Blog O’ Leaps

During the introductory section of the Bulldog Drummond movie review below (the post from December 8th), I indulged in a not uncharacteristically ill-tempered rampage concerning the all but inevitable “Mr Banana Peel, Meet Mr Foot” approach of the mainstream media here in dealing with popular culture - the routine collapse over minor hurdles like research, knowledge, any remote demonstrated understanding of the area in published material whatsoever - and, in particular, the misuse of the term “B-Movies”.

You might even want to read through the first few paragraphs of that.

As if to illustrate most of the points made in it, The Age just recently published this article by Stephanie Bunbury.

I can’t be bothered going through the whole screed owing to this monumental headache that’s just come upon me now, but a few examples ought to give the general flavour.

For starters, the headline is “Revenge of the B Flicks”. These aren’t B Flicks. These are big money A-pictures. There are no B-pictures anymore anyway (again, see the section of the Bulldog Drummond movie review headed “An Insufficiently Brief Word About B-Movies” - we’ll all be wasting time if not losing lunch if I’m endlessly quoting myself here) but even if there were, these would be A-movies.

B-movies and cult films aren’t interchangeable expressions. If they were, the kind of superhero movies Stephanie Bunbury refers to early in the article aren’t “cult films” now anyway. The superhero picture is now an established part of the mainstream, unless anyone hallucinated the box-office returns for the Spider-Man, X-Men, new era Batman, Iron Man pix, etc.

Many of the other movies mentioned are either pure-A mainstream movies, horror or science-fiction pictures. What are generally, and lamentably, termed “sci-fi” movies (a designation the genre cultists themselves emphatically rejected as a barbarism back in the 60s and 70s when followers of the genre could, at least on a numerical basis compared to the mainstream, somewhat legitimately be termed a cult interest), and some of the upcoming ones sound horrible enough to even deserve the expression, have constituted a genre in the mainstream since at least the 1970s. It’s unmistakably so now.

There have been horror A-pictures going back to the silent movie era.

I’m not saying Stephanie Bunbury came up with the heading, because there’s every chance she didn’t. (I don’t believe she makes a single reference to B-movies in the body of the article, and it’s common in newspapers for someone other than an article’s author to provide a headline.) But someone should know better, and the point I made already in the blob section previously mentioned was that, in the media mainstream here, nobody does, and nobody cares, because of inherent contempt/fear/innate misunderstanding of popular and mass culture and the “world of entertainment” in general.

What’s in the article is no picnic either, however.

I don’t get the point of endless references to “fanboys” - chiefly a reference to comic book fandom of yore, (which started within that and/or other genre fan bases) but long-since broadened to include other areas typically of interest to the same group, including cartoon animation, horror movies, video games, etc etc) - when the subject matter being referred to is established as an iron-clad part of the mainstream. “Fanboy” means nothing when every second person on the block went and saw “Iron Man” - going by what the term was meant to designate, if everyone’s a fanboy, then nobody is.

Either the person using it is decades behind the eight-ball on this score, (always a strong possibility with newspaper magazine coverage of specialist interest subjects), or they’re flat-out wrong, or not keeping up, or they’re trying to use what they think is an exciting, attention-grabbing piece of slang without quite understanding what it means, and none of these alternatives are necessarily exclusive.

And I quote from the article concerned:

“Back in our world, real-life fanboys are in for a fiesta down at the multiplex. Over the next year, they will be getting a clutch of comic-book adaptations, some sci-fi visions of the end of the world, a handful of classic remakes and sequels to scoff at and, praise be, a new Quentin Tarantino some time after a mooted Cannes Film Festival premiere in May. Plus a whole horror revival. And a new movie, again a likely Cannes contender, from Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen! It’s enough to make you cancel your hotline to the video store, kick aside the pizza boxes and come on out of the basement.”

Right, so you’re a fanboy if you go see superhero movies, “sci-fi”, “classic remakes” (whatever they are), Tarantino pictures (!), or Sacha Baron Cohen movies (??!!). Again, when everyone’s a fanboy, nobody is, or to put it another way, the term becomes broadened to such an extent, it becomes completely useless as an indicator of anything. When more than half of everyone is in a “cult” we call that mainstream. When an actual cult has that many members, they call it “a religion”. If even 40% of everyone with a television happens to watch one program at the same time, we don’t call that a “cult show” or its viewers “fanboys”, we call that a rampaging monster ratings hit. Sometimes even 30 or 35% can do the trick. But you get the general drift.

Where Stephanie’s enchanted mind takes her from there is an interesting stroll.

“But the fanboys are not necessarily entirely happy about that. The same basement-dwelling constituency, indeed, has been gathering in cyberspace to decry Hollywood’s lack of inspiration.
How many more Transformers movies (Michael Bay’s on the job; the band re-forms yet again) do we need? Or X-Men origins films…or Terminator episodes…?

The films they really want to see, however, are also unapologetic geekfests, so perhaps this is just whinging. One film they’re all dying to see is The Spirit, directed by comic-book doyen Frank “Sin City” Miller. Based on the ’60s noir comic-book hero and due out Januray 8, it will blaze a trail for Zack “300″ Snyder’s The Watchmen, drawn from a classic ’80s comic about a bunch of former superhero vigilantes summoned from retirement for the inevitable final showdown.
Due in Australia in March, this is possibly the most breathlessly anticipated film of the year.”

Can younger folks even remember how many years ago it was that superhero based material was considered the exclusive provenance of “basement-dwelling geeks”? This turns up in a post-Xmas article in a mainstream media context in 2008? Our Steph may as well be railing about technology boffins who cluster around those strange new CD players while “everyone else” clings to vinyl. It’s a dead argument. The mainstream is going to see what the mainstream is going to see, whether the shivering furtive types loitering around the art-houses like it or don’t.

And wouldn’t it be just like those “basement-dwelling geekfest” types to whinge when they get what they want.

Or is it what they want?

Apparently all those fanboy geeks are clamouring to see a movie about “The Spirit”. Well, the mainstream of superhero fans she’s referring to from back in the 70s and 80s probably wouldn’t have known the Spirit comics if they’d fallen downstairs into a large pile of them. I doubt that anyone who could be legitimately designated a fanboy now would even have heard of “The Spirit” outside of the production of this movie version. Will Eisner, who created and owned The Spirit, and remains unmentioned in La Bunbury’s article, is a consensus choice, among those who might be trusted in this area, as one of the great comic book writer-artists of all time. The Spirit was not a “60s noir comic-book hero”, whatever such a thing may be. The heyday of the character was in the 40s and 50s, and it was a humour-tinged comics series with a hero clearly derived from the crime genre pulp prose fiction that preceded it (some of which later provided both inspiration and material for film noir). The Spirit was kind of a lighter-toned version of pulp magazine characters like The Shadow, only done in comics form, and with a more varied approach.

To say that this subject matter constitutes slam-dunk easy-reference material for whoever is to be fancifully identified as a fanboy cult, is an enormous stretch, no matter what the movie turns out to gross. It’s like saying the original Captain Marvel, or Walt Kelly’s Pogo strip is the same deal. The last time the Spirit was in anything that might be termed the “fanboy mainstream” was over 50 years ago, there were no fanboys then, and it was in the real mainstream, when comic sales in the general population were high, and newspaper comic sections were still considered a key point in circulation.

The description of The Watchmen also has a fair amount of pixie-dust and popcorn about it. The “most breathlessly anticipated film of the year”? The vast majority of people here have never heard of The Watchmen, unless through trailers and website/magazine references to the current movie. The original comic-book version was certainly known to the “fanboys” of the time (mid-80s). It was considered one of the greatest superhero comics ever done. (THE greatest, in my opinion, just shading Frank Miller’s vaguely contemporary and not entirely dissimilar Batman redefinition, The Dark Knight Returns. Whether the current genus of fanboy, should such a thing be readily definable, would know of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons Watchmen, is a lot more up for grabs. I tend to think it wouldn’t necessarily be a much-read household word among the current batch of avid younger comic book readers. For one thing, it’s over twenty years old, and the churn-cycle among comic book consumers is a lot shorter than that. Ploughing back through history is also not a common trait in comics readers, and never really was. It was always the minority (if not a small minority) that fished back through the classics of the medium, and even there, the majority of those who did, focussed on the major ongoing characters of the main publishers. The Watchmen was originally published as a 12-issue finite series, then collected and perenially made available as a “graphic novel” (I continue to prefer “finite series”). The characters only appeared in those twelve issues. I’m not saying its unknown, because it isn’t, but the movie version will be taking this story and the characters to a mainstream which is largely unfamiliar with them, or to put it more realistically, has never heard of them before. If you polled 300 people exiting a supermarket in Anytown, Australia City this very day, over 98% of them would probably believe that The Watchmen was a jewellery chain store, or a generic reference to lower order batsmen put in to hold the fort when a wicket falls shortly before stumps in a multiple-day cricket match.

Regarding her description of The Watchmen’s story, it’s generally less than helpful, in that, specifically, it’s flat-out wrong. It’s about “a bunch of former superhero vigilantes summoned from retirement for the inevitable final showdown”? Really?

“Summoned” by whom, exactly? There’s no “summoning” here. A number of the characters become embroiled in the main plotline unwittingly, and against their better judgement. (One is murdered before the story even establishes itself, so I guess he missed the “summons”.) Three of the main characters aren’t retired, and two of them are government operatives, not “vigilantes”.

Stephanie Bunbury may as well have said The Watchmen was the story of this young guy who trades his family’s cow for magic beans. At least that would have been an accurate synopsis of a story, if not the actual one under discussion.

“The inevitable final showdown” is an ill-considered attempt at hipsterism which runs directly contrary to the whole nature of The Watchmen story. The X-Men and Spider-Man movies have “inevitable final showdowns”. In The Watchmen the characters we follow as readers have absolutely no clue where the events depicted are leading them, and neither do we. That’s part of the point of the story. The centrepiece denoument - the first climax, if you like - is nothing to do with your classic superhero final showdown. That’s also a major point of the story. The “real” ending could be very loosely compared to the classic superhero genre “inevitable final showdown” but the fact that it really isn’t anything like that is the whole point of the enterprise (such as any one point could be defined in what is an extremely dense and multi-layered work). It’s a revisionist approach to standard superhero storytelling. That’s what The Watchmen was about. (A not uncommon theme in Alan Moore’s work, incidentally. This was also the theme of its sparring partner/bookend of the period, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns.)

The actual story, or at least the bit of it we see at the start used as a hook to involve the reader, is that someone seems to be killing the costumed heroes of the past, one by one.

(As a somewhat more careful recent newspaper summation of The Watchmen pointed out, slightly contrary to Stephanie Bunbury’s version, while the characters might be generically defined as superheroes, only one of them actually has extra-human powers of any kind. To be fair, while it’s a distinguishing point that matters within the story, it’s a fine point. Batman is undoubtedly considered a superhero by generic standards. He can’t fly, he can’t shoot laser beams out of his nose, and the only way he can walk through walls is if he blows them up on the way through, but the mainstream would consider him part of the superhero family, and that’s how the character has long-since been marketed. It’s interesting that another mainstream print account thought to make the distinction, though.)

The point is, all of this could have been gotten right for the exact same money, and it’s difficult to come up with a sustainable theory as to why it wasn’t, other than sheer contempt for the subject matter. You wouldn’t run a crime or sport story without checking the facts to that sort of rudimentary level. That’s MY whole point.

I’ll leave the rest of it alone, since to my mind it’s all so much authentic frontier gibberish anyway, you can read it via the link above if you want anyway (fortune favours the bold), and it’s a phenomenon we’re all tediously familiar with in the broadsheet newspaper mainstream anyway - i.e. writer breathlessly plugs this season’s line in box-office fodder, shivering delightedly with the taboo excitement of mentioning rude major movie-plex commerce in a “serious” paper, while desperately trying to put themselves over as arch and above-it-all so their “cool” friends (one shudders to imagine) don’t think they’ve fallen for the popcorn-fodder hook, line and stinker.

If that’s the level of attention they’re going to bring to this level of movie-making, I’ve always thought, and continue to do so, that we’d all be better off if they just didn’t bother at all, and ran an extra ad for neat-casual knitwear, or one o’ them sokadudu puzzles.

However one additional misadventure in the movie world of Steph Bunbury is worth highlighting, leading, as it does, to considerable humour.

It’s the hammie-snapping lurch for contemporary significance she assigns to various not conspicuously suitable movie targets, presumably as a nod to any old Uni lit professors of hers she fears might be reading the article, and otherwise assume she’s gone to the dogs wallowing in this kind of generic movie tripe.

“Science fiction is, of course, the safest way to talk about apocalypse when the real thing seems a possibility,” pronounces La Bunbury. Actually this is a time when most people are thinking about capitalism is about to hit the bricks, rather than the entire world. Doomsdayers and fringe-dwellers aside, even most people who are fairly certain that the planet is heading to hell in a handbag on an environmental basis are probably thinking in terms of centuries, or at least numbers of decades, rather than everything blowing up, say, next Tuesday. The fact of the matter is, when the Cold War was at its height, and people really did think the planet could be blown up sooner rather than later, there were as many, if not a lot more, movies about aspects of the Cold War (i.e. reality of the time) rather than there were elaborate science-fiction apocalypses. This tends to contradict the Bunbury Theory, which, in and of itself, makes little sense when you think about it anyway. The classic theory of movie mainline analysis is that in times of dire trouble, movies work as an entertainment because of the escapist factor, not because they flock to remind you of imminent disaster in more creative and lateral ways.

And how about this beaut:

“The Wolf Man, due out in the US in November, promises to be serious horror in the way that…James Whale’s horror films based on the Frankenstein story authentically represented popular fears in the ’30s.”

Yeah, because in the 30s, you see, what was mostly paramount in people’s minds was the deathly fear of some yayhoo scientist and his idiot assistant monkeying around in graveyards for body parts, stitching them all together and then electrocuting them to life. I mean, if you don’t mind umpire, please.

If she’d just forgotten the lunging for social significance and just said that back in the 30s, people found Universal’s Frankenstein movies genuinely scary, and we don’t perhaps so much now, but this genre horror movie aims to bring that sensibility back for a contemporary audience, well, that kind of would have made sense. Presuming that’s what she meant, and it is no picnic to extract what she meant from what she said, because what she did say is essentially so much shredded packing material.

Anyway, like I said, you can lumber through as much of this kind of highly inteelekshule hee-haw in the original article as you can stomach. It’s not exactly like I’ve exhausted the examples.

Incidentally, I have nothing in particular against Stephanie Bunbury whatsoever, don’t know her, have never dealt with her, and though I’ve seen her by-line for years, couldn’t think of a single previous article by her that offended me previously. In fact I couldn’t readily remember the content of another article by her at all. It’s just this approach to “covering” popular culture in the mainstream media here that, to put this in the jargon of higher literary criticism, leaves me spewing chops.

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THE CRYING GAME (1992)

Strangely engaging movie, in part and in its way, which works a lot of atmosphere out of its settings. I’m admitting this up front because it’s true, and also an amazing achievement in the face of so much about the movie that is fundamentally brutally flawed, both conceptually and in terms of dramatic construction. And, trust me, on the latter point, if it was a building, you know there’d be a reputable builder coming by a week or so later, to survey the rubble, shake his head repeatedly in amazement, and speak disdainfully of “Cowboys”.

It starts as an IRA kidnapping of a British soldier, and hostage situation, which goes intensely awry, and then becomes an off-kilter love story for the bulk of the picture, and finally reverts to a violent suspense movie, with a Tarantino-like climax of gunplay gone wrong in every possible way. Bear in mind that those are three quite different things, and also bear in mind that unless the movie’s better points sufficiently beguile, and your suspension of disbelief is in top muscular form and benching around 350kg, you’re probably likely to come out the other end of The Crying Game still thinking that those were three quite different things, i.e. at no point did they approach becoming a unified whole.

It’s essentially a soap-opera with unusually good acting in some key roles, which seeks to leech urgency and realism from the plotline relating to the Irish “troubles”. That this is exactly what it is and what it’s doing are pretty much given up early in the piece, at the end of the opening section, when both timing of a certain incident and an ill-considered piece of plotting furniture – a twist, if you like, although not the one the movie is best known for – stretch the credulity well beyond snapping point. I don’t know (or care) if they were lurching for irony there – for me it was a pure Grade-A deal-breaker. Director/writer Neil Jordan went in one brilliant spasm from a realistic, harrowing hostage situation with believable characters and carefully meted out psycho-drama to Instant Hollywood with bunting and streamers. *

Then the real movie takes off, which is the unusual love story between one of the IRA kidnappers, Fergus (Stephen Rea) who’s gone to ground in London, and a hair stylist named Dil (Jaye Davidson) who also happens to be the former girlfriend of the English soldier they kidnapped (Forest Whitaker).

What can I tell you? It’s a love story. Those have trials and tribulations in them. **

Many trials and tribulations later, the remnants of the IRA cell, chiefly represented by granite-hard Jude (Miranda Richardson) show up to drag poor Fergus back in for no real apparent reason, to enact yet another stunningly ill-considered plan.

Actually, the way the IRA are depicted in this, in terms of their planning and execution on the two occasions we see them in action, the American police would probably be comparatively grateful for how respectfully they were portrayed in the Keystone Kops shorts. (Bob Denver’s character in Gilligan’s Island was a master of the well-concocted scheme by comparison.)

They are also, with the sole exception of Stephen Rea’s character, portrayed as flint-hearted, borderline lunatic, unprincipled killers. Even as a person with no connection to either side of the Irish struggles, including any religious one, this portrayal was uncomfortable for me, but not as uncomfortable as using the back-story of the violence in Northern Ireland to generate a hopeful ballast of respectable realism for what is, at its core, an old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama with heavy soap-ish tendencies. THAT was as uncomfortable as hessian bike-shorts, not to mention cynical enough to beat the band AND steal their instruments. The couple of threadbare attempts to explain why the IRA members are doing what they do are so feeble, insufficient and straight off the World Cliche Fund teletype, that it probably would have been less of an insult not to have bothered at all. But without any half-way convincing attempt at such an explanation, they’re just the bad guys in a Hollywood movie that happened to be made in Britain.

Anyway, the movie’s got more problems than a substantial yellowing of the proverbial bathroom hand-towel of morality.

None of the three sections sit together logically, emotionally, dramatically or any other way except they happen to come in the same movie in sequential order. Stephen Rea’s character in the first section isn’t the same as the one in the second section. The sense of humour he demonstrated in the opening act disappears entirely except for a brief re-flourishing at the very end.

There’s no particular reason for the IRA folks to show up again near the end of the movie, other than the movie needs it dramatically for a climax. Everything in The Crying Game happens when it does patently because the folks behind it knew it “needed something to happen there”. Many successful formula pictures are made to this pattern, but their success is that we don’t get the wires, pulleys and framework so obviously shoved in our faces. The locations and sets are milked for a lot of lovely atmosphere, and that helps the movie hold together and resonate in the viewer’s mind, but it doesn’t paper over cracks like that.

That The Crying Game does gather something of a mesmeric effect, when it’s not kicking you right out of the picture with hotdogging in the plot department, comes down to the goodwill engendered by a couple of terrific performances, namely from Forest Whitaker as the English soldier, and, mainly, Jaye Davidson, as Dil, the ill-used, sad, but ever arch and glamorous hair-stylist that Fergus falls hard for.

It’s the humanity and conviction of the love story between Rea’s and Davidson’s character that gives the movie its real resonance, and it’s as well that it takes up as much screen-time as it does, because you could make a fair case that it’s the only stuff in the movie other than the early scenes with Rea and Whitaker which doesn’t feel like they’re trying, as insultingly obviously as possible, to sell you a semi-trailer load of uncut prime-grade bulldust.

Even there, though, there’s the scene, where they’re desperately trying to tie up the two strands of the movie that are just never going to knit together properly, where for no reason, Dil walks into the greatest possible (IRA-related) danger at the worst possible time, AND is mindlessly drunk, AND chooses that moment to tell us and Fergus about the major blood disorder she’s cunningly kept secret for the balance of the picture. ***

The other performances are more of a mixed blessing. Miranda Richardson is quite believable as a down-home local hard-nut militant in the opening scenes, then returns for Act 3 like she’s just walked out of some 80s cult movie where she played a power-suit clad, black leather glove-wearing caricature dominatrix. That performance has nothing to do with the Rea/Davidson movie, in tone, in approach, or in any other definable way. It would have fitted in fine in, say, Repo Man, or Desperately Seeking Susan, or a sketch comedy show for that matter. Actually it probably belonged in a sketch comedy show. Probably would have been fun anywhere but here too.

Adrian Dunbar as the other main IRA character probably delivers what was ordered – the problem is that the character is basically a nasty cipher as written, and that’s about the whole ball-game there.

Stephen Rea’s performance is more of a curious beast to dissect. Apparently when they gave him a big haircut between Acts 1 and 2, they nicked Fergus’ brain as well. The guy who’s likeable, passionate, even voluble in the first section can barely string a sentence together in the second. This is the character as written but it sure leaves Rea having to do a lot of work with his trademark amazingly tired eyes to keep you roped in with the romance. He’s got chemistry with Davidson – just as well, because if he didn’t there wouldn’t have been any movie at all to speak of – but you wouldn’t want to be relying on the dialogue to work out why. ****

Boiling it down to the grit, The Crying Game is a nice-looking bittersweet romance story, bookended by a couple of unconvincing stabs at “relevant” violence, and patently misconstructed with so much decorative Deus Ex Machina balustrading in the plot-work that it’s kind of a surprise to reach the end and not find out it was all a dream by J.R. Ewing.

It’s worth watching for Jaye Davidson’s screen-busting performance ++, the ghost of an honest, painful, if weird little romance movie that could have been, and just enough other bits and pieces of movie-making magic done well +++ (visually, and with use of vintage pop music, it’s a small triumph of atmosphere at least) that, despite many rational objections that one might have to The Crying Game (like that so much of it is conceptually, well, “idiotic” is probably the word I’m scratching for) it still tends to lurk around the corners of the brain afterwards, in a way that even powerful cleansers won’t shift.

Which only leaves me to address the proverbial Tyrannosaurus in the room – why do so many other people rate The Crying Game so highly? As best I can tell you is what I’ve already told you – the love story part is beguiling, Jaye Davidson is moreso, and it’s very atmospheric. Maybe if that stuff flew for you, you overlook the rest. Beyond that, I haven’t got a clue why anyone would make such a big tsimmes about a cracked flywheel of a movie like this, and an obvious cracked flywheel at that. No more idea than I would have about how Neil Jordan could have won an actual Oscar for a screenplay so jigsawed in construction and riddled with plot-quackery, or how Jaye Davidson’s nomination was for a supporting role, when it’s so obviously one of the two leads.

(6 out of 11 on the slyly effective MPHOAH scale, a tremendous amount of which can be credited directly to Jaye Davidson)

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NOTE: ALL THE FOOTNOTES BELOW ARE RIDDLED WITH THE SPOILERS I TOOK RIDICULOUSLY ELABORATE CARE TO LEAVE OUT OF THE MAIN ARTICLE.

For all I know there’s one person out there, other than me, who still hasn’t got around to seeing the picture, and still might do so. If you’re that person, don’t read these footnotes.

* (What I’m specifically referring to there is the scene where Fergus has to kill Jody the English soldier, and Jody runs away, escapes to the nearby road and is immediately run over and killed by an English military vehicle. Irony failure alert. It’s also at that precise moment that the British military opens fire with every piece of weaponry in the world and blows the IRA enclave to foofer-dust. Bear in mind that they’ve got helicopters involved, they’ve clearly had enough information and surveillance to be looking in the right area of the country, and they’ve had three days to do it, but the exact moment they attack is when Jody has just died, and even if the magical British tank hadn’t been teleported there to do the job by Neil “J.K.Rowling” Jordan, then they would have come just in time to see the result of Fergus executing him. There’s a ‘big stretch’ and then there’s ‘traction to the point of torture’. This kind of plotting would definitely pass muster in a Flash Gordon movie serial.)

** (Obviously everyone who’s seen the movie, and probably the vast majority of those who haven’t, know that There’s Something About Miriam, err Dil, that the Stephen Rea character doesn’t know, and not to put too fine a point on it, it’s located in or around the trouser area. To me, on finally seeing it – well, I meant the film, but you also do see “it” – I was kind of amazed that this was ever promoted as any kind of plot twist (which it was for its US release) since it’s pretty darn obvious from Square One. It’s even kind of pushed in the picture that Fergus is the only one in it who doesn’t know. He’s been reduced to such a passive, monosyllabic carpet tile of a character by then that making him also an unobservant nong doesn’t really help matters along.)

*** (Another doozy comes in the follow-up to this when Jude, the Miranda Richardson character, who’s been portrayed as a tough, capable person of action, both quick and capable with a gun, bursts into Dil’s living room like she’s collecting for charity, and immediately gets herself riddled with bullets by Dil, who not only hasn’t handled a gun to that point in the picture, but whose most ostensibly violent act was probably cutting Fergus’ hair in a reasonably gentle and careful manner. But, as I’ve said, this kind of stuff goes on right through the picture.)

**** (I know Stephen Rea can act, both from his early scenes with Forest Whitaker in this, and particularly from his performance in V For Vendetta, where other than Hugo Weaving in the lead, Rea stood out, despite the fact that that was a movie full of showy flavourful characters, and his was probably the most understated of all. But in the main whack of The Crying Game, he’s sure not getting a ton of help from the scripting.)

++ (Amazingly, Davidson made one appearance on TV after The Crying Game, and played one other movie role, and then went back to the fashion industry, according to his listing on IMDB.com. He was modest enough to say that it wasn’t his acting that got him the Oscar nomination (he didn’t win) but that the role was interesting as scripted. Wotta guy. (And gal.) To be fair if I’m braining him with all that crockery for everything that gave me cluster headaches about the writing, Jordan does deserve credit for the good stuff, which would emphatically include the character of Dil. As to why Davidson didn’t go on to a ton of further acting work after a screamingly obvious star-making performance like this, you kind of have to presume that he didn’t want to, which from the admittedly little I’ve read on the subject, may have actually been the case.)

+++ (And some parts done not so well. A lot of the choices in music are good ones, but the mixing in the print I saw on pay TV (so it was a two-track version) was pretty shaggy in spots. There’s accents that are not always easy to catch, delivery of lines in those accents that are on occasion pretty rapid fire/thrown away that arguably should have been re-takes for clarity, and then you’re struggling to hear them anyway over howling background noise and mega-blasts of vintage pop hits. I kind of expect this to happen in the odd sporting telecast here, but not so much in a movie where they’ve got the option of going back again and getting it right.)
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DEMENTIA (1955)

Boy, is this one a doozy.

Relatively little-known horror film about a street girl (Adrienne Barrett) from the po’ side of town. All we know about her is that she lives in a ratty flop-house and she either killed someone the night before we pick up her story, or she thinks she did.

As if in a trance, she leaves the flop-house and goes out into the street, where she encounters winos, a rather dubious cop (Ben Roseman - he also plays her father in the movie -”Paging Freud - Dr Sigmund Freud!”), and a pimp who pretty much immediately off-loads her onto a rich fat guy in a limousine (Bruno Ve Sota – not a typo).

While riding in the limo, she has a kind of psychotic episode, where she zones off into a dream sequence (or something) in which she meets a masked guy in a graveyard, who shows her scenes of her of her family life with her father (drunk and abusive) and her mother (“something of a tart” might be putting it mildly), this reminiscence (or whatever it is) culminating in two acts of violence, one of which may be imagined, or maybe not.

Back with the rich fat guy, we reach a somehow scarily empty modern building, where he has some sort of nookie-lair. It may be where he lives (I’ve seen this suggested in one article about the movie) or some sort of exclusive club setting. He’s a pig, and chaws away at some fried chicken delivered by a butler, and then with grease all over his kisser, goes for the girl. This doesn’t turn out well.

Then she’s back in the streets, being pursued by the implacable, leering police guy. She runs into the pimp, who guides her into one of the seedier nightclubs in motion picture history, where she sees Shorty Rogers’ * jazz band, playing jazz which is readily confusable with rock’n’roll, which is the one time we see her let herself go and enjoy something.

However, this is just a very brief intermission in the general run of guilt and oppression, and soon the nightclub setting turns into a trial of accusatory mockery for our young hopeful. Then she wakes up back in her flophouse, and it seems like it was all a long, disturbed dream, and we’re back where we started. Right up until she goes to the drawer she got her smokes out of back at the start of the picture, and we find out, well, maybe not.

Dementia seeks to capture the logic of a dream on film, and a lot of the time, it does. Some of the framing and shooting is excellent. The scene transitions are not exactly always subtle, but effective and interesting.

Some comparisons have been made between this film and Eraserhead, another black-and-white movie subsisting entire on the logic of a dream. They’re both two of the relatively few that have captured this sensibility successfully in a movie, but Dementia reminded me more of the generally disparaged, little-seen and underrated 1962 remake of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari **. Eraserhead is a slow frenzy which transfers freely between one level of reality and another without apparent preference, whereas Dementia and the Caligari remake are more deliberate – there’s a semblance, allowing for a pretty wacky context in both cases, of a strange kind of logical progression – and require the existence of a baseline reality as a touchstone. (I’m not saying that one approach is better/more valid than another. There are different kinds of dreams, and one screaming-mimi dream as a result of pizza too close to bedtime is as “valid” as another, presumably. I’m just saying the styles are different.)

Dementia is a lot more raw than either of the other two, anyway. If it’s a nightmare, it’s very much a street nightmare. It’s got some of the feel of a 50s juvenile delinquent exploitation picture, although what it does with it is way wilder than the zaniest of those. ***

Who’s responsible for this pungent little nut-hatch of a movie is somewhat up for grabs. John J. Parker is credited as writer/producer/director, but according to actor Bruno Ve Sota (also credited in a production capacity) Parker often handed the direction to him. The story was inspired by a dream Parker’s secretary had and told him about – the very same Adrienne Barrett who plays the lead role (known as “The Gamin”) in the movie.

Presumably the cinematographer, William Thompson, can be at least partially credited with some of the unforgettable shots – not that he showed quite the same apparent aptitude in shooting Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 From Outer Space for Ed Wood.

Shot silent, made entirely without dialogue (none synchronised or on titles), with the few sound and vocal effects (surprisingly well) post-synched, with a science-fictiony score by George Antheil ++ augmented by weird wordless keening vocals by Marni Nixon, this is a very unusual puppy indeed.

I’ve seen some criticism of the non-professional La Barrett’s acting in the lead role, with some going as far to say it would have been a hit at least on a ‘sleeper’ level if it wasn’t for her performance as the victim/protagonist. Quite frankly, given both subject matter and approach, this movie wouldn’t have been a hit if they’d advertised free beer and a full three-course meal with every ticket sold, picked up prospective patrons at their homes, and driven them back after the film was over.

She plays some of the movie in a trance, laughs hysterically out of context at other times, comes over vulnerable at times, and looks kind of shockingly delinquent-tough (in a realistic, non-typical movie kind of way) at others. Given the kind of movie Dementia is, and that none of the performances are exactly wreathed in subtlety, her’s fits in just fine.

Dementia is a surprisingly absorbing movie, with imagery you won’t forget in a hurry, and presuming the description doesn’t put you right off, you probably ought to try and see it once, as it’s one of movie-dom’s few genuine one-offs.

The Kino Video DVD of this has the original version of Dementia, at 57 minutes, and never released in this format at the time.

It also has the version that was released, cut back to 55 minutes +++, entitled Daughter of Horror, with occasional narration added – the latter voiced by, of all people, a young Ed McMahon. Yep, the Johnny Carson sidekick guy. The scripting of the narration is just a shade loopier than a theme park full of rollercoasters. Ed’s spooky voice is a taste-treat as well. I’ve watched about half of this version, and because there’s not as much narration as you might expect, it’s not as much of a bastardization of the original movie as it could have been, although the original version is the one.

Because Dementia is struck from an original negative and Daughter of Horror from a release print, the happy accident of its chequered history (examined in some detail in an article you can access in the extras) is that the never-released original version is the one with the sharper, less marked print now.

There’s some set-piece stuff you won’t forget in a hurry here – the expressionist-looking scene where Barrett’s character walks down an alley with her giant shadow preceding her on a large pale wall, the composition of the shots in the entrance-hall of the rich guy’s building, the creative use of no budget whatsoever when someone takes a header off a balcony, and an amazing violent effect achieved by a shot of a disintegrating mirror that might well be Lady from Shanghai-rerun territory, but gives old Orson a run for his money.

It’s got its limitations, and plenty of them, but Dementia is largely a success on its own terms, and few movies have been quite as determinedly loony-two-shoes individualistic about defining their own terms.

(8 out of 11 on the user-friendly MPHOAH scale)

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* (The same Shorty Rogers who supplied the music for one of the most famous cartoons of all time, Friz Freleng’s Warner Bros epic The Three Little Bops. Actually, it’s similar music too.)

** (The remake was entitled The Cabinet of Caligari. Maybe the medical licensing board was tougher this time around. Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the 1919 original with Conrad Veidt, make that your first priority date with insane dream-logic movie-making, ahead of any of the features mentioned here. Stop piddling around here and go do it now. If you can see the version Kino Video put together, restored better than should have been possible, with highly effective tinting, and a new score that works, all the better.)

*** (The movie Dementia most reminds me of is a 60s ultra-indie entitled Carnival of Souls. You should see that too, presuming you’re into obscure and truly bizarre horror movies which are much more interested in their own weird logic than any vaguely conventional generic considerations. They’re not that similar, but there are similarities, which you couldn’t say about 99.8% of movie history compared to these two. If anything, I’d say Dementia is the better picture, because it’s shorter and more focussed, the one probably resulting from the other. Like it or laugh your pants off at it, there’s nothing extraneous in Dementia.)

++ (The score seems a bit ripe at the start, but keep an ear out for where it goes. If you like your bit of classical music, there’s some interesting tonal stuff in there – not dissonant exactly, but disconcerting – and it adds a lot to the movie. It probably would have worked at least as well without the Marni Nixon vocals, which are much-commented on when the movie is commented on at all, but overall come over a bit too Forbidden Planet for me in this context.)

+++ (This reminds me to mention that apart from some stuff that very much constituted “adult themes” at the time – as in “We just don’t do that stuff in movies in the mid-50s” – there’s some violence in there, and one particularly grisly bit at that. Nothing that would induce up-chucking in a seasoned veteran of the post-slasher movie era, but you still probably wouldn’t want to show it to Great Aunt Minerva or the kids, given that either/both may have nightmares for months and up-chuck into the bargain.)
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MATCH POINT (2005)

Around this time there was some romantic comedy about Kirsten Dunst being a tennis player and some other guy who wasn’t as good a tennis player, and I thought this was that movie, right up until I saw it. *

The other movie never really had any particular attraction for me, but now I wish I’d watched it instead.

Anyway, Match Point is about some tennis coach, (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who’s engaged (or something) to the daughter of this rich, old money type family in England. But he falls for this American actress (Scarlett Johansson) who tends to the rougher side of life, because they have wild nookies, which the guy doesn’t have with the likeable daughter of the rich family.

It rattles on like that for 124 minutes. Variations on the same enthrallment-resistant crises over and over again, until it turns unconvincingly bleaker and uglier. It’s gloomy as a wet weekend in Wantirna, seems to run about three days longer than that, the characters on the screen most of the time aren’t the likeable ones, and the ones that are meant to be keeping our attention tend to be short of character, redeeming features, and dialogue with enough snap to prop up a drooping eyelid or two.

Even as later Woody Allen features go, you’d be struggling to find a duller one. It could almost pass as noir if it wasn’t for the slackness of the pacing, and the general dithering around to get precisely nowhere.

From memory there was one actual funny line, dropped in passing, between a couple of women in an art gallery.

Meyers’ character reminds me of a couple of other lead male characters I’ve seen in movies I watched recently – the brooding wet-end guy played by Clive Owen in Croupier, and the morally-challenged lead played by Christian Bale in American Psycho. The latter characterisation worked in context, and the former wouldn’t in any context. A hybrid of the two tends to struggle for appeal, given that one was a self-involved lunkhead, the other was a self-involved homicidal lunkhead, and neither had anything that would tripwire anything resembling empathy in an audience, particularly given that this was the exact quality the characters lacked themselves. **

Don’t know or care whether it’s Meyers or the character as written – from memory, it’s a little of Column A and a little of Column B – but, as it turns out, it’s one heck of a movie-crushing combination.

Scarlett is great to look at, of course, and otherwise spends what seems like 98% of screen time grumping or crying.

The main purpose of this movie, as near as I can see it, is to separate whatever came before and after it on Woody Allen’s filmography. It’s competently shot, made, and mostly acted better than that, and otherwise bear in mind two solid rules of thumb:
(a) If Woody Allen doesn’t bother to show up in one of his movies, you don’t bother showing up either. ***

(b) I see movies like this so you don’t have to.

Basically, you’d derive similar entertainment from pruning your toenails with gardening shears, only that would necessarily be somewhat more involving.

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

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* (That one was called Wimbledon, apparently.)

** (This is NOT a knock on Bale’s performance in American Psycho. It’s actually just what the doctor ordered in that picture. The problem with Meyers’ character here is that he’s not only a sadsack assclown, but he wouldn’t “voom” if you put the proverbial million volts through him, and he’s on screen a hell of a lot. It’s a little like the Woody-conundrum presented by the Michael Caine character in Hannah and Her Sisters - after a year or two of them loitering around on-screen, you get this vague feeling of creeping dread that the writer-director mistakenly thinks there’s something about this hopeless numbnuts character that we’re meant to find actually ‘human’ or ‘likeable’ or something, rather than the complete time-wasting yutz of a cipher that they patently are. It’s hard to get the thought out of your head that in, say, Play It Again, Sam or Annie Hall, the Woody Allen lead-character would have skewered and dismissed cheese-puffs like this in about two lines of deadly-accurate dialogue, and rightly so.)

*** (A lot of the ones he does show up in over the last couple of decades aren’t any bargain either, but there are exceptions. I’m yet to strike any exceptions in the category of Woody Allen movies that don’t contain Woody Allen on screen. It’s the difference between having a fighting chance and no chance whatsoever.)

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Heydy, hodey, howdy friends and parishioners.

Your esteemed if not festooned Interweb Unca, ol’ Leaping Larry L, has the considerable pressure of announcing his brand new, debut, and what’s-that-on-my-shoe actual BOOK, entitled Ad Infinitum.

It’s a collection of columns what I wrote for The Age newspaper’s media lift-out, The Green Guide, between 2003 and 2006, under the title “Ad Nausea”.

They were kind of send-ups of TV ads and promos at the time. Imagine the unbridled hilarity now! Well, I may well be a majority of one, but I still think they’re funny.

What I did was chop ‘em down, cut ‘em up, and do a little re-writing, and presto-chango, Abracadabra-a-la-Peanut-Butter-Sandwiches, and Viola! - there we are, it’s a book.

Also included is the best of a short run of Pay TV related columns I did for the same publication.

With all of that, it’s still a pretty skinny read (116 pages) and, no doubt hilariously overpriced, but if it makes you feel any better, with the costs involved being what they are, I reckon I’ll be darn-tootin’ lucky to break even, and a potential soaking is on the cards in Wallet City.

Actually, one positive thing I can say is that at least it looks pretty good. I mean it looks just like a real book, and everything.

Anyway, if you’re interested, you can get it from radio station RRR (corner Nicholson and Blyth Sts, East Brunswick, right at the end of the 96 tram line) over the counter for $25, or from their website, rrr.org.au where it will cost $25 plus whatever P&H they have to add on.

If, for some reason, you can’t access it by either of those methods, contact me via the contact thingo somewhere hear in the top right hand corner of the page, and we’ll try and work something out.

Ad Infinitum - the first and possibly only ever book by Leaping Larry L. Available now, wherever the financial heartbreak of self-publishing is observed. (Well, actually only via RRR.)

Here, with any luck whatsoever, is a link to a picture of the front and back covers, by way of illustration, and stuff.

ad-book-cover.pdf

BULLDOG DRUMMOND’S REVENGE (1937)

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AN INSUFFICIENTLY QUICK WORD ABOUT B-MOVIES

“It was clear that the top (or A) feature would garner the lion’s share of the box-office take. Thanks to the guaranteed distribution, there was practically no risk in producing the second (or B) feature, but there were only modest profits.”

- Charles Flynn/Todd McCarthy, “The Economic Imperative”, Kings of the Bs (details below)

“Another problem today in finding a B picture is that the notion of the A picture is more nebulous than ever, and you can’t have B pictures without A pictures. Indeed, with the predetermined double feature’s disappearance, it is less and less often that one hears the once familiar refrain: ‘I liked the second feature more than the main one.’ Nowadays a double feature is more likely to consist of two failed A pictures, with the older one on the bottom of the bill.”
- Andrew Sarris, “Beatitudes of B Pictures”, 1974, ibid.

“Let us now praise the B picture. But what is it exactly?”

- Andrew Sarris, “Beatitudes of B Pictures”, ibid

.

The usual attractive combination of slovenliness, ignorance, absence of research, and not caring whatsoever that marks the mainstream media’s coverage of popular culture history here has seen the term ‘B-movie’ come up for some slapstick abuse for at least a good part of the last 20 years.

What are often referred to as B-movies are often cult films, quirky, eccentric and/or trashy entries, or anything cheaply produced or of an obviously exploitation movie bent.

The “serious” papers here have apparently never been able to completely convince themselves that movies, contemporary music, television, comics etc are really of any importance, and thus deserving of the basics of research, fact-checking, and at least rudimentary grounding in the subject matter that would be expected of anyone writing about politics, general news, sport and so on. The tabloid papers apparently just don’t know any better. The only matters in these areas that are reported with any weight and gravity commensurate to that of ‘proper news’ are those which come with $ signs attached, i.e. box office figures and star salaries.

As a result of this rigorous and thorough policy of not knowing and not caring in equal proportions, many, many factual mistakes pass unedited to stand uncorrected, and the misuse of the term B-movie is one of them.

However, the term B-movie once was a specific designation with a particular meaning – quite a handy thing in both the English language and specialist jargon – rather than the vague windy whoof which the mainstream media here has allowed it to become; and our consideration here of the blithely knot-headed, enjoyable but decidedly non-iconic moment in motion picture history which is Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge allows us the opportunity to reinvestigate the original, correct usage of the term.

About a million years ago, when giant winged reptiles frolicked over Murrumbeena, the purchase of a movie ticket entitled one to more than three trailers for movies you’d never see in your right mind, some frankly masturbatory ads for wine, mobile phones or whatever, and the main feature.

Back then, the programme might include a cartoon, a short subject, a serial chapter, a newsreel, and a secondary feature movie before the intermission, followed ultimately by the main film the moviegoer had actually paid to see.

This necessitated the production of movies that were generally never intended to headline a bill, and were also, in general, more economically budgeted, not to mention economically cast, and, given the position on a programme already choked with copious footage, tended to be shorter than the main feature type movies as well. The studio system was in full force at the time, and studios were well-geared towards producing copious amounts of these kinds of secondary attractions.

The ones topping the bill, that were intended to actually draw the consumers into the cinemas, were referred to as A-pictures. The other kind, sharing the same half of the programme as the Three Stooges short, Flash Gordon and/or Bugs Bunny, were the B-movies.

A-pictures were made somewhat more speculatively, not unlike the major movies of today. You’d perhaps spend a bomb on something that looked, sounded and was cast like a million bucks (and probably cost that and maybe plenty more) and take an educated gamble that it would recoup the costs and, hopefully, make a monstrous profit into the bargain. Admittedly, before Federal authorities “encouraged” studios/distributors to divorce themselves from their interests in exhibition chains, this was less of a gamble than it might otherwise have been, but ultimately, much like today, to be profitable, an A-picture still needed to attract people into the cinemas.

B-movies were a different kettle of chickens entirely. They were generally farmed out at a flat fee, thus putting an upper limit on profitability, but then, the costs were lower to start with. Basically, the profit, although far smaller than a successful ‘A’ could attain, was guaranteed. *
Some maintain that any real meaning of the term “B-movie” thus died with the old studio system, and you can see the point. Technically, this is largely correct, although you’d have to make slight allowances for times, post-studio system breakdown in the 1960s, 1970s, and maybe even a tiny bit into the ‘80s, when double-bills still sometimes occurred in first-release movie houses. **

However, especially in more recent times, when there’s only one picture on the bill, anything that screens in a cinema is essentially an A-picture by definition, and there’s no need to plough any further into the alphabet trawling for extraneous designations.

Certain kinds and trends of films tended to recur under the auspices of B-movie production. It became a kind of connotative shorthand to refer to later (let’s say 1970s) movies as “B’s” if they resembled that kind of pacy, rugged, sawn-off horror/crime/suspense flick produced to a tight if not downright penurious budget. And as an analogy, or connotation, this made a certain amount of sense, even if it wasn’t technically accurate.

The more contemporary trend, of calling just about anything vaguely off-beat that wasn’t obviously targeting the megaplex mainstream a ‘B-movie’ is just sloppy thinking if it’s thinking at all. Movies made for cable, regular TV, or even for direct-to-DVD are actually much more analogous to the real meaning of B-movies. In at least the former two cases, they’re made under certain budgetary restrictions, and effectively go out at a flat fee, thus setting a ceiling on potential profit, similar to the old-time B’s.

A SMALL EVENT OF SERIESES

Anyway, a particular class of B-movies in ye olden days – numerically a minor puddle off the main rainwater drain-flow, but a pretty interesting little digression for gutter-hunters nonetheless - were the series movies which featured one or more major recurring characters. These might include Jungle Jim (a somewhat more clothed Tarzan off-shoot with Johnny Weissmuller), Bomba the Jungle Boy (another quasi Tarzan spin-off), the Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the Saint and Falcon movies with George Saaahhhnders and his real life bro Tom Conway, the original Bulldog Drummond movies, and an intense but ultimately not exactly generation-spanning fascination with Asian detectives such as Charlie Chan and Mr Moto, among many others. (Other series, not a phalanx of other Asian detectives.)

Not all series movies were pitched at B-level. Some were A’s, and some of what became B-series were initiated by one or two A-pictures. (Both the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series and the Bulldog Drummond pictures conformed to this pattern.) Although I didn’t cite any above, some were comedies, like the long-running Blondie series, based on the comic strip, Francis the Talking Mule, and the Ma & Pa Kettle films, although whether they play as comedies now might come down to the eye of the beholder a bit. (To me, Percy Kilbride as the impenetrably laconic and magnificently idle Pa Kettle is one of the great comedy ‘types’ of all time. For the rest, you’re probably on your own.)

What’s interesting about some of the nominally crime/action/mystery-oriented series pictures is that, constrained by budget and their inherent purpose (i.e. as minor features sharing a bill with a longer A-picture) they tended to a bracingly brisk running length, tended to have an orientation towards leavening humour, and as a result of both qualities, had an ability to turn out as breezy, enjoyable little movies. ***

It’s a little strange that some critics and film historians have been generous enough to acknowledge the technical facility and efficiency of certain makers of the chapter serials, (which is more than fair enough), but hardly anyone other than Leonard Maltin ever acknowledges the efforts of those who laboured on the series B’s.

At very least, folks who don’t mind the odd wallow in a real old creaker of a movie should be gently shepherded towards the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes pictures, the Saint and Falcon movies, and the Bulldog Drummond flicks. All of them have nice moments of suspense, a few laugh-out-loud flickers of humour, pleasantly oily villainy featuring oak-solid character actors carving a little ham, and rattle along like a nitro-fuelled tram. The contrast between these exceptionally unpretentious little firecrackers and the bloato ‘action movie’ dirigibles of today is instructive. All the technology, visual firepower, untold gold bullion splurging, and 158 recording tracks of explosions are on the side of the current films, but they just can’t make the movies MOVE like the old guys did. If you can make allowances for the technique, technology, mores, and financial limitations of the older films, they’re still surprisingly (if not astonishingly) enjoyable to watch, not to mention zippy like a pinball machine.

SOMETHING RESEMBLING AN ACTUAL MOVIE REVIEW

None of the old B-movie series may have been as determinedly cracked as the Bulldog Drummond movies. (Although some of the later Falcon movies with Tom Conway might give them a run for their money.) I first came across these in the job-lot of antique pictures that Channel Nine picked up at some media yard sale when it first went to 24 hour broadcasting (sometime in the 70s from memory) and used to run all night old movie marathons, in times long before ‘infomercials’ were discovered in the wild, and employed to reduce the average human being’s risk of exposure to entertainment, by doing away with such frivolities as all-night movie marathons.

I’d never heard of them, and fell in love with them straight away, recognising them as sawn-off, chopped-down prototypes for the later adventures of The Saint and James Bond. Actually, there’s a bit of Thin Man breeziness to the main characters in there too, and the vestiges of a Biggles-derived sense of highly righteous Britishness. Hell, there’s even a sidekick called “Algy”.

[The books of “Sapper” (Herman McNeile) may have been somewhat more earnest than the movies ever turned out to be, and, according to at least one description, more unequivocally racist and reactionary as well. However, they preceded both The Saint novels and stories of Leslie Charteris, **** and, by over two decades, the first James Bond novel, and seemingly were the prototype for both, as the movie adaptations may well have been for the subsequent Saint and Bond films.)

They were snappy, funny and effortless viewing, stocked with quality character actors in highly eccentric roles, and they were over with before you’d had an opportunity to ever think about checking your watch.

Of course, as rare things do, they vanished, (probably even before Nine’s movie marathons did), and like the vast majority of citizens worldwide, I pretty much forgot about them. However in more recent times, everything ever committed to film stock, videotape or 8mm home movies seemed inclined to turn itself out on DVD. More recently again, it became apparent to me that even those titles long since forgotten by history to the extent that no-one had remembered to officially or even hardly officially issue them for retail as DVDs, were nonetheless available if you knew where on the electrophonic internerd to look for them, and, on an inexplicable whim, I started having a desultory scratch-around for the Bulldog Drummond pix on the off chance. Much to my general befuddlement, it turned out that someone had issued them as a “proper” DVD (albeit on a public domain basis, not an official studio reissue) with no less than six of the old creakers on the one double-sided disc, three movies per side. *****

(Bear in mind that three Bulldog Drummond pictures take less up time than one Peter Jackson King Kong remake, not to mention that you’ve got a shot at still having your own hair and teeth and not remaining in a coma after watching the BD pictures.)

The first one on the disc was Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge, so that’s the one I’m semaphoring you about.

A scientist (English of course) has come up with some highly compact new bomb which has the tremendous benefit for humankind that a mere suitcase-full of the suckers can blow up all of Europe. Bulldog Drummond’s buddy the Inspector guy from Scotland Yard (John Barrymore) is trying to supervise the scientist’s safe passage to some top-secret conference he’s got to go to to explain his invention, only the wrong people are trusted, and the scientist putts out well before the second round of comedy interplay between Bulldog Drummond and his butler (E. E. Clive). Soon, despite the Inspector guy’s orders to stay out of it, and his fiancée’s similar preferences, Bulldog is blithely squaring his jaw and hurling himself into the espionage ruck, dragging his somewhat less enthusiastic butler and cheerfully “What ho!” lunk-headed buddy Algy (Reginald Denny, who looks and talks EXACTLY like a Reginald Denny) with him.

Along the way is treachery, skulduggery, cross-dressing, character comedy and gag lines slapping back and forwards at a spiffing clip, excellent long-suffering comedy butlery from E. E. Clive, a international train ride with danger at every turn, comedy relationship problems, and just in case that didn’t give you your full money’s worth for a whole 60 minutes of entertainment, there’s the little sub-plot about how the explosive used to make the mini-bombs is both highly volatile and completely unpredictable, could blow up at any impact, and the villains don’t know this, and are on the same train as the heroes.

Man, that’s how you pack your hour’s sausage-worth of entertainment. After all, why leave any air-pockets?

Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge clunks down the intervening decades and survives as a complete hoot. John Howard (no relation) might not utterly burst off the screen as one of the great leading men, but he was a great choice for this depiction of Bulldog Drummond. Not a spy like James Bond, not exactly even a foppish gentleman righter of wrongs like the Saint, nor a gentleman amateur detective type like the Falcon, but a bored ex-Army guy who just hates the idea of missing out on a spot of “Top hole!” adventure in the interests of general British niceness, so long as physical risk and gunplay are occasionally involved. Tennis just wasn’t his thing, you know, so he recovers stolen and exceptionally combustible explosives instead. Throw in a few laughs, some block-headed guy named Algy and enough plot for any three normal movies, and it’s a winning formula to me.

(8 out of 11 on the MPHOAH scale)

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* (For a much more detailed look at this subject, down to a breakdown of numbers from actual cases of A and B-pictures, check out the book Kings of the Bs edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn (originally pub. Dutton, 1975). You should check it out anyway, if you can find a copy. It’s one of the best books on the movies I’ve read. Lots of interviews with some very interesting movie makers, some of whom haven’t been covered in any great detail (or in some cases any detail) elsewhere. Also a selection of articles of varying seriousness on both individual B-movies, and genres within the B’s. The chapter dealing with this particular definition of B-movies is entitled “The Economic Imperative”, written by the book’s editors.)

** (This is fudging it a little, although essentially accurate. Double bills were becoming more uncommon in first-run houses here even in the early 70s, and certainly more as time slid on. There probably were still the very occasional double-bills as late as the early 80s. When such things did occur, it became more commonly the practice for the co-billed (secondary) feature to be a former A-movie, whether an older one, or a more contemporary one that wasn’t fancied to do box-office by itself. Drive-ins were more the place where double (or even triple) bills were encountered, but there again the trend changed to where B-type featured were ultimately supplanted by former A’s. None of this refers to revival houses, which did typically run double-features throughout the 70s, 80s and even 90s, before video and then DVD killed most of them off. In those cases, there was no real question of A and B designated pictures, since the pictures drew from a different audience to the mainstream, were all generally non-first release movies anyway, and it was a case of specialist interest pictures either drawing or not drawing as a double, not an A/B picture situation. With exceptions in the hard-tops during the period mentioned, it was the drive-ins that most closely approximated the old divisions, since before they themselves were whittled away, and before they went effectively to an all-A pictures set-up, they would actually run one main attraction with lesser one/s, sometimes lower-budgeted and analogous to the B’s of yesteryear. Bear in mind that I haven’t recently researched any of this - and wouldn’t know exactly where to look in an Australian context to be honest - and am going largely on both what I’ve read, and a not-entirely-ironclad memory as a movie-goer. You should probably view this as necessarily +/- 100% when it comes to margin for error, although I’m reasonably sure the basics are right, if not the particulars.)

*** (This is probably evident in the ensuing paragraphs anyway, but I’ll make the distinction more evident for less superannuated readers somewhat addled by antique concepts and terminology, and to err on the side of clarity. The “series B’s” as I call them were not the same thing as serials, despite the fact that both had continuing characters, and were, in a sense, made to the B-movie economic template, both in terms of restricted budget, and, I suspect, in the manner in which they presumably sold at a flat rate, as programme filler items at the cinemas. The ‘chapter serials’ as I prefer to call them since it’s a more clearly distinctive description, were, as the name implies, a single storyline broken into chapters. Typically each episode or chapter would begin with a recap of events at the end of the preceding chapter, spin out its tale of derring-do or doing-der, and then leave the hero/heroine/all of the above in some inextricably dire predicament to set up the next chapter. This was a traditional form of movie storytelling going back to the silent era. According to the Ephraim Katz Film Encyclopaedia, the standard length for chapters was two reels (roughly 15-18 minutes, similar to the Three Stooges comedy shorts, for example.) The B-Movie series were complete, if generally short, feature movies, (55 to 75 minutes to put a reasonably indicative nominal figure on it, although there was no particular standard length in reality) complete in themselves, although in some series, a degree of plot continuity was observed, in that events which took place in one movie would be acknowledged in the next one. (For example, if the lead character married someone in one movie, he would still be married to her in the next.) However, as mentioned, the series B’s were each complete within themselves, and a longer story wasn’t broken over two or more pictures. Basically they were similar to the James Bond series in those regards. Whereas, you might say that the serials were one James Bond picture broken up into 15 (or however many) equal parts.)

**** (For the record, as near as I can tell, the first Bulldog Drummond book was published in 1930, the first Saint one in 1935, and Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, appeared in 1953. Although a creature of a somewhat different stripe, it’s probably worth mentioning W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories here as well, spy tales set in WWI of a notably less heroic, arguably more cynical stripe than the Bonds of this world, and a clear anticipation of another kind of spy fiction, for example represented by the novels of John Le Carre. However Maugham was an influence on Bond’s author Ian Fleming – as anyone who has read the Bond short story collections For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy could only fail to notice if they’d never read a word of Maugham’s – and of the novels, Casino Royale is noticeably closer to that more downbeat approach than some of the more elaborate later examples.)

***** (It’s a release dated 2004 from an outfit called Treeline Films. On the front of the package it says “Mystery Classics”. It also displays a colour photo of a ferrety-looking gent who to my eyes resembles a somewhat harried middle-aged gay librarian, decked out in a trenchcoat and white scarf, with black hat significantly askew and carrying a large magnifying glass for no readily apparent reason, especially in that he is clearly looking over it rather than through it. All of which has nothing to do with the contents of the disc, which are all in black and white, aren’t necessarily mysteries, probably aren’t considered classics by anyone, and have little to do with aging clerical workers who have defined their sexuality late in life and now wear trenchcoats and carry magnifying glasses to celebrate this fact. The six movies contained on the disc are listed in smaller type on the cover. The titles are BD’s Revenge, BD Escapes, BD in Africa, BD’s Secret Police, BD Comes Back, and BD’s Peril. All feature the non-Prime Ministerial John Howard in the lead role, with the exception of Escapes, in which we delight in the company of an astoundingly young Ray Milland. The absence of original studio information in either packaging or opening credits strongly suggests this is a public domain job. Of the one movie I’ve watched so far, I’d guess that it was an old, if reasonably complete, TV print. It’s a little grey here and there, at one point flashes dark-light-dark-light like a vintage discotheque, but is generally both easily watchable and audible.)

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