Short-Order - THE ANTIQUE COLLECTOR (1976)

It's a shame that short films have largely gone the way of the dodo, at least outside of bundled showings at film festivals.  Edison famously remarked that he didn't think anybody would sit still for a movie longer than a half hour, and short films used to be a standard part of the theater-going experience along with newsreels and cartoons.  Most shorts shown theatrically from the 30's through the 50's were serial films shown one episode at a time, and once TV came along theatrical serials quickly became obsolete.  Theaters started shedding shorts along with newsreels and cartoons (also largely rendered obsolete by TV) in an effort to fit more screenings in per day.  Short films occasionally get shown on TV for special occasions (such as Mickey's Christmas Carol or Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance) but almost never theatrically, the main exception being Pixar shorts shown in front of their own feature films.  Home video has helped shorts out somewhat but only in bundled form and usually under the banner of awards consideration, such as the Academy Awards shorts collections released each year.  It's because of this lack of availability that short films have a sort of fleeting preciousness, so I appreciate whenever I can find a good older one, and for that purpose I'm once again grateful to the fine uploaders at YouTube and Internet Archive.  The latter hasn't been featured too much on this blog but has been an invaluable resource for collecting interesting movies that have fallen into the public domain or whose owners don't mind putting up for free.  A while ago I snagged an interesting short from the Internet Archive, The Antique Collector, made by an industrial film maker in the mid-70's and remaining a finely crafted curio from an age when shorts were at their most threatened.

A young boy named Tom (Scott Hart) works at his grandmother's antique store, scooping up items where he can and learning the fine art of marking up prices and haggling.  His grandma (Edna Macafee) is an expert in the business but her spirit is gradually fading, and one day is charmed by a wealthy-looking man (Tom Ramirez) who buys an expensive piece of glassware from the store without asking the price.  What she doesn't know what Tom sees - the man pitched the item into the trash after leaving the store.  After he comes around a couple more times Tom realizes that he's not interested in the items he buys from the store, but rather buying Tom's grandma - and he may not realize how literal the collector's intentions are.

Unfolding like a delicate Twilight Zone episode, The Antique Collector is a warm and strangely resonant fable that has held up rather nicely for being almost forty years old.  The direction and cinematography seep atmosphere and mood, the store among a pocket of antique shops stuck in a strange, dusty strip mall.  The store is so displaced that the characters seem to inhabit a kind of dreamworld, an atmosphere supported by the boy having a secret best friend in an unsettling mannequin propped on a balcony.  The acting, while not exactly Hollywood-level professional, is at least impassioned and works well with the odd premise.  The only actor to have appeared in anything else (according to IMDB) is the grandma, Edna Macafee, who managed to appear in both Warlock Moon and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a resume I'd kill to have.  The music is pure 70's and extremely charming, and the ending has a cozy, still-shot quality that puts it in league with the best of 70's horror flicks (...like Warlock Moon, for that matter).  Its writer/director, Jerry Callner, apparently had an award-winning career in industrial and educational films (much like Carnival of Souls director Herk Harvey) and his son James went on to make a number of films about obsessive compulsive disorder, a condition he suffers from himself.  It's a shame this is so unknown that it doesn't even have an IMDB entry, nor does its creator or hardly any of the actors involved, but that's exactly what Internet Archive is for - helping people like me fill in the gaps of American film culture.  Here's the short in full for those with just under a half hour to spare, not even breaking Thomas Edison's famous prediction of the maximum amount of time that people would sit still for a film.

~PNK

A SIFF 2016 request - SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (1964)

Last year I spotlighted nine films that I'd seen at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival, and this year I'm going to publish another round-up article, hopefully reviewing many more films than my relatively paltry run last time.  This year I'm going to at least one of the special revival screenings featuring an older film rather than a new one, and SIFF always has a few of them each year - one year I saw the deeply unnerving Mother Joan of the Angels and left the theater shaking.  The revival I most want to see this year (and my schedule allows me to see) is The Color of Pomegranates, long on my TO WATCH list and most likely one for your list, too, and I'm really peeved I'm going to be missing Cave of the Spider Women.  While I've had some good luck in catching Midnight Movies and historical screenings at various silver screens (catching rarities like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and The Best Man utilizing original prints) I've recently been thinking of a list of older gems I'd love to see in a packed, darkened theater at SIFF or elsewhere, including a bunch of movies I've reviewed here.  Today I'd like to spotlight a film that not many people have seen but those who have hold it dearly to their hearts as a gem of 60's British filmmaking, Bryan Forbes's Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Only fitfully available in the U.S., Seance has never been a huge moneymaker but its superb artistry and singularity in its genre make it a must-see for fans of psychological nail-biters, and I'd like to think of my article as my bid for its inclusion in SIFF's 2016 festival.

Myra (Kim Stanley) and Billy (Richard Attenborough) never really recovered from the death of their son Arthur.  Having been left to their own devices for far too long, Myra has unglued herself into the role of a professional medium and Billy laid down as her doormat long ago.  Myra hatches a plan - the two of them kidnap the young daughter of a wealthy couple and send a phony ransom letter.  Keeping the child in their son's old room masquerading as hospital staff treating her for "double German measles", Myra plans to step forward offering her services as a medium and eventually help the family and the police "find" the child.  As neither of the pair are professional criminals things can't exactly go as planned, and Myra's continued "communication" with Arthur may only be the least of their worries.

Botched kidnappings have long been a great plot device for crime thrillers, including After Dark, My Sweet, Fargo and Julia, but Seance tops them all in its exposure of the kind of loneliness and desperation that drives someone to take another family's child.  Largely eschewing the typical setpieces and pacing of its thriller genre, Seance uses silence and calm to crush the viewer's soul.  It's one of the slowest crime dramas I've ever seen yet it's never boring, the total stillness of Myra and Billy's insular existence so stifling at times to make the viewer want to claw their way out of their own skin.  There are rarely more than four or five people on screen at a time, the scenes mostly confined to drawing rooms and bedrooms, and when the action finds its way outdoors its surroundings are so entropied and forgotten some of them could double for a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Its through this acute emptiness and loneliness writer-director Bryan Forbes (working from a novel by Mark McShane) draws an indescribable and frightening atmosphere, playing off tight angles and stark confinement so well the viewer can feel the proximity of walls and taste the dust in the air.  I could feel the influence of Jack Clayton's The Innocents through much of the film, and why not take influence from one of the greatest horror films of the 60's to make a kidnapping film?  Both films illuminate how madness feeds off the echoes of the human mind left in the dark, as Myra's increasing instability and Billy's insurmountable weakness to her demands create a psychological moebius strip, each decision to dig their hole deeper dovetailing into the next.  The range of questions raised when someone decides to become a medium is a large and fruitful one for fiction, but Myra's need for her "gift" is both unsettling and enormously sad, and Billy's painful loyalty to her does little more than delay an inevitable point of psychological destruction.  The performances here are extraordinary and most likely career bests for both Stanley and Attenborough - Stanley teetered on a razor's edge so long the skin finally breaks, and Attenborough more regret than human.  The cinematography by Gerry Turpin (who would later photograph the heartbreaking senility portrait The Whisperers) is crisp and cold, accentuating each dry crack in living room walls and making sure neither the characters nor the viewer have any means of escape.  The music by John Barry (yes, the James Bond John Barry) has moments of shimmering, heartstopping simplicity and sensitivity, and the outdoor locations need little help to be engulfing.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon is hardly a thriller, and its insistence on forcing the viewer to live out the arc of its characters' madness in real time most likely contributed to its difficulty in finding an audience outside of England, even in spite of its mostly positive critical reception.  After briefly seeing the light of day on a VidAmerica VHS release in the 80's the film remained hidden until a 2002 DVD release by Home Vision Entertainment, the company behind the Criterion Collection that once had a DVD line under its own name that had a similarly high standard of its catalog without Criterion releases' high price tags and exhaustive print restoration.  The cover above is from that release, and I deviated from my usual practice of using original posters as headers for my reviews because I feel the HVE DVD cover is a better representation of the film's mood and atmosphere than any of the posters.  The release has its flaws, though - there's nary a special feature to be found and the sound transfer is poor, with people's voices creating ripping distortion at any dynamic above mezzo piano.  If I were a less jaded viewer I might be able to take the release's stifling sound transfer as another dimension to Myra and Billy's physical and mental prison but I've long outgrown the phase where I'd hold on to a fullscreen DVD of The Ring just because the movie is about video tapes.  I wonder why HVE didn't think the film wasn't good enough to be included in the Criterion Collection, as it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of movies they've featured (And the Ship Sails On, anyone?) and they later inducted The Innocents, anyways.  While we might not see a re-issue anytime soon some enterprising fans have made it easy for us and uploaded the film to YouTube, so until a revival comes your way you can at least see Seance for yourself in all its harrowing power.  It's a great reminder that sometimes prisoners are kept not so much so they can't get out but because their captors can't live without them inside.

~PNK

Calling the Eye and the Ear - the short films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

Now THIS is what I call a blurb:

When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard - paralyzing the professor and killing his guest, a graduate student diligently interviewing friends of a deceased literary master to learn the color of the Great Man's eyes - we enter the mystery of the sardine.  It is a mystery whose unwitting detectives are not trench-coated sleuths but, rather, include a twelve-year-old Oxonian mathematician named Ian, author of Euclid Was an Ass; his mother, Miss Prentice, a palmist; his beloved, Emma, daughter of the professor, for whom he names his most important postulate; a bureaucrat, Joseph Kszak, dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia; the Great Man's widow and his secretary, affectionately known as the Dancing Ladies; and Lady Cooper, the aging daughter of a famous Polish general.  The clues they unearth - drawing on philosophical logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between - lead them far from the tiny sea-coast town with the exploding poodle: we find them hunting in Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London.  The solution ultimately lies, however, at the furthest and most magical reaches of reason, which can only be deduced by this mystery's most visionary detectives.

Sorry to drop all that on you at once, but that's the blurb of what sounds like the greatest novel ever written, and I just happened to find it at an estate sale in a pristine, hardback First Edition for $2.  It's called The Mystery of the Sardine, and its author, Stefan Themerson, was not only a novelist but also a philosopher and composer (at least of the 2-act opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, or Brother Francis' Lamb Chops (!)).  He also made experimental short films in the 30's and 40's with his wife Franciszka, who was herself a painter, illustrator and stage designer.  Oh, and Stefan also did the illustrated initials to the chapters of one of the greatest books ever written, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style:

Obviously the Themersons are too amazing to ignore, and ignore I shalln't.  I obviously can't review the book here, but there's a sad catch to this article - all but three of the short films are lost, which for somebody used to a world where any movie can be seen by anybody is worse than if they never existed, because at least then I wouldn't be angry that they disappeared.*  There are three left: Przygoda czlowieka poczciwego (The Adventures of a Good Citizen), Calling Mr. Smith from 1942 and The Eye & the Ear from 1945.  Fine souls have uploaded all three to YouTube and we're knocking down all of 'em today.

An "irrational humoresque", The Adventures of a Good Citizen starts with a couple intertitles I can't read.  Then official looking people look right and left as per signs that flash on the screen, then walk right and left through mirror trickery.  This sets the stage for blitz-speed comic setpieces of men answering the phone and then backing up through paper walkways, as well as men trying to move a large mirrored bureau.  If you were thinking that sounded like a film that featured a lot of footage of people in reverse you'd be right.  Among those who move forward are two teams of protesters that appear to be walking into each other as per the Eisenstein 180-degree rule.  Then the people moving the mirror find themselves stopped in the woods and have altogether too much fun with it.  I suspect you might have altogether too much fun with this short, especially considering the overcaffeinated music by Stefan Kiesliewski.  What I'm saying is that everybody who reads my blog is already irrational.

Made after the Themersons settled in England, Calling Mr. Smith begins by opening Encyclopedia Brittanica to set the theme - art as a reflection of the soul of the age, rattling off the artistic "peaks" of various European cultures.  Then church organs and sculptures melt through trick photography.  A swastika glides by and the narrator (presumably Franciszka) says that Nazism (as well as murder and atrocity) are the peak of German culture - and then the film splits, leaving a silhouetted fragment on the screen and the projectionist bumble-yelling.  The projectionist is the Mr. Smith of the title, and we realize that Calling Mr. Smith is an anti-Nazi propaganda film, now a bit ironic as Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and helped pioneer the concept of propaganda in the 20th century.  The Themerson's investment in anti-Nazism is the occupation and large-scale suppression of their Polish homeland and its people and Nazism's wide suppression of the arts, including much of Germany's artistic past (including the music of Bach) and Polish composers such as Chopin and Szymanowski, each composer illuminated through a glass darkly as distant, monochrome silhouettes of leaves, violins and children bend and break across the screen.  While the Themerson's illustrate how the occupation of Poland has wreaked havoc in many ways, including showing a list of some 200 illustrious Polish professors who were sent to concentration camps, their accusation of Germany's suppression of the arts is an important one, as Hitler's stance on what kind of art was acceptable to the Reich was a very narrow one and was largely an excuse to suppress Jews by labeling their art as "degenerate".  Gallery shows and concerts were mounted showcasing "degenerate" art and music, and many of these subjugated figures weren't given their just exposure until decades later.  I normally don't like discussing propaganda films here but this one has a real artistic merit, using the device of still images passed over a skewed looking glass to great effect and utilizing a metafictional element in the use of a projectionist who doesn't want to screen the film we are currently watching.  It's a haunting piece, capitalizing on distant sadness and personal neglect, and would make a heck of a double feature with Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania as the most artistically valuable propaganda films of all time.

The Eye & the Ear is an attempt to create a visual experience equal to that of an auditory experience, chiefly that of listening to four orchestrally-accompanied songs from Slopiewnie by Karol Szymanowski, previously featured in Calling Mr. Smith and long regarded as one of the greatest Polish composers of all time.  This film features the most animation of the three - while the previous two had featured momentary stop-motion animation The Eye & the Ear uses both stop-motion and traditional animation much more extensively, first to show falling leaves and growing branches, then later Art Deco geometry and score analysis.  The visuals are extraordinary, utilizing collage, modern design and special photographic effects to great illustrative effect.  Fantasia may have come out five years prior but not even Fantasia approached the modernist potential of this kind of music-illustration cinema.  The four songs show a full range of psychological approaches to visualizing music, from fluid thematic representation to free-association collage, mathematical abstraction and finally a gripping subconscious simplicity.  It's the best of the surviving Themerson films by far and a masterful cinematic tribute to the emotional and psychological power of modern Classical music.

If you're going to watch any of these watch The Eye & the Ear, but really we should be checking every attic and storage room in Poland and England for the rest of these dark beauties.  The Themerson's were simply unstoppable and I'm really glad to have chanced upon their work.  This article has been a long time coming and hopefully can act as a bit of a warm-up to my SIFF 2015 overview, or at least that dang belated article about Household Saints.  The moral of this story is that $2 is never too high a price when dealing with genius.

~PNK

*Of course, my greatest sadness in cinema is over a movie that never came to be, Salvador Dali's collaboration with the Marx Brothers.  Holy Shit.  Without hyperbole, that would have been the greatest movie ever made.

The Early Prime of Nancy Savoca, part 2 - DOGFIGHT (1991)

After True Love was a big winner at Sundance Nancy Savoca was given a shot at making a move for Warner Bros., a pretty big deal for a novice director.  That doesn't mean that the studio really gave her a shot, though - her second movie, Dogfight, was only released in two theaters (!) in the US and went direct to video in the UK, part of a long tradition of studios bungling a slightly off-centered movie's distribution and then calling the movie a failure as if they had nothing to do with it.  It's pretty unfortunate, as Dogfight is one of the best movie romances of the 90's and among the best performances for Lily Taylor and River Phoenix, the latter more precious due to his untimely death.

Set in San Francisco in the early 60's, Dogfight stars Phoenix as Eddie Birdlace, a listless young Marine about to be sent to Vietnam whose friends like to partake in "dogfights", group dates where each boy finds the ugliest girl they can ask out and take them to a dance club so they can vote on who's the biggest "dog".  The "winner" gets a pot of money and usually the girl gets a cut, so there are a few regulars to the "fight".  Eddie isn't one to back down from a challenge, so after running around for a while he comes across Rose (Taylor), a lonely, pacifistic coffee shop clerk, and sweet-talks her into going with her, though she has no idea about the fight.  She finds out about it from another "contestant" in the bathroom and is understandably angry.  However, during the course of the night Eddie has actually taken a liking to her.  After some awkward flirting they go on a long, winding date through San Francisco that same night, and as they grow closer their bond becomes deeper and stranger, revealing aspects of their personalities and stations in life that are both impossible to ignore and heavy with symbolic weight.

Whereas True Love was brash and bawdy, Dogfight is enormously tender.  Written by the unprolific Bob Comfort, the film uses the backdrop of Haight Ashbury at the cusp of Vietnam to explode a microcosmic romantic encounter to a hugely enveloping experience.  The conceit of Eddie having to leave the next day allows for events to play out almost in real time, and each new locale they visit is more wonderful than the last but another inch closer to a devastating departure.  The period reconstruction is unbelievable, as SF landmarks like City Lights Books rub shoulders with magical nooks and crannies, such as a basement filled with antique mechanical toys.  The performances by Phoenix and Taylor are stunning, arguably the best of their careers (but with Phoenix that's a hard claim to make, as there's about four or five "best" performances to choose from), each actor totally inhabiting their roles and creating fascinating opposites.  Savoca's direction lovingly draws out every detail from the sets, lighting and action without being overbearing, allowing the setting and story to take on a magic realist quality where anything can happen, and the magnified timeframe only helps that cause.  The mood has shifted from True Love to be both funny and quite sad, as the story is driven not only by circumstance but by its characters' deep-set insecurities and star-crossed worldviews, and it isn't afraid to follow the pair towards a quietly surprising, poignant conclusion, and leave it open-ended, to boot.  It's a brave and creative sophomore effort from an artist growing more and more into what could have been a modest icon in American cinema on par with what Alexander Payne would become later in the decade.

And the worst part of it is that nobody saw the thing.  Two theaters?  That's not enough to recoup expenses for a modern TV pilot, especially with an off-centered, small-scale movie like this.  But at least Dogfight got multiple DVD rereleases, which can't be said for Savoca's most daring and thought provoking film, Household Saints.  Stay tuned, Women's History Month.

~PNK

The Early Prime of Nancy Savoca, part 1 - TRUE LOVE (1989)

In my preparation for Women's History Month this blog cycle I realized that I couldn't think of too many female career movie directors.  There are a few big names, of course, most notably Kathryn Bigelow, Julie Taymor, Liliana Cavani and most hilariously Doris Wishman, but that's a pretty small list, especially considering that I can't stand to include Barbra Streisand in that list.  Other multi-film female directors have found fame but their careers have either crashed and burned (like Elaine May) or never really saw consistent fruition (like Jennifer Chambers Lynch).  In fact, there seem to be fewer women in film direction than in any other artistic field (aside from orchestral conducting, it would seem, as I could only think of one female conductor of international repute, Marin Alsop, and Wikipedia's list is only seven names long).  There's not a savory reason for this, especially considering that the rise of independent cinema in the 80's and 90's should have opened the door to a whole generation of female auteurs.  A couple of names did rise to the surface in that optimistic time, one being Allison Anders, whose Gas Food Lodging was a Sundance darling and her film Border Radio made it into the Criterion Collection.  Another, and the one I'm more familiar with, is Nancy Savoca, who won big time at Sundance in 1989 and made two more striking character dramas before fading into TV-directing obscurity.  This month V-f-t-P is going to celebrate all three of her early films, starting with the most financially successful of them, True Love.

Donna (Annabella Sciorra in her big-screen debut) and Michael (Ron Eldard in his big-screen debut) are getting married, and while they seem to be enthusiastic it's clear that the problems of modern marriage are both more present and more subtle than anything they could have imagined.  And that's pretty much it - True Love understands that the mounting frustrations and secret failings of young people hurtling into lifelong commitment is drama enough, as Donna and Michael's romance is threatened by nothing larger than themselves.  As it turns out, the hardest problems to overcome are the ones you consider essential parts of your character, and whether or not Donna and Michael are up to the challenge may be impossible to determine.

Starting out with the engagement party video (a somewhat recent invention at the time), True Love is as naturalistic and sympathetic as I've seen from a wedding movie since Rachel Getting Married.  Savoca uses the everyday problems of working-class New York Italian-Americans as a backdrop for a drama of modesty, not shying away from the combination of money problems, bad fashion choices and general crudeness (such as the side character who calls a rude driver both a "dicksuck" and a "suckhole").  Their culture, much stereotyped in movies but expertly dissected here, is as much to blame for Donna and Michael's problems as themselves, as Michael's malaise at the prospect of responsibility is both created and encouraged by the "boys will be boys" attitude prevalent amongst his circle of friends and, by extension, his male community.  Donna is no less problematic, as she is too quick to fall for gimmicky wedding concepts (like mashed potatoes dyed blue) and lets men use her as a doormat without coming up with alternatives.  The ingenious part of this is that Savoca is too smart to let either one of them be the "right" one in any given argument (aside from the ending), such as Michael turning down the idea of the ghastly dyed potatoes and Donna interpreting this as him being a backward drip, or Michael's reasonable request that Donna not meet him after the bachelor party lead to him making the colossal mistake of squealing off to Atlantic City to gamble away as much of his savings as he can get his hands on.  Their friends are no improvement - Donna's wear awful clothes and make jokes about sticking Michael's head in the oven, while Michael's are heinous enablers who seduce him into terrible decisions.  On top of this there are a number of hilarious scenes with odd side characters, like the guy who sells them the rings  and "Christ heads" wearing a bizarre v-neck sweater/t-shirt combo and a bachelor party filled with guys in their 60's falling asleep to ancient 8mm stag movies.  The writing manages a difficult feat in featuring wacky, cynical characters while still treating them with real respect, and as such True Love stays afloat where other movies would sink our hearts.

Annabella Sciorra would go on to prove herself an interesting and intelligent film presence in movies such as the dreadfully underrated What Dreams May Come; the close-examination material here requires acting of that caliber and she does a fine job for her big screen debut.  Simultaneously street-smart and woefully unprepared for life, Donna is a hard-edged modern woman with a mother's heart and over-tired eyes.  She spends the whole second half of the movie deeply embittered and is notable for movie couples in that she's the one who hits first in their fights, daring Michael to hit back.  Ron Eldard has had a bit less success but has remained versatile in small roles in movies like Super 8 and the frustrating near-success Delivered, and he's almost unrecognizable here as Michael, severely babyfaced and utterly oblivious.  Both actors take full hold of the comic and dramatic possibilities of the material, bouncing along the script and greatly aiding the flow while keeping your attention at all times.  The same can be said for every actor in the movie, featuring small-time icons like Aida Turturro and Vincent Pastore as well as a whole host of people I've never seen before but can't take my eyes off of.  This is all captured with Savoca's expansive and richly colored frame, showing a lot of confidence for her first time out and amplifying the emotional punch of every scene.  The cinematography allows colors to pop and flood the scenes and there's a lot of engaging tracking shots and fresh angles.  And the most essential win for her is the pacing, both measured and eager to follow the story wherever it may go.

I remember when The Break-Up came out and Vince Vaughan mentioned that any break-up has enough drama to carry a whole movie.  While I didn't like that movie too much I applaud the concept of really going for a seemingly simple story like that and proving that a movie can be engaging in simplicity.  True Love is a pretty simple story but it's so entertaining and wise that you couldn't care less.  It's no surprise that this was an audience and critic favorite at Sundance that year (winning the Grand Jury Prize) and it's a great movie to launch careers with - it has all the audience appeal and intelligence of a movie like High Fidelity well before the fact.  The best audience favorites are the ones that show us truths that we might not have considered but accept unhesitatingly, and True Love is wise enough to focus more on young love's hangovers than its celebrations, and the fact that, when it comes to love, we just don't know when to quit.

"You know, there's times when he does things like what he did last night and I wanna fuckin' kill him...then I see him." ~Donna

~PNK

Short-Order - MR. HUMPHREYS AND HIS INHERITANCE (1976)

After I did my article on Whistle and I'll Come to You I rewatched the first of the M. R. James adaptations I'd seen, A Warning to the Curious, which was excellent, and decided that if one of them can be great they can all be great.  This led me to checking out the only one of the BBC James adaptations to get an official DVD release in the states, 1979's Casting the Runes.  It blows.  That is, aside from a hilariously fake giant rubber spider and the worst floating head effect I've ever seen.  If those things float your boat, that is.  Fortunately, a special feature on the DVD put things back on track; it was a true short film adaptation of a James story I'd never heard of, Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance.  Presented as part of a beautifully dated 70's music show called Music Scene, the short was introduced by Philip Wilby, the man who wrote the score, urging viewers to consider how the music was written to aid the horror and furthermore to discuss it in class or work or whathaveyou.  While that intro might be the best thing ever broadcast I can safely say that the film itself is pretty dang good, only taking 16 minutes but sticking in the viewer's dreams for much longer than that.

The eponymous Mr. Humphreys has just inherited, quite unexpectedly from a distant uncle, a semi-grand old country house.  His uncle was apparently a strange man, strange enough that his body isn't kept in the family vault, and the property features a large hedge maze, the gate of which features a plaque reading "SECRETUM MEUM MIHI ET FILIS DOMUS MEUM" (MY SECRET TO MYSELF, AND THE SONS OF THIS HOUSE).  Mr. Humphreys is as naturally curious as every other James protagonist, so he goes in, and at the center finds a pedestal with a metal orb on top*; the base reads "TERRITORY OF DEATH", which is enough to get Humphreys to temporarily retreat.  He investigates further in an attempt to get the maze cleaned up enough for general use (as his uncle forbade visitors from using it), but despite Humphreys's insistence that mazes are easily understood he can't begin to predict what might be preventing him from mapping the maze...or what lies beneath its center.

Working on a more modest scale than Whistle and Warning, Mr. Humphreys is just right.  As with Whistle and Warning, the key to good James adaptations appears to be Location, Location and another dose of Location for good measure (I can't wait to see what could be done with "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook"), as the country house is both properly old but also eerily unkempt.  Once again James's ideas are engaging and unique, drawing the reader/viewer in with elements that surprise in how creepy they are in his hands.  As per the much-hyped music, it's actually pretty good, created in that brief window when horror scores could be somewhat Avant Garde.  It's a lot like Gerald Busby's score for Robert Altman's 3 Women, and much like Busby Wilby little to nothing else to his name as a composer, which is a it unfortunate as I'd like to hear more from him.  It's also quite a bit like the classical music Frank Zappa wrote in the 60's with its heavy emphasis on winds and thick harmonic scoring.  If anything is wrong with the short it's its pacing - too much wandering around for this little time, and an ending rushed enough that the narrator can't even finish his sentence before the end credits start rolling.

Perhaps there's virtue in not overstaying one's welcome, and at a scant 16 minutes there's really no time, or reason, to complain.  I found an upload and included it below, but if you don't like watching a TV short being played by an outmoded video player on a new video player (with a bit of lag and missing the Music Scene intro) you might want to hunt down that Casting the Runes DVD, if only to laugh your ass off at floating heads and funk-music intros.  Either way Humphreys is a quick-'n'-satisfying way to get your James fix and a worthy interlude to its larger cousins.  And remember, if a hole mysteriously appears in a map you're making, don't look in.

~PNK

*The spiderweb budget for this short must have been through the roof, let me tell you.

Happiness Month Finale - PAPERHOUSE (1988)

When I first started going to college in Tacoma I knew film only by the big and biggish names, and my deep love of uncovering filmed obscurities was merely a gleam in my eye.  It was around this time that I discovered some local video stores and, finally being away from my parents' cinematic tastes, decided to widely experiment with my rental choices.  While there was a Blockbuster not far from my house my most frequent rental stop was Backstage Video on Procter St., now the only video store in Tacoma as that Blockbuster and the mighty Stadium Video have both fallen.  What's so neat about Backstage is that they have a large VHS selection not only to rent but for sale, and one of the first videos I checked out was this brooding-looking and intriguing tape:

For those who can't read it, the review at the top of the box says "Paperhouse is the thinking person's Nightmare on Elm Street."  That logline, combined with the scary eyes and flaming house, would lead most renters to think that Paperhouse was a horror movie, especially when combined with the salacious back image of a seeming madman wielding a claw hammer like John Hurt attacking a prostitute in From the Hip.  Yes, I know this is the British VHS but the American tape looked almost exactly the same, so shush.  It was certainly enough to catch my eye, so into my player it went.  I was immediately floored, not by horror but by one of the most ingenious, haunting and insightful movies ever made for children, a stunning exploration of the relationship between dreams and childhood whose power is only matched by how infuriating it is that there's no American DVD.  It's time to finally tackle this blog's namesake, and I can't think of a better time than the close of the year than to vindicate the name of arguably the best kid's psychological fantasy film ever.

Preteen Anna (Charlotte Burke) is a problem for her mother (Glenne Headly) and her school teachers.  Upset that she wasn't allowed to skip school on her birthday*, she immediately picks a fight with another student during class and, when sent out in the hall, is struck down by a fainting spell.  She uses this to get her mother to pick her up, only to admit that her illness was partially made up.  The next day she ditches school with a friend only to collapse again, finding herself more drawn into a mysterious dream landscape and stuck down with glandular fever.  Confined to her bed, Anna takes to drawing paper and draws a house - and upon entering her next dream she sees the house from her drawing on the horizon.  Her dream world expands as she continues drawing, and after drawing herself a friend in the window she returns to the world to find Marc (Elliott Spiers), a boy about her age, also traversing the dream world but without the use of his legs.  As it turns out Marc is another patient of Anna's doctor who is suffering from a far more debilitating disease, and their dreaming worlds are linked by their incapacitation and things left unexplained.  While the two of them find a kind of expansive freedom controlling their private landscape they may not realize its full power, especially when Anna's estranged father comes into the fold.

For those who don't know, my two favorite movies are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Videodrome, two astonishing films that intelligently and realistically explore unbelievable worlds of the human mind, and Paperhouse is the greatest attempt to achieve their brilliance on a young adult level.  While the actual causes of the surreal situation are never revealed, Paperhouse is concerned less with cosmology and more with relatable human reactions to being thrust into the unknown and what it reveals about ourselves.  It's plot is one of the most creative examples of the "wonderland" plot, wherein an inexperienced, usually troublesome child enters a surreal landscape and emerges a different and wiser person, and Anna's journey lets her imitate a god only to end up a better human.  Rather than saddling her with whimsical natives to guide her, Anna's counterpart in Marc is a sobering and intimidating presence, entirely sympathetic, even more mature, but a constant critic of Anna's misuse of her power.  If these performances fell flat the whole film would be little more than a 90-minute design exercise, but thankfully one-time actress Charlotte Burke and the tragically departed Elliott Spiers (dying only six years after filming this)** turn in mature and highly empathetic performances that nail every varied emotion the story calls for.  The film also wisely avoids the "idiot parent" cliche of fantastic stories wherein a child encounters the Unknown and a skeptical parent assumes lying or insanity in spite of evidence right in front of their faces - Anna's mother is completely unable to understand what her daughter might be going through but sincerely does her best to help her.  And trust me when I say when Anna's father shows up he creates an utterly unforgettable screen presence in young adult film.


The most astonishing thing about the film is the production design by Gemma Jackson (Finding Neverland, Game of Thrones), which accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of reproducing a child's crude drawings of objects exactly in three dimensions.  The house is crooked and molded from lumpy clay, all straight lines are wobbly as if drawn with crayon, and mechanical objects barely work due to their kid design.  At one point Anna uses a black crayon to scratch out an upstairs window and when she visits it later there are huge, terrifying swaths of porous black scored into the windows, an awful amplification of her worst qualities.  All of this is captured with an extraordinary depth of field and lighting design, courtesy of the passionate vision of director Bernard Rose.  Rose is an acutely underrated director, part of a generation of filmmakers who came of age in music videos, and would go on to direct Candyman, Immortal Beloved and the highly underrated Chicago Joe and the Showgirl as well as two acclaimed Tolstoy updates, Ivans XTC and The Kreutzer Sonata (neither of which I've seen).  Paperhouse is without question his best film and its underexposure is a crime to his name, and the sad thing is that its death was strictly a business decision.


While you wouldn't really think it, the demographic range of children aged 9-12 is pretty tricky to market to, as older pre-pubescents are thirsting for darker, more complex material but have no interest in works that cater to the squirming, shrieking hormone vortexes of the few years just around the corner.  As such, filmmakers aiming for the age bracket feel compelled to increase the levels of tension and violence but find themselves facing a PG-13 rating, and in 1988 that rating was so new that consumers didn't really know what to make of it and the MPAA didn't know how to wield it.  Paperhouse has nothing particularly objectionable for 10-year-olds but was deemed to frightening for them, and the distributors must have panicked at the prospect of a kids movie unable to be freely viewed by kids and decided to market it as a horror movie - and if there's one thing horror fans hate it's a movie clearly made outside of the genre that gets passed off as a fright flick.  I should probably be thankful that the movie has a following at all, a testament to its own greatness and having nothing to do with Vestron Pictures' marketing decisions.  And once again, I tip my hat and lift my glass to the internet and its infinite capacity to celebrate the undeservingly obscure and Backstage Video for facilitating my discovery of one of my all-time favorite films.


Bernard, you're a good egg.  And all of my readers are good eggs for sticking with my digital ramblings as far as they've annoyingly stuck around.  Paperhouse is a wonder and is a fitting final gift from me to you at Eve's Eve.  Lion's Gate has finally made the film available on demand on Amazon and YouTube for those who like shelling out bucks for HD, but for the rest of us a couple different users have uploaded the movie in 10-minute chunks.  I'm giving you the start, but much like Anna's journey your film viewing experiences are entirely of your making and hopefully leave you enriched.  Paperhouse never fails to make me faithful in movies as well as supremely happy, and with my recommendation I wish everyone a Happy New Year and look forward to 2015 with many more articles on the way.

~PNK

*Certainly a better use of that setup than Meet the Deedles.


**Spiers's last film was the utterly insane-looking Taxandria, so it looks like I'll have one more Armin Meuller-Stahl film to admire before I'm through.