Kashchei the Immortal (1944)

Posted on May 27, 2020 at 2:11 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

After completing in rapid succession the Russian fantasy films Wish Upon a Pike (1938), Vassilisa the Beautiful (1939), and The Humpbacked Horse (1941), Aleksandr Rou wouldn’t make another full length feature film for three years, as the war relocated Soyuzdetfilm Studios (later to become Gorky Studios) from Moscow to Dushanbe in the then-Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Arriving in theaters at the end of the war, Kashchei the Immortal (1944) – alternately Kashchey or Koschei, among many other variant spellings, but we’ll stick to the one – brings to life a famous supernatural antagonist from Russian folklore, often referred to as “the Deathless,” who can only be killed by locating his well-hidden heart and destroying it. In Rou’s hands, the character becomes a militaristic tyrant and an obvious stand-in for Hitler, conquering lands far and wide, and residing in a seemingly impenetrable fortress with a glowering and toothy façade. Stressed throughout is the inherent power of one’s native land to overcome enemies; in traditional folk tales, it’s defending native Rus against encroaching Mongols; here, the allegory is Nazi invasion. Late in the film, the hero inhales some of his native soil, raises his sword, and shouts to his army, “People’s strength, rise up!” Yet the film is more than propaganda. Rou also draws directly from The Thief of Bagdad (1924) to fill out his somewhat rushed 63 minutes. (Is this version cut down? The climax seems to skip ahead quite jarringly. I’d be interested to know.) The end result is a spectacle with impressive production design and charmingly inventive special effects – one of Rou’s best fantasy adventures.

A village is raided and burned by the horde of Kashchei the Immortal.

Nikita Kozhemyaka (Sergei Stolyarov) is soon to be married to the beautiful Marya Morevna (Galina Grigorieva), who at the start of the film is rebuffing another suitor. After Marya and the other young maidens of the village release doves with messages to their lovers, a rampaging force of horned-helmeted stormtroopers descends – in an impressively staged scene anticipating the opening massacre of Conan the Barbarian (1982), of all things. The wooden buildings are set ablaze, in what appears to be a combination of miniatures and full-sized mocked-up structures built and burned while the actors flee in close proximity to the flames. Marya is kidnapped, and when Nikita reaches the village it’s already in ashes. He consults with Father Mushroom, a miniature spirit who would later appear in Rou’s Father Frost (aka Jack Frost, 1964), and is told that Kashchei is behind the destruction. He also gives Nikita a “cap of darkness” (his mushroom hat) which grants its wearer invisibility. In pursuit of his foe, Nikita travels to a distant, apparently Persian city (with palm trees, minarets, and statues of horses) which has been conquered by Kashchei. Nikita is ordered by one of his acolytes to dismount and bow to a hideous idol of a “jackal” (a heavy-browed monstrosity with snaggle teeth in a wide mouth). He refuses, and uses his cap of darkness to liberate a prisoner, Bulat the Joker (Aleksandr Shirshov), who is about to be executed for having stolen a magic carpet. (The carpet, still hanging in the air, is restrained by a heavy chain linked to a massive ball. It’s an image one might expect to find in a Terry Gilliam movie.) With his moustache, lack of a shirt, and slightly darkened skin, Shirshov is the spitting image of Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad; like Fairbanks, Bulat and Nikita ride upon the flying carpet as it bears them over the walls of the city. Though the optical effect has its limitations – the two are as transparent as ghosts – the carpet flutters realistically in the wind.

One of the jackal idols of Kashchei.

With Bulat now in tow as a heartthrob sidekick, the two reach Kashchei’s fortress, built into a mountainside with another variation of the jackal face, its jaws lowering to form a drawbridge over a crevasse, guarded by soldiers with faces hidden in helmets that make them looks insectoid (or perhaps like the goblin soldiers of Labyrinth). Here Kashchei keeps Marya in a state of eternal sleep, lying upon a slab like Snow White, a condition he seems to have magically tied to her engagement ring: when he puts it back on her finger, she comes to life; when he removes it, she falls back into sleep, and he uses the ring to stop the downpour of a waterfall so he can access his secret chamber. Kashchei is introduced with the flash of a lightning bolt and the sudden apparition of his gaunt frame swathed in black shadow, the light only falling in pinpoints on his eyes, so that they seem to glow white. As the shadow fades, he’s revealed to be wearing a breastplate shaped like a ribcage with bony epaulets like little wings. He’s played by the wiry actor Georgiy Millyar, who would become the definitive cinematic Baba Yaga in many fairy tale films, and would again play Kashchei in Rou’s Through Fire, Water and…Brass Pipes (1968). Momentarily reviving Marya while Nikita and Bulat look on in hiding, Kashchei proposes marriage, and inadvertently reveals how he might be slain: by finding and destroying his heart which is in a black apple on a black tree that grows on a black hill. (In various fairy tales, Kashchei’s heart is always hidden like a Russian nesting doll.) He also reveals that anyone who discovers his heart will be turned to stone.

Georgiy Millyar as Kashchei the Immortal.

Though Nikita can revive his lover by placing his ring on her finger, when they’re cornered by guards Marya plunges herself back into sleep by throwing the ring at Kashchei’s waterfall, giving Nikita and Bulat an opportunity to escape. Here is where it feels that the film is missing a reel. Nikita, on horseback once again and with an army suddenly behind him, is confronting Kashchei and his army on a battlefield while, in a distant corner of the world, Bulat comes to the black tree on the black hill where Kashchei’s heart is hidden. Nikita decapitates the villain, who simply grows another head; incredulous, he glances down at the severed head still lying on the dusty earth. He claims victory only when Bulat destroys the hidden heart, which turns him to stone; for a lingering moment his eyes are unaffected, giving a soulful look before they too petrify. Nikita lifts up Kashchei, tells him that he will fight him until he has “no more heads left,” and then smashes him into the ground, which splits in stop-motion. The “deathless” one dissolves into a skeleton, and at that moment Bulat is restored to life, just as the broken spell releases Marya from her eternal sleep. The three pose astride horses with the army behind them, casting profiles like a Soviet propaganda poster – albeit an odd one, as Bulat still has a turban on his head and giant loop earrings. I’d imagine this film, arriving after the long war was finally coming to an end, would have brought warm applause from its audience – Hitler had fallen, Stalin was victorious, and the land was defended and restored.

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The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

Posted on May 22, 2020 at 10:50 am by Jeff Kuykendall

After an extended hiatus, Hammer’s Frankenstein series resumed with The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), the third installment following The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – which kicked off Hammer horror proper – and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958). Peter Cushing was back as the Baron, a role he would maintain for the rest of the series, excepting a certain failed reboot we don’t need to discuss here. Not returning was director Terence Fisher, whose graceful guiding hand gave the series such distinction before and after Evil. Freddie Francis, who won an Oscar for his cinematography on 1960’s Sons and Lovers, took his place, having joined the Hammer family by photographing Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960) and recently directing the Jimmy Sangster-scripted thriller Paranoiac (1963). As you might expect, Francis guarantees that the film looks great, though he pulls the series backward with a desire to make a film in the mold of the Universal Frankenstein films. In fact Evil was part of Hammer’s distribution deal with Universal, and they gave permission to use the makeup evoking the famous Jack Pierce monster design, from which Hammer so famously diverged with the grisly makeup worn by Christopher Lee in their first film. Francis plunges forward with a new monster evoking Karloff’s – in the broadest possible brush strokes – and a sparks-spraying laboratory set, including a lightning rod that extends from the roof, to allow Cushing to become, at least briefly, Colin Clive. In theory, this fan fiction mash-up between Hammer and Universal horror should at least be interesting. So why does it thump dead at our feet like one of the monster’s victims?

Discovery of the creature in a familiar frozen fashion.

The simple answer echoed down the decades, that the monster makeup’s to blame, is only reinforced in the thorough new Blu-ray special edition from Shout Factory. (The film was previously available on Blu-ray in Universal’s 2016 Hammer Horror 8-Film Collection box set, a mixed bag of acceptable and unacceptable aspect ratios, which Shout’s re-releases have been individually correcting as needed. Evil fell on the “acceptable” side of the fence, but lacked any special features.) The makeup on the monster is an embarrassment, especially from the standpoint that the production value on the film is otherwise superb, as is to be expected from a Hammer film in 1964. As worn by the New Zealand wrestler Kiwi Kingston – who had never acted outside the ring – it looks like a papier-mâché mask, turning the creature’s forehead into a rather sharp-angled box (to where the famous bolts have been relocated). We can see easily enough that there’s an actor peering out from inside – not that it gives Kingston the ability to express himself through it. As Hammer historians have reported, makeup supervisor Roy Ashton whipped up a flurry of ideas for the studio but was given no direction or approval until the final design was mustered at the last minute; his talent is more easily evidenced in other films, such as The Curse of the Werewolf (another recent Shout Factory release, also recommended). Even more so than many of the other Hammer Frankenstein films, this is a monster movie. By putting a retro-horror spin on the franchise and bringing in Universal trademarks, Francis only emphasizes the focus on the monster and its importance. Because the design is an outright disaster (I noted exactly one shot where I thought it looked rather menacing, but that was fleeting), the film’s center of gravity sags toward a sinkhole.

Zoltan (Peter Woodthorpe), Hans (Sandor Elès), and the Baron (Peter Cushing) inspect the creature (Kiwi Kingston).

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, onto the positives, which often get overlooked with this film. Cushing is in top form, especially enjoyable in the opening acts; after being driven out of a town where his equipment has been destroyed by an angered priest, he and his faithful assistant Hans (Sandor Elés, later to appear in And Soon the Darkness) boldly travel to the village where he got his start, the Baron arrogantly confident that he won’t be recognized. He dons a masquerade mask for the village festival that’s in full swing, but his pride gets the better of him when he discovers that the local Burgomaster (David Hutcheson) has raided his home and stolen all his belongings. “Even my bed!” Baron Frankenstein roars as he storms through the Burgomaster’s house, completely ignoring the negligee-clad young woman (Caron Gardner) lying upon it. She is clearly attracted to the Baron, and gets a humorously obvious sexual thrill as he locks himself in the room with her when the police arrive, then uses the sheets to form a rope to escape out the window. The Baron also meets a local carnival hypnotist named Zoltan, played with depraved zeal by an excellent Peter Woodthorpe (Gollum from Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings); Zoltan, using his powers of mind control, is the only one who can command the monster, which allows him to blackmail the Baron. Also excellent are Duncan Lamont as the Chief of Police, and Katy Wild as a deaf-mute beggar who falls in with the Baron and Hans. Unfortunately, a subplot in which she forms a sympathetic bond with the Baron’s creation never has a chance to land an emotional impact, thanks to the inadequate creature currently in use.

Zoltan manipulates the creature. In shadows, the limited makeup is more effective.

The plot lumbers on like the monster – not helped when it’s delayed by an extended flashback sequence showing the Baron’s creation of the creature years before. (This is essentially a soft reboot of the series, ignoring the body-switching ending of The Revenge of Frankenstein as it harkens back to a more Universal-centric origin story for the Baron. If one does some mental gymnastics and squints just right, you might be able to keep it all in the same continuity.) Katy Wild’s beggar girl helps the Baron and Hans rediscover the creature who’s been frozen in ice inside a cavern, a la Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). As Zoltan insinuates his way into their lives, at one point he considers raping Wild’s character, an unfortunate notion which is thankfully discarded quickly. The creature finally goes on a rampage, and the film ends with a climactic fire – a rule, it seems, for most of the Cushing series – before a tower in the Baron’s castle explodes. You’ll be pressed to remember anything else happening in this film even minutes after it’s ended; it’s as though following the Universal tropes, already growing creaky by the 40’s, has flattened the material far too much. It certainly doesn’t give Cushing a lot to do – the shining star of the series, far more than its various monsters. We enjoy seeing the Baron scheme and double cross and murder from one village to the next, but at this stop he mostly stews. The Shout release’s supplements include the alternate cut made for US television which is padded with footage shot without the main cast. It also includes the 1958 Anton Diffring-starring pilot for the series Hammer produced for American television, Tales of Frankenstein – this also paying homage to the old Universal movies. (Evil of Frankenstein producer and screenwriter Anthony Hinds took plot elements from one of the unused Tales of Frankenstein scripts, namely the idea of a hypnotist controlling the monster.) Other extras include interviews and an excellent commentary track by historian and author Constantine Nasr.

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The Stone Flower (1946)

Posted on May 20, 2020 at 11:23 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Soviet cinema’s master fantasist, Aleksandr Ptushko, forged the path that would make his reputation following a forced hiatus from filmmaking during WWII. He had previously supervised the production of a number of stop-motion shorts for Mosfilm as well as directed two groundbreaking features – a Communist-parable take on Jonathan Swift, The New Gulliver (1935), and The Golden Key (1939), based on the Pinocchio-inspired book by Aleksey Tolstoy – which combined live action with puppet animation in the style of George Pal’s Puppetoons. Returning to Moscow after the war, he set upon making a completely live action film in full color, using equipment and Agfa colored film stock seized from Germany. The Stone Flower (1946) was shot partially in the grand spaces of Prague’s Barrandov studio for its adaptation of a Pavel Bazhov story, an old folk tale from the Urals. It would be a children’s film of exceptional technical accomplishment, a cinematic illustrated storybook of which any random film frame could be hung on a wall. The film would go on to win a special prize for color at the first Cannes Film Festival, and become a big enough hit at home to set a new standard for Russian children’s cinema and launch Ptushko on a path that would take him to such dazzling fairy tale features as Sadko (1952), Ilya Muromets (1959), and many more up through his final feature, the sublime Ruslan and Ludmila (1972).

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain spies upon young Danilo (V. Kravchenko).

The film takes place in the recent past (“about 60 years ago in the old Urals factories”) and concerns the carving of the green copper mineral malachite – a color which Ptushko exploits frequently in the presence of magic. The factory workers speak with awe of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, a witch whose dominion is the rocks they mine, though none have seen her. An elderly stone carver, Prokopyich (Mikhail Troyanovskiy), is such an expert craftsman that we’re told “no one knew the soul of stones better than he.” In thinly-veiled Communist messaging, he is exploited ruthlessly by the wealthy land owner and his brutal, whip-wielding bailiff. Prokopyich receives an apprentice, Danilo, whom he allows to wander idle, afraid that working with the stone and its dust will send him to an early grave. On one of these wanderings, Danilo becomes an object of interest for the Mistress of the Copper Mountain (Tamara Makarova), disguised as a lizard; while basking on a rock, she transforms into a woman in a slinky, glittering green dress. Years later, the land owner summons Prokopyich and demands he make a malachite box of such ornate design that it will win him a bet with the Marquis de Chamfort, whom he met on a recent trip to France. Working through nights to almost fatal exhaustion, the sculptor cannot complete the box; when the landlord arrives demanding the prize, Prokopyich is stunned to discover that the box has been completed by Danilo, who’s now a young man and a formidable talent (Vladimir Druzhnikov). The beautifully carved box bears the image of a lizard on its lid.

The journey into the mountain, with unfolding doors of stone.

Pleased with the box, the landlord’s wife demands that she make him a vase. Danilo pours his heart into the creation, working upon it as the months pass, and neglecting his girlfriend Katya (Yekaterina Derevshchikova) – in a lyrical sequence, she paces in sorrow beside a river and Ptushko holds the camera in place, watching the rippling water and the branches of the trees as the seasons pass before our eyes. When the vase is complete, Danilo reveals to Katya that she was the inspiration for its design, which is in the shape of a flower. But he has become obsessed with the legend of a stone flower in the domain of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, an object of such craftsmanship that it teaches secrets of gem-carving mastery to the artisans who behold it – though he’s warned that the price may be to become one of her carvers, working in her mountain and forgetting all about “earthly life.” As he walks through the woods in the middle of the night, a hill of flowers suddenly bloom before our eyes and out strides the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, who promises he may see the Stone Flower when the first snow falls. This happens on his wedding day. Ptushko delivers one of his many frame-filling close-ups as the haunted Danilo stares off into the distance, and then leaves Katya’s side and strides past revelers, departing without anyone noticing. Ptushko delivers an incredible bit of production design as Danilo follows the Mistress from “Serpent Hill” into the mountain, where walls of rock part in all directions in a single shot as they penetrate further and further into its interior, the last lowering to form a bridge over a crevasse; then we see them walk through canopies of multicolored minerals until they finally reach the stone flower, which materializes before a vast wall of crystal. Danilo sets to work building a likeness of the flower within the mountain, while the Mistress falls deeper in love with him. Outside, the forlorn Katya drifts through life under the protection of the worried Prokopyich, until they are finally reunited as love breaks the spell.

The Mistress of the Copper Mountain (Tamara Makarova) reveals the stone flower to Danilo (Vladimir Druzhnikov).

The central triumph of the film is Ptushko’s ability to turn special effects into emotional expression, most notably in the hypnotic scene of Katya’s long summer and autumn separated from her lover, but also in the ecstatic blooming of flowers at midnight, or in a scene where Katya confronts the Mistress of the Copper Mountain who’s stolen Danilo from her, and the jealous sorceress waves her hand at a tree, which suddenly uproots itself and lowers across a chasm so she can cross and then vanish (the tree springs back up before Katya can follow). In further films, Ptushko would push these ideas even further, culminating in the four-year-long production Ruslan and Ludmila, whose subterranean tableaux are even more dream-like and stunning to behold. An oft-used criticism of special effects movies is that character and story take a back seat; in Ptushko’s films, beginning with The Stone Flower, they are fully in service, even if the characters are deliberately pressed into types, as fairy tales do: Danilo, the obsessive artist seeking perfection; Katya, mourning her lover. Ptushko is seeking the ultimate visualization of the fairy tale, which even extends to a scene that would become something of a trademark in his films: the gathering of woodland animals a la Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, often filling the corners of the frame with noses and tails twitching. He would stretch his mode into romances (Scarlet Sails) and epics (Ilya Muromets) and even whimsical fantasy in the context of the contemporary urban life (A Tale of Time Lost) – but always with a distinctive, vividly colorful, deeply expressive style that could only be the work of Ptushko.

 

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