The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

Posted on May 16, 2020 at 4:37 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Hammer had just completed its Karnstein trilogy loosely derived from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla when Spanish director Vicente Aranda (The Exquisite Cadaver) delivered a very different adaptation of the seminal vampire novella, La novia ensangrentada, aka The Blood Spattered Bride (1972). Artfully directed, swooningly photographed, and interrupted with unexpected moments of surrealism and bursts of frenzied sexual violence, the film is distinctive even in a market overstuffed, at the time, with sexy vampire movies. From the start we can see that the film has much on its mind: virgin bride Susan (Maribel Martín) is interrupted in her would-be honeymoon suite by a nylon-masked rapist, only for the assault to abruptly dissolve as her husband (Simón Andreu) opens the door, suggesting the encounter is either a paranoid fear visualized or a secret fantasy. The man in the mask bore an uncanny resemblance to her husband. The narrative proceeds just as conflicted, as though in active debate with its topics – feminism, pop psychology, chauvinism, the battle of the sexes – and never fully choosing a side. After the imagined attack, a shaken Susan asks to be taken back to her husband’s home, a rambling country estate near towering ruins. In the comfort of her husband’s bed, he rips open the dress of his new wife in the same manner she fantasized at the start of the film. She splays her arms like a crucified martyr, submitting to the defilement. Later, he corners her in an aviary, surrounded by fluttering wings and drifting feathers, like a fox in a henhouse – pressing her against the side of the cage before being interrupted by the maid’s pubescent daughter Carol (Rosa Rodriguez). Carol later asks Susan why he hurts her, and she’s taken aback by the suggestion; she tells the girl she loves him. But we also see the man, who is only given the name “El” in the credits and looks like John Cassavetes/Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby, seize his wife by the hair and drag her up the side of a rock after surprising her in the woods. If they are playing games, this goes too far; she rebuffs his next sexual overture with the excuse that women are everything or nothing – and this time she will be nothing to him. All this and more before a vampire shows her fangs.

“El” (Simón Andreu) surprises Susan (Maribel Martín) violently.

The vampire, of course, is Carmilla (Alexandra Bastedo), known to the husband’s family as Mircalla Karstein. Susan first learns of Mircalla by discovering her portrait, committed to the basement with its face pointedly cut out and temporarily filled, in one of the film’s many strangely surreal images, with the face of young Carol, pulling a prank. Mircalla murdered her sexually abusive spouse on her wedding night, an act that seems destined to repeat itself when Susan begins receiving visions of Mircalla directing her to the hiding place of a sacrificial knife. This culminates in an ecstatically brutal stabbing – the camera fixed on Susan’s face rather than the wounds, and the hands of Mircalla guiding her – which is revealed, like the earlier rape, to be another fantasy bordering on premonition. He continues to hide the knife from her; she continues, uncannily, to find it. This leads to a burial of the knife in a beach, where the husband discovers Carmilla née Mircalla completely buried in the sand, breathing through a snorkel mask. Aranda first shoots the discovery from the perspective of Carmilla, gazing up through the mask. Then we see her face, purplish, dazed, as though she’s resurrecting before our eyes. No (proper) explanation for her beach burial is ever given; but whether she washed up or sprouted through the earth like a forgotten bulb, she seems to have been summoned by Susan’s arrival. The fateful visit to the beach signals a subtle shift in the narrative’s POV from Susan to “El,” which contributes to the film’s seemingly divided loyalties. As Carmilla begins to exert an unholy influence on Susan – Susan’s dream made flesh – “El” consults with a doctor (Dean Selmier) who dismisses his rising concern that something occult may be afoot. The doctor’s bland psychoanalytical explanations of Susan’s behavior are echoed in the literature which Susan discovers on the home’s bookshelves; she opens randomly to a page and the text accuses her of mental illness and hating her husband. Indeed, Susan’s actions increasingly seem borne on a chorus of voices – the doctor’s, her husband’s, Carmilla’s. Is she losing all autonomy, or finally gaining it? When the doctor tracks down Susan and encounters her consulting with Carmilla in the ruins like a sacred, secret ceremony, he seems just as alarmed by Carmilla’s declaration that Susan turn against her husband as the sight of teeth sinking deep into her neck, drawing blood. Later, he skips over this part when he recounts the scene for “El” – the point, he tells his friend, is that Carmilla is turning her against him. Vampirism is just a detail.

Mircalla/Carmilla (Alexandra Bastedo) in the trap.

Bastedo is a fascinating Carmilla, in a billowing purple dress which she sometimes wears as a cloak, occasionally suggesting the doe-eyed Yutte Stensgaard of Lust for a Vampire but in the critical moments displaying a roguishness and bloodlust. Her best moment comes when she’s caught in a trap set out for foxcatching; upon hearing the approach of the hunter, the pain is forgotten – she shoos Susan away and waits gracefully for the hunter’s arrival like a metamorphosed character in a Grimm fairy tale. When Susan stabs the hunter, Carmilla’s face melts with warm pride. Yet the film’s final stretch largely belongs to “El.” His execution of the vampires is brutally over-the-top (and, again, surreal, with a coffin spilling blood as he blows it to pieces with his rifle), so cold blooded that it’s clear his righteous mission is morally compromised. The film thus aligns itself with contemporary and future vampire films in which the crusading vampire killers are – subtextually or super-textually – the true monsters; though one could also argue his position, given that his wife is, you know, trying to murder him in his sleep. Sometimes Aranda’s restless imagination gets the better of him, as in a superfluous, illogical, but humorous little passage where Carmilla is revealed to be Carol’s classroom teacher, lecturing her young students on the properties (and taste!) of blood, or in a newspaper headline coda which is too abrupt to achieve any impact. Yet in the transgressive seas of 70’s horror cinema, The Blood Spattered Bride leaves deep marks.

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The Scarlet Flower (1977)

Posted on May 8, 2020 at 6:33 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

No one will argue that the two finest cinematic adaptations of the Beauty and the Beast story are by Jean Cocteau and the Walt Disney Company, respectively. But dig deeper into fairy tale cinema and you’ll uncover the hypnotic, oneiric The Scarlet Flower (1977), adapted loosely from the 19th century author Sergey Aksakov. In the opening minutes, a peacock strides through the hall of a mansion gone literally to seed, red blossoms oozing out of a monochrome corridor, and a ghostly, grinning woman steps out of her painted image hanging on a wall. Far away, in a country cottage, a bird alights on the head of an indifferent cat, and a rooster occupies a doghouse while its ousted occupant paces outside – omens which disturb the merchant Yerofei Yerofeich (Lev Durov) before he sets out on his horse-drawn cart into the woods. Director Irina Povolotskaya eschews the broad pantomime stylings of other Soviet fairy tale films, such as those of genre specialist Aleksandr Rou (Father Frost); instead, she creates an atmosphere of psychic unease, relying upon a score of bells, harpsichord, and Russian folk songs mournful or feverishly frenetic. It’s also infused by an almost pagan eroticism: her Beast is not leonine, but a creature of the forest, the former prince now hidden inside a cloak of twigs, leaves, and moss like one of Tolkien’s Ents. Even our introduction to the merchant’s teenage daughter Alyona (Marina Ilyichyova) has the feel of a dark sexual confession: she asks her father to retrieve the scarlet flower she’s seen only in her dreams, but asks that he tell no one about it. Later, after he’s discovered the flower and brought it home, she huddles in a corner away from family and friends, cupping the prize in her hands as it glows with red warmth. Sometimes that magic red lights up the outdoors, shining through the windows, tracing a portal between the mundane world and the cursed realm of the Beast. Scenes set within the Beast’s haunted palace, perched at the edge of a lake, are drained of color by cinematographer Aleksandr Antipenko, allowing only oranges and reds while the inhabitants are bloodless, bluish gray – surreal images that call to mind Wojciech Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) in their occult mystery. This is ostensibly a children’s film, but the embattled director Povolotskaya is obsessively drawn into details that enrich the film and make it something much more. As she states in an interview on the 2003 Ruscico DVD, her vision was questioned relentlessly by the studio heads, and the film was cut by “500 meters” – the end result is only an hour long. But what an hour!

The fairy (Alla Demidova) spies on her visitor Alyona.

Povolotskaya and screenwriter Natalya Ryazantseva supplement Aksakov’s tale with a fairy, occasionally called a witch in the dialogue, and indeed gradually transforming through the story from a powder-wigged phantom in baroque dress into something closer visually to Baba Yaga, a reflection of the desolation she feels: we learn that she’s cursed the prince out of her own anxieties. (A recurring theme in the film seems to be a fear of being laughed at, from the Beast to the fairy; even Alyona’s own sisters can’t stop laughing. Perhaps this story is conceived by Alyona herself, acting out her insecurities in an extended diary entry.) Her hobbies include harpsichord playing and divination; she tells Alyona, “I can give you a book with cabalistic signs, or I can teach you fortune telling, or I can show you a lucky star that will always direct you. But you must run away from here. Tell me, what do you need [Beast] for?” The decision to include this new character also shifts the role of antagonist away from the Beast, and despite some eerie, dislocated threats (we only see his eyes) toward Alyona’s trespassing father early on, his character softens quickly as he and Alyona have romantic assignations in green fields, beside waterfalls, and on the murky lake – out of which the Swamp Thing-like creature rises to romantically join Alyona in her drifting boat. Yet the fairy is hardly a typical villain, and retains her own eccentricities, such as keeping a domesticated peacock and turtle, the latter wandering across her parlor table as she pets it. The peacock becomes an unusual recurring image: when Alyona first parts the Beast’s veil to match his gaze unobstructed, she recoils from what’s still obscured from us: in a manic edit Povolotskaya instead shows us the peacock swiveling to display the eyes of its feathers.

Alyona (Marina Ilyichyova) gazes at the Beast through a watery lens.

The dreamlike quality to the film also borders frequently on nightmare. As characters recall – or are visited by – the scarlet flower, it flashes as a red beacon on the screen, illuminating the world with an almost apocalyptic light (with shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind when it beams through the windows). The rustic villagers at one point fill the merchant’s home, swaying slowly back and forth while they sing their folk song like something out of a Bela Tarr film (or perhaps George Romero). And the film features an actual nightmare of the Lynchian variety, filmed in broad daylight, as Alyona’s siblings discover the Beast hiding inside the merchant’s cart with all the impact of a dark sexual secret being dragged traumatically into the public eye. After an accidentally extended separation from the Beast, in which he’s convinced Alyona has abandoned him, she returns to the tree at the foot of which the scarlet flower grows to find that her lover has partially decomposed into moss and soil. She wraps her body over the golem-like shape, lifting the curse – and color finally fills the palace and returns to the complexion of the fairy and the only other occupant of the haunted house, her companion referred to in the credits as the Old Man (Aleksey Chernov). The Beast is restored to his more conventionally handsome shape as the prince – also changing actors according to Povolotskaya, metamorphosing from a makeup-laden Valentin Gneushev (who would later gain fame in Russia as an influential circus director) into Aleksandr Abdulov. But I prefer the ballrooms with the M.C. Escher patterns on the floor, the wandering turtle and peacock and particularly placed owl, the relics and ghosts of the desaturated, haunted world before the spell was broken.

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The Missionary (1982)

Posted on May 7, 2020 at 7:30 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In 1982, Monty Python began filming its swan song, The Meaning of Life (1983), which would close with the opening credits of 1969’s Flying Circus playing on a TV set drifting off into space – a fitting bookend to 15 years of Python comedy. The Pythons were focusing ever more on their solo projects; getting together to collaborate had become strained. Michael Palin, sensing the dissolution and watching his friends and colleagues launch new endeavors, decided to write a comedy film, conceiving of an early 20th century clergyman, having spent a decade as a missionary in East Africa, reintegrating into sexually repressive English society and finding his newly liberal attitudes, informed by the tribesmen he befriended, at odds with everyone but the down-to-earth “fallen women” to whom he proselytizes. Casting himself in the lead, Palin saw it as being in spirit with his and Terry Jones’s 1976-79 series Ripping Yarns, each of which was a self-contained parody of tales found in the likes of Boy’s Own magazines; though it was also not far in spirit from Jabberwocky (1977), Terry Gilliam’s film in which he starred as a typically plucky Palin naif, wandering by accident through different strata of society. Like Jabberwocky, The Missionary has one foot in broadly satirical Pythonesque comedy, another in a rigorously detailed world populated by distinguished British actors rather than comedians. Palin set up the film with Denis O’Brien and George Harrison at HandMade Films, the company created to finance Life of Brian (1979) and for which Gilliam and Palin had just made Time Bandits (1981). This time, the director would be Richard Loncraine, who had directed The Haunting of Julia (1977) and Dennis Potter’s Brimstone & Treacle (1982), and would later go on to the acclaimed 1995 adaptation of Richard III with Ian McKellen. Palin would soon become the celebrated host of globe-hopping television travelogues, but for now, at least, he would be a big-screen leading man. The film was never going to be a global hit, nor was it meant to be; not only is it proudly British but it’s also uniquely Palin in its sensibility, point of view, and unassuming charms.

Rev. Charles Fortescue (Michael Palin) in East Africa.

The film opens with Charles Fortescue’s name being carefully obliterated with black paint on an honors board in an English public school, perfectly framing the narrative as the story of one man’s tumble into disgrace. Reverend Fortescue arrives back in England to be reunited with his fiancée Deborah Fitzbanks (Phoebe Nicholls), who is obsessively organized: “I’ve kept all your letters…they’re upstairs, in numbered boxes. The first eight boxes are general subjects. They’re subdivided into specific sections. And there are six for particular subjects: birthdays, Christmas, Easter, that sort of thing. So I can find July 8th 1898 – see ‘Elephants’ box five, section three…” She anxiously awaits their impending wedding, but skillfully retreats whenever he moves in for close contact. In London, Fortescue visits the Bishop (Denholm Elliott, who had also appeared in an episode of Ripping Yarns), expecting to be appointed as a prison chaplain or something along those lines. Instead, he’s asked to go out into the streets, speak with prostitutes, “find out why they do what they do, and stop them doing it.” Seeking to raise funds for a mission for this purpose, Fortescue appeals to the sex-starved Lady Isabel Ames (Maggie Smith, never funnier), wife to the impossibly wealthy, impossibly bigoted Lord Henry Ames (Trevor Howard). Lady Ames tells Fortescue at once that she’s attracted to him, and though he resists her advances and retreats back to Deborah, she insists he go right back and ask for the money, ignorant of what this really means he’ll have to do. Soon Fortescue has his mission, even though the price has been his own prostitution. Rumors begin to spread to the Bishop that Fortescue has been having relations with the women he’s taken in – and he has, with some of them, a byproduct of treating them with the tenderness and attention they’re seeking. As one of the prostitutes tells him, “Do it and enjoy it; it’s not the end of the world.”

Fortescue reunites with his fiancée Deborah Fitzbanks (Phoebe Nicholls).

The film boasts rapturous soft-focus photography by Peter Hannan, who had shot Loncraine’s previous films and would go on to lend an unexpectedly handsome look to The Meaning of Life. With such painterly compositions the film looks like a Merchant Ivory production, which is appropriate given that’s the genre it’s parodying. The look also enhances the gags. In one long take, Fortescue, visiting a lord and lady who are potential benefactors, launches into an impassioned monologue while pacing in the background of an ornate parlor; in the foreground, the lady gradually realizes that her husband has just passed away in his chair. At the end of the scene, a maid covers the body in a white cloth, so that he disappears into the scenery amidst the rest of the draped furniture. A remarkable extended bit sees a butler (Michael Hordern) with a very poor sense of direction leading Fortescue back and forth through Lady Ames’s vast mansion, wandering into closets, through the cellar, and finally outside, where the entire building fills the four corners of the screen. “I think if you won’t mind sir, we’d better walk round to the front door and start again.” He promptly walks in the wrong direction. The period detail from one scene to the next is spot on, which enhances the laughs – to see Maggie Smith, a familiar face in productions such as these (right up through Downton Abbey), understatedly but persistently making aggressive sexual advances on Palin makes the whole film worthwhile by itself. The film also features small roles for Timothy Spall, Neil Innes (who sings the song over the end credits), and a brief appearance by Charles McKeown, who would soon appear in Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).

The Bishop (Denholm Elliott) pays a visit to Fortescue’s unusual mission.

The story eventually traces Fortescue’s fall from grace as he reaches self-actualization and sexual liberation outside the boundaries of society and church. This involves getting closer to Lady Ames and discovering that she’s wasn’t born into wealth – she wears her role like a mask – and that she’s about to take desperate measures against her monstrous husband. Here the film drifts amiably off the rails. Palin’s satirical targets are clear: sexual repression, hypocrisy, prejudice against the disenfranchised. The whole story seems to be building toward the establishment of the mission, and we’re waiting to see Fortescue amidst the prostitutes, the complications that ensue – and then Palin’s script all but skips over it, giving us instead an assassination subplot in which we’re not at all invested. There are three scenes set in the mission: a comical seduction with echoes of Sir Galahad in Castle Anthrax; a visit from Lady Ames in which she discovers the compromised Fortescue; and a visit by the Bishop in which he discusses the rumors about this place. It’s easy to see how another draft would have fixed the problem – excising the assassination storyline and spending the rest of the film inside the walls of the mission, and contriving to bring Deborah there, one way or another. You expect Fortescue’s two worlds to collide, and they don’t quite. The script could also stand to give more dimensionality to the sex workers, most of whom are relegated to the roles of extras. In Indicator’s excellent Region B Blu-ray release, Palin, in a new interview, acknowledges the film’s shortcomings – that the third act never lives up to the heights of the first two. He says it could use more emotion, which is astute: perhaps there was some reluctance to move too far from the broad comedy parameters established by Python and Ripping Yarns. Yet Palin was always gifted at writing warm, empathetic characters, and that shines through in The Missionary. Even though the story never quite comes together in the end, it’s a pleasure to spend time in this world.

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