Happy Thursday, everyone! The baseball playoffs are almost here (hooray for my hometown White Sox, the first team to clinch their division), it's getting cooler, the Bears might move to Arlington Heights and I have some new fun stuff to show off. Let's get to it. We have a woman hiding her past, a Catholic school in turmoil over chocolate bar sales, Burt Lancaster with birdies and kung-fu in 18th century France. It's a weird week..
______________________________
I don't buy that much into the auteur theory of directors. Frankly, film is one of the most collaborative of arts and to attribute the majority of the praise for a films style and focus to the director is reductive and more than a little insulting to everyone who works so hard on a film. (I quite like Kevin Smith's take on this; he obviously has a very distinctive style that could be considered auteurish but he simply refuses to use the "A film by" credit, one of the reasons for which he has never been admitted into the Directors Guild of America. The case against possessive credits and why the Writers Guild of America is against such a thing if the director isn't also the writer is laid out well here.)
Another director with a very distinctive style that could be considered an auteur is Samuel Fuller. A genre director that worked mostly outside of the studio system, he made weird, unconventional movies that tackled themes that few studio films would do in the pre-New Hollywood era. A case in point, this old Criterion I found of the movie The Naked Kiss (1964).
Constance Towers stars as Kelly, a small-town prostitute who ends up in yet another small town to peddle her wares. Almost run out of town by the local sheriff, she decides to settle down, hide her parstand get a job as a nurse at a local children's hospital. What could have been a movie purely a nice person trying to hide a shameful past becomes more of a waking nightmare as she learns more horrifying things about this town. (I feel like Stephen King might have things to say about all this, but I can't see that he's written about it.) This is a great, weird movie that goes places you're absolutely not expecting and ends in a weird moment of....maybe hope?
If you check this out and like it, also check Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), the absolute better movie about someone getting themselves committed to a mental institution under false pretenses, in this case to solve a murder.
The Naked Kiss is streaming on Criterion, HBOMax, Amazon Prime, Kanopy, Tubi, Plex and IMDb TV. Whew. You have no excuse to not being able to find. it.
Shock Corridor is also on Criterion and HBOMax as well as IndieFlix and Flix Fling.
______________________________
Hey, a blast from the past! I've never read the sequel but I quite liked The Chocolate War, an excellent movie about going to an all-guys Catholic high school (like the one I went to) and all the terrors therein. (Look, full credit to a lot of the people who worked there but my school had terrinble underpinings ox extreme whitness and misogyny thyat became more and more obvious as they went coed and their attendance became more diverse). RObert COmier passed away in 2000 and I would love to see his take on how Catholic education has evolved since Chocolate War was published.
Frankly, I also grabbed this just for the title.
______________________________
Interestingly, I've never seen this biopic of Robert Stroud. Stroud was a murderer who was incarcerated at Leavenworth in Kansas before being transferred to Alcatraz and became known as the Birdman because he became a self-taught ornithologist. It's apparently a pretty soft biopic of someone his fellow prisoners thought was far more sinister than portrayed here but frankly the reunion of Burt Lancaster and John Frankenheimer after The Train (an amazing movie about Resistance fighters hijacking a train of stolen Nazi art) is very attractive.
Birdman of Alcatraz is streaming on Kanopy and on PlutoTV with ads.
______________________________
Usually I save this last position for schlock but forget it, this is art with schlock trappings and it's a film that it's really fun to mention to people and have them go, "Huh?" Based on a real legend about a monster in the country of pre-Revolution France, the King has sent a nobleman and his faithful Mohawk companion to investigate the tales and kill the monster if need be. And then the movie gets weird. There's kung fu! Feral family members with knife weapons! The best use of the slo-mo fighting cliche we're all sick of! A weird level of eroticism! So much mud and rain! I love this movie so much and I was very, VERY happy to run across this hardcore three-disc Canadian DVD set. (The US DVD is worthless.) And if you only know Mark Dacascos, said Mohawk companion, from hosting the US version of Iron Chef you really need to check this out because he has amazing fight moves.
(Fair warning, there's toplessness in this trailer.)
Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des loups) is sadly not streaming on any current US package, but you can buy and rent it everywhere and it's absolutely my recommendation of the week.
No comments:
Post a Comment