Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989)

Wendell B. Harris Jr. in Chameleon Street

Cast: Wendell B. Harris Jr., Timothy Alvaro, William Ballenger, Thomas Bashaw, Alfred Bruce Bradley, Margaret Branch, Rick Davenport, Amina Fakir, Anita Gordon, Gary Irwin, Jeff Lamb, Angela Leslie, Bruce Seyburn, Jennifer Turner. Screenplay: Wendell B. Harris Jr. Cinematography: Daniel S. Noga. Art direction: Timothy Alvaro. Film editing: Matthew Mallinson. Music: Peter S. Moore.

 An altogether astonishing movie, Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street is raw, clumsy, funny, mordant, and almost as interesting for what happened to the movie itself as for anything that happens on the screen. It was born of its writer-producer-director-star's fascination with a real life con man, William Douglas Street Jr., who managed to pass himself off as a reporter, a doctor, a lawyer, an athlete, and a Yale student. Only once did Street try to make real money with this talent; the rest of the time he did it because he could, which ultimately wound up sending him to prison. Harris's exploration of Street's career is a kind of docudrama, and it won him the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. What it didn't win him was fame as a filmmaker, which Sundance had done for directors like Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh, among others. Hollywood showed its interest only in buying the rights to remake the movie, but not to distribute it. At the Sundance festival, Chameleon Street's chief competitor for the award was To Sleep With Anger, a film by another Black director, Charles Burnett, that was picked up for distribution by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. It's a more conventional movie, featuring stars like Danny Glover, while Harris's film is largely performed by non-professional actors. After three decades of underground circulation, Chameleon Street was restored in 2021, distributed and released on video. It can now be seen as a pointed look at the Black experience and as a commentary on the quest for identity and status, not only within the film but in the film's history. 

Blood for Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

Udo Kier in Blood for Dracula

Cast: Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, Arno Jürging, Vittorio De Sica, Maxime McKendry, Milena Vukotic, Dominique Darel, Stefania Casini, Silvia Dionisio. Screenplay: Paul Morrissey. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi. Music: Claudio Gizzi. 

The great Vittorio De Sica had a career that extended from the sublime -- directing Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1954), acting in Madame De ... (Max Ophus, 1953) -- to the ridiculous -- appearing in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula. De Sica plays the Marchese Di Fiore, an Italian aristocrat in financial straits who lives in a decaying mansion with his wife (Maxime McKendry) and four daughters. He has been forced to dismiss all of his servants except one, the surly Mario Balato (Joe Dallesandro), a Marxist who eagerly anticipates a revolution like the one that has just taken place in Russia. Di Fiore's only hope is to marry off one of his daughters to a wealthy suitor. The oldest, Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic), and the youngest, Perla (Silivia Dionisio), are considered not suitable, but the two middle girls, Saphiria (Dominique Darel) and Rubinia (Stefania Casini) are prime marriage material. So who should arrive in their village but a well-to-do Romanian count named Dracula (Udo Kier). In this version of the Dracula story, the count can drink only the blood of virgins. The villagers back in Romania have gotten wise to this fact, and no women go near his castle. So he figures that the Italians, being devout Roman Catholics, will have seen to it that virginity prevails, so he journeys there with his assistant, Anton (Arno Jürging), in search of a bride. He's delighted to learn of Di Fiore's marriageable daughters, so he makes a play for the girls, only to discover that neither is a virgin -- Mario has seen to that. Sampling his would-be brides makes the count violently ill, giving Kier an opportunity to go over the top in portraying Dracula's reaction. The film is about what you'd expect if you've seen its companion piece, Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein (1973): a good deal of nudity on the part of the actresses and Dallesandro, some bloody deaths, a lot of barely acceptable acting, and a wide variety of accents: Italian, German, French, British, and Brooklyn. De Sica, who wrote his own dialogue, makes his character one of the saving graces of the movie, along with cinematography, settings, and a score that are better than it deserves.    

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.