Author Archives: JStafford

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About JStafford

I am a writer for The Travel Channel, ArtsATL.com, Burnaway.org and other publications. I am also a film researcher for Turner Classic Movies and a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle. This blog is dedicated to overlooked, obscure or underrated movies and other cinema topics that I want to share.

In the Realm of Carson McCullers

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When people talk about Southern Gothic literature, they are usually referring to writers such as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell and Carson McCullers and novels featuring marginalized characters suffering from loneliness, madness or despair in distinct Southern settings. A typical example would be McCullers’s second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, published in 1941, which is set on a Southern army base in the 1930s and depicts various characters who identify with voyeurism, self-mutilation, repressed gay desire and murder. On the other hand, her 1951 novella The Ballad of the Sad Café has some Southern Gothic elements but is actually much closer to a bizarre folk tale handed down from some primeval culture with its grand passions and Greek tragedy stylings. It would seem the most unlikely candidate among her novels for a film adaptation and yet it was turned into a movie in 1991 by actor and celebrated author Simon Callow. Critics were divided over its success as cinema but for those willing to suspend their disbelief over the larger-than-life characters and storyline, The Ballad of the Sad Café is an admirable attempt to capture the heart and soul of McCullers’s original work. Callow finds a nice balance between theatricality and naturalism, the grotesque and the poignant, all supported in part by strong performances, especially Vanessa Redgrave in the central role.

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All in the Family

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If you had gone to a movie theater showing Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in 2007 without knowing anything about it or who directed it, you’d probably think it was the work of a dynamic new director who had talent to burn, someone possibly in his or her late twenties or early thirties. Of course, we know it’s the work of the 83-year-old Lumet but the film is just as fresh, surprising and alive to the harrowing and painful emotions of its tough familial breakdown as Lumet’s best work and that means on a par with 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976).

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The Mysterious Language of Twins

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Twin sisters Gracie and Ginny Kennedy created a secret language only they could understand in the 1979 film POTO AND CABENGO, the names they called themselves instead of their English names.

In 1977 journalists became fascinated with a story about six-year-old twin sisters in San Diego who spoke in a language no one could understand but was the sole means of communication between the two girls. Their names were Gracie and Ginny Kennedy but they called themselves Poto and Cabengo in their nonsensical form of speaking. Had they actually created a secret language for themselves or was it just meaningless blather? The girls became a media sensation and speech therapists at the Children’s Hospital in San Diego studied their language in hopes of determining whether the girls’ interaction was a case of arrested idioglossia, a phenomenon in which twins (or individuals) create a private language with a unique vocabulary and syntax (most children grow out of it at age 3 but the twins were a rare exception). French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin had recently moved from Paris to the University of California at San Diego for a faculty position when he first heard about the twins. He immediately decided that Gracie and Ginny would be ideal subject matter for his first solo directorial effort but the result entitled Poto and Cabengo (1979) could not really be classified as a documentary. Instead, it is a highly personal non-fiction portrait that is closer to an experimental film than anything else and Gorin’s involvement with the twins and their family become just one aspect of the movie’s multi-layered narrative interests.

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The Spider and the Fly

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Most film critics and movie lovers point to Nashville (1975) as Robert Altman’s masterpiece, although I’ve always been partial to his unique spin on the Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). I also admire an earlier film that he directed that was conspicuously absent or missing from his filmography in most of the obituaries on the director after he died. That Cold Day in the Park was made between Countdown (1967) and M*A*S*H* (1970) in 1969 and was based on a novel by Richard Miles. The screenplay was by British screenwriter Gillian Freeman, who had written the novel and film adaptation of The Leather Boys (1964), Sidney J. Furie’s drama about a troubled working class marriage and the husband’s friendship with a closeted gay biker.

Frances (Sandy Dennis) invites a seemingly homeless man (Michael Burns) to her apartment to dry off from the rain in THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (1969), directed by Robert Altman.

A gender twist on John Fowles’s The Collector, That Cold Day in the Park stars Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen, a lonely spinster whose apartment overlooks a park in Vancouver. One wet, wintry day she spots a young man on a park bench who appears to be homeless. She invites him into her home to get warm but ends up encouraging him to stay. The fact that the stranger (Michael Burns) pretends to be mute only adds to the ensuing strangeness. His little joke backfires, however, when he arouses Dennis’s long-suppressed sexual feelings and becomes a prisoner in her apartment.

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A Warrior’s Path to Redemption

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The Japanese film poster for HAUNTED SAMURAI (1970)

The samurai film in Japanese cinema was often classified as a chanbara, a sub-category of the jidai-geki (period drama) which was more action oriented. The chanbara was at the peak of its popularity in Japan from the early 50s to the early 70s with occasional revivals of the form up through the present and some of the most famous examples of the genre are Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1954), Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956), and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). One aspect of the samurai film that always struck me was that it seemed like a period variation on the American western and the fact that Kurosawa was a huge fan of director John Ford seems obvious when you look at Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, whose main protagonists are samurai-for-hire, not unlike professional gunfighters or bounty hunters in the wild west. Both of Kurosawa’s films went on to inspire two popular westerns respectively – John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Reminiscent of Kurosawa’s chanbara efforts is Haunted Samurai (Japan title: Kaze no Tengu, 1970), an often overlooked samurai action-adventure from director Keiichi Ozawa that came toward the tail end of the genre’s peak period but also seems custom made for an American western remake.

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Cinema Interruptus

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All of us have probably walked out on a movie at the theatre at some point in our lives but how often have you been forced to leave a film due to circumstances beyond your control? The few times this has happened to me are ingrained in my memory probably because it was such a rare occurrence…and because the interrupted scene and the movie itself never received the proper closure. In other words, a simple case of cinema interruptus (the Latin word for interrupted). The films in question are Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959) and Cat Ballou (1965).

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Building the Ultimate Superhero

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Richard Harrison plays a banker who gets transformed into a superhero against his will in the 1968 fantasy adventure FANTABULOUS INC.

Richard Harrison is not a name most moviegoers in the U.S. are probably familiar with but film buffs around the world know him as one of the American actors who relocated to Italy in the early sixties and enjoyed a long and prolific career there in B-movie fare and low-budget genre films. In a career of more than 100 feature films, there may not be a bona fide classic among them but there are several cult gems and entertaining oddities to enjoy and one of my favorites is La Donna, il Sesso e il Superuomo (English title: Fantabulous Inc., 1968), directed by Sergio Spina. Although it is usually classified as a Eurospy flick released in the wake of the James Bond craze, it is actually a fantasy/adventure/satire that sends up the whole concept of the superhero in comic books and films. It also works as a subversive cautionary tale about the dangers of fascism delivered in the form of a comic cartoon.

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Law of the Yukon

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The Russian film poster for BY THE LAW (1926)

It is not a surprise that novelist/journalist Jack London was the most popular writer of the early 20th century and he enjoyed an international readership, especially in Japan, Eastern Europe and Russia. In fact, one of the landmark films of early Soviet cinema is By the Law (Russian title: Po Zakonu, 1926), based on London’s short story The Unexpected, and directed by Lev Kuleshov, a former painter turned set designer who eventually became a film theorist and director who launched the montage movement of the 1920s (Sergei Eisenstein [The Battleship Potemkin, 1925] was one of his students).

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The Suburban Sex Underground

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When did mate swapping parties and swinging singles soirees in suburbia in America become a social phenomenon? Some say it began during the Korean War (1950-1953) among married couples on army bases and then spread to the suburbs. One thing is certain: stories about such behavior began to appear in paperback novels, tabloid exposes and the media in the fifties and were common knowledge for most people by the time John Updike’s 1968 novel Couples was published (it focused on the lives of ten sexually active couples in a small town in Massachusetts). But even before Updike’s critically acclaimed work, sexploitation films in the sixties had been mining this subject matter in adult fare like Wife Swappers (1965), Unholy Matrimony (1967), Andy Millgan’s Depraved! (1967) and Suburban Roulette (1967), directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

The often overlooked master of the form, however, was Joseph W. Sarno, who made his directorial debut with Nude in Charcoal (1961) and scored a drive-in hit with Sin in the Suburbs (1964), which delved into the secret sex orgies of masked participants in suburbia. Even more groundbreaking was Moonlighting Wives (1966), his first feature in color, which expanded on the swinging singles scene by combining it with a tale about a prostitution ring masterminded by a housewife in a middle class community.

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In the Doghouse

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Sigrid, a part-time cashier and psychology student, wants some romance in her life and feels empowered to arrange a meet-up on the Tinder dating app with Christian. They meet for drinks at a café and Christian turns out to be handsome, charming in his own shy way, a perfect gentleman and, as we learn later, independently wealthy. The date goes well and the couple go back to Christian’s home and spend the night together but, in the morning, Sigrid realizes they are not alone. She is greeted by his dog Frank, who is actually a man in a dog costume. But this is not a prank or performance art. This is the real world inside Christian’s domain. At this point any sensible person would flee the premises, right? And Sigrid does at first. Of course, the viewer already knows from the opening frames of Good Boy (2022), written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Viljar Boe, that Christian is eccentric. Who else would fix a gourmet meal of steak, roasted potatoes and asparagus for their pretend dog and serve it in a doggie. bowl? And if Christian seems odd, what does that say about the guy in the dog suit?

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