Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the life of a regimented life of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with the DeMille-level lurid tortures of the Proletariat at the hands of the Cossacks. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like a tall shadow person with sable highlights in the stuffy Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, and things start looking up, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time going. One unbearable matriarch after another pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps. But Moscow is just more poking, at the hands of the reigning queen in Russia, a perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser overplaying to near Shelly Winters-ish levels), and her no-good nephew Peter (Sam Jaffe), the half-wit prince and Catherine's betrothed, prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than bedding his young wife. She's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male offspring out of her, in a way that makes Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of compassion.

Well, if Peter won't bed her, she better find someone who can, fast, and keep it on the DL. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"),  intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"), drab nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches, endless ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded.

That said, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin) you can forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera, and sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and be able to just lean back and watch Dietrich age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty inflicted on his icy star.

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and though she never came out of the closet it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking a (possible) fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors and stern masseuses (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at but never bullied, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear, deep back into the closet.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

The bulk of the film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in sacrifice and honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to help her. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted feminine shots at chin of the status quo, the kind of target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered like Babs does here. The huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave; hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar except. When Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2
It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and deeply racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and afterwards affixes himself to a striking British socialite played by Myrna Loy. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, except that --like all British socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs--she has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead before the film starts, saving any alleged social discomfort with the all-white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny) and his unbearably controlling mater, she's blessed with the king of 'harrumph' - C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is pointing towards two 1932 hits for its box office hopes ---Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Paramount's surreal charms or Universal's lurid expressionism, even Columbia's humanist handball, even if the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene mad with magic.

 Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British and then turning the tables. If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders.

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the other man who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in.... India, and always squarely on the MGM stage. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim (as Damita's aesthete husband) lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort as one of his wife's lover caught with a lame alibi. It turns out Erich's habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. She can be charming, but when she's not 'on' she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady. Nice legs, though. Too bad that fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings).

This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot familiar (for the era) triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor in shards if needed!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce, scandalous, risque and o-so progressive in and of itself, was still enough of a subject for a films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers, so here's novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably but Brent always presumes that is the case, which is one reason I dislike him. His whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of rapists. Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works, until maybe the very end, (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at ritzy clubs with his new, younger Paris Hilton-esque wife. So Chatterton comes home and throws her weight around to keep him afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and sacharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest string of words ever uttered.  Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced on the drive home that she's pregnant but doesn't want to have the baby since it would ruin her figure and tie her down to some squawling brat, for example, she's instantly killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

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The 5 Final Destinations Nation, but a dream within a dream...

 

The most effective teen horror films, like HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, know that closed-down gold mines or prom trains or the moon or other weird settings don't scare us as much as something coming for us in the place we're from--suburbia. The FINAL DESTINATION series gets this right. With flash-cut minutiae of hazardous modern life, a dozen nurse's office wall's worth of queasy safety warning poster moments, it goes where no other horror franchise treads, right over extension cord patches. It takes a sensitive, true paranoiac to even notice these little things--a spray paint can too close to a candle, soda cup condensation too near a tanning bed outlet, a small crack in the window--and James (X-Files) Wong and Glen Morgen are true paranoiacs.

The stories all start the same: a group of teens or young adults or 'adults' are at an event or about to embark. A grisly premonition is played out as if real but then we zoom out of the dreamer's eyeball, back to the start of the event. He or she starts freaking out, and saving his or her immediate cronies, plus some random others, pissing off death and creating the need for little Rube Golderg-style mouse traps to come. Showing flair both as a Young Person's Guide to Home Safety manual come to life, and witty horror, the series prefers its blood to be a dark shiny CGI red; there's no sick-in-the-gut feeling over the gore, just what Pauline Kael would call a 'dirty kick' --a remembrance of being a very young child and alert to all the tiny things that might add up to kill you.

I guess it takes growing up alienated to relate. I would love to see a sequel where some super shy kid has one of the premonitions and is afraid to look uncool by freaking out and quietly sits there, shaky but stoic, as everything he saw comes to pass...and so he dies anyway. That would have been me, during the early 80's slasher boom, too cool to pretend I wasn't terrified of my own shadow, frozen with a sunglassed smirk, hoping the killer would be quick about it. After all, I had places to be.

I've lectured to enough stone-quiet college kids nowadays to know my brand of morose teenagerdom is both better and worse than ever, with a chemical buffer SSRI balm to their pain that stops them from being too sad, maybe, but also stops them rising up and declaring their right-to-be-weird, and that's just one reason why the Final Destination series wouldn't work as well if set outside the USA, where we're still embarrassed about dying, like it's dandruff or an STD. And if it's inevitable, then we still have to fight it, like it was genuinely evil instead of just impartial and passive.

This is, of course, just old-fashioned Puritan dread, the kind that demands after every ascension into Jessica Lange's arms there shalt also be a zipped-up body bag and Ethel Merman. This is what Wong and Morgen understand, which is why the 'precog' is treated like a monster by at least a few of the saved kids and their parents. These resentful survivors are the 'normal,' Christian, white, hetero, NRA types, the ones who are afraid of--and embarrassed by--death, yet also obsessed by its potential as a legitimate alternative to the sins of the flesh. Therefore, death is dirty, and obscene, like sex--the Puritan ethic again--but then of course the undercurrent always springs up. The politician who hates gays so much he just has to cruise the bus stops and pick up male escorts, etc. The puritan American heads are buried Ostrich deep in an assortment of desert dirt dogmas and so these weird inconsistencies seem perfectly natural to them, such as hating and fearing the person who saves your life, or voting for more war but rejecting health-care for disabled veterans and first-responders. They want to be the ones responding, and they're mad no terrorist ever breaks into their house, giving them chance to actually use one of their machine guns. Therefore they hate the people who do get a chance to fight, even as they sulk indoors and grip their arm chair in Fox News-fueled anger.

Another unwritten American fear underwriting the Final Destination Nation is the 'burnt melting-pot' syndrome. We pay good money to be able to avoid our neighbors; in the darkened rows of theater seats and tract homes we want our bubble, and now that our lives are saved, the lights are on and these gays and minorities want us to talk to them; coming up to us, uninvited, warning us some other thing is out to kill us means we're now somehow in their debt, which is most irksome. Anyway, these 'touched by premonition' survivors indirectly cause most of the killings they're trying to avert, barging in at odd hours and overreacting to every little thing. They ask only that instead of being afraid of a monster we embrace all living things as part of our collective experience... what a drag. Instead of dying safe within our constrictive view of what it means to be Americans, we're forced to live on, continental and existential.

But what makes these films 'fun' is that preconception and paranoia go hand in hand, and that's what makes us a nation of psychics. We've seen so many horror movies we're always know when something's about to happen. A perfect meta-textual William Castle gimmick, Death in these films can almost hear us shouting at the idiots onscreen and it's tickled to death to be a part of the action. It loves to fake us out and surprise us. And best of all, it doesn't traumatize or implicate us in its devious design. No single figure of malice presents itself; there is no bogeyman who can be barricaded out, no icky sexually assaultive aspects. Instead there's just a lovable, twisted, silent, invisible Rube Goldberg coincidence time-space serpent, occupying the same 'no space' omnipresence of ourselves as viewers.

Here they are in order:.

FINAL DESTINATION (2000) - **1/2
The plane crash opener is solid, but this film falls off from there. Devon Sawa is too solemn and sweaty and it makes no sense why he would still go out of his way to save the life of the main dick who torments him or why the dopey fed who suspects him of foul play doesn't bother to research past premonition cases. And Sawa does himself no favors, racing into the houses of those he reckons are about to die, indirectly causing their deaths, getting their blood all over his clothes. I've known dumb kids like this in real life, and one of the reasons I've never been arrested is because I always just walk away when they start acting like this, so why should I stick around now?

The love interest, a girl with the great character name of Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), exudes fresh odd final girl Wednesday Adams-style resilience which makes up for Sawa's glum posturing. A highlight is their visit to a mysterious undertaker (Tony "Candyman" Todd) who dispenses cryptic advice and a great middle section with Devon alone in a cabin, 'death-proofing' every last corner and jagged edge.

Overall this gets by more on chutzpah than ingenuity. The series got a lot better once it limited death's palette to the freaky but possible, requiring much more Rube Goldbergian ingenuity on behalf of the writers, and scaling back the unlikely associations of total douche bags with the heroes and heroines.



FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003) - ***1/2
A big step up, with a great catastrophic highway accident opener. One of the best. This time the teen gifted with grisly premonitions is female (A.J. Cook), and the return of Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) adds extra final girl glory (the scenes in her padded cell are hilarious) means two final girls! And there's far less teenagers involved and more a random assembly of highway drivers, including an obnoxious cokehead biker and a douchey tool who just won the lottery. Your money's no good here, douche! Death works pro bono.

I like when they all decide they have to move in together and start death-proofing a studio loft, as if preparing for an MTV Reality show season where death acts like a Rube Goldbergian host of hosts.


FINAL DESTINATION 3 - (2006) ****
The Citizen Kane of FD movies, this is the one that got me into the series because it's always on IFC. Mumblecore goddess Mary Elizabeth Winstead is ideal as the survivor-psychic; when she freaks out at the roller coaster we realize we've never seen her so undone, even in the sequel/remake of THE THING!  She has a hot younger sister, a decently repentant boyfriend of her dead friend, and an unusually witty group of cliché stock teen peers. Deaths are foretold in photos she took while waiting in line for the coaster, which is guarded at the front by a giant red demon statue (Tony Todd supplied the mechanical voice).  It all adds up to a particularly wry entry, with tons of loving horror fan in-jokes (characters have last names like Romero, Freund, Dreyer, Ulmer, Wise, Halperin). The deaths are, as always, spectacular, leading up to a clumsy but amusing fairground fireworks finale with a runaway white horse, and an second climax at the hippest of all locales, la NYC subway.

THE FINAL DESTINATION (4) - 2009  -**
I have no idea why the powers that be decided to call this 'The Final Destination' -- is four a bad luck number in junk sequels? It would be forgivable if it didn't use 3-D as a crutch. And the climax, set in a 3-D theater showing a movie with a big explosion that will happen literally at the same time unless the hero stops it blah blah, isn't nearly as meta if you're seeing it at home in 2-D. Nice idea though. And there's a great but under-explored side bit with a security guard in AA who tries to use being marked for death as an excuse to relapse-- which every good AA-er always harbors secret fantasies of (see my review of 2012 - Day of a Million Relapses!) - it would have been great if he did relapse, instead of just forgetting all about his poured measure of brandy. Yo, finish your drink! Instead, this installment is a little too heavy on the X-ray bone breaking animation (and unrealistic CGI blood) which only recalls that cable TV show 1000 WAYS TO DIE.  rather than the hipster glory of its last two predecessors.

FINAL DESTINATION 5 (2011) - ***1/2
This go-round kicks off on a suspension bridge with a busload of employees bound for a corporate retreat. The craziness that ensues looks good even in 2-D; the nasty stressing of gore over fun in the previous installment is gone and, while less casual than the third, it's still got a nice hint of indie hipness about it, like a big budget Roger Corman production directed by Joe Dante or Lewis Teague.

This time it's discerned that if you kill someone while on your borrowed time they can take your place, so the ubiquitous distraught douchebag buddy decides it's only fair he kills the hero's girlfriend, etc. since his died on the bridge. The ending brings us all the way back around to the first film in a nice surprise loop-de-loop, showing death's wicked sense of humor and whole raison d'etre for starting this whole catch-and-release mess to begin with.

 Special mention to the hottest girl in maybe the whole series, Olivia (Jaqueline MacInnes Wood) who is killed while strapped into a Lasik eye surgery machine. I predict big things for this tall, lanky, at-ease-in-her-own-skin Elizabeth Hurley-Megan Fox-Sophie Marceau-ish beauty. I hear from Wikipedia she's already a 'fan favorite.' Count me in, except I once dated a girl who looked like her, but she wanted a whole me, not just a half. And she wore no glasses, and is now old and looks like Anna Magnani.

What, is that off-topic? WRONG! Only true, jaw-dropping, youthful beauty--the kind its possessor can radiate casually and without the poison of disdain--can allay the terror of mortality. We cling to such loveliness like we might hold onto a slowly deflating helium balloon over a shark-infested sea. Soon age, and show biz, and unworthy Svengalis will siphon the air out of Woods' loveliness and in a mere half-century or less, she'll be old, in another, turned to dust. Oh, Paula! Oh, Lenore! Oh, Annabel Lee! Oh, To stop time
for just a second,
those precious minutes of Woods' radiance
like grains of sand
I hold in the waves...

how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? (- Poe)

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His Girl Friday vs. CNN: Boston Edition

The turbulent, tragic events in Boston this past week created a curious time ripple in our 24 hour news channels, and they may never recover. The internet has taken the lead now, and by the time CNN catches up, whatever they caught up to is old news. Watching TV at home now is like being a grandpa; your iPad's telling you some serious shit is going down and you turn to CNN, presuming they'll have up-to-the-minute details. You trust them to be on the ball, and they're still playing regularly scheduled programming, still playing the stuff they fill in time with while waiting for real news to break.

Some of this reticence might be explained by the ribbing they were getting by John Stewart, who pointed out how many times CNN had announced the terrorists had been identified and/or arrested, and so on, leading to boy who cried Blitzer confusion. For what it's worth, at least one CNN source who spoke with Business Insider seems to agree with Stewart. "As I think everyone knows, we really fucked up," the source is quoted as saying. "No way around it. "

I mean this as no disrespect to the survivors and victims and heroes of the hour, please believe me. This is a criticism solely of the newscasters, for whom babbling about the (very real) courage of Boston with a gleam over sad music in the background was the new black, to the point they couldn't stop doing it even when real shit was breaking.

Here's some REDDIT thread compilations from the same time period the TV newscasters were busy babbling and re-playing past moments of triumph and sadness and horror in Texas and Boston:

EDIT 12:41 EST: MIT updated their emergency site again. The shooter remains at large, police continue to search the campus. Please REMAIN INDOORS until further notice.
EDIT 12:49 EST: Shots fired in Cambridge. Shots and Explosions in Watertown.
EDIT 12:50 EST: Shots fired. Grenades spotted.
EDIT 12:51 EST: More shots, explosion. Grenade went off.
EDIT 12:55 EST: Officer down. Explosives at scene. 94 Spruce Street??
EDIT 12:56 EST: Reports of a stolen state police truck. Black, 4 door.
EDIT 12:57 EST: Second officer down. Hand Grenades...automatic weapons fired.
EDIT 12:58 EST: Spruce (sp?) and Lincoln
EDIT 1:00 EST: Dexter and Laural. Suspect injured. Explosives in the area.
EDIT 1:01 EST: Officers ordered back.  HYPERLINK "https://maps.google.com/maps?q=94+Spruce+St,+Watertown,+MA&hl=en&sll=42.367813,-71.171703&sspn=0.00352,0.004823&oq=94+spruce+street&t=h&hnear=94+Spruce+St,+Watertown,+Massachusetts+02472&z=16" Map of area thanks to  HYPERLINK "http://www.reddit.com/u/rm-rf_" /u/rm-rf_ 

EDIT 1:01 EST: Suspect is on foot.
EDIT 1:02 EST:  HYPERLINK "http://www.reddit.com/u/iBrave" /u/iBrave sent me another  HYPERLINK "https://maps.google.com/maps?q=spruce+and+lincoln+intersection+cambridge&hl=en&ll=42.368005,-71.170791&spn=0.004635,0.00655&sll=42.377822,-71.153287&sspn=0.004635,0.00655&t=h&gl=us&hnear=Spruce+St+%26+Lincoln+St,+Watertown,+Middlesex,+Massachusetts+02472&z=18&iwloc=A" map
EDIT 1:03 EST: Bomb Squad on their way.
EDIT 1:05 EST: Officers asked to power off phones/leave them in the car to prevent explosions.
EDIT 1:06 EST: 2 explosives confirmed. One near down officer. Robot in area to diffuse.
EDIT 1:09 EST: Suspect car still in the area.
EDIT 1:09 EST:  HYPERLINK "http://i.imgur.com/wrJusck.png" Parameter from unnamed source.
EDIT 1:10 EST: Watertown not answering phones. Suspect in ambulance, one at gun point.
EDIT 1:11 EST: OFFICER MISSING! [NVM, thank God]!
EDIT 1:11 EST: They are taking one of the suspects to Beth Israel (hospital). (Thanks  HYPERLINK "http://www.reddit.com/u/TheVacillate" /u/TheVacillate)
EDIT 1:12 EST: FBI on scene (thanks  HYPERLINK "http://www.reddit.com/u/bnjmn556" /u/bnjmn556)
EDIT 1:13 EST: Roll call to make sure everyone is okay/accounted for.
EDIT 1:17 EST: MIT updated their site: Suspect remains at large.
EDIT 1:19 EST: 2 in custody.
EDIT 1:19 EST: Another guy down?
EDIT 1:20 EST:  HYPERLINK "https://twitter.com/akitz" Photos and Videos
EDIT 1:22 EST: Reports of suspect heavily armed in backyards.
EDIT 1:23 EST: MSP called for K9 unit.
EDIT 1:25 EST: May NOT have second suspect!!!
EDIT 1:26 EST: Reports of pressure cooker bombs!!!
EDIT 1:29 EST: Active shooter. audio noises
EDIT 1:29 EST: CNN has footage of suspect at gun point.
EDIT 1:30 EST: No report of an active shooter at this time. 40 police cars on their way to Watertown.
EDIT 1:32 EST: Second suspect reported to be in custody. No active shooters. No shots fired.

Being afraid of jumping the gun and confirming faulty information on air isn't really an excuse to let yourself be scooped by social media. I don't think it's the whole story, either, though they made it seem that way once they finally switched over to live coverage and immediately set about rationalizing their tardiness as concern for the facts, and not the false rumors and misdirection that the police can sometimes put out to convince the criminals to let down their guard, and so on.

What was most mind-boggling is at the same time all this was happening, TCM's was showing one of my all-time favorite movies, HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940), introduced by Robert Osborne and Cher. The tale of two reporters going all-out to scoop the other papers on an escaped prisoner, meek homeless killer Earle Williams, in a high profile capital punishment case. So we were watching my girls' choice: CNN while "Hallelujah" kept playing over slow-mo montages of survivors as big news broke on Twitter, and mine: Rosalind Russell hiding Williams in a roll-top desk and keeping him quiet so they can get an exclusive extra out exposing the current sheriff and mayor as self-serving imbeciles was a perfect analog synchronistic mirror to what was going on over on mainstream news channels right that very second, which was enough to make any newscaster a star, but once they finally woke back up these reporters didn't snap into the spirit of the thing, but rather resumed treading water with a nonstop freestyle extemporaneous blather.

Of course there are major differences in the film and the coverage, but synchronicity is God's way of showing you that things bear scrutiny. Take this HIS GIRL FRIDAY moment of overlapping contradictory reports from the reporters all gathered in the press room, phones to their ears, watching the drama unfold as cops surround the rolltop desk with drawn guns. In the real event, the roll top is rolled up and Earl Williams weakly shouts "Go ahead, shoot me!" and he's hauled, exhausted and half-dragging his feet, from the room.

Reporter 1: Williams was unconscious when they opened the desk!

Reporter 2: Williams put up a desperate struggle but the police overpowered him!

Reporter 3: He offered no resistance!

Reporter 4: Tried to bust through a cordon of police

Cary Grant: - Duffy, the Morning Post turned Earl Williams over to the sheriff!

(sheriff slams down phone on Grant, cuffs him)

Reporter 2:  The sheriff is tracing a mysterious phone call which led to Williams' hiding place!

 This all happens so fast it takes several viewings to soak all the way in, but I mention it to point out the remarkable way ain't a damn thing changed. Why else was I confronted with such a monstrous coincidence as the film playing on TCM at the exact same time all this was breaking? What's awesome is that if the TV news couldn't wise up to the power of social media, the cops could. Instrumental, perhaps, in cornering him, was the cops announcing at a press conference that they would be pulling out of the Watertown neighborhood the killer was last seen in, knowing the media would leak it back to the suspect, from every possible direction, over and over again, and result in the hiding killers letting down their guards.

Getting news faster, and from a variety of simultaneous sources, and letting the public see it all as it happens and draw their own conclusions, not just rambling about whatever comes into your should be the number one goal of any TV broadcaster at this time. In 1940 breaking news had to be sent in via phone from a reporter, typeset and rushed through the printer to beat out another paper in an extra edition; even if they only had an hour or so ahead of their rivals, it was a major victory. Reporters were made or broken by such scoops. And on this past Thursday night, cable news channels got scooped. Outclassed. Turned into dinosaurs. Until CNN wises up and gets an intern to monitor cop radios and Twitter feeds, or scrolls tweets from a pool of on-the-spot names constantly onscreen, then instead of giving attention-hungry reporters enough on-air rope to hang themselves, then HIS GIRL FRIDAY will have the real news, and Earl Williams will go to die and in the process a light will go out in the eyes of Molly Malloy, as she loses the one friend she ever had, and all the while good people at CNN will be running another episode of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, and quietly working on their resumes.

 

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The Blackened Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

Playing like a midnight car accident between a banned entry in Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code jackboot and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit. Occurring almost in real time over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot, owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie aims for wry spin on the MGM formula of 'cavalcade of stars playing an array of types at a fancy hotel or night club' ala Grand Hotel, or Paramoun'ts  International House, but its way darker than either: murders go unpunished, trysts are planned but never executed and if there's no autogyro to lift you off the roof, well, just walk home as innocuously as you can. Nazism is in der Winde!

There are several interwoven stories and emotions too strange not to unweave and examine separately:

1. The chilling exhilaration of the Russian gambler who lost his fortune gambling the night before, so he's going to kill himself tonight. Clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about the ways he might do it, his merriment in the face of being broke nonetheless recalls Dostoevsky's famous line, "a real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion." As he gives away his watch and remaining moneys to the scantily-clad chorus girls, they don't seem too troubled about his suicide threats either, since if they took him seriously they might have to give his stuff back. And so the morality of the film slips willingly into the murk like a blackened commando with a knife in its teeth. One last stab at ambivalence before the code turned every chorine saint or savage.

2. The love quintanglement between the stars of the show-within-a-show, the ballroom dancing pair of 'the Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him, as if there's one in every bar) played by Ricardo Cortez and his partner, played by Dolores Del Rio, and a whole slew of their former lovers, past, present, and future: rich married woman Kay Francis is after Cortez; smitten songwriter Dick Powell, and the club owner Al Wonder are both into Del Rio (Powell 'knew' her first) who is way to obsessive over Cortez. The way these people crawl and scrape shamelessly after each other is a little worrisome, and way too adult for the code to come. 

3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two party girls, but their matronly spouses are in tow ("There out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris," laments Guy). But the ladies too find their matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos in the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the evening. There's some amusingly smashed interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, though.

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round, forced to rely heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. There's also whips, knives, and double entendres but what lingers most is how Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism and its inverse - our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns first as people and then as abstract patterns, then back again, in a way that's truly relevant to the film's uneasy sense of self-loathing and alienation. The cast's freaky 'otherness' is played up even as they are meant to be identifiable as certain types: the foolish rich wife, the Mexican firebrand, the hicks from Indiana, etc. There's no sense of connection or belonging here, just humanity slipping in and out abstraction.

5.  Al Jolson singing "Going to Heaven on Mule," in blackface.
Yikes, here we go...

Grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through these offensive stereotype settings, Jolson more than overdoes it, cavorting and twisting his face into hideous leering grimaces. One wonders how this was ever popular, though Jolson does grow on you in a trainwreck nostalgia kind of way. Notes the Museum of Family History site:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the troll king of early sound film, the golem who segued between the handsome, effeminate lovers of the silents and the fast-talking toughs of the gangster boom. Jolson was neither lover nor tough; he was insecure and caught in a narcissistic downward spiral through the molasses air, as if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious yet tickled to a childlike, near-Jerry Lewisian fit of jouissance over the attention: "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He's a "borscht belt Pagliachi... a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, most self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

Now there are some who think two wrongs don't make a right, but this ground zero of racism has a train-wreck pull for others, maybe it's wrong to do so, but we seek reasons why we might excuse him. Does it help that Jolson was a big supporter of black entertainers and possibly felt a kinship with oppressed African Americans? A Jew who played up his own Jewishness, Jolson had to struggle with stereotypes himself, and both black and Jews had to constantly depict themselves as humble and naive to avoid racist ire. As if cementing the similarity, behold the above picture, so bizarre it almost seems culled from some Martian TV transmission. The archaic Yiddish characters on the newspaper providing an under-halo to the sunrise of loose straw from his hat, he's a blackface golem from an alternate universe. And the whole Green Pastures satire aspect is eerily soothing: the opiate promise of heading into the sunshine of eternal glory, just like the code had planned for us immediately following this last pre-code moment of a wanderin' in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

 Here's Jolson fan Glenn Kenny on the many questions surrounding Jolson's 'right' to blacken up:

The salient feature of the film, finally, is its ultimate musical number, the notorious "Going To Heaven On A Mule." A few scenes prior to this, the heady ethnic stew from which Jolson concocted his varied performing personae is underscored in a bit where he exchanged patter with "Russian count" Michael Dalmatoff before launching into a quite credible (that is, suitably schmaltzy) rendition of "Ochi chyornye" ("Dark Eyes"). For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward.

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of the Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile.

I like her comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context, noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. On some level I can't agree, though of course she's right --we don't have an adequate grasp of contextual objection. However, for my money the  post-WWI Parisian setting of the film helps - for Paris became home to expat black jazz musicians for a reason: racism was largely absent there -- no Jim Crow-- and yet the spectacle of blackness, of difference, seemed heightened for an avant garde shock value in many stage productions popular there. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up in posters and set decor, or the exotica of Josephine Baker (left). And the connection of Jews and black musicians had always been vibrant and reciprocal. During the Nazi occupation 'Zionists' were suspected of underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notees:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.

In an excellent piece on Django Reinhart in the 1940s, From the Barrelhouse quotes a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing mistrustfully at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons like Coal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television, even seeing Song of the South in the theater, and never thinking anything was wrong about it except that it was boring as fuck and I wanted to get on to Treasure of the Matacumbe, which came on after Song in a 1976 double feature revival, though that sucked too.

Perhaps abjectification precedes awareness, but it forgives nothing. More than anything now, minstrelry is our shame, not Jolson's or anyone else's, but an example of the White-Christian compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent underneath the skin of so much news rhetoric.

A word on Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested gigolo Ricardo Cortez, her beautiful but weirdly taut face creeps me out: the sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones. She's like death incarnate... at least in this film.

In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer (him) sacrifices himself so the plasticine dish can run away with the spoon shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft. In a way he'd be ideal as the evil plastic surgeon in visage... slowly reducing his love's face to a featureless taut skin skull...

This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and/or bad teeth or big nose or wrinkles or thin lips is mostly gone now. If someone wants surgery they have it, but we're intolerant of all hate crimes, even self-hate crimes...

Thus we need to watch the veiled racial hierarchy of whiteness with a grain of tolerance  in 1934, a decade or so before the founding of the State of Israel and 30 odd years before the death of Martin Luther King. Here we have whiter-than-white Dick Powell winning the Mexican beauty while the best Jolson's Russian Jewishness can do is eliminate Cortez's Latin lover and then step nobly aside, just as Del Rio would step into a volcano at the end of her 1932 break-out, Bird of Paradise (so Joel McRae could go back home to his white fiancee).

And the freak otherness doesn't begin to end there, for in addition to Del Rio's oddly skeletal features, there's Kay Francis at her most eerily caricature-like: her alabaster skin, triangle mouth and round fleshy head making her seem like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre melange, trying to nail down the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door.

But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for aberration: we see a pair of men dancing, and Jolson making a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise as he sees them,  (below), the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it. Jolson is, above all, a caricature of his own self, running around from table to table his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a Nerf ball through the deep end of a pool. A user review on imdb, sums his character up best, as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Nazis with Joseph Breen and his Catholic Legions.

Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but for tonight, all these things that the code would put an end to are here at the Wonder Bar, assembled here as if by a mysterious blackmail letter. The most glaring even to the novice will be how Jolson gets away with covering up his lover's crime of passion by letting another man make good on his suicide threats, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so slippery it's still shocking even for a pre-code. Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be able to play for almost 30 years? Even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow an end to what used to be mere innocent decadence--the Weimar era and the jazz age--and the arrival of corrupt, racist, sexist, colonialist  'morality' of the both the Nazis and Joseph Breen's Catholic Legion of "decency." Some joke. If you can take it, and like it, get this movie anyway you can't. And when we go back in time to kill Hitler, let's take out Breen too. In the meantime. Shall we run?

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Hunter S. Thompson reads Kafka, Dissolves

The animators at Buck made this long-form, award-winning, lovely and deeply hallucinatory riff on Hunter S. Thompson for an all-for-charity online book outlet called Goodbooks.com. One of the best things about it is the way it breaks free from the Ralph Steadman aesthetic - there's almost no ink splotches and chaotic shattered charkas; instead it digs deep into the heady peak mushroom moments where everything is always in the middle of turning into everything else and tea made from bong water is always a 'good' idea.

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CinemArchetype 24: Death

The final frontier. Do we have anything, really, to fear from it? As the kids all say just before being Rube Goldbergianly sliced to ribbons in the FINAL DESTINATION movies, 'it's a part of life; if it happens, it happens... but it's not an intelligent, scheming force - that's ridiculous!'

And then, of course, that intelligent force dices them real pretty.

But Death has always been personified in films, plays, novels. And who's to say those diced kids don't wake up in a better place, or get reincarnated back into the game, or better yet, get to sleep forever and never return to this sorrowful jail existence?

Destiny - 1921 - dir. Fritz Lang

PS - this is the second time I've written this list. Last time it deleted itself and I had a nervous breakdown. Then again, nervous breakdowns are the fertilizer of the soul; the breaking, the destruction of old mores and self-conceptions allows genuine change to occur. That's what tarot card readers will tell you should you draw the death card. But are they just kidding you so you don't panic and rip their table cloth?

When death comes in his/her figurative onscreen representation, it's guaranteed to be a wee bit trite unless said figure manages to harness both the 'significant change is scary but there's nothing to fear' aspect and the 'from which no traveler returns' aspect. Death is not cruel or unkind, but merciful! Yet also, terrifying. Without the latter, the former has no function -  there can't be mercy without suffering - and once one is no longer afraid, death is beautiful.  Because, in the end, unless you're talking about a snuff film, cinematic death is hardly permanent. It's just a dramatic twitching agony then lying still, like children play in the backyard. Anyone can return from the dead for a sequel, or at the very least, hop up from the ground after the director yells, cut! All life and death fades with the waking up from the 'reality' of the film to the future memory of the viewer as he or she sets about gathering his or her popcorn and scarf, moseying out the theater, looking for car keys and maybe gazing up in suspicion at the far-off moon, all the while heedless of the tiny whirlwind at his feet, and the unmanned tractor trailer rolling ominously a-toward.

 

1. Jessica Lange as Death - All that Jazz (1977)
One "Bye Bye Life" finale later and I, a small alienated lad of 15, was death's true champion. Factor in a strutting Ben Vereen, glittery glam creatures cavorting in blue and red-veined body suits, and middle-aged chain-smoking choreographer Jake Gideon (Roy Scheider), dying on one level of reality while belting out his smooth sure-am-blueness to the glittering ceiling of the next, and by the third climactic chorus the hairs stood on my neck's rough back as the sleeping cock towards Apollo's electric guitar solo womb.

Leading up to this, Gideon (Roy Scheider) shares mostly one way conversations with his personal angel of death, played by a teasingly Mona Lisa-esque Jessica Lange. I love how relaxed, even flirty, Gideon is in these scenes, and I love his nonstop momentum; even when he's heart attacking his way along empty hospital corridors he's not going to stop reaching towards his own silver-lined black cloud future. Mortality's crossing guards--the hospital staff and surgeons-- are ignored like some needlessly nervous mom at a carless corner. And since Jake's psychopomp is such a glowing, white-clad hottie, what's to fear? The last shot may be painfully abrupt, throwing us out the door to the far-less sexy Ethel Mermen's belting "There's No Business (Like Show Business)" while Gideon's pale husk is zippered up into a body bag, but at least Jake went out to a pinnacle Bob Fosse moment. When I die, it's this film I want as the last thing I see before I die.

2. Frederic March as Death in Death Takes a Holiday (1933)

Death got good press in the pre-code 1930s, when surrealism, Dada, and avant garde metaphysical probing was all the rage at the nationally-sponsored theaters. In this play (made into the 1933 film with March and later Meet Joe Black) Death poses as a living count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable, who is awesome). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella Swan seem like Mary Poppins; and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan, but Death with a capital S for Scythe. Love + Death = Modernism, a cry-in-your-whiskey highball for your dead gunner and hurrah for the next who dies tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc, Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition), which since you can pick it up for under two dollars is worth getting just for that, even if you (wisely) avoid JOE BLACK itself, like the proverbial plague.

3.Cedric Hardwicke as Mr. Brink - On Borrowed Time (1939)

"...On Borrowed Time could have been expanded from out of one of the ideas that featured in the background of Death Takes a Holiday – the idea that while Death is present on Earth all mortality is held in suspension. Both films also portray Death as a rather decent figure – here Death waits for people to finish what they’re doing before claiming them, something you can’t help but compare to various accounts of less than dignified death in real life. It’s worth comparing both films to the afterlife fantasies of the 1940s that emerged following the US entry into WWII – the likes of Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) and A Guy Named Joe (1943). Death Takes a Holiday and On Borrowed Time seem to hold the view that Death is a matter of people genteelly learning to accept the natural processes of life, whereas the films of the 1940s by comparison seem almost hysteric in the need to prove to people the existence of an afterlife in defiance of true (Wartime) tragedy." - Richard Schieb

4. Bengt Ekerot as Death - The Seventh Seal (1957)
When it comes to personifications of the big D, no one plays it like Ekerot in Bergman's most recognized and satirized of gloomfests. With his skull-tight cowl, pale face and big reptilian eyes, Ekerot is both scary and civilized, sexless yet charismatic. He relishes the chance to hang with a cool dude like this weary knight Max von Sydow, before the inevitable reaping. A true nobleman is hard to find in amidst Death's daily haul.

We can't even imagine now, all smug in our finery, that once upon a time there was 'the arthouse' and titans like Kurosawa and Bergman were dropping genius groundbreakers all up in there, and something like Seventh Seal was gobbled up, digested, and then transformed into Woody Allen homages before it could even leave the theater. Now indies and imports are neo-realist downers or twee quirkfests, and lofty art draws chuckles proportionate only to its reach. This Death chess game alone lives to tell the tale.

5. The Red Death - The Masque of the Red Death. (1964)
One of the sillier aspects of this film is that not only is there a guy in a red robe to be the 'red death' but there's a whole rainbow of robed figures at the end, sewing plague like Skittles throughout the Middle Ages. And our main red robed figure doesn't play chess with Prospero (Vincent Price) the Satanic figure who locks up his gates in a futile attempt to keep the plague at bay, he plays cards with a little peasant girl from the village Price has earlier--half out of sadistic whim out of plague-times necessity--burned to the ground.

Poe would never be so populist in rooting against such a charismatic monster and usually screenwriter Charles Beaumont likes him too, but it doesn't matter, for when this weird death in his robe with a mask that makes him look like a fuller brush come to life gets to deliver the comeuppance Price's Prospero has been secretly longing for all along, the now dripping red paint Prospero leads the cast in a wild interpretive dance!

6.a)  María Casares as the Princess / Death - Orpheus (1950)
Jean Cocteau's dreamy allegory finds a brooding cafe poet Orpheus (Jean Marais) haunted by regal Spanish actress María Casares, who reaches out to him from the reflective pool / mirror. Orpheus' clueless wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa) would prefer her husband stop listening to his muse's sweet words, which are coming over his car radio like a ghost transmission from WW2, the days when broadcasts regularly included long strings of seemingly jumbled code words meant to confuse the eavesdropping Nazis. I had a strong yen for Cesares seeing this the first time as she reminded me a lot of my then wife, an Argentine socialist intellectual filmmaker. Now I think avoid the film como de proverbial plaga.

6.b) Death - Black Orpheus (1959)
A spurned lover gone homicidal puts on a theatrical skeleton mask and stalks his ex through carnivale in this entrancing, uber-rhythmic festival of color, movement, and amour. The film electrified art house crowds and put bossa nova on the map. And the death figure here is genuinely scary. We know what's going to happen: Eurydice will die and Orpheus will make his deal (here with some voodoo practitioners hanging out in an empty theater) and so forth, but knowing what's going to happen just makes it that much more tragic, as if death was an inexorable magnetic force that all the dancing in the world can't keep at bay for long. Sooner or later, even carnivale ends.

7. Billy Mahoney - Flatliners (1990)

... Keifer Sutherland's return of the repressed is the worst of all the others, a mysterious incarnation of a bully who used to torment him in grammar school. Dressed in Halloween hoodie and toy scythe, Billy beats the crap out of grown-up Sutherland with the force of a Scorsese bouncer. Later, Sutherland has grown used to the assaults and every night develops a new strategy to deal with it, like trying to get rid of the hiccups through sheer will power-- which sometimes works... with hiccups, not with Billy Mahoney. In a great scene we see Kief's become a kind of death junkie: he rocks back and forth, chanting, "Come on, Billy Mahoney! Come on Billy!" daring him, invoking him. (I like to think PJ Harvey's song "C'mon Billy" is based on that scene). Anyway, a chill enters the room, and his skin gets paler and skulls are superimposed everywhere, not in the cheap EXORCIST THE VERSION YOU'VE NEVER SEEN way, but in the barely noticeable way... the way you can only detect if you're very sick or otherwise open to hallucinations (for what are hallucinations but the ability to see all of life as it really is, alive with dying?) -more

8. Robert Redford as Harold Belden - Twilight Zone (1962 - "Nothing in the Dark")
There are certain TZ episodes we all remember - Burgess with his glasses, Shatner with his gremlin, and Robert Redford as a wounded cop who's really death personified, come to claim some old broad scared who's been locking her door to all visitors for she knows old death is comin' soon.

Redford was just a kitten at the time, but he's perfectly cast - who could resist his gentle beauty? When he comes for you, a feeling of flattered grace subsumes all dread. Look at him, that unwrinkled brow and eyes used to charming girls of all ages without strain; why, he wouldn't even hurt a fly.

9. The Rube Goldberg Variations - Final Destination (series)
What makes these films fascinating as artifacts of modern horror cinema is the personification of death isn't anthropomorphic but rather the entire environment: electrical current, turning wheels, weather patterns, freight, breezes, asphalt, airplanes, roller coasters, horses, and even a 3-D multiplex theater itself. The concept that somehow a premonition of death 'shouldn't' have happened, forcing death to work overtime in claiming the lives of those who escaped their scheduled demise suggests, in a sense, that certain agents inherent in our DNA are at war with the inescapable force of mortality, that death has a regimented schedule which our premonitory powers are forever trying to disrupt.

What makes these films effective as 'fun' stems from the very easy way we can recognize death's movements in random events; there is no single figure of malice but just as we as viewers effectively occupy a 'no space' omnipresence in the films we watch, we have no trouble recognizing the work of this invisible Goldberg coincidence time-space serpent.

We're there, after all, to see it 'perform' its repossessions. The temporary escape from fate provided by the protagonist's vision might even be a 'head start' kind of approach on death's part. And, in a sense, by making Death appear vulnerable to being even temporarily escaped, and making it resemble us as invisible, omniscient viewers, the Final Destination films ally us with Death in a temporary partnership, making us feel immortal.  As long as we see what death sees, as long as we remain invisible within the narrative frame, we're safe from being seen, and therefore 'taken'.

10. Death as a bank of TV monitors - Scrooged (1997)
As the maker of the medium (the executive producer of a major network), Bill Murray's Scrooge is a new kind of miser, hogging the time his employees would spend with their families to force them into making a live Xmas eve broadcast. When the Ghost of Xmas Future finally arrives it's ingeniously through the one place this Scrooge feels safe - the TV, ala Samara in THE RING, trashing all sense of immortality, which a life spent as a free-floating ghost inside the televisual image tends to instill. There's no arguing for mercy with a TV monitor showing a metallic skull shouting down at you in a howl of white noise. The program has begun. When it turns its eyeless sockets towards thee... oh man, there's no off button that can save you. You've grown so used to the simulacrum there's no way out; it's like the very air you swim in suddenly becomes cognizant of your presence, and hunts you down. Turns out you were never a friendly invited ghost - just a mouse that, once discovered, warrants immediate extermination.

11. Charlotte Rampling - Vanishing Point (1971)
Here lies the blurry mile marker between the couple on the run in a car across the expanse of the American dream (see Cinemarchetype 22, the Outlaw Pair-Bond) and the driver alone who has already, in a sense, broken free. How many victory laps does he need before Charlotte Rampling appears?

My advice, videotape yourself when at the height of your being in love and totally happy. Ten years later after the bloom has faded you can watch it and realize yes, you were in love, you were happy, even if  you don't remember it. That's the trade-off. To paraphrase Tolstoy, that's why truly happy people are invariably uninteresting writers. That's why all the best couples need to die at the end, or else escape to Mexico, beyond the reach of cameras. That's why even if you're all alone and speeding across the country, you will receive a lovely hitchhiker just before you make it through the Monte Hellman celluloid burn.

12. Marius Goring as Conductor 71 - A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
He "lost his head in the second germinal of the so-called French revolution." and so, being French, is secretly on the side of the British WW2 bombardier (David Niven) he was supposed to collect as he plummeted sans parachute into the Channel. Damn that British fog! In the meantime Niven has survived and fallen in love with radio operator Kim Hunter, a Yank!, thus the three of them form a kind of allied front in arguing against the necessity of Niven's going at his appointed time. The French may be many things, but when it comes to love they are always on its side - prizing it even above death, apparently.

Inversing the usual WIZARD OF OZ split, Great Britain-- is awash in glorious Technicolor; each scene of stout-hearted wartime life along the shore is so beautiful it seems like heaven, while the Other World is in black and white, and overly clerical, mirroring the endless lines servicemen had to stand in, for chow, uniforms, assignments, etc. So Conductor 71, while embarrassed by his failure to bring Niven in on schedule, secretly appreciates being compelled to linger in the Technicolor splendor. He even jokes "Do you play chess? We could play.... every day," as if riffing on a film still eleven years from being made.

Bonus! Death as PCP hallucination, Disco Godfather

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