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.