Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

In short: Mask of Murder (1988)

Original title: Invastigator

Warning: spoilers ahead, but can you really spoil something this tediously obvious?

A small town in Canada (Sweden). A serial killer with a pillow mask goes around murdering women. On a nightly raid, copper McLaine (Rod Taylor) and his partner Ray (Sam Cook) shoot down a very good suspect whom the audience can indeed identify as the killer, or really, in McLaine’s case, shoot the man when he’s already down. During the course of the firefight, their boss, Chief Superintendent Rich (Christopher Lee) is badly wounded, because Christopher Lee isn’t cheap.

Strangely enough, the murders resume shortly thereafter. Is it a copycat killer? Or has McLaine found out that Ray and his wife (Valerie Perrine) are having an affair and plans a long and boring revenge there’s no possible way for him to get away with?

I’ve liked quite a few films Swedish filmmaker Arne Mattsson made in the 50s and 60s, but this, my first excursion into the handful of entries that make up his filmography during the 80s, is a dire attempt at a return to filmmaking after half a decade’s absence. It aims at mixing elements of the giallo (which makes sense, seeing how Mattsson made films you can see as related to the Italian style decades earlier), the police procedural, and the thriller (non-thrilling division). Alas, the script is flaccid, limping from one badly written scene to the next, with no sense of drama or tension. The supposed surprises feel phoned in, and even a half-awake viewer will see them coming from miles away while the film seems to prefer twiddling its thumbs to causing any excitement in its audience.

The acting, even from the old pros in the cast, is terrible throughout. Most of the cast seem to be sleepwalking – Taylor is particularly bad – and the film is full of painfully dull line readings. Even worse, it is also full of flubbed lines that never should have made it into a finished movie but are left for the audience to gawk at.

But then, Mattsson’s direction feels amateurish more often than not, as well. It is full of bad framing and terrible visual choices, with nothing on screen that would suggest a director with decades of experience in serious popular filmmaking.

Lady in White (1962)

Original title: Vita frun

With his last will, a rich arsehole industrialist (as if they were any other kind) manages to snub rather a lot of people, starting with his nurse and certainly not ending with composer of pompously melodramatic piano tunes Eva (Gio Petré) and colonialist Roger von Schöffer (Jan Malmsjö), the children of his first wife. The only winners in the bequest lottery are his second wife Helen (Anita Björk) and her daughter (Elisabeth Odén, I believe) – whom he had adopted, unlike the children of his first wife. These two get everything, even the mansion that once belonged to Eva’s and Roger’s family. Helen graciously allows Eva to keep living in the mansion, but in the most hurtful manner she could come up with.

A bit later, Eva drowns herself in the nearest swamp. Afterwards, Roger returns from his stint in Brazil, and curious things start happening that surely won’t have anything to do with the typical crime-causing passages all wills in mystery movies contain.

In any case, a mysterious Lady in White – who may or may not be a ghost – portends evil, apparently ghostly hands play Eva’s horrible music on a harpsichord, and there’s fun with a life-sized doll, too.

Eventually, Helen calls in private detective John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten). He’s not bringing his rather more interesting wife, alas. However, comic relief assistant Freddy (Nils Hallberg), now having left the Hillmans trying to get his own detective agency going, has been hanging around since the beginning of the movie to pump his aunts for some starting capital. Which is great for people who like comic relief characters, I suppose.

This is the final Hillman mystery by Arne Mattson, and despite what the title’s closeness to the first one in the series might make one belief, this is not a re-tread of that one, but has a plot all of its own; apart from the inclusion of a potentially ghostly lady, of course, but I’m certainly not going to complain about that sort of thing.

Hillman only arrives at the halfway mark through the film. Before that, Mattsson and his audience spend quite some time with a cast of characters right out of the nastier arm of the manor house mystery that would bear its most beautifully poisoned fruits a couple of years later in its own corner of the giallo. Everybody here has dirty secrets, is unpleasant, a liar, a drug addict, a cheat, a money-grubber or of the bizarre belief that being titled is anything but a reason for shame for the oppression one’s ancestors grew fat on. In other words, it’s a fun time to be had with these pretty stains on humanity that gets even better with everybody’s love for hand-wringing melodrama. Though I’m not terribly sure the film finds its characters quite as reprehensible as I do.

Mattsson’s handling all of the talk needed for the sort of film this is rather excellently, posing everybody in the most effective way for maximum hand-wringing, using reflections and shots made from knee-height to make things visually more interesting (and weirder, too), really going as all-out visually as I’ve by now begun to expect of the man’s often pretty astonishing looking films. Mattsson is particularly great at the spooky bits, so much so I’m rather disappointed he apparently never made a straight-up piece of supernatural horror (though this comes pretty damn close for spoiler-y reasons). Particular highlights in that regard are Eva’s suicide in the swamps by night, the final appearance of the Lady, and a climactic séance that ends with a proper mad scene – all shot in ways that would have fit perfectly in an Italian Gothic (which is the highest possible compliment for this sort of thing), all drenched in shadow.

In short: Lady in Black (1958)

Original title: Damen I svart

Private detective couple Kajsa (Annalisa Ericson) and John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten) are going on a long-awaited holiday in the country, supposedly to get away from crime. Too bad they’re going to visit Kaja’s friend Inger von Schilden (Anita Björk), who is in a bit of trouble, and not just because she has an affair with the assistant of her husband Christian (Sven Lindberg). Soon enough, a series of murders start, perhaps committed by the area’s local ghost, the titular Lady in Black. Clues, however, and a lot of them too, point towards Inger as a rather more corporeal suspect, if a very clumsy one.

Of course, the Hillmans investigate, alas assisted by their stuttering odious comic relief assistant Freddy (Nis Hallberg), who has followed them to the country.

This is the first of a commercially quite successful series of films about the detective couple directed by Arne Mattsson.Tonally and formally these are close relations to the Italian proto giallos and the German Edgar Wallace krimis that started up at about the same time. Clearly, something good was in the air in Europe at the time.

As far as I’ve read, Swedish critics never did warm to Mattsson, putting him down for his commercial instincts (a problem well known to German genre directors of the time as well), and, absurdly, even mocked his propensity to, you know, move his camera. Which indeed, he does here, too, stylishly and intelligently, emphasising and deepening character relations with it, something he does with some eccentric but effective framing choices in many a scene as well. Mattsson also puts quite some effort into expressionist/noir plays with shadow and light, which pays off particularly well in the scenes involving the Lady.

The script, as is often the case with films like this, isn’t quite as great as Mattsson’s visual realization. The humour really hasn’t aged terribly well (if it ever was funny at all), the sexy bits are not terribly sexy if you’re not from the 50s, and the melodrama and connected characterisation is sometimes a bit stiff. However, the mystery at the film’s core works rather well in the film’s decidedly non-naturalistic world, and the Hillmans make a fun detective couple. It is particularly nice to see in a film from this era how much Kajsa is actually doing on her own account, and how matter of factly the film treats her as her husband’s equal, something this film does much better than any of the Wallace movies from my native Germany ever managed (or even tried).

Lady in Black is really a wonderful film as a whole, aiming to be a crowd pleaser but doing so stylishly.