Blog O’ Leaps

CROUPIER (1999) *

As aeons of James Bond movies have conclusively proven under laboratory test conditions, it’s pretty much as difficult to manufacture a dull casino sequence as it is to produce a vaguely interesting one involving underwater action.

Thus Croupier, the tale of a wannabe author who goes to work “undercover” in a reasonably upmarket casino to get material for his elusive first book, should have been starting off the proverbial 15 metre mark in moviedom’s proverbial 110m footrace.

However, did I mention this was an ENGLISH casino and art-house movie at all? If you want dowdy, dull and glum, they’re serving enormous quantities of all three at the Croupier buffet. It’s all a tremendous amount of trousers as it turns out, despite a class-A cult movie reputation.

For starters, there’s the budding author and main character’s “writerly” narration, which is every bit as thoroughly embarrassing and clunky as its equivalent in TV’s Sex and the City, without the compensatory factors of Sally Jessie Parker’s inherent charm and goodwill to take the curse off at least 50% of the time. It’s a picture killer, particularly as it is voiced by the movie’s star, Clive Owen, who was apparently instructed to play a large inert wooden dildo in this film, and I’m here to tell you he mostly stuck rigorously to instructions.

As written, shot and performed, it’s difficult to find one character in this movie that you could bother to uncork the urinary welcome wagon for, should they happen to spontaneously combust directly in front of you. Not that there’s any particular risk of anything in this film catching fire. Probably not if you poured petrol on the thing, broke out the BBQ fire-lighters, and turned a flame-thrower on it.

Anyway, the teak bozo who’s the main protagonist gets sucked into the casino world of shuffling numbers, drugs, booze etc, and his relationship’s breaking up because he’s a git, and there’s some nominal suspense as to whether he’s going to remember he’s an author and get the book done, when they think of it, which they don’t often, but it will probably be more than you think about it.

The sum total of all possible Earthling interest in the picture is provided by three sexy female characterisations, which are all individualistic although not enormously thoroughly delineated roles, played extremely well and with considerable liveliness (against all the odds) by the actresses in question. I have to think, on the basis of everything else in the movie, that these performances/characters generated the vast majority of interest from film-goers, other than any inherent interest provided by the casino theme itself. There’s just nothing else there. There’s a few set-pieces, generally involving these three women, that work, although much like many of the finer recorded music labels, they work entirely independently of the mainstream.

Just to put a finer edge on the general cack-handedness, somewhere along the line, it apparently abandons all confidence in its main premise (writer working undercover in casino to get “material”) and decides to become a kind of crime/caper movie instead. You can’t exactly blame it, but by the time it gets around to putting in for a transfer to a different movie, well, to paraphrase the timeless wordsmithery of famous nasal drip Julian Lennon, it’s much too late for goodbyes.

To put the final lump of liver atop the cupcake, it then comes up with various attempts at devastatingly hi-impact twist endings, which belong in an entirely different picture for starters, patently have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the one you’ve been enduring for an hour and a half, and would be struggling to raise even a shoulder-shrug in a middling Columbo episode anyway.

On the positive side of the ledger, technically, the movie’s reasonably competent, there have probably been duller pictures, and it beats working. That’s about it for the upside.

In conclusion, I’d just like to thank the actresses Gina McKee, Kate Hardie and Alex Kingston for quirky, intriguing performances in the face of sheer futility, and recommend you see almost any other movie instead, possibly including ones with Roger Moore in them. Maybe even Andrew McCarthy, to stretch a point. You realise that in 91 minutes, you could listen to at least two Stones albums? Alternatively, you could nod your way through Croupier. The very idea!

(4 out of 11 on the industry-endorsed MPHOAH scale)

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* (The listed date on the IMDB.com website is 1998. The date on the entry in the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide is 1999, which I presume is the US release date. The Australian release date, again according to IMDB.com was 2001. I always go with the Leonard Maltin dates, where available, by way of standardisation. This information is here for anyone who actually cares, a selective and elite group whose membership at this point frankly no longer includes yours truly.)

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WRESTLEMANIAC (2006)

In the late 60s/early 70s, there was a little revolution in (at least) English-language horror movies, which overturned one of the most time-honoured conventions of the genre. The bad guy would sometimes prevail. *

Prior to that, regardless of the dominance of the major Ee-vill protagonist/s, regardless of the horrors the audience had endured, and no matter how the chills and unease lingered (presuming they did at all), at least nominally matters were always set to rights in the climax when the forces of evil got theirs. (Or, generally in older horror films and Scooby-Doo episodes, all paranormal elements were revealed to be a hoax/dream.)

For such a simple idea, this was one of the greatest changes in an established genre possible. Simply put, previously the suspense generated was about HOW good could prevail against overwhelming evil. Let me tell you, from the point of view of the frazzled young horror consumer of the time, it added a considerable extra layer of suspense when you had to wonder WHETHER good would prevail, as well as how it might do so. **

As we take the liberty of time-tramming to the shop-soiled, harshly lit world of the present day, questions of such conventions, much like many other time-honoured traditions both good and bad, have long since been thoroughly plastic-bagged and left for the boys on the council garbage route.

As the 1960s Hammer horror movies (and their continental cousins from Italy, Spain and elsewhere) introduced more graphic sex, violence and gore violence elements than their big studio/Production Code era antecendents would have ever dreamed of including, the slasher movies of the late 70s and 80s went further again.

Although not a particularly thoroughly examined phenomenon in the mainstream of popular culture analysis, the horror movies of recent times (say the last 5-10 years at most) have registered another significant sea-change. A pretence at questions of morality – in characters, in the scenario, in the movie’s overall tone and shape – is hardly even a consideration at all. Movies like the Hostel series, See No Evil (featuring the WWE’s Kane) and the Rob Zombie series starting with House of 1000 Corpses, to name just a few in a much larger general generic trend, don’t care who’s good, who’s bad, who gets ripped apart, the degree of graphic gore, the degree of sadism implicit, explicit, or both, much less which of good or evil prevails in the end – they are made, marketed and, most importantly, consumed, as the movie equivalent of a theme park ride – one long, bloody rollercoaster.

If you wanted to draw a particularly long bow, which I don’t but I’ll note the possibility for the hell of it and someone else can furnish their doctoral thesis out of it, they are, in one sense as “pure” as movies can get. You’re meant to react exactly to what’s on screen at any given time, and not to think about anything else *** – whether long-established conventions of drama validated over thousands of years, areas of morality, the kind of buiding, creeping dread a certain kind of less explicit horror movie used to specialise in, the ultimate fate of any individual character or group of characters, or any such decorative curtain materials.

What the conventional reviewers who excoriate such movies as pure trash and a great deal worse fail to understand, or perhaps don’t want to, is that the game has changed. There is an audience out there, not necessarily all sick, pathological cases by any means, who have long since accepted something that the “smart” reviewers don’t necessarily get – a movie is just a movie. That might sound trite, obvious, or a weaselly 5c lemonade stand attempt at profundity to the reader, in which case I’m forced to say the reader doesn’t get it.

You could put it another way – a movie is EXACTLY a movie. To a newer generation of movie-goers/DVD watchers, they’ve been conditioned to films which consist of a series of action set-pieces. The whole procedure for them is set-up and pay-off. They WANT a rollercoaster ride. For a significant minority of them, paring away even the base-levels of characterisation, progressive conventional plot-line, hero-villain moral dynamics that one might expect in the most elemental (and/or elementary) of megaplex action fodder, was not only no loss, but a logical next step forward.

There was already an audience READY for this approach. Some might think this means they’d been conditioned to accept greater violence and less moral examination in their entertainment both by popular culture and the media. That’s possible, but it’s a side issue, and doesn’t speak to the main point at all. It was the kind of storytelling that mainstream and successful cult movies had evolved into employing, the orientation of the movie-business itself, that led to the logical next step.

And the next step was: You don’t need three acts, tension and release, the good guys bloodied, beaten and down on their own 25 yard line coming back against all odds to surge for the match-winning touchdown, and all those tropes of yesteryear – all you need is something on screen that temporarily holds (or overwhelms, if you like) the attention. In a sense, movies have come full circle with these kinds of horror movies (and other genre movies that head in this direction as well) – we’re back to the Edison days when you could shoot a short reel of some guy called Fred Ott sneezing and people would be wowed just because it was something happening in the movies. Only now, you’d have him sneezing just before some wacko with a power-tool bores through his guts in grisly Technicolor, and then his head explodes mightily for no readily apparent reason.

But only the audience’s entertainment threshold regarding the kind of content has changed. The principle is more or less identical. The kind of movie under discussion here is essentially a series of Fred Ott sneezes laid end to end. All that’s been added (and then just to reinforce the impact of the “sneezes”) are the kinds of plotting/editing/technical considerations that came to movies as storytelling devices as far back as D.W. Griffith and precursors/fellow pioneers in the 19-oughts and teens.

To an audience which thinks like this, “A movie is just a movie” is an unspoken notion and probably completely unconsidered on a conscious level, but it’s absolutely accepted and internalised all the same. They don’t care about questions of implied morality/amorality, violence, dehumanisation etc as they appear on the screen, because the movie experience is purely the movie experience, and has nothing to do with the outside world, other than the exchange of money for ticket, and buying the popcorn and/or ice-creams. There’s no moral implications to a rollercoaster ride, and you don’t tend to discuss the subtext or social impact of such an experience afterwards, well not if you want to hang with the gang, anyway. You ride Space Mountain (or insert more up-to-date amusement park fodder here) and then you go for burgers.

To paraphrase those eminent cultural observers, The Knack, the reviewers don’t get it, but the younger boys and girls understand.

Just to clarify, I’m not saying I love the trend, or the movies that delineate it, and I do have my fussbudgetty, old fogey, reservations about exactly what it is these movies are saying, not to mention how they’re saying it, but I “get” the phenomenon, and in the face of no available realistic alternative, I accept that this is part of the grand cascading panoply of the kind of entertainment movies as a whole now bring us. Picture me as the guy on the sidewalk as this particular parade stampedes by, with the deadpan if not slightly hangdog facial expression, carrying the drooping pennant that reads “Whoopee.”

To get even more 5c lemonade stand philosophical on all your candy-asses, the “Movies are just movies” movement is what it is, and that’s all that it is. All the small-l liberal, brow-furrowing, heart-outpouring, protests in the world won’t change the situation. All the traditionalist, hand-wringing, droning lectures on the potential of art to change society for the good, the hard-won lessons of dramatic structure, the need for a moral compass, and any use of the expression “aesthetics” whatsoever can have no impact on an audience to whom these criteria mean absolutely nothing, and who have long-since accepted as movies something that even their relatively recent predecessors could never have accepted.

To draw a no-doubt laboured analogy, in the movie Goodbye, Mr Chips, (reviewed nearby in these electromophonic pages), the highly traditionalist Mr Chips expresses his great moral trepidation about people getting around on bicycles, because human beings were never intended to travel at those velocities. There was a time when such considerations were taken quite seriously. However, you can see that this would be a very difficult concept to explain, much less convince the listener of its validity, to someone who had grown up with the idea of cars (and aeroplane travel, and motorbikes, trains, etc etc) as a given.

It’s the same with movies, fundamentally. To a young, or youngish, current movie-goer – raised on endless weekend morning dance/pop music videos on network TV, action movies where everything blows up, Bruce Willis/Kanoe Reeves/Vin Diesel/insert-current-equivalent gets the girl, the designated ballad/current idiot music plays over the closing credits and that’s all she wrote, and TV series which are all high concept, high spots and climaxes without any particular amount of detectable care about how they get there – any questions of a movie’s dramatic construction, moral implications, depth of characterisation, plausibility of plot (even given “normal” suspension-of-disbelief expectations) are not just beside the point, “old people thinking”, or even too flat-out boring to merit consideration: they’re completely irrelevant. There is simply no point of reference for a person who implicitly accepts movies as being this way to deal with those considerations. You might as well be telling them that bicycles are wrong because people were never meant to travel at those kinds of velocities. You’ll get the same kind of look and answer from them anyway.

Having completed what may well be the most long-winded introduction to a movie review in planetary history, and undeniably the only one ever that failed to mention the actual movie in question on even one miserable occasion, let me say that: (a) Wrestlemaniac absolutely belongs to the 21st Century kind of rollercoaster horror movie sub-genre under previous, improbably lengthy discussion; (b) that Wrestlemaniac may be among the stupidest movies ever made; and (c) while it mostly is a bad thing, and a remarkably bad thing at that, in a sense this is not entirely a bad thing.

Of all the wildly diverse, grimly fiendish and outlandish protagonists that such horror movies have employed in the past, I can vouch that you’ve never truly lived as a movie consumer until you’ve seen young, interchangeable and mostly highly unlovable, cast members relentlessly hunted down and butchered by a short, powerfully built, tubby, middle-aged guy in wrestling tights and a wrestling mask. Even realising you’re watching such a thing makes you feel significantly stupider than you were before you started. It’s funny, because the movie form – in the most extremely basic sense of hunted, hunter and the suspense automatically generated by the viewer’s natural tendency to place himself in the on-screen characters’ shoes and thus preferably avoid being torn from arsenic to breakfast-hole by a large meathook, for example – to some extent sucks you in, rivets your attention, and then you can’t help stepping back and thinking “Wait a minute, this isn’t Freddy Krueger, or The Thing, or anything, it’s a fat little Mexican wrestler.” If nothing else, it’s a telling antidote for ever feeling you’ve become overly sophisticated, urbane or blasé. They ought to distill and bottle the experience, thus not only performing a valuable public service, but also removing any notional necessity for ever seeing the movie.

OK, so the basic idea of something that looks like it had every ambition of shooting straight to DVD thus avoiding any unnecessary time wasted by cinema operators and projectionists, is that a bunch of apparent leftovers from a Motley Crue audience in the 1980s who have somehow time-shifted two decades forward without aging, have gone down South from the US of A to shoot a no-budget, straight to video porno movie in Meheeco. There’s the obligatory fat nerdy guy, the loudmouth huckster who’s shooting the porno, some big guy for whom they never thought of anything to do so he’s always wasted, and two party gal types in abbreviated clothing for the purposes of pornography making. This is pretty much where characterisation starts and stops in this movie. You have reached the terminus – please alight from the vehicle. I will say that the erstwhile porno director guy may be one of the most nerve-janglingly irritating characters ever to pollute a screen, and because he talks a lot, you’ll have no shortage of opportunities to be irritated by him. You might want to have some calomine lotion handy, or something, or at least remember it’s your television set before you start kicking the screen in.

Anyway, when they get to Mexico, they start hearing rumours about this Mexican wrestler, El Mascadero, who used to be in the area, vanished for many decades, who went crazy and supposedly got locked up in a ghost town called Sangre de Dios, which translates to “Blood of God” everywhere but in the dialogue, where they change it to “Blood of Christ” for no apparent reason other than someone lost the Spanish-English dictionary.

Blah blah blah, they head to Sangre de Dios, start shooting their idiotic porno movie which may be the only artefact in cinematic history to contain even less forethought and storytelling craftsmanship than Wrestlemaniac itself. Soon enough, or actually not soon enough, but you get the idea, El Mascadero turns up, as lively, short and stocky as ever, and starts stalking the measly character-templates by night and ripping them into conveniently sized pieces for stacking, etc.

That’s pretty much the whole picture, other than a minor detail about one of the porno gals being slightly less obnoxious and more resourceful than the other bozos, and a prolonged climax centred around whether she can find the bad guy’s weak spot and survive.

Basically, the whole deal boils down to “There is blood, my children, oh verily, there is blood.”

It is hard to get over how idiotic the entire enterprise is, but my favourite idiocy is when the fat, nerdy guy discovers the premise explaining El Mascadero’s sinister, superhuman, and somewhat portly powers.

SPOILER FOLLOWS.

Y’see, it turns out that the Mexican government, ahead of the Olympic Games in a certain year in the 60s (’68, when it was in Mexico? I forget, due to radioactive nerf acting/dialogue-incited delirium) was determined not to be embarrassed in the wrestling events, so it did what any right thinking government would do, and took pieces of the three best wrestlers they had and somehow magically foofer-valved and Frankensteined them into one wrestler, only he went berserk and started killing people in the ring (and other parts of their bodies as well, f’nar) and committed an act so gross (I think it might have been suggesting a “Wrestlemaniac II”) that he was locked up in a small out of the way town forevermore, apparently free of climbing/digging equipment or a Bunnings where he could have enquired about same.

Other than those who lost 85 minutes of their lives enduring the gore-soaked cheese-puff in question, I think the most put-upon people in the whole deal are the Mexican government, who are apparently characterised as being so unchristly dumb that they didn’t know the difference between the professional wrestling that has been popular in Mexico since the 1930s, and the amateur wrestling that appears in the Olympics, sans ring, ropes, masks, foreign objects, violent deaths via mutilation, and dives with a twist off the top turnbuckle.

That’s more than you need to know about the story considerations. Here’s the rest. Acting – largely undetectable, if not downright headache-inducing, with three minor exceptions. The character actor guy who first tells the kids about the legend of El Mascadero is a proper actor who you’ve seen in tons of stuff without ever quite remembering his name (Irwin Keyes – I looked it up) and boy can you tell the difference, even from his 90 seconds or so on screen.

(He also has the unique distinction of having appeared in both Wrestlemaniac and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. This is a bit like both painting the Sistine Chapel and being responsible for recent pub toilet graffiti concerning the moral laxity of Stella the local barmaid – i.e. it shouldn’t be possible in the first place, and certainly nothing like it can ever happen again.)

Leyla Milani, as the most longwindedly put-upon of the youth pornography thespians, manifests some basic ability to extract sympathy under conditions of extreme privation, which probably accounts for most of the moments of suspense that are actually suspenseful, at all. She’s no bargain, but by this movie’s standards, she’s freaking Katherine Hepburn. ****

Rey Misterio does what he needs to do as the monster, El Mascadero. That short, stocky, muscly, pot-bellied terrifying monster El Mascadero. He got what he needed to do, and given there was no real way of getting it right, exactly, he came as close as you could to doing that.

For those who don’t know, Rey Misterio is an actual, and well-known, Mexican professional wrestler, of many, many years standing. He was not jigsawed together from the parts of three other Mexican wrestlers, and never competed, much less dismembered anybody, at any Olympic Games I am aware of. He is also NOT the better-known Rey Mysterio who wrestles for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as is further explained below. *****

There are a few other minor points for the defence worth raising, against all my better instincts, and with the interests of fairness stretched to snapping point.

1) Sometimes, there’s just enough skill or luck or basic, inescapable movie-goer instinct working in favour of Wrestlemaniac that it actually does, against all likelihood, generate some actual tension

2) Sometimes, whether intentionally, or not intentionally but inevitably, given the content, there is a sense that it’s generating some laughs, of a slimy variety but laughs nonetheless.

3) Once it actually gets going and sinks a boot into proceedings, which takes quite a while, there are duller and more unwatchable movies you could see, some of them also sheer keeee-rap, but others much more ostensibly worthy, probably many of them made by Steven Spielberg over the last twenty years or so. Not many dumber ones though.

4) The one thing that’s bizarrely professional about the movie is that it’s actually pretty well shot. There are some scenic, and well-framed and even incisively shot views of the Mexican countryside that seem to be bucking for inclusion in a completely different movie. The ghost town itself is not only a surprisingly well-conceived set for a garbage-dump of a picture like this, but the way the shooter (Tabbert Fiiller – and all I know about him is that he’s got a powerful amount of doubled letters in his name and, as a result it tends to look like a misprint) exploits it is quite impressive, if you can take your mind off the imbecility happening in the foreground. Actually his contribution is almost certainly the dominant factor behind Reason 1) quoted above.

5) Bucking an almost insurmountable trend, and flying in the face of every other apparent contribution by director/writer/editor Jesse Baget, the very final scene is apt, ironic, clever, a terrific wrap-up for the movie, and genuinely, laugh-out loud funny. It seems to have flown in from a entirely different picture. All I can say is, it was poor programming to put the one vaguely decent scene in the picture at the end, since there was very little chance that even the most undiscriminating of viewers would have survived through the rest of the horse-hockey to get there. However if you do manifest the considerable stoicism, and triathlete-level endurance to get there, at least there’s some sort of tangible prize for your efforts.

This is, in all conceivable probability, the longest review that Wrestlemaniac will ever receive, and having achieved this notable milestone in human history, I retire hurt but not obliterated, a beaten but not broken man. i.e. I may have rented the thing, but at least I didn’t buy it.

In short, flavoursome poop Wrestlemaniac may undoubtedly be, but poop it remains nonetheless. Poop on an epic scale.

(3 out of 11 on the widely admired MPHOAH scale, and trust your ol’ Unca Leapster, that is generosity bordering on downright clemency.)

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* (I’m not saying this NEVER happened previously. Individual examples can doubtless be found. I am suggesting it didn’t become a significant, demonstrable genre trend until the early 70s. Herschell Gordon Lewis did this much earlier in some of his ’60s pictures. I wouldn’t exactly call them part of the Hollywood mainstream, or even the mainstream in a genre, as influential as his bloodbath pictures turned out to be, particularly on the 80s splatter movies. He didn’t make them to be mainstream. They were made to make money on the more marginalised Southern and grindhouse circuits. Some of the Hammer/Amicus/other English pictures of the 60s also had good-doesn’t-prevail endings. Heck, even a movie as old as “Dead of Night” had a non-standard ending for a horror movie. Like I said, there were undoubtedly isolated examples. I’ll stick to the basic idea that in the mainstream of the genre this didn’t become a commonplace until the late 60s and particularly early 1970s.)

** (I remember the first movie I saw where this happened. One of the Count Yorga movies from the early 70s. Fair blew my toiny moooooiiiind.)

*** (Again I’m not saying that there hadn’t been instances of this approach before, isolated and random ones, but my guess is that the keynote precursor of the “rollercoaster horror” movies of today is probably the first Evil Dead film from 1983, anticipating the current trend by around two decades, if not some change as well. That Sam Raimi knew what he was doing. Which is also why that movie is a prototype, rather than being part of the trend itself. That kind of considered calculation and detachment are not generally qualities of this decade’s horror toboggan rides, to put it mildly, and with Rob Zombie somewhat excepted.)

**** (According to her IMDB.com listing, Leyla Milani is the same woman who turned up as part of the WWE crew of “divas”. (i.e. women with boob jobs who almost exclusively appear on camera wearing very little for precisely that reason, and occasionally are forced to pretend they can perform a professional wrestling match in spite of all visual evidence to the contrary.) Since these seemingly number in their legions, all can hardly act to any noticeable degree, and largely look more or less interchangeable, I can never differentiate any of them except for the very few who are actually competent pro wrestlers by trade, since those women inevitably stand out from the pack. Since Leyla was not conspicuously one of the latter, I have no idea what she did in WWE, or which one she was, have no particular memory of any appearance she made there, and, in fact no idea whether the listing is right, and she actually was in there, although there’s no particular reason to doubt IMDB.com that I’m aware of. In her defence, she’s one of the least worst in the whole movie.

***** (He’s billed as Rey Misterio, which is basically correct, although also arguably somewhat misleading. He used to wrestle as Rey Misterio Sr. The famous Rey Misterio in the US, and probably the bigger star in Mexico (if not everywhere else as well) for some years, is Rey Misterio Jr, who is not his son, as you might expect, but is legitimately his nephew. Billing Senior simply as “Rey Misterio” (and showing him on the front package artwork from the back, wearing tights and mask) opened the possibility that this could be misinterpreted as being the famous WWE star, who again, is much better known in the US than his uncle. In their potential, if slightly threadbare defence, Junior has long since dropped the “Jr” from his working name, and exclusively appears under the semi-anglicised spelling “Rey Mysterio”, which his uncle does not. The question of whether anyone in a video store in noticing the title and grabbing it would also pick up a slight spelling variation is, at very least, moot. Whether in paying money for an obvious poop ambush like this, you deserve absolutely everything you’re getting is another valid consideration.)

ADDITIONAL NOTE, WITHOUT ASTERISKS: (Incidentally if this could possibly matter to anybody, the original, or proper, or whatever, title of the movie was El Mascadero Massacre. Wrestlemaniac is listed on the IMDB.com site as the “International English title”. Given that the film was made in the English language, quite why it would have a separate English language title is something of a poser, but relief is at hand, because: (a) they were probably exercising some wishful thinking in thinking they could market an unwatchable English language movie to Hispanic audiences in the States, which is anti-genius thinking of the first order, but, then, look at the movie, and (b) you could waste time thinking about this, but, then, look at the movie.)
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GOODBYE, MR CHIPS (1939)

Though this would make for poor form and a short running time in a crime thriller, let’s go with a confession in advance here. Despite a mere two viewings – hardly a nick on the film stock compared to my usual habit of wearing favourite movies clear through to the other side – Goodbye, Mr Chips is one of my favourite movies of all time. So best not to expect rationality here, as a refusal to stay even vaguely on the planet often offends.

It’s a fairly simple film in terms of basic structure. A good-hearted but rather stuffy gent, Mr Chipping (Robert Donat) turns his hand to teaching at a screamingly traditional English public school, which because it’s English, actually means it’s a private school. He’s very dedicated to teaching, and cares about his pupils, but due, in part, to a classic impacted English case of being both shy and withdrawn in a manner that makes him seem a little aloof, doesn’t really make much of a personal connection with them.

Due to an unexpected invitation to join the school’s German master (Paul von Hernreid according to the credits, but better known without the “von”, and minus an apparently expendable consonant, as Paul Henreid) for a holiday break, he also finds himself on an equally unexpected trip abroad, where he accidentally meets the love of his life (Greer Garson) up a whacking great alp in Switzerland. (Aha – so that’s where you find ’em! I could kick myself now – it’s such an obvious place to look.)

Under her influence, and with the odd wifely display of cunning and gentle prodding in a good cause, he allows his previously buried fondness for seeing the lighter side of things, along with various other salient qualities, to come to light in his professional life. As a result, he becomes a part of the fabric of the school and a much-loved figure to “his boys” there. This covers many generations of those boys, from grandfathers through to grandsons, as the film genially lapses in and out of various stages of Mr Chips’ life.

Without battering you with the entire shooting script, that’s pretty much the guts of the deal.

What it doesn’t explain is what the film does, and how it does it so well.

One of the more cunning ploys, in what is an extremely manipulative, although completely painless, procedure in general, is that the movie opens with Mr Chips already nearing the end of his life – a school legend, and beloved figure to masters and boys alike. The foreshadowing gives received weight to what follows, and lends intrigue to the scenes of his early teaching days, where he’s a bit of a well-meaning bumbling clod, and you wonder how he’s going to work his way out of this phase to become, essentially the Jesus of schoolteachers, albeit with a grey moustache, and a somewhat more genial disposition, not to mention an un-Biblical quantity of tea and cakes.

The secret of the movie’s triumph is no great secret, though. It pretty much comes down to faultless good manners, relentless decency, and sheer radiant goodwill. In other words, the success of the movie is that it projects the same qualities it celebrates in its main character. If you can have “extremely nice” with a great deal of feeling, and without blandness – and the existence of this movie suggests you can – that’s pretty much the scoreline with Goodbye, Mr Chips.

As a history of a man, it’s also clearly intended as a documentation of a time past, a notion of timeless worthwhile qualities that live on, and also certain traditions regrettably lost over time. It’s about England. It’s something of a reflection on what makes a life worth living. It also transpires that it’s a pacifist movie, made at an interesting time for it to be so.

But let’s hear from the loyal opposition. The Lenny Maltin Movie Guide refers to its “extreme length”. Well, by today’s standards, they’d barely get the soundtrack orchestra tuned up by the time this was over, and wouldn’t have even got in the first six completely unnecessary climaxes, but it is a couple of hours in duration. All I can say is, I never checked my watch once on either viewing. Well, I don’t own one, but you get the gist. It’s not paced like Bullitt or anything, but there’s no obvious slack lying around to trip over that I’ve ever noticed.

The Ephraim Katz Film Encyclopaedia simply blots that it’s “maudlin”. It’s a movie with no chronic shortage of sentiment, that’s for sure. My take is that writers, director and stars tellingly invest so much feeling into the movie, that the emotions come off as honest and simple in the best way, rather than slimy and like they’re trying to sell you a used vehicle.

In terms of plot manipulation, they don’t miss too many gimmicks along the way. I’m not sure this is inherently a flaw. It’s a naturalistic movie, in application, and to an extent in setting, but not an entirely realistic one in intent. As indicated earlier, Mr Chips, the school, his wife’s love for him, his for teaching and “his boys”, are all to some extent metaphors.

The deal-sealer is Robert Donat’s performance/s as the Many Ages of Chips. It was probably a once in a lifetime part, and he was a hell of an actor. So much of the movie is him, that you can easily imagine that with the wrong star, even if a capable actor and just a quarter-notch wrong for the role, and the entire megilla could have collapsed in a screaming heap.

Greer Garson apparently became a major star of this one role as Mrs Chips, and you won’t need an instruction manual to work out why. As written, the role is an idealisation, rather than much of a characterisation, but she’s so generous in infusing the part with feeling and grace that she’s unforgettable in it, and also you may have to turn the brightness down a notch on your television.

A word should be said about director Sam Wood, if only because that’s one more word than he usually gets. This is a guy who directed such wildly unrelated, undyingly famous movies as Goodbye, Mr Chips, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, and uncredited portions of Gone With the Wind, and hardly anybody can find a word to say about him, and if they do it’s along the lines of “reliable technician” or some laundry powder description like that. I’m going to take a wild fling at this one and say that anyone who was at the steering wheel on movies that resonated like those did – and, incidentally, continue to kabong people around the head region to this day, the solitary seven decades later – probably had a little more going for him than being a solid technician. Call it a mad hunch. *

I think it’s a beautiful movie, as is. There’s not a thing about it I don’t like. It’s brilliantly done Hollywood that has the good grace to keep the Hollywood out of everything but its quintessential movie-making sleight-of-hand, and otherwise be as English as it needed to be.

In the interest of fairness, although not without a certain amount of teeth-grinding, I will allow that determined, cast in granite, cynics, and those chilled to a light coma by either the basic premise or setting, should take a pass on this one, button their black shirts to the collar, and head off to take up seat-space at a Hal Hartley movie or something, so I don’t have to.

For the rest of you, the one warning I’d give is that this movie may have some unexpected atmospheric and/or physiological side effects. Well, every time I watch it, a strange mist seems to appear towards the final reels, and my head seems to leak a little through the eyeballs. It’s the darnedest thing. Perhaps it was some experimental processing method.

(11 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap)

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* (The film is also dedicated to Irving Thalberg – a legendary producer at MGM – although his exact extent of his involvement with this movie, if any, I am unaware of. Wood worked with Thalberg on the two Marx Bros pictures mentioned above, and Thalberg was a key figure in putting together A Night at the Opera. He died during either pre-production or production of A Day at the Races two years prior to the release of Goodbye Mr Chips, so his only influence on it may have been simply whatever influence his approach and personality had on those who worked with him, like Sam Wood. But bear in mind, there’s a dedication to him on this film, and he was known for not taking due credit on movies he’d worked on.)

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W.C. FIELDS STRAIGHT UP (1986)

THE UNKNOWN MARX BROTHERS (1993)

These are documentaries of varying approaches about vaudeville comics of the 1910s and ‘20s who were in their movie primes in the ’30s and ‘40s.

I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily a good introduction to the great comedians in question, with one exception, but are probably essential viewing for confirmed fans. The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell is the exception – it has many hilarious, well-chosen scenes from a good range of their movies. With the other two, my suspicion is that it would really help to have previously seen a handful of key movies from each of the performers concerned. *

Here’s the basic breakdown. Both Marx Bros docos feature rare footage you’re unlikely to have seen before with little or no duplication of these elements between them. Both tell the story of the brothers from beginnings through vaudeville to movies and beyond. …In a Nutshell has more of a focus on their careers, and Unknown has more of an accent on the personal. Nutshell has more telling footage from their famous movies, and Unknown probably has more odds and sods that you’d never seen before, including many television appearances by the individual Marxes – but then The Unknown Marx Brothers is also almost half-an-hour longer.

If you’re a Marx Brothers fan, of the type that has seen all the movies many times over, I can’t stress enough how much you’re likely to enjoy both documentaries. I don’t know how they found it, but In a Nutshell features an extended clip in which the Marx Bros perform an entire chunk of their Broadway show I’ll Say She Is, which they apparently recreated for some sort of previously long-lost Paramount promotional reel in the early ‘30s. Since that show was never filmed, (unlike the later Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) this is your one chance to see them doing any of it. The fact that most of it doesn’t really hold up anymore is mitigated by the historical value of seeing what was the flavour of big-time live entertainment back in the ‘20s, and also what the Marx Bros transitioned from to become the Marx Bros we came to know.

The Unknown Marx Brothers digs up the tiny amount of solo Harpo footage from the 1925 Richard Dix silent movie Too Many Kisses, as well as a great Groucho Marx appearance on the TV show What’s My Line? plus a nice later Harpo appearance on the Today show in the early ‘60s, and Chico Marx playing the piano to a bunch of Australian servicemen, who all seem highly amused and heavily moustachioed.

Both Marx Brothers in a Nutshell and W.C. Fields Straight Up share common parentage, in that they are both written (or co-written), edited, and in the latter case also directed, by Joe Adamson. Adamson’s an interesting guy. He wrote the best book, without any question, on the subject of the Marx Bros – Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo (1973). As a chronicling of their movie history, as biography, as criticism, in terms of research, and interview quotes from people who were THERE, I’ve never seen anything on the Marx Bros that comes remotely close. Also, it’s funny, which helps. **

In a way, Marx Brothers in a Nutshell is a movie version of the book, albeit understandably with less of an accent on movie criticism and more on showing movies. As strongly as I recommend both Marx Brothers documentaries to helpless-hapless-hopeless fans, the book is also a must, presuming you can find it.

The W.C. Fields doco is more of a mixed blessing. It’s credited as being co-written by Adamson and Roland J. Fields (W.C. Fields’ grandson) and it suffers from a tug of war (or two) in orientation, and occasionally feels like it could use the services of an experienced traffic cop to restrict it to one direction. On one hand it’s a clip movie, on another it’s trying to dispel myths and apocrypha and get to the real Fields, and on the inconvenient third hand, there’s a lot of footage of Roland J. Fields making windy sociological statements about the humour in Fields’ pictures, and drawing biographical long bows suggesting that humour derived from Fields’ own fractured family life. A lot of the latter is not entirely convincing and more of it is dull.

The presumably Adamson led expedition in search of ‘The Real Fields’ is also somewhat stridently insistent and ultimately dull, as well as being stymied at many turns by interviewees repeating stories, many of them suspiciously familiar, which seem at least as apocryphal, unlikely and unsourced as the ones that do get dispelled.

Atypically for something Adamson would be involved with, the clips of Fields at work in the movies are shuffled chronologically, often truncated, and not startlingly well selected. There’s still plenty in there, a lot of it is hilarious, but the flow is continually interrupted by searches for the real Fields, and more windy stabs at significance by the grandson.

The gems in there are some audio and video interviews with directors, writers and actors who worked with Fields, as well as long-lost clips of him from old newsreels, promo reels and outtakes from same. Virtually all of this material is brief but welcome. A very small amount of his relatively little-seen silent movie work is included.

I have to say that the second remastered DVD box set of W.C. Fields movies from Universal (W.C. Fields Comedy Collection Volume Two) contains a brief documentary/clip show which despite being an old half-hour TV special, and also despite being hosted and narrated by Wayne & Schuster, has a better selection of clips, and generally they’re full scenes as well. ***

Other information. The Unknown Marx Brothers (by David Leaf/John Scheinfeld) runs 126 minutes and is narrated by Leslie Nielsen. The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell, 98 mins, narrated by Gene Kelly.
W.C. Fields Straight Up, 93 mins, narrated by Dudley Moore.

Despite understandable trepidation the consumer may well have, none of the celebrity narration is intrusive or detracts from concentration on the subject matter proper. No whoopee-cushion deployment, dancing or piano playing is entered into.

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The two Marx Brothers pix probably each run to about 9.5 out of 11 on the MPHOAH scale

W.C. Fields Straight Up – maybe 8 out of 11 MPHOAH

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* (In case anyone is less familiar with these comedians’ movies, it might be helpful to pointer some of the better titles to see.

MARX BROS – Duck Soup, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, A Night at the Opera, Go West

W.C. FIELDS – The Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Bank Dick, It’s a Gift, You’re Telling Me!
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

In each case, you could make a pretty good case that the first three on the list are the best pictures they made. All those listed above are, at very least, enjoyable.)

** (Joe Adamson also wrote one of the best books on classic era Hollywood animation – Tex Avery: King of Cartoons. He has a way of writing that captures the breezy humour of the stuff he’s covering, he absolutely “gets it”, and he sourced the right people to interview.)

*** (This was included as a bonus feature in the box set. That set also includes four of Fields’ most entertaining pictures out of five attempts, a better strike rate than Vol. One, although the latter included two of his three greats, The Bank Dick, and the possibly still underrated It’s a Gift.)

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Just for the amusement of LeapsterSite readers, if not at the content, then at the spectacle of Ol’ Unc Larry reduced to an old crank sending out complaint letters of boiling bile and bilge at random to the great wide world, heretoforth, already, are reproduced two recent, connected electronic letters I sent to the ACCC, the organisation dedicated to preventing Australian consumer interests, or whatever it is they’re meant to be up to since Prof Fels resigned and they apparently went into the witness protection program.

* (I have very slightly edited some aspects of the original letters, due to both the forum and the format of their publication here. The essential content, and most of the wording, remains unchanged from that submitted to our good rockin’ buddies at the ACCC.)

LETTER NUMERO UNO

Various beers from overseas are made under licence here. Long-standing examples are the brands Heineken, Beck’s, Stella Artois and Carlsberg. More recent ones include Kronenbourg and Kirin Ichiban. In my opinion, they are packaged, marketed and priced as import beers, despite being manufactured here. The only indication that these are not what I feel they purport to be is some fine print generally located on the neck label. Misleading advertising refers to their European heritage, their long history etc., thus reinforcing the erroneous impression that these are the original, imported beers. It is my contention that these beers:

(a) are not what they are representing themselves as, or are being represented as, in that they are marketed and priced as imports but manufactured here; and

(b) that regardless of any personal aesthetic judgements of quality, on any basic empirical level they do not taste like the original beers.

I consider this kind of marketing nothing short of fraudulent. The change (from the original imported beers to the locally manufactured “alternative”) was never announced to consumers, mentioned in advertising, nor adequately represented in packaging. There is no fair warning here. I have previously contacted the ACCC about this, by phone, about 12-18 months ago. I have never heard back. I cannot understand how this fraud upon consumers has been allowed to continue unchallenged. Such “fake import” beers, as I term them, should be CLEARLY labelled “Made in Australia”.

LETTER NUMERO DUO

In addition to my recent complaint regarding Australian-manufactured beer products marketed, packaged and priced as “imports”, I would like to add some specific products which constitute slightly different, although, to my mind, no less fraudulent practices.

(1) A liquor store owner recently informed me that beer being packaged and sold here with the markings “Carlsberg Imported” is, indeed imported, but not, as consumers are no doubt being encouraged to infer, from Denmark, where Carlsberg originates, but manufactured under licence in Malaysia. If this assertion is correct, this seems awfully close to fraud to me. Such product, if in existence, should clearly be labelled, so that the consumer can clearly sight-read the information before purchase, “Made in Malaysia”.

(2) A product has appeared on shelves here entitled, I believe “Cuba ‘59″. It is packaged as if a beer from Cuba, with extensive large lettering in Spanish over the packaging. On the rear of the packaging surrounding the six-pack, and there only, it says in relatively small lettering “Inspired by Cuba. Made in Australia.” This seems very much like an attempt to deceive the consumer as to the product’s origins. “Made in Australia” should appear prominently on all packaging.

(3) Beer marketed and sold here as a product of the Japanese brewery Asahi (as “Super Dry” or “Extra Dry” branding - can’t remember which) is, in the very fine print on packaging, revealed to be manufactured in Thailand under licence. This should be clearly represented to consumers.

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ADDITIONAL “MADE IN AUSTRALIA” LEAPSTER EDITORIAL COMMENT

If I hear anything significant back, I’ll let you know on the Web-O-Leaps, but it’s probably for the best for all our health if nobody holds their breath.

Incidentally, with a Mahatma Gandhi-like inspiration towards magnificent, sweeping, peaceful civil disobedience, I urge all LeapsterSite readers and in particular lovers of BEEEEER, to refrain from the purchase of what I like to refer to as the “Fake Import” beers, manufactured right here in Australia City but in my opinion, packaged and marketed as something else, which currently include, but are not limited to Heineken, Beck’s, Stella Artois, Carlsberg (which doesn’t include their “Elephant” brand which is a full import), Kronenbourg and Kirin Ichiban.

This does NOT apply to the Heineken, Beck’s and Stella Artois genuine imports, usually marked clearly as such, generally on the neck labels, which are manufactured in the correct country of origin
(i.e. the Netherlands for Heineken, Germany for Beck’s, etc.) which you can find around if you hunt high and low for them (the bloke who operates the liquor store on Doncaster Road in the North Balwyn Village stocks them, for one example)

Any purchase of these fake imports is an encouragement of the practice. You’re not getting what you paid for, and you’re paying far too much for a locally made imitation of the beer you actually thought you were buying, presuming you were attempting to purchase the legitimate, original product, manufactured in the appropriate country of origin.

If you actually like the “made under licence” product, feel you’re paying a fair price, and know going in that what you’re buying is a locally-produced simulation (or, to be fair, you could say “attempted and licenced recreation”) of the original product, then that’s a different matter, and more power to you, although I have to add that I feel you probably should have your papers checked, proverbially speaking.

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PS I have since received communication from our favourite consumer-rights prevention folks at the ACCCP. The word is, according to the relevant law, the tiny line of print on the back of the neck labels concerning the Australian origins of these faux-import beers is all the breweries are legally required to do. A classic example of the law being a horse’s patoot. This is a complete crock.

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