Don’t Look Now (1973)

Posted on October 26, 2011 at 5:04 am by Jeff Kuykendall

This is a difficult one for me to approach. Don’t Look Now (1973) – as serious as it is, as complexly designed – is not a particularly difficult film. By its end, all the mysteries are solved, all the questions are answered, and it suddenly reveals itself to be quite simple. But the emotional punch is always too potent for me. I think it’s the tone. At nearly two hours, director Nicolas Roeg adapts a 55-page story by the late Daphne du Maurier with great respect and almost perfect fidelity, but he could have done the same as a one-hour episode of television. By taking his time developing the characters and lingering in the winding canals and alleys of a sinking Venice and that goddamn heavy, mournful tone, with Pino Donaggio’s delicate, beautiful score to aid him, he reduces me to dust. This film is very nearly dangerous. I love it as you would an alluring rose that keeps slicing your fingers to ribbons each time you handle it.

Donald Sutherland as John Baxter, at work in Venice.

It may pack an even greater punch for me now that I’ve been married for over a decade, and can relate more to the relationship between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s grieving parents John and Laura Baxter. (If I have a child I may have to forego ever watching this again.) The film opens in Roeg’s singular collage style, depicting the drowning death of their young daughter Christine while their son helplessly watches, and they sit unaware in their living room while John reviews slides he took in Venice. Unaware, that is, until John has a strange premonition while staring at a slide of a church, and a stranger in a red hood sitting in one of the pews, the face disguised; he spills his drink and a red streak blots out the figure’s head and spreads in a stain. He runs out into the rain – a fraction too late to rescue his red raincoat-wearing daughter. Later, they’re back in Venice, sitting in a cafe. He’s returned to complete work on the restoration of a mosaic in an old church. They’re recovering from the trauma of the death, but Laura is smiling again, and finding moments of apparent happiness. He becomes disturbed that two elderly women are watching them; when Laura meets them in the bathroom, she discovers that one of the sisters, blind with milky eyes, is psychic. The woman tells Laura that Christine is with them; that she’s happy, laughing. Laura is so overwhelmed with the news that she faints when she returns to John’s table, overturning it and all the drinks. Roeg films this in slow-motion, paying strict attention to the fate of every spilled glass.

Julie Christie as Laura, meeting for psychic advice with the two sisters.

Life continues – they meet with the local bishop overseeing the church’s restoration; they wander the byways of Venice together, which are gradually becoming deserted as winter approaches and the tourist season ends. The newspapers are filled with stories of a murderer on the loose. Laura, however, can’t stop thinking about the sisters – she wants to talk to her dead daughter again. When she finally consults with them in their hotel room one late evening, the psychic warns her that danger awaits them unless they leave Venice immediately. In the middle of the night, they receive a call from England. Their son has become injured at school with a possible concussion. Laura leaves immediately, but John decides to stay for a few more days; he was work to do at the church. She flies home, but not long after, he glimpses her on a boat with the two sisters, dressed in black. Panicked that she’s returned without contacting him, he comes to believe that Laura, still emotionally fragile, has fallen under their influence, to be manipulated for some unknown purpose. He returns to the hotel where the sisters were staying, only to find it vacant. He contacts the police; he questions everyone he’s met…and catches glimpses of a small figure in a red raincoat – just like his dead Catherine – running over bridges, ducking into alleys.

John helps place a gargoyle while working on the ancient Venetian church.

Roeg had co-directed the notorious, experimental Mick Jagger film Performance (1970) with Donald Cammell, and had initiated his distinctive solo career with Walkabout (1971), a meditative film about two children who find themselves abandoned in the Australian outback. Don’t Look Now firmly established his kaleidoscopic, impressionistic style, which would serve him well in unusual films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980). His films are like images reflected through shattered glass: there are obsessively repetitive patterns, and a narrative which constantly interrupts itself to depict moments past and forthcoming – perfect for a film about psychic premonitions, the weight of the past, and fate. A film class could fill a semester studying his editing style and use of montage in Don’t Look Now, intricate and painstakingly mapped. The most famous montage comes half-an-hour in, as we see John and Laura lying upon the bed reading a newspaper, initiating foreplay (Christie runs her fingers tenderly down Sutherland’s naked back and buttocks), making love, brushing their teeth, and getting dressed in the morning, all as a series of shots sliced into pieces and rearranged, while Donaggio’s score, both romantic and devastating, pulls you along. The disconnected images aren’t jarring, but lyrical; the effect is moving. This is a married couple reconnecting and recovering after the death of their daughter; naturally, the press at the time was more concerned with whether or not Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland had real sex on film! They didn’t. (But perhaps Roeg enjoyed all the attention, because he upped the sexual ante over his next two films.) All that tabloid chatter was a silly distraction; the scene is crucial to both the narrative and the emotional weight of the film, because they’ll have a row, and she will disappear, and John Baxter will spend the second half of the film trying to figure out just what the hell happened to his wife and why. And when brief shots from their lovemaking is intercut into the film’s very final montage, it serves to underline the story’s tragedy.

A crowd watches as a homicide victim is pulled from the canal.

The curious thing about rewatching Don’t Look Now is that it begins to seem almost unduly long. That’s perhaps because after you’ve seen it once, and its key twist has been revealed, you realize that there’s quite a lot of nothing happening in the story until you get to the end. Some of that tension toward the unknown dissipates on a reviewing, and so some narrative momentum is lost. Du Maurier, author of Rebecca and the story which inspired The Birds, composed an efficient and wry little tale, just a bit too sour to work as black comedy, but mildly shocking nonetheless (the title comes from the story’s opening line of dialogue, spoken as John points across the cafe to the two sisters staring at them). Roeg is largely faithful to the story, which was overstuffed with incident; dragging it out to this length, however, means adding some unnecessary business involving the bishop and John’s work at the church. But Roeg’s contributions shouldn’t be dismissed; in many ways he improves upon the source material. He draws stronger connections between the past and the present, placing a greater emphasis upon the mysterious little figure in the red raincoat, and lets the story stretch out and breathe. It becomes more emotional, almost unbearably so; yet he can also milk enough claustrophobic suspense from the material that it elevates Don’t Look Now to the level of a first-rate Polanski. All this means it’s no wonder that this typically makes the short lists of the best horror films of the 70’s.

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Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Posted on October 24, 2011 at 5:38 am by Jeff Kuykendall

I saw a snippet of Phantom of the Paradise (1974) on television as a child; I remember Paul Williams talking to the masked Phantom, and thinking, “Who is this little man with the giant glasses and the shaggy blond hair, and why is there a masked man with black lipstick and silver teeth and a bulging eyeball talking to him?” It haunted me for years…until I finally rented it about a decade ago, and said, “Aha! So this is why I’m so messed up.” Because otherwise I was watching Superfriends and The Incredible Hulk and this just did not fit in with any of my familiar paradigms. I probably did recognize Paul Williams, somewhat, because he had been in The Muppet Movie (1979), which I watched over and over, and various episodes of The Love Boat, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew, and Fantasy Island – all shows which were hard to avoid in the late 70’s and early 80’s. But Phantom of the Paradise represented something so far from the beaten path that it could only leave a  strong mental impression. Now I own both the CD and the vinyl LP, as well as the French import DVD (because it has extras, of course, which the Region 1 version does not), and I watch it ritually every year or so. I have joined the Paradise cult, really, and yet I still cannot tell you what the hell is happening in the last five minutes of the film – and my brain is fully-formed now (more or less).

The soundtrack to the film.

It’s much easier to approach this film as an adult who can place it all in context. Brian De Palma was coming off a minor sensation with the low-budget shocker Sisters (1973), which initiated the Hitchcock comparisons that have dogged him for his entire career. Paul Williams was a singer/songwriter with a few hits under his belt, though most of them were performed by other artists (The Monkees, Three Dog Night, The Carpenters, Helen Reddy). His albums were the kind of soft AM music that you would put on the record player while turning the lights down low and guiding your lady friend across the shag carpet and over to the liquor cabinet for some drinks on the rocks. But increasingly in the 70’s he gravitated to film and television; after Phantom of the Paradise he would write the songs for the kiddie gangster musical Bugsy Malone (1976) – Christ, another film that haunted my childhood – before penning the numbers for The Muppet Movie (including “The Rainbow Connection” and “Movin’ Right Along”), a film in which he also appeared. He was an unlikely celebrity; he was short, and he looked a bit like Angela Lansbury, albeit with a voice like a cat’s growl. He was just as unlikely a suspect to collaborate with someone like De Palma, who was establishing an overstimulated cinematic style, hypersexual, intricately composed, and proudly cinephilic, dropping visual references to his favorite filmmakers in a manner which critics would come to love or loathe. Yet in Phantom those homages could find a comfortable home as parodies. De Palma saw the film as an opportunity to try on different costumes and play around: to make both a horror film and a musical, and to ape lots of other genres along the way. Paul Williams found an ideal showcase as both a songwriter and an actor. He’d write songs that would send up every musical genre he could think of, while skewering the soullessness of the music industry. And, as the Phil Spector-like rock impresario Swan, he would also be the star of the film. Whatever else this film was going to be, it was guaranteed to be unique.

Archie Hahn leads the Juicy Fruits in "Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye."

The storytelling is as much in the music as it is in the script, and in De Palma’s dazzling visuals. In the opening song, “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye,” the Juicy Fruits (a Sha Na Na-styled retro group, led by comic actor Archie Hahn) sing about a rock star who commits suicide to boost his album sales, thus raising money for his sister’s operation. The idea would be satire if it weren’t completely believable; it also sets the stage for some of Phantom‘s central themes: doing anything to become famous, and the public’s lust for morbid spectacle. Meanwhile, De Palma goes to work, cramming his frame with information: while Hahn sings and combs his greased-up hair, we see one of his back-up singers initiating a brawl with a guy in the audience, and then making out with the guy’s girlfriend – he returns to the stage holding a brassiere. This is immediately followed by the introduction of Arnold Philbin (George Memmoli, Mean Streets), who is pleading to Swan – directly to the camera – in a spoof of the opening of The Godfather. But listen to what he’s saying. Their latest manufactured starlet wants to break with Swan’s Death Records (originally to be called Swan Song, until Led Zeppelin, just launching their own label with that name, put an end to that). Even though Philbin bribed the judge, the court refuses to accept the validity of signing someone to a lifetime contract. So the next crucial theme is established: signing a contract with a record company is equivalent to signing over your soul.

Amateur composer Winslow Leach (William Finley) meets - and falls for - amateur singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper).

While Philbin talks, the Juicy Fruits leave the stage, to be replaced by Winslow Leach (William Finley, Sisters), taking the piano to sing his song “Faust.” Swan is immediately taken by the songwriting, and asks Philbin to persuade Leach to sign over the number so it can be used for the opening of Swan’s latest club, The Paradise. (Though Williams is playing Swan, it’s easy to imagine that he saw himself in Leach: sincere, talented, but lacking the good looks and natural charisma that typically define a pop star.) Swan wants Leach’s words, but not his voice. For that, he auditions hundreds of girls, though when they show up at his palace, it’s only to join an orgy on a giant circular bed. (Revenge of the Cheerleaders fans should watch for a small part by Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith.) The beautiful young singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper) forms a fast friendship with Leach, but when she realizes the sleazy nature of Swan’s auditions, she leaves in disgust. Leach, desperate to receive credit for his songs, infiltrates in drag. Paul Williams is introduced in a robe and with a smirk on his face; he throws Leach out, and two cops, bribed by Swan, plant smack on him. Leach is taken to Sing Sing (get it?), where his teeth are removed (to prevent infections, we’re told) and replaced by metal. Along with other prisoners, he’s forced to work at the Death Records packaging plant, where he hears the latest single by the Juicy Fruits, “Faust.” Leach goes into a rage, escapes the plant, and heads to Swan’s corporate headquarters, where an accident in a record press mangles half of his face; he stumbles off, bleeding and moaning, into the night. When he returns, he will be the Phantom.

The trademark De Palma splitscreen: the Phantom sets off an on-stage explosion while Swan (Paul Williams) watches.

The Phantom’s first crime might be the film’s most famous scene. De Palma offers two continuous extended takes in split screen, showing simultaneous events at The Paradise. While “The Beach Bums” (a Beach Boys parody – the same performers from The Juicy Fruits) rehearse onstage with girls in bikinis, Swan looks on from a balcony above, and the Phantom sneaks a bomb into the trunk of a prop car which is wheeled toward the band. On the one hand, the scene works as an extended parody of the opening shot of Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil (1958); but it’s a marvel of staging, as we occasionally see the same characters from two different angles, each shot providing different information, culminating in Swan catching a glimpse of The Phantom just before one camera swings toward the on-stage explosion and the other zooms in on Swan’s face. After this first murder is committed, and with so much exposition out of the way, the viewer ought to expect the film to settle into Phantom of the Opera mode. Instead, the Phantom confronts Swan directly, and Swan, grinning, immediately pulls the mask right off Leach’s face. He pushes Leach into a bargain: continue working on the Faust cantata, and he’ll use it to open The Paradise. The bargain is further cemented when Swan agrees to use Phoenix as the star, to Leach’s satisfaction. He signs his name in blood upon a contract provided by Swan, which is hundreds of pages long, worded in a vaguely sinister legalese, and somewhat reeks of the occult. But after Leach finishes his compositions, Swan seals him behind a wall of bricks, so that the headliner of Faust can instead be his latest musical discovery, “Beef” (Gerrit Graham), who uses an Alice Cooper-like theatrical persona to mask his behind-the-scenes effeminate vamping. On the night of The Paradise’s opening, the Phantom escapes, and wreaks havoc – until he learns the full implications of that contract he signed, and which Phoenix has signed as well.

Jessica Harper sings "Old Souls" at The Paradise's premiere of Faust.

De Palma and Williams are both at the top of their game, and the enduring cult appeal of the film lies in its fusion of clever visuals and sharply-written (albeit very 70’s) songs. But they had a secret weapon in Jessica Harper, the 25-year-old actress with a surprisingly rich voice. Harper would develop a habit of attaching herself to idiosyncratic projects; she’s as well known for this film as her roles in Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria (1977) and Woody Allen’s Fellini homage Stardust Memories (1980). She was able to use her singing voice again in Shock Treatment (1981), playing Janet Majors, the role originated by Susan Sarandon in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) – a film to which Phantom of the Paradise is often compared (perhaps unfairly to both films). But Phantom is a stealth musical. De Palma puts every number in context; no one bursts into song unless they’re on stage and have a reason to. He does embrace the musical sequences, particularly in a striking proto-music-video montage for Williams’s rendition of “Phantom’s Theme (Beauty and the Beast),” and in the “Somebody Super Like You”/”Life At Last” medley, which takes on both glam rock and heavy metal. Ironically, the film’s best song, “The Hell of It,” is only attached to the ending credits; but it’s impossible to not sit through those credits as a result. Phantom of the Paradise could easily have been a more fleshed-out musical, but there’s so much story – and comedy and spectacle – that it’s already a very packed 90 minutes. Should they ever remake the film, it demands to take place on the set of American Idol, or some equivalent. Few of the film’s cynical ideas about the major-label music industry are out of date.

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Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

Posted on October 21, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Jean Rollin immediately followed The Nude Vampire (1970) with another low-budget piece of vampire erotica, Shiver of the Vampires (Le frisson des vampires, 1971), and although he would continue to pursue the same Gothic obsessions until his death in 2010, it’s easy to see Shiver as completing a trilogy. It’s also the best of this first cycle by far, as Rollin finally achieves a style of storytelling ideally suited to his violent and sexual daydreams: it’s an adult fairy tale, unpretentious, with touches of genuinely funny camp, and heaps of exploitation to satisfy the grindhouse market. It may be flawed as “serious cinema” in the director’s usual ways – some charmingly awkward acting, gratuitous nudity, and absurdly-staged action – but Rollin’s knack for searing images is finally wedded to a worthy story, one that taps into archetypal fears, longings, and paranoia. It’s a complete original, and I love it without apology.

Newlyweds Isle (Sandra Julien) and Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) arrive for a honeymoon at the manor of her deceased cousins.

By 1971, lesbian vampire films were all the rage. Hammer was furiously tearing bodices with its Carmilla-inspired “Karnstein” films (The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire, Twins of Evil, 1970-1971), and Jess Franco was seducing grindhouse audiences with Vampyros Lesbos (1971). Rollin had a niche to exploit; though his two previous films didn’t particularly emphasize lesbianism, Shiver of the Vampires would. Michel Delahaye, who played the lord of the vampires (or, rather, “mutants”) in The Nude Vampire would return in a very similar role. Rollin was so enamored with the image of the Castel twins walking through empty castle corridors holding candelabras that he wrote them identical roles here; however, Catherine Castel was pregnant, so she was replaced by Kuelan Herce – who is neither blonde nor Caucasian, but is posed in every shot beside Marie-Pierre Castel (credited as just “Marie-Pierre”) as though they are playing twins. Somehow, this adds to the enjoyment. The gorgeous Sandra Julien plays Isle (“Isa” in the American dub), who is introduced in a pure-white wedding dress, and is subsequently corrupted into vampirism and bloodlust over the film’s 96 minutes. She and her young husband, Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand), intend to spend their honeymoon at the rural castle occupied by her two cousins, but as soon as they arrive in town, they learn from a local, Isabelle (Nicole Nancel), that the cousins – whom Isabelle loved – have just been buried. So the couple expects to find the castle vacant, but are greeted instead by the twins-who-are-not.

The vampire Isolde (Dominique) emerges from a clock when it strikes midnight.

Though it’s their wedding night, Isle is grieving her cousins, and asks to sleep alone. As her bedroom clock tolls for midnight, its door swings open to reveal a vampire woman, Isolde (Dominique), tucked inside, her arms wrapped around her body like a mummy. She slinks out of the clock and greets the nude Isle, then leads her down into the graveyard for a secret ceremony in which Isle is persuaded to drink from a goblet of blood. Antoine witnesses this, but can find no trace of the vampire the next morning. When he explores a library alone, the books come to life, flying from all shelves and burying him beneath a pile. Then Isle’s cousins return, as played by Delahaye and Jacques Robiolles. They don’t have much to say about their unexpected resurrection, but regale the two newlyweds with their researches into ancient religions, in particular the worship of the goddess Isis. Their dialogue is delivered by having each actor duck into the camera’s frame at alternate turns, until finally they both try to squeeze in at once – like cartoon characters. Later we learn that they were vampire hunters who became vampires themselves, and now serve Isolde, who has been recently reborn. That night, Isle, naked, waits in anticipation by the door of her clock. When she reluctantly drifts back toward the bed, Isolde suddenly emerges from the curtains behind it, and bites Isle on the neck. So ravished, Isle collapses onto the sheets.

The castle servants, played by Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce.

We learn that Isabelle, the local girl, was the favorite of the two vampire cousins, who commanded her through the howls of their dog Anubis. When she is called to the castle once more, it’s to be usurped by Isle, whom the vampiress Isolde prefers. Isolde kills Isabelle through an embrace; her pasties, sharp as spikes, stab her victim through the nipples. It’s a Surrealist’s idea of a murder scene. Before a thorny-framed work of art representing two bloody bite-marks, the vampiress scolds the two ex-vampire hunters, calling them “bourgeois vampires.” Apparently there’s a subtle caste system at work. Born of vampires, Isolde considers herself to be a “wandering vampire,” a superior specimen and worthy to rule. (One wonders if Anne Rice watched this film and took notes.) The two female servants are mortals enslaved by the vampires – as any horror fan knows, a vampire always relies upon human assistance to keep the crypt safe during daylight hours. And so, while the two maids secretly wish to escape the rule of their masters, the two male vampires resentfully plot against Isolde, Isle prepares herself for a life of immortality, and Antoine…well, Antoine can’t even get his car started so he can get the hell out.

Jacques Robiolles and Michel Delahaye, as the ex-vampire hunters now serving Isolde, greet Antoine and Isle.

There’s a lovely moment, set in daylight, when Isle encounters a dead dove which Antoine has accidentally shot in the gardens surrounding the castle. When she’s away from her husband, she drinks the blood of the bird, and drops its body upon the lid of a coffin. The smell of blood wakes up Isolde, hidden inside, and she asks Isle if she will destroy her by opening the lid and exposing her to the sunlight. Isle stands over the coffin, staring at it, uncertain – trapped between her hypnotized devotion to the vampire and some vestiges of personal will. She decides not to open the coffin. Soon Antoine is fetching her sunglasses and she’s refusing to leave her bedroom. This marriage is pretty much over.

Isle, with a touch of bird blood still on her lips, dons sunglasses to endure the daylight.

As far as Rollin films go, the ending is almost exhilarating. Inevitably, it takes you to the same beach that figured into the conclusions of Rape of the Vampire and The Nude Vampire; the repetition by now has a lyrical quality. Better still, we’ve come to at least understand the characters and the stakes (pun intended); the conclusion is emotionally satisfying without abandoning the film’s fable-like tone. The earlier films had an improvisational jazz score, which perhaps suited the surrealistic shenanigans; but Shiver of the Vampires isn’t jazz, it’s rock and roll. A group of young musicians calling themselves Acanthus provided Rollin with a score that combined elements of psychedelic and progressive rock, the perfect accompaniment to candelabra-marching in diaphanous nightgowns through castle corridors and cemeteries lit by red and blue spotlights. Finders Keepers Records released an LP and CD of the score last year, with French comic artist Phillip Druillet’s beautiful poster art on the cover. The Acanthus tracks are interspersed with dialogue from the English dub and the canine shrieks of Anubis. (It’s become requisite October listening for me already.)

The vampires' castle at night.

Goth label Redemption has been the primary purveyor of Rollin on DVD in the last decade or so; they’re passable releases, but rumor has it that Kino has acquired the rights to Rollin’s filmography, with Blu-Rays on the way. The upgrade should come with some new attention paid to this most esoteric of cult filmmakers, but I don’t know that the majority of his work will be that much more “accessible” – not truly. Because with Shiver of the Vampires, Rollin was dispensing with Dracula clichés while perfecting his own personal mythology, writing from the gut, stringing together the simplest possible narrative which would allow him to exhibit his spellbinding and bizarre images. It is modern in a way which many horror films of the period were not; it’s almost punk art. The result is a cinema which is not about vampires, but for them.

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