Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/24/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Fumio Watanabe, Go Kato, Tomoko Mayama, Yuko Hama, Shigero Tsuyuguchi, Asao Uchida, Taketoshi Naito, Yoshi Kato, Azami Ogami, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Eiken Sakurai, Hideaki Sakurai.

The Lone Wolf and Cub series, of which Sword of Vengeance is the first, has something in common with the Zatoichi films, such as Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964) and Kenji Misumi's own The Tale of Zatoichi (1962): They're about handicapped warriors traveling through hostile territory. Zatoichi is blind, whereas Ogami Itto is simply encumbered with a small child, his son. Yet somehow they beat the odds, fighting off whole armies out to get them. It's a good premise, made more suspenseful in the Lone Wolf films because we naturally don't want to see small children put in harm's way. Which Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance does from the very outset, in which Ogami, the official executioner, is forced to behead an infant, setting up the plot which leads him into a very real hell. Ogami is an intriguing character, which helped me put up with the somewhat routine villainy and violence of the film.

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, Virginia O'Brien, Rags Ragland, Zero Mostel, Donald Meek, Douglass Dumbrille, George Givot, Louise Beavers, Tommy Dorsey. Screenplay: Nancy Hamilton, Irving Brecher, based on a play by Herbert Fields and Buddy G. DeSylva. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof, songs by Cole Porter, Burton Lane, Ralph Freed, Roger Edens, E.Y. Harburg. Costume design: Gile Steele.

Natalie Kalmus must have been in heaven. The ex-wife of Technicolor founder Herbert Kalmus, and the contract-designated "color supervisor" for any film using the process (as well as the bane of any directors or cinematographers who wanted to do it their own way), was surely delighted when MGM chose Red Skelton and Lucille Ball to star in Du Barry Was a Lady, thereby ensuring that Technicolor's most vivid hue, red, would be on display throughout the film. Ball's hair stylist, Sydney Guilaroff, even devised a new red hair dye for the star, one that she would continue to use -- even to make jokes about -- for the rest of her career. The movie itself is nonsense, one of MGM's second-string musicals, based on a Broadway hit that had starred Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman, but jettisoning not only its stars but also most of Porter's songs. Before it gets to the central gimmick -- Skelton accidentally gets slipped a mickey and dreams he's back in the court of Louis XV -- it's a string of night club routines, including a trio of singers who imitate the famous but now-forgotten big bands of the day, but also featuring one of the best big bands, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Skelton mugs a lot, but Zero Mostel, cast as a fortune-teller, mugs even more. At least Gene Kelly, the nominal romantic lead, gets to dance a bit. Ball was still in that stage of her career in which nobody seemed to know what to do with a beautiful woman who was also a gifted clown. Her best moments in the film come when she gets to do her clowning, as in a sequence in which Skelton (as Louis XV) chases her (as Madame DuBarry) around a bedroom and across a trampoline disguised as a bed. She also gets some funny moments in the film's closing number, Porter's "Friendship," goofing around with the rest of the cast. (It's also the one number in which her own singing voice is heard; the rest of the time she's dubbed by Martha Mears.) This is one of those movies for which the fast-forward button on the remote control was designed: Skip anything savoring of plot, most of the tedious mugging, the calendar-girl fashion show, but stop for the Dorsey numbers, the Kelly dances, and any time Ball is allowed to show what she did best.