Gigi and Carletto are two naïve country bumpkins who, like many others from rural Italy and southern regions like Sicily, have come to the northern city of Milan to seek their fortunes. They soon fall in with other recent arrivals to the city seeking work and eventually set up a communal living situation in an abandoned apartment with others. Both men have big dreams and expectations but the reality is quite different from what they imagined and they fall prey to the city’s corrupting influences. It is a familiar scenario that you have probably seen in numerous other movies but director Lina Wertmuller gives it her own unique spin in Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (English title: All Screwed Up, 1974), an exuberant, gleefully crude satire that uses broad comedy and eccentric characters to magnify the myriad problems of Italy during the early 70s. This is her idiosyncratic contribution to Commedia all’italiana, a genre of comedic social commentary first created by Mario Monicelli and Pietro Germi in the late fifties/early sixties with such films as Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and Divorce Italian Style (1961), satires where serious themes like poverty, unemployment, marital woes and economic hardships are treated in a lighthearted style.
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Minions of the Fuhrer
You’d expect a film with a title like Hitler’s Children (1943) to be an exploitation picture, not a prestige production and you wouldn’t be wrong in most respects. But this sensationalistic melodrama about a Nazi youth and his American girlfriend struck a resonant chord with audiences of its era, making it the highest grossing film of all time for RKO Studios, surpassing even the box office receipts of King Kong (1933) and Top Hat (1935).
Continue readingWorst Family Vacation Ever?
Everyone has their favorite family vacation horror story but this one takes the prize. In Jeopardy (1953), Barry Sullivan and Barbara Stanwyck play a married couple traveling with their small son (Lee Aaker) along the Mexican coast. After scouting for an ideal location for their fishing trip, they set up camp near a deserted village. The little boy wastes no time exploring his surroundings and promptly gets stranded on a derelict pier. When his father attempts a rescue, he falls beneath the rotting timbers and is pinned in the sand. High tide is just a few hours away and so is certain death unless Stanwyck can find a rescue party for her husband. She races off in the family car to seek help and is apprehended by Ralph Meeker, an escaped convict who commandeers her vehicle with no interest in saving Stanwyck’s husband.
Continue readingThe Poet of Chaos
People tend to forgive artistic geniuses for their human imperfections when their talent is so monumental – this could also apply to any super-celebrity with landmark achievements in any field from sports to politics to music – but at a certain point, there is a limit to what society will tolerate. The protagonist of Baal, a 1970 film adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht play, is the embodiment of this. A former office clerk turned itinerant poet and musician, Baal’s work propels him to the level of a literary icon, beloved by the intelligentsia and the common man. He could care less because he hates everything, including the society that helped shape his talent. More importantly, he hates himself and that self-destructive urge informs his every act, making him one of the most nihilistic and anti-social characters even conceived for the stage or screen.
Continue readingFrank Chandler’s Secret Identity

Now that Hollywood has settled into a regular routine of converting comic books and graphic novels into big screen blockbusters, it seems the time is right to revisit some of the earlier superheroes of American pop culture. Take, for example, Chandu the Magician. Based on the popular radio serial by Harry A. Earnshaw and Raymond R. Morgan and broadcast in fifteen minute episodes, the program ran from 1932 to 1936 and then was revived with new talent in 1948 and broadcast until 1950. What makes Chandu unique is the protagonist. Once known as Frank Chandler, he has spent three years among the yogis as a disciple, mastering the art of hypnosis and the occult arts, before being sent out into the world by his mentor to battle the forces of evil under his new identity, Chandu. His nemesis is Roxor, an evil madman intent on dominating the world after hijacking a death ray weapon created by Chandu’s brother-in-law Robert Regent, who is imprisoned by Roxor. When Regent refuses to divulge the secret of activating the death ray, his wife, daughter and son are also captured and threatened with death. Chandu is the only one who can save them.
Continue readingThings Come to a Boil
Satiric films about the world of advertising are always welcome and certainly necessary in a world where marketing of some kind is always assaulting the senses of potential consumers. Among some of my favorites in the genre from their respective eras are Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), Giants and Toys (1958) from Japan, Putney Swope (1969), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), the subversively comic documentary The Yes Men (2003), and Thank You for Smoking (2005). But undoubtedly one of the most cynical, biting and deranged of them all is How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) in which the title can be taken quite literally. The protagonist of the movie, a self-assured marketing genius, sees his life and career usurped by a boil on his body that ends up replacing his own head and becomes an even more successful version of himself. What? Yes, you read that correctly.
Continue readingAvenging Apparitions
Based on a kabuki play written in 1825 by Nanboku Tsuruya, The Ghost of Yotsuya (Japanese Title: Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan) is one of the most popular and famous of all Japanese ghost stories. It has been filmed countless times over the years but Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1959 version of The Ghost of Yotsuya might be the definitive version. The story is one of fate, passion, betrayal and revenge – all classic themes of kabuki theatre and Greek tragedy.
Continue readingFree Spirits

When you consider movies made for children and/or family viewing, stories about horses constitute a large portion of the genre, especially in American cinema. My Friend Flicka (1943), Black Beauty (1947), The Story of Seabiscuit (1949), Snowfire (1957), The Sad Horse (1959) and The Black Stallion (1970) are just a few of the more famous titles and some of these have inspired remakes or sequels. Still, one of my favorite films in this category comes from France and is often overlooked today – Crin Blanc: Le Cheval Sauvage (English title: White Mane, 1953), written and directed by Albert Lamorisse (1922-1970).
Continue readingBeat Girls and Hep Cats
Among the numerous Hollywood films that attempted to explore the subculture of the emerging beatnik and bohemian scene of the late fifties, none is odder or more blatantly miscast than The Wild Party (1956) which casts Anthony Quinn as Tom Kupfen, a former star football player turned full time deadbeat, hanging out at basement jazz clubs and dive bars, looking for action. He’s joined by a motley crew of hipster accomplices that includes Kicks (Nehemiah Persoff), a jazz pianist of some talent, Honey (Kathryn Grant), a spaced-out former girlfriend, and Gage (Jay Robinson), a switchblade-toting psychopath.
Continue readingThey Came from Tugador
I always welcome the opportunity to learn new words and I discovered one today from an unlikely source – Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy (1981), a science fiction fantasy from Yugoslavia. In the movie, an aspiring writer questions a psychiatrist about the possibility of fictional characters from a story becoming real creations through the power of thought. The psychiatrist calls it Tellurgy – a non-existence word – but Tulpa is a noun that has the same meaning and refers to a being or object that is created in the imagination by visualization techniques. There have certainly been other movies to explore this phenomenon – Forbidden Planet (1956), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), Ruby Sparks (2019) – but Visitors of the Arkana Galaxy takes the concept in unexpected directions, employing genre parody, surrealism and a healthy dose of black comedy.
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