The Company of Wolves (1984)

Posted on January 17, 2020 at 10:49 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

If you have seen Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), your first viewing was probably a lot like mine: I went in expecting a werewolf movie and instead encountered something surprisingly more. The VHS cover art, ubiquitous in the Horror section of video stores in the 80’s and 90’s, spotlighted the film’s most startling lycanthrope transformation, a wolf’s long snout bursting through a human’s jaws as it sheds its mask. The visual was announced like a trump card played against 1981’s dueling werewolf-makeup movies, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London. The striking sight makes literal the film’s oft-repeated claim that certain men are hairy on the inside. But as successful as that climactic moment is – a technical achievement worthy of a Fangoria cover, at least – Jordan’s head isn’t really in that game. The Company of Wolves is less inspired by Universal Wolf Man movies (though there’s a touch, with a perpetual fog snaking through the artificial forest) than tales more primitive, foundational, Jungian. In fact it derives from a cycle of short stories (“The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves”) by Angela Carter published in her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. Carter, who passed away in 1992, was one of the most fiercely intelligent and breathtakingly lyrical modern re-interpreters of the fairy tale, picking up and turning over tales like “Bluebeard” and “Puss-in-Boots” while penetrating straight to their core, exposing the ideas that the stories stir within us but which the original tales only danced around. She lets those tales be what they are, or anyway what they always seemed to want to be. Her versions are sexual, violent, dream-like, funny, gut-wrenching, romantic. In the film, she shares the screenplay credit with Jordan, which is more than a minor detail. Her voice almost fully informs the picture.

Granny (Angela Lansbury) warns Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) of dangers in the woods.

I say almost fully – to modern eyes, this is also very much a fantasy/horror picture made in 1984. For one thing, the moments of horror aim to compete in the mid-80’s marketplace. But its studio-bound environments are stunning to behold, evoking something between children’s book illustrations by Arthur Rackham and modern spectacles like Dragonslayer (1981). The village hidden in the hills and forest is an appropriately claustrophobic collage with hovels, an emerald mine, a church, farms, and a cemetery. Jordan fills every corner of the screen with odd details, partly to remind the audience that this is, in fact, a dream. This is stated at the outset when a pubescent girl (Sarah Patterson, who’s wonderful) escapes the screams of her older sister by locking herself in her bedroom with her sister’s stolen lipstick smeared across her lips, surrounded by dolls and books, falling asleep on the bed to dream – first, as a priority, of her sister getting shoved around by her dolls grown life-size, before being pursued and devoured by wolves. This brings a smile to the sleeping girl’s face. Then she becomes Rosaleen, a Red Riding Hood in origin story form, living in a single-room cottage with her parents (David Warner and Tusse Silberg) and learning about the dangers of wolves from her red-cloak-stitching Granny (Angela Lansbury, acting for the jugular). This, in itself, is an excuse for further embedded stories, making The Company of Wolves an anthology of sorts. Jordan favorite Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) appears as a newlywed who vanishes into the woods, presumed killed by wolves. Years later he returns, jealous that his wife has taken a new husband, and sheds his skin to reveal that he’s the kind of man who’s hairy on the inside. Beware the man whose eyebrows meet. After I saw this movie in the 90’s that line popped into my head unbidden whenever I encountered such a fellow, and I feel kind of guilty about it.

Rosaleen makes a surreal discovery in a nest.

Such tales from Granny demonstrate that men show their true selves with their wives after “the bloom’s off,” while Rosaleen’s mother pushes forward a counter-narrative that women can give as good as they can get. This becomes important when Granny has to face her own wolf, and Rosaleen must pick up the pieces and make a choice without any familial guidance. But Carter and Jordan take their time getting to the What big eyes you have. In the meantime, we learn how men who go into the woods alone will make deals with the Devil (who are chauffeured in fancy cars) – a potion may put hair on your chest, but at a price. Rosaleen begins to invent her own tales, and delivers one of the film’s major showcases, a wedding reception in which the pregnant ex-lover turns the groom and his party into wolves for revenge, a deliciously grotesque fantasy scene delivered with Dark Crystal-style sardonic humor. And Rosaleen contends with her first suitor, a rather piggish adolescent who plies her for a walk in the woods, which leads to getting separated, lost (first wonderfully, then strangely, then dreadfully), and pursued by a bloody-muzzled wolf that’s been feasting on livestock. The next time she walks through the woods, she goes by herself – and takes a knife with her. Where the familiar Riding Hood tale ultimately leads us is surprising, blood-racing, and unexpectedly moving. But throughout, the film never loses its essential strangeness – which only spotlights the eerie qualities of the legends themselves.

Rosaleen meets a man whose eyebrows meet.

Over the decades, The Company of Wolves, while never quite falling into obscurity (many know it), has nonetheless seemed to slip through the cracks. Though well reviewed upon release, and nominated for four BAFTAs in costume and technical categories, it often seemed to be received as too artsy for aficionados of 80’s horror, and too much the gory horror movie for those accustomed to dismissing genre films. For many critics, there’s nothing worse than a genre movie that’s putting on airs. But this has aged very well and feels neglected. This was only Jordan’s second film (after 1982’s Angel, starring Rea), but it did become a calling card that led to bigger pictures, perhaps peaking with The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with the Vampire (1994), though he’s been consistently busy ever since, most recently working on the TV series The Borgias and Riviera, and the thriller Greta (2018) with Isabelle Huppert and Chloe Grace Moretz. And yet The Company of Wolves has resisted gentrification; it’s still partly hidden away in the woods, where old rites are performed and superstitions followed, where Grannies warn little girls about the dangers of men and wolves. No sequels and remakes have been made, and those who discover it and love it maintain a quiet little cult. And – quietly – it’s one of the best fantasy films of the 80’s.

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Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Posted on January 11, 2020 at 10:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Following the runaway success of Dracula (1931), Universal quickly arranged a follow-up vehicle for its new horror star. Bela Lugosi was reunited with producer Carl Laemmle, Jr. for Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), while the striking Hungarian also farmed out his talents for Fox (Chandu the Magician) and Paramount (Island of Lost Souls). In retrospect, this period would sadly be the height of his film career before a rapid slide into lower billing and poverty row productions. For Rue Morgue he was easily slotted into the role of Dr. Mirakle, whose profession as a carnival showman displaying his gorilla Erik before paying customers disguises his true passion as a mad scientist. It’s a role that would typecast him in future decades as the sort of villain who plots to create invisible rays or atomic supermen, though here his features are uniquely distorted by a unibrow that would require hedge-clippers to maintain. He even has a ghoulish henchman played by the prolific Noble Johnson (The Most Dangerous Game, King Kong, The Mummy). If this does not seem to resemble any of Edgar Allan Poe’s original mystery tale, strap yourself in. Dr. Mirakle’s ultimate pursuit unfolds in a cellar laboratory borrowed from the set of Frankenstein (1931). “My life is consecrated to a great experiment,” proclaims Lugosi to a girl he’s kidnapped and brought to his lair. “I tell you I will prove your kindship with an ape! Erik’s blood shall be mixed with the blood of man!” Specifically he’s interested in the blood of a woman, when attractive Parisian Camille L’Espanaye (Sidney Fox, hot off Laemmle’s film adaptation of Preston Sturges’ play Strictly Dishonorable) catches the gorilla’s eye: Erik steals her hat through the bars of his cage, then sniffs it with fetishism.

Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) confers with his assistant (Noble Johnson) while the gorilla Erik waits in the carriage.

This early on, we’re clearly flirting with that peculiar pre-Code subgenre obsessed with ape/woman congress, most explicitly treated in 1930 with the overtly racist Ingagi, whose titular African tribe cross-breeds with apes, and whose poster depicts a gorilla fondling an abundantly topless woman. At least King Kong (1933) treats the taboo subject a bit more respectably, never going much further than the king of Skull Island stripping a few items of clothing from the body of the unconscious Ann Darrow. Amazing that Charles Darwin could get our society so hot and bothered. The Scope Trial of 1925 was a recent memory, and Rue Morgue brings its topic front and center. Dr. Mirakle makes it the theme of his carnival act, though the concept remains a sideshow for much of his audience. “Did you hear what he said?” one character asks, to which the other scoffs: “That we might be the production of evolution?” Erik is played by makeup artist Charles Gemora, who would don gorilla suits in numerous films including The Chimp (1932), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1933), Road to Zanzibar (1941), and Africa Screams (1949); he was also, naturally, in Ingagi. His work here is absurdly compromised by close-ups of a chimpanzee’s head, shot in such a way as to attempt to make it larger than it is – an effect that’s never convincing.

Dr. Mirakle is confronted by Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames).

Certainly there are nods to Poe’s story. The protagonist is named Pierre Dupin, after Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. But the Dupin of the story was a detective solving a murder (Poe’s was the first detective story). Pierre, played by Leon Ames (billed as Leon Waycoff), is an ill-defined character who has forensic detective skills, but is primarily a bland hero whose purpose is to protect and rescue his girlfriend Camille, the object of the gorilla’s affections and Dr. Mirakle’s scheme. His most impactful moment comes when he bribes a mortician so he can personally perform an autopsy on one of Dr. Mirakle’s victims, found floating in the river. But Ames’ limp performance only underlines the distracting American-ness of this 19th century Paris. The city survives better with its production design, by Charles D. Hall (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein), and its cinematography, by Karl Freund (fresh from Dracula and soon to direct The Mummy). When the film breaks free from basement laboratories and Parisian parlors, we are treated to fog-smothered streets that come to steep precipices over the dark Seine, and a finale in which Erik scales sharply slanted rooftops with Camille slung over his shoulder. Director Robert Florey, who was awarded this film after being abruptly removed from Frankenstein, is heavily influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), though he doesn’t push his visuals to such dream-like extremes. There is, however, an abundance of style, and Florey’s attempts to punch up certain moments are appreciated, notably in the climactic moment of horror when Erik is let loose in Camille’s apartment, strangling her mother and stuffing her up a chimney while Florey cuts in quickly to the faces of those residents gathered on the steps listening to the awful noises coming from behind the door. (It’s also a relief to finally get a moment taken from the source material, though the film’s narrative approach completely removes any of the original’s mystery.) And for Pre-Code luridness, there’s little that can top Lugosi gloating over his captive early in the film, her negligeed body bound to an X-shaped cross while he draws blood from her to mix with his gorilla’s. Murders in the Rue Morgue is now available on Blu-ray from Shout Factory, who have been making the most of a licensing agreement by steadily releasing Universal Horrors box sets that look beyond the classic monsters. This is only available as a stand-alone disc, perhaps because it’s been long awaited by Universal horror fans and should sell well enough on its own. The presentation, pristine and eye-popping, has been worth the wait.

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Monty Python’s Flying Circus: The Norwegian Blu-Ray Edition

Posted on January 10, 2020 at 10:59 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Last November Network in the U.K. released their sparkling new restoration of the landmark series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974) to mark its 50th anniversary. All four series are available in Network’s region-free box set, “The Norwegian Blu-Ray Edition” (get it?), with individual series being released one at a time over a period of months.* It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since A&E released the show on DVD – the last physical media release of Flying Circus here in the States, apart from some repackaged versions of the same over the years – and the discs haven’t aged terribly well, forcing you to sit through long menus, offering unsubstantial supplements, including some censored skits when uncensored versions were available, and looking like, well, DVDs encoded back in 1999. Network treats the show the way it should have been treated in the first place, offering a cleaned-up presentation taken from the original 2-inch videotape masters and going back to the original 16mm negatives and prints for the location-filmed sketches. Forget the version currently on Netflix. This is the best possible way to watch the series that gave us dead parrots, silly walks, Spiny Norman, an unexpected Spanish Inquisition, and the exploding version of the Blue Danube.

Graham Chapman

Really, it’s amazing how great this series now looks, given its origins. Network has also restored the episodes using as their guide how the content was originally broadcast – David Frost’s telephone number now appears where the Pythons impishly inserted it; Graham Chapman’s Summarize Proust contestant again has hobbies of both strangling animals and masturbation; and that spot is cancer, not “gangrene” – while uncovering additional deleted material and outtakes which are available to view in the special features. Personally, I was thrilled to finally see a bit of animation cut from rebroadcasts of the “Crackpot Religions” sketch, in which a series of Christs on the cross are strung together to become a line of telephone poles. Not everything that was filmed could be found; Python fans will be kept waiting for lost sketches involving a sculptor carving a long-nosed statue for his frustrated client (reportedly ruined by an alcoholic Chapman, struggling to remember his lines), and a wine tasting in which all the wines are just “wee-wee” (which John Cleese notoriously asked the BBC to remove before it was broadcast). But even the most diehard Python fan will discover material here they never knew existed. For me, that was a trio of short films the Pythons created for the employees of Birds Eye vegetables, Harmony Hairspray, and Close-Up Toothpaste to promote product relaunches. Taken together, those industrial films have about as much original Python content as one of their German episodes. (Speaking of which, those two German episodes are conspicuously not included, along with a few other choice items like the Montreux special – it’s a shame, but it’s heavily rumored these will be part of a separate release coming soon.)

Michael Palin

The studio outtakes are also a small treasure trove for Python fans; though some clips are mundane, and quite a bit are missing audio (subtitles are provided), I was delighted by candid moments like the studio crew extracting a giggling Eric Idle from beneath a gigantic 16-ton weight prop, or take after take of a sketch in which Cleese and Michael Palin are discovered in bed together, Palin accidentally mooning the camera at one point. A student film called “And Now For Something Completely Different” (not the Python feature) is also great fun, interviewing the Pythons on location while they’re dressed in full-body casts for a sketch about a sadistic hospital. And more interesting moments have been recovered from the dust bin – in an incomplete and fairly tattered videotape of an interview on In Vision from December 1974, Chapman, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam are asked what filming the new series (their fourth, shortest, and last) was like since Cleese had decided not to participate in it. Jones gives a sly grin and says that it’s much easier, before Gilliam dives in and speaks more diplomatically about Cleese’s absence. It’s a surprising public admission: you can see the glee on Jones’ face that he gets to create a Python series without Cleese arguing over his material. Cleese loved getting a rise out of Jones, but these two stubborn forces also kept Python in balance – between Jones’ surrealist, slapstick sensibilities and Cleese’s character-based humor. With Jones now left to dominate the writer’s room, Idle – always stranded in the middle and usually writing by himself – found himself at a disadvantage and soon objected to carrying on with the series. The future of the troupe was to be in collaborating with Cleese and in arenas in which he was more interested: particularly in making Python films.

Eric Idle, about to be squashed.

All these recovered scraps underline just how precious material is from this era of the BBC. Fans of classic British television are  familiar with the maddening policy of wiping tapes, erasing original content to make room for the new – thus those reconstructed Doctor Who episodes that have been pieced together from audio taped by fans off the original broadcast. Python-related projects prior to Flying Circus suffered from this treatment, including At Last the 1948 Show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, and The Complete and Utter History of Britain, all of which are available in only incomplete form on DVD. But Flying Circus survived, partly thanks to the efforts of the Pythons themselves, and what we have here has the feel of the most complete portrait of the series that’s possible, at least at the moment. Reflecting the Beatles-esque popularity of Python, each series set comes packaged with a book – not a booklet, mind you, but a substantial and lengthy book – by Andrew Pixley detailing the history and production of each episode. These are invaluable and painstakingly researched, far from a regurgitation of the usual anecdotes Python fans have heard elsewhere many times over. As with his book on the production of The Prisoner for Network’s 50th anniversary set of that show, he provides new context which answers many questions about why each episode was the way it was, including why some episodes feel more disjointed than others. I wasn’t aware of the great extent to which the scripts were taken apart and reassembled before production, so that many skits were moved to other episodes, and others written on the spot to fill gaps. But his books are also exhaustive to a fault – you’ll be grateful when Pixley explains a joke that would only make sense to someone watching the show in the U.K. in 1974; less so when he details references that need no explanation (who is this “Dracula” character anyway?), and you’ll just be scratching your head when he pulls rather mundane sentiments from the Pythons using absurdly obscure sources (I recall a 1990’s AOL chat cited at one point!). Note that these books are the main supplements to provide background for the shows; there is no retrospective documentary with the Pythons here, presumably because there’s already a variety of excellent ones already available, including 2009’s Monty Python: Almost the Truth. There are no talking heads here, and only Gilliam pops up to give the Python seal of approval, in a lengthy and delightful piece where he witnesses the results of the new restoration on a computer monitor, seeing his animations the way he always intended them to be shown. Python fans will share in his delight.

*An important note – buying the sets individually may be preferable for those who want to avoid a fragile, if attractive, box that doesn’t keep the four series sets very secure during shipping. Online forums are filled with complaints from those who received damaged boxes, with the sets, laden with a heavy accompanying book for each series, ripping through the thin dividers meant to keep them in place. I was one who received a damaged box back in November, though Network was able to replace it with an empty, intact copy. Alas, those extra supplies have been exhausted and the best one could hope for now is a refund for the damage, unless the company decides to manufacture more spares or create a sturdy version.

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