THE FOX WITH A VELVET TAIL (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

The "fox" in the title means nothing as such, it's probably just a marketing tactic to make consumers associate the movie with other "animal-named" giallos. However, there's nothing Argento-esque about this movie by Spanish director/co-writer Jose Maria Forque. If anything, FOX has more in common with a suspense-giallo like 1969's PARANOIA in being focused on a mundane murder-plot. 

The alternate title IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE applies better to the situation of wealthy lady Ruth (Analia Gade), in that for almost half the movie she seems to be peacefully ensconced on her estate, immune to any forces of chaos that might be swirling about her. At the film's outset she tells her husband Michel (Tony Kendall) to move out, because she has a new lover, Paul (Jean Sorel). Michel is downcast but not overly upset, so he leaves, expressing the hope that Ruth will change her mind. But for over half an hour, Ruth and Paul live things up in the lap of luxury. Sure, a little chaos intrudes when the brakes on Ruth's car fail, but hey, that could happen to anyone, right? And that gorgeous redhead Daniela (Rosanna Yanni) who moves in next door-- just part of the cheery scenery, right?

No detective-work is required for Ruth to suss out the destructive forces in her life: she simply lucks onto three conspirators openly discussing their plans to murder her. But with no proof of the murder-plot, Ruth must find some way to cause the destructive forces in her life to rebound on her enemies. At one point, she appears to be under the thumbs of two of her oppressors, but Ruth may have one more card to play.

FOX is beautifully photographed and both Gade and Yanni are glamorous, but there's just not enough characterization to make any of the principals seem like more than bare functions of the plot. While in many films like this the predators are eminent, this time it's the potential victim who holds the narrative together. FOX is watchable but strictly non-demanding.     

        

EXTREME MOVIE (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I don't want to devote much time to this toss-off comedy, mostly a collection of blackout sketches, though a few segments are devoted to the experiences of a high-schooler named Mike as he pursues the girl of his dreams. It has a couple of skits devoted to time-travel and to a "Weird Science" situation, but neither the fantastic nor naturalistic elements are memorable enough to merit analysis. Yet I will admit that I found EXTREME more diverting than the average bad comedy, possibly just because though the producers mostly used unknown actors, they brought in a lot of hot women to justify their sex-spoofs. Also, I noted that one online reviewer with the site FILM CRITICS UNITED felt much as I did:

The good thing for this movie, despite the fact it’s not really all that funny is that it is still funnier than those Friedberg / Seltzer theatrical disasters ‘Date Movie’, ‘Epic Movie’, ‘Meet the Spartans’ and I think there’s one more that I made a conscious effort to avoid seeing.

The only thing I'll add is though the EXTREME jokes aren't as tiresome as those of the F/S "movie" series, they have the same problem: being too flaccid to generate anything like an inventive twist. One quick example: a young guy strikes up a chatroom-conversation with a woman and wants to meet with her. Though she hasn't laid eyes on him, she thinks it would be cool for him to come to her apartment pretending to be a masked rapist, who will then ravish her. Anyone watching will know that the young horndog will not be getting any, and the scripters take the most obvious route: through exigent circumstances the masked "rapist" shows up at the wrong apartment and menaces the wrong woman, who's terrified despite his fumbling approach. But there's no twist to conclude the skit and provide even fleeting satisfaction. Maybe it might have worked if the wrong woman subdued the guy, tied him up, and began indulging in some sort of "Misery" fantasy instead of the way the actual skit just petered out.

The script here was written and directed by a team best known for the theatrical release NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, which I have not re-watched for over twenty years. But I remember liking it mildly in the theater, and to my knowledge it may be the best spoof of teenage sex comedies. But then, ANOTHER was also a more high-ticket production, with a cast of solid B-level performers. So it looks like it didn't take long for the duo to slide into mediocrity-- along with most of the comedy-makers for the next twenty years.

            

FINAL CURTAIN (1957)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

“I know that I must find that object, even though I don't know what it is I must seek. I also know I fear that I will find that object. This night the calling is stronger than it had ever been before. This night was to be the night I had looked forward to with fear, knowing all the time that it had to come sooner or later and there was nothing that I could do to heed that call. This was to be the night. This, the last night of our play. This night when all of the others had gone home.”

I'm as surprised as anyone else might be, knowing of Ed Wood's notorious artistic failings, to find that anything he did registers as "good." And FINAL CURTAIN boasts many of the same failings as Wood's full-length movies. But judging CURTAIN only by its symbolic discourse, it is good on those terms. This 22-minute item is like a massively clumsy version of Edgar Allan Poe-- and though I can't prove it, I suspect Poe was one of Wood's inspirations for his sometimes-rambling confessional narratives.

Long ago, SF critic Algis Budrys wrote an essay on HP Lovecraft for some SF-magazine, archly claiming that Lovecraft mastered a POV Budrys called "first person hysterical." The comment wasn't true of Lovecraft at his best, but it was true of a lot of the works of HPL's literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, whether Poe's frenzied narrators dealt with physical danger (the torture-victim of "Pit and the Pendulum") or with internal upheavals (the protagonist of "Tell-Tale Heart"). And "first-person hysterical" certainly fits the unnamed protagonist of CURTAIN, as attested by the snatch of dialogue printed above, from the very beginning of the story.

So, backstory to the project. Prior to August 1956-- the time when Bela Lugosi, the most bankable actor Wood ever worked with, passed away-- Wood had written various spec-scripts, whether original or adaptations of Wood's own prose stories, as potential vehicles for Lugosi. FINAL CURTAIN would have clearly drawn upon Lugosi's iconic Dracula image, by having Lugosi play a stage actor who had just finished starring in a play about vampires, and who remained, throughout the narrative, clad in a tuxedo because that's what his stage-character had been wearing for the play's final performance that day. (Had Lugosi played the part, an audience would have assumed that the actor had essayed the part of Dracula, though the script never says so.) After Lugosi died, Wood managed in 1957 to shoot two pilot episodes for a proposed anthology teleseries, PORTRAITS IN TERROR-- one being FINAL CURTAIN (which came about because Wood secured permission to shoot his film in an empty theater) while the other was entitled THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED. When no network bought the project, Wood subsequently re-used footage from both in his 1959 feature NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. Ironically this movie also failed to receive commercial exposure until being discovered for the home video market in 1984. Then a copy of FINAL CURTAIN was found and released to said market in 2012. 

CURTAIN's protagonist is an unnamed actor (Duke Moore) who starred in a vampire-play for "months," and now that the play's run is over, he remains in the now-empty theater because he has some unexplained intuition about finding some "unseen object." The Actor (as he's billed in the credits) never speaks out loud, but a voiceover-- the only words spoken in the episode-- purports to be the Actor's inner thoughts, though the often-frenzied mental dialogue was recorded by another Wood player, Dudley Manlove. The Actor never devotes so much as a stray thought to his past, his profession, or anything but the vague unease haunting him. He starts at every cat's yowl, every creaking board.

After ten minutes of these ruminations, the actor heads upstairs, still unusually apprehensive about everything he sees and feels in the theater. He enters the prop room and sees what he momentarily mistakes for a woman with long blonde hair. When the apparition does not move, he remembers that it's the dummy of a vampire that was used in the play. The actor fingers the dummy's dress and her long hair, and he seems to have fallen in a little in love with the image, much the way Poe's protagonists conceived sudden amours. He starts to leave the room, takes one look back-- and suddenly the "dummy" (Jeannie Stevens) smiles and beckons to him. The terrified thespian manages to blunder his way out of the room, and once he's in the corridor outside, he simply goes back downstairs. Since "the Vampire" (as Stevens is billed) does not appear again, the Actor is able to dismiss the experience. 

After more ruminations, the Actor enters the "last room" in the theater. There he discovers a coffin-- though all the audience sees is a boxy shape, like an overturned cabinet. The Actor opens the "lid" of the "coffin," which he decides is the "object" he's anticipated, and he crawls in and shuts the lid, whereon the film ends with the implication that he smothers himself to death with a figurative Premature Burial.

Frankly, I went back and forth a little regarding the phenomenality of this short tale, with respect to "the Vampire." Ed Wood certainly didn't care about making things clear, so any conclusion I make might be my personal preference alone. I wouldn't have put it past Wood to have imagined (a) a real female vampire who just happens to be the spitting image of a prop dummy used in a play, and (b) who decides to stop by the theater in which the Actor's roaming around, as she's been called to him by his "half in love with easeful death" train of thought. Indeed, the plotline of NIGHT OF THE GHOULS-- the movie into which Wood inserted scenes taken from CURTAIN-- revolves around the notion that a phony spiritualist accidentally summons real ghosts. But at least the ghosts of GHOULS actually DO something, forcing the crooked medium into a coffin, where the swindler dies just as the Actor does.

Yet, even granting Wood's capricious plotting, it might be a bit more likely that the Actor simply imagines the prop dummy coming to life and beckoning to him-- which is, incidentally, the only really scary scene I've ever seen in a Wood movie. And the scene works because, in large part, viewers half expect it. And I'm not talking about expecting the Big Reveal because any viewer can see that the "dummy" is breathing. I'm saying that, because the Actor strokes the dummy's hair and clothes as if he's thinking about making out with the mannequin, it's the perfect "revenge of the feminine" for the dummy to come to life and say, "Sure, come on, big boy" with her gestures. Therefore, the Actor conjures up his own punishment, much as the narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart" imagines that he can hear the beating heart of the man he murdered. The Vampire-scene is also a turnaround-- probably unintentional-- on the end scene from Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA, where cross-dresser Glen's wife willingly permits him to share her clothing.

The Vampire-scene also mirrors the episode's final moments, in that first we see an unliving object seem to come to life, after which a living man makes himself unliving. One online review claimed that the Actor is really dead from the first, but I think this interpretation robs the character of any empathy. Wood might not have understood how to make the Actor sympathetic to an audience, but he WANTS viewers to feel for the thespian's inner turmoil. The Actor has played a living dead man for "months," and there's the broad implication that he's been seduced by the idea of death. The setup is not unlike that of the actor-protagonist of 1947's A DOUBLE LIFE, who becomes overly invested in playing Othello, to the extent that the performer begins thinking that he is Othello, with deadly consequences. 

                    

Does Wood come close to tapping Poe's unique exploration of the dark side of human psychology? No, but I think Wood, even though he made this pilot when he was still in his thirties, showed a penchant for death-haunted characters throughout most of his cinematic career. Whatever TV-network might've watched Wood's pilot-episodes would have been entirely justifying on rejecting them as having no prime-time potential. But in some ways, the short CURTAIN does a better job than the full-length features at translating Wood's anxieties into a "personal myth"-- one with at least a little more universality than the director's passion for angora sweaters.

                                  

        

NIGHT FRIGHT (1967), TOP LINE (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Despite having lots of trash-films to choose from on streaming channels, I can't help checking out the various junk offered on the Mill Creek collections. I haven't found anything outstanding yet, even in a "so bad it's good" way. Yet at least sometimes even crap gives me exercise in finding a new way to condemn it.

I'd seen the cheapie "teens vs space monster" flick NIGHT FRIGHT broadcast on TV long ago and remembered nothing about it but a general negative impression. And there really was almost nothing to remember. It's at least a small curiosity that this dull 1967 drive-in fodder got re-released on some 1980s video label with a new title, implying that FRIGHT might be a more violent version of Spielberg's E.T. 

Most of the film involves a gorilla-like monster who emerged from a "spaceship" stomping around a rural town and killing off a few generally "clean" teens, before the sheriff (John Agar, the only "name" actor) brings the creature down. No one else can act their way out of a paper bag, and the monster is only shot in darkness, probably to conceal the suit's zipper. One small novelty in the script is that the monster isn't an alien. According to an explanation by the town's high-school professor-- who was apparently involved with the US space program at some time-- the creature is an Earth-animal, possibly a real gorilla, whom American scientists experimented on so that it could survive in outer space. So the "spaceship" was American-made, but it was launched with, what, zero publicity?  Frankly, the 1959 origin of DC's monster-ape Titano-- also an Earth-anthropoid sent into space, where he got special powers-- makes this bland piece of tedium look pretty sad.

     

TOP LINE, an actual eighties movie, is at least lively if no more consistent than NIGHT FRIGHT. 

Italian writer-director Nello Rossati had worked on at least two decent junk-movies known to me: the Ursula Andress sex-flick THE SENSUOUS NURSE and DJANGO STRIKES AGAIN, the only legitimate sequel to the 1960s DJANGO. I suspect that Franco Nero's association with TOP LINE was born of having worked with Rossati on the DJANGO sequel. The poster makes TOP look like another Indiana Jones clone, but what viewers got was an erratic, confusing "thriller" about an author and his girlfriend who discover that there are aliens among us.

What's the nature of the aliens, and what are they doing on Earth? Why do various government agencies pursue Author Ted and gal-pal June (Nero and Debrah Moore) to keep them from revealing the aliens' dubious secrets to the public? Why did guys like William Berger and George Kennedy consent to do glorified cameos here? Maybe this nonsense would have been more bearable if Nero and Moore had played a tough guy and girl like the leads of RAIDERS. Then, TOP might have been a decent "Indiana Clone." But all the stars do here is run away a lot. There are just two diverting scenes. In one, the protagonists are pursued by a Terminator-like robot, but they manage to thwart the automaton by luring him into the horns of a dilemma-- a dilemma consisting of a savage bull. In the other, Ted finds out the hard way that his ex-wife is one of the aliens, and that she's actually a lizard-like humanoid in Earth-disguise. Rossati doesn't write any memorable dialogue here, but Nero sells the scene with his look of horror, implicitly at having slept with a lizard-lady without catching on to any difference. The bottom line is that TOP LINE is pretty close to the bottom, but Moore and Nero keep this crap from being as stinky as many other timewasters.

            

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The phrase "tongue in cheek" not infrequently comes up in reviews of QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. But no matter how many tongues are lodged in how many cheeks, QUEEN's not a comedy because it isn't structured around the production of jokes and funny situations. Despite all the risible elements of the movie-- not least the presence of top-billed Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Venusian with a Hungarian accent-- the plot is structured like a drama. The essence of the story is yet another reprise of the War Between Men and Women, in which the men win the contest by killing a monstrous incarnation of femininity.

The usual backstory routine: Ben Hecht, writer of many Classic Hollywood movies, either composed or inspired a ten-page treatment about a planet ruled by inept females. Allied Artists bought the treatment for one of their low-budget sci-fi productions, such as 1956's WORLD WITHOUT END, as well as hiring that movie's director, Edward Bernds, for QUEEN. The credited screenwriter was Charles Beaumont, who has scored some success in SF-magazines but in 1958 had only successfully sold three television scripts before this job. What Beaumont and any uncredited collaborators produced was almost certainly compromised by QUEEN's low budget, recycling costumes and props from three or four other SF films, including a giant spider-puppet from WORLD WITHOUT END. 

Though Beaumont had yet to make his Hollywood bones, he does establish his gender-conflict fairly clearly in the opening scenes, at least as well as the best-known "babes in space" movie of the 1950s, CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Unlike that 1953 flick, QUEEN's space voyage is manned by an all-male team of four astronauts. Three of them, Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming) and two other young guys named Mike and Larry, express a desire to take on an exploratory mission in space, but they're obliged to do a "milk run" to an orbiting space station, escorting its architect Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch) to that destination. Even being told that they're to investigate anomalous signals to the station doesn't satisfy these seekers of glory, none of whom have any strong ties to females of the species (though Larry is constantly portrayed as the facile ladies' man of the bunch.)

However, when their spaceship approaches the station, a mysterious ray destroys the orbital and everyone aboard. Patterson and his three-men crew seek to avoid the ray, but it must not be the same one, for the ship is transported all the way to a jungle-planet. Despite an initial sighting of snow-- poetically described as "angel's hair"-- the four astronauts find that both atmosphere and gravity allow them to leave the ship and wander through a potted-plant jungle. Konrad theorizes that they've reached Venus, even though it doesn't look anything like established theories about the planet's nature.

Beaumont doesn't waste time on the discrepancy, for the viewer instantly gets proof that the planet MUST be Venus, since the guys are taken prisoner by a gaggle of love-goddesses. Okay, they're just a lot of cute girls in short skirts, but they're armed with disintegrator rays, so the guys have to go along. The astronauts see no men of any age (or women who are extremely old or young), and a tribunal headed by mask-wearing Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell) accuses the Earthmen of plotting an invasion of Venus. Yllana announces that the men are to be executed, but then she simply has them confined in some room together.

While under "cathouse arrest," the Earthmen meet Talleah (Gabor), allegedly a scientist, though she never says anything remotely technical. She gives the guys a quick and dirty summary of Venusian history. Ten years ago, Venus engaged in a war with another planet (whose name sounded like "Mordor"). Venus won, but the planet suffered radiation bombardments. Yllana and her all-female coterie somehow overthrew all the Venusian males and exiled them to a neighboring "satellite." Yllana and her allies are apparently fine with never enjoying male company again, but Talleah has assembled a gang of rebels planning to end the Queen's rule. Also, the Earth-guys learn that Yllana is responsible for blowing up the space station, and that she plans to do the same to the planet Earth.

However, everyone thinks that Patterson ought to try making out with Mask Maiden, so he vows to take one for the team. Unfortunately, Yllana takes off her mask and reveals that her real reason for hating men is because nuclear radiation ravaged her facial features (though the rest of her is perfectly fine). She wants to make an exception of Patterson, so that he becomes her consort on Venus. But not only does the captain have "butterface" issues, he's already got the come-hither from Talleah, so he turns Yllana down.

One might think that Yllana now has no reason to keep any of the Earth-dudes, and I don't think she even says anything about letting them live long enough to watch Earth die. Bernds must have insisted on re-using his damn fake spider from WWE, because the Earthmen briefly escape with Talleah and a couple of random girl-buddies, but only long enough for Mike to get attacked by, and saved from, the unconvincing arachnid. So Talleah fakes apprehending the fugitives and takes them back to their previous set. Beaumont kills a little more time by having Patterson capture Yllana and letting Talleah don the Queen's mask to impersonate her-- but this gambit also fails. Yllana escorts all of her enemies to the site of the long-range disintegrator ray, which looks like a giant easy-bake oven. Then Yllana presses what she calls a "red button" (actually black) -- and the machine simply doesn't work. Talleah's rebels attack Yllana's guards in a half-hearted battle, while Yllana runs inside the machine to make it work. Instead, the ray-machine blows up and finishes off the Ugly Duckling. Talleah becomes queen and orders the return of Venusian men from exile. The world has been safe for the return of heterosexual coitus, so the astronauts conveniently receive orders that they can stay on Venus for at least a year of humping.

Beaumont's best movie/TV work was ahead of him. But though he crafted a sloppy script, that's probably helped the movie in its claim to "so bad it's good" status. Ironically, there are some major tropes in QUEEN that could have made for a decent formula-movie, along the lines of Bernds' equally cheap WORLD WITHOUT END-- and not just the trope of the male-female war. Yllana "coulda been a contender" for good villainy, given that she holds warring males responsible for her disfigurement, and thus for her exclusion from hetero happiness. During Talleah's mask-masquerade, Patterson comments that she could be Yllana's "twin sister" (despite the accent), and the idea of heroes and villains mirroring each other is another rich trope, even though you'd have to make Talleah interesting for the trope to work at all. It's interesting that Patterson refers to the ship's attackers as "deadly neighbors," and what better justifies regime-change than finding out that your neighbors are already plotting against you? But all of QUEEN's tropes are as stillborn babes. Zsa Zsa wouldn't have been selected for a good script at all, so her casting is another of the movie's "tongue-in-cheek" aspects. And wouldn't most actors prefer to be known for a notorious dog than for an efficient formula-film remembered only by a small coterie of nerds?

                        

 

THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS (1960}

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I confess one of the reasons I revisited both of Jean Cocteau's famous "Orpheus" films is because this one, 1960's TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS, was rumored to include an appearance by Brigitte Bardot, who passed the previous month. By all indications, the pouty-lipped blonde above is not Bardot, but Annette Stroyberg, the Bardot-lookalike whom director Roger Vadim married immediately after he and Dear Brigitte divorced.

But once one knows that-- so what? I'm sure Cocteau fooled a lot of French people with the Bardot-imposture. And though TESTAMENT has no cast members credited except for "The Poet" (Cocteau himself), some players are iconic enough to compel recognition, such as Yul Brynner and Jean Marais, while others are famous primarily for their roles in ORPHEUS, as with Princess Death (Maria Casares) and Heurtebise (Francoise Perier). Toward the picture's end Cocteau the Poet tells the audience that he included these celebrities (hence the lack of advertising) because he considered them his "friends." But then why the Bardot imposture? Because she was not his "friend?" More likely, as in most of TESTAMENT's set-pieces, he just threw in anything that appealed to his sense of fun. The characters that Cocteau channels from ORPHEUS aren't really faithful recreations of the originals; they're more like playing cards whom the poet reshuffles for a new game.

I could go into great mythopoeic detail about why I think Cocteau chose (say) to have his poet-self killed off by Athena (Claudine Auger), a deity not predominantly associated with poetry. But in most if not all the film's bewildering set-pieces, Cocteau juxtaposes banal imagery with profound imagery, as if he's trying to confound even his ardent fans. Could he be trying to say that both the banal and the profound are inextricable parts of real experience? Qui sait? I critiqued this Bob Burden's FLAMING CARROT story on the theory that Burden did have a linear narrative hidden beneath all the attempts at randomness. But I won't attempt that with Cocteau, because I feel as if every profound image is meant to be undermined by random occurrences that mean nothing to anyone but Cocteau and possibly his inner circle. For that reason, I term TESTAMENT an "irony" rather than a drama like ORPHEUS, given that in Cocteau's farewell film it's possible to choose any particular set of images over any other.

If TESTAMENT has any sort of structure, it might be a sort of career overview/confessional poem, in which the artist celebrates all of his favorite creations and/or motifs. Cocteau died three years after the film's release. I don't know if the French artist knew the works of Irish poet Willliam Butler Yeats. However, one of the last poems Yeats released before his passing, "The Circus Animal's Desertion," includes a strong resemblance to TESTAMENT's apparent theme in the verse's closing stanza.

Those masterful images because completeGrew in pure mind but out of what began?A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slutWho keeps the till. Now that my ladder's goneI must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.   

  

 

       

   

ORPHEUS (1950)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

"No excess is absurd." --the Former Poet, defending a book of blank pages entitled "Nudity."

I've seen all three of Jean Cocteau's "Orpheus Trilogy" in the past, but as the first was not readily available, I'll hold forth on the second part, which is arguably the best-known and most critically celebrated. I'll note that Cocteau wrote and had performed a play with the same title back in 1926. Yet according to the Wiki writeup, the play doesn't share much with this movie but the basic reworking of tropes from the Greek myth of "the troubadour of Thrace," as an opening line calls the Greek singer. Clearly Cocteau had to rethink this project in terms of what could be accomplished on a certain cinematic budget, and what might impress viewers within the venue of postwar art-cinema.     

In 1950s Paris, Orpheus (Jean Marais) is not a singer but a poet, married to a faithful young wife, Eurydice (Marie Dea). Unlike the majority of poets in modern times, Orpheus is so well known for his works that at one point a bunch of female fans stop him on the street for his autograph. Yet, in a scene at a Parisian cafe, the young man confesses to an acquaintance-- an older, retired writer-- that he knows many people think him a poseur, and he seems to wonder if they may be right. It's during this conversation that the old fellow makes his rather Bataillean comment about "excess," though the concept is never elaborated.

A beautiful woman, called only "the Princess" (Maria Casares), arrives at the cafe with her entourage. Cegeste, a young member of that entourage, creates a row at the cafe, so that police are summoned. Trying to escape the law's long arm, Cegeste runs into the street and is killed by two black-clad motorcyclists who simply keep going. The French cops are apparently too flummoxed to notice how the Princess orders the dead guy loaded into her car by her chauffeur and then invites the fascinated Orpheus along for the ride.

Both in the car and at the Princess's mansion, the mysterious black-clad woman refuses to answer questions from Orpheus. At some point he's simply sent back to Paris, ignorant of his new role in the Princess's world. But the audience sees her true nature when she simply restores Cegeste to a semblance of life and consigns him to her world, the world of Death. To the extent that the Princess resembles anyone in the Orpheus myth, it would be Persephone. But it's a Queen of Death who moves freely in the living world, and who implicitly chooses Orpheus as a replacement for Cegeste.

 Orpheus, returning home, finds Eurydice more than a little concerned at his being absent all night. Also present are a Surete inspector, who questions Orpheus about the missing body of Cegeste, and Eurydice's sometime friend Aglaonice (Juliette Greco). The cop doesn't return, but Aglaonice becomes a familiar presence in the film. She's a member of some vague feminist group to which Eurydice once belonged (and thus a stand-in for the classical Maenads), and she clearly has a thing for Eurydice. The doting wife only wants her husband to love her and even discloses that she's pregnant with his child.  

 

By accident or design, the Princess' chauffeur Heurtebise makes certain that Orpheus is beguiled by the world of Death, making the curious arrangement to keep the Princess's car in Orpheus' garage. Orpheus starts hearing broadcasts of poetic phrases from the car's radio, and he's entranced by a level of poetic accomplishment foreign to him. Cocteau doesn't clarify if these are things the poet actually hears or just imagines hearing, but in any case, he does fall in love with the Princess. For that matter, Heurtebise becomes enamored of Eurydice, but she remains entirely fixated upon her husband.

Eurydice is killed, but Heurtebise tells Orpheus that Princess Death answers to an otherworldly tribunal, to whom Orpheus can make an appeal. The strongest visuals show the hero and his guide passing through mirrors into the death-realm, though the confrontation with the tribunal proves underwhelming, as the superiors of Death are just a trio of middle-aged men seated at a table. They rule that Eurydice's life was taken unfairly, and they send her back to the living world, but with the stipulation that Orpheus can never look at her again. This seems like an extreme take on the original myth, since in that narrative Orpheus only had to convey his restored love to the living world, at which point she would have been real again. Inevitably, the injunction is violated, and not even in line with iterations in which the male seeker simply fails because he wants to see his beloved again.

The conclusion shows Cocteau drifting away from the original story's tragic denouement. Once Orpheus returns to the real world, he's besieged not by Aglaonice's "League of Women" but by a crowd of poetry-lovers who for some reason think he's responsible for the death of Cegeste. Orpheus dies and goes back to the death-realm. However, the tribunal decides to release the young couple back to life, sans all memories of these experiences. The old guys do allow the young poet to bid farewell to his former love Princess Death before he forgets her, and before she pays an unspecified penalty for her actions. I don't know whether we should assume that the young couple manages to work out all problems thanks to this do-over. 

I think Cocteau meant in part to caution those vulnerable to the siren-song of poetry, possibly implying that poetry's "excesses" could separate them from the foundation of life itself. However, the death-realm loses some of its claim to transgressive fascination once it's been revealed that "Hades" is managed by three older guys keeping track of who's supposed to die and when. ORPHEUS doesn't quite rate the accolade of "masterpiece." However, despite its flaws it's still one of the most important art-films of the 20th century.

              

CINDERELLA (1977), LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (1960)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

In my review of the 1978 FAIRYTALES-- the second of Charles Band's attempts to produce a comedic softcore fairytale-- I said that it was fortunate that Band didn't continue mining that vein. But now FAIRYTALES starts to look pretty good next to 1977's CINDERELLA.

For one thing, this story of the put-upon stepsister follows the broad template of the story sedulously but barely gets any comedic punch out of the cornball sex jokes injected.  Instead, producer Band and director Michael Pataki (a character actor, here directing the second of his two feature films) pad the thin tale with forgettable musical numbers. One of the big downsides of CINDERELLA '77 is that despite the babelicious charisma of headliner Cheryl Smith, her stepmother and stepsisters are grotesquely made up and get far too much screen time (particularly the two sisters, who have a number about enjoying sibling incest together). By comparison, the other nice-looking women-- Brenda Fogarty ("Gussie Gander" from FAIRYTALES) and Pamela (SATURDAY THE 14TH STRIKES BACK) Stonebrook-- have next to nothing to do.

CINDERELLA's sole credited writer Frank Ray (INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES) Perelli uses one of the same gimmicks he'd use in FAIRYTALES: the prince of Cinderella's realm has a little problem keeping interested in sex. That's the reason for the prince to hold his big ball (so to speak), to find a female with whom he can conceive an heir for the kingdom. So out go the invitations to all the eligible girls in the realm, even to Cinderella-- but the stepmother burns her invitation and forces the poor girl to stay home and clean the house.             

Enter Cindy's savior, a "fairy godfather," played by another alum of FAIRYTALES, Sy Richardson. But the godfather is a sneak thief who hides from pursuing law-dogs in Cindy's house. Questioned by the girl, he breaks the fourth wall by acting like he already knows the Cinderella story, and that he's ready to assume the role of magical donor. But to make the burglar-schtick work, Fairy-Guy (who makes the expected gay joke but doesn't "play gay") just happens to have swiped a magic wand from someone. Thus he grants Cinderella her magic gown and her horse-and-carriage, but only until midnight. More importantly, he grants Cindy the gift of a "snapper," which apparently used to be a metaphor for "she's nice, she's tight"-- yet for some reason, this enhancement doesn't go away at midnight as do the other paraphernalia. Thus, in place of the glass slipper routine, the prince, having had orgy sex with a bunch of women at the ball, goes on a search for the girl with the tight twat and happily weds Cindy. Given that Sy Richardson's character is lame this time, and that everyone except Cheryl Smith hams things up terribly, this is one "belle of the ball" that has a sour ring.

 As if to prove that hewing to a template is no guarantor of quality, we have the first of three Mexican "Red Riding Hood" films, all directed by Roberto Rodriguez. However, the short length of Riding Hood story presents problems for a feature-length movie, even one aimed at kids. Over half the movie is just buildup to the climactic confrontation of Red and her enemy the Wolf, with the little girl (Maria Gracia, playing the same Red-role in all three movies) gamboling around her little town while other kids go missing. 

The culprit is of course the Wolf (a human actor in a shabby costume). though this time he's partnered with "Stinky the Skunk" (also a guy in a bad costume). Stinky serves as the Wolf's henchman despite the way the Wolf bullies him, and clearly, he's there so that the director can fill time with the antics of the two anthropomorphic animals. Stinky is more or less the Laurel to Wolfie's Hardy, setting the big bad lupine up for various comic embarrassments. In keeping with this, Rodriguez chooses to take all the "bite" out of the original folktale. Not only is it questionable as to whether the Wolf really wants to eat Little Red, he's kidnapped some other town-kids but hasn't eaten them, imprisoning them in a cave-- I guess until he's really, REALLY hungry?

This undemanding kid-flick-- which I would think would have bored an awful lot of tots-- was followed by a second film I've not seen, CAPUCERCITA Y LOS TRES AMIGOS, in which Red had a second adventure with the tamed Wolf and Skunk, as well as a Dog of some sort. Both movies would probably be forgotten today, save by hardcore kiddie-film fans. However, with his third "Red film," Rodriguez scored a bullseye that has entered the fannish Halls of Fame, teaming up Little Red with "Pulgarcito," the Mexican version of Tom Thumb, for TOM THUMB AND LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD. This loony film pitted the quick-witted kids, as well as the Wolf and the Skunk, against an array of folkloric monsters that might've given pause even to Santo and the Blue Demon.

SNOW WHITE (2025)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

A funny "inverse parallel" struck me when I thought of this revisionist remake alongside the 2024 movie WICKED PART ONE.

The story of Dorothy in Baum and at MGM is "Us Us Us" (i.e., Dorothy needing and finding friends/allies) but WICKED transfers the story to the Witch, whose story is all "Me Me Me."

The story of Snow White both in fairy tale and at Disney is "Me Me Me" (Snow finding her own identity) but the 2025 revision makes her story about "Us Us Us."

Of the many complaints I heard about the 2025 SNOW WHITE, none of them mentioned the strange insistence on altruistic motives for Snow (Rachel Zegler) throughout the script. I don't discount the other complaints. I'm sure the filmmakers thought the de-emphasizing the original's romance elements would be in line with feminist thought. And I don't doubt that they shifted the meaning of the "Snow White" name so that the film wouldn't seem to be trumpeting the virtues of Whiteness. But I was quite surprised that the film opens with a long musical number telling the audience how from childhood Snow was taught by her royal mother and father to serve the people rather than ruling them. In expansive scenes showing kid-Snow working in the kitchen with the plebes, we're told via song that "the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it." This redefinition of Snow White's character arc away from personal wish-fulfillment and toward a super-altruism becomes particularly ironic given the much-excerpted scene regarding Snow's interaction with the dwarfs.

Online pundits made much of this scene, in which Snow seems to be ordering the dwarfs, in their own house, to clean things while she sits back and supervises. Admittedly this was a change from the attitude of the 1937 Snow White, who industriously cleans the house herself to repay the "little men" for their kindness to her. But in fairness, the exact connotation of the 2025 Snow-scene is that she's discreetly telling the dwarfs to clean up a big mess that they just made-- and without even mentioning that the rough talk from six of them hurt Dopey's feelings. The rather mild commandments from 2025 Snow are not that different from 1937 Snow being a little strict with the dwarfs as she becomes their surrogate mother. 

Further, the cleaning-scene is nowhere near as egregious as all of the instances in which 2025 Snow is constantly worrying about the fate of her precious people, under the tyrannical rule of the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). Even her alleged "romance" with the handsome bandit Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) is predicated on her trying to persuade him to help her free her people instead of doing things for the benefit of himself and his fellow forest-thieves. In a duet between Jonathan and Snow, he accuses her of focusing on "princess problems" (are those like "white people's problems?"), but there's no real suggestion that this Snow is entitled in any way. 

In contrast, the Queen is selfhood personified, and her competition to be "fairest in the land" has less to do with feminine beauty and more to do with their differing definitions of what is "fair." For Snow, "fair" signifies the total social equity she raised to believe in, and which she never questions for a moment. (Presumably she believes in "inclusion" too, since she inhabits a multi-racial medieval kingdom.) For the Queen, "fair" means whatever gets her what she wants. Her big solo number, "All is Fair," is a terrible song with awful doggerel lyrics. But the song gets across the script's labored point: the Queen only uses the word "fair" ironically, as in the saying, "All's fair in love and war." And the Queen would amend even that only to "self-love," because she's incapable of any other form of love. Additionally, this means that her command of the kingdom is founded on the Hobbesian idea of "the war of all against all," endless competition for self-gratification. This is certainly an atypical script from credited writer Erin Cressida Wilson, best known in cinema for erotic/psychological thrillers like CHLOE, SECRETARY, and THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. In all likelihood, she just took the money and wrote what some Disney functionaries told her she had to write.

Nothing else in SNOW WHITE is as interesting as the battle of Snow and the Queen as representations of altruism and selfishness, respectively. The script's treatment of this important theme is both jejune and naive, particularly when it suggests that the only good reason for having a love affair is to get your "non-aristocratic prince charming" help you promote the cause of equity. But it's at least a better theme than anything in WICKED PART ONE, with its endless self-pitying "me me me" refrain.  

What else? The CGI dwarfs, I guess. If I'd seen the film as a kid-- not knowing any of the backstage rumpus brought about by Peter "Dickhead" Dinklage-- I would probably have found the animated little people reasonably entertaining, assuming I'd never seen the 1937 original. They're not horrible, but they would have been better played by costumed dwarfs.

Performances? Zegler sings well but as an actress she's bland, and I for one can't tell if she could do better with a better script. Burnap tries harder to bring charm to his good-hearted rogue so I think he probably can act. Gadot looks great as the Evil Queen, but she's also utterly one-note in terms of character. The entire significance of Snow's "death-by-apple" is bungled with some extraneous stuff about rescuing Snow's lost father, who's not really alive anyway yatta yatta yatta. When the reckoning comes between Snow and her adversary, the Queen manages to snuff herself in a scene that I found reminiscent of the climax of 2005's THE BROTHERS GRIMM. Given the context, I guess Disney could have found worse sources to steal from.

There's no question that Leftist politics informed the decision of 2025 SNOW to downplay romance in favor of group ethics. But I have seen far, far worse examples of ideological distortion than this one. SNOW WHITE probably wouldn't even crack the Top 50. 

 

THE NAKED TRUTH (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I often don't review films whose fantastic content consists of "fallacious figments" in the naturalistic mode; that is, where characters do things like talking to the movie's viewers (a thing that happens early in NAKED TRUTH). As of this writing I haven't even reviewed what is probably the classic in that category: 1990's AIRPLANE, which movie TRUTH falls all over itself seeking to (badly) imitate. But as it happens the only true thing about TRUTH is how well it shows how NOT to execute this sort of comedy.

Niko Mastorakis, director and co-writer of this fiasco, is largely known for his 1980s formula-flicks, most of which he also co-wrote and of which I've seen a half-dozen. I remember his oeuvre as adequate formula-productions, and I even gave a mildly positive review to 1989's NINJA ACADEMY. Though that film was little more than a riff on the successful POLICE ACADEMY series, Mastorakis and his co-writer seemed to understand what sort of wacky humor such a riff required. But in TRUTH we see the director and his collaborator utterly failing to get on board with AIRPLANE's type of humor.     

One of the first indications of Mastorakis's cluelessness is the naming of his two young male heroes: Frank and Frank. This conceit might have been slightly funny had there been any character differences between the protagonists, like one was daring and the other timid. But no, both are fast-talking slicks aspiring to write for the movies. The only real reason there are two of them is that later they will fall afoul of a murderous drug-dealer and will hide from him the same way Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon did in SOME LIKE IT HOT, by pretending to be women. Mastorakis botches this comedy-model as well, but in fairness he's not really making HOT his primary pattern.

Appropriately, one of the movie's first crummy attempts at an AIRPLANE-style non-sequitur joke takes place on an airplane, while the two Franks are en route to the destination where all the hilarity will ensue. Frank One (not that one can tell them apart) sits in his airline seat asleep, apparently enjoying his dreams. Seventy-year-old stewardess Zsa Zsa Gabor tries to wake Frank, then shakes him and slaps him. When Frank wakes, she tells him she couldn't allow him to have a "dirty dream" about her because she's a "feminist." Now, unlike most of the dumb jokes in TRUTH, the audience is supposed to find this funny because of a real-world event: Gabor being charged in 1989 with having struck a traffic cop -- which resulted in at least one other bit of stunt-casting for Gabor, in the opening scene of the 1989 NAKED GUN sequel. But that bit was over and done in less than a minute. By comparison the TRUTH joke, though milking the same event, lasts too long and fails to deliver a decent punchline.

That said, Gabor at least got a scene focused on her. Most of Mastorakis' previous films starred unknowns and only worked in a few scenes of more prominent actors, which was and is a standard practice in B-movies. But here the director apparently got the idea that the appeal of the Abraham-Zucker movies was that they used a lot of celebrities, particularly in AIRPLANE. So the director worked in blink-and-miss-them cameos by name-actors, where they usually weren't even doing anything funny. Thus one can find in TRUTH the following performers whipping out a few minutes that probably translated to no more than a day's shoot for each: Lou Ferrigno, David Birney, Spice Williams, Alex Cord, Norman Fell, Yvonne deCarlo, Ted Lange, Erik Estrada, Little Richard, Dick Gautier and Bubba Smith. Their appearances are so desultoty they aren't even worth the effort of "star-spotting."

The only half-decent joke in the flick takes place near the end. After the two dudes have escaped various murder-attempts by the drug-dealer (Herb Edelman), they and their FBI contact (Courtney Gibbs) find themselves in a jungle. The drug-dealer corners them, but the good guys are rescued by a gang of LA cops, led by Bubba Smith, who surround the crook and begin beating him with truncheons a la the contemporaneous Rodney King incident. (All of the cops, incidentally, are Black.) The slightly funny part comes at the end, when someone puts up a banner reading, "Police Brutality Tape-- Do Not Cross."

I'd be remiss not to mention that during the Franks' totally tedious female imposture, they get involved with a beauty pageant, and this allows the filmmakers to cast a lot of smokin' babes, including Andrea Parker of THE PRETENDER. But despite a little bit of upper-body nudity, there are dozens of films in which one can find sexcapades superior to those of the (mostly clothed) TRUTH.                               

BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

On this blog I generally review either metaphenomenal films or isophenomenal films that are in some way relevant to metaphenomenal tropes. For that reason, I've hesitated to review my favorite film by Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who passed away this week. Zany as it is, I'm not sure how much I have to say about the comedy-western THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING, wherein Cardinale teamed up with French legend Brigitte Bardot (as of this writing still among the living). However, four years later Cardinale teamed with another Italian luminary, Monica Vitti for a film originally called "Here Begins the Adventure." The English title for this comedy-road film, BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER, may be better in that it suggests the allure of adventure that Moreau's leather-clad motorcyclist holds for homebody Cardinale. However, director/co-writer Carlo di Palma does bring in elements of irony here, given that Cardinale's character is in some ways much more dynamic, even though BLONDE is primarily one of the many knockabout comedies that the Italian film industry so often produced.     

For the first ten minutes BLONDE almost does look like a precursor to the over-fifteen-years-later drama THELMA AND LOUISE. Claudia (Cardinale) works in a laundry while her barely-seen pig of a husband sits on his ass. Later there's a line about how Claudia's husband beat her, but the English translation doesn't say this right away. Claudia encounters the leather-clad, motorcycle-riding blonde Miele (Vitti). After hearing some of Miele's stories about her adventurous life, Claudia begs Miele to take her away from her drudgery. Miele, preoccupied with making a rendezvous with her fiancee up north, initially takes Claudia a little way, leaves her flat, and then changes her mind, rescuing the laundress from a lothario.

It's soon evident to the viewer, though not to naive Claudia, that Miele is a complete bullshitter. The next half hour is pretty boring, as the two women tool around the Italian countryside. Miele carelessly loses the motorbike and whines ceaselessly about making her appointment. The ladies try to steal a car and end up almost kidnapping a kid, but that action quickly peters out. 

Still on the way to the northern city, the girls stop in Naples, where the film's best scenes take place. The heroines help an old woman get back her money from one of the local gangsters. In return she gives them a magic charm that may or may not have real power. A few scenes later, the girls end up at a casino-- one where, curiously, the gangster-owner punishes his subordinates with an electrical torture machine. The girls break the bank, which sounds like the charm at work, though technically, Claudia is shown invoking the power of the charm AFTER the ladies start winning. However, the casino's gangster-boss lures them into another game. The girls lose but accuse the gangster of cheating and try to leave with their dough.

Now, the charm is never mentioned again, but it would be the only explanation for what happens next. As gangsters surround Claudia, Miele tells her that since her husband used to beat Claudia, Claudia ought to do the same to the thugs. And so the slim Cardinale proceeds to slug her way through a dozen men as if she had become Bud Spenser, the bulky colossus from the TRINITY films. (This might have been an intentional reference since one of those films is seen airing in a theater at the film's climax.) Miele, supposedly the big adventuress, does little to contribute to the fight, but though the girls get free they lose their money and are reduced to hiking north once more. They have another adventure on a train (where the director briefly emulates a silent movie with B&W photography and undercranking). They both have Edenic dreams wherein Claudia hooks up with a devil while Miele does the same with an angel, and both beings are played by the same actor. They eventually quarrel and part, only to come together to get Miele to her goal. Only after parting again does Claudia find out just how much of a fake Miele is. Yet Miele redeems herself by kicking her own bad boyfriend to the curb, and the two hit the road again, getting more of a happy ending than Thelma and Louise.

BLONDE is too whack-a-doodle to be credited with strong sociological intent, feminist or otherwise. But I was never completely bored, given that even the slow first half-hour spotlights the stunning looks of the two costars. BLONDE certainly doesn't deserve to be listed with the many more serious movies in Cardinale's repertoire. But in contrast with her LEGEND-ary costar Bardot, I never felt that Cardinale's vivacity was best served by sober dramas. She possessed one of the screen's most infectious smiles, and so I tend to like her comedies better than her serious stuff. And as I said, BLONDE is also one of the very few times Cardinale dabbled in any kind of fantasy-story.   

      

THE BEST OF THE TOM AND JERRY MOVIES (2017?)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I didn't see a date on this DVD collection of eight STV "Tom and Jerry" movies, but since the latest of them came out in 2017, I'll use that as a default date. All eight of the films appeared long after the properties of Hanna-Barbera had been absorbed by other companies. Nevertheless, though the scripts only range from decent to poor, the quality of the animation is quite good, especially compared to a lot of the DTV movies with H-B franchises (like some of the Scooby-Doo movies). The basic premise of all eight involves sticking the duo into some generic situation, sometimes horning in on some other iconic story, and adding the usual violent pratfalls to the mix. In order of appearance, rated either P for Poor or F for Fair.

TOM AND JERRY: SHIVER ME WHISKERS (2006) (P)-- Cat and mouse show up in the era of piracy and get caught between a devil (a ghostly apparition warning them of a treasure and its curse) and the deep blue sea (represented by two warring pirate brothers). This one has no crossovers, though Tom's perpetual enemy Spike the Bulldog appears in a support role. Mark Hamill voices the ghost.

TOM AND JERRY MEET SHERLOCK HOLMES (2010) (F)-- This seems to be the first of the STV films in which the cat and mouse overtly team up with a major fictional icon. This story adds the wrinkle that for regular human beings are okay interacting with walking, sometimes talking anthropomorphic animals, including not just Tom and Jerry but also a trio of thug-cats who serve the main villain. Said villain is of course Professor Moriarty (Malcolm McDowell) -- who else would a routine team-up flick pit against the Great Detective (Michael York)? The plot seems somewhat derivative of the 2009 live-action Holmes film starring Robert Downey Jr. In addition to support-characters Spike and Tyke, the script also works in Droopy and his frequent antagonist Butch. A battle between Holmes and Moriarty makes this a combative comedy.

TOM AND JERRY AND THE WIZARD OF OZ (2011) (P)-- This is easily the worst of the eight, being little more than a straight retelling of the 1939 film with the cat and mouse shoehorned in. Butch, Droopy and Jerry's cousin Tuffy are present as well.       

TOM AND JERRY: ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRIE MOUSE (2012) (P)-- Again, it's just the standard Robin Hood story, with the addition of Tom, Jerry, Spike and Droopy. The only asset is that the flick revives the character of Red Hot Riding Hood, infamous from the memorable MGM cartoon directed by Tex Avery. This time Red doubles as Maid Marian, but she still sounds like the Red of MGM as voiced by animation stalwart Grey Griffin. Red has a fine moment escaping a trio of guardian wolf-dudes by making them jealous of one another. Also a combative comedy, with Robin, Richard the Lion-Hearted joined by cat and mouse in battling Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

TOM AND JERRY'S GIANT ADVENTURE (F)-- Thanks to the script of the peerless Paul Dini, this retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk allows more space for original gags than the previous flicks. Cat and mouse work at StoryLand, a nearly bankrupt amusement park based on a fairy-tale theme. It's run by young Jack and his widowed mother, but the usual evil banker threatens to foreclose on the park, The mother asks Jack to sell their cow for money, but an odd fellow named Farmer O'Dell (read "Farmer in the Dell") convinces the young boy to accept magic beans in trade. Of course the beans grow the usual stalk, but this time Jack and his animal-buddies ascend and find a whole kingdom of fairy-tale icons. Most of them have only minor gags-- Mother Hubbard and her two dogs (Spike and Tyke), Humpty Dumpty, Simple Simon and the Pieman (played by Meathead and Screwy Squirrel), Old King Cole (Droopy), Barney Bear (playing no one in particular), and best of all, Red Hot Riding Hood's return, this time as a generic fairy. The fairy-kingdom is menaced by a giant named Ginormica who continually robs the residents, but Farmer O'Dell brought Jack to Fairy Land to fulfill his destiny to defeat the giant. The story's standard but is made more tolerable by the gags, particularly another sexy/funny song from Red. No combative mode.

TOM AND JERRY: THE LOST DRAGON (2014) (P)-- Tom and Jerry are raised in some medieval town by a good elf-girl, Athena. The three of them find a baby dragon and thus get on the bad side of dragon-hating townsfolk. In addition, Athena's evil aunt Drizelda has insidious plans for the baby dragon and for pretty much everyone else. No crossovers and no combative mode. It's not actively bad but just ordinary.

TOM AND JERRY: SPY QUEST (F) (2015) -- Frankly, this movie is the only one that urged me to check out this collection, as I'd never heard that anyone had attempted a teamup between the cat-and-mouse and the cast of JONNY QUEST. The animators and scripter Jim Kreig render yeoman service in trying to find a happy medium between the funny antics of the dueling duo and the "straight" adventure of the Quest team. For the most part they succeed, though I certainly could have done without villainous Doctor Zin having the three cat-thugs-- Tin, Pan and Alley-- as his henchmen. (Maybe Moriarty wanted to sabotage Zin by giving the trio a good rating?) Overall SPY QUEST feels sort of like a dual homage to William Hanna and Joe Barbera for both their wacky animal comedies and their brief but brilliant plunge into high-adrenaline adventure. Oh, and original Jonny-voice Tim Matheson has a small role here, while Tia Carrere contributes her version of the sultry Jezebel Jade. And yeah, Droopy's there again and is wearing out his welcome. Combative comedy all the way.

TOM AND JERRY: WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (P) (2017) -- This isn't as ill-advised as the OZ crossover, but it's still very unnecessary, as it's just another reprise of the classic movie adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale with the cat and mouse worked in. Oh, and at least Droopy's time is brief, though unfortunately that of Cousin Tuffy is not.      

    

         

         

ALIAS JESSE JAMES (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In my college years I remember harboring a liking for Bob Hope's comedies, but for the most part I can't remember particular scenes or routines that made me laugh. It's entirely possible that I simply liked Hope's persona-- the cowardly nebbish who always got the hottest babes-- more than any specific Hope schtick.

All that said, ALIAS JESSE JAMES-- which was not one of the films I saw back during my modest Hope-fandom-- is almost completely laugh-free. Hope had trod this sort of western-spoof material in 1948's far superior THE PALEFACE, and his director for that film, Norman Z. McLeod, was probably selected for JAMES because of those credentials. Hope was also reunited with a previous leading lady, Rhonda Fleming, who doesn't have to do much more than look beautiful and feed the comedian his straight lines.

The concept: a prologue informs viewers of the noble role played by insurance companies in the winning of the American West. One such insurance salesman, Milford Farnsworth (Hope), is a total failure at his vocation until he has a chance encounter with famed bandit Jesse James (Wendell Corey). Upon meeting Milford, Jesse comes up with a scam, signing up for an expensive policy and planning to fake his death to collect a big payoff. Jesse departs for his Western haunts, and when Milford finds out he's insured an outlaw, the hapless salesman pursues the outlaw in the hope of reversing the policy. 

Eventually Milford overtakes Jesse, but the outlaw sees in Milford a "body double" he can use to complete his scam. However, Jesse's girlfriend Cora Lee (Fleming) quickly falls out of love with Jesse and in love with Milford, with barely any effort on Milford's part. Assorted jokes make use of fantasy in the naturalistic "fallacious figments" trope. like Milford's hat inflating when he drinks strong alcohol, or outlaws moving in slow motion when they're fed loco weed.

The only notable feature of JAMES is a gimmick at the conclusion, where Jesse's gang is beaten not by the incompetent Milford, but by eight familiar western heroes, mostly from the small screen, except for Gary Cooper, more or less essaying his "High Noon" character. Tonto is one of these heroes, though there's no Lone Ranger, and the ranks even include Davy Crockett, who would have been about a hundred years old by Jesse James' time. Sadly, even this appealing bit is stultified by yet another unfunny Bing Crosby cameo.