Going Bananas!

Carmen Miranda and chorus girls performing “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” from THE GANG’S ALL HERE (1943), directed by Busby Berkeley.

In the early 1970s midnight movies became a craze after the Elgin Theatre in New York discovered a surprise hit with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970). Soon other theatres across the country launched their own midnight film series and movies like Night of the Living Dead (1968), Pink Flamingos (1972), The Harder They Come (1972) and Harold and Maude (1972) began to attract audiences that missed those movies during their limited initial release. Some of those early midnight movie choices were surprising and included Hollywood classics like Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), the rock ‘n’ roll satire The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and the WW2 era musical The Gang’s All Here (1943). Yet, when you consider the fact that a lot of those early midnight movie screenings were attended by younger audiences, many high on pot or other substances, it starts to make sense. The Gang’s All Here, in particular, with its eye-popping dayglo Technicolor hues, surreal art direction and outlandish dance choreography is as psychedelic and mind-blowing as the “trip sequence” in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

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Heavenly Hijinks

Audiences are obviously suckers for films about helpful ghosts or guardian angels because Hollywood has been grinding out variations on this theme for years. Alternately saccharine and sentimental, these films are rarely well received by the critics but there have been a few exceptions over the years, the chief one being Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), which is really the film that started the whole trend. In its wake, there were numerous contenders covering the same celestial terrain – I Married an Angel (1942), Angel on My Shoulder (1946), Down to Earth (1947) and Angels in the Outfield (1951) – but Here Comes Mr. Jordan remains the most imaginative, comical, and romantic of the lot.

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Masks Are Powerful

The demonic mask featured in ONIBABA (1964), Kaneto Shindo’s classic tale of murder and retribution set in 14th century Japan.

There is one cinema gimmick that always works for me and can sometimes lift a movie out of the ordinary and take it somewhere unexpected. This usually occurs when someone either puts on a mask or appears in one. The simple act of doing this immediately brings something theatrical and visually arresting to the scene that taps into our subconscious on an almost primeval level.    

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Second Sight

The gift of clairvoyance and the ability to predict the future is a plot device that has been well mined in the cinema from It Happened Tomorrow (1944) to Nightmare Alley (1947) to The Night My Number Came Up (1955). But one of the earliest and most intriguing presentations of this phenomenon can be found in the rarely seen 1934 release, The Clairvoyant (aka The Evil Mind). Made at an early stage in Claude Rains’ career when he was still accepting film work in both Hollywood and England and was not yet a contract player at Warner Bros., The Clairvoyant provides an excellent showcase for the actor as Maximus, the mind reader.

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