Female Wrestlers, Open Heart Surgery and a Homicidal Gorilla Man

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In the grand tradition of Samson vs. the Vampire Women (1962), Blue Demon vs. the Infernal Brain (1967) or any of the countless Mexican horror adventures featuring the masked wrestler Santo, Night of the Bloody Apes (1972) takes a popular mini-genre in Mexican cinema and updates it for seventies audiences, liberally adding large helpings of violence, sex and female nudity (the film was produced in Mexico in 1969 but not released in the U.S. until 1972). If nothing else the film shows just how far things have progressed since the more innocent black and white Santo features of the early sixties. Sure, the standard stock ingredients are still here – lots of wrestling interspersed with mad scientist/monster-on-the-rampage shtick but there’s also something new – gross-out gore effects rendered in garish color.

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Defying Gravity

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The days when famous large scale traveling circuses like the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey toured the country are long past but they live on in the movies. Among the many films in that specific genre are Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Polly of the Circus (1932), Carnival Story (1954), The Big Circus (1959), The Flying Fontaines (1959), Circus World (1964) and the Canfinflas comedy El Circo (1943) from Mexico. One of my favorites though is Trapeze (1956), which came from an unlikely director, Carol Reed, who had previously directed such acclaimed features as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949).

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Cemetery Creepers

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Grave-robbing, desecration of the dead, sacrificial blood rites, inhuman experiments and murder are just a few of the grisly ingredients of The Mad Ghoul (1943), which despite its lurid title is not a poverty row quickie but a polished and unusually classy B-movie from Universal’s low budget unit.

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A Simple, Ordinary Domestic Failure

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Edna has been married to Harry for 20 years and has devoted all of her time and energy to their marriage and home. Nobody asked her to do this but she willingly sacrificed her own interests and desires in order to achieve her vision of marital bliss. Every day when Harry goes to the office, Edna immerses herself in the rituals of being the perfect housewife…or her obsessive version of that. Dusting the furniture, washing the clothes, cooking gourmet meals, scrubbing the floors or cleaning window panes, Edna is too busy to ever socialize with friends or pursue any hobbies of her own but doesn’t seem to mind. Then cracks begin to appear in Edna’s perfectly ordered universe. Harry begins working late at the office more often and then a phone call from a friend informs her that Harry is having an affair with his secretary. What could be more predictable or cliched? Yet, Dancing in the Dark (1986), the film adaptation of Joan Barfoot’s acclaimed novel, isn’t a soap opera melodrama about a marriage destroyed by an affair. Instead, this is a chilling psychological portrait of a woman who has allowed her delusions about marriage and domestic bliss to turn her into a victim of her own making. Edna even admits in the opening moments of the film that her story is nothing more than a “simple, ordinary domestic failure.”

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Blackjackets Rule!

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The Swedish film poster for RAGGARE! (1959)

In America during the mid-1950s there was a backlash against conservatism and conformity which was fueled by the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and a pervasive mood of rebelliousness and frustration among teenagers. Much of this was reflected in the pop culture of the era, especially movies such as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1956), and Blackboard Jungle (1956). Yet, this social change was not exclusive to America and was happening simultaneously all around the world. Juvenile delinquency, gang warfare, wild, alcohol-fueled parties and sexually promiscuous behavior were typical of the kinds of anti-social behavior on display in films as diverse as Die Halbstarken (English title: Teenage Wolfpack, 1956) from West Germany, Kurutta Kajitsu (English title: Crazed Fruit, 1956) from Japan, and Violent Playground (1958) from Great Britain. One of the lesser-known entries in this category is Raggare! (1959) aka Blackjackets, which stirred up considerable controversy in its native Sweden but didn’t attract much attention outside Scandinavia (It never received a theatrical release in the U.S.). There are also hardly any black leather jackets on display and most of the characters don’t share any physical similarities with the cast of Grease.

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The Idle Rich Are a Strange Breed

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Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert, center top) finds herself an unexpected guest of millionaire J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee, top right) at his lavish estate in THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942).

In 1942, director Preston Sturges was rapidly approaching his career peak in Hollywood. Not only was he riding high from the critical and box office success of The Lady Eve (1941), but his esteemed reputation at Paramount Studios had given him the creative freedom to complete a film project dear to his heart – Sullivan’s Travels (1941), starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. So what to do for an encore? At first, Sturges toyed with the idea of doing another film with Lake called The Passionate Witch. But that project was soon handed off to French director Rene Clair with Sturges’ blessing (it was released as I Married a Witch, 1942) while Paramount’s “in-house genius” came up with a new script, tentatively titled Is That Bad?, that poked fun at the idle rich, a class of people with whom Sturges enjoyed some familiarity. After all, his former wife – Eleanor Hutton – was an heiress who was once wooed by Prince Jerome Rospigliosi-Gioeni, among other international aristocrats. This new project – which came to be known as The Palm Beach Story (1942) – would soon prove to be his most expensive undertaking to date.

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The Detective and the Madman

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A. Edward Sutherland was a highly skilled and reliable director from the Hollywood studio system era who is best known today for his light comedies and musicals, especially the ones he made with W.C. Fields such as It’s the Old Army Game (1926), Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1928), International House (1933), Mississippi (1935) and Poppy (1936). In fact, he was one of the few directors that got along well with the notoriously difficult comedian on film shoots and the two were also close friends off the movie set. Sutherland, who got his start in the film industry in 1914 as a stuntman and actor, even served as assistant director on Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) and made the transition to directing in 1925.  What isn’t as well known is the fact that Sutherland made two Pre-Code thrillers in the early thirties that are often overlooked in his filmography.

Comedian W.C. Fields and director A. Edward Sutherland

Secrets of the French Police (1932) is a deliriously entertaining B-movie programmer that clocks in at a brisk 58-running time and manages to blend Grand Guignol horror with a plot to pass off a flower vendor as the missing Princess Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Murders in the Zoo (1933) is an unusually sadistic yarn in which a crazed millionaire (Lionel Atwill) uses wild animals in his zoo to murder his enemies. While Murders in the Zoo deserves an in-depth article on its own, I am devoting this post to the overlooked Secrets of the French Police, which was executive produced by David O. Selznick for RKO Studios (the mogul would leave RKO for MGM in 1933, where he would produce movies for his father-in-law Louis B. Meyer).

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Sex Tourism in Kenya

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Austrian tourist Teresa (Margarete Tiesel) faces a group of male hustlers at a Kenya beach resort in PARADISE: LOVE (2012), directed by Ulrich Seidl.

Sex tourism has been around for centuries but it really started to flourish in the 1800s. I used to think it was only men with money that traveled to poorer regions in Asia, South America and the Philippines to have sex with underage girls but some women are also avid sex tourists. Heading South (2005), directed by Laurent Cantet, was one of the first movies to dramatize this activity with Charlotte Rampling playing a well-to-do Bostonian who enjoys cavorting with the young black gigolos of Haiti during her annual vacation. Although it was unusually frank and edgy at the time, it almost looks subtle next to Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies: Liebe (English title: Paradise: Love, 2012), the first in the Austrian filmmaker’s “Paradise” trilogy. In this film, Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), n overweight fifty-year-old woman with a sullen teenage daughter, takes a solo holiday at a beach resort in Kenya (It was filmed at the Flamingo Beach Hotel in Mombasa). Besides enjoying the sun and surf, her prime objective is to join her Austrian friend Inge (Inge Maux) in a series of sexual escapades with young African men. Of course, it costs money – sex tourism in Kenya is a booming business – but Teresa is looking for something more than just casual sex.

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New Discoveries & Overlooked Treasures: Telluride Film Festival 2012

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*This archived article originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website in September 2021.

Tis the season for major film festivals and Telluride often exceeds those that follow – Toronto, New York, Chicago – by presenting the North American premieres of major works, a mixture of Cannes award winners receiving their American debut, lesser known surprises (some without distributors yet) and wonderful retrospectives from silent films with live music accompaniment to overlooked treasures like Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1956), Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (1961) and Paul Fejos’ Lonesome, (1928).  Unlike the other film festivals, however, Telluride enjoys a long held tradition of withholding its slate of films until the day before the event begins and attendees are rarely disappointed; in fact, most patrons feel rewarded for making the annual trek deep into the Rockies. The big event premieres of the 2012 event included such heavy hitters as Christian Petzold’s Barbara, Michael Haneke’s Amour and The Attack, Ziad Doueiri’s controversial drama about a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Yet, it was the unexpected additions of such films as the French documentary Journal de France, Michael Winterbottom’s Everyday, I Knew Her Well (1965) from Italian director Antonio Pietrangeli, and a revival of Something Wild (1961) that made it such an unforgettable year.

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Searching for Closure

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Have you seen any good Lithuanian films lately? I have to admit that I know nothing about the cinema of Lithuania and not that much about the country which borders Latvia at the north, Belarus on the southeast and Russia and Poland to the southwest. I only know that Lithuania was an independent country for centuries until it was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1990, the year its independence was restored. The country does have a rapidly growing film industry and studios like HBO and Netflix have utilized the region for film locations as in the 4th season of Stranger Things and the 2019 mini-series Chernobyl. But the only Lithuanian filmmakers I can name are Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, brothers who immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and became major figures in New York’s experimental film scene along with fellow peers like Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. Piligrimal (English title: Pilgrims, 2021) is the first Lithuanian movie I can recall seeing but it presents a refreshing and rarely used approach to the storytelling process that requires the viewer to play detective as the story begins four years after a terrible crime has been committed and details about the case emerge slowly in bits and pieces.

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