Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/27/22

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

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)

Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)

Cast: Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, Jennifer Billingsley, Rafael Campos, William Swan, Jeff Corey, Ann Sothern, Scatman Crothers, Charles Seel. Screenplay: Luther Davis. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Leon Barsha. Music: Paul Glass.

After the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), a cruel and ugly word, “hagsploitation,” was coined to denote a new subgenre in which aging movie stars were cast in films that subjected them to all manner of abuse. The stars were all women, of course. Male movie stars like Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart were allowed to keep playing tough guys and cowboys and even romantic leads until the end of their careers. But actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland were stripped of their glamour in movies like Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Aldrich, 1964) and Lady in a Cage, which bridged the gap between psychological drama and horror movie. Lady in a Cage is a deeply unpleasant movie, with a pervasively nihilistic view of human beings. Its opening scenes, before we even meet our protagonist, Cornelia Hilyard (de Havilland), feature a young girl tormenting an apparently unconscious woman lying on the sidewalk and a shot of traffic swerving around a dead dog in the street. Soon, Cornelia, who is recovering from a broken hip, has sent her coddled son, Malcolm (William Swan), off on a long holiday weekend, only to be trapped by a power failure in the elevator she has installed in the stairwell of her house. She has an alarm bell, but no one hears it except a ragged wino, George Brady (Jeff Corey), who breaks into the house and begins to plunder it with the help of his friend Sade (Ann Sothern). When they visit the fence (Charles Seel), the loot catches the eye of Randall (James Caan) and his cohort, Essie (Rafael Campos) and Elaine (Jennifer Billingsley), a trio of psychopaths. They proceed to make life hell for Cornelia; in addition to looting and destruction they discover a letter that Malcolm has left for Cornelia in which he threatens to kill himself unless she stops coddling and smothering him. Randall takes the opportunity to suggest that Malcolm is gay and that mother and son are incestuous lovers. Mayhem ensues, and the film ends bleakly. And yet it’s a strikingly effective movie, one that feels out of time, anticipating by many years some of the darker films by directors like Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke.