Here are some of the movies available to Vancouverists on the big screen this weekend, October 31, All Hallow’s Eve, through November 2nd.

Kiggins (whose website has finally returned to life) comes up with the loose Jules Verne adaptation turned into a kids film, Journey to the Center of the Earth, plus WALL-e, though the theater appears to be closed for Halloween. Admission is $4 (but changes to $5 in January). Note also the theater’s School Family Matinee Program, with begins with The Longshots, starring Ice Cube.

Cinetopia carries on with the Middle East spy thriller from Ridley Scott, Body of Lies , which reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe for the first time since The Quick and the Dead, the video game derived Max Payne, W., the derivative cop-brothers-corruption Pride and Glory, Clint Eastwood’s Changling and adds The Nightmare Before Christmas in Digital 3-D, the adult-teen sex comedy from Kevin Smith Zack and Miri Make a Porno (called only Zack and Mira in some papers), and the cultural phenomenon, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, graduating from the small to the big screen.

The Regal Cascade Stadium 16 Cinemas retains the noisy and Hitchcock-’70s derivative new political paranoia thriller Eagle Eye, the Christian produced religious allegory Fireproof, the surprisingly tenacious Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Body of Lies, Changeling, Max Payne, Pride and Glory, The Secret Life of Bees, and W., and adding High School Musical 3: Senior Year, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, and the latest in the unkillable Saw series, Saw V, while the Regal Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema overlaps some of the same titles plus others.

Meanwhile, a few short miles away in another town, the Hollywood Theater, whose website now suddenly seems out of sorts, appears to be playing The Monks, a series of films on the local environment, and the farmland tale August Evening, whose trailer can be viewed here. More next week as schedules become clearer.

The Cinema 21 introduces The Pool, a new film from Chris Smith, who American Movie, and a rockcumentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life, for devoted disciples of the singer only.

It’s almost all comedy time at the Laurelhurst Theater , and boy do we need it. The theater continues with Pineapple Express, the comic Tropic Thunder, WALL-E, and adds Vicky Christina Barcelona, Hamlet 2, and Man on Wire. For ’80s horror nostalgia and fashion buffs, the theater has held over The Lost Boys.

The all-digital Living Room Theaters continues with Transsiberian , a new thriller from the cult director Brad Anderson, the charming documentary Man On Wire, I Served the King of England, the Philip Roth adaptationElegy, and Priceless, and adds Save Me, The Pope’s Toilet, and the underrated Kubrick horror film, The Shining. On Tuesday the theater will be open all day streaming digital election results.

The Northwest Film Center has, among other offerings, further entries in the Global Concerns: Human Rights on Film series, this week Project Kashmir, To See If I’m Smiling, and Deadly Playground, the first films in the 35th NW Film and Video Festival, with new work from reviewer turned moviemaker Brian Libby and the always dependable Chel White. For nostalgia buffs, Fellini’s overwraught existentialist drama La Strada is on hand, plus the documentary Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine.

Why didn’t Jean-Pierre Melville every film an adaptation of a novel by Herman Melville? After all, the French director, born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, adopted the Yankee novelist’s name out of his love for all things American. Melville might have done a terrific adaptation of Melville’s The Confidence Man, although the director appears to have had a special fondness for Pierre, or the Ambiguities.

Instead, Melville directed a series of about 10 films, most of them gangster thrillers in the American (and British) vein, but with certain French inflections. Two of them have just been released on DVD by Criterion, beginning with Le Deuxieme Souffle.

Melville’s gangsters, as he was at pains to indicate in interviews (he died in 19xx), bear no relation to real life gangsters, or even, he claimed, to any facets of his own real life. On the other hand, his thrillers are, at root, about betrayal, and as he told interviewer Rui Nogueira in the book Melville on Melville, when there are two of you, one always betrays. Melville went on to add that he himself led an ascetic life, alone most of the time in order to avoid the betrayals of friendships. But as critic turned filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier says elsewhere on the disc, Melville had a tendency to manufacture feuds with everyone including his intimates, rendering him a much more complicated figure.

Melville didn’t start making films professionally until after WWII, and he broke into cinema completely as an outsider. His favored characters are outsiders, and they appear happiest when they are alone. Melville, however, fought with the Resistance, and not a few pundits have noted how similar his gangster films are to his one Resistance film, Army of Shadows, and how similar Army of Shadows is to his gangster output. Both share the code of silence, of no careless speech, of names left unspoken, and an overall mood of professionalism, ritual, melancholy, restraint, and bleakness. There is a torture scene in Le Deuxieme Souffle that has triple layers: unintended modern 21st Century resonances, an allusion to contemporaneous issues concerning the Algeria war, and reflections back on Melville’s own time in the Resistance. It is both a gangster’s and a resistance fighter’s duty to escape from prison if he can, and there are no less than two jailbreaks by Le Deuxieme Souffle’s anti-hero Gu (short for Gustave) Minda.

Paradoxically, Melville tells his long two-and-a-half-hour story with great economy. There are no wasted movements, no outsized emotions. Looks between people say more than dialogue. The movie thus requires more than usual concentration, if for no other reason than to catch the doublings that are pointed out by the two enthusiastic academics who provide the commentary track, such as the bent cigarettes that go unlit in the mouth of Minda at the beginning of the film, and his nemesis, Commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse) at the end. Not to mention the doubling of Minda and Blot in other ways, or the contrasting of the brothers Paul (Raymond Pellegrin) and Jo (Marcel Bozzufi, later of French Connection fame) Ricci. Something the pair doesn’t point out is the visual rhyme of Minda being low to the ground at the film’s beginning and then at the end, especially when he is crawling about on narrow stairs.

Another fascinating quality to the films is the cut and dried differences between its two styles of interiors, all shot in Melville’s own movie studio, Studio Jenson. The rich have lush, over done rooms with lots of statuary and mirrors, while the crooks hide out in empty, dingy rooms with washed walls. There is a very poignant moment when Minda is alone, eating pate on New Year’s Eve in his lonely safe house. The clock strikes midnight, and he goes to the fireplace to tear off the last day of the calendar. Behind that last sheet there is nothing but ripped cardboard. In these subtle ways does Melville comment on his character’s life, which is both admirable and isolated at the same time. Like his American kin, Robert Aldrich, who also bought his own studio after the success of The Dirty Dozen, Melville suffered the tragedy of his studio burning down.

Criterion offers up the 1966 Le Deuxieme Souffle in a fine black and white, wide screen transfer advertised as a restored high-definition digital transfer. Supplemental material includes a 20+ minute new video interview with Bertrand Tavernier, who worked briefly with Melville, along with excepts from two French television shows that feature interviews with Melville, Ventura, and also Meurisse.
Also included is the original theatrical trailer.

The meatiest supplement is the yak track by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau, who wrote the book Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris and Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute, who has also written a few books. As they trade off comments they offer up numerous insights and observations. In fact, they offered so many that they started to steal some of the thoughts that were coming into my head. Just as it occurred to me that Melville was in certain ways was doing to the gangster film what Sergio Leone was doing to the western in Italy, creating a heightened, ritualistic pastiche, Andrew comes along and says the exact same thing. The duo point out significant differences between Melville and the living directors he has influenced, such as John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, whose films are populated by, in their view, less mature, more talky characters. They point out that Melville’s movies are not about honor among thieves, since these men are almost always suspicious of each other and solo, and while Vincendeau carefully notes the differences between the movie and its source novel by Jose Giovanni, an ex-con who specialized in crime novels, Andrew notes how similar Gu and Blot are to Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino’s characters in Michael Mann’s Heat, pointing out several characterological and plot similarities. The only thing they don’t do is make parts of the film’s plot make sense. For example, I am still wondering why the character called Jacques the Gambler is shot near the film’s beginning.

Finally, there is a 16-page supplement with cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, stills, and an essay by Adrian Danks, who writes for the Australian website Senses of Cinema.

Le Deuxieme Souffle hit the street on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, and retails for $39.95.

The obsession of EW with the speech of Conan O’Brien, which I have been closely monitoring, rears its ugly lips. Yet again, this week’s “SoundBites” column in the TV section of Entertainment Weekly (issue number 1018, page 49) contains an innocuous and witless quote from the late night TV host, currently slated to take over for Jay Leno in the near future. I remain baffled as to why O’Brien continues to appear in this column, much less on the cover the publication at least once a year, or even as a viable replacement for Leno. At the very least this continual O’Brien celebration, is proof that there is an old boys network in New York magazine entertainment publishing, or at least a sycophantic allegience of celebrity among publishing drones, however pallid or vacuous the subject of adoration may be, designed to distract us from the true horrors that are starting to afflict us. The story continues.

Max Payne made a lot of money over the weekend and that must be a sign that the movie-going public wants the same thing over and over again. The film, based on a video game, which came as news to those of us not versed in the world of video games, a fact that is admittedly an increasing deficiency in understanding contemporary movies, is an anthology of familiar tropes, most of which other reviewers have already elucidated. I don’t know if these qualities are in the game itself, but the film quotes Blade Runner, se7en, Sin City, various versions of Batman, and The Matrix trilogy, to name only a few without going through the picture frame by frame. Max Payne also uses as its plot foundation a premise already widely common, from the recent Kevin Bacon vehicle Death Sentence to the even more recent Death Race, that is, the plot device of a man who has lost his wife and children to thugs and spends most of the movie looking for the killers. In this case, it is Max Payne himself (Mark Wahlberg ), a former New York City homicide cop reassigned to the hell of the cold case department after the loss of said wife and kids, one of the killers being still on the loose. Max apparently uses the cover of the cold case bureau to maintain the hunt for this killer.

Regular reviewers have been distracted by the film’s humorless reliance on Matrix-style visuals and fashion sense, and by an increasingly difficult-to-follow plot that is otherwise fairly predictable. The person with crucial info for the hero dies before getting a chance to reveal it, just as we expect. The villain proves to be exactly whom you assume him to be, and scenes begin and end just as the viewer is used to them beginning and ending from hundreds of previous, similar films.

Max Payne will ultimately probably only fully please action fans with a taste for modern urban pseudo noir, but for students of film it has some sociological interest. Once again, a large corporation proves to be the villain, controlling both cops and the street, where the drug the company produces destroys lives but also somehow is useful in dominating the economy. The Gulf War gets its licks, too, as there is a link between the villainous pharmaceutical company and the war, which appears to serve as both a testing ground and a recruiting agency. One never gets over the fact that large corporations, in this case Fox, rather revel in tales of corporate perfidy. Are they thumbing their nose in our faces, or distracting us with market researched bread and circuses? Or perhaps corporate evil is simply a convention of superhero or comic book derived movies.

Also of interest is the continuing use of the tragically ripped apart family as a motivating force. There is an almost masochistic reveling in the hero’s suffering, his denial of contemporary sensual pleasure by being lost in the past, the humorless revisiting of past traumas. This makes for an inward, isolated hero, one who probably appeals to the vast imagination but isolated identity of sci fi buffs. That such a figure is now appealing to non-specific demographics is fascinating, when it isn’t depressing.

Director John Moore has a minute track record. Previous films include The Omen, Flight of the Phoenix, and Behind Enemy Lines. He appears to specialize in remakes (Capricorn One is in the works), but his real strength is taking second tier action stars (Dennis Quaid, Owen Wilson) and wrapping an operatic if sluggish tale around them. All Max Payne lacks is a score by Ennio Morricone, and it would have the heightened and elegiac tone it aspires to, but, for the viewer, without maximum pain.

Here are some of the movies available to Vancouverists on the big screen this weekend, October 17 through 19.

Kiggins (whose website still appears non-functioning; all I get is a white screen) comes up with the American Girl adaptation, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl this weekend. Admission is $4 (but changes to $5 in January).

Cinetopia carries on with the noisy and Hitchcock-’70s derivative new political paranoia thriller Eagle Eye, the traditional looking western with Ed Harris, Appaloosa , The Duchess , a British heritage film that is a thinly disguised replay of the Princess Diana story, The Express , yet another sports drama that tells in essence exactly the same story as the previous 12 inspirational sports dramas, the Middle East spy thriller from Ridley Scott, Body of Lies , which reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe for the first time since The Quick and the Dead, and adds the video game derived Max Payne, the teen sex comedy (shouldn’t that be a contradiction in terms?) Sex Drive, and the comedic but surprisingly sympathetic biopic of George Bush from Oliver Stone, W..

The Regal Cascade Stadium 16 Cinemas retains Burn After Reading, the right wing political satire An American Carol, Eagle Eye, Fireproof, Lakeview Terrace, Nights in Rodanthe, Appaloosa, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, The Express, a fantasy about mole people in an underground city starring Bill Murray called City of Ember, Body of Lies, and the Blair Witchy sounding Quarantine, starring Dexter ’s sister, and adding Max Payne, Sex Drive, The Secret Life of Bees, and W., while the Regal Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema overlaps some of the same titles plus others.

Meanwhile, a few short miles away in another town, the Hollywood Theater continues with the effective French thriller based on an American novel, Tell No One and Hollywood Chinese, a conventional documentary on an interesting subject, and adds Choke, Chained Heat as part of a grindhouse festival, and the unpredictable and stylish new indictment of the bourgeoisie from aging French New Wave director Claude Chabrol, A Girl Cut in Two.

The Cinema 21 introduces Trouble the Water, a highly personal and individual documentary about New Orleans and Katrina.

When I was a kid the scariest movie in my young experience was Village of the Damned (1960) — and I didn’t even see the movie, only the trailer on TV. There was something about the way a dog snarled at an unearthly blonde kid that terrified me. I finally really saw it as an adult, and it proved to be an effective intellectual British sci-fi thriller, based on a novel by John Wyndham and starring George Sanders. Now the Laurelhurst Theater has revived it to terrify us all over again. Also on hand is Pineapple Express, the comic Tropic Thunder, Battle in Seattle, the critically acclaimed Frozen River, and for kids of various ages, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and WALL-E.

The all-digital Living Room Theaters commences its second annual Latin American Film Festival, with films on Cuba, Pancho Villa, Salvador Allende and other topics, along with Transsiberian , a new thriller from the cult director Brad Anderson, the charming documentary Man On Wire, Kabluey, I Served the King of England, the Philip Roth adaptationElegy, The Lucky Ones, and Priceless.

The Northwest Film Center has, among other offerings, further entries in the Global Concerns: Human Rights on Film series, this week The Sari Soldiers, and more films in the David Lean retrospective, including another tale about infidelity, this one based on an H. G. Wells novel, The Passionate Friends, plus Madeleine, the dry The Sound Barrier, possibly the most boring movie ever made, and the witty and light Hobson’s Choice, with Charles Laughton.

Here are some of the movies available to Vancouverists on the big screen this weekend, October 10 through 12.

Kiggins (whose website still appears non-functioning) tosses the Asian-martial arts cartoon satire Kung Fu Panda into the mix this weekend. Admission is $4 (but changes to $5 in january).

Cinetopia carries on with the new Coen Brothers black comedy Burn After Reading, with an excellent turn from John Malkovich, the noisy and Hitchcock-’70s derivative new political paranoia thriller Eagle Eye, the tear jerker that reunites Richard Gere and Diane Lane, Nights in Rodanthe, the traditional looking western with Ed Harris, Appaloosa , and the dog comedy Beverly Hills Chihuahua, while adding The Duchess , a British heritage film that is a thinly disguised replay of the Princess Diana story, The Express , yet another sports drama that tells in essence exactly the same story as the previous 12 inspirational sports dramas, and the Middle East spy thriller from Ridley Scott, Body of Lies , which reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe for the first time since The Quick and the Dead.

The Regal Cascade Stadium 16 Cinemas retains Burn After Reading, the right wing political satire An American Carol, Eagle Eye, Fireproof, the surprisingly tenacious How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Lakeview Terrace, Nights in Rodanthe, Appaloosa, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Blindness, Flash of Genius, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and adds The Express, a fantasy about mole people in an underground city starring Bill Murray called City of Ember, Body of Lies, and the Blair Witchy sounding Quarantine, starring Dexter ’s sister, while the Regal Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema overlaps some of the same titles plus others.

Meanwhile, a few short miles away in another town, the Hollywood Theater continues with the dreadful ’70s homage, Humboldt Country, a revival of the documentary Jazz on a Summer Day, the effective French thriller based on an American novel, Tell No One, and adds Hollywood Chinese, a conventional documentary on an interesting subject, and Year of the Fish, a retelling of the Cinderella story set in NY’s Chinatown, with the film image given that faux-cartoon rotoscoping treatment that makes everyone look smoothed out like Michael Jackson.

The Cinema 21 holds over the documentary about the crisis in the world’s water supply, Flow: For The Love of Water, and the home grown documentary about the local phenomenon of the Chapman swifts, called On The Wing.

The all-digital Living Room Theaters is featuring Transsiberian , a new thriller from the cult director Brad Anderson, the charming documentary Man On Wire, Kabluey, I Served the King of England, the Philip Roth adaptationElegy, The Lucky Ones, Priceless, and Call+Response.

The Northwest Film Center has, among other offerings, further entries in the Global Concerns: Human Rights on Film series, including the charming Postcards from Leningrad, which shows revolutionary activity in Venezuela from the viewpoint of two kids, and more films in the David Lean retrospective, including the grim, frustrating ambiguous tale of a presumptive extra-marital affair penned by Noel Coward Brief Encounter, plus Lean’s two Charles Dickens adaptations, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, which goes rather downhill after its ravishing opening.

Having more or less raided Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window for their previous hit collaboration, indeed pilfered the 1954 classic to such an extent that the copyright-wielding heirs to source writer Cornell Woollrich’s estate are suing the production (though the litigants really should have been screenwriter John Michael Hayes and Hitchcock himself), the team of director D. J. Caruso and and actor Scheisse LaBarf have picked out another Hitchcock epic for their latest inspiration, Eagle Eye.

While in Disturbia, Caruso and credited screenwriters Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth contrived laboriously to make LaBarf a home-bound teen, from which perch he grew to suspect a neighbor as a serial killer, in Eagle Eye, LaBarf is a slacker kid of loose morals who finds himself thrust into a large espionage caper much bigger than his anonymous, ordinary little self can handle. Seemingly picked at random, rather than by an accident of misidentification as in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, LaBarf is forced instantly to go on the run as a suspect in the eyes of the authorities, his only communication that which he has with an all-powerful female voice on the other end of a cellular phone, who also has the ability to make Times Square reader boards change their messages to give LaBarf quick guidance and to make all the cellular telephones in the same subway car ring simultaneously with the same bit of discomforting news, among other, even more dangerous accomplishments. With its capitol setting, battling bureaucrats, and sense of satellites hovering over us at all times to mess up out petty stupid lives, Eagle Eye forms an unfunny companion to the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading.

These unofficial adaptations of Hitchcock films appear to be a good idea. Disturbia made about $120 million dollars worldwide, while Eagle Eye had a good opening of about $40 million (just under a quarter of its budget). Eagle Eye’s success seems contingent less on its pedigree and heritage, however, than on the fact that it pushes all the same buttons pressed by all the other chaotic action films of the day (ultimately, pilfered premises are for pitch meetings, not for the people in the audience). Though Eagle Eye has four credited writers (John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz, Dan McDermott), the film is touted as inspired by an idea that came into the head of Steven Spielberg, also one of the film’s producers, a man so busy that he must pass out his brainstorms to others like pedophiles dispense ice cream, and the less dense viewer assumes that this clever idea comes down to the rather clever reason why LaBarf’s Jerry Shaw was really plucked out of the crowd in the first place. However, the cleverness of Spielberg’s premise does not make up for the chaos and impenetrability of the second-unit-dominated action sequences.

If the first half is Hitchcock’s NxNW, the second half is Kubrick’s 2001, as the main, or mainframe, villain turns out to be a computer gone mad. This computer yells at LaBarf and Monaghan the way audiences usually yell at the main characters in horror films, telling them futilely what to do next. Perhaps the filmmakers were also under the inspiration of ’70s paranoia movies such as Parallax View and others. As this column has mentioned before, however, as much as filmmakers make love the films of the ’70s, the audiences of the ’70s weren’t so fond of them, rushing to Won Ton Ton the Dog That Saved Hollywood, while the film buffs were sitting hunched virtually alone in neighborhood theaters watching Badlands.

A good cast, that includes Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson, are wasted amid the carnage, but not in the usual sense. Their anonymity has more to do with the programatic quadfurcation of the film into alternating scenes of action and plot advancement, “character development” and bureaucracy bashing.

Scheisse LaBarf, on the other hand, is a protegee of Steven Spielberg, and is another one of those indistinguishable stars whom the media industrial complex periodically attempts to ram down our throats as the newest big star. LaBarf’s movies do make money, Hollywood tells us, so it appears that the strategy of simply saying he is a star works, for in the city of dreams what is said to be so, is so. Thus he is a star, whether we want him or not (I personally know of no one who goes to a film specifically because LaBarf is in it). The very last moments of the film bear some evidence of market research-based decisions on narrative resolution, as apparently the idea of giving one’s life for one’s country is a very good one theoretically, but still, if you want your movie to make money, the hero must survive to the credits.

LaBarf’s obligatory partner in faked crime is sexless-in-the-city girl Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), who also seems at first plucked at random from the faceless crowd, but who also turns out to have unknowing ties to the conspiracy. Unfortunately, though her role is ultimately important, it’s difficult to fight for screen space against a camera biased in favor of LaBarf and a litany of distracting and screen dominating cars, subways, airplanes, and even high tension wire rigs. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that Monaghan would be paired with LaBarf, given that one of the last remnants of the old studio system is the notion that all stars have chemistry with each other and that we the audiences are all dying to see each of them eventually united with each other seriatim. Since becoming a “star,” LaBarf’s screen partners have been Lindsay Lohan, Sarah Roemer, Megan Fox, Cate Blanchett, while since Monaghan has been willing foisted upon us the cute Sante in short skirt and boots in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, she has been set-up chemistry-free with Tom Cruise, Casey Affleck, Ben Stiller, and Patrick Dempsey.

Though Eagle Eye had potential to embrace the harder edge of the great ’70s paranoia thrillers, it just couldn’t tear itself away from the rigid techniques of the day, which leave the viewer exhausted and confused. In the end, the eye surveying the now old hat tropes of this programatic thriller is more meager than eager.

Here are some of the movies available to Vancouverists on the big screen this weekend, October 3 through 5.

Kiggins (though its website doesn’t seem to be working) offers the Asian-based horror film Mirrors, and Step Brothers, the comedy with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Admission is $4 (but changes to $5 in january).

Cinetopia continues with the new Coen Brothers black comedy Burn After Reading, Choke, based loosely on Northwest writer Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Eagle Eye, the new political paranoia thriller, Ghost Town, the Ricky Gervase comedy, Nights in Rodanthe, and adds Appaloosa , and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

The Regal Cascade Stadium 16 Cinemas continues with Burn After Reading, Eagle Eye, Fireproof, Igor, Lakeview Terrace, Miracle at St. Anna, My Best Friend’s Girl, and Nights in Rodanthe, and adds the right wing satire An American Carol, the wester Appaloosa, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Blindness, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Flash of Genius, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, while the Regal Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema has some of the same titles plus others.

Meanwhile, a few short miles away, the Hollywood Theater continues with the dreadful ’70s homage, Humboldt Country, as well as a revival of the documentary Jazz on a Summer Day.

The Cinema 21 features a documentary about the crisis in the world’s water supply, Flow: For The Love of Water, and another documentary about a local phenomenon, the Chapman swifts, called On The Wing.

The all-digital Living Room Theaters is featuring Transsiberian , a new thriller from the cult director Brad Anderson, the charming documentary Man On Wire, Kabluey, I Served the King of England, the Philip Roth adaptationElegy, The Lucky Ones, and Priceless.

The Northwest Film Center has, among other offerings, further entries in the Global Concerns: Human Rights on Film series, and more films in the David Lean retrospective, including the utterly weird ghost comedy penned by Noel Coward Blithe Spirit (if you see it, look for the high tech coffee pot on display in the film), In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, and Brief Encounter.

If you’ve never heard of Edgar Wallace, don’t feel alone, but do feel culturally illiterate. The prolific British mystery writer, and the co-author of the script to King Kong (he died before the film’s release; see Video Watchdog No. 126 for the full story), is, or at least is reputed to be, more popular in Germany than his homeland. In Germany he forms a sort of one man crime wave, what Karl May was to the American-set westerns that so influenced the Hitlererian view of the world, Wallace’s mysteries and African adventure series festooning airport “bookstores.”

More important, Wallace’s books formed the foundation for a popular series of films in the late 1950s and through the ’60s and beyond, called krimis . These movies didn’t bear much export, but did influence the Italian gialli and may have inspired a producer to convince Fritz Lang to revive his Dr. Mabuse series in 1960 for one last entry ( Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse). Samuel Fuller’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street may be a form of homage to Wallace and his films. German cult film viewers still like them. A couple of years ago, a German DVD distributor issued a set of over 40 of the krimis , covered throughly in issue No. 134 of Video Watchdog. There were in fact two competing producers of Wallace adaptations, and the article walks the reader through these complexities.

Though of obvious low budget and sometimes awkward in production these prove to be fun films, but only a few of them have come into the American market. The color College Girl Murders was released a few years ago, and a double bill without portfolio that collected Monster of London City and Mystery of the Red Orchid. In January, the company Retromedia initiated the Edgar Wallace Collection, with a gathering of Mad Executioners and Fellowship of the Frog (apparently the first of the German krimis, released by the German studio Rialto), and now comes Edgar Wallace Collection, Vol. 2: Curse of the Yellow Snake/The Phantom of Soho (Retromedia, single sided dual layered disc with both features in black and white, no supplements).

Curse of the Yellow Snake or Der Fluch der gelben Schlange (1963), supposedly based on Wallace’s 1926 novel, follows two narrative tracks. The first concerns the search by one Cliff Ling, or Lynn (Joachim Fuchsberger) for the Yellow Snake, an ancient Chinese artifact whose possessor can, if he begins a war on precisely November 17, achieve world domination. Meanwhile, Joan Bray (Brigitte Grothum), is a London woman whose marital status is apparently up for commerce. First she was going to be palmed off to the unseen-by-her Joe Bray (Fritz Tillmann), foster father to Cliff (if I follow the plot correctly) and biological father to mixed-race industrialist Graham St. Clay (I’m guessing here, but possibly played by Pinkas Braun, whose character thus also goes by the name Fing-Su). Joe had the Yellow Snake back in Hong Kong before it was ripped off in the opening scene by two thieves. There is also some kind of tension between the two faux brothers, and the second Graham sees Joan, he wants to “buy” her, too. Graham, it turns out, is the prime thief of the Yellow Snake, and plans, from his huge London warehouse where hooded acolytes gather, to conquer the world.

As an action thriller, Curse of the Yellow Snake mostly makes sense, is well photographed, by Siegfried Hold, and minus some pacing problems, bears a modicum of suspense. The film also seems to feature many of the facets that dictate content for other Wallace krimis : the primarily London setting, though manifested mostly as library shots of notable London exterior landmarks (otherwise the films are shot in German studios); the presence of Scotland Yard as an institution that sets right threats to universal order; hooded villains out of a silent serial; rather older men as the heroes, Fuchsberger looking like a seedier George Clooney; periodic assassinations, usually of witness just before they are to be questioned. The slaves to Graham running about the factory put one in mind of Goldfinger and Cliff Ling has a bit of the Nayland Smith about him. The eerie electronic score, which also provides sound effects, and the occasional quick zoom ins onto someone’s face, evoke the gialli. St. Clay, ranting about world domination, might have struck contemporaneous viewers as a cheap citation of Hitler, but such demagogues are the currency of villainy in this type of film from the silent through the sound serials to the Bond films.

Both Curse of the Yellow Snake and Phantom of Soho are produced by CCC, the main production company competing with the Rialto Wallace’s and even occasionally using the same stars, such as Fuchsberger. Both are produced by Artur Brauner, and Phantom of Soho, or Das Phantom von Soho (1964), plays the trick of being adapted from a book by Bryan Edgar Wallace, the master’s son who makes a cameo in the film’s credits. Shot in black and white, both film have a noirish feel, with Soho having a score out of Touch of Evil and an opening out of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, with sexy street hookers popularing an unlikely London street. With its killer POV shots, masks, gloves, notes attached to chest with big knives, also evokes the look and sound of the Italian giallo films getting started around the same time.

Phantom of Soho offers a complicated story about a series of murders of prominent elites in the hooker-flourishing streets of a noirish Soho. Into the mix are Joanna Filiati (Elisabeth Flickenschildt), a wheelchair woman who operates one of the Soho clubs called the Sansibar, and who bears a horrific scar on her face and a mysterious past, her plastic surgeon and seeming partner, the generally quaking Dr. Dalmar (Werner Peters). Investigating the crime(s) are Chief Inspector Hugh Patton (Dieter Borsche), deemed to have a special flair for the case since he served in Africa like the first victim, and his buffoonish assistant Sergeant Hallam (Peter Vogel), who serves a similar function as Ling’s gay and hysterical artifact collector best friend in Yellow Snake, i. e., comic relief.

As mentioned both films are in black and white, and also wide screen. Both films come from rough prints, with lots of breaks and perhaps a little bowderlizaton of violence in Soho.

Edgar Wallace Collection, Vol. 2: Curse of the Yellow Snake/The Phantom of Soho hits the streets Tuesday, October 7, 2008, and retails for $19.98.