For Your Height Only (or: For Y’ur Height Only, as the opening titles would have it) at long last realized the Filipino midget James Bond spoof that audiences around the world craved for two decades. And once you have seen the under-three-foot-tall Weng Weng kick, punch, shoot, and – most of all – floor-slide, you will have no further patience for the likes of Derek Flint, Matt Helm, Austin Powers, or Woody Allen’s Jimmy Bond. Weng Weng’s Agent 00 will occupy that space in your heart: crouching, winking at you, and waving (as he does).
Supposedly the film was the brainchild of Dick Randall, American producer of such arty hits as Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers (1967), The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1975), and Pod People (1983); the stroke of genius was to make a low-budget picture in the Philippines which would be a vehicle for one Weng Weng, a placid-faced little person eager for his shot at superstardom. The end result became a regional hit and spawned sequels (Agent 00; The Impossible Kid). Weng Weng plays Agent 00, aka “Weng,” who wears a white leisure suit and is dispatched by his superiors to break up drug syndicates. Crooks fear him, women love him, and wherever he goes, the James Bond theme song plays (because, really, who’s going to see this, right?). The bad guys know they’re such; one declares to his cohorts, “The forces of good must be exterminated – with lethal force!” When they kidnap our hero’s partner, Irma, she delivers speech after speech to her captors on the virtues of good and its high likelihood of overcoming evil. Between scenes such as these we’re treated to Agent 00’s battles with the baddies, in which he typically hides behind objects, creeps up behind his adversaries, kicks them in the balls, and slaps them over and over in the face. After a while, this gets old, but then it gets fun again. Such is the cyclical nature of life.
When we first meet Agent 00, he rescues a beautiful woman, then questions her about the evil men chasing her. She explains: “They’re big on drugs, and they said they’d peddle my pretty bod as a prostitute…I said I wasn’t interested, and now I get shot at once or twice a week. One of these days – bye-bye, Lola!” Yes, this film is poorly dubbed with absurd dialogue, but For Your Height Only achieves an absurdity that borders on Ionesco or Beckett. Shortly after rescuing Lola, Agent 00 calls her from his hotel room, and the following exchange occurs, rapid-fire:
“Hello?”
“Hello, Lola? Now listen carefully. This is important.”
“Interesting!”
“Check it out.”
“I’ll go right there.”
“Meet you there!”
Now, presumably the above conversation is missing a few lines which our able storytellers have decided to leave out. However, it’s presented with no evident time lapse. For all the world it feels like Weng and Lola had their dialogue rewritten by Waiting for Godot‘s Vladimir and Estragon. Further, the dubbing itself crosses the line into the cheerily whimsical. A guy named Cobra sounds like Humphrey Bogart, another like Terry-Thomas at his most upper-class fey. Keep in mind these are Filipino actors, driving cars with Philippines license plates. Nevertheless, the dialogue is rewritten to sound more American, which is why one mob boss tells his underlings (with a New Jersey accent), “we’ve gotta get the ball into the end zone!” One bored voiceover artist dubs her character with the phoniest English accent she can muster, which really adds something special to the sequence in which Weng dances with her beneath a glittering disco ball, saves her from the bad guys, and then succumbs to her womanly charms in her hotel room.
“You’re a great person, you know.”
“You know what they say. It ain’t the size, it’s where you use it.”
“Maybe. But are you a sexual animal?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m crazy about you, Agent 00. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way you strut your stuff, YOU KNOW SEX is like tequila. Take one sip and you’re a goner.”
“Shall we get it on?”
Fear not: you’re spared a sex scene (it’s not that kind of film). He does have an eye for the ladies, though. Later he meets a large-breasted photojournalist playing racquetball. He asks for a picture of the drug lord he’s seeking, and she responds, “In my duties as a police reporter, by all means do I take a lot of bad guys’ pictures. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a private rogues’ gallery. Buy a girl a highball?” By all means he does. But Agent 00’s heart truly belongs to Irma, even though, when she first meets him, she casually says, “You’re such a little guy though. Very petite, like a potato.” When she’s captured by supervillain Mr. Giant, who communicates to his minions via a cosmetic mirror, Agent 00 will stop at nothing to rescue her, and by that I mean he kicks a lot of people between the legs.
Naturally Agent 00 has gadgets. In this scene, his boss issues him his equipment; note that his delivery has the curious feel of a stand-up comic dying onstage, while Weng merely stares blankly at him.
The ring which can alert him to the presence of poison comes in handy when a woman slips something into his glass of Coke before offering it to him (and then gets up and leaves, which is suspicious enough). He picks up the glass, notices his flashing ring, shrugs, and drinks from the bottle instead. His Oddjob-style razor-tipped hat does Goldfinger one better by being remote controllable, so he can torment his enemies by swooping his little white hat at them over and over again. But his finest gadget is a Thunderball-style jet pack. When he straps it onto his back and launches himself across the water to Mr. Giant’s stronghold on Hidden Island, Weng Weng flies through the air and looks fucking terrified.
“I declare war on that little stinker!” proclaims one bad guy. But Agent 00 is a one-man army, sliding on his back across the floor in nearly every fight scene, as though he’s been shot out of a cannon onto the set. He jumps off a bridge and even out of one of the uppermost floors of a hotel, using an umbrella to slow his fall. (For this special effect, a doll is tied to an umbrella and thrown out a window.) His kung fu is commendable, especially when the people he’s fighting help him out, by bending over and allowing him to spring off their bodies and kick somebody else in the face. He sword-fights, too, wielding a small Bushido blade while cornering a frightened American gangster against the edge of a balcony. Even though the American’s sword is about three times as long as Weng Weng’s, it is flung out of his hands as soon as Agent 00 taps it gently. (Then Agent 00 kills him.) This feels less like an action picture than an extremely elaborate home movie showcasing Weng Weng, and he appears to be having a great time. I submit that For Your Height Only is adorable.
Andrea Thomas (Joanna Cameron) seems like an ordinary high school science teacher, albeit one who keeps a pet raven in the classroom. Yet, as the opening credits tell us, on an archaeological dig in Egypt she uncovered a mystical amulet which can transform her into the goddess Isis, “dedicated foe of evil and defender of the weak.” One would assume she would fly to the big city to battle criminal overlords, but instead she hangs about a small town and teaches important life lessons to Cindy Lee (Joanna Pang, playing about five or sex years below her age) and other youths, occasionally catching a small-time crook by putting her fists on her hips and waiting for not-very-special effects to happen. She’s assisted by Rick Mason (Brian Cutler), who has a mustache and smiles a lot – presumably because Isis runs around in a skirt too short to stay put.
Cindy Lee’s photos cause general bafflement, but the sheriff doesn’t believe these rumors of alien visitation. Granted, some people are abandoning their homes and leaving the state, and there have even been several reported disappearances, but none of this is worth the sheriff’s time. Andrea takes off her oversized glasses and makes a serious face, which she did in the last scene as well, and is, in general, the reason why she wears glasses. The sheriff at last agrees to take them to see the scorched markings supposedly left by a flying saucer. Just then, “Chick Jeffers and Art Byron,” Cindy Lee’s school chums, pull up to share the local gossip about the disappearances, and she shows them her UFO pictures, which allows the two boys to exchange a secretive look. “Mr. Moss’ll want to know about this,” they say as soon as Cindy Lee hops off. They’re up to no good, which you could probably tell just by looking at them.
As the gang approaches the first burn mark location, Rick Mason says, “Maybe there’s something to this whole UFO thing after all.” “Spooky!” Cindy Lee agrees, and snaps some pictures. Andrea takes a sample, scientific-like, just before the sheriff calls them away: a new UFO-marking has been found. As they head off, a theremin noise is heard overhead. Everyone looks up, and white flying saucers move slowly across the blue sky. Just like in Cindy Lee’s photos!
Everyone races uphill in pursuit of the saucers, but Cindy Lee realizes she’s out of film, and runs back to the jeep. The theremin noise suddenly rises on the soundtrack. Cindy Lee looks up in the sky and says, “Oh no. Andrea and Rick. I need you. They’ve come back.” Sure enough, when the others return, Cindy Lee is gone and a fresh, smoking circle has been burned into the road. Has she been abducted by aliens? Have they fried her with a laser beam? Lest you be held in suspense, we immediately cut to Cindy Lee, being driven down the mountain by Chick and Art, who have glum, guilty looks upon their faces, though she’s ecstatic that they saved her from the aliens. When she gets out of the car to look for more UFOs (this consists of standing still and looking about vacantly), Chick and Art steal her photos, which they don’t feel too good about. When “Mr. Moss” shows up – a middle-aged man covered from head to toe in dirt – he takes the photos and then loses his cool because he wanted the negatives. “This is just paper!” Cindy Lee, who has been standing approximately seven feet away this entire time, wanders back to the car and innocuously asks what’s up. That’s when the collective conscience of Chick and Art presses down upon them at long last, and hurriedly they drive little, innocent Cindy Lee away. Mr. Moss, infuriated, jumps in his car and chases them. When they reach the police, Chick and Art point to Mr. Moss accusingly. “He wants her pictures!” Outraged at this moral violation, the police spring into action, but Isis is quicker – Andrea transforms into her alter ego by running a bit of the opening credits sequence, and then says in a voice that echoes, “Oh zephyr winds which blow on high, lift me now so I can fly.”
Perching upon a rock overlooking the mountain road, Isis observes Mr. Moss in his getaway car. She puts her fists on her hips and looks concerned, a move which invokes her mystical, ancient-Egyptian ability to overheat car engines. Mr. Moss pulls the smoking vehicle aside and begins to run, red-faced, sweaty, looking for all the world that he’s three paces away from a stroke. She teleports ahead of him and then declares, “Mr. Moss, perhaps you need a dose of your own medicine,” and utilizes another of her goddess powers which always came in handy in the days of the Pharaohs – she makes white UFO blobs appear over his head, which induces a panic, and a few more strokes. When he can finally stand, he runs back to her and pleads, “Isis, you just gotta help me. The UFOs are after me.” “Why, Mr. Moss,” she retorts triumphantly, “there are no such things as UFOs!” The sheriff arrives and immediately drags Mr. Moss away, without for a moment questioning what this Egyptian goddess is doing here. I suppose everyone in this small town knows Isis by now. Anyway, it’s time for the episode wrap-up.
Mr. Moss, you see, had discovered gold at Mountain Park, and so he had to scare the property owners into selling their land with the ruse of UFOs, and the able assistance of Chick and Art. “A gas hose to burn the ground, a projector to make mid-air pictures of UFOs, and sound equipment – no wonder I was fooled!” says Rick Mason in embarrassment. (As you’ve correctly guessed, this is also the plot of every single Scooby-Doo episode.) Chagrined but triumphant, the team leaves Isis and returns to find Andrea sleeping under a tree (after Isis hastily flies there). Funny, they declare, that Andrea is never around when Isis saves the day. That’s right: they still don’t know that Isis and Andrea are the same person. Why? Because Isis wears a white tunic, and Andrea wears pants. And so, as Andrea shares a secretive look with the camera and the music rises, another adventure comes to a close. Now finish your cereal and go brush your teeth.
They didn’t call them noirs then; they were just crime pictures – cheap, pulpy, sensationalistic. The papers turned up their noses but audiences flocked to them, so studios kept making them. But if we didn’t have crime pictures as deeply strange and disturbing as Nightmare Alley (1947), the French critics wouldn’t have had such fodder for their essays on this new, perverse, cynical American genre. This film, indeed, goes further than most of the film noirs dared, and it’s also one of the very best. I’d easily place it near the top of a list that would include Double Indemnity (1944), Phantom Lady (1944), Detour (1945), The Third Man (1949), Gun Crazy (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and Touch of Evil (1958). In other words, if you’re new to noir, here’s as good a place as any to start. It’s bizarre, funny, kaleidoscopic, and has a black, black heart.
Trouble is, Molly can’t lie like Stan Carlisle can, and soon Bruno is forcing the two to get married. (Does this imply that Stan took Molly’s virginity? Needless to say, we don’t see that part.) And look at poor Joan Blondell. She underplays the revelation with a subtle look of disappointment; contrary to expectations, she doesn’t fight for Stan, but surrenders him to the younger, prettier woman as the dreary inevitable. This isn’t the worst of his betrayal, however. He and Molly take the “Code” to the big city, and are soon performing the plagiarized act before high-paying customers at a luxury hotel. So amazing is “The Great Stanton” that he even susses out an amateur con artist in the audience. Psychoanalyst Lilith (Helen Walker), hoping to prove the psychic a fraud, writes down the question: “Do you think my mother will recover from her present illness?” Stan responds that it’s a trick question; her mother is dead. He’s only guessing, but he can smell a con a mile away. As he later explains to her in person, “It takes one to catch one.”
Stan is on a rapid ascent, and his success is fueled by his preacher-style cadence and Biblical phrasings. He is, essentially, an Elmer Gantry, propped up by true believers and basking in the glory. As he begins to promise his followers that he can communicate with the dead (for there’s bigger money in that racket), it’s difficult to not think of John Edward, the contemporary psychic whose bestsellers and long-running television series (Crossing Over with John Edward) made him a mammoth celebrity in the late 90’s and early 00’s. Penn and Teller devoted an early episode of their series Bullshit! to explaining how psychics like John Edward work, but that same explanation is here, decades earlier, in Nightmare Alley. Make generalizations and work upon the emotions of the mark. Let them do the heavy lifting; you just prod them in the right direction. Even Pete, drunk and finishing off the bottle which will end his life, manages to briefly convince Stan that he’s using psychic powers to peer into his childhood; just as Stan takes the bait, Pete scoffs, “Every boy has a dog.”
Stan’s listening. As he rises into the status of a minor celebrity, he becomes known as the “Miracle Worker.” He’s warned of a hard fall by Zeena, who returns with Bruno in tow, for an unwelcome visit to the luxury suite of Stan and Molly. She reads his Tarot, and he draws the Hanged Man – worse, he drops the card on the floor, which (we’re told) is a terrible omen. The last time this happened, Pete ended up dead; now it’s Stan’s turn for an evil fate. The soundtrack also drops warnings that something very, very bad is going to happen. Every time Stan is overcome with anxieties, director Edmund Goulding subtly overlays the hysterical cries of the carnival geek, who – as Stan watched one night – went mad, and ran raving into the darkness. We never see the geek’s act, but we’re told what it entails, and that’s enough. A man gets low, finds himself with no recourse, and he might end up with such a job. Stan, even at the height of his success, is haunted by this penalty of failure. Goulding’s experimental touch with the sound design here presages the work of David Lynch, and indeed, this is a very Lynchian noir.
Each stage of Stan’s journey is signaled by the arrival of another woman; he uses Zeena to acquire the “Code” before abandoning her, and uses the younger, prettier Molly to work his tricks on the upper-class. But it’s Lilith – sophisticated, reserved, intelligent – who becomes the femme fatale that ends him. Behind Molly’s back, he pays visits to Lilith, and convinces her to betray her profession and assist him in the greatest con of all. The penultimate stage of this ever-shapeshifting film most closely resembles the work of James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity (novels which go to great lengths to explain why insurance fraud isn’t as easy as it looks). Nightmare Alley is actually based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which I haven’t read, but Stan Carlisle embodies the typical Cain protagonist: an antihero who sets aside conscience for material gain. Unfortunately, he still has Molly at his side – and she does have a heart. With Molly on one side and Lilith on the other, the Great Stanton is set to take a hard, hard fall.
There is a moral, as the Hays Code demanded; crime had to pay…though did it ever pay this hard? Film noirs took that Hays mandate and pushed it to the limit. Their characters ventured down dark alleys in pursuit, often, of immoral goals; but doom ever lurked over their necks like a guillotine blade. Nightmare Alley is not just an exemplary noir, but illustrates the genre’s themes most starkly. Here, the carnival replaces the typical seedy streets of the crime thriller, but it proves just as shadowy and morally fraught. Goulding lets his camera snake in and out of the carnival tents, swooping from the stage into the throng of spectators, constantly shifting from those who watch to those who plot the spectacle from behind the scenes. Stan, addicted to the carny life, confesses to Zeena: “Lady, I was made for it. I had all kinds of jobs before this one came along; none of them were anything but jobs. But this gets me…the crowds, the noise, the idea of keeping on the move. Seeing those yokels out there gives you a sort of superior feeling, as if you were on the know, and they were on the outside looking in. Kind of hard to explain, but I like it.” Nightmare Alley proves just as darkly addictive.
