Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

James Woods and Debbie Harry in Videodrome

Cast: James Woods, Debbie Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Leslie Carlson, Jack Creley, Lynne Gorman, Julie Khaner, Reiner Schwarz, David Bolt, Rena King. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spear. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

The menacing technology in Videodrome -- cathode ray tube TV sets, video cassettes (Betamax!), broadcast television -- looks antique and even quaint 40 years later. We worry today about the internet, smart phones, social media. But the root fear remains the same: extreme self-absorption, alienation, anomie. In that respect, David Cronenberg's fable has dated not at all. Partly that's because as a specialist in "body horror," Cronenberg, with the significant help of makeup artist Rick Baker, is able to translate psychological, even spiritual concerns into physical ones. The grotesque invasions of the body in Videodrome are treated as invasions of the soul. If I have reservations about the movie, it's that it too quickly pins the blame on television instead of exploring the root causes of the hunger for violence and violent sex that the medium exploits. It's like deploring consumerism while ignoring capitalism's encouragement of it. But that's another film entirely, or rather a whole bunch of films. 

Ned Rifle (Hal Hartley, 2014)

Aubrey Plaza in Ned Rifle

Cast: Liam Aiken, Aubrey Plaza, Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Thomas Jay Ryan, Martin Donovan, Karen Sillas, Robert John Burke. Melissa Bithorn, Gia Crovatin, Bill Sage, Lloyd Kaufman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Vladimir Subotic. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Kyle Gilman. Music: Hal Hartley. 

And so ends the saga of Henry Fool that began in his eponymous film in 1997. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) is known as usual mainly through his effect on others, primarily the Grim family but also -- in Fay Grim (2006) -- the international espionage community. He has sent two of the Grims, Fay (Parker Posey) and Simon (James Urbaniak), to prison because of their association with him. And now a third, his son, Ned (Liam Aiken), who has taken the surname Rifle, bears a grudge because of what happened to his mother, Fay, and his uncle Simon. He has reached the age of 18, having gone to live with a devoutly Christian family -- the Rev. Daniel Gardner (Martin Gardner) and his wife,  Alice (Karen Sillas) -- since his mother was sentenced to life in prison as a terrorist. (Yes, to understand that you have to watch Fay Grim.) For those who have watched his films, it seems like the gang of Hartley regulars is all here. But there's a newcomer: Aubrey Plaza, who plays Susan Weber, a young woman who seems to be obsessed with the Grims. She's a graduate student at Columbia who's helping Fay write her memoirs, and she did a thesis (which was rejected) on Simon's Nobel Prize-winning poetry. But what she really wants to do is track down Henry -- she has her reasons, which we will learn. Susan crosses paths with Ned when he goes to see his uncle, also trying to find Henry, whom he wants to kill, despite the earnest Christian faith that he has adopted. The rest is a working out of motifs drawn from previous Hartley films, and not just the first two in the trilogy. There's also an echo of Hartley's short film The Book of Life (1998) in which Donovan played Jesus and Ryan played the devil: In Ned Rifle Henry is under psychiatric care because he is pretending that he believes he's the devil. But I think Henry Fool is really a variation on Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-made man who isn't what he seems and eventually meets his end because of the charismatic spell he casts on other people. Plaza is terrific and the rest of the cast is in great form. 

Frankenhooker (Frank Henenlotter, 1990)

Patty Mullen in Frankenhooker

Cast: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Joanne Ritchie, Paul-Felix Montez, Joseph Gonzalez, J.J. Clark, Gregory Martin, Carissa Channing, Shirl Bernheim, Hannah York, Helmar Augustus Cooper, Heather Hunter, Louise Lasser. Screenplay: Robert Martin, Frank Henenlotter. Cinematography: Robert M. Baldwin. Production design: Charles C. Bennett. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Joe Renzetti. 

Mary Shelley's monster -- by which I mean the novel, not the creature in it -- has undergone so many dismemberings and reassemblages over two centuries that I doubt she would recognize it today. I certainly don't want to speculate about what she would think of Frankenhooker, which carries the premise of reanimating the dead to its sleaziest extreme. When Jeffrey Franken's (James Lorinz) fiancée, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen), dies in an accident that leaves him only her head, he takes what he has learned in the med schools he flunked out of and the equipment he has "borrowed" from his job in an electrical power plant, and sets out to collect other body parts with a view to reconstructing and reviving her. He finds the parts he needs on the women walking the seedier streets of Manhattan. How he collects them and how the plan goes awry involves, among other things, some explosive crack cocaine and a vengeful pimp. Yes, the movie is in the worst possible taste, with something to offend almost anyone. The acting is atrocious and the special effects are, let's say, marginal. But it's also some kind of classic -- cult or camp or exploitation, you label it. I can only say that if you don't laugh out loud at least once, you may need to reanimate yourself. 

Meanwhile (Hal Hartley, 2011)

D.J. Mendel in Meanwhile

Cast: D.J. Mendel, Danielle Meyer, Chelsea Crowe, Miho Nikaido, Penelope Lagos, Lisa Hickman, James David Rich, Hoji Fortuna, Kanstance Frakes, Scott Shepherd, Christine Holt, Stephen Ellis, Soraya Soi Free. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Daniel Sharnoff. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Kyle Gilman. Music: Hal Hartley.

The knock on Hal Hartley's Meanwhile from, for example, the commenters on IMDb, is that it's just a guy wandering around talking to people. Which could, I suppose, be said of James Joyce's Ulysses. Not that Meanwhile, with its slightly less than an hour run time, bears extended comparison with Joyce's mock-epic tour of Dublin. But it does have something of that novel's semi-affectionate take on a city, in Hartley's case New York. Joseph (D.J. Mendel) is an ordinary Joe in the way that Leopold Bloom was an ordinary man, which means that you wouldn't take a second look at him in a crowd but if you took time to observe him you'd discover multiple ways in which he's unique. Hartley intercuts Joseph's peregrinations with apparently irrelevant scenes in which a worker in his own office at his production company, Possible Films, picks up an advance copy of a novel titled Meanwhile, a big fat book that she takes home and apparently reads. But what we have here isn't a novel; it's a New Yorker short story. Nothing is concluded but everything is potential. For me that was enough to savor and appreciate. 

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932)

Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Sidney Fox, Leon Ames, Bert Roach, Betty Ross Clarke, Brandon Hurst, D'Arcy Corrigan, Noble Johnson, Arlene Francis. Screenplay: Robert Florey, Tom Reed, Dale Van Every, John Huston, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Milton Carruth. 

Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue looks great, thanks to Karl Freund's cinematography and Charles D. Hall's atmospheric sets, which were designed in collaboration with an uncredited Herman Rosse. Freund in particular brought his experience as cinematographer on such classics of German expressionism as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to the task of re-creating the seamy side of Paris in 1845. Unfortunately, Florey was a comparative novice as a director, and the pacing of the movie is all wrong, static when it should be dynamic, with performances stuck in that peculiarly halting way of early talkies. There are supposedly comic scenes that fall flat: the byplay between the hero, a medical student called Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames) and his friend Paul (Bert Roach), and a routine involving three witnesses to a murder, a German, an Italian, and a Dane, each adhering to an ethnic stereotype. Only Bela Lugosi, as the sinister (what else?) Dr. Mirakle, gives his character any life. Dr. Mirakle is a carnival showman whose act centers on a gorilla called Erik (sometimes played by a chimpanzee and sometimes by the actor Charles Gamora in an ape suit). The doctor believes he can talk with Erik and wants to breed him with a human woman, so with the aid of his assistant Janos (Noble Johnson) he kidnaps streetwalkers, one of whom is played in her film debut by Arlene Francis, now mostly remembered as a panelist in the old game show What's My Line? After failing to find a compatible blood-type (and killing the women in the process) he finds his perfect subject: the pretty Camille (Sidney Fox), whom he spots in the audience at his show with her boyfriend, Pierre. You can guess the rest. Murders in the Rue Morgue has the makings of the best Universal horror classics, but it failed on its initial run. Critics panned the performances, with the exception of Lugosi's. Censors objected to the violence, the depiction of prostitution, and some belly-dancers in the sideshow, and some even to the endorsement of the theory of evolution. It was trimmed from its reported release time of 75 minutes to just over an hour. But it retains some exceptionally creepy moments, and its exciting end sequence anticipates and perhaps even influenced King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933).   

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006)

Parker Posey in Fay Grim

Cast: Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Liam Aiken, Jeff Goldblum, Chuck Montgomery, Leo Fitzpatrick, Saffron Burrows, Jasmine Tabatabai, Elina Löwensohn, Thomas Jay Ryan, Anatole Taubman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Hal Hartley.  

Fay Grim (Parker Posey) is having a bad day: Her husband is missing, her brother is in prison, and her son is about to be kicked out of school. Soon this will look like one of the better days. Fay Grim is another of Hal Hartley's ventures into subverting a genre, particularly the espionage thriller. But it's also filtered through another genre, one you might call "the Sandra Bullock movie." At least I call it that because it brought to mind the last Sandra Bullock movie I saw, The Last City (Adam Nee, Aaron Nee, 2022), in which she plays a woman who gets swept up into an unexpected adventure. Bullock is not the only actress who lands in that kind of film, but she's been the prototypical heroine of them since her breakthrough movie, Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994). In Fay Grim Posey fits the part as well as or even better than Bullock. It's nominally a sequel to Henry Fool (1997), in which Hal Hartley introduced us to Fay, her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), and the enigmatic Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). All you need to know from that film is that Fay and Henry had a son, Ned (Liam Aiken), and that Simon went to prison because he helped Henry flee the country to avoid a murder rap. Now, an Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) from the CIA is suddenly in touch with Fay to see if she knows the whereabouts of the notebooks Henry kept. He claimed to be writing a sort of confessional novel that publishers had told him was unpublishable. Henry is dead, Fulbright tells her, but the notebooks may have significance no one has previously suspected. And so begins an elaborate chase that takes Fay to Paris and Istanbul, and involves Simon (whom she gets sprung from prison) and Ned (who receives a mysterious clue in the mail), as well as a lot of intelligence agents and terrorists from all over Europe and the Middle East. Fay Grim becomes as intrepid as Jason Bourne or James Bond in the process. Posey's performance holds it all together and makes me wonder why she's not as big a star as Bullock. It's fun to see some of these characters again, but by wading so deeply into spy spoof territory Hartley has lost the control that made Henry Fool such a fresh new start for his career, and some of his recently acquired mannerisms -- like the tilted camera, the so-called "Dutch angle" -- are tiresome.  

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Linda Darnell, Bruce Cabot, Dana Andrews, and Charles Bickford in Fallen Angel

Cast: Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, Bruce Cabot, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a novel by Marty Holland. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Harry Reynolds. Music: David Raksin. 

Stuck with the inexpressive Alice Faye as his leading lady, Otto Preminger does wonders with the stranger-comes-to-town noir Fallen Angel. He plays it with only the slightest hint of a tongue in his cheek, taking its otherwise improbable turns of the plot with a straight face. It helps that he has a wicked counterpoint to Faye's blankness: Linda Darnell, as Stella, a waitress in a diner called -- what else? -- Pop's. It helps, too, that the stranger who comes to town is played by Dana Andrews with just enough charm and just enough sleaze to keep you guessing about what his character, Eric Stanton, will do next as the plot unfolds. Stanton arrives in a small coastal California town with not much more than a nickel for a cup of coffee at Pop's, and begins to plot how to con his way into some money. It just so happens that he hits town at the same time as another con man, Professor Madley (John Carradine), a spiritualist-seer. The Professor wants to put on one of his shows but has run into interference from the influential Clara Mills (Anne Revere), the spinster daughter of the late mayor of the town. Stanton wagers that he can win over Clara, which he does by wooing her pretty younger sister, June (Faye). (We have to take it on faith that he succeeds with June because Faye's expression is much the same after he wins her as it was before.) The upshot is that the Professor's show goes on, and Stanton makes enough from the deal to leave town. But he doesn't quite yet, because meanwhile he has hit it off for real with Stella. (Andrews and Darnell have genuine chemistry, which makes the lack of it in his scenes with Faye even more apparent.) And there's also the temptation presented by the fact that June has money and Stella doesn't, so he thinks up a scheme to got his hands on it and then leave town with Stella. No, it doesn't go as planned. In addition to Darnell and Andrews, there's a good performance from Charles Bickford as a retired cop who hangs out at Pop's and takes a key role in the plot when Stanton's scheme doesn't quite work out. Preminger gets fine support from cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who had just won an Oscar for his work on Preminger's Laura (1944), which had also starred Andrews. Fallen Angel is no Laura, for sure, but it's better than it probably has any right to be.   

So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950)

Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde in So Long at the Fair

Cast: Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson, Honor Blackman, Felix Aylmer, Cathleen Nesbitt, Betty Warren, Marcel Poncin, Austin Trevor, André Morell, Zena Marshall, Eugene Deckers. Screenplay: Hugh Mills, Anthony Thorne, based on a novel by Thorne. Cinematography: Reginald H. Wyer. Art direction: Cedric Dawe, George Provis. Film editing: Gordon Hales. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

They might have called it The Gentleman Vanishes. Jean Simmons and David Tomlinson play Vicky and Johnny Barton, sister and brother, whose travels around Europe take them to Paris for the 1889 Paris Exposition, the event that saw the opening of the Eiffel Tower. After seeing a bit of the city on their first night there, Vicky retires to her hotel room while Johnny, feeling tired, stays downstairs to have a nightcap. In the morning, Johnny has vanished. Not only that, the room where he was staying has vanished too. The hotel staff denies that he was ever there, and moreover asserts that the room where he was staying, No. 19, has never existed: The only room 19 is a bathroom. The manager of the hotel, Mme. Hervé (Cathleen Nesbitt), whom we saw check the Bartons in the night before, insists that only Vicky checked in and shows her the registry that only she signed. And so begins Vicky's harrowing attempt not only to find her brother but also to prove that she's not insane. So Long at the Fair is a mostly engaging variation on the gaslighting theme that evokes the similar, though less complex, disappearance of Miss Froy in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes, though it's not in the same league as Hitchcock's classic. This version is a little too complicated for its own good: It's hard to ignore the many implausibilities of the scheme that's revealed at the end, and the accidental death of a witness who might have prematurely exposed the scheme feels like a contrivance to keep the plot going. But there's still enough fun in trying to figure things out, and the performances are good. Simmons gives full expression to both Vicky's bewilderment and her determination as she deals with uncomprehending authorities, and Dirk Bogarde is handsomely dashing as the expatriate artist who comes to her aid. 

Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)

Jennifer Salt in Sisters

Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, William Finley, Lisle Wilson, Barnard Hughes, Mary Davenport, Dolph Sweet. Screenplay: Brian De Palma, Louisa Rose. Cinematography: Gregory Sandor. Production design: Gary Weist. Film editing: Paul Hirsch. Music: Bernard Herrmann. 

You can get caught up playing Spot the Steal while watching Brian De Palma's Sisters as he steals from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), borrows from Psycho (1960), or pays homage to Rope (1948), as many critics have noted. He also called out of retirement the composer most associated with Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, to compose the score. But the central borrowing is of Hitchcock's most prevalent theme: voyeurism. In the opening scene, Danielle (Margot Kidder) and Phillip (Lisle Wilson) appear on a parody of a reality game show that has a voyeuristic premise: He's a man changing in a locker room when she enters on the other side of a partition that has some missing panels. When he realizes that she's blind and she starts to change clothes, what should he do? The contestants on the show have to predict his action: Will he watch? Will he tell her he can see her? Will he turn away? After the show, Phillip learns that Danielle is not really blind, and they go out to dinner and then back to her apartment where he spends the night with her. But he encounters some complications: He learns that she has a jealous ex-husband (William Finley) and that she has a twin sister named Dominique who is staying overnight in her bedroom because it's the twins' birthday. What happens next is partly witnessed by another voyeur: Grace (Jennifer Salt), a journalist (she writes a column for a Staten Island newspaper but dreams of better things) who witnesses some of what happens in Danielle's apartment from her own across a courtyard. But when she calls the police to tell them what she saw, at first they don't believe her (she has written articles criticizing the cops), and then when they go to Danielle's apartment there's no evidence that what she saw has happened there. We know the truth, so the suspense in the rest of the film comes from Grace's attempt, with the help of a private detective (Charles Durning), to uncover both the crime and the cleanup. It's a nicely plotted variation on the Hitchcockian theme. The film suffers because Grace is written and overplayed as a nervous wreck, plagued by an interfering mother (Mary Davenport), another Hitchcockian trope. And the revelation that Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins who were separated introduces some not too convincing psychology. But the suspense and the ironic ending are nicely handled. Watch for Olympia Dukakis in a bit part as a woman behind the counter of a bakery.

Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014)

Shelley Hennig in Unfriended

Cast: Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olsted, Will Peltz, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson, Heather Sossaman. Screenplay: Nelson Greaves. Cinematography: Adam Sidman. Production design: Heidi Koleto. Film editing: Parker Laramie, Andrew Wesman. 

If physical space can be haunted, it stands to reason -- or at least the kind of reason one can bring to such things -- that cyberspace can be too. That's the premise cleverly articulated in Unfriended, a teen horror movie that takes place entirely on a computer screen. The computer belongs to Blaire (Shelley Hennig), a teenager who uses it to communicate via Skype sessions with her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Storm). We see her first online with Mitch in a makeout session in which they vow to wait until prom night to go all the way. Then they're joined by other friends: Jess (Renee Olsted), Adam (Will Peltz), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson). They exchange the usual taunts and gossip and dirty jokes until they notice that the avatar of another person has appeared on their screens. Who is this lurker and what do they want? To cut to the chase, it turns out to be Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide a year ago to the day. Anniversaries of deaths, as we know from other horror movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), are not to be ignored. Laura is back for revenge on those who posted the videos of her getting drunk and soiling herself that drove her to take her life. And so she wreaks her revenge, not only eliciting the guilty secrets of the others on the computer screen -- Blaire, for example, who has just promised to give her virginity to Mitch, has already lost it to Adam -- but also killing them one by one as the rest watch. The technique of telling the story is interesting, and the actors are up to the challenge of going crazy with terror. But the characters elicit no sympathy and the pacing lags enough that you can't help asking why they don't just shut down their computers and go for help instead of, for example, Googling for solutions. It's also a movie that works better on one's own computer screen than on either a TV or theater screen where the various windows and text boxes opening and closing are hard to read and follow. A sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco, 2018), was a flop. 

Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983)

Christopher Walken in Brainstorm

Cast: Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson, Jordan Christopher, Donald Hotton, Alan Fudge, Joe Dorsey, Bill Morey, Jason Lively, Georgianne Walken. Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin, Robert Stitzel, Philip Frank Messina. Cinematography: Richard Yuricich. Production design: John Vallone. Film editing: Freeman A. Davies, Edward Warschilka. Music: James Horner. 

Brainstorm is a sci-tech thriller based on a premise familiar to the genre: Brilliant scientists come up with a breakthrough and face the threat that it will be misused by nefarious forces. In older films, the nefarious forces tended to be foreign ones, Nazis or Commies. Today, however, they usually come from our own corporate-military-industrial complex. Working together, Dr. Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) and Dr. Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) have created a way to transmit the brainwaves of one person to another, stimulating not only the visual and audible sensations but also the bodily ones -- respiratory, muscular, etc. The transmissions can also be recorded and stored. It's virtual reality gone whole hog, especially after Brace's wife, Karen (Natalie Wood), an industrial designer, comes up with a snazzy little headset. Brace and Reynolds are hopeful for all sorts of peaceful uses of the technology, but to get funding for it, they have to agree with the head of the corporation for which they work, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson), that it can be shown to investors. And you know who has the money to fund such a project. The inventors are dismayed at the prospect of misuse, but they put up with it until the real dangers of the invention show up. A researcher records himself having an orgasm and gives it to another man who plays it on a loop, sending himself into a coma from the experience. And then Reynolds herself, a chain smoker, has a heart attack and dies, but not before hauling herself to the device and recording the experience. Brace discovers the tape and almost dies playing it before he's able to disconnect. Finding that the company has kept the tape and has actually killed someone with it and is experimenting with other malign uses for the technology, Brace and Karen team up to find ways to stop it. It's a worthy premise, but Trumbull, a noted special effects director making his first (and only) feature in the director's chair, encountered a perfect storm of difficulties, the chief of which was Natalie Wood's death in 1981. Wood's major scenes in Brainstorm had already been filmed, but MGM, which was in financial difficulties, pulled the plug on the project. Fortunately, the production was insured by Lloyd's of London, which stepped in and allowed Trumbull to complete the movie. Wood's sister, Lana, doubled for her in the remaining scenes. Still, Brainstorm was not a critical or commercial success. There's a funny sequence in which Brace causes the robots on the assembly line to go haywire, and Fletcher's performance is great. Wood is fine, but Walken, a specialist in offbeat characters, seems miscast. The subplot, which involves the Braces using the technology to communicate their feelings to each other and repair their fraying marriage, is tedious and sentimental. And the concluding sequence, in which we find out what Reynolds saw when she was dying, is almost inevitably a letdown.   

Gone in 60 Seconds (H.B. Halicki, 1974)

Eleanor taunts her pursuers. 

Cast: H.B. Halicki, Marion Busia, Jerry Daugirda, James McIntyre, George Cole, Ronald Halicki, Markos Kotsikos. Screenplay: H.B. Halicki. Cinematography: Scott Lloyd-Davies, Jack Vacek. Art direction: Dennis Stouffer. Film editing: Warner E. Leighton. Music: Ronald Halicki, Philip Kachaturian. 

True, Americans love cars. But it's equally true that they love seeing them crash. Gone in 60 Seconds is the fulfillment of stunt driver H.B. "Toby" Halicki's dream: to make a movie with the wildest, most destructive car chase in film history. At that he succeeds, with a 40-minute scene in which a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang called Eleanor takes on all comers, leaving 93 automobiles in ruins. Eleanor is the true star of the film, as Halicki realizes: She's the only performer mentioned in the opening credits. The remaining hour or so of the film is just setup, although an additional 32 cars get wrecked in some fashion before the big chase. Halicki plays Maindrian Pace, an insurance investigator with a sideline: He and his crew steal cars and resell them after disguising the stolen cars with identification numbers and license plates taken from similar models they buy from junkyards. (As an upright insurance man, he insists that all the stolen cars be insured.) When he gets a big order from a Venezuelan drug lord for 48 vehicles of all sorts, he and his gang set out to procure them. Each car is given a woman's name as a way of keeping track of them. There are a few hiccups: Nancy, a Cadillac Eldorado, is discovered to have a trunk full of heroin; Maindrian insists that she has to be destroyed, which angers his brother-in-law, Eugene (Jerry Daugirda), who wants to sell the drugs. Eleanor is also a problem: At the very last minute before he's supposed to deliver the cars, Maindrian discovers that she's uninsured, which goes against his rule. Fortunately, he knows where another Eleanor can be stolen, which further angers Eugene, who rats out Maindrian to the cops, giving them the location where Maindrian is going to steal her. When he's discovered, Maindrian takes off in the new Eleanor, leading a flotilla of cop cars from various Southern California towns and cities into the film's autopocalypse. The remarkable thing about the great chase is that Halicki was able to get cooperation from various authorities, ranging from the California Highway Patrol to the mayors and city councils of the towns through which it runs. The story of how the movie was made is in some ways more interesting than the movie itself. Halicki, driving Eleanor, was seriously injured in one scene and had to shut down filming for three weeks. (Fifteen years later, Halicki was killed in an accident while making a sequel to the movie.) Much of Gone in 60 Seconds is tedious setup exposition, and it's poorly acted -- the cast largely consists of Halicki's friends and family -- but those 40 minutes are golden, a tribute to Halicki's persistence and especially to his cameramen, stunt drivers, and film editors. 

Blood and Sand (Rouben Mamoulian, 1941)

Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand

Cast: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, Alla Nazimova, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish, Lynn Bari, John Carradine, Laird Cregar. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Cinematography: Ernest Palmer, Ray Rennehan. Art direction: Richard Day, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Bischoff. Music: Arnold Newman. 

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's novels aren't read much anymore, but they were a fertile source for screenwriters in the silent era, providing two vehicles for Rudolph Valentino, Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921), and two for Greta Garbo, Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926) and The Temptress (Niblo, 1926). It was probably the Valentino connection that led producer and studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to revive Blasco's old warhorse Blood and Sand as a vehicle for Twentieth Century Fox's biggest male star, Tyrone Power. He plays Juan Gallardo, the son of a bullfighter who was killed in the ring. The movie follows Juan's rise and fall, as he becomes the greatest matador in Spain, but finds love and glory too much to handle. It's genuine cornball stuff, with the usual characters: his sweet and devoted wife, Carmen (Linda Darnell); the temptress Doña Sol (Rita Hayworth), who steals him away from Carmen; and the devoted mother (Alla Nazimova) who prays that he'll be gored in the ring just bad enough to get him out of the game that killed his father. Darnell's is a thankless role, and it's not made any better by the decision to include a scene in which Carmen prays to the Virgin and we hear both her prayer and the Virgin's response to it in voiceover. Hayworth is sensational, however, never better than in a scene in which she dances with Manolo (Anthony Quinn), a friend of Juan's who has set out on his own to become a rival bullfighter. The Technicolor cinematography won an Oscar, and some of the credit goes to director Rouben Mamoulian, who wanted to evoke the palette of Spanish painters like Goya and Velázquez. Mamoulian has to be faulted, however, for the thudding obviousness of the death scene of Nacional (John Carradine), one of Juan's friends, who expires with his arms stretched out in a pose that recalls the crucifixes often seen in the film. The bullfight scenes, shot in Mexico, were supervised by Budd Boetticher, who had done some bullfighting there. They are, fortunately for those of us who find the sport repellent, kept to a minimum -- there's more sand than blood to be seen. 

Two Fables by Hal Hartley

PJ Harvey and Martin Donovan in The Book of Life

 

Tatiana Abracos in The Girl From Monday

The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, 1998)

Cast: Martin Donovan, PJ Harvey, Dave Simonds, Thomas Jay Ryan, Miho Nikaido, D.J. Mendel, Katreen Hardt, James Urbaniak. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Art direction: Andy Biscontini. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. 

The Girl From Monday (Hal Hartley, 2005)

Cast: Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd, Tatiana Abracos, Leo Fitzpatrick, D.J. Mendel, James Urbaniak, Juliana Francis, Gary Wllmes, Edie Falco. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Inbal Weinberg. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley. 

As the millennium approached -- remember the Y2K jitters? -- two producers from the French company Haut et Court teamed with a European TV network and asked filmmakers from around the world to make hourlong movies that would reflect their visions of the imminent future. Hal Hartley, fresh off the success of Henry Fool (1997), was the American director chosen, and The Book of Life was his response. It's a fable about the Second Coming: Jesus (Martin Donovan) arrives in New York City, tasked by God to fulfill the prophecies about the end of the world recounted in the book of Revelation. He is accompanied by Mary Magdalene (PJ Harvey). Jesus likes New York and its people so much that after retrieving the Book of Life (an Apple Powerbook) from a storage locker (No. 666) and breaking the fifth of the seven seals he calls the whole thing off. Apocalypse? Nah. His decision is hotly protested by attorneys from the firm of Armageddon, Armageddon, and Jehoshaphat. God, Jesus observes, is all about the Law, so lawyers are his favorites. Jesus is somewhat aided by Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) who wants the world to continue so he has somewhere to meddle. The film's brevity is its chief virtue: Too much more and the wit would have cloyed -- as it sometimes does -- into whimsy. The humanistic outlook of the film seems to have stuck with Hartley into his next movie, The Girl From Monday, a venture into science fiction that doesn't quite work. In the future, the United States has become a conglomerate, and people are traded on the stock exchange. (The more sex they have, for example, the higher their value.) Bill Sage plays Jack, an advertising executive who is secretly a member of the resistance to this new order, but he's so disillusioned that he drives to the seashore where he plans to kill himself. Instead, he just passes out after taking pills, and awakes to see a woman (Tatiana Abracos) emerge from the sea. She's an alien from a planet where people are part of an incorporate whole, and when he asks her name she says "No Body." Jack takes her home with him and teaches her how to perform simple physical tasks like drinking and eating. He also learns that she's there to bring back with her a fellow being from her planet (known on Earth as Monday after its discoverer) who came to Earth years ago. The problem with The Girl From Monday is that the satire on consumerism doesn't mesh well with the sci-fi premise. The film is a muddle of ideas, many of which are half-baked. Hartley's inspiration is said to have been Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), but Godard's movie has a coherence and dry wit The Girl From Monday lacks.   

The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

George C. Scott in The Exorcist III

Cast: George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Brad Dourif, Jason Miller, Nicol Williamson, Scott Wilson, Nancy Fish, Tracy Thorne, Barbara Baxley, Harry Carey Jr., Mary Jackson, Zohra Lampert, Viveca Lindfors. Screenplay: William Peter Blatty, based on his novel. Cinematography: Gerry Fisher. Production design: Leslie Dilley. Film editing: Peter Lee-Thompson, Todd C. Ramsay. Music: Barry De Vorzon. 

I am no great fan of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), so I couldn't be expected to like The Exorcist III very much. It's an inchoate movie, made by a writer-director who has a lot of interesting ideas, which he sometimes accomplishes, but he doesn't quite know how to put them together. The premise is that a priest, Father Dyer (Ed Flanders), and a police lieutenant, William Kinderman (George C. Scott), who were close to Father Karras (Jason Miller), the exorcist of the first film, meet on the 15th anniversary of his death. Within a few days Father Dyer is hospitalized and then murdered in a peculiarly unusual way, neatly drained of his blood while in his hospital bed. Investigating the death of his friend, Kinderman interviews hospital staff, including the chain-smoking head of the psychiatric ward, Dr. Temple (Scott Wilson), who gives him access to the most securely guarded inmates. One of them has been institutionalized there for 15 years after being found wandering the streets of the city. After claiming amnesia and lapsing into catatonia, he suddenly turned violent and began to claim that he was James Venamun, who had been executed 15 years earlier as the serial killer known as Gemini. There have been recent murders that strikingly resemble those of Gemini, so Kinderman is allowed to interview the patient, whom he recognizes as the long-dead Father Karras. During the course of the interview, however, the patient changes form to resemble Venamun (Brad Dourif). Further deaths follow, and Kinderman's own family is threatened before he begins to figure out what in the literal hell is going on. The problem is that there are two or three movies going on here at once. One involves the mystery of Father Karras, and another the story of Gemini, and of course the whole thing is tied back to the demonic possession premise of the original The Exorcist. Blatty hadn't planned to include an exorcism in the film, which is based on his novel Legion, but the producers insisted, so a priest called Father Morning (Nicol Williamson) is awkwardly inserted into the story to do a big effects-laden exorcism scene. It fits oddly with the slow, moody pace of much of Blatty's film, and finally turns out to be the wrong way to deal with the problem anyway. There's a good deal of overacting in the movie -- Scott was nominated for a Razzie as worst actor, though Williamson, Dourif, and Miller do their share of hamming it up too. Blatty does accomplish one good jump scare scene in the film, effectively using sound and camera placement, and there's a well-done sequence in which Kinderman races to save the lives of his family, so it's not a total misfire.    

So Evil My Love (Lewis Allen, 1948)

Ray Milland and Ann Todd in So Evil My Love

Cast: Ray Milland, Ann Todd, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leo G. Carroll, Raymond Huntley, Raymond Lovell, Martita Hunt, Moira Lister, Roderick Lovell, Muriel Aked. Screenplay: Ronald Millar, Leonard Spiegelgass, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Mutz Greenbaum. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Vera Campbell. Music: William Alwyn. 

So Evil My Love needs a better actress than the starchy Ann Todd to make its central premise work, that a respectable Victorian widow of an Anglican missionary would fall so hard for a handsome cad that she'd do anything from larceny to murder for him. It could also have used a more charismatic cad than Ray Milland in the role. We meet Olivia Harwood (Todd) on a ship returning to England from Jamaica, where she has buried her husband. When the ship's doctor asks her to help nurse some malaria patients on board, she agrees -- a little reluctantly, which is perhaps a sign that she's not as sweetly complaisant as she might be. One of the patients is traveling under the name Mark Bellis (Milland), which may not be his real name: He's an artist who makes his living by stealing valuable paintings and forging Rembrandts. A spark is lit between them, although we don't really see it because the actors have so little chemistry, and when they get back to London, Bellis makes his way to her doorstep. She owns a small house and lets out rooms, one of which he takes, though under the disapproving eye of her other tenant, the ostentatiously proper Miss Shoebridge (Muriel Aked). When Olivia allows Bellis to paint her, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, she relaxes her defenses and passion blossoms -- or what passes for it in the screenplay if not on the screen. Meanwhile, Olivia makes contact with an old school friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who is unhappily married to the wealthy and domineering Henry Courtney (Raymond Huntley). Susan has confessed her unhappiness, and her love for another man, Sir John Curle (Roderick Lovell), in letters to Olivia. When the affair between Bellis and Olivia develops, he finds the letter and sees the possibility of blackmailing Courtney, who is in line for a peerage that would be derailed by scandal. Under Bellis's spell, Olivia gets deeper and deeper into a plot that turns lethal. There's potential for real heat in the story, but miscast leads and a talky script undo it. 

Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

Cast: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, based on a story by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins. Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Basil Wrangell. 

Possibly the most unorthodox film ever made by a major Hollywood studio, let alone one made by MGM, a studio known for glossy entertainments. It was a kind of disaster when it was first released, subjected to censorship and deep cuts before being re-released, and even then widely panned, derided, and snubbed by critics and audiences. It could almost certainly not have been made after the introduction of the Production Code. It's a unique and unclassifiable movie that's usually treated as a horror film, but not easily filed away in that category. Its acceptance today as a classic, deserving its place in the National Film Registry as one of the most important American films, is largely the result of changing attitudes toward human diversity and difference, including the rejection of "eugenics," the pseudoscience that promoted the idea that only those deemed physically and mentally superior should be allowed to breed. As a movie, it's sometimes not particularly well acted and the central plot -- the trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) marries the dwarf Hans (Harry Earles) and then poisons him to try to get her hands on his inheritance -- is trite, though Cleopatra's comeuppance is effectively gruesome to say the least. But the movie is atmospherically staged and filmed, and the central theme of our common humanity prevails.   

Battle Royale II: Requiem (Kenta Fukasaku, Kinji Fukasaku, 2003)

Cast: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Ai Maeda, Shugo Oshinari, Ayana Sakai, Haruka Suenaga, Yuma Ishigaki, Miyuki Kanbe, Nana Yanagisawa, Masaya Kikawada, Yōko Maki, Yuki Ito, Natsuki Kato, Aki Maeda. Riki Takeuchi, Sonny Chiba. Screenplay: Kenta Fukasaku, Norio Kida. Cinematography: Toshihiro Isomi. Production design: Emiko Tsuyuki. Film editing: Hirohide Abe. Music: Masamichi Amano. 

I suspect that anyone watching Battle Royale II: Requiem after the Hamas attack on Israel will have a different reaction to it than those who watched it before. It's a movie in which the heroes are terrorists: We even get a repeated shot in which they blow up two identical tall buildings. The first Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) was an easy movie to get caught up in because it was fast and often funny, and the premise of a government of an overpopulated Japan selecting teenagers to kill off one another in a televised game show format was ridiculous enough that you could easily distance yourself from the movie. But the sequel, begun by Kinji Fukasaku but completed after his death by his son, Kenta, isn't so inventive, and the heroic terrorist premise is hard to swallow. It reunites some of the survivors of the earlier film's massacre who are part of a worldwide crusade against adults in general. This time, they're holed up on the island where they fought in the earlier film, and a class of ninth graders from a Japanese middle school for troubled kids is forced to storm the island and defeat the terrorists. But once they land on the island, after a sequence obviously designed to remind the viewer of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), the would-be attackers join forces with the terrorists and turn against the government. The rest is a series of war movie scenes as the government returns fire. The borrowing from other movies is pervasive: The film's climax, for example, is a direct lift from the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969). The teacher of the students chosen for the assault is wildly overplayed by Riki Takeuchi, who delivers a blistering anti-American speech before sending the kids off to fight. In general, it's a muddled film, not only politically but also in its failure to present clearly delineated characters in whom we can invest some emotional commitment and in the overall lack of suspense about their fates. 

Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973)

James Brolin and Richard Benjamin in Westworld

Cast: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Norman Bartold, Alan Oppenheimer, Victoria Shaw, Dick Van Patten, Linda Gaye Scott, Steve Franken, Michael T. Mikler, Terry Wilson, Majel Barrett, Anne Randall. Screenplay: Michael Crichton. Cinematography: Gene Polito. Art direction: Herman A. Blumenthal. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Fred Karlin. 

Today, Michael Crichton's film Westworld is probably best known for inspiring the HBO series of the same name. Viewing both of them is a study in the anxieties of two eras almost 50 years apart. The 1973 film takes place in a futuristic amusement park in which the guests indulge their fantasies by encountering androids playing figures from the past and mostly either killing them or having sex with them. So does the series, which ran from 2016 to 2022. In both the movie and the series, things go seriously awry, with the androids killing or maiming their human guests. Especially in comparison with the series' handsomely realized vision of the future, its exploration of the creation of the androids, and its portrayal of the corporate intrigue behind the scenes of the park, Crichton's movie looks antique: the special effects are clunky, the characterization and acting are routine, and some of the action scenes are unconvincing. But the chief difference between the movie and the series lies in their understanding of the causes of the park's disaster. In the movie, the cause is said to be malfunctioning technology, an undetected glitch in the machinery. But in the series the cause lies deeper: The androids develop consciousness, a self-awareness that causes them to rebel against their human makers. To put it in other words, in the 1970s we were concerned about the problem of increasing dependence on fallible technology. In the 21st century, we're worried about technology becoming too good, about artificial intelligence outstripping human intelligence. The fallibility is not in the machines but in ourselves. But to be fair, Crichton showed a sign of our concern about AI, specifically the potential for cybernetic beings to self-replicate and evolve on their own. An engineer in the movie notes that the androids are "almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work." 

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (John Hough, 1974)

Cast: Peter Fonda, Susan George, Adam Roarke, Vic Morrow, Eugene Daniels, Kenneth Tobey, Roddy McDowall, Lynn Borden, Adrianne Herman, James W. Gavin. Screenplay: Lee Chapman, Antonio Santean, based on a novel by Richard Unekis. Cinematography Michael D. Margulies. Production design: Philip Leonard. Film editing: Christopher Holmes. Music: Jimmie Haskell. 

"Dirty Mary" is Mary Coombs (Susan George), a petty thief and groupie who gets involved with Larry Rayder (Peter Fonda), a would-be NASCAR star, when he pulls off a supermarket heist with the aid of Deke Sommers (Adam Roarke), an alcoholic auto mechanic, and goes on a run that develops into a widespread, high-speed car (and helicopter) chase, masterminded by state police captain Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow). And that's pretty much all you need to know about Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, except that the title does a disservice to Deke, the third in the trio and the only close-to-interesting character in the film. Mary and Larry might as well be animated cartoons for all the humanity their characters generate, and George and Fonda play them accordingly. (George's manic performance, often lapsing into her native British accent, got on my nerves.) But Roarke makes some effort to provide some nuance to Deke, a loser whose fondness for the bottle makes him unemployable even though he's shown to be a master at making bashed-up automobiles run. He's also somewhat in love with Larry, his one chance at redemption. Otherwise, the real stars of the film are the cars, a 1966 Chevrolet Impala, a 1969 Dodge Charger, a bunch of Dodge Polara police cars, and that helicopter. You pretty much know how it's all going to end, and when it does it stops, having accomplished the inevitable with no need to point a moral or adorn a tale. 

Flesh for Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

Joe Dallesandro and Dalila Di Lazzaro in Flesh for Frankenstein

Cast: Joe Dallesandro, Monique van Vooren, Udo Kier, Arno Jürging, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Srdjan Zelenovic, Nicoletta Elmi, Marco Liofredi, Liù Bosisio. Screenplay: Paul Morrissey. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Jed Johnson, Franco Silvi. Music: Claudio Gizzi. 

Silly, kinky, campy, bloody, sometimes scary, often very funny, and altogether ridiculous, Flesh for Frankenstein is also known as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. Warhol's contribution to the film was his name and very little else, except for his association with director Paul Morrissey and star Joe Dallesandro. The idea for the film has been traced back to Roman Polanski, who suggested to Morrissey that he make a Frankenstein movie in 3-D. The backing for the proposal came from producer Carlo Ponti, with the result that the facilities at Cinecittà in Rome and Italian film technicians like cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, production designer Enrico Job, composer Claudio Gizzi, and special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi became available. The result looks better than it has any right to. It features Udo Kier in one of his first journeys over the top, playing the mad scientist baron, who is trying to breed a new master race. He has his female creature (Dalila Di Lazzaro) and the torso of the male in storage as the film begins, and is searching for a Serbian peasant with the right nose, or as he calls it, nasum -- the baron likes to drop in a little Latin to impress his assistant, Otto (Arno Jürging). He finds it on Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic, an otherwise unknown actor), who has the misfortune to go with his friend Nicholas (Dallesandro) to a brothel. On their way home afterward, they're waylaid by the baron and Otto; Nicholas is knocked out and Sacha is beheaded. Unfortunately, Sacha wants to be a monk, possibly because, as we see, he's more attracted to Nicholas than to the women in the brothel. So despite having his head sewn to the male creature's torso, he's a failure when the baron tries to breed him with the female. Meanwhile, Nicholas has been hired as a servant by the baroness (Monique van Vooren), who wants him to serve at table but mostly to have sex with her. The baron, who is also her brother, has lost interest in sex some time after the birth of their two children. Nicholas recognizes Sacha when the baron presents his creatures at dinner, so with the help of the children, who have been spying on everything in the castle, he finds his way to the laboratory where everybody in the household eventually winds up in a scene that has more corpses than the last act of Hamlet. Let it be said about Flesh for Frankenstein that it's almost never boring. 

Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997)

James Urbaniak and Thomas Jay Ryan in Henry Fool

Cast: Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak, Parker Posey, Maria Porter, James Saito, Kevin Corrigan, Liam Aiken, Miho Nikaido, Gene Ruffini, Nicholas Hope, Chuck Montgomery. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley. 

In commenting on Hal Hartley's Henry Fool, I feel a little like those people who used to say about Woody Allen that they preferred his earlier, funnier movies. It's not entirely true, of course. Henry Fool is a great step in the right direction for Hartley, winning him the award for best screenplay at Cannes, earning him more mainstream attention than his previous films, and setting up an intriguing trilogy (which Hartley has said wasn't in his mind when he made what became its first installment). It's just that to move from the comparatively sedate world of mostly harmless and underachieving misfits to one in which the characters confess to crimes like statutory rape, get seriously beaten up, commit manslaughter, and win the Nobel Prize in Literature is a long stretch. As usual, much depends on how well the performers can bring the characters to something like life while still working within the distinctive parameters of Hartley's style. They succeed brilliantly in Henry Fool, with Thomas Jay Ryan playing the Mephistophelean title role to perfection, moving from slovenly to seductive with apparent ease. James Urbaniak's Simon Grim is the perfect patsy for Henry's manipulations as he rises from semi-literate garbage man to literary celebrity, taking the fall for Henry even as he triumphs. And as Fay Grim, Simon's slutty sister, Parker Posey manages to break free from Hartley's deadpan mode to be the best Parker Posey she can be, always a treat to watch. There's also the usual gallery of supporting characters who irrupt into the world out of Hartley's imaginings. Henry Fool has more satiric moments than Hartley's earlier films, taking shots at right wing politics and the publishing industry (which I suspect Hartley intends as a stand-in for the film industry). 
 

Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975)

Giancarlo Giannini in Seven Beauties

Cast: Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, Shirley Stoler, Elena Fiore, Piero Di Iorio, Enzo Vitale, Roberto Herlitzka, Lucio Amelio, Ermelinda De Felice, Biaca D'Origlia, Francesca Marciano. Screenplay: Lina Wertmüller. Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Enzo Jannacci. 

As a student of literature, I was called on to memorize the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, avarice, sloth, gluttony, and lechery. But I don't think I was ever made to recall the corresponding virtues, which the medieval church categorized as humility, kindness, patience, charity, diligence, temperance, and chastity. Our age has added another to the list of virtues: survival. We speak of "survival of the fittest," which has caused us to couple fitness with health as the supreme necessities for survival. One of our most popular TV shows, now in its 45th season, is Survivor, the reality competition show that has a motto: "Outwit. Outplay. Outlast." Which brings us to Pasqualino Frafuso, aka "Settebellezze" or "Seven Beauties," the protagonist of Lina Wertmüller's scarifying satire Seven Beauties. Pasqualino commits almost every one of the seven deadly sins all for the sake of survival. He outwits, outplays, and outlasts the worst that can befall him in Europe under the heel of the Nazis, lying, killing, raping, seducing as the means to an end: staying alive. And of course we loathe him for it, while at the same time questioning what we would do in the same circumstances. Seven Beauties is an unsubtle film, and its lack of finesse in character and situation works against its ostensible aim as a moral fable. It makes a feint at seriousness of purpose by introducing a sympathetic character, Pasqualino's friend Francesco (Piero Di Iorio), and a moral exemplar, the anarchist Pedro (Fernando Rey), but the dominant note of the film is a sour nihilism. Giancarlo Giannini's performance as Pasqualino would be a standout in any film: He's introduced to us as a Chaplinesque caricature of a strutting dandy, and for a while it's fun to watch him go from bad to worse, as in his efforts to dispose of the body of a man he has killed. But soon a queasiness sets in, as we wonder how much lower this worm can crawl. There should be no redemption for a Pasqualino, but instead Wertmüller gives us a cynical ending, suggesting that Pasqualino will repopulate the Earth with his own kind, in his own words, "A rotten comedy, a lousy farce, called living." 

Corridor of Mirrors (Terence Young, 1948)

Edana Romney and Eric Portman in Corridor of Mirrors

Cast: Edana Romney, Eric Portman, Barbara Mullen, Hugh Sinclair, Bruce Belfrage, Alan Wheatley, Joan Maude, Leslie Weston, Hugh Latimer, John Penrose, Christopher Lee, Lois Maxwell, Mavis Villiers, Thora Hird. Screenplay: Rudolph Cartier, Edana Romney, based on a novel by Christopher Massie. Cinematography: André Thomas. Production design: Serge Piménoff. Costume design: Owen Hyde-Clark, Maggy Rouff. Film editing: Douglas Myers. Music: Georges Auric. 

As a study in erotic decadence, Corridor of Mirrors courts (and has received) comparison to any number of stories, films, and fables, including Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (filmed by Albert Lewin in 1945), and the French legend of Bluebeard and his wives. When we first meet her, Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney) seems like a petulant young woman, catered to by her husband, Sir David Conway (Bruce Belfrage) and more than happy to escape from her three noisy young children to go to an assignation with her lover at, of all places, Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. She tours the museum until she comes to the effigy of Paul Mangin (Eric Portman) in the hall of criminals; he was hanged for the murder of Caroline Hart (Joan Maude), a night club singer. From here the story unfolds in flashback: Before she is married, Mifanwy meets Paul in the night club. He is attracted by her dark beauty and she by his mysterious aloofness. She goes to his opulent mansion, where her explorations take her to a hall lined with mirrored doors, behind each of which she finds a figure of a woman in an elaborate Renaissance costume. As their relationship develops, he eventually unveils for her a portrait of a 15th century Italian woman who looks exactly like Mifanwy, and claims that they were lovers in a past life. She also encounters a mysterious woman named Veronica (Barbara Mullen) who resides in his mansion and asserts that she, too, was once his lover, now relegated to the role of servant. This is all a little too spooky for Mifanwy, who finds that taking up with the comparatively normal David gives her a break from Paul's sinister ways. But she's drawn back again, with calamitous results. That Corridor of Mirrors stands up at all to the comparisons with the other tales is in large part because of the sumptuous settings and costumes, the atmospheric cinematography, and an only occasionally overbearing score by Georges Auric. What it lacks is the wit that Cocteau and Wilde brought to their fables, and any real chemistry between its leading players, Portman and Romney. Portman plays Paul with the stiffness of his effigy at Madame Tussauds, and Romney, who also wrote the screenplay with Rudolph Cartier and served as co-producer with him, doesn't have the range or depth as an actress to bring off such a complex role. It was her third film and her last. On the other hand, it was the first film for Terence Young as director; he went on to launch the James Bond series with Dr. No (1962), and made two more movies with Sean Connery as Bond, From Russia With Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965).

Star Dust (Walter Lang, 1940)

John Payne, Linda Darnell, and Jessie Ralph in Star Dust

Cast: Linda Darnell, John Payne, Roland Young, Charlotte Greenwood, William Gargan, Mary Beth Hughes, Mary Healy, Donald Meek, Jessie Ralph. Screenplay: Robert Ellis, Helen Logan, Jesse Malo, Kenneth Earl, Ivan Kahn. Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley. Art direction: Richard Day, Albert Hogsett. Film editing: Robert L. Simpson. Music: David Buttolph. 

Character actors gave a lot of energy to Hollywood movies of the '30s and '40s; they were depended on to bring a little of the pleasure of recognition to audiences who were familiar with their more or less established characteristics. So it's interesting to see two of the best cast against type in Star Dust, a fair-to-middling comic romance, designed around the up-and-coming Linda Darnell, whose ascent to stardom it's very loosely based on. Donald Meek, for example, had been typed from the beginning by his own surname, playing mousy, subservient types like the whiskey salesman whose sample case gets plundered in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). In Star Dust he's a casting director at a Hollywood studio, still subservient to the studio head played by William Gargan, but also conniving to advance the career of starlet June Lawrence (Mary Beth Hughes), with whom, if you know how to decode Breen Office censorship, it's suggested that he's been sleeping -- or at least plans to. Also cast against type is Roland Young, who often played underdogs with an edge, like the schemingly humble Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) or the henpecked Topper in a series of movies starting with Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937). In Star Dust he's Thomas Brooke, a former silent movie star who now works as a talent scout for Amalgamated Pictures. On a scouting trip he discovers Carolyn Sayers (Darnell) in a small Arkansas town, but decides not to bring her to Hollywood because she's only 16. He returns to Hollywood with two discoveries: a football player, Bud Borden (John Payne), and a singer, Mary Andrews (Mary Healy). To Brooke's surprise, Carolyn turns up too, having forged a letter under his name recommending her to the studio. He overlooks this misdemeanor and decides to promote her anyway. The rest of the plot is the usual now they've got it, now they don't stuff about breaking into the movies. Mary Healy gets to sing the title song, the Hoagy Carmichael standard; she does it well enough, though nobody ever sang it better than Hoagy himself. Charlotte Greenwood, a celebrated comic actress on the stage, makes one of her few memorable movie appearances as an acting coach. Darnell is quite fresh and lovely, though the scene that provides her break into the movies displays her limitations as an actress even though it wows the audience in the film. Payne is likable as the handsome football player who keeps getting his nose broken before he's supposed to make a crucial screen test. 

Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000)

Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins in Ginger Snaps

Cast: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers, Jesse Moss, Danelle Hampton, John Bourgeois, Peter Keleghan, Christopher Redman, Jimmy McInnis, Lindsay Leese. Screenplay: Karen Walton, John Fawcett. Cinematography: Thom Best. Production design: Todd Cherniawsky. Film editing: Brett Sullivan. Music: Mike Shields.

The title is a silly pun, but I don't know of any other reason why Ginger Snaps is not more widely hailed than it is. It certainly delivers on the blood-and-guts scares that much better known movies only promise. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is a 16-year-old girl who is bitten by a werewolf on the day that she first begins to menstruate -- later than usual, as her mother (Mimi Rogers) notes. And while the association of menstruation with the emergence of supernatural powers is nothing new -- e.g., Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) -- it gives the werewolf trope a grounding in human psychology and physiology. As the condescending school nurse (Lindsay Leese) tells Ginger, handing her a condom, she can now get pregnant and thus has even more need for "protection." In this case, Ginger needs protection from herself: She begins to change, not only developing signs of lycanthropy, but also exhibiting a sexuality that she has heretofore been inclined to hide behind a façade of goth dress and mannerisms. The person closest to Ginger is her 15-year-old sister, Brigitte (Emily Perkins), who is in the same high school class (she skipped a year) and who shares Ginger's deep alienation to the extent that they have vowed to kill themselves when both turn 16 if they haven't been able to escape their bland suburban existence. Their obsession with death leads them to produce a collection of grisly posed photographs that they exhibit to their class, causing the teacher to refer them to the school guidance counsellor and the rest of the class to shun them as "freaks." Their parents are no help: Their mother (a keen performance by Rogers) is self-centered and ineptly domineering, and their father (John Bourgeois) is a wuss. Their only ally is the school drug dealer, Sam (Kris Lemche), who has a greenhouse where he grows his own in a secret backroom. On the night that Ginger is bitten, Sam runs over the werewolf with his van, killing it but also exposing Ginger's secret. The script by Karen Walton and director John Fawcett skillfully and often wittily blends these elements into more than just a setup for scares. Isabelle and Perkins give smart performances, maintaining the sisters' connection even as the one tries to keep the other from giving in to the urges she can't control. It's a darkly funny movie, but when I found myself laughing amid the horror, I was usually laughing at my own vulnerability to its clever and sometimes fresh manipulation of horror-movie tricks. 

The Seven-Ups (Philip D'Antoni, 1973)

 Cast: Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco, Larry Haines, Richard Lynch, Bill Hickman, Jerry Leon, Victor Arnold, Ken Kercheval, Lou Polan, Matt Russell, Joe Spinell. Screenplay: Albert Ruben, Alexander Jacobs, Sonny Grosso. Cinematography: Urs Furrer. Production design: Ed Wittstein. Film editing: John C. Horger, Stephen A. Rotter. Music: Don Ellis. 

The Seven-Ups has sections that remind me so much of Jean-Pierre Melville's crime films, that I found myself wishing that Melville had directed it. I can sense director Philip D'Antoni striving for the kind of ambience Melville achieved in movies like Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Le Doulos (1962), and in Roy Scheider he has the kind of actor like Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo who could bring off a certain world-weary style. D'Antoni does succeed in using New York City settings as effectively as Melville does with Paris, but there's a slackness to the film's pacing, a lack of energy and tension, that undermines it. The exception, of course, is the great car chase scene in the film's middle. The Seven-Ups is part of a trilogy of car-chase movies for D'Antoni, who also produced but didn't direct Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). The chase in this film almost saves it from being just another movie about vigilante cops using unsanctioned methods to take out criminals, a subgenre that reached its peak in Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan movies, Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973), and The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976). 

Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

Lionel Atwill in Doctor X

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Leila Bennett, Robert Warwick, George Rosener, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson, Harry Holman, Mae Busch, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Robert Taskner, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard Warren Comstock and Allen C. Miller. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy.

In Doctor X, Lee Tracy is called on to do two incompatible things: serve as comic relief and play the romantic lead. He succeeds at the former more than he does at the latter, which is not saying much.  (The comic shtick involves things like joy buzzers and exploding cigars, which gives you a sense of the level of humor Tracy is asked to participate in.) The film is a whodunit horror about a serial killer who strikes at the full moon and who leaves his victims mutilated. (The movie calls it cannibalism, but I don't recall any evidence that the killer actually ate the people he murdered.) The chief forensic clue is that the victims were sliced up with a particular kind of scalpel, used only by one facility in the city: a research institute headed by Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill). When the police detectives call on Xavier, they are introduced to his research staff, each of whom becomes a suspect in the killings. Meanwhile, Lee Taylor (Tracy), one of those anything-for-a-story reporters Hollywood was fond of, is snooping around too, trying to uncover the Full Moon Killer before the police do. This involves Taylor breaking and entering at not only the institute but also Dr. Xavier's creepy gothic mansion on a cliff in Long Island, where he lurks around in some skeleton-filled closets. (Cue the obvious gags.) He also meets Dr. Xavier's lovely daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray), and they inexplicably (at least where she's concerned) hit it off. Naturally, Joanne has to be put in jeopardy and Taylor has to rescue her. Doctor X is mostly remembered for its experiment with two-strip Technicolor, which yields some interesting if washed-out looking images, but also seems inappropriate for the film's sinister old dark house setting. There are a few nice scares among all the goofiness and pseudo-scientific poppycock -- the usual foaming and smoking beakers and flasks and some sparking and arcing electric apparatus -- but in a golden age for horror movies, Doctor X is decidedly second-tier.