It's (Almost) On

By the pricking of my thumbs
something wicked this way comes.

Silent Sunday: La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)

I watched this surrealist masterpiece late at night, in the dark, by myself. It's among the scariest movies I've ever watched, and is surely the most effective at dragging you into its nightmare. I couldn't sleep that night, and Jean Debucourt's haunted, blank stare and a wispy white lace dragging through the water cropped up in my dreams on several subsequent nights.

But the real nightmare is that this appears to be the only Jean Epstein film available on DVD in the United States.

Read the full review.

(I'm using the French title to distinguish this from James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's version of Poe's story, which was also released in 1928 and which, according to Nick, is the 24th best film of all time.)

You Asked for It: Ballad of a Soldier (1959)

For the inaugural entry in my every-few-weeks series of reader-requested reviews, Nathaniel won the sweepstakes, but I received the reward: I finally got around to watching this touching, heartbreaking, and gorgeously shot film about a soldier's interaction with various elements of Russian society on his way home for a brief leave (ma's roof needs fixing). Thanks, Nat: I can't imagine a better start to this series.

Read the full review.

There were so many great suggestions in my original post that I've decided to just work through those. The next one, according to Random.org, is going to be Thom's pick of Duel in the Sun (1946). Check back in a couple weeks for a review of the Western epic that (or so sez IMDB) seven directors had a hand in creating.

Final Girl Film Club: The Devil's Daughter

Final Girl, my favorite horror film blog (ok, the only horror film blog I read), has a monthly movie club in which she picks a horror film and bloggers do what they do: they blog. This month's pick is a 1973 made-for-TV movie, The Devil's Daughter. What did I get myself into? Would I have to reach for my rhyming dictionary like the last time I was confronted with an assignment, a deadline, and a horror film?

But it was surprisingly good, so good that I decided not to write a single rhyme about it. I really enjoyed its blend of inventive borrowing from other genre films and original touches. It shows its TV roots in its technical failings, but hell, lots of theatrical releases display abject amateurishness.

Read the full review.

Silent Sunday: After Death (1915)

Russian director Yevgeni Bauer directed 26 films during a four-year career before his death from pneumonia in 1917. William M. Drew wrote a fine introduction to Bauer's career; he tells us that Bauer made comedies, social dramas, and historical films, but what he's best known for are his dark tales of obsession. Three of these films, Twilight of a Woman's Soul, The Dying Swan, and this one, After Death, are available on DVD from Image Entertainment.

Here, the fates of Andrei (Vitold Polonsky), an introverted, even misanthropic scholar, and Zoya (Vera Karalli), a mysterious, beautiful actress, intertwine into a tangled knot of guilt that even death can't dispel. Or maybe it's that only death can dispel it.

Read the full review.

(This is an attempt to start a regular feature. We'll see how regular it ends up.)

Screencap 1 (Unborn Elephant)

(Stealing an idea from Nathaniel, among others.) (I'll identify the movie in a few days.)

Charley Chase's 1925 film Isn't Life Terrible? isn't up to Chase's usual standards, at least judging by what I've seen of his work. The Leo McCarey-directed short unfortunately depends for much of its running time on racial humor, as Chase and his wife inadvertently swap their daughter for a little black girl while embarking on a cruise. I'm assuming that the repeated closeups on the child (who, incidentally, is cute as a button) are supposed to be hilarious, but I didn't find them so funny. Overall, the film is sloppy. The scene from which I extracted this intertitle is typically confusing: Charley and a camping-gear salesman are lying together on a foldable camp bed, and one of them says the line about the unborn elephants, which is a lead-in to a punchline: "I can feel their tusks in my back." It appears that they're both talking before the intertitle comes up, and while it's obviously Charley's punchline, it's unclear who sets it up. Plus, it's not very funny anyway.

Travis deserves special mention: he guessed Big Red Riding Hood, a Charley Chase short from the same year (released a mere 90 days earlier) and also directed by McCarey.

All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

When Thom sends you instructions, you follow them. Especially since he finally hit 1946.

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Inspired by Self-Styled Siren's recent review of a biography of Joseph Breen, I had Frank Walsh's Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry close at hand. Page 123, starting with the fifth sentence:

When a studio representative told Gorman¹ he couldn't understand the basis of his request in view of the Chicago rating², the priest airily responded that Fall River made its own decisions³. It was becoming apparent to Quigley⁴ that in Fall River, every priest was becoming his own movie critic. He advised Paramount to tell Gorman that although it was willing to listen to his concerns, it could not hand over the power to decide what movies could be shown to every bishop in the country.

Notes: (1) Father Edward Gorman, a member of the Catholic Legion of Decency and a priest in Fall River, Massachusetts; (2) the Chicago chapter of the Legion of Decency had come up with its own list of condemned films, which included some that the Production Code Administration had passed with the blessing of the national Legion of Decency; in this instance, Gorman wanted Paramount to withdraw from circulation a movie (Four Hours to Kill) that even Chicago had passed; (3) Fall River was banning films—in this case, The Scoundrel, on the basis of the Chicago list, not the national-Legion-approved list; (4) Martin Quigley, editor/publisher of the Motion Picture Herald and one of the architects of the Production Code.

Equidistant was Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, one of the best badly-written books I've ever read. If an author with an ounce of poetry in him had rewritten it, it would have been half as long and twice as good. But I still enjoyed it immensely; Dreiser's cataloging style attracts the archivist and listmaker in me. Page 123, fifth sentence:

Jessica was beginning to feel that her affairs were her own. George, Jr., flourished about as if he were a man entirely and must needs have private matters. All this Hurstwood could see, and it left a trace of feeling, for he was used to being considered—in his official position, at least—and felt that his importance should not begin to wane here.

Notes: Hurstwood is starting to neglect his family's affairs, being more interested in his newfound attraction to Carrie.

Now, the five: Shane, who probably has something on 18th-century British politics nearby; Angela, who doesn't post enough; Shawn, who went so long without posting that I didn't notice that he started again; Kris, who's being tortured by terrorists; and Amy, who has really good taste in books. (Not that the others don't.)

Order Me Around

As a break from the top-down, "I choose all the reviews I'm going to write," autocratic site-management style I've been using since 2000, I've decided to ask readers to pick some movies for me to review. Another way to put this is that I've been having a hard time convincing myself to write reviews lately, but I seem to do all right when I have an externally imposed deadline. However you want to look at it, I'm asking you for reviewing assignments.

Post a suggestion in the comments. When I get five of them, I'll have Random.org's integer generator choose the winner. I'll post a review of that film within two weeks. Then I'll repeat the process with a new batch of suggestions.

Your suggestion should be available on Netflix (while you're at it, become my Netflix friend). Also, it should be something I haven't seen, or at least something I haven't seen in a long time. If I've seen your suggestion, I'll ask you for a replacement.

No Uwe Boll films, please.