulatory and can even run -- the film's argument, as it were, requires its protagonist to have the ability to take violent action -- this isn't really plausible but the viewer is willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot.  Logan, who is being sedated against his will, recovers enough to escape from his hospital room.  He explores the facility and finds his son's autopsied corpse in a freezer in the morgue.  Logan, then, eludes pursuers, steals a motorcycle, and proceeds to take revenge on those who killed his son. 

The revenge scenes are stark and realistic.  Armed with a semi-automatic rifle that he has bought at a Rawlins' gun shop, Logan confronts one of the more repulsive and deceitful governmental doctors and forces the truth out of him.  Logan, then, goes to the company that has manufactured the MX-3 agent and, in a night time raid, kills the security guard and blows the place to smithereens with dynamite charges.  (Presumably, he is planning to release the MX-3 toxin into the air near the base and kill everyone there; probably, this would kill everyone in Rawlins as well.  But, it turns out that the nerve gas is not on-site -- he's blowing up an empty laboratory, lots of lab animals, and offices.)  Logan hijacks a truck and goes to the military plant where he blows off the head of a sentry.  He crashes the truck in the base in a vacant field, gets out and starts firing without effect, and, then, drops dead, expiring under the searchlights of a hovering helicopter, pinned to the ground and twitching like an insect on a specimen board.  He dies at dawn.  The MPs led by one of the villainous army doctors collect Logan's body so that it can be dissected and the camera, again in a helicopter (these would be drone shots today) rises over the camp, moving into a final shot of soldiers who seem to be playing baseball.

Logan's climactic revenge occupies about 15 minutes of the film that is an hour and 45 minutes long.  Accordingly all of the movie, more or less, builds in a "slow burn" to the final mayhem.   Unlike the initial Rambo film, First Blood, which has a similar premise (revenge against the military and local authorities), Logan doesn't have any special skills, he's not a Navy Seal or Special Forces operative, and his lethal conduct involves shooting security guards and blowing up an unoccupied lab and office building.  In the final shoot-out, he fires a few rounds that don't hit anyone and, then, simply slips into a gruesome seizure as he dies.  The film's implicit point, which is made subtly and without emphasis, is that the victims of Logan's lethal rage are either sentries, bystanders, security guards and hapless police and some lab animals.  (The film lingers on the trapped lab animals -- rabbits, puppies, guinea pigs -- as if to emphasize that these blameless beings, like Logan's son, are the victims of callous government experimentation and, in turn, will be killed by the hero.)  When Logan confronts one of the bad guys, the film doesn't show the protagonist killing the villain -- instead, Logan guns down the man's cat, an action that epitomizes his revenge against bystanders and people who just happen to cross his path.  The film's point seems to be that Logan and his son were collateral damage to the army; the people and animals that Logan kills in revenge are also collateral damage to his real targets, the government bureaucrats and heartless doctors (one of them is played by Martin Sheen), who all survive his rampage unscathed.

The movie is directed in a workmanlike manner with odd flourishes.  There are some weird slow-motion sequences that don't really address the film's main point and that are not used to illuminate or aestheticize violence (after the manner of Peckinpah).  We see Logan spitting out tobacco juice from his chaw in slow-motion, a very strange shot, and, later, coffee  is shown in slow-mo dowsing a fire.  The scene in which Logan invades the home of the evil and dishonest military doctor begins with a sequence in slow motion showing a cat prowling around.  We are completely disoriented and wonder why Scott is focusing on the cat.  Later, the cat is gunned-down and the earlier slow-motion shots of the animal seem devised to highlight and underline the feline's later killing -- something that takes place in an instant without slow motion and that seems thematic to the movie.  We don't see the bad guy killed, just his cat, again emphasizing the idea of collateral damage.  The last third of the film involves explicitly expressionistic imagery.  We see Logan trotting along a dark wall.  Then, when more light is cast on the scene, the dark wall seems taller and more massive, an ominous image.  Much of the final part of the movie is shot in darkness with raw, angular shadows cutting across the images.  The effect of the movie is troubling:  the picture is set up so that the viewer yearns to see the arrogant and vicious military personnel punished for their  crimes.  But the people who die aren't culpable at all -- they just happen to be around.  The script is laconic.  We're not told whether Logan's motive in blowing up the munition's laboratory is revenge against the company or some insane plot to destroy everyone in sight by releasing the nerve gas.  The action is generally underexplained and we are left to our own devices to interpret what we see.  In the final scenes, Logan, sweating heavily with a bloody nose, staggers around like a zombie, one of the living dead, on his wrathful errands.

Quentin Tarantino has said that Rage is his favorite movie and, indeed, there's much more in the film than meets the eye.  (George C. Scott has strangely feminine lips; he always seems to be primly pursing his lips -- it's an odd aspect to his physiognomy and subverts the notion that he is an "all-man, he-man" hero.  In keeping with film practice in the early seventies, the opening titles don't occur until about ten minutes into the movie -- this was a habit with filmmakers of that era.) 

The term "collateral damage" dates to 1905, used in non-military contexts (for instance, civil engineering as to dams and other water projects).  An army targeting manual printed in 1961 uses the phrase in a military setting, but the expression didn't come into common parlance until the mid-80's.  The phrase, usually blamed on Vietnam (like many things in our recent history), was almost never used during that conflict.  It's not a term that George C. Scott would have known in 1971 and 1972. With each year, the term is more and more in vogue.  High-minded critics of the phrase as a euphemism haven't come up with any convincing substitute for the expression which is, in fact, reasonably precise and meaningful and does not seem to have been invented in bad faith -- "collateral damage" can come in many forms:  killing, wounding, traumatizing, as well as destruction of property, infrastructure and the environment; the term is a useful phrase that covers all of these effects as well as others.   

Dark Visions and Aftershocks (Joanne Verburg) -- MIA

Dark Visions is the title of an exhibition of about 25 works on paper with fantastical subjects.  There's really no unifying theme to the small show on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as I write this note at the end of August 2024.  The pictures are on show in the Winton Jones Print and Drawing Gallery on the museum's third floor, a small room accessed through the medieval collection on the north side of the grand stairway.  The highlight of the exhibition is a large print by William Blake, a monotype named "Nebuchadnezzar", brilliantly colored in flame-like orange and various shades of brown.  In the picture, the mad king (as described in the Book of Daniel) prowls on all fours a meadow stippled with green and bluish pigment; the king's face is the stuff of nightmares, haunted with great staring eyes embedded in stark white and turned backward to peer out of the picture in a full- frontal view -- the head doesn't seem set exactly right on the bestial crawling figure.  This is one of Blake's most famous images and I have known it all my life, but the picture is big, bright, and impressive when seen in person -- it's about a yard long and two feet wide.  Blake's drawing is unerring and the image is one of the great, idiosyncratic images in Western art -- a cautionary picture, although one can't quite specify what we are being cautioned against.  Two of Blake's much smaller engravings from his narrative series illustrating Job are also on display.  By contrast with the picture of Nebuchadnezzar, which is much larger than anticipated, the Job images are very compact and jewel-like, a little larger than playing cards and, again, Blake's virtuosic designs framed with quotations from the text are wonderfully shapely and appealing to the eye.  The other usual suspects are on show:  there's a set of smoky-looking Goya engravings from his Proverbios, a book from his Capriccios turned to a macabre plate Se Repulsen ("they preen themselves"), and two large and elaborate Carcieri (""Prisons") by Piranesi.  There are several Italian baroque images from mythology, a bony chimera, also by an Italian engraver, and Delacroix' 's big print of a lion cradling a doomed rabbit in its paws, the creature reposing in a dark womb-like grotto -- this is called "Lion of the Atlas Mountains."  The rabbit, seemingly resigned to its fate, is weirdly passive and limp in the beast's claws.  George Romney's spooky and abstract "Study for the Lapland Witch" depicts a howling spectral creature with wide eyes and an open mouth, her features and hair streamlined as if depicted in a blizzard gale -- some of the elegant sfumato calligraphy on display in this chalk and ink drawing have a distinctly Chinese or Japanese appearance.  Gustav Dore's "Street of the Old Lantern" is big, dark, and morbid -- it shows the poet Gerard de Nerval hanged from a grating on his door, hosts of spirits and sinister winged figures hovering around the rather corpulent, grimacing corpse; there's certainly nothing flattering about the image of the dead poet and the crowds of angels and demons don't know what to do about the suicide (whose ghost is nowhere to be seen).  This is a stark and rather defamatory engraving -- I wonder how it was received by contemporaries.  There's a scary illustration to Poe's "The Black Cat" by an artist named Alphonse Legros (I never heard of him before), Alfred Rethel danse macabre image of a hideous skeletal Death playing on a femur-fiddle among revelers who have either fallen over dead, their masks tilted over their faces, or are fleeing post-haste from the infected ballroom -- this image seems to be connected to Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" although I don't know if there's any actual influence.  Rethel, a German engraver, was a precursor to Max Klinger, also a master of the macabre, and he was an influence on Kaethe Kollwitz who has recently been featured in a big retrospective of all of her works at Metropolitan Museum of Art.  An artist hitherto unknown to me, John Bingley Garland is represented by one of his "Blood Collages" -- these are intricate collages assembled from chopped-up woodcuts in books and scraps of gold-leaf together with what look like handwritten lists on yellowed paper,, the picture is streaked by "blood" in the form of drips and smears of bright red pigment.  These eccentric images are worthy I think of more study -- Garland seems to have made the collages toward the end of his life in England during the latter part of Queen Victoria's reign.  The "Blood Collage" shown in this exhibition looks surprisingly modern and has a sort of psychedelic buzz about it. (Garland, in fact, was from England but spent most of his life as fish-monger and legislator in Newfoundland, but, when his brother died, returned to England.  His "Blood Collages" are said to be outstanding examples of Victorian "decoupage" -- the red pigment is supposed to represent the salvific blood of Christ). 

JoAnn Verburg's photography show, "Aftershocks", occupies the third floor gallery ordinarily devoted to camera art and consists of  about 25 large pictures.  The photographs, showing objects life-size, are presented in "light-box" format -- in other words, they seem to be lit from within.  Several of the pictures include motion although it is subtle -- someone turning the pages of a newspaper, rippling water, people reclining on the ground, ribcages moving as they breathe, and, sometimes, slightly changing position.  It's a pretty show that mines the vein of Theocritean idyll or pastoral.  The pictures show olive trees and green thickets in which you can glimpse people behind the brush or resting on the banks of a natural spring.  Verburg made the pictures near Spoleto in Umbria and the photographs have a faintly elegiac tone, the hushed atmosphere of Poussin's Et in Arcadio ego.  Labels tell us that the pictures were made in the aftermath of the international furor over George Floyd's murder, in the context of the Covid pandemic and that the title refers literally to an earthquake and its aftershocks palpable in the area where the pictures were taken.  In about half the pictures, furtive-looking figures, mostly masked by intervening branches, read newspapers.  Some headlines are visible -- the International New York Times reporting on terrorist attacks, immigrants drowned at sea, and the like.  The images obviously contrast the tumult in the human world with the serenity of nature -- although wreckage of fallen branches in the foreground of some of the pictures suggest that nature may not be that peaceful either. There is a wonderful book about Latin pastoral poetry, Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet -- the show reminds me of that book and the poetry cited in it.  The pictures also supposedly are in dialogue with the MIA's famous Van Gogh showing olive trees under a blazing sun -- I didn't see much similarity, but Verburg who is a native of St. Paul, has apparently lectured on that picture.  This is a subtle and interesting exhibition, very tranquil and counter-cultural and its worth spending some time with these images.  Too much contemporary art intends to provoke and slap you across the face -- Verburg's means of persuasion are much more low-key and, ultimately, effective.  

(Verburg is an instructor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  The male figure shown reclining in the pictures is her husband, the poet Jim Moore.  She lives in St. Paul and Spoleto. She is quite well-known.  She was the director of the Rephotography Project, an expedition that set out to create contemporary photographs of locations on the frontier that were the subject of pictures by pioneer photographers like Timothy Sullivan.  A copy of the book documenting this project and some volumes by Jim Moore were on a table in the exhibit and I recognize that you peruse these materials if you attend the show.)

  

 

Griselda

 The Netflix series, Griselda (2024) relies upon a gimmick perfected by Roger Corman, the King of B's.  Corman remade successful Hollywood pictures with a low budget, substituting female cast members for the roles played by men.  For instance, Arena was a gladiator movie imitating Spartacus but cast with bosomy female warriors.  Grselda follows this pattern:  it's more or less a mix of Brian DePalma's Scarface and Coppola's The Godfather featuring women with large breasts as protagonists.  In 1970's Miami, a ruthless ex-prostitute claws her way to the top of the cocaine business, rules with an iron fist over her drug-dealing empire, and, then, is destroyed by her own hubris.  Sofia Vergera, a Latin bombshell with a sitcom pedigree (she's originally from Columbia) produced the six-episode mini-series and plays the starring role of Griselda Blanco, the drug kingpin.  For about three episodes, the show is compelling but, then, collapses into the cliches typical of the genre and the show's narrative arc feels not only predictable, but formulaic.  Shows of this sort are well-produced and have snappy dialogue and impressive locations and photography -- but there's less here than meets the eye.

Griselda Blanco is a prostitute and low-grade drug dealer in Medellin.  Some drug deals go bad and she has to fuck her way out of the problem by having sex with a Columbian gangster.  She gets wounded when she revenges herself upon the bad guy and has to flee to Miami with her three sons.  She has smuggled some high-grade uncut cocaine into the US in her underclothes -- like a good Corman movie, the drug mules, all shapely Latinas, carry cocaine in their brassieres so we  get to see lots of breast in the movie as they disrobe to access their drugs (at heart, Griselda, despite its pretensions, is a exploitation film.)  Griselda clashes with local drug lords in Miami.  She recruits about a dozen prostitutes from Medellin to smuggle coke into the country.  When the gangsters running the business in Miami threaten her, she essentially gives the stuff away for free, thereby creating a host of customers in the Florida middle-class -- tennis pros, lady realtors and scum of that sort. (The film is a technicolor billboard advertising the benefits of recreational cocaine -- there are lots of picturesque party scenes with semi-naked girls).  Griselda is fierce, cruel, and relentless -- she's also clever and establishes herself as a powerful force in the local drug industry.  She vanquishes a series of foes, having their lieutenants and dealers slaughtered in showy assassinations and becomes the Godmother of the Miami drug trade.  The first three episodes detailing Griselda's rise to power are the best parts of the show and quite entertaining -- it's always fun to see a scrappy, fearless underdog battle her way to the top against all odds; audiences like to see those who are ostensibly weak and helpless overcome bullies and this is the appeal of the first half of the six-part show.  But, then, Griselda becomes the bully and, like Tony Montana, starts sampling her wares until she becomes increasingly paranoid and unstable.  Her paranoia climaxes in a spectacular tantrum that she pitches in episode five in which Griselda fires hundreds of rounds from a gold-plated machine gun, forces party-guests to copulate in front of her at gunpoint, and threatens her husband (and the father of her fourth son) with murder.  By episode six, Griselda is sucking down the fumes from crack cocaine, smooching with a sexy lady-friend for some simulated lesbian sex (I said that this was an exploitation picture at its core), and ordering increasingly arbitrary murders.  (She is surrounded by a gang of about a hundred Marielitos, that is Cuban refugee-gangsters like DePalma's Tony Montana, and lives in a huge fortress that, for some reason, the cops are afraid to raid.)  Things deteriorate, Griselda's husband, whom she has threatened to kill, flees to Columbia with her youngest son, Michael Corleone Sepulveda.  After fleeing to California, the Columbian mob in Miami pursues her relentlessly and Griselda has to surrender to the cops to escape the vengeance of the gangsters she has offended.  Griselda goes to prison.  While she is in jail, three of sons get killed.  Griselda follows through on her threat to have her husband murdered.  We last see her on the beach remembering happier days.

The show features a female detective, Jane, also Latina, who is posited as the righteous, if equally competent and deadly, mirror-image to Griselda.  The picture contrives several confrontations between the two women in the last couple acts of the series but, not surprisingly, they don't have a whole lot to say to one another.  What they do discuss is politically retrograde.  Jane tells the imprisoned Griselda that she retired for a while from police work to attend to her child (she's also a single mother like Griselda in the first three episodes).  While Jane was staying at home, Griselda was out breaking the law with the effect that her familia is wrecked -- her three sons get killed and she has her husband murdered.  Sofia Vergera is good as Griselda -- she plays a variant on the Latina spitfire, but is pretty effective in that role.  She alternately looks vulpine, glamorous, and, sometimes, even seems ugly.  Of course, she dresses in form-fitting low-cut garments to show off her figure. The last couple episodes are intricate and there are many coincidences and haphazard fits and starts on the path to Griselda's demise.  The writing is serviceable, but the effectiveness of the dialogue is hard to evaluate since it is mostly performed  as harangues in Spanish.  (Griselda gives several speeches to rouse her Cuban-born army -- in these  scenes, she's a bit like Henry V in Shakespeare's play:  "once more into the breach dear friends!") Griselda has a habit of tracing the outlines of buildings, the horizon, or distant groups of people with the tip of her lit cigarette -- I have no idea what this quirk is supposed to mean.  The broad outline of the story is based on the real life exploits of Griselda Blanco.  You can read about her on Wikipedia and see her picture -- needless to say, in real life the woman looked like a dumpy version of Al Capone; Griselda bears about as much resemblance to the real facts as the glamorous Sofia Vergera bears to the frumpy real-life gangster.  The show has strong feminist themes but these are stewed in a pot that is mostly exploitation.   

Griselda Blanco's real son, Michael Corleone Sepulveda sued Netflix over the film that he claimed to be defamatory.  The Court dismissed his lawsuit with prejudice.    

Film Study note on X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes

 Roger Corman and X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes

“Nudity sells.” – Roger Corman

Always make the monster bigger than your leading lady – Roger Corman

Ad copy for Candy Stripe Nurses (New World Films - 1974) : “They’ll give you fast-fast-fast relief!  Playing doctor was never like this!  Keep abreast of the medical world with the Candy Stripe Nurses”

Plato thought that the eyes worked by extromission –that is, the eyes emitted particles that collided with objects and, then, returned as messengers to report to the brain on their adventures.  Aristotle thought that vision worked on the basis of intromission; objects sprayed light-bearing particles from their surfaces some of which were collected in the interior of the eye and, then, analyzed by the brain.  Because God is light, the eye is the part of human body closest to the divine. 

Wilhelm Roentgen invented an early version of the x-ray machine.  In 1895, Roentgen made a fifteen minute exposure of his wife, Anna Bertha’s left hand.  (The image exists today showing bones underlying Anna Bertha’s left hand on which her wedding ring is clearly visible.)  Anna Bertha was horrified at the picture, and upon first seeing it, cried out “I have seen my own death.”  She is said to have never entered her husband’s laboratory again. 

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Corman’s advice to young film-makers: Prioritize your shots; rehearse while the crew is lighting the set; chase the sun; use foreground objects to enliven a dialogue scene; bring in movement to stimulate the eyes; wear comfortable shoes and sit down whenever you can.   

Corman’s directions to a new director, Christian Blackwell who made Night call Nurses (1972): “Get frontal nudity f rom the waist up, total nudity from behind, no pubic hair – now, get to work!”

Corman’s requirements as to scriptwriting: “There should be nudity every 15 pages, but it can be partial, a bare shoulder, buttocks, a boob... the leading lady has to strip or the audience will feel cheated.”

Corman disputed the notion that he made “B” movies.  The characterization of a movie as a “B” picture arose in the silent era when Adolf Zukor, the founder of Famous Players Studio (est. 1912) created a three tier production system: “Class A” movies featured stage stars and professionally built sets and were made with “artistic” qualities; “Class B” movies were made with established screen actors; “Class C” movies were cheaply and quickly made without experienced or well-known actors.  Bu the mid-thirties, this hierarchy had collapsed into “A” and “B” movies.  B movies were made for the bottom of a double feature.  Ordinarily, a double feature would be comprised of a prestige picture made with a big star or stars and “B movie” that was much more cheaply produced with actors who were either not well known or declining with respect to their star power.  Corman began making movies in the fifties when the studios were no longer releasing prestige pictures as part of a double feature.  Therefore, Corman argues that “(he) never made a B picture in his life.”  His films were essentially short features, made quickly and with low budgets, but featuring actors who were reasonably well-known in the industry – for instance, people like Vincent Price.  Corman’s pictures were largely made for consumption at drive-in movie theaters, a kind of screening ubiquitous in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.  (Austin had a drive-in movie theater that showed pictures outdoors until the mid-eighties.) The most famous drive-in movie theater in Minneapolis was the France Avenue screen at 494 and France, a theater that persisted from June 1966 until 1982 when it was closed and, then, demolished in 1986.  The theater had spaces for 1700 cars.)  Around 1959, my father drove from Asbury Park, New Jersey to Philadelphia to pick up a friend at the bus station.  (This was Alan Bowman, a DJ at a rural radio station in central Nebraska).  For some reason, I traveled with my father in our old Rambler dressed in my pajamas.  Off the Jersey State Turnpike, I recall seeing a huge screen on which a movie was being projected.  On the screen, a brown and gold city was collapsing into rubble – my father said that the movie was called The Last Days of Pompeii.  It was odd to see the calamity writ in enormous images against the night sky proceeding in complete silence.  The Internet identifies this picture as released in 1959, an Italian sword and sandal epic starring Steve Reeves.)  Producers of B movies were called “Keepers of the B’s” or “B-Keepers.”  

Corman was born in 1926 in Detroit, the son of an engineer who designed roads, bridges, and dams.  People who knew him said that Corman had the analytical mind-set of an engineer.  He loved tinkering and economizing.  Efficiency and thrift were his bywords.  (As a boy, he built model airplanes with balsam wood, equipped them with motors, and, under radio-control, flew them.  This hobby stood him in good stead when he made Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), a World War One flying aces movie shot largely in Ireland and employing many shots using model airplanes.)  

Corman’s engineering sensibility is evident in the way that he would make one movie and, then, in quick succession build another picture from the outtakes and footage left on the cutting room floor from the production of the first film.  (This was the modus operandi that resulted in the well-regarded twin Westerns Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting, both directed by Monte Hellman and released in 1966).  In some instances, Corman economized by using the same sets in several successive movies: he did this with Bucket of Blood (1959) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960) – in the latter film, Corman used both the sets in the 1959 picture and two-days free studio shooting at the old Chaplin Studios before it was torn down.  (Little Shop of Horrors was shot in two days; in the early sixties, Corman didn’t take pains to preserve his work – the original negative of the movie was thought to be lost, but bootleg versions circulated, some of them shown on TV without recompense to Corman. When Allen Mencken scored his musical version of the picture for Broadway, Corman had to find the negative.  His brother located it, gathering dust on a shelf in the recording studio where the post-production dub had been made – it was labeled The Passionate People Eaters.)  In some cases, Corman would acquire a foreign film for next-to-nothing, for instance, a badly made and cheap Russian science fiction picture that he had re-cut, re-dubbed, and fitted-out with monster footage – the result was Battle Beyond the Sun (1963), edited and revised by an eager-beaver UCLA film-school graduate, Francis Ford Coppola.  This worked so well that Corman repeated the trick in Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) in which he re-cut another Soviet sci-fi movie (1962's Planeta Bur), hiring Peter Bogdanovich to shoot some additional skin-flick scenes with Mamie van Doren playing a naked mermaid. Sometimes, Corman would simply re-make a prestige picture, but with an exploitation angle – his 1974 sword and sandal movie The Arena is an all-female gladiator rip-off of Spartacus.  If a picture featured lots of nudity, Corman’s staff would try to sell centerfold images of the leading ladies to Playboy, thereby establishing buzz for the movie and garnering free publicity (as well as a fee for the publication of proprietary photographs.)   

Corman’s second to last directorial effort was Gas-s-s-s! Or it became necessary to destroy the World to save it. In this horror-comedy, an airborne toxin kills everyone older than 25.  The youth are left to run a world in which all elders, politicians, leaders, and trusted religious figures have been eliminated. The picture featured Talia Shire, Bud Cort and Ben Vereen; the climax of the movie was shot at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. Prior to making Gas-s-s-s! (released in 1970), Corman had directed more than sixty pictures, making movies at a rate of five or six per year.  After 1970, with one exception, Corman limited his involvement in the film industry to producing and distributing films directed by others.

Corman returned to directing for Frankenstein Unbound! released in 1990. This was his last directorial effort.  He is credited with producing several hundred pictures as well as many cable TV series and shows.  Beginning with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers in 1992, his company also distributed many European art-house films, including Truffaut’s Story of Adele H, Fellini’s Amarcord, Kurosawa’s Dersu Urzala and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.  For Amarcord, Corman cut a trailer that was “all boobs and buns”; he said “it may be Fellini but we’re still selling sex and violence.”  When Fellini saw the trailer he said it was better than the way the movie had been marketed in Italy and Europe because of its “flat-out vulgarity.”  

  

Corman was famously well-spoken and had courtly manners.  He paid next-to-nothing.  Corman’s notion was that young people would work for peanuts to have an opportunity to break into the movie industry.  He hired young women to work as his personal assistants.  The pay was awful and the job description included anything, more or less, Corman needed to get done.  On the other hand, young women who worked for him, started by answering the phone, buying doughnuts and brewing coffee, but by the second week were reading scripts and scouting locations.  Although no one could stand working for him for very long – he was demanding and unpredictable – no one ever regretted their first employment with him either.

Corman alumni who had their first jobs with him include: Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, David Carradine, Francis Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathon Demme, Bruce Dern, Ron Howard, Peter Fonda, Carl Franklin, Pam Grier, Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, the cameraman Janusz Kaminski (D.P. on Schindler’s List), Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, John Sayles, and Martin Scorsese.  Scorsese shot Box Car Bertha with Shelley Winters on Corman’s payroll.  Corman recognized Scorsese’s talent and told him:   “Make this movie right and you’ll never have to work for me again.”  

Corman liked marketing gimmicks. When he released Piranha in 1978 (directed by John Sayles), his advertising people suggested that local theaters throw dead piranhas (that could be acquired through the studio) on the banks of waterways in the community in an attempt to stir-up panic.  “Boy Scouts and local law enforcement can be enlisted in the ad campaign as they investigate the reports of piranhas in their rivers and lakes.”  Corman coordinated film publicity with centerfold pictures of his leading ladies in Playboy and Hustler.  One of Corman’s assistants remembered fielding calls from Playboy when Corman was producing Bloody Mama with Angie Dickinson.  The Playboy flack wanted to know if the leading lady would take off her clothes for magazine.  The assistant said that the woman with the best figure on the set was Angie Dickinson and she wouldn’t do the gig, but, maybe, one of the supporting actresses could be persuaded to appear.   

Corman thought of himself as the “sody-pop kid”, a reference to George Stevens’ Shane.

Corman married one of his assistants, Julie Halloran in December 1970.  At the wedding party, Corman, who had economized on booze, ran out of champagne.  Not to worry: Jack Nicholson was sent out to buy another couple cases of the bubbly.  

Corman received recognition to his contributions to cinema late in his life.  In 1996, he as awarded the Academy’s Governor’s Award for Achievement.  But this honor was fraught with controversy.  Originally, Elia Kazan had been selected for the award, but Hollywood bears grudges and Kazan had “named names” to HUAC in the fifties and a number of prominent players threatened to boycott the awards ceremony if the prize was given to him.  As a compromise, and, I think, a sort of joke, the Governor’s award, therefore, was a given to the somewhat disreputable Corman.  Corman received an honorary Oscar in November 2009.  At the banquet, Corman alumni were much in evidence.  Quentin Tarantino, a big fan, showed a reel of Corman’s greatest hits, including the dance scene from X-The Man with X-ray Eyes

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Corman was a great recycler of props, sets, and used actors.  Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff all made their last pictures with Corman.  (Boris Karloff’s performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 Targets, produced by Corman, is one of his greatest and the movie, which seems mostly improvised, is a classic.  Corman resolved a contract dispute with Karloff arising from his appearance (with Peter Lorre) in his picture The Raven (1963) by agreeing to pay the actor for a two-day shoot that Bogdanovich parleyed into the well-reviewed Targets – a mass murderer is stalking a drive-in movie theater and Karloff, who appears in a cheesy movie on the big screen, saves the day by hunting down the sniper who is shooting audience members in their parked cars.)  Movie stars got their first big break on Corman films – for instance, Peter Fonda, Sylvester Stallone, and, of course, Jack Nicholson among many others; conversely, washed-up actors ended their careers in Corman movies as well.

Corman claimed to have produced over 100 movies and never lost a dime.  In fact, this was the title of his autobiography.  The exception to this string of successes was Corman’s pet project The Intruder made in 1962.  The Intruder starred William Shatner and was a story “torn from today’s headlines” – the picture involved the desegregation of an Arkansas public school in the face of violent racism.  Corman made the movie on location in Sikeston, Missouri and the film’s production was vexed by threats and vandalism committed by local Klansmen.  When the movie, an uncompromising look at White supremacy, was released it was widely regarded as an important and effectively made picture with a social conscience.  (Corman was a life-long liberal Democrat.)  Corman made the movie for United Artists but that company got cold feet and withdrew the picture from distribution.  Although slated for screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the distributor also withdrew the movie from that competition.  No one saw the picture, a film Corman regarded with pride as one of his best, and the movie lost money.  Corman was dismayed by the experience, began psycho-therapy (which he continued for the rest of his life) and vowed that he wouldn’t get trapped making a “message” picture ever again.  On the heels of this debacle, Corman turned back to Poe and exploitation movies such as X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes.

Corman hired Ray Milland to appear in X: the Man with X-ray Eyes.  Milland was past his prime in 1963.  He had won an Oscar for his performance as an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945).  Milland had been a big star: he worked for Fritz Lang in Ministry of Fear (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock in Dial M for Murder (1954).  (Hollywood is fickle – it’s interesting to consider that Milland appearing in a drive-in exploitation film directed by Roger Corman had been acting for Hitchcock alongside Grace Kelly in a prestige production made a mere nine years earlier).  As a handsome leading man, Milland had appeared as a romantic lead opposite Dorothy Lamour, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly (with whom he reputedly had an affair) and many other famous actresses.  He also appeared as the protagonist in one of the most well-regarded film noirs, The Big Clock (1948).  After working in television for a few years, Milland retired to the French Riviera.  Retirement didn’t suit him and he returned to the screen courtesy of Corman casting him in one of his Poe films, The Premature Burial (1962) and, then, as Dr. Xaver in X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963).  Milland continued to act on television (Death Valley Days) and horror and action movies, including the notorious Blaxploitation film The Thing with Two Heads (1972), as a White racist sharing a torso with Rosey Grier.  He died in 1986.

Corman made X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes for $300,000.  The picture was shot in three weeks.  Corman had dispatched a film-crew to France to capture location shots for a racing movie set at the Grand Prix.  The apprentice sound man on that picture was a recent UCLA graduate, Francis Ford Coppola.  Corman thought Coppola had promise and, after the shoot on the Riviera wrapped, he gave the kid a budget of $22,000 and told him to go to Ireland to make an ax-murderer picture on a three-day schedule.  The result was Dementia 13.  The picture was no good, but Corman used it to fill-out the lower-half of a double bill with X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.  

Corman’s X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes consists of six sections.  The first part of the movie comprises about one-third of its length – in this section, we are introduced to Dr. Xavier and his experiments with enhancing vision. After the rhesus monkey dies from the lethal pressure of what it has seen, Dr. Xavier applies his serum to his own eyes so that he can peer through human bodies.  In this part of the film, X uses his x-ray vision in service of medicine.  But his efforts result in the accidental death of his colleague and X becomes a fugitive from justice.  The succeeding scenes in the movie are much shorter and accelerate rapidly to the film’s grim ending.  The picture traces Dr. Xavier’s decline from using his gifts in service to medicine, to side-show fortune-telling, quack healing, and crime.  The stations of the X’s cross, as it were, are the amusement park on the pier (a sideshow attraction), a desolate urban street with it uncanny entirely chalk-grey structures where X’s skills are used as part of a specious healing scheme, thence, as an instrument of theft in Las Vegas and, then, a car chase that leads X to the final and sixth act, the film’s ending at the religious tent-revival.  In terms of locations, the six episodes can be defined as (1) hospital; (2) amusement park on pier; (3) a nondescript store-front; (4) Las Vegas; (5) desert highways; and (6) and the tent revival or tent meeting.  

Corman designs the film to mirror the picture’s genre.  X is constructed so that it can be marketed as a movie exploiting nudity – after all, the film’s premise is that it’s hero can see through people’s garments, an aspect of Dr. Xavier’s enhanced vision that is, indeed, aggressively developed in the first (hospital) section in which the protagonist attends a party and sees the dancers gyrating around him without their clothing.  Xavier wants to see visions that are forbidden to ordinary sight – the 7/10ths of the electromagnetic spectrum to which our eyes are insensitive.  Corman’s audience also wants to see things that are ordinarily off-limits – in this case, naked women and men.  Accordingly, there are strong thematic connections between X’s project and the desires of the audience to also see things exposed that are ordinarily concealed.  After all, the making of an exploitation film is not all that different from what Dr. Xavier attempts.  And, in fact, the two enterprises, seeing into the forbidden spectrum, and looking at sex, nudity, and violence as embodied in a film of this kind, are conceptually similar enterprises.  Indeed, Corman highlights the commercial aspects of making movies by the scenes in which Dr. Xavier’s surrogates seek funding from the rather shadowy foundation represented by the beautiful, blonde female physician who acts on behalf of the non-profit controlling the purse-strings for the mad scientist’s experiments.  The film’s curious emphasis, at least initially, on finances mirrors Corman’s interests in making the best movie possible with the least amount of money. If the money runs out, the show ends. 

Corman’s exploitation films are usually something of a bait and switch or a tease.  These movies, at least as they existed in the sixties, were akin to the side-show attractions featured in the film’s second episode on the amusement pier: more is suggested than is shown and the audience never gets to fully enjoy the spectacle that the movie’s premise (and advertising) promise.  This is clearly the case with X.  We buy our ticket in the hope of viewing naked women.  But, instead, of nude bodies, the film’s actual subject is different – X is primarily about death.  Dr. Xavier sees through skin and flesh to visualize the bone.  (The sordid carnival barker played by Don Rickles, for instance, is visualized as a talking skull.) The movie doesn’t so much expose tits and ass as it reminds us of our mortality – underneath our plump, pink flesh, we are all skeletons.

Corman details a variety of means of seeing in X.  Here is a partial listing of ways that we can use our eyes as shown in the film: we can use our eyes to gratify sexual desire (voyeurism); our eyes can be deployed as scientific instruments in search of the objective truth (x-rays); we can see in order to discover other’s secrets (“Mentallo”) or steal (breaking the bank at Vegas); our eyes may be tools to judge others – a look can condemn. Seeing can be visionary: Dr. Xavier sees a monstrous eyeball in the glowing center of the universe.  This ocular god may be Emerson’s transcendent eyeball (“All mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball.  I am nothing...I am a particle of God.”) The transparent eyeball at the center of the universe, an image that mirrors the disembodied eye in the eerily long first shot, is, also, a camera.  Corman’s mad scientist imagines God as a camera.

Corman’s X demonstrates a paradox.  The more Dr. Xavier’s vision is strengthened and enhanced, the less he is able to see.  This is dramatized in the scene in which Xavier flees in his car over desert highways.  Xavier can see everything but his pitch-black eyes are, also, damaged to the extent that he can’t drive.  If you can see everything, you may see nothing that all.  This paradox, that too much seeing equals blindness, is visually expressed in the deterioration of Dr. Xavier’s eyes into wet, dark cavities in  his face. The eye is light’s receptor and, for Medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, God is light, claritas, and splendor; the eyes, therefore, partake of this light and are radiant with the reflection of God’s glory.  But too much light devastates the eyes.  To see too much is to be blind.

Corman, like many film people in Sixties’ Hollywood, spent years in Freudian psychoanalysis.  Describing his Poe pictures, Corman said that their essence was captured in the idea of a small child wandering through a dark and forbidding mansion.  The child comes to a locked door and hears sounds coming from inside that both alarm and excite him.  Corman said: “(He can hear father and mother behind the door.)  What is father doing to mother? – it could be murder because what he hears sounds pretty violent: the bed springs are bouncing around, he hears cries, and that’s pretty frightening to him because his parents represent the only security that he has in the world.”) There are literal locked doors concealing secrets in Corman’s Poe pictures – for instance, in the Masque of Red Death, a sealed chamber contains an altar to Satan at which Black Masses are celebrated; in The Tomb of Ligeia, a locked door hides the mummified corpse of the Lady Ligeia to which the protagonist (played by Vincent Price) pays conjugal visits.  X is about seeing too much, penetrating the locked chambers all around us – the monkey sees too much and dies of shock; Dr. Xavier’s eyes rot from the visions to which they are exposed and, in the end, the penalty for too much seeing is to have your eyes plucked out.  

Corman initially wrote a four-page treatment for X in which the protagonist was a mad scientist.  He, then, rewrote the treatment and made the hero a jazz musician who had taken too many drugs and experienced too many chemically-induced visions.  This didn’t satisfy him and so he reverted to the first draft with the mad scientist.  There is reputed to be another cut of X with an additional scene.  In the last shot, Dr. Xavier stands before the camera with his eyes torn out and blood pouring from empty eye sockets.  He screams: “I can still see!”  

Corman died on October 7, 2023 at the age of 99.   

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft

 A negative review of Werner Herzog's 2022 The Fire Within:  A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft describes this documentary as a "highlights reel" of exploding volcanos and flowing magma. This characterization is, more or less, accurate, although I think the film is far more interesting and thought-provoking than this description suggests.  As always with Herzog, his documentaries function as self-portraits and this elegy is suffused with whiffs of the great director's own mortality.  The movie has a valedictory aspect -- the incineration of its title figures also signifies the impending death, I think, of the 82-year old Herzog.

On its face, The Fire Within is extremely simple:  Herzog declares in  his voice-over that he is not producing a documentary about volcanoes or a biography of Katia and Maurice Krafft.  His intent is to memorialize their passing in a non-linear, non-narrative opera of image and sound.  After some spectacular footage (by the Kraffts) of Katia standing on the brink of a wall of fire -- it's lava spewing out of a volcano -- we see the husband and wife documentarians at the base of Mount Unzen in Japan.  The mountain is shedding clouds of steam and gas with periodic pyroclastic flows -- that is, bursts of thousand-degree fumes suffused with molten particles.  Maurice Krafft, who has seen hundreds of eruptions, denigrates the pyroclastic flows as very small.  His wife Katia wants to leave the mountainside for more promising eruptions in the Philippines.  Krafft overrules her and they advance to a knoll within the zone of exclusion extending about 4 km from mountain's base.  These scenes are tinged with foreboding because we know that an immense pyroclastic flow incinerated the couple and another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, on June 3, 1991, a couple of days after the footage that we have just seen. (In total, the pyroclastic flow killed 43 people, including 16 journalists.)  Herzog is not re-making his movie about fatal obsession, Grizzly Man -- the movie isn't about the hubris of the Krafft's nor does it suggest that they took unnecessary or reckless risks to film the mountain.  Rather, Herzog contends that they were the victim of bad luck -- after several previous close calls (which we see in the movie), their luck simply ran out.  If you work in the proximity of a hundred erupting volcanoes, one of them will ultimately, it seems, snuff you out.  

From the initial sequences at the foot of Mount Unzen, Herzog deploys images shot by the Krafft's to trace their development as film-makers.  The movie is austere in concept -- with a few minutes of exceptions, it's basically nothing more than a procession of shots showing erupting volcanoes.  This may sound dull, but, in fact, the footage produced by the Krafft's is so spectacular and unearthly as to impose on the film a transcendent aspect -- we are seeing God's wrath, the apocalypse, the end of the world, the doom that may await all of us in a poisoned future.  Some of the footage is unbelievably beautiful and strange:  we see huge domes of lava throbbing in seas of fire, rivers and oceans of magma with rafts of black stone continuously being reabsorbed into the fiery molten rock; sometimes, the lava glows with a purplish or indigo tint.  Clouds of ash bury villages and kill cattle.  A lahar (meltwater and boulders from a glacier vaporized by an eruption) kills 20,000 people and leaves villages under level plains of sullen grey mud.  As the film progresses, the footage becomes more amazing until the images seem to escape reality and become roiling abstractions of fire and rock.  All of this is scored to music -- mostly opera arias but also jaunty pop tunes and Mexican polkas -- in one scene, a Mexican village suffocated in ash with men on horseback trudging through the wasteland (there's a wrecked crucifix and a dying bird in the monochrome dust), Herzog wryly remarks that it looks like a "spaghetti Western shot on-location in Hell."  An eruption fills the air with black particles and, at noon, it looks like midnight -- we see people riding around in the gloom on bicycles with plastic sacks on their heads.  (Herzog suggests that this is what the polluted future may look like for all of us.)  An eruption in Iceland results in a town being ripped apart by fifty-foot high columns of lava -- in the background, we see gaseous vapor and glowing fires:  it looks like a  hellscape from Bosch.  Herzog commends the Krafft's by saying they "went to hell to claws these images from the Devil's talons" -- this is melodramatic, but considering what we see in the picture, pretty accurate.  Most of what the movie shows is indescribable and, so, I am conscious that my words here are inadequate.

There is a sort of narrative, albeit faint and, often, interrupted by digressions.  Herzog means to trace the increasing sophistication of the Krafft's as filmmakers.  In their early efforts, they are surrounded by tourists and seem to be tourists themselves.  Herzog says their first films are nothing more than home movies.  They, then, pass through a phase in which they imitate Jacques Cousteau (down to the French oceanographer's trademark red stocking cap) and attempt to put a scientific burnish on their images.  At one point, they experiment with ludicrous-looking helmets and fire-protection suits.  But, their artistry increases and Herzog celebrates their ascent to become great visionary filmmakers with an unerring sense as to how to position their cameras as well as brilliant framing and editing.  The Krafft's seem to have made a variety of films, some of them not about volcanoes and we see clips of these pictures:  some sort of religious festival in Japan, a komodo dragon gutting a decomposing animal, raging rivers and snowy mountains.  In one montage, Herzog shows the difficulties that the Krafft's experienced in reaching their locations for filming -- we see horses struggling to cross terrifying rapids, a car slid fifty feet into an Indonesian ravine and, then, hoisted out inch-by-inch (the scene looks a little like the transit of the steamer over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo); in other shots, boxy trucks navigate fields of yard-wide boulders.  Herzog says that such travel is "travail" and that it is exhausting and horrible and, yet, he wishes he could have been with them every step of the way.  In fact, time and again, Herzog expresses his envy for the couple's achievement and remarks on his desire to have accompanied them to these awesome and terrible places.  He also observes that, with their maturity, the Krafft's became ever more conscious of the human suffering caused by volcanoes and the picture doesn't flinch from showing us horrors of various kinds.  Returning to Mount Unzen, the movie depicts the enormous pyroclastic explosion with people fleeing from the huge deadly cloud of dust roaring across the landscape at 400 miles an hour.  A last shot near the mountain seems to catch, accidentally, the Krafft's with their cameras and tripods aimed up at the exploding peak.

Herzog has mined this vein before, most notably in his chilling and beautiful short documentary La Soufriere, a film about an eruption that never occurred.  That film is scored to Wagner as is the final sequence in The Fire Within .  Somewhere, probably near Mount St. Helen, a road has been torn in half; the camera moves along the ragged edge of an abyss where the asphalt is sheared off.  Herzog says that to get his shot, Maurice Krafft (who used a 16 mm. Arriflex) had to walk dangerously close to the yawning gulf into which half the road has fallen -- it looks like the hole is a hundred feet deep.  Herzog surmises that Katia had to hold tightly to Maurice to keep him from falling into the abyss.  Wagner's Liebestod underlines this imagery.  

The film's narration seems to contain an error.  The picture shows Katia Krafft sprayed by a geyser of hot water jetting out of big house-high knob of calcium.  Herzog says this is Yosemite.  It's not.  It's a thermal feature in Yellowstone.  

The Nutty Professor and The Ladies' Man

 Jerry Lewis wrote (with Bill Richmond) both The Nutty Professor and The Ladies' Man.  Lewis also directed both pictures.  The Nutty Professor is Lewis third film under his own direction; The Ladies' Man, a much more ambitious and surrealist film, was released in 1962, the year before the The Nutty Professor reached the screen.  Although ostensibly comedies, neither film is funny in any conventional sense; the movies are witty, however, and ambitious in scope, more on the order of social commentary and satire.  (My observation -- it's really not a criticism -- that the pictures aren't funny is, perhaps, idiosyncratic:  The Ladies' Man was a big box-office success and its profits led to Lewis making The Nutty Professor, the next year.  Lewis stars in both pictures and the viewer's response will be, necessarily, inflected by how you perceive the actor's aggressively over-the-top characterizations of his protagonists -- in both case, the heroes are spastic, well-meaning morons wholly devoid of any sex appeal and physically repulsive; they have deformed overbites, wear nerd glasses crookedly over their sweaty brows, and stumble around smashing to bits anything in their path.  Both protagonists have the cringing personality of a badly abused dog -- they seem to be the victims of some combination of horrible torture and brain injury, afflicted by a hideous backstory that is never really explained (there is a hint as to the hero's horrible upbringing in The Nutty Professor and it's really awful to behold.)  Comedy is heartless; it makes no room for pity or sympathy and, therefore, Lewis' pictures are arduous -- his titular characters are figures that would fill  you with horror and sympathy if you encountered them in real life; therefore, it's hard to know how to react to these movies.  The brutality of comedy has sentimentality as its soft underbelly.  When great comedians go wrong, it is usually by way of indulgence in cheap sentimentality.  (This was Chaplin's great failing and is implicit in Lewis' films as well; Laurel and Hardy are superior to Chaplin's "Little Tramp" and Lewis' various mentally retarded schlemiels because they never fall into the trap of wringing a sentimental response from the audience.  Lewis and Chaplin want you to laugh and shed a tear as well --  and this can be off-putting particularly in the context of Lewis' mentally impaired protagonists.  Beholding their plights, are we supposed to laugh, recoil in horror, or cry at their abject  disabilities?  It's to Lewis' credit that his pictures raise this problem, but he, certainly, doesn't solve it.)  '

The Nutty Professor is easier to review -- it's a parody of Stevenson's story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  A hideous and repulsive chemistry teacher with a  penchant for explosives is bullied by a football student in his class.  The teacher, named Dr. Julius Gelp, admires a comely coed, Stella played by the radiant and supremely sexy Stella Stevens.  (She is a bit like a more brash and aggressive Marilyn Monroe --she's got Marilyn's sex appeal without the somewhat freakish aura of victimization with which we associate Miss Monroe.)  Dr. Gelp tries body-building with predictably unsuccessful (and, even, grotesque) results:  a barbell stretches his arms so that  his knuckles drag on the ground level with his toes.  Gelp, then, invents a potion that turns him into a suave, ultra-hip, crooner, a persona called Buddy Love.  Of course, Love effortlessly intimidates men and enthralls all the girls, including Stella.  The problem is that the potion's effects are unstable and Love keeps reverting back to his monstrous origin in the twitchy, repulsively inept form of Dr. Gelp.  The received wisdom is that Lewis is savagely satirizing the stage and screen persona of his former partner and sidekick, Dean Martin.  A more sophisticated version of this analysis proposes that Buddy Love is the harsh and controlling aspect of Lewis' own character, an insular and arrogant figure of the kind that Lewis plays so effectively in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy.  Whatever your interpretation, The Nutty Professor is, perhaps, Lewis' most audience-friendly and accessible picture because the shambling moronic antics of Dr. Gelp are offset by the suave and brutal egomania of Buddy Love, a figure who is more like Frank Sinatra then the rather harmless and avuncular Dean Martin.  The first half of the film is shot like a brightly lit horror movie -- the transformation scenes are marginally scary and there's lot of alchemical accoutrements in the lab.  Lewis has a good feel for locations and sets.  The climax of the film takes place in a purple-carpeted amphitheater with different levels, a bit like the descending neighborhoods in Dante's Hell -- this infernal place is called "The Purple Pit".  Love becomes the king of "the Pit" and all the girls swoon when he swaggers on-stage to tickle the ivories, a cigarette dangling off her lower lip.  Unfortunately, at the height of his performance, Dr. Gelp's horrible adenoidal squeal intervenes and his velvety baritone turns squeaky -- Lewis' vocal work here is a tour de force.  An oddity of this picture (and its precursor) is that Lewis wants the movie to be all things to all people --it's got some uninventive and nasty slapstick, some horror film vibes, musical numbers and, even, a sequence featuring Les Brown and his Band of Renown (that is, a famous night-club act from the Big Band era that was waning when the movie was made.)  The supporting players are uniformly great, particularly the Dean of the School and his obsequious, sexually repressed secretary.  Of course, the film rejects the oily Buddy Love character in favor of the awful Dr. Gelp and the resplendent Stella Stevens is made to fall in love with the hideously repellent chemistry professor -- this is where Lewis' films makes a demand on the audience that can't be accepted.  The director has gone out of his way to show how sexually unappealing Dr. Gelp is -- he'd rather bloviate on chemistry and blow things up than have sex.  So how are we supposed to believe Stella's assertion that she likes (even loves) Dr. Gelp?  To its credit, the movie has a sly jest up its sleeve.  In the last shot, we see Stella walking arm-in-arm with the shambling Dr. Gelp -- Stella's fantastic ass is shown to its best advantage in tight jeans and we see that she has two bottles of chemical potion tucked in her belt; that is, she will be able to summon Buddy Love to her bed whenever he is required.  (Gelp's horrifying parents have bottled the potion and put it on the market.  In a flashback, we see Gelp's mother mercilessly browbeating his father while the little tyke looks on helplessly from his crib; after Gelp's dad has swallowed some of the potion, the shoe is on the other foot and he viciously dominates his wife at the film's climax.  The movie is clever enough, makes its points effectively, and reasonably entertaining -- but the whole project seems a bit disheartening to me.  I will quote the movies' moral:  "You might as well like yourself since you're going to have spend the rest of your life with yourself.."  It's strange that comedy, which tends toward subversion, also reverts so often to tedious moralizing.  

Lewis was able to make The Nutty Professor on the strength of receipts from The Ladies' Man, released in 1962.  This film is either a work of genius or an unwatchable mess -- or, maybe, both at the same time.  It's essentially a surrealist romp with no discernible plot (it shows a situation not a story); to say that the movie's logic is dreamlike does a disservice to the lucidity of dreams.  The movie makes no sense on any level at all.  In a village in which everyone is a hysteric (as witnessed by a chain of bravura sight gags in the opening shot), a spastic,,shuffling fool (he makes Stepin' Fetchit look like Clark Gable) is horrified to find his girlfriend betraying  him with a collegiate thug, a bit like the jocks who tormented Dr. Gelp in The Nutty Professor.  The protagonist, Herbert Herbert Hiebert, vows to have nothing to do with women for the rest of his life.  And so what does he do?  He gets a job as a handyman and jack-of-all-trades at a huge boarding house filled with nubile young women, budding opera singers under the tutelage of the formidable Madam Wellon-Mellon.  The studio indulged Lewis by allowing him to construct an elaborate four-story doll-house, a huge structure with no front facade and fly-away walls and ceiling.  This set has an elevator, palatial rooms, impressive stairways, balconies, dining rooms -- it's extraordinary and all open to view, a voyeur's delight.  The studio also allowed Lewis a large enough budget to employ a crane and hundreds of yards of dolly track so that his camera could prowl through the creamy corridors of the vast set.  (The dolls' house cost one-half million dollars, an enormous sum in 1963 -- Corman was able to make three of his opulent Poe films, and in England to boot, for that sum on money.)  Hiebert is terrified of the thirty or so girls in the boarding house and repeatedly tries to flee but the women stop him. The movie has a dizzying mise-en-abyme aspect when a documentary TV show appears at the house, complete with a fruity BBC-style "presenter." to depict Madam Wellon-Melon's academy.  At this point, the movie goes completely off the tracks and indulges itself in perverse dance numbers and various skits that have no real relationship to anything preceding them in the movie -- this part of the picture is depicted as a "variety show" staged by Hiebert and the girls for the amusement of the camera crew.  (There's a lion that stalks around the house and a forbidden chamber in which a black-clad dominatrix hangs upside down from the ceiling like a huge spider - she's got the long legs of an arachnid or Cyd Charisse and she performs an extended dance number to big band accompaniment, slinking around threatening Lewis who here appears as a sort of nerdy ballerina -- it's like a completely unhinged Gene Kelly ballet, a bit like "The Broadway Melody" sequence in Singin' in the Rain, but, infinitely, inferior.)  Even on its own terms, the movie makes no sense at all -- Hiebert is depicted as a monster of infantile destructiveness; he breaks everything he touches and, of course, is another of Lewis' spastically twitching deplorables.  Therefore, it's completely inexplicable that the women would need (or want) him around the house.  He seems to be completely useless -- but the girls and Mrs. Wellon-Mellon and, even, her competent factotum, played by the great Kathleen Freeman (also excellent as the Dean's secretary in The Nutty Professor) all want the moron to remain at the Boarding House.  None of this can be explained -- even dream logic will not suffice.  The Ladies' Man is full of desperately unfunny exchanges of dialogue, sight-gags that just consist of Lewis wrecking everything in sight -- it's utterly bizarre and completely devoid of anything that I could recognize as humor.  In fact, the film seems panicked in its attempts to amuse the audience.  It's got flop-sweat all over it -- and, literally, in one scene in which Lewis' Hiebert battles a collapsing bed; when he turns his back to the camera, we see that sweat has soaked through the back of his night shirt.  But, apparently, audiences in 1962 ate up this stuff and applauded the movie as hilarious.  Tastes change, I suppose.  Of course, seeing a Laff Riot alone in your house on Cable TV is a vastly different experience from what you encounter in a movie palace with a big screen.

There is stuff in both movies that can't be explained:  why does Dr. Gelp have a watch that loudly plays the Marine Anthem when it is opened?  Why does the potion first turn Gelp into a sort of hairy-armed werewolf?  What is poor George Raft doing in The Ladies' Man, appearing in a cameo in which he is mercilessly abused and humiliated by Herbert Hiebert?  If you can figure these things out, please let me know.