On a recent Wednesday evening the humid night gave over to occasional lightning flashes in the sky as Kramer screened Unearthly Strangers, part of the so-called D. K. Holm Film Festival. Unearthly Strangers is an obscure, talky, but intriguing British science fiction film with very little science fiction in it. Nevertheless, about 30 or more dedicated cinephiles seemed to get a kick out of it, as the last embers of the grill glowed in the dark, and the last vestiges of hedonism’s beverages were drained from the cups.

Next week’s film is as yet unknown (Mr. Kramer favors spontaneity and also takes requests), but in two week’s time, on Wednesday, July 16, Kramer will offer the third in the D. K. Holm series, a double bill of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, followed by The Train.

Form Buster Keaton’s The General to the horror film Terror Train the train movie has been a vibrant subset of Hollywood pictures, in which the brisk movement of the train usually contrast pleasingly with the static moments in the compartments themselves. These are two of the best. Directed by Joseph Sargent in 1974 from a novel by John Godey scripted by the great Peter Stone (Charade, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a great heist film in which Robert Shaw leads a team of men to seize and hold for ransom a Manhattan subway car.

Walter Matthau is the transit cop out to stop him. Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, Jerry Stiller, and Doris Roberts also pop up in this gritty, funny, fast-paced tale fueled by David Shire’s jangly urban score. These days, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is most famous for being the source of Tarantino’s colorful gang pseudonyms for Reservoir Dogs, but new viewers will be won over by its gritty wit and cynicism.

The Train started out as an Arthur Penn film but after a dispute, John Frankenheimer took over. The 1964 film tells of a group of French resistance fighters and railroad workers attempting to thwart a German general (Paul Scofield) from stealing France’s great art as the last days of WWII wind down. Shot in a contrasty, grim black and white, The Train harks back to Keaton’s The General as a collection of difficult problems that one man must solve over a vast playing field, in this case, Burt Lancaster as the incongruous Paul Labiche. The Train is all about Lancaster as a physical presence, as a perpetual motion machine, sliding down staircases and running along hill tops in his lone effort to stop that train.

If Kramer’s loyal audience can last through a double bill, they’ll enjoy two of the finest train movies ever made, two movies that form a striking contrast between the two stylistic ends of the genre.

Forthcoming D K Hom Fest films include The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The World of Henry Orient (1964), Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), or some other Guy Maddin selection, a double bill of Them! (1954) and Tremors (1990), Little Murders (1971), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Showtime is around 9 PM, or whenever it gets dark and the spirit moves the multitude, and it’s all happening at 1804 SE 38th Avenue (between Hawthorne and Lincoln), Portland, OR, 97214. Lance Kramer can be reached at 503 231 3561, or via kramer.lance@gmail.com.

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Clint Eastwood (San Francisco, 31 May, 1930 — )
Ranking: Actors Turned Directors

The Beguiled: The Storyteller (1971 documentary short)
Play Misty for Me(1971)
High Plains Drifter 1972)
Breezy (1973, director only)
The Eiger Sanction (1975)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The Gauntlet (1977)
Bronco Billy (1980)
Honkytonk Man (1982)
Firefox (1982)
Sudden Impact (1983)
Pale Rider (1985)
“Vanessa in the Garden” (1985, episode of Amazing Stories)
Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
Bird (1988, director only)
White Hunter, Black Heart (1990)
The Rookie (1990)
Unforgiven (1992)
A Perfect World (1993)
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Absolute Power (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, director only)
True Crime (1999)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Blood Work (2002)
Mystic River (2003, director only)
Piano Blues (2003, episode of The Blues)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006, director only)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, director only)
Changeling (2008, director only)
Gran Torino (2008)
The Human Factor (2009, director only)

The most successful of all actors turned directors, Eastwood has fashioned a creditable body of work while making only one film that transcends its genre, the commercial limitations of the art form, and its director’s rigidly codified public personality.

Unforgiven was duly honored by public and Oscar alike, and remains an all too unique chapter in his nevertheless still fascinating career. An often no more than efficient director both stylistically and financially, Eastwood began his directing career while blazing brightly as one of Hollywood’s most popular American stars, an heir to John Wayne, and an actor who appealed to both men and women. Now his status as an eminence grise within Hollywood virtually guarantees Oscar noms, if not the occasional win.

Though he found fame through the spaghetti westerns he made for Sergio Leone, it was as a disciple of Don Siegel that he made his directorial debut, with Play Misty For Me. This film, coming as it did from an international sex icon, was an odd tale, one bespeaking of an almost paranoid suspicion of women within a view of sexuality that foreshadowed Fatal Attraction in its account of a female stalking her prey with unlimited patience, while also anticipating the reliance on the stalker as a fundamental figure in the films of the ’90s. In fact, this thriller showed more the influence of Siegel (who has a cameo) than Leone, and Eastwood starred in Siegel’s The Beguiled, which has a similarly paranoid view of womankind. In the end, Misty had more to say about the screen actor as besieged public figure (and about Eastwood’s affection for jazz) than it did about the genre with which it was theoretically aligned. Suspicion of women also crops up in Breezy, a businessman-meets-hippy tale staring an icon from an earlier era, William Holden.

Eastwood’s career can be divided broadly into three phases. From 1971 through 1976 Eastwood was an actor-turned director still better known for his acting. His directorial projects, usually popular with the public but designed simply to support and continue that popularity, alternated with blockbusters made with other directors who increasingly proved to be cronies from his old Rawhide days or stunt or second unit directors, men of little creative or visual distinction who could be relied on to serve the star’s needs.

But with The Outlaw Josey Wales, on which he took over the direction after filming started, a new Eastwood emerges, one who makes lengthy, deliberately paced films that emphasize groups or ensembles over Eastwood as sole star. This phase announced the collaboration, personal and professional, with actress Sondra Locke. Yet in the end this phase also proved to be a creative nullity, though coincidentally it came at a time when other directors (Woody Allen) and stars (Robert DeNiro) were experiencing similarly long and inexplicable dry spells. Yet at least Eastwood was exploring unusual characters, some comic, some tragic, while in the other side of his career as mere superstar he was appearing in a string of bread and butter hits.

After the Locke years, Eastwood endured a rough transition. Anomalies such as the hit aspiring Heartbreak Ridge , A Perfect World, and The Rookie paired the aging Eastwood as a mentor to younger actors, and the narrative content of these films seemed more explicitly political than his elegiac westerns. But with the watershed achievement of Unforgiven, written by David Webb Peoples, a new, mature set of tones invaded his work: feelings of melancholy, twilight moods of loss, regret, memory, and the desire to change. What is most interesting in the otherwise routine if entertaining Absolute Power is the mood of remorse over his daughter that Eastwood’s character feels, and the continued use of Gene Hackman as a linchpin of near successful malice, the moral mirror of the star but whose evil is much greater then that found in the unconventional characters Eastwood cast himself as, men who are deemed “officially” evil by society (thieves, alcoholic reporters).

Also interesting in Absolute Power is its confirmation that Eastwood has always been better on screen with great actors, be it Richard Burton, or in this case Ed Harris, than with similar “stars” such as Burt Reynolds, types whom he has been all too often pair for strictly commercial reasons.

The mood of regret reappears in True Crime, and offsets the concurrent thread in Eastwood’s directorial career, that of official adaptor of popular novels, on par with fellow actor turned director Robert Redford. Eastwood lacks the visual zest and attention to detail to qualify - at this point - for the Pantheon, but his films show much more thematic variety within narrative consistency than they at first seem to offer, a sign that Eastwood, behind his pose as a simple man, is in fact working out complex ideas and responses to life. As his content spreads to a middle of the road liberalism focusing on the troubles of women, Africans, and African-Americans, his films remain paradoxically too long for a fiscal conservative, pedestrianly photographed, and all too often intellectually incoherent.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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M. Night Shyamalan (6 August 1970, Mahe, Pondicherry, India -)
Ranking: Lightly Likable

Praying with Anger (also writer, 1992); Wide Awake (also writer, shot in 1995, released in 1998); The Sixth Sense (also writer, 1999); Stuart Little (writer only, 1999); Unbreakable (also writer, 2000); Signs (also writer, 2002); The Village (also writer, 2004); Lady in the Water (also writer, 2006); The Happening (also writer, 2008); The Last Airbender (also writer of this adaptation, 2010).

M. Night Shyamalan shares certain high profile characteristics with his idols, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg: Shyamalan often inserts himself physically into his movies as an actor, an elongated version of the Hitchcock cameo (Shyamalan even cast himself in the lead role of his first, semi-autobiographical), and also like the Master of Suspense Shyamalan started out making dramas but only found success when he turned to the thriller genre. Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is fond of the tracking shot that rolls in onto the face of a person standing in wonderment or fear of something off camera, and he arranges to always have a small child as a central component of his plots. Also like Spielberg, Shyamalan takes what is normally B movie material and gives it an A level treatment, with big stars, good camera work, and a generally realistic presentation. And like his more modern contemporary Cameron Crowe (”Show me the money”; “You complete me”), Shyamalan has at times the knack for writing a phrase that enters the cultural vocabulary (”I see dead people,” from The Sixth Sense).

But perhaps the director Shyamalan most resembles is William Castle. Each of Shyamalan’s post straight drama films has a gimmick of sorts and Shyamalan is not shy about promoting the hell out of each film, a process that can sometimes backfire, as in the case of Lady in the Water, during which the director allowed the excellent reporter Michael Bamberger onto his set and into his home for a revealing book called The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale. The book unintentionally confirmed some of the worst excesses Shyamalan’s critics deplored and the resulting coverage proved to be both the type of halo bruiser and precise depiction of how movies are made that Lillian Ross’s 1952 book Picture was about the making of The Red Badge of Courage and its director John Huston. Like Castle’s products, Shyamalan’s films all to often deliver less than they promise, and it maybe that like Castle, Shyamalan’s true artistry is in self-promotion.

The consistent theme in MNS’s movies, though, is not the trick or surprise ending, but instead, the interesting thematic turn of someone thinking he is saving someone when in fact it is really he who is being saved. Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) in The Sixth Sense thinks he is helping the little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), but it is really the kid who is rescuing Crowe from the delusion that he is still alive, while in Unbreakable, David Dunn isn’t just being revealed as as superhero, it is also Elijah Price being exposed as a supervillain. In Lady in the Water, Cleveland Heep isn’t saving Story, she is rescuing Heep; depending on how clearly this narrative twist is treated defines how successful Shyamalan’s movie is going to be, on an aesthetic level.

Lady in the Water is further complicated by the consistent Shyamalan sub-theme of telling stories. Heep can’t just learn more about the mysterious ethereal woman who emerged from the apartment swimming pool, he has to enjoin all manner of complex re-tellers to tell him. Thus, he can’t get the lexicon of the water people directly from the old Korean woman, it has to be translated to him by her daughter. Shyamalan thinks he is honoring storytelling, but he is really putting impediments in its way. In a related subplot, the critic (Bob Balaban) must die because he doesn‘t convey stories, he merely interprets and judges them, which suggests that in real life Shyamalan is succumbing to the Frank Sinatra syndrome of taking the reviewers too seriously and fixating on them to the point of embarrassment (Bamberger reports on one fascinating if grotesque act of confrontation that Shyamalan engages in with an NYU film student). Finally, the theme of water occurs occasionally in Shyamalan’s films, sometimes as a benevolent force, sometimes as an impediment. The element has a special attraction for the writer-director, perhaps because of his religious sensibilities, though in his later films the religious themes or imagery seem to be cynical, crowd-pleasing grace notes. In addition, one can’t ignore Shyamalan the writer’s tendency toward howlers, major and minor, which Shyamalan the director than goes on to include in the film, such as the notion, pointed out by a perceptive colleague, that it is absurd for the water-phobic aliens of Signs to invade a planet that is 70 per cent liquid.

With The Happening, Shyamalan returns to the sci-fi playing field of Signs and follows its pattern. There is a reasonably well known action star at the center (Mark Wahlberg as a high school science teacher), there is a family in crisis, there is an inexplicable “invasion,” and there is a small child in jeopardy. The Happening, however feels underwritten and undercooked. The Happening had the innovative publicity campaign advertising the film as Shyamalan’s first R rated film. The result, though, is grotesque scenes that fail to enliven a generally tepid experience. The film isn’t scary, and is highly repetitious, with Wahlberg and company on the run alternating with them arriving somewhere and having a mini adventure, followed by another trek through the fields and another stop. Wind blowing the trees hasn’t been made so ominous since Antonioni. Conveniently placed radios and televisions update the viewer on plot or technical points. What’s worse is that the director has overwhelmed the writer. There are numerous tracking or rolling in shots that are unnecessarily busy and attempt to infuse life into a static moment. Opportunities for character-building dialogue are squandered, and the rift that “threatens” the marriage between Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel turns out to be remarkably trivial. The rift is alluded to so lightly that it’s possible to watch two thirds of the film and not realize that the couple even has a problem.

Shyamalan is a director who knows how to orchestrate the complex machinery of movie making to return a slick product. Though his films aspire to some kind of vaguely Christian or mystical message, his theses are usually muted, making his films feel more superficial than they are apparently intended. It is even possible that Shyamalan includes religious imagery that might run contrary to his own beliefs if only to appeal to what he perceives to be the American movie going demographic. In addition, he tends to make his lead characters humble, flawed “everymen” (though an inconsistent variation in Unbreakable is that the Everyman is in reality a super-powerful mutant). Most of his films can be enjoyed on a surface level, but his world view has not yet clearly come to the fore, inhibited perhaps by his derivative visual style. Still, no final determination on Shyamalan’s status can be made until there is an explanation for the drastic dropping off of quality and sense between Unbreakable and the films after. The dark hints found in Vern’s review suggest a path for future research.

The composer of the score for Laura and numerous other movies is on record as finding Hitchcock an “arrogant and dreadful person to so many people, ruthless and cruel … Hitchcock owed [Herrmann] everything, and [Hitchcock] had the loyalty of an eel,” as he said in the excellent one hour documentary Music of the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (part of a three or four part series). Puzzled by the vehemence and frankness of his statement, I looked up Raksin’s name in the indexes of all the likely Hitchcock books, and found no citations. Raksin never scored a Hitchcock movie, so his opinion is of unknown origin beyond his observations concerning the career-diminishing Herrmann-Hitchcock contre-temps. Yet somehow his contrary views didn’t find their way into Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, published in 1983, a quasi muckraking bio that served as a companion to the author’s earlier book, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, from 1976 (revised in 1991), at one time the longest and most sympathetic analysis of the director’s films. Dark Side came as a shock to some readers because of its salacious details about Hitchcock’s private conduct and the revelations about his harassment of Tippi Hedren, among other of his leading ladies. Raksin’s views are compatible with those found in Spoto’s biography concerning his treatment of collaborators.

Now, Mr. Spoto offers a third volume, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (Hutchinson, 256 pages, $40, 978-0091797232, currently available only in England). At once it is both a thumbnail version of Dark Side, and an updating, with information and comments which, as he says, some interviewees requested he hold back for various reasons during their or others’ lifetimes. Some passages are identical between the two books, such as the description of the agonies earlier actors before Tippi Hendren went through (The Dark Side, page 459, Spellbound page 177), but much of it is new, such as Diane Baker’s quotes on Marnie, and the anecdote about Hitchcock suddenly lunging at To Catch a Thief’s Brigitte Auber for a lip-lock at a “friendly” lunch. In keeping with the subtitle, with each film covered Spoto goes on to say what happened to the film’s main starlette (the “future” of Madeleine Carol is among the most interesting).

The portrait of Hitchcock is much like the one put forth in Dark Side, only darker. He comes off as an overgrown adult adolescent hiding behind, yet tortured by, his weight, cold and impersonal to real human beings while inwardly conjuring fantasies about his leading ladies, some of whom he fell in love with pathetically (Ingrid Bergman, Hedren), a foul mouthed lecher trapped in a marriage blanc who would sometimes throw himself physically on his stars (Karen Black was once a surprisingly cheerful victim), a money-grubing credit hog who directed his publicists to perpetuate an apparently mythical image of the director as an artist who privately visualized the movie in advance without collaborators and who became more withdrawn and unhappy as he aged, even shown weeping at his desk because Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, didn’t visit the director in his elaborate lot office complex.

It appears that Mr. Spoto is of two minds about Hitchcock, admiring the artist but deploring aspects of the human being. But what one wants from a biography writer is a reconciliation of contrary impulses. At one point he writes, in justification for both Hitchcock’s failings and his own exposure of them, that, “It is precisely this complex of elements that gives the life and character of Alfred Hitchcock such poignancy; that must evoke our compassion; and that in some marred, marvelous way for the better, still shares something of our common humanity. Were that not so, it would be impossible to explain his enduring worldwide popularity and his legacy of sleek entertainments. [page 144]”

What the reader is going to wonder, especially one who is a fan or student or admirer of Hitchcock, is what to do with all this information. How does it help us appreciate the films themselves? How do I take Marnie, now knowing his conduct with Hedren and Auber and Black? In Dark Side, Spoto goes on to say that after the break with Hedren he lost all interest in Marnie, which resulted in terrible process shots and other laughable effects that diminish the effect of the film, and he mocks critics who wrote themselves into pretzel prose to justify such sloppy work on the screen, alluding to without naming such critics as Robin Wood, whose “defense” of the process shots is in reality quite clever.

One almost pines for a time when one didn’t know so much about celebrities. Since the 1970s, perhaps starting with the Polanski case, the media and the celebrities themselves, such as Robert Evans in his memoir, are much more open about their hedonism, bragging about their drug use and sexual liaisons, creating a chasm between the image on the screen and the reality of human conduct. In the end, it is better to know the truth, if it is knowable at all, but there is a general diminishment of the achievement of Hollywood when the values of the filmmakers are so at variance with their real views, and readers are confronted with an inundation of sordid stories and neurotic behavior. As movies improve by being more realistic, the artists themselves grow less tolerable.

As an addendum to Dark Side, Spellbound by Beauty is a breezy read. well written and organized. Some of the photographs included were new to me, including one of Kim Novak obviously nude in bed during the shooting of Vertigo. And his occasional critical observations are intriguing, such as Spoto’s pointing out that Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho form a trilogy of films in which a central character is absent or doesn’t exist. As a briefer version of his massive bio, the book might appeal to readers with limited time, and Hitchcock enthusiasts will probably buy it pro forma, as this writer did. I expect, however, that Hitchcock partisans in the critical community, at whom Spoto takes occasional potshots, will be poised to attempt to refute or minimize his take on Hitchcock the man.

Based on a novel by Niven Busch, and scripted by Charles Schnee (with silent collaboration from Mann), The Furies concerns the almost incestuous relationship between widowed landowner Temple (”T. C.”) Jeffords (Walter Huston), a bombastic force of nature, the “top man on God’s green earth,” and his daughter, the masculinely named Vance (Barbara Stanwyck, in a role anticipates her work in Samuel Fuller’s 40 Guns, and even the series High Chaparral). Jefford’s son is the ineffectual Clay (John Bromfield), whose sartorial outlandishness in the book summarizes his psychology more explicitly, and he vanishes from the movie after about 55 minutes.

Vance ends up torn between two men, her childhood love, Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland), part of a family that squats on the ranch, and gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), who not only resembles T. C. but who is one of the few men whom T. C. hasn’t “spoiled” her for. Complications ensue when T. C. shows up with a potential new wife, Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), and are further complicated when Vance tosses a pair of scissors in her face.

There is more to the story, much more, and the plot, if the viewer is totally unfamiliar with it, is agreeably unpredictable. Like many movies of the 1950s it’s really about money, business, and deals. The suspense rests less on gun fights than on signing contracts. The Furies eventually tracks the competition between father and daughter for control of the ranch. And like the other psychological westerns, it is filled with un-self-aware neurotics. T. C. takes as his second wife a woman who looks remarkably like his daughter, as Jeanine Basinger points out in her book on Mann, but Mann makes sure you get the point via a pointed two shot; meanwhile, Vance is drawn to a man who physically resembles dad. Like Raoul Walsh’s neurotic Pursued, and King Vidor’s Shakespearean Duel in the Sun, also both based on novels by Busch, The Furies prepared the way for other “mature” psychological westerns such as High Noon and The Searchers.

That Mann is not as esteemed or well known among the public as Ford or Hitchcock is almost criminal, but probably due to the fact that he toiled almost exclusively in the groves of genre has sustained his anonymity. He’s like the perfect filmmaker: a great director of actors, shaper of screenplays, an eye for decor and location, and visually dynamic, especially in collaboration with John Alton. His films are sublime studio productions but graced with physical and psychological realism. His career arc resembles Elmore Leonard’s in reverse, moving from mysteries to westerns, from the closed and dark to the open and bright, though Mann brought elements of each to the other.

Fortunately, film critics tend to be wild about Mann, and Basinger’s book about about Mann is excellent, and was recently reprinted and updated. As Basinger points out, though there isn’t much written about Mann, but she directs the reader to two essays that are available on line can be found at Brights Lights, one of the few film websites that posts print-magazine level essays, that is, basically, publishable writing.

The Furies is not a “perfect” film or a perfect Mann film, as Basinger and in his yak track, Jim Kitses readily admit, while remaining fond of the film. It’s got too much subplot, and has an odd, chunky structure for a “classical” Hollywood film (a major character isn’t introduced until more than 40 minutes in, for example). Yet paradoxically The Furies is richer for being flawed. The story is more ambitious and sweeping than the more chamber piece films Mann would go on to do with Stewart, especially The Naked Spur, and it offers greater insight into Mann’s various and consistent concerns, such as ambiguous heroes and the tyranny of money. It’s probably not the best film to serve as an introduction to Mann’s work, but the Criterion disc in general is.

The Criterion Collection’s box set of The Furies (a single-sided, dual-layered disc, black and white, full frame, English mono, spine No. 435) comes packed. There is an audio commentary track by Jim Kitses, whom Basinger praises as the best writer on Mann in his book Horizons West. Kitses emphasizes the blend of genres that constitute The Furies. He also likens it to The Taming of the Shrew.

In addition, there is a 1967 BBC interview (about 15 minutes) with Mann, as he embarked on shooting A Dandy in Aspic, during which production Mann died. The interview is conducted by Movie critic and later writer-director Paul Mayersberg, and Mann comes across like a somewhat toned down T. C. Jeffords; this followed by a nine minute archive interview with Walter Huston, staged in the 1930s, a somewhat useless novelty; a video interview (about 18 minutes) with Mann’s daughter from his first of three marriages, Nina. Her main point concerns the moral ambiguity of Mann’s main characters. She also reveals that Mann, whose origins up to now were mysterious, was raised on a Theosophical commune until he was 13, and notes some autobiographical elements that Mann inserted in his films, including The Furies; the theatrical trailer; and finally a photo gallery of about 35 screens featuring on-set photos.

In addition, there’s a 40-page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, DVD credits, along with an essay by Robin Wood, which weirdly doesn’t generate excitement about seeing the film. Also, Wood doesn’t mention Greek mythology and theater from which the title obviously derives instead preferring to stress Mann’s interest in King Lear, variations on which Mann revisited throughout the 1950s, according to Wood (officially, The Furies is the name of T. C.’s ranch). Mann, by the way, according to the Cahiers interview, thought he was making a remake of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. This is from an also included 1957 Cahiers Du Cinema interview with Mann, in which one is startled to read him saying that women don’t really fit into the western template, which is odd given that the very film on the DVD has a woman as the central character. In addition there is a separate reprint of Niven Busch’s source novel, which, on the basis of a quick skim, was changed in certain significant ways on its way to the screen.

The Criterion Collection’s edition of The Furies hits the street on Tuesday, June 16, and retails for $39.95.

Now, in the wake of its May 30th opening, the new horror film The Strangers has received an unusually positive flow of reviews, despite its falling under the general umbrella of so-called torture porn. Starting with the New York Times, and including such diverse forums as at the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and even the usually acerbic, or at least refreshingly tough, Slant, all praised this first feature by youngster Bryan Bertino. It turns out, culling praise from these reviews, that for a horror film to succeed with the reviewers, it must be discreet in its terrorizing, it must have good actors playing complex characters rather than stick figures, it must emphasize creepiness over blood, and the film is more successful if the sound effects track plays the role of an additional character. Only Roger Ebert, while also praising the neophyte’s command of his craft, suggested that there might be something evil about The Strangers.

The Strangers is technically accomplished as far as it goes, the way an episode of a TV anthology horror series might happen to be innovative, or like Spielberg’s Duel, clever on a limited budget. Though there is an attempt to characterize the two main characters, James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), as sympathetic, we really don’t know too much about them. They have left a wedding party, where James asked Kristen to marry him, but she has refused. Like an Antonioni movie, The Strangers opens post-argument, as the couple arrives at James’s father’s isolated vacation house. In the course of the film’s trim 90 minute running time, the couple are assaulted by three masked visitants, two of them women. We never see their faces, or learn their motivation, so they remain strangers. Instead they just make their presence noisily felt, by banging loudly on doors and slowly sliding the tips of kitchen blades across table tops.

As most reviewers have pointed out, The Strangers, intentionally or not, is evocative of a recent French horror film, now out on DVD, called Them (Ils), in which a group of feral children terrorize a couple in similar circumstances, as well as of last year’s Vacancy, and Michael Haneke’s two Funny Games films, which also proffer a bleak view of human self defense against organized evil. As a home invasion film, the roots of The Strangers stretches back to The Desperate Hours, Key Largo, or The Petrified Forest, though these are crime films. The appeal is to the idea of a safe, sacred space unexpectedly dominated by strangers with no respect for the owners’ values. Most serial killer horror films, like Halloween, are essentially home invasion movies in their own way, but the horror films like those of the 1970s, and which are obviously an influence on Bertino, worked hard at providing motivation for the implacable killer, often as a surprise twist at the end. We learn nothing about this film’s strangers except that they practice horrible randomness. Text at the film’s start indicates that the story is based on real events, but though the date of these events is given as February 11th, 2005, in reality Bertino, according to hints in interviews, was probably thinking of the Sharon Tate murders by the Manson gang, a subject he has been obsessing on since he read Vincent Bugliosi’s book as a kid. If so, this is a stripped down vision of what might have gone on in the minds of both victims and perpetrators.

If The Strangers has any real or lasting appeal (it made $21 million its opening weekend), it will of course be on DVD, where, as if in some kind of William Castle promotion, the viewer is seeing the film in a vulnerable context that replicates that in the film itself. Why would people want to submit themselves to such nerve racking thoughts? Over the weekend, desperate for something entertaining to view to fill some time, I grabbed the DVD of The Towering Inferno off the unviewed shelf. I was actually shocked at how this 1974 film reveled in the horrible fates of some characters, and looked up Pauline Kael’s review, collected in her book Reeling, where she, to her credit, expressed a similar shock and disgust. I must be getting squeamish in my old age. In any case, for me the virtue of horror films has always been that, unique to most genres except noir, horror films offer the director more freedom to explore visual experiments. The Strangers actually sheds that opportunity, in order to concentrate, as in the torture porn movies, on the slow tormenting of victims. If someday Bertino really does do an adaptation of the events at the Tate-Polanski house, I might be interested, if he can balance the horror with some human truths and insights into those terrible events.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s fourth entry in the feature film series (Indy also has a life in mass market paperback books and a short-lived television series) has a strong opening sequence, a good third-quarter chase sequence, and an overly familiar end (though I wasn’t entirely clear on what happened to Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko, who seemed to be suffering a similar fate as Paul Freeman in the first film). In fact, I felt as if I had seen the film already, last December in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Both films have a too-large crew of treasure seekers made up mostly of one family, with the addition of an underdeveloped character of questionable morals (Ray Winstone as Mac), and both films end up in a temple of gold that gets filled with water. The final “action” sequence is like one of those endless anime climaxes where things just keep exploding and crumbling endlessly, with the patented Spielberg addition of things glowing before they fall apart whilst people look on in frozen awe.

On the Raider’s scale, the film is not quite as good as the first one, but better than the third, and way better than the second. Its artistic success is probably attributable to the fact that Spielberg and Co. (the script is credited to David Koepp, Jeff Nathanson, and Lucas) worked essentially off of a template of the first film, which it mimics closely, except for the added family member element borrowed from the third film (here a potential “son,” in Last Crusade a dad).

At first it’s disconcerting to see all those old faces: Ford, Karen Allen, Jim Broadbent (in some cases, faces such as John Hurt’s, made even older via make up). At times the movie itself seems old and sluggish, like an ancient baseball player on Old Timer’s Night throwing out the first ball. But soon you get used to it, because the plot elements are so familiar and go by so fast that you don’t really “see” anyone anyway, and you can slip into the roller coaster ride, though here it does feel more like a warm bath.

Given the “secret” of the film’s plot-generating premise (i.e, what the treasure hunters are looking for), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is rendered less a fourth Indy film than the third in a Spielberg aliens trilogy, after CE3K and E.T.. Except that the alien element of the film is probably less Spielberg’s idea than Lucas’s. Indeed, the fogey-ish quality the film emits can also be attributed to its going over old ground that The X-Files did back in the 1990s.

Like the third film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a female villain to liven up the action, and Blanchett’s character is slightly more developed than most of the others. She is a Stalinist, though at the tail end of the reign of Nikolai Bulganin, but whose dedication to her cause hides hubris. Like Freeman’s character in the first film, ultimately she selfishly wants power and knowledge, seemingly on general principles. With her Rocky and Bullwinkle accent and ruthless athleticism, Blanchett’s Spalko considerably livens up the film: this is one “Natasha” who doesn’t bore us.

If you’re going to do a journey action film, you’ve got to have a drunk doctor.

That’s one of the many rules for the perfect action film to be found in Dark of the Sun, the now-obscure merc film released in 1968, and starring Rod Taylor and Jim Brown. The film is kicking off the 10-movie D. K. Holm Film Festival on Thursday night, May 29th.

It is also narratively imperative that the alcoholic doctor deliver a baby. And that there be a blonde woman for various protag- and antagonists to fight over. And, when the savages who are the main threat to the journeying party finally close in, a noble man must press a gun to his wife’s head to save her from the brutal ravishment in store.

All of these elements go back at least to John Ford’s Stagecoach, which was written by Dudley Nichols and an uncredited Ben Hecht, from the story, “Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox. Elegant gambler John Carradine does not pull the trigger, as his equivalent in Dark does, but the gesture is enduring. Dark of the Sun is based on a 1965 novel by Wilbur Smith, the popular Rhodesian writer, and given these familiar elements, the film is thus not “original” in the conventional sense. But in pop products, you don’t need to be original. It’s all how the elements are presented.

Also known as The Mercenaries, the film is directed by Jack Cardiff, the great cinematographer of many Michael Powell movies, and director in his own right of about 12 features. His approach is a solid enthusiasm, a methodical attention to the plot line. This solidity is what makes Dark of the Sun a textbook action film, a resource for anyway seeking to write or direct a Saturday afternoon action film. You’d think that it would be a favorite film of Steven Spielberg, but no, it is Quentin Tarantino who has championed the film in the past, no doubt because of Jim Brown’s fine, understated performance.

Cardiff mentions Dark of the Sun in passing towards the end of his autobiography, Magic Hour, but only to say that developed a great friendship with Taylor and that the film, though set in the then Belgian Congo, was shot in Jamaica, which is the only place the production could find the right steam engine train. Cardiff also noted that, though the film was criticized for its violence at the time, his research into conditions in the Congo at the time unearthed images more sanguinary than what he put in the film.

Dark of the Sun concerns the three-day mission of mercenary Captain Bruce Curry (Taylor) to travel 300 miles north through rebel territory on a train laden with 40 troops, to rescue the residents of a still-unattacked white outpost called Port Reprieve. His assignment comes from new Congolese president Ubi (Calvin Lockhart) who is in league with European diamond brokers. It just so happens that there are $50 million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in the town’s time-locked safe. Curry’s most trusted aide is Ruffo (Brown), who fights for political rather than mercenary reasons, and they have a great friendship. If Brown’s performance is rather underrated, so is Taylor’s, in this and several other movies. The Australian-born actor blends a Grantish charm with circus athleticism, making him a sort of poor man’s Burt Lancaster. The two work well together. There is a great conversation between Curry and Ruffo, well-acted and well-written (by credited screenwriters Quentin Werty and Adrian Spies) about 35 minutes into the film, a great revelatory and testimonial chat that most modern action films probably wouldn’t pause for.

The film is produced by George Englund, once married to Cloris Leachman and later an associate, as it were, of Marlon Brando, and though liberal in spirit the film hews to the racial notions of the time, which is what has probably minimized its legacy. Africans are either bug-eyed rapine savages, tools of the Europeans, or Man Fridays. Yet in what other film would the dignity of a minor character such as Kataki (Bloke Modisane) be honored? In any case, there are numerous great moments in the film: Curry’s put down of a fat journalist; the assembly of the train by night (anticipating the reconstruction of the trucks in Sorcerer), the air attack on the train which eventually hides in a tunnel, an unnecessary fight between Curry and the film’s villain, ex-Nazi Henlein (Peter Carsten; voiced, I suspect by Paul Frees, the noted announcer and character actor [seen as a scientist in The Thing]), the suspense of waiting for the bank’s time lock to open as the rebels, called Simbas, are getting closer, and the mercenary team’s clandestine re-entering of the town during a Simbanese riot.

Best of all, though, is the great catchy score by Jacques Loussier, which is up there with the great scores by Herrmann and Morricone, and so unlike the tuneless sawing of modern film composers such as Howard Shore. Loussier is still alive as of this writing, but has only composed scores intermittently through the 1990s, after doing Melville’s Le Doulos and the Bond film You Only Live Twice.

If as a viewer I have a “problem” with Dark of the Sun, as an action film and as a work of art, it is the pro forma and unnecessary death of an important character and the forced morality of the final sequence. But one sort of expects lousy endings from films made before the ‘70s. In any case, up until those moments, Dark of the Sun is the perfect action film.

Every once in a while your adult self manages to catch up with a film you saw once, fleetingly, as a kid, a film about which you remember neither the title, the cast, nor who made it. All that remains is a few vivid scenes or shots, and a basic premise. Periodically, for the next several decades, you spend untold hours of mental exercises or physical research trying to track down that film’s title.

Such things are easier these days. Back in the early days of VHS, you could ask one of those rarely enthusiastic video store clerks, or write Joe Bob Briggs, where there was a chance, if he printed your query, that one of his readers might recognize it. There wasn’t much I could tell them. This black and white British science fiction film starts out with a man running across a wet bridge at night, and ends with someone falling to their death on the street from a building, and with a circle of women looking down on the corpse. In between, the viewer learns that aliens have invaded the earth in the form of the female sex, marrying all the available scientists. One egghead gets suspicious when he accidentally catches his wife taking a casserole out of the stove without using a oven mitt.

I saw this film sometime in the early 1960s, probably 1965, with my mom on one of our weekly trips to the drive-in. In this case, it was the old Amphitheater, used during the day for car races. The walk from your car to the concession stand, hidden under the bleachers, could take up a reel of film. Just on the other side of the screen, I-5 roared, and the “throw” from the projection booth to the mammoth screen was so long that the film usually had a washed out look. I enjoyed these outings with my mom, because she was game to see anything, from The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming!, to some minor Hershel Gordon Lewis bloodfest (which was, as I recall, the second title on this particular evening’s triple bill).

Today, access is easier. In my case, I simply sent a query to Mobius Home Video Forum and got the title to the film that had been vexing me within minutes.

Thus it turns out that that film that had haunted me all those years was a film callled Unearthly Stranger. Its pedigree turned out to be interesting, however. Directed by John Krish for the small company Independent Artists, the script is credited to Rex Carlton, from a story by Jeffrey Stone. This obscures the truth that the film is an unofficial adaptation of William Sloane’s novel To Walk the Night The only information I could find out about him was on an Amazon page. Sloane wrote only two novels, but they are both highly regarded by science fiction specialists, To Walk the Night originally coming out in 1938, back in the days when science fiction was interested in ideas rather than thinly disguised war stories.

Unearthly Stranger became available recently, and the film version,despite its obscurity, and for being quite different from the source book beyond a basic premise, proved to be yet another creepy, slow-paced, black and white, British sci-fi-horror-noirish film from the era, like The Day the Earth Caught Fire or The Earth Dies Screaming. These are talky films that always seemed to have been shot in abandoned back lots on perennially overcast days. In this one, space travel scientist Mark Davidson (John Neville), part of a special team, is caught up in a series of mysterious deaths while growing increasingly worried about his mysterious new Swiss bride Julie (Gabriella Licudi).

Instead of being a pile of crap like most dimly remembered films seen finally decades later, Unearthly Stranger works, in a Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents sort of way, with limited sets and lots of dialogue to make up for the lack of special effects. Anglophile viewers will be pleased to see familiar faces pop up. Besides Neville, who later appeared in The X-Files, there is Patrick Newell, who played Mother in late episodes of Avengers, and Philip Stone, who played Alex’s ineffectual dad in Clockwork Orange. Jean Marsh is also on hand as an initially benign general secretary.

Unearthly Stranger is an “invasion” tale pitched at a much lower key than, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like Double Indemnity the film begins with a guy racing back to his office, in order to tell his tale into a tape recorder. The rest of the film is a huge flashback, the story he recounts into the machine. The story is insidious. It’s as if the boys from The Big Bang sitcom all found themselves in the unlikely position of having beautiful wives, only to learn that each of their mates was an alien creature, tasked with thwarting their research.

The final images of Unearthly Stranger are quite chilling, as they prey on the male (or at least adolescent or nerd male) fear of women and their power. The film does well with that most difficult of things, following a bunch of characters as they gradually and believably come to realize that something fantastical is happening around them. It also touches on, in a pop psychology way, common fears about the unknowability of one’s mate. Who is this person we’re fucking? What are they really? Will we ever truly know them? And when will they betray us? Even more, the film preys on the fear that what we fear (terrorists, communists, women) are everywhere. One of the film’s most chilling lines is, “You mean, there are others?” And only in science fiction, or perhaps British science fiction, is love not allowed to triumph. The film ends on a wonderfully chilling note.

David Denby makes an interesting point in his review of Iron Man (here, for however long it is posted) and it’s been bothering me ever since. He seems to have struck at the heart of what’s wrong with most comic book adaptations, and perhaps only an art-mongering intellectual type who probably never read comics as a kid could have noticed it. He notes that Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark, is great only when unarmored. When he dons steel, we can no longer see his face, and the film loses its main attraction. Worse, when he faces off at the end against villain Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), “they disappear into their armor and battle like two oversized beetles.”

I realize now that this anonymity of battling bruisers that makes up the last 40 minutes of most big budget comic book adaptations has been what’s bored me about them. Yet these sequences are probably the most faithful elements adapted from the comics, at least in spirit. As a kid, I found the Marvel battle sequences dynamic and cinematic; cinematically, though, I find them a bore, with nothing really at stake as two masked, mostly CGI figures swing at each other to standstills.

And I had high hopes for the adaptation of Iron Man, because from the trailer the film appeared to be one of the closest, more accurate adaptations of the original comic, unlike with most of the other Marvel men who have come to the screen. And the first half of Iron Man is accurate, as proven by a refresher course in the series provided by Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, (Del Rey, 224 pages, $19.95, ISBN 978-0345506153), a tie-in book about the character by Portland, Oregon, movie reviewer, novelist, and comic book writer Andy Mangels. Stark’s sartorial splendor is much better read about in the comic than seen on the screen, where it and its wearer are reduced to animated cartoon characters thanks to the CGI.

Mangels’s book is an excellent survey of the Iron Man mythos, from the character’s introduction in Tales of Suspense issue No. 39 in December of 1962, through the numerous transformations in artists, villains, and the uniforms (they get sleeker), and even including Stark’s bout with alcoholism, a characteristic “tragic flaw” with which Marvel’s masters liked to humanize their superheroes. Mangels’s book benefits from frank interview snippets with Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, who established the character in the first story, though not with input from the late Don Heck and Jack Kirby, who drew the comics (along with Steve Ditko for a phase), and whose own writing skills were crucial to the creation of this and other Marvel figures, as Mangels shows (for example, Lieber says he would give Heck a script with a beginning and end and Heck would fill in the middle).

Another nice thing about Mangels’s book is that it is a movie tie-in that doesn’t tie into the movie, which goes barely mentioned and wholly unillustrated. The book is not an excuse to praise the artistry of the film. Though Mangels does some sociological scene-setting, one wishes that he had gone in for more in the way of sociological or thematic analysis (what does Iron Man’s prophylactic encasement mean?), but the author’s depth of knowledge of comic books makes up for this absence in its vastness. He seems to know everything about the 70-year history of the format and is able to trace antecedents to Iron Man in earlier publications. I wouldn’t say skip the movie and read the book, for after all, the first half of Iron Man is fairly good for what it is, but Mangels’s book offers a salutary compendium that shows just how little of the comic books ever really make it into the movies.