The Lurk of Mr. Wrong: DARK OF THE NIGHT (1985)

You may have noticed that there's no title in the above poster.  That's because the title I gave above, Dark of the Night, is the American re-titleling for the VHS release; it was originally released in its native New Zealand under the title Mr. Wrong.  While this is a bit more plot-specific, it isn't helpful at all as the title to a horror movie, hence the generic retrofit.  Then again, pitching this movie as a horror flick isn't helpful, either.  Allow me to elaborate.

One of the most interesting details in Shaun of the Dead which nobody talks about is its deftness at telling a quarter-life crisis story.  Its protagonists are all in their late 20's and early 30's, still reeling from college B.S. and stuck in unimpressive jobs, unsure of why they got there or where they're going.  This point in a person's life is actually quite ripe for a horror tale, with a heap of uncertainty and anxiety surrounding one's life and doings.  There's a lot of moving around and uncomfortable decision making, and it's entirely possible for one of those moves to wind the protagonist up in a haunted house.  Dark of the Night is just like that, except it's a fabulous Jaguar sedan.


Meg (Heather Bolton) has just moved out of her parent's house, and snaps up the grand old car for a suspiciously nice sum.  There's a nice montage of her admiring all nearby bells and whistles (apparently she'd never seen a dashboard cigarette lighter before), and other drivers give props from the other lanes of the road.  Hunky-Dory-ness is quashed soon enough, however, as she hears mysterious wheezing from the back seat, and has dreams of being chased by the car and a woman walking through the rain.  Her mother is fond of the car and wonders if Meg has found a boyfriend yet, just in time for Meg to meet Wayne, an old High School classmate of hers.  The sprightly woodwinds on the soundtrack as she races down a hill after their meeting should tip the viewer off the movie is still far from blood-curdling terror.

 However, while stopped at a light in the rain, she sees the woman from her dreams coming towards her car, getting in the back just as a man gets in the passenger seat without asking.  While Meg is concerned about the silent woman the man makes thuddingly obvious passes at her - until the woman vanishes, followed by the man.  He eventually emerges from far off (though we don't know why he left), and Meg is rattled enough by this to look into the car's history, eventually uncovering its previous owner: Mary Carmichael, a woman about Meg's age who vanished years ago.

I'm going to lay it straight for you: this movie isn't particularly scary, but I don't think it was supposed to be a terrifying thrill ride to begin with.  Dark of the Night uses the set-up of a haunted car to paint a picture of twenty-something uncertainty, with Meg wrestling with life on her own and trying to deal with the poor purchase of the car.  Actress Heather Bolton is excellent as Meg, somewhat modest and awkward but with a real drive to enjoy her newfound freedom.  Her character is expertly written and realized, and the other performances and other aspects of the film are very well done.  It's the first (and apparently only decent) film by New Zealand writer/director Gaylene Preston, and it's a unique and absorbing personal project that was funded by the New Zealand Film Commission.  I've gotten the impression that film boards in Australia and New Zealand work like Canadian film funding agencies, whereby project get support if they're deemed as a valuable contribution to their country's art establishment.  Canada is usually not too interested in funding flat commercialism, and I'd bet that New Zealand has a similar policy.  The good news is that Dark of the Night is much more than that, observant, charming and beautifully filmed.  If you weren't warned beforehand you may have ended up turning the movie off after 10 minutes, which is what I did the first time I tried watching it, but I'm glad I gave it another chance, and it has a cozy spot on my VHS shelf to this day.  That's the only way to see the movie in an America-friendly format (with a chintzy-looking replacement title card), and I wasn't able to find it on YouTube.  I did find a promo for its revival in a film festival, so enjoy and let this appealing little movie into your life, if you're so inclined.

~PNK

Weaving Family Across the Land: TRAMP AT THE DOOR (1985)

When I was taking Music History in undergrad, we were visited by a Canadian composer for a special lecture on the classical tradition of the Tundra Not Unda.  Her general thesis was that being a composer in Canada (or any other artist seeking state funding) meant that government financiers were mainly interested in two subjects that theoretically made up the “Canadian Experience”: space and identity.  Space may have come from the wide open spaces of the Canadian wilderness, and how the pioneering spirit still lingered through the generations and built a foundation for country life.  Identity seems to come with living in North America, as the histories of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico were rich with the trials and tribulations of colonialism and immigration.  I can’t speak for all Canadian arts as to whether anybody producing art explores these concepts by choice or by necessity, but I can attest to the late writer Gabrielle Roy and director Allan Kroeker, whose combined arts made this wonderful TV movie from the mid-80’s that occupies that interesting slot of videos that have been out of print for decades but are very cheap to acquire online.

Tramp at the Door is set in the Manitoban Prarieside in the mid-30’s, following Gabrielle Roy herself (newcomer Joanna Schellenberg), her Justice-of-the-Peace father (August Schellenberg, Joanna’s real-life father) and her mother (Monique Mercure, who has been in things I’ve seen but I’ve never recognized her).  Her father was born of an immigrant family in Quebec, and forged a new existence for himself in early adulthood, away from his family.  His only connection left with his roots are his stories and memories, as was common with people living far away from each other in those days.  That is, until the Roy’s (called the Fornier’s in the film) are approached by a strange visitor (Ed McNamara, who died within a year of this film’s release), who we had recently seen conning a train conductor into thinking he had bought a ticket by wearing a stranger’s coat while he was in the  bathroom and getting the ticket punched before the coat’s owner returned.

The stranger approaches one rainy evening and introduces himself as Gustav, a cousin from Quebec.  Gabrielle is the one to answer the door, and she doesn’t believe him at first, because he gets her name wrong (calling her Agnes) and saying Fortnier instead of Fornier.  He is only invited inside and to the table because of the father’s curiosity in meeting a cousin from the old home.  The news of family developments spill forth, but Gustav seems to only speak of cousins as their names and details are offered to him by the family (my favorite is when he insists that a cousin who had lost his legs in the war ended up running the family farm).  Gabrielle and her mother immediately suspect that Gustav is a liar, but the father is in the mood of fool-suffering because he likes the illusion of family connection across the horizon.  Despite grumblings from his wife, he attempts sending Gustav off in the morning.  This is unsuccessful, with the father claiming that the roads are unsuitable for horseback riding.

The mother, also in the mood of fool-suffering (for her husband, anyways), gives Gustav an old work-outfit and sets him to help out around the house.  He throws himself into the help, tending to farm duties and even fetching mail from town on foot despite the great distance.  By night, he becomes a fountain of stories from the family, speaking of many cousins from the past: one who lived to be ninety after failed suicide attempts, a bootlegger who became a priest and another who killed her husband by putting glass in his soup.  Each story has a captivation to it, and Gustav often stops his stories right at a climactic point, ensuring that the family will keep him at the house for another day.  The mother is the most interesting in her reaction to all this, admitting that even though she doesn’t trust Gustav or believe the stories for a second, all information she did get of her husband’s past was in the form of stories, anecdotes, comparisons, and fragments.  Her husband’s stories were in their own way no more or less real to her than Gustav’s.

This continues for some time, with the web of history that Gustav spins becoming more and more thick and emotionally grabbing for the family.  One of the most incredible was the story of Cousin Cleofas, who apparently died aboard the Titanic with his wife, and his family didn’t find out about it until a decade later.  It’s in these moments that a thick air fills the living room, an air of rapt fascination, one that is represented beautifully by the music and lighting.  Even more fascinating is a story that he tells to Gabrielle one day, about a cousin who pulled himself up by his bootstraps by giving bottles of a cure-all cough syrup to his townspeople, and became a well-regarded and wealthy man despite having no real credentials or medical skill.  Of course, the story of how he lost all his money is for another time, stringing her along with yet another cliffhanger.

Throughout all of this a strange balance is maintained, with Gustav’s illusion keeping the family looking the other way, even though they always question him implicitly, and internally.  In a curious moment, the father finds a notice of an older, possibly deranged older man being in town on the board next to his office.  He takes the notice down, and when a coworker questions him he claims the notice was for a team of horses he wants to buy (even though he already has one), and gets defensive when probed.  Gustav has become a member of the family through pure charm, a feat that may never happen again in this day and age, where people have to undo sixteen locks on the door just to pay for pizza delivery.  He is blessed with the enormous gift of observation, and knowing how to play on people’s needs.  At one point, he breaks through to the mother’s religious bent by spinning a story of a miracle-working Brother Andre at St. John’s Oratory (a Quebec basilica).  She sees the gift of compassion in his heart, a gift that seemed obvious to them all along, by his ability to weave tales for no other purpose than to fill his hosts’ hearts with joy.

And then, he's gone.

But, not really.  Merely, he has moved onward, further West, towards another town and another family.  Nothing was taken from the Fornier’s home, and no ill feelings were kept; he just knew that it was time to keep moving.  And then the letters start coming, as Gustav tells of more family members he supposedly visits in his journeys, each one having a kind word for Mr. Fornier.  The Fornier’s spend their evenings pawing through old photographs and correspondences.  One night they think they recognize Gustav’s voice in a radio serial, and realize that his Scheherazade-like technique of cliffhangerismo may have been lifted from them.  The letters start to create a trail across the Prairie, a line of experience and warm feelings that can’t be proven by the Fornier’s but are a joy to relish.  Relatives that the father had never heard of were seemingly happy to send their regards through Gustav.  And then, he is silent.  In a pivotal scene, Gabrielle forecasts her own future as a writer by re-telling the story of the cough-syrup cousin to her classroom.   And, in her own burgeoning talent, she weaves Gustav into the character, while wearing her teacher’s coat and hat.

Much more of the plot, I shouldn’t tell, but it might not be what you expect.  It is this film’s gift to create a warm, sprawling texture that engulfs the viewer during its tidy 80-minute running time.  I can imagine that the original TV broadcast was an inferior way to view the film, as the depth of the cinematography, design, and acting is far too much for the small screen.  The cinematographer Ron Orieux and art director Bonnie von Helmot have a love affair with natural light, and the way it plays across skin, wallpaper, and wheatfields (I suspect Days of Heaven was influential in the look of the piece).  The direction by Kroeker is superb at capturing the experience of hearing Gustav’s stories, often following his inflections and movements with a handheld camera, imitating the spectator.  I got the feeling throughout most of the film that I could simply walk through the screen and live the life of a Manitoban farmer in the 1930’s, as the rhythms and moods of this kind of life are made luminous and endearing by the director’s touch.  As for the acting, it’s just right, and especially excellent from the young actress playing Gabrielle.  Ed McNamara as Gustav is astounding, giving the huckster an enormous charisma despite his obvious façading.

Few films I’ve seen have been better at exploring the relationship between family ties and storytelling, perceived connection and realistic disconnection, than this one.  Gustav opened a world of life and love spanning across thousands of kilometers, allowing an extended family spread throughout the prairie to flood into a single household.  In a way, he also was hugely helpful to the family’s immigrant experience, as immigrants have to hold onto their connections in a new world; the Fornier’s were no stranger to this, even though their ancestral homeland is never truly revealed.  Another film that expounded on the importance of immigrant family ties was Barry Levinson’s Avalon, one of my favorite family epics and a movie you should see immediately.  Referring back to my earlier point on the nature of Canadian art, Tramp at the Door is a beautiful entwining of space and identity, as well as a loving ode to the power of storytelling.  Gabrielle Roy went on to become one of the foremost Francophone writers in Canadian history, and I’m of the opinion that this story is an expression of the birth of her love for the storytelling craft (she died not long before this film was made, and it is dedicated to her memory).  The best writers in the world are those who seep compassion from every pore, can see to the heart of people and make monuments to the human experience.  It is just this gift that Gabrielle’s mother sees in Gustav, noting that he was a creature of true grace.  I believe that an Amen is in order for everybody involved.

I was unable to find the movie on YouTube, but the good news is that the old VHS copies are pretty cheap used at the Amazonz: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000MC1FHS/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

~PNK

Philip Baker Hall's SECRET HONOR (1984)

Philip Baker Hall is a face whom you may recognize on a good day, appearing in a lot of movies and TV, and probably best known these days for appearing in three of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies, Hard Eight (as the lead), Boogie Nights, and Magnolia.  He's an actor a lot of people like but not many list among the greats, mostly because he's been relegated to small roles all his life.  I could count myself among this crowd, but that would have to be before I saw Secret Honor.  In fact, a lot of how I feel, not just about Philip Baker Hall but also film acting and speculative history, can be put into the categories of "before Secret Honor" and "after Secret Honor".

We're greeted with a text crawl:

This work is a fictional meditation

concerning the character of and events

in the history of Richard M. Nixon, who

is impersonated in this film.

The dramatist's imagination has created

some fictional events in an effort

to illuminate the character of

President Nixon.

This film is not a work of history or

a historical recreation.  It is a work of

fiction, using as a fictional character

a real person, President Richard M. Nixon--

in an attempt to understand.

The meditation is here more of a primal scream, pitting a solitary Nixon (Hall), holed up in his study with Scotch, a tape recorder, CCTV screens, a camera, and a revolver, against the world.  There are no other characters, and Nixon never leaves his study.  The only other faces we see are portraits of Lincoln, Washington, Eisenhower, Wilson, Kissinger and Nixon's mother.  He speaks to his assistant Roberto (who isn't there), issuing various instructions, including sending a manuscript to his publishers.  And then the dams break, beginning with the proclamation to "your honor" that the pardon given to "my client" was fake.  He dictates wildly, supposedly into the tape recorder but moving too much for it to pick up anything.  His speech is a vast swath, veering in numerous directions from his High School debate results to the dark secrets he carried with him through the Presidency.  Occasionally he stops and asks Roberto to erase everything he just said.  Though animated he appears under control (aside from four-letter words); this changes with the Committee of 100.

The above note on fictional events is no lie; Secret Honor rewrites Nixon's life to include a secret organization, one that attracted Nixon with the promise of pushing him into Congress and ended up forcing him to invent Watergate as a way out, to escape their plan.  There are many allegations, some odd and shocking (such as Marilyn Monroe's murder by the CIA).  It would help the viewer to have a good working knowledge of Nixon's life (I was fuzzy on some events, particularly his relationship to the Cuba Missile Crisis and the Alger Hiss case).  It is only a small part of the film's strategy to push Nixon away from a vilified public menace and more as a man trapped between external pressures and internal horrors.  And the horrors are deep and tragic, stretching from his brothers' early deaths to his mother's control.  All of this, truly everything, is delivered by Hall in one of the most unbelievable performances in all of film.

You've never seen a Nixon like this, working at articulation but swooping too fast between sideshow barker and raging lunatic.  There are small moments where he assumes the role of his own lawyer, and attempts presentability.  But there is no hope, as his absolute, manic passion drives him over natural expression and into hyperaction: waving his arms, using all the octaves available to his voice, cursing for anchor points, pulling childish faces, each turn in language gripping him to his very core.  He's at the end of all available ropes, and the fact we can understand him at all is a testament to his intelligence and purpose.  Through all of this, his mother keeps breaking through, not really there but there enough.

Based off a stage play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, the movie was directed by Robert Altman (Nashville, M.A.S.H., Gosford Park) while he was a professor at University of Michigan, using a largely student crew.  Altman always had an "actors first" method to direction and nothing less than that would suffice with a performance this complicated; he makes the eternally wise decision of staying out of Hall's way.  The camera roves on its own, making lovely moments amidst the sound and fury, but they are merely accentuations, never jarring, and I couldn't imagine seeing the film without them.  The music by George Burt (who I've never heard of before) is also unintrusive and essential, taking cues from the great 50's soundtracks by people like Bernstein and Herrmann.

I suspect that this film's obscurity is due less to its low budget and independent status, but rather a polarizing effect from Hall's performance.  He took enormous risks, giving everything he had into every second, and one could make a case that nobody would really act like that.  It's a kind of litmus test for those who can only accept naturalistic acting, as Hall is neither naturalistic or surreal.  Either way, you can't take your eyes off him, not for a second.  The film's intent may have helped as well.  Made more than 10 years after Nixon's impeachment, it was released at a time when public opinion was only beginning to soften on Watergate, and I suspect that most people went in expecting something less sympathetic and complex.  I wasn't a huge fan of Oliver Stone's W.; ts conception seemed to be decided more by Stone's publicist than Stone himself, as if they wouldn't want the chance to get a cynical, left wing biopic pass in the small window where Bush was still in office but nobody would get mad.  There's no part of me that believed that film was "an attempt to understand" (and I'm saying this as a liberal).  I can certainly bet that nobody was expecting someone to make Secret Honor.

If you're not a fan of political drama, you may be left in the dust, but either way I'd say you shouldn't go another week without seeing this movie.  Hall's portrayal of Nixon should be held up as one of the greatest performances in any film, but nobody talks about it (though we are past the time when people talk about Altman movies).  Its inclusion in the Criterion Collection isn't enough.  So in order to sway you, I've included it here:

~PNK

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971)

I'd like you to do me a small favor.

There are times when you just need to watch a movie cold.  No blurb, no spoilers, no trailer, nothing.  And that's the problem with trying to get people to watch a movie: they need precedence in order to give up their 90 minutes.  But sometimes the experience only works without any foreknowledge.  Let's Scare Jessica to Death is one of these cases.

This movie is one of my favorite horror films ever, made in the early 70's to little recognition and slowly building in power ever since.  It's brilliant and strange, and works best if you know nothing about it beforehand.  Even seeing the poster is a bad idea (or the DVD cover).  The above image is my favorite still that entices without giving anything away.  I've seen the movie nearly 10 times and each time I watch it I find more to admire and soak up.  I can't guarantee you'll love it immediately, but let it sink in.

Look, I'll fully admit that I'm kind of ripping this post off from Bleeding Skull (with their brilliant post on the subject here, though you might want to put duct tape over the screencaps).  At the end of that post the review Dan Budnik said he intended the recommendation as a small gift, and that if he was goofier he'd buy everybody the DVD.  I'm not that goofy, but I do have something else to offer - the movie on YouTube:

~PNK (with special thanks to YouTuber Robert Buchanan)