Women of Whirlpool Island, aka Jotai Uzumaki-to (Japan, 1960)

After cutting his teeth on the Super Giant movies (that’s Starman to you, yankee), Teruo Ishii went on to direct a wide variety of genre pictures for Shintoho, including a series of film noirs. All of them, to some extent, bare traces of the perversity that Ishii would later give free reign in his euro guro films of the 70s, 1960’s Women of Whirlpool Island included.

Women begins with Okami (Yoshido Teruo)--a classic hoodlum with a conscience, laconic and steadfast--returning to the island hideout of his gang, a shady nightspot called Club Seaside. Here he attempts to reconnect with his former lover Yuri, who is played by Mihara Yoko, a later Pinky Violence mainstay. Yuri, sadly, has been reduced to a heroin dependent slave of the gang, and is being forced by them to help recruit the young women of the island to act as drug mules, sex slaves, or both.

One of these young women is a fiery dock worker named Shima, who is played by Masayo Banri (Tane in the Zatoichi movies). Through Shima, we see the cruel process by which these girls are inducted—lured with promises of travel and adventure, and then, for those destined for the sex trade, raped by one of the gang higher ups before being forcibly hooked on drugs and shipped out to wealthy clients overseas. Yuri, for her part, is sick over her complicity in this racket, and begs Okami to end her life upon their first meeting. Instead Okami helps her to get clean and, then, after befriending Shima, partners with Yuri in bringing the gang down through a series of violent escapades.

In Ishii’s hands, Women of Whirpool Island is a film noir swathed in a fog of melancholy. The island setting seems primarily intended to represent a place isolated from law, where evil enjoys free reign. There is no literal whirlpool here, only a metaphorical whirlpool of vice and degradation that is impossible to escape once one dives in. The righteous have little hope in a place like this and, for them, the island’s sheer cliffs, towering over a roiling sea, represent an ever-present invitation to suicide.

At the same time, Ishii’s approach to this material explodes with visual invention. Much of the film’s first half involves scenes of two or more characters talking, and the director enlivens these potential longueurs with dramatic, deep focus compositions and inventive lighting schemes involving the use of colored gels (in one shot, Yuri is illuminated by a single, pure white spotlight, while the rest of the gang is bathed in a deep red.) He also employs so many low angle shots of his actors that he at times appears to be paying homage to Ozu.

As for the director who would later make Horrors of Malformed Men, he is evident in a druggy dance sequence reminiscent of the alien dance troupe (or, as I like to call them, the Alvin Aliens) in Invaders From Space and the wave of sadism that sweeps through the film’s final act. The latter occurs after the gang’s uber boss arrives on the island in the wake of repeated failed attempts by his underlings to keep Okami in check. The boss has a glowering teddy-boy enforcer who is quick to dole out consequences. First, he viciously whips the lieutenant in charge and then literally grinds his face into the dirt with his shiny Cuban heel. Then Yuro is hung from a chain and whipped. This being a Japanese film, the preceding is all aestheticized to some extent, but, as it’s also a gritty film noir, it is not aestheticized to the point that it doesn’t provoke a few grimaces.

Unless you are someone completely devoid of imagination—or who has never seen a movie --I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Women of Whirlpool Island ends in a hail of bullets. All I’ll say beyond that is that it is a satisfying conclusion to the competent genre exercise that has preceded it. The film’s main attraction may be its controversial director, but it is nonetheless strong enough to stand on its own—itself an island, distinct from Ishii’s larger body of work. In that metaphor, I guess that body of work would be some kind of larger land mass. A continent, I guess. Anyway, good movie.

The Charmer, aka Saher Al Nisa' (Egypt, 1958)

That Egypt suffered its own share of post-war anxieties is evidenced in part by the prevalence of film noir within the country’s cinematic output of the 50s and 60s. These films are remarkable not just for their high technical quality, but also for how easily they slot into the genre overall, deep shadows, rain slicked streets and all. As such, they’re worthy of being judged side-by-side with the canonical works of masters like Wilder, Mann and Tournier. Take, for example, The Charmer, which chooses as its subject one of noir’s most generative figures, the shady spiritualist.

From Nightmare Alley to The Amazing Mr. X, the fraudulent fakir has provided for some of noir’s bleakest visions of human nature, given he is a character who cynically exploits people at their most vulnerable. I think it’s a gimme that anyone who is driven to find a supernatural solution to their problems has got to be at a pretty catastrophic low point in their lives. Only a monster would play such a person for a sucker.

Hamza, the character played by Farid Chawki in The Charmer, is just such a monster, although director Fatin Abdel Wahab (Ebn Hamido, The Haunted House) cannot resist giving his exploits a somewhat light-hearted treatment during the film’s first half. The idea of the picaresque con man seems to have an intractable hold on the imaginations of commercial filmmakers, perhaps because they see in him/her a sort of fellow traveler. Wahab, for instance, piggybacks upon Hamza’s prolific use of spooky sideshow gimmicks to swath his moody crime thriller in a haunted atmosphere worthy of Val Lewton. It’s all good fun, but ultimately makes for a stirring transition once The Charmer takes an inexorable turn into darkness.

As the film begins, we find Hamza, a small time crook, on the eve of his release from prison. Another inmate, Kawakby (Tawfik El Deken), has become Hamza’s criminal mentor during his time inside and now asks him for a favor. He will point Hamza toward a treasure ripe for the taking if Hamza promises that, after stealing it, he will use half of the money to pay the tuition of Kawakby’s sister so that she won’t be expelled from school. Hamza agrees, but not necessarily out of a generousness of spirit. Instead, he launches into a diatribe about how much he hates women and about how this job somehow will provide a platform for his revenge against the whole damn lot. Hamza’s misogyny is due, he tells us, to a history of abuse, neglect, and disappointment from the women in his life—in particular his mother, sister, and step-mother. Not surprisingly, that information does nothing to make this exchange any less troubling.

Hamza’s marks are two people who live in the same tenement in Tablia Alley, a rough part of the city. They are Morsi Amin, a drug dealer (Reyad El Kasagby) and Adalat, a matchmaker (Wedad Hamdy). Hamza shows up in the guise of wild-haired holy man Sheikh Maksouf and, using information provided him by Kawakby, makes short work of dazzling the two with his mind reading abilities. A series of supernatural escapades follow, which end with Hamza fleeing town with both Amin and Adalat’s treasure in hand—and each of them blaming the other for the loss. As I mentioned before, most of this is played for laughs, with Hamza making preposterous animal noises (awoooo!) during his conjurations and quite hilariously portraying himself as an ascetic who cannot touch cash.

The Charmer then skips forward in time a bit, where we find a much more high-toned version of Hamza (smart suit, groovy shades) haunting an upscale resort with a female accomplice. His target this time is Rashid Abdel Wahab, a disabled businessman (Mohamed Elwan), and his devoted wife Aziza (Hind Rostom). Hamza introduces himself to Aziza as Sharraf Eddin, a “Spiritual Scientist”, and gradually convinces her that he alone is capable of curing her husband.

Given that he is already planning to rob them, the “treatment” that Hamza then subjects Rashid to can only be seen as needlessly humiliating and cruel—an insult added to injury. Declaring Rashid’s infirmity the result of demonic possession, he proceeds with an “exorcism” that mostly consists of a weird floor show involving dancers in devil costumes and really loud drums. At the same time, opining that it would be helpful to Rashid to be more aroused by his wife, he encourages Aziza to wear ever more revealing outfits. He also sets out to seduce her, with the result that the character played by Hind Rostom gradually goes from being a tremulous innocent to being exactly the kind of back-stabbing gold digger that we’re used to seeing her play. Eventually, she falls so deeply under Hamza’s spell that she says she is willing to kill Rashid to get him out of the way. This, of course, not before Hamza has encouraged her to steal a fortune in jewels from her husband’s safe—such loot being necessary to Hamza purchasing from America the “nuclear device” he needs to complete Rashid’s treatment.

Hamza’s ruse begins to unravel when Kawakby, released from prison, returns home to find that Hamza, contrary to their agreement, has contributed absolutely nothing toward his family’s wellbeing. Incensed, he sets out to track his former friend down—only to blackmail him into giving him a cut of the take when he finds him. Meanwhile, the District Attorney (Hassan Hamed), now hot on Hamza’s tail, has other plans for the two. No amount of legal intervention, however, can prevent poor Aziza from meeting a karmic fate which she perhaps does not so richly deserve.

The Charmer is a rewardingly tight little thriller filled with gorgeous kitsch. The film loses none of its narrative punch for you taking time out to bemusedly savor Sharraf Eddin’s modish office with its smoke billowing whatsit and prominent disco ball, or its talk of nuclear devices from America that cure the lame… or that batcrap crazy dance number, for that matter. More importantly, it is a superb showcase for Egyptian cinema’s legendary tough guy, Farid Chawki. As Chawki is usually presented as more than a bit of a roughneck, it could be said that playing a suave and calculating con man might be a little off his beat—yet he acquits himself terrifically, making Hamza as compelling as he is loathsome. Meanwhile, Hind Rostom, if not playing against type, definitely plays against her normal trajectory, playing a good girl whose heart gradually ices over, rather than the other way around.

Sadly, those sympathetic to Hamza’s brash misogyny might see Aziza’s turn toward treachery as a validation of it. That’s awful, but I like to think, perhaps naively, that those people don’t read 4DK. If they do, I would point out to them that one of the translations of this movie’s Arabic title is “Betrayer of Women”, which indicates to me that no endorsement of Hamza’s behavior is being made on the part of its makers. Yes, it might be nice if they had expressed that sentiment a little more emphatically, but I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that this is the best we can hope for from a film made in the Middle East—or America, even—during the 1950s. In other words, sure, you might not like this film, and with good reason--but, personally, it is simply too good for me to conceive of any reason that it should not be seen.

Cairo Station (Egypt, 1958)

My reviews of films from Egyptian cinema's golden age have a tendency to momentarily class things up here at 4DK. Cairo Station should prove no exception, as it is a recognized classic from one of Egypt's most celebrated directors. Formal attire may be appropriate.

Cairo Station looks to the bustling train station of its title--which also serves as the film's sole location--as a portal into the world of Egypt’s working poor, ignoring the thousands of commuters, tourists, and travelers who pass through its gates daily in favor of the various porters, hacks and vendors who keep its gears turning. Front and center among these is Qinawi, played by director Youssef Chahine, a newspaper hawker who lives in a lowly shack on the station grounds; this thanks to Madbouli, the kindly newsstand proprietor who rescued Qinawi from the streets. Gimp-legged, slow witted, and oddly passive, Qinawi is an easy target for bullying and ridicule by the calloused bunch who are his fellow workers.

Qinawi has developed a fixation on Hanouma (Hind Rostom), one of a number of unlicensed female juice vendors who make up part of the underground economy that has grown up around the station. A boisterous troublemaker, Hanouma teasingly encourages Qinawi's crush, even though she is engaged to marry Abu Serih (Farid Chawki), a burly porter who is engaged in an uphill struggle to unionize the station’s workers. Hanouma’s flirting inspires delusions in Qinawi that, once shattered, send him spiraling into madness, at which point Cairo Station takes a very dark turn indeed.

In terms of its cast, Cairo Station packs a lot of star power. “Egypt’s answer to Marilyn”, Hind Rostom (Ebn Hamido, Sleepless) imbues Hanouma with an almost savage sensuality while at the same time maintaining the hard, cynical edge one would expect from a character attuned to a life of scrabbling. As Abu Serih, Farid Chawki (Oh, Islam!, Antar The Black Prince), demonstrates the same brute physicality that made him one of Egyptian action cinema’s biggest stars and earned him the nickname “The Beast” among his fans.

The standout among the cast, however, is Chahine, whose Qinawi is alternately pathetic and sinister, sympathetic and repellent. Deprived of human touch, Qinawi can only look, and look he does. The walls of his shack are plastered with pictures of pinup girls, which, it is intimated, he spends most of his time clipping out of magazines and whacking off to. We are repeatedly shown close-ups of his eyes as he looks at the chests and legs of female passersby, and at Hanouma in particular. As wanton and free as Hanouma may seem, Chahine won't let us forget that she is nonetheless a prisoner of Qinawi’s tyrannical gaze.

Cairo Station was rightly praised by critics in its day, but Egyptian audiences-- accustomed to the frothy, Hollywood-style entertainments of Egypt’s studio system—gave it a much less cordial welcome. After all, while many films had at that point covered the topic of loneliness, few if any—especially in the Arab world--had addressed the issue of sexual frustration with such frankness. And it is indeed sexual frustration that sends Qinawi on the path to madness and murder, essentially turning him into a monster. Once he realizes that Hanouma’ s acceptance of his marriage proposal was only made in jest, he savagely knifes a friend of hers, Hawwalitum, thinking it is her, and stuffs her body into a trunk meant for Hanouma’ s trousseau, after which he attempts to frame Abu Serih for her murder. Hawwalitum, however, survives, and Qinawi, realizing he has avenged himself against the wrong girl, sets a desperate trap for Hanouma.

Like its namesake, Cairo Station contains multitudes, both narratively and in terms of genre. The primary story of Qinawi, Hanouma and Abu Serih is periodically pushed aside to focus on Abu Serih’s battle against his union-busting superiors, as well as a mostly silent story about a young girl who is waiting at the station to say goodbye to her apparently indifferent boyfriend. Stylistically, it combines gritty neo-realism with moody Film Noir atmospherics.

The film also, to some extent, works as a Hitchcockian thriller, albeit one that undermines its own suspense somewhat by playing havoc with audience sympathies. For example, it is still possible to feel sorry for Qinawi while at the same time fully appreciating the threat he poses to the women around him. Hanouma, meanwhile, is as cruel to Qinawi as she is kind, and Abu Serih, while unequivocally heroic in his efforts to establish a union, is also seen beating Hanouma mercilessly simply for dancing to rock and roll music. In short, there are victims here, but no heroes. The cumulative effect of that is that Cairo Station’s violent denouement, when it arrives, comes across as much more preordained and tragic than it does horrific.

The hostility toward Cairo Station on the part of Egyptian audiences resulted in it being banned in its home country for twenty years. When it was later rediscovered by more appreciative filmgoers, some claimed that it was the greatest Egyptian film ever made. I do not know whether that is true or not (I have not seen every Egyptian film ever made), but I would certainly recommend it. It is a well-crafted work of considerable risk taking, marked by both a clear-eyed vision of the human condition at its most humble and debased and an uncommon compassion.

Enough to give you paws.

Ugh. Sorry about that. What is it about cats in particular that inspires godawful punning on the part of those who you'd think would know better? Is it a contact catnip high? Purrrr-haps. God!

Anyway, tonight the 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down crew tweeted along to Felidae, a German animated feature that introduces quite a few new practices to the roster of cartoon cat behaviors--though nothing that will be surprising to anyone who has ever played host to one of these fly eating, proudly butthole displaying, hate-fucking creatures.

Here. Read the transript and see what I mean. 

The 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down: Felidae on Storify
 

And now, as has become tradition, here is a trailer for next month's feature, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill. That's right, people: Kommissar X is coming to the Show Down!

Tonight! Cat around with the 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down as we curl up to FELIDAE!

Oh, Don't get me started about cats. So adorable! Especially when they're single-handedly trying to solve a string of brutal ritualized serial killings... of cats! That happens, right?

At least it does in Felidae, an animated feature from Germany, and it's pretty great--so much so that I almost regret offering it up to the pitiless gaze of the Shout Down crew. Almost. Oh well, they can't all be risible stinkers.

To join along with us, just log into Twitter at 6pm Pacific time tonight--that's Tuesday, December 9th--and, using the hashtag #4DKMSD, comment along with us as you watch the film via the handy YouTube link below:



Hope to hear from you tonight. In closing, instead of using a pun involving the word "purr", let's not and say we did, alright?

This Tuesday! The 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down pussy-foots around FELIDAE

I'll be honest. While Felidae is certainly an oddity--it's a bleak and violent film noir with a cast of animated cats, after all--it nonetheless has many things to recommend it. In further honesty, I will say that I find movie tweet-alongs where everyone just "oohs" and "aahs" over how clever the movie is boring. That is why, if I fall silent at times during Tuesday's proceedings, it is most likely because I am just sitting back and enjoying the show--something that you, also, are welcome to do.

As usual, we'll be starting at 6pm PT this Tuesday Night, December 9th, using the hashtag #4DKMSD. Here's hoping you all join me.

And now the trailer:



If you want to read more of my thoughts on Felidae, check out my review at Teleport City.

El Vampiro Negro (Argentina, 1953)

“Tonight you are the luckiest audience in the world,” enthused Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller. “Because you get to see this film.” The film, 1953’s El Vampiro Negro, is an Argentinian remake of Fritz Lang’s M. And after that screening, a featured presentation in San Francisco’s venerable Noir City festival, I have to say that Muller was right. I feel very lucky indeed.

However, having seen El Vampiro Negro, it strikes me that simply calling it “a remake of Fritz Lang’s M” is a tad reductive. The premise of both films is the same: a city -- Berlin in the case of M, Buenos Aires in the case of El Vampiro Negro -- is held in a grip of terror by a serial child murderer who is elusive to the point of virtual invisibility, with tensions rising among the denizens of the city’s increasingly squeezed demimonde as a result. Yet Vampiro, directed by Roman Viñoly Barreto, shifts the perspective on this tale to the point that it could be considered a companion to the original as much as an update of it.

Where Lang’s film takes a panoptic view of the Berlin underworld as a body politic, its members teeming together to expel a monster from within their midst like so many scruffy antibodies, El Vampiro Negro takes a far more intimate and character driven approach. This approach provides us with a much more rounded view of the child murderer, who, thanks to the nuanced work of actor Nathán Pinsón and a screenplay that provides us with a little more context for his actions, ends up being portrayed with startling compassion, especially given that nothing is done to underplay the horror of his crimes. Granted, Pinsón takes his cues from the note of pathos struck by Peter Lorre in the original film’s climactic monologue, but the extent to which he expands upon that can’t be written off to pure emulation.

Barreto also diverges from Lang in providing his film with a lead female character, and a substantial one at that, contrasting sharply with the male dominated world of M, where the primary females are the Greek chorus of hookers and floozies who provide color along the edges. That character is Amalia, a down on her luck cabaret singer and single mother who turns out to be the only person to have caught a glimpse of the killer. Amalia is played by Olga Zubarry, a major star of Argentinian cinema whom Muller referred to as “Argentina’s Marilyn Monroe”; though to me she seemed like more of a ringer for Lana Turner. In any case, as a struggling parent shamed by her reduced standing -- and whose fragile state is exacerbated by the unwanted attentions of the authorities -- she circumvents her undeniable glamor to give a strong, heart rending performance that made me want to seek out more of her films at the soonest opportunity.

Its emphasis on drama and characterization makes El Vampiro Negro a much more conventional genre film than M. But as a genre film, it is not only outstanding, but also a thrilling exemplar of the noir style at its most expertly distilled. Cinematographer Anibal Gonzalez Paz gives the film’s nocturnal urban landscape a foreboding allure, the lonely streets bathed in heavy shadows against which the slashings of police searchlights stand out all the more startlingly. The faces of bit and featured players alike are captured in tense, claustrophobic close-ups, making palpable the sense of dread and pent up anxiety that the unseen killer’s mounting atrocities have inspired. Finally, when Zubbary’s Amaya confronts the killer, a lone spotlight suspends her face in the darkness with an almost unbearable intensity, as if she is an aggrieved angel emerging forcefully from the bleak night. It’s enough that, even without the fine performances of Pinsón and Zubbary, El Vampiro Negro could get by on mood alone.

Of course, as I sat there in the Castro Theater, I was excited, not only to be seeing El Vampiro Negro, but also to finally be seeing a product of Argentinian commercial cinema’s golden age, about which I had heard yet whose products I had yet to track down. That there are always “new” sources of exciting international pop cinema to be found, even at this late point in my career as a film obsessive, is a source of joy and amazement -- even if the passionate interest of a few cinephiles isn’t enough to open the floodgates. El Vampiro Negro is as technically accomplished as anything produced by Hollywood in it time, and, within its genre, boasts a rare artistry. If released on these shores, I’ve no doubt it could have found an audience. Yet it remains the product of a thriving industry that few outside its country’s borders knew existed. Except for us lucky few.