Bedazzled (1967)

The exploding British comedy scene of the 60’s was fueled in large part by the breakthrough success of Beyond the Fringe, a theatrical revue with an emphasis on anti-establishment satire – both intellectual and unapologetically silly – featuring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett. All four young men achieved an instant celebrity, none more so than Cook and Moore, who starred in the series Not Only…But Also beginning in 1965, spotlighting their comedic – and, in the case of Moore, comedic and musical – talents. The two caught the attention of Stanley Donen, the legendary Singin’ in the Rain director who had moved to England in the early 60’s and recently completed two Hitchcock-inspired romantic thrillers, Charade (1963) and Arabesque (1966), as well as the experimental drama Two for the Road (1967), and he proposed a collaboration. The comedians subsequently conceived a modern variation on Faust, with Cook penning the screenplay and Moore composing the jazzy score, casting themselves as the leads (the Devil and his mark, respectively). It seems a small miracle that this film exists: a handsome 20th Century Fox production filmed in Swinging London and starring two stage-and-TV comedians who were unknown quantities as big-screen leading men. But the film played to the strengths of Donen, Cook, and Moore, with a significant comic assist by Eleanor Bron of Help! fame and a memorable supporting role – actually, hardly more than a cameo – from the film’s only true movie star, Raquel Welch. (Naturally, Welch was all over the advertising.) The late 60’s saw a number of oddball satires from major studios, but Bedazzled, with its clever dialogue and charming lead performances from three sketch comedy veterans, is easily one of the best.

Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) attempts to seduce Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron) through a Satanically-assisted gift with words.

Dudley Moore gets a few letters swapped out to become Stanley Moon, a nebbish short-order cook who for six years (!) has been secretly, miserably in love with his co-worker Margaret Spencer (Bron). He can only bring himself to speak to her in his thoughts, and we eavesdrop on them as he opines: “Each time you speak it’s like a thousand violins playing in the halls of Heaven,” while waitress Margaret bleats deadeningly over the counter: “One cheeseburger, one shanty, one portion French fries.” In church, Stanley’s desperate prayer – apart from could he please get together with Margaret – is a request to God to give a little sign to prove his existence. (“I mean, I’m not saying that if you don’t give a sign I won’t believe in you; I’m not threatening you or anything like that…”) In answer he gets the Devil (Cook), currently using the pseudonym George Spiggott, who interrupts Stanley in the middle of a clumsy suicide attempt. He explains that he’s in competition with God to be the first to a hundred billion souls, and offers Stanley seven wishes in exchange for his. The first, a “trial wish,” he uses on a “Frobisher & Gleason raspberry-flavored ice lolly.” After taking a bus to the establishment, Spiggott hands him the ice lolly and asks, “Have you got a sixpence? I’ve only got a million-pound note.” Thus begins their exploitative friendship, with each of Stanley’s proper wishes coming with a monkey’s paw twist from Spiggott, who nonetheless washes his hands of all culpability.

Stanley Moon, pop star.

With one foot in sketch comedy, Bedazzled takes an episodic format based on each of Stanley’s wishes and the sexual frustration that ensues. He becomes a silver-tongued philosopher in my favorite of the segments, but Margaret’s erotically charged responses to his verbal gymnastics fails to translate into anything physical. Spiggott projects Stanley and Margaret into wealthy married life, but she’s blatantly unfaithful. And so on. These segments are kicked off with Spiggott’s reliable magic words “Julie Andrews” and end when Stanley blows a raspberry to communicate his desire to terminate (which seems to happen more quickly with each one). Donen gets to play with different modes for each outing, though the most notable stylistically is Stanley’s transformation into a pop idol, his in-studio performance filmed in black-and-white cinéma vérité and accompanied by dozens of screaming girls, offering not just a tribute to A Hard Day’s Night (1964) but verisimilitude with contemporary Top of the Pops-style programming. Stanley’s song, “Love Me,” needily pleas in thesaurus form, but he’s outgunned by Spiggott’s appearance as the placid-faced lead singer of Drimble Wedge and the Vegetation, whose song offers nothing to the audience but alternating loathing and indifference. “You fill me with inertia,” he tells his chorus of gyrating go-go dancers. While all this is happening, Margaret and an inspector with romantic intentions (Michael Bates) go searching for the missing, presumed-dead Stanley.

Raquel Welch as Lilian Lust.

The sketches are the film’s strength and its weakness; they tend to be one joke, escalated to conclusion – and you’ll get the joke pretty quickly. They also pad the film a bit unnecessarily; at 104 minutes, Bedazzled is pretty long for this simple a premise. But Cook’s screenplay finds plenty of hilarious moments between the sketches, filling in the details of Spiggott’s daily routine and illustrating how he’s become so jaded with it, eager to finish his game with God and win his way back into Heaven. He scratches records before sending them on their way (via a clothesline) to customers; he opens a box of Agatha Christie novels and tears out the last page of each. We also meet his retinue of the 7 Deadly Sins, including Welch as Lilian Lust – obviously Stanley’s personal favorite of the bunch – and Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) making a wonderful Envy. As the story progresses, and wish after wish crumbles, Stanley meekishly approaches a kind of low-key self actualization. Midway through the film he says that he likes Spiggott because he actually listens to him – which, naturally, is a double-edged sword. By the end of the film, he breaks free of Spiggott, and if this film is going to resonate with the viewer on a personal level, it’s the emotionally accurate depiction of an abusive relationship finally brought to an end. Stanley may never get with Margaret, but at least he’ll win or lose on his own small-scale terms. So Bedazzled is just as much therapy as it is devilish comedy, though the latter keeps giving and giving throughout the film. As when Stanley argues with Spiggott that Adam and Eve must have been happy in Eden, and Spiggott replies: “Of course they were. They were pig-ignorant.”

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Horrors of Spider Island (1960)

The 1960 German film Horrors of Spider Island (Ein Toter hing im Netz, or “A Corpse Hangs in the Web,” among its many titles) is famously terrible – it was deservedly included in the tenth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 – but I can’t see how anyone could possibly be let down by it. It’s primo drive-in nonsense: on a remote island targeted by uranium hunters, a mutated spider bites a man and turn him into a half-spider fiend who stalks his fellow castaways, bikini-clad, promiscuous club dancers en route to Singapore. Girls are draped throughout this movie like Oriental rugs – because it’s humid, and they need to lie down – while cocky, randy men leer from above and fend off the raging humanoid spider monster. That’s it. I just described the entire film. This semi-legendary psychotronic movie is now on Blu-ray thanks to Severin Films, who have included both a later U.S. cut called It’s Hot in Paradise as well as its original, uncensored German version, which includes surprisingly plentiful nudity: a cat-fight in which clothes are ripped free! – a skinny-dipping scene in awkwardly shallow waters! – a numbingly prolonged topless dance so darkly lit that you’ll get eye strain! Severin typically goes the extra mile with their limited edition pre-orders, and as a website exclusive they include a reproduction of a 1962 French photo-comic adaptation, as well as (now sold out) a resin figure of the clawed, snaggle-toothed mutant spider, which now glares at me on my desk. This is the right approach to selling a gloriously cheap and sleazy picture like Spider Island.

Alexander D’Arcy, as the doomed Gary, leads his fellow castaways (including Barbara Valentin) through Spider Island.

Director Fritz Böttger lets you know the score straight away by opening with an interminable sequence in which a multitude of models and dancers audition in various stages of undress before the arrogant Gary (Alexander D’Arcy, far from The Awful Truth), who crosses his legs as a signal to his assistant Georgia (Helga Franck) whether one of the young women should be selected for the voyage to Singapore. Much is made of the secret signal, which is the film’s excuse to spend as much time as possible with voluptuous women parading before the camera. On a stock footage trip over the ocean, the plane stock footagely goes down, intercut with close-up shots of the women, apparently in another dimension, screaming at the camera. “There’s absolutely no reason yet to fear the worst,” Gary’s partner back home reassures us: “We only know that the plane caught fire and we lost radio contact.” Luckily, Gary and the women arrive in strategically ripped clothing at the titular island, which Gary immediately, oddly, accurately conjectures to be the home of uranium miners. Upon discovering a log cabin, they find the body of one Professor Green suspended in a giant spider web (thus the original German title). Gathering together that night in the cabin over some canned food, we get an early indication of how the female characters will treat the imminent danger for the rest of the film: one complains that all the talk of giant spiders is spoiling her appetite; the other shrugs and says, “I can’t change anything.” Gary flings himself into a love triangle with Georgia and the libidinous Linda (Elfie Wagner), complains that it’s the humidity that’s causing him to plunge into Linda’s mouth, and walks into the jungle to be stalked by one of the spiders, which moves very fast thanks to editing and the prop-master sticking it in various trees. The spider jumps him (or his shoulders, anyway), they wrestle, and he immediately – and I mean immediately – turns into a fanged, furry-headed spider-thing.

Georgia (Helga Franck) is assaulted by the spider-infected Gary.

With that out of the way, Gary and any other mutant spiders (there was just the one) will frequently disappear for large swaths of the picture while the castaways meet two of the dead professor’s male assistants (Harald Maresch and Rainer Brandt). Böttger, especially in the uncut version of the film, is far more interested in the lengthy triangulation of seductions and jealous rivalries as the chauvinist Brandt tries to choose a mate from the women dancing and posing in flower-covered bikinis (or less) about the grounds. Of the female cast, generating the most interest is the statuesque blonde “Babs,” played with a Traci Lords pout by Barbara Valentin, who would later appear in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s SF epic World on a Wire (1973). Even though the women are treated as decoration, the film can’t stop obsessing over them, putting the monster constantly on the backburner – and that’s all part of the campy appeal of Horrors of Spider Island. The cinematographer is Georg Krause, who had filmed Kubrick’s Paths of Glory just three years earlier, yet here, almost inevitably, seems to be just as concussed as the cast. I would have it no other way. Mix yourself your favorite Tiki cocktail and enjoy.

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Clue (1985)

In recent years we’ve had intermittent threats of board games becoming movies. Candy Man and Monopoly have been in development for a long while, the latter most recently announced with Kevin Hart attached. Yet this has been an intellectual property avenue that’s largely, perhaps mercifully, been neglected. Battleship (2012) may be one of the genre’s most prominent examples, thanks to its absurdity: changing the simple strategy game into an alien invasion epic. The genre also includes horror films – Ouija (2014) and Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), from Hasbro Studios –  and, if role-playing games count, Dungeons & Dragons (2000). (1995’s Jumanji may be an honorable mention, but it’s actually based on a children’s book.) It makes sense that the more narrative-friendly medium of video games are adapted far more frequently, though doing that well has also proven a notorious challenge. For board game movies, it may just be that we’ll never top Clue (1985). Even when Clue was released, many critics were cynical of the idea, and it wasn’t immediately hailed as anything special. It may be that its central gimmick was too great a distraction: the film was released with three different endings, so unless the theater announced which ending it was showing (and many of my local theaters did), you were essentially partaking in a game of chance to find out how it would end. When the film was released on VHS, it took a shape which has subsequently become its standard cut – all endings included – making it clear that not only was one ending was quite a bit better than the others, but that you’d feel robbed if you didn’t get to see all of them. Wouldn’t you think just a bit less of the movie if it didn’t have Michael McKean’s final triumphant line, or Madeline Kahn’s constipated description about hating someone so much that “it, flame, flame, flames, on the side of my face, breathing breaths, heaving breaths…” Watching all of its endings in a row, we can also see how they’re intended to comically rhyme with one another, and that it was always meant that viewers seek them all out. As a complete package, the film has deservedly become a classic of 80’s comedy.

The candlestick.

That the film works so well can only be marginally attributed to the source material. The game Clue (original UK name: Cluedo) is of course a whodunit, so making a murder-mystery was a given. The 70’s version that my family owned when I was growing up depicted actors/models on the cover portraying the famous characters, which further suggests a live-action interpretation could easily be made. But the film’s success relies on its slam-dunk creative team and cast. John Landis (An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, etc.), who executive produced, conceived the story with the film’s director Jonathan Lynn, and Lynn wrote the extremely verbose screenplay. Lynn was steeped in the British comedy scene of the 60’s as both actor and writer, having appeared in Cambridge Circus, and eventually went on to co-write the popular Yes Minister series. Clue was his first directorial effort; he would go on to make Nuns on the Run (1990) and My Cousin Vinny (1992), among others. The cast is filled out with ringers. In addition to Kahn as Mrs. White and McKean as Mr. Green, we’re served up Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet, and a couple of new characters: Tim Curry as the Butler and Colleen Camp as French maid Yvette. (Lee Ving of Flashdance also appears, however briefly, as Mr. Boddy.) The setting is a sprawling mansion with rooms and murder weapons paying homage to the board game; even the floor has a grid-like pattern that suggests spaces on a board. The location provides the opportunity for Lynn and Landis to riff on the Old Dark House mystery-horror-comedy genre so popular in the 20’s and 30’s (The Cat and the Canary and its ilk) as well as Agatha Christie including her long-running play The Mousetrap. Clue wasn’t the only 80’s film to mine this territory, but evoking these tropes provides a warmly familiar backdrop for a comedy in which how the actors react to each other is far more important than who actually dun-it.

Amateur investigations with Colleen Camp, Lesley Ann Warren, Michael McKean, Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, Martin Mull, and Madeline Kahn.

Lynn’s screenplay continually divides up, pairs off, and chaotically mashes together his characters so that in each new combination, every performer has a chance to shine in different ways. Warren’s devil-may-care Miss Scarlet is the madam of a politically-connected escort service. Lloyd’s Prof. Plum is a handsy lech – the polar opposite of his role in the same year’s Back to the Future. Kahn is a black widow with multiple dead or missing husbands:

“Your first husband also disappeared.”

“That was his job. He was an illusionist.”

“But he never reappeared.”

“He wasn’t a very good illusionist.”

McKean’s character is highly strung. Curry is a Butler’s Butler; when he suggests they move the cook’s body from the kitchen into the study, it’s just to keep the kitchen tidy. Mrs. Peacock is dignified but oblivious:

“Is there a little girl’s room in the hall?”

“Oui oui, Madame.”

“No, I just want to powder my nose.”

With Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving).

And so on. Nothing they do very much matters – we know that the plot must be constructed in such a way that the culprit could be literally anyone (isn’t this true of all those murder mysteries that don’t play fair?). Instead, the focus is on building a comic momentum. The film revs up slowly, its jokes patiently deployed, until bodies start piling up, panic sets in, and the comedy reaches a breathless crescendo in the film’s most fondly remembered set piece, Curry’s attempt to solve the murders by verbally and physically recapping everything that’s happened in the film so far, sprinting from room to room and playing both killer and victim. (Let’s be honest. Even in this intimidating ensemble, Curry is the film’s real star.) That Lynn is willing to go as broad as Mel Brooks with this material is indicated early on, not just from the recurring bit of guests at the front door sniffing the air suspiciously and checking their shoes, but at the generously spilling cleavage from Camp and Warren. This is proudly unsophisticated comedy. The jokes may not all be good, but like Airplane! they pummel you into submission through sheer accumulation. That’s how we get to the multiple endings, which work best when presented as multiple endings, so that we can see the various ways this could play out, like Penn and Teller revealing how a magic trick works. When viewed one after another, the endings are funnier, players shifted just slightly to present new murderers and motives, similar lines given multiple meanings, all of it wonderfully weightless. (I could not tell you what the plot of this film is, nor any of its plots, except that blackmail and politics and a mysterious phone call from J. Edgar Hoover are involved.) Clue is, indeed, a delightfully played game, which is a lesson that any future board game-to-film should try to remember.

 

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