The Farrow Saga.

A new book about the Farrow family was pretty much inevitable and now we have Marilyn Ann Moss’ “The Farrows of Hollywood”. This joins Frans Vandenburg and Claude Gonzalez’ 2021 feature documentary John Farrow, The Man in the Shadows and Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy’s 2022 Four Part Mini Series Allen vs. Farrow dealing with oldest daughter Mia and her anguished marriage to Woody Allen. Sixty years after patriarch John Farrow’s death, attention is finally being directed to the Farrow saga. It has everything 

- celebrities, Hollywood, Hollywood celebrities, the Pope, the Queen, the Beatles, Oedipal conflict, the Black Dahlia Murders, WW2 and Australians.

Because of Paramount’s share of the market and gung ho re-issue mechanism, I saw just about all of John Farrow’s films in the local movie house double features of my now distant youth, four with Ray Milland, four with Alan Ladd, three with Barry Fitzgerald. Before I even recognised his name, Farrow loomed large. His 1947 California (prepared for Ladd and filmed with Milland) was a milestone, along with the Errol Flynn San Antonio, the models for the new cycle of Technicolor A Feature westerns, a large and agreeable part of post WW2 movie going.

I discussed this and put up my screening notes on California when I commented the Vandenburg / Gonzalez documentary in a piece for blogspotfilmalert  17 November 2021

Farrow's California - Barbara Stanwyck & Milland with extras in Edith Head outfits.

The new commentators see something mysterious in the lack of information on John Farrow and this is the point where I start to diverge from them. With the exception of the few name-above-the-title celebrities, it was rare to find material dealing with studio directors of the day. Try to locate biographies of Roy Roland, Lew Landers or Alexander Hall and the maybe a hundred more hard-working, widely circulated and usually highly paid craftsmen filmmakers, whose output kept the cinemas open. Drawing attention to them would not have been repaid at the box office and publicists were rarely nudged by people who had access to the public - fans, critics, their editors. My contemporary Australian enthusiasts thought it was all about people they read about in British material, think Luis Bunuel, Luchino Visconti or Alexander Dovzhenko - not that their work was being shown here. This would shift in the fifties with the auteurist critics, where Farrow, Roland and the rest dipped out again.

However Catholic and Australian Farrow was an irresistible target for John Howard Reid, who was just starting movie writing activity. His research blew the smoke off one of the first of the Farrow mysteries, Farrow's asserting a Newington education. The Reid biographical sketch in the Herald was reprinted in Fort Street’s alumni journal, confirming their claim to him as one of their own.

I have the Reid-Farrow correspondence. Bertrand Tavernier once expressed interest in acquiring that for one of his projects. When John started publishing, I suggested he put out his own Farrow book, which would have been unique at that stage. He hesitated, possibly just as well. Revelations that came after John Farrow’s early death showed our knowledge to have limits. Disgruntled children (and wives) underworld associations, and serial womanising pile on, along with remarkable acts of principle.

  Don Quixote - Farrow script. 

We have only sketchy information on John Farrow’s early association with film. After a spot as maritime advisor to a Hollywood location unit  (I proved right guessing White Shadows in the South Seas there), seaman Farrow jumped ship in San Francisco and found work as a screenwriter. In this period, his association with Robert Flaherty was followed by stints with his friend William Wellman, Cecil B. De Mille, Victor Fleming and G.W. Pabst. That must be the all-time greatest movie apprenticeship. It would be so nice to learn more about it.

While it is extraordinarily difficult to see his work from this period, during which sound arrived in Hollywood, the examples that are accessible suggest that the movies that John Farrow wrote are by and large more interesting than the ones he would go on to direct. He did not take script credit on his later films but there is an obvious match between his interests and the subject matter on Two Years Before The Mast, California, Alias Nick Beal, Submarine Command and Botany Bay. Farrow’s one Academy Award win would be for writing, on Around the World in Eighty Days, though Moss casts doubt on his participation.

Farrow married MGM's Maureen O’Sullivan, whose career could stand some more consideration in itself. As well as being Tarzan's Jane, her status as the resident juvenile in the studio's big literary adaptations of the thirties, including the Fanny character in Port of 7 Seas, the MGM filming of the Pagnol original, her contract regularly placed her in nice production line efforts - with Joel McCrea in Woman Wanted or Charles Laughton in Payment on Demand. Let’s overlook Bonzo Goes to College. The Farrow marriage union would produce seven children.

It is hard to believe that his new chroniclers have viewed their way through all those Farrow productions that filled my early Saturday afternoons. Moss gives up on the pre-Paramount films but does try to provide a paragraph each on the later work. However, she repeats the now familiar furphy that presents him as a film noir specialist, listing out The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Where Danger Lives and The Unholy Wife. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that these all come from in his ten film collaboration with Farrow friend, fellow Catholic dignitary and established thriller writer Jonathon Latimer, whose Crime Club novels also provided the basis of three of the Universal series.

You can make a revealing comparison between the l935 George Raft-Frank Tuttle film of Dashiel Hammet’s The Glass Key and the Allan Ladd-Stuart Heisler version, scripted seven years later by Latimer, who livened up the sit-down ending by having Ed Beaumont/Ladd play on the murderous tensions among the heavies.  What is being singled out is Latimer’s input. 

In fact, Farrow hit his stride in the westerns, California, Copper Canyon & Hondo (forget Ride Vaquero – he had other things on his mind there), to which we can add his scripts for Victor Fleming’s Wolf  Song and William K. Howard’s White Gold. 

When a twenty-year-old original Technicolor print of California unexpectedly surfaced for a split week at London’s Cameo Victoria, I pointed the Films & Filming crew towards it and they were unanimously surprised by its superiority to the John Farrow films they knew. John Wayne, shrewder than people give him credit, attributed the success of Wayne's Hondo to his westerns-oriented Batjac Company serving it up ready to go, while with his other Farrow film, draggy The Sea Chase, the director was on his own. Watching A Bullet Is Waiting recently, I was reminded how boring Farrow titles like Commandos Strike at Dawn and Where Danger Lives had been.

Farrow directed The Hitler Gang - Bobby Watson as Der further.

Let’s also note another aspect of the record that doesn’t fit, the picture of John Farrow as grim martinet, whose heavy paternal hand biographers want to see in the torturous outcome of daughter Mia's marriages. John Farrow’s sense of humor was one of the things that made Maureen O’Sullivan persist, despite his being unlikely husband material. He is the Catholic notable who used to make his obligatory confession to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood priest, one who couldn’t understand a word of what he was being told, and Farrow slipped a shot of Randolph Scott and Cary Grant in with the one of Gable and Lombard in the audience of his Technicolor rodeo short. The one outlier in his career, the Betty Hutton musical Red Hot and Blue, is actually quite funny.

John Farrow, little known Hollywood movie director, did abruptly acquire the high profile of father of celebrity daughter Mia, then an unconventionally pretty young woman in whom we can see both her parents’ features (the abrupt cut to her gone sun-bleached Beachcomber in the Jan Troell re-make of Hurricane, is one of the great movie moments). Mid-sixties, Mia became New Face of the moment with the Television Peyton Place series and cemented her status as the lead of Roman Polanski’s best film, the 1968 Rosemary’s Baby - and with a marriage to Frank Sinatra  Let’s note in passing that even prettier daughter Tisa made an acting impression in the sixties Coogan’s Bluff and Fingers and her sister Prudence stopped over with the Maharishi getting a Lennon-McCartney song dedicated to her. 

About now things start getting turgid. Eternal Seducer John Farrow had had an affair with Sinatra’s then-wife Ava Gardner while they worked together on Ride Vaquero. This is moving out of my area of interest but it’s revealing how Farrow’s new secondhand fame distorted the perception of his movies. The plot would thicken with Mia's marriage to Sinatra followed by Andre Previn and Woody Allen, with allegations and counter charges about which the couple's son Ronan Farrow published widely, becoming pin-up boy of the Me Too movement.

Pray for Rosemary's Baby.

As for the other characters of the saga, the disfunctional Farrow clan - children official and otherwise, discarded spouses and lovers, if I had to pick out a subject for my sympathy, I’d elect Mia's adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn, who can be glimpsed, during her subsequent marriage with Allen, in Barbara Kopple’s 1997 Wildman Blues documentary. She only broke her silence when the politicals hit fever pitch, saying that she rejected the “Mommie Dearest” model but...

So the John Farrow profile remains blurred, Hollywood movie director, author, famous father, famous father in law, famous grandfather, Catholic and Australian – you could say in that order of importance. It now seems unlikely that we’ll ever get a connected picture of someone who is probably this country’s most widely seen filmmaker. I remain curious. It’s too big a piece of the jigsaw to have missing.

                John Farrow selected this studio portrait.

I don't think "The Farrows of Hollywood" is going to be the last word on Sir John Villiers Farrow, career filmmaker, author, submarine commander and determined inventor of his own legend. His life provides fascination often missing from his films. I'm still waiting for someone to reconcile the two.

Barrie Pattison 2024

Slaughter

 
Coming off a Dario Argento retrospective, films that are stylish, master crafted and occasionally shocking, I was faced with, another shocker specialist, whose work was none of those things. You Tube fielded a nice, reduced-aperture transfer of Todd Slaughter's 1948 The Greed of William Hart, under its re-issue title Horror Maniacs, a reel longer than the abbreviated version that has been circulating.

English melodrama specialist Tod Slaughter is someone who has been hiding in plain sight for the better part of a century. After down market first runs, his film output never figured in theatrical re-issue or TV, film society or cinémathèque showings. You’d have to engage with sixteen millimeter distribution, VHS or DVD to reach it. There's a thirties Sweeney Todd movie in there. 

Slaughter established himself post WW1 doing blood and thunder pieces with his Elephant and Castle company and  touring regional British theaters. He appears to have made himself the front runner in an established British tradition.  His 1935 Maria Marten: Murder in the Red Barn film was preceded by four movie versions, including a (now of course lost) 1913 Maurice Elvey film shot in the actual Suffolk Red Barn.

Slaughter’s films played to the audiences who had hissed and jeered his characters on stage, as he delivered lines like “I’ve got my eye on yer, William!” or “There’s queer folk about at night.” Mainly directed by the largely forgotten George King, these were mounted functionally on modest budgets and the playing was relatively restrained, without the rib nudging and nods to the audience we see when such work is simulated in later productions.

Tod Slaughter.

Slaughter is sometimes compared to Charles Laughton and it is not hard to imagine either actor being assigned to the other’s roles but, after the relish which Laughton brought to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Jamaica Inn or even The Strange Door,  Slaughter’s avuncular fiends are outclassed. 

The Greed of William Hart is another Body Snatchers film, made in the wake of the 1945 Robert Wise-Val Lewton movie and appearing about the time Dylan Thomas wrote  his “The Doctor and the Devils” script that was finally filmed by Freddie Francis in 1985. William Hart writer John Gilling would return to the subject in the 1960 The Flesh and the Fiends fronted by Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence, this time identifying the historical characters whose descendants had demanded the family names be changed for the Slaughter version. Retooling the sound track to rechristen Burke & Hare as Hart and Moore consumed the funds intended for the film’s music track.

Slaughter’s support cast is headed up by the admirable Henry Oscar (The Four Feathers, On the Night of the Fire, Murder Ahoy.) Oscar is a perfect foil, blending in impeccably without showing up the other cast members, though he deserved better. Presentable juvenile Patrick Addison made only this one film and Slaughter’s wife Jenny Lynn is an imperiled heroine. Director Oswald Mitchell also did The Old Mother Riley films. Confined to the small Bushey Studio, though photographed (there is no D.P. credit on the print) and edited on film, this one has the look and feel of then contemporary early TV drama.  

 The Greed of William Hart - Aubrey Woods, Slaughter and Oscar

Slaughter and Oscar arrive in Swanson’s Tavern, as the mist swirls outside, and angrily reject proprietor Hubert Woodward’s attempts to palm them off with “Yer Highland muck” instead of real Irish whiskey. Conversations reveal that the citizenry are becoming restless about frequent disappearances of locals like one of Slaughter’s hovel tenants. We hear the leads and young Aubrey Woods discuss their business arrangement about delivering boxes to Arnold Bell’s  Doctor Cox.

A drunken woman bar fly is murdered by candle light. No blood - nasty rather than shocking. However, after the doctor has removed the head off screen in his dissection class, it’s impossible to identify the body.  Addison finds tall hat Sergeant Dennis Wyndham reluctant to act without catching the ghouls in the act. There’s another murder and Slaughter is undone, when the body is revealed in the cupboard. An angry mob has gathered.

While vigilante-ism is endorsed in some American films (versions of The Virginian, De Mille’s This Day & Age) their cinema also fields imposing criticisms like They Won’t Forget, Fury and Try and Get Me/The Sound of Fury but it’s hard to find something comparable in British product - Captain Boycott and they do read the Riot Act in Fame is the Spur? Also notice that the privileged class doctor is given a speech about the need to advance science, while his menial associates are motivated by sadism and greed. There’s a lot that’s uncomfortable viewing in British film.

Slaughter’s product lacked the imaginative dimension that made the parallel American “Horror Movies” captivating to successive generations.  However, they do manage creepiness like that found in Edgar Ulmer’s work. The word “evil” was common in the films of the day. Think Gainsborough’s forties costume melodramas, particularly ones by Leslie Arliss. I’d always noticed those as the departure point for Hammer’s Horrors and it’s been pointed out that Slaughter represents an earlier cycle that both feed off. There it is, a straight line through some of the tackiest British filmmaking.  

I’ve been seeing Tod Slaughter films at twenty year intervals. On reflection that’s about the right rate.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

Capra & Vidor

So This Is Love is near to the last missing piece in my viewing on Frank Capra, something which has turned into a lifetime project. I’ve still got The Donovan Affair to go but the YouTube copy of that is foul, while their So This Is Love is a beautiful lift of the T.C.M. transmission, running at the right speed - even if it is watermarked and mute.

Capra’s number eight movie shows him already established as a maker of assured program entertainment. The audience, who saw it in their neighborhood movie palaces in 1928, must have thought that one was pretty good as they gathered up their shopping and exited past the posters of next week’s attractions. The notion, that people would be streaming this made to order item into their homes nearly a Century later, would have seemed fanciful.

In So This Is Love, Greenwich Deli waitress, one time Edison star Shirley Mason, is first seen peering admiringly out of the store at local champion, toothpick chewing Capra regular  Johnny Walker, who is intimidating main street merchants into buying tickets for the up-coming Boxer’s Ball, with his associate pug uglies standing by to throw rocks at the windows of anyone unwilling to pay. She makes Walker a special Deluxe chicken sandwich but he’s dismissive, saying “She ain’t got It.”

So This Is Love - Mason, Jean Laverty & Walker

William Buster Collier Jr., whose career would shortly hit a peak with parts in Little Caesar, Street Scene and playing the Cherokee Kid in the 1930 Cimarron, plays Local dress maker William H. Strauss’s assistant. He has eyes for Shirley but is too timid to move, so Strauss gives him a discount on the ball tickets he was forced to buy, and our hero works up his courage. Shirley thinks she is too mousy for the ball but he gets her up in the shop’s best regalia and the pair make an attractive couple. Now glamorous, Shirley catches Walker’s eye and he cuts in on their dance, with Buster unable to reclaim her as the bruiser moves her into the back room.

Buster’s pal, familiar face Ernie Adams, alerts him to the situation and the kid bursts in to find Walker molesting the girl. This is surprisingly explicit.  Buster’s intervention just gets him thrown into the street derisively and when Shirley follows appalled, she finds his flat full of his drawings of her (compare Brigitte Helm in Pabst’s Abwege of the same year) and Walker flattens Buster for messing with “his” girl. Addams tells Buster he’s yellow for not reclaiming Shirley from the obnoxious bully and starts training him but the kid, dismissed as "a hemstitcher", is humiliated again. This is the best passage of the film.

  So This Is Love - Mason & Collier.

Comes the night of Walker’s big fight and some stretched plausibility gets young Buster into the ring with him, after Shirley has done her best to sabotage the tough. There’s the hint of a better film in the way the leads use their everyday skills to get them through. Think Steve Martin in The Three Amigos, telling the Mexican villagers “Sew like the wind!”

The stars are appealing and Columbia’s modest budget is enough to put together a convincing studio representation of a working class Jewish (they don’t use the word) community. Capra moves it along nicely, even with some misjudgments, like the comic dress fitting for the fat woman or the repeated entrances of the towel wrapped fighter. It echoes Capra’s great The Strong Man.

Collier and Walker had also appeared in the fringes of King Vidor's now all but forgotten 1924 The Wine of Youth, which turns out to be a significant jumping off point for the main-line Metro product to come. The film registers the input of author Rachel Crothers, the most important woman playwright of the day.  It looks like the prototype shaping MGM's deluge of A feature women’s pictures, not just Crothers adaptations like this film, When Ladies Meet or the two versions of her No More Ladies.  One of those was by George Cukor, who also did her Susan & God for them. Stand these with all those Greer Garson, Joan Crawford, Roz Russell weepies engineered to showcase their female stars in no sex romances.

Wine of Youth shows three generations of women, all named Mary, sharing the same home in the Roaring Twenties. The film works at filling in their characters with flash backs to the courting of both Gran Gertrude Claire and Mom Eulalie Jensen. This pair are uneasy with the fast life style of flapper daughter star Eleanor Boardman, then Mrs. Vidor, who features at the extended party sequence, where suitors Ben Lyon and William Haines are putting moves on Eleanor, while the jazz babies indulge in cigarettes, the contents of a bottle labeled Ginger Ale and riding in fast cars with boys.

Wine of Youth - Haines, Boardman & Lyon.

 In their best evening clothes, the leads come into the party with its jazz band and women’s bare knees visible. The film's young stars, at the beginning of their careers, live it up. 

Boardman worries about her predecessors, questioning the role models they present. She determines on the social experiment of going off camping with her two suitors, her comic brother Robert Agnew and his squeeze the animated Pauline Garon. This would scandalise the olds -  and sure enough Billy Haines starts undoing the ties on Boardman’s tent flap.

So far we could be watching one of William A. Seiter’s social comedies, taken with a bit more seriousness. The pay-off comes when mum and particularly dad, the little known E.J. Ratcliffe who was in the silent Four Feathers, discover that their kids have overstepped the norms of their polite society. Back at the house, the parents decide that their relationship has been a disaster and prepare to separate in the presence of the youngsters. This scene has an intensity which marks it off from the work being done around it and may make the film the then most substantial work celebrity director Vidor had done.  

Wine of Youth - Boardman & Haines.

 

Wine of Youth is dominated by elegant Boardman’s presence. Completely the star, she is presented in a succession of glamor outfits, including shape defining one piece bathers which she fills impressively. Co-stars, later prominent Billy Haines, Ben Lyon and William Collier, are little more than interchangeable elements in her surroundings.

 

 Production is ambitious with the design of pre-Gibbons Metro, in the hands of now forgotten Charles L. Cadwallader - large scale but unremarkable. Director Vidor was already established but this appears to be the most accomplished film he had then made. His collaboration with producer Louis B. Mayer would go on to be one of the most important in American film and include The Big Parade, The Crowd, Lillian Gish's La Bohème, Hallelujah and Arthur Knight's favorite movie North West Passage. Around the edges we find items like their less prominent but in many ways more appealing The Stranger's Return or H.M. Pulham Esq. - a filmography that neither Mayer or Vidor was able to sustain on the same scale by themselves.

The film’s portrait of flapper world and high society is as manufactured as its morality but the artificiality, which would continue to be taken for realism by a large sector of its audience, still intrigues. As in its successors, the outcome is determined not by character and circumstances but by the need to endorse the believed values of its family audience, with a little bit of titillation and high life thrown in - the Metro formula. 

The on-going dominance of the Hollywood film meant this value system would be visited on Inuit seal hunters and Darjeeling Muslims, sometimes generating resentment which has never fully subsided. Add to this, dissatisfaction with its Andy Hardy mash up of concepts like the only game in town and  father knows best, creating an environment where much of its industry's best product features a reaction against it - White Heat, A Place in the Sun, The Hustler, The Manchurian Candidate, American Beauty and the a whole lot more.

Frank Capra and King Vidor would both go on to erect their own recognisable visions of  America - different, questionable but impossible to ignore.  These early films help bring those into focus. Even if they weren't so involving in themselves, it would make them essential viewing.

Barrie Pattison 2023

Spaghetti and Sandals.

Blasetti with Gino Cervi.

Director Alessandro Blasetti appears to have been the major figure in Italian nineteen thirties film making. His status has come under attack on two fronts. He was an admirer of the fascists and his work has been hard to locate, though diligent foraging in ethnic video outlets did shake loose original language copies of his impressive 1931 Resurrectio, 1933 La tavola dei poveri and 1935 Vecchia guardia to challenge my limited Italian. 

 So interest picked up when a sharp but re-framed version of  Blasetti’s 1938 Ettore Fieramosca appeared on You Tube.  It was derived from the 1833 Massimo D'Azeglio work, which had already been twice filmed. In the Mussolini period, it was considered to have patriotic relevance for showing Italians aligning with Spain to overthrow a Sixteenth Century invasion by France. Unfortunately the film is one of Blasetti’s weaker efforts.

Ettore Fieramosca opens with ravaged peasants streaming into the film's solid looking castle, where the draw bridge is rolled up to provide their safety. Arriving outside, Condottiero Ettore Fieramosca, represented by Blasetti’s regular leading man Gino Cervi still young enough to play a tousle headed juvenile, takes a dim view of this, particularly when a castle archer lets loose an arrow, which takes down one of his horses. He demands hospitality.

Inside the Keep, Cervi is faced by another Blasetti regular, long serving Elisa Cegani as owner Giovanna di Morreale, surounded by schemeing courtiers whose menials fill their wine goblets over their shoulders at diner. As in La tavola dei poveri,  there’s some nice use of twilight filming. Skinny dipping with the castle kids, Gino is shown the secret river entrance to the castle crypt and, through the decorative ventilators, he sees Cegani at prayers.

Opposing armies maneuver on the hills and a battle is mounted, complete with charging cavalry and hand to hand combat - the film’s big set piece. Cervi joins the castle’s ineffectual defense and is smuggled wounded into the crypt by sympathisers. Gegani nurses him back to health. Not content with the outcome, Gino/Ettore mounts the historic Disfida di Barletta, where thirteen Italian knights confront thirteen French knights, their heraldic banners planted at the side of the battle field to be lowered as their owners are overcome in the struggle. Finally, the survivors dismount and face off with drawn swords. Ettore carries Giovanna’s colours and she waits on the battlements to see if he will survive to return them to her.

Ettore Fieramosca - Elisa Cegani

The film doesn’t lack ambition, with big elaborately decorated settings and crowds of dress extras. It draws on two very Italian imageries - Opera with its dancers, decor and costumes and Catholicism, complete with the service with the long candles and taking the knee at the altar. Looking at Cegani in her white cowl, she could be a nun - if she wasn’t plastered with make up. Camp follower Clara Calamai (later in Ossessione and Deep Red) makes a much livelier impression.

A stunt man from Metro’s fifties Ivanhoe, told me that jousting was one of the most difficult forms of action to stage. For this reason, it had been rare in films up till then (think Elvey’s second Wandering Jew) and  there was no experience to draw on. Looking at the Blasetti film - or Alexander Nevsky - it’s impossible to miss the superiority of contemporary Hollywood work - the De Mille The Crusades or the Curtiz - Errol Flynn films. Blasetti’s swashbuckling 1939 Un'aventura di Salvator Rosa, with Cervi again, is a decided advance, though it has some of the same ponderousness, like Henry King’s post war Italian-filmed Prince of Foxes. Salvatore Rosa is one of the director's best films however. It strikingly anticipates the superior Tyrone Power Mark of Zorro of the following year. 

You Tube and TUBI also offer another Italian costume adventure, an old favorite Vittorio Cottafavi's 1961 Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide / Hercules Conquers Atlantis/ Hercules and the Captive Women.  Seeing this again was high on my bucket list. It is still the film, that the few of us who paid these any attention, decided was the pick of the mid Century Pepla, the Italian sword and sandal cycle. It’s easily the best of the half dozen or so (depending on your criteria) that director Vittorio Cottafavi made, generally recognisable from the presence of Ettore Manni, midget Salvatore Furnari and yellow  smoke.

Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide - Reg Park.

 

 

Cottafavi was one of the signatories of the original Neo Realist manifesto along with De Sica, Rossellini and Zavattini, a leading interpreter of the work of Ugo Betti and someone who got a whole issue of “Presence du Cinéma” to himself, before moving to R.A.I. to make accomplished versions of literary classics. Despite a varied and frequently impressive output, Cottafavi's reputation did not travel. Bertrand Tavernier claimed that Communist critics bracketed him and Henri George Clouzot as film makers who did not show sufficient respect to WW2 Resistance movements. I once found myself defending his work to a local academic, who put up a clip of Hercules Conquers Atlantis as a joke - Fay Spain’s “Love me Hercules and together we will rule over men and Gods” scene too.

For Hercules Conquers Atlantis, one of several English speaking versions, they start as they mean to go, running the titles over the tavern number that appears to have been the first scene of the Italian original. This itself is a virtuoso exercise, apparently filmed in a single run of the camera. (possible edit when it briefly moves behind a dark pillar) A brawl breaks out. Manni actually picks up and throws a stunt man out of shot and the clearly classical trained dancing girl continues a strenuous Peter Vander Sloot routine through all the confusion, while imposing former Mr. World Reg Park’s Hercules finishes his meal untroubled. In other versions, the scene exists in a different edit. These films fell into the hands of fringe distributors who saw it as their function to make them over to their own taste.

Hercules is shown back home in Thebes, relaxing with wife Luciana Angiolillo and teenage son Luciano Marin. However the sky turns red and a booming voice prophecy rings out. The newly federated Council of Greek Kings is unimpressed. Alessandro Sperli is told by his queen mother not to meddle and the Spartan ruler, a youthful Gian Maria Volonte just making his name, does a spear throw to emphasise his point but more gung ho local Theban royal Manni is determined to sail out and investigate. All those tavern brawlers who have been in training for such a moment are nowhere to be found. Manni has to recruit a crew of mutinous cutthroats and Galley Slaves and kidnap his friend Park, who dozes in the sun on deck unaware that his son and midget associate tag along. Don’t expect any of this to make too much sense - not in English at least. 

The production runs to a practical sea going galley, so we face a bit of an anti climax, when the storm at sea is done with a tacky model. The mist clears and Hercules Park finds himself on the beach of the island home of  Proteus, who we are told by maiden Laura Efrikan, being eaten by its rocks, can be “the air that you breathe, the land you walk on” but  is visualised as guys in lizard suits and lion skins, as well as a snake, a stuffed eagle on wires, a gasoline blaze and finally elderly Maurizio Coffarelli. Park of course subdues him, releasing Efrikan from the rock which bleeds - straight out of Dante that.       

Laura says this won’t go down well with the Queen of Atlantis, who devised her sacrifice to maintain the kingdom’s divine protection, so Reg undertakes to explain things - cut to that imposing Atlantis decor with the ten horse chariot being driven through the populous city square. Its giant decors and crowds of extras prevent this from looking like a cheap production, even with a fair amount of hand me down. 

Reg is confronted by Queen Antinea, Fay Spain an odd choice hired in for name recognition in the English speaking market no doubt. She does a surprisingly regal job. He’s about to start his defense when Laura says “Hello mother!”  

At this point, they inject the plot of Pierre Benoît’s “L’Atalantide” with amnesiac Manni wandering the royal palace, before they side line him in a sarcophagus. More giant sets and ballet. Opera is still with us but we have lost the Catholics. This one is explicitly pagan with the malevolent presence of Proteus in conflict with Zeus, who his son Hercules occasionally calls on "Oh, great Zoos..." 

Hercules Conquers Atlantis.

When Hercules looks like he’s not going to go for her power sharing proposal, queen Fay slips him a royal roofie but our hero is too smart for that and escapes to debate with High Priest Mario Petri. It’s not hard to see Petri as a mythological Robert J. Oppenheimer, disclosing the secret of the destructive mineral deposit (the blood of Uranus of course) without sufficient consideration of what it will do in the wrong hands. 

Meanwhile Hercules’ son and Antinea’s daughter have become an item, with talk about incinerating them, before Park and Furnari show up to throw the funeral barge crew overboard. At this point the film starts stretching things with succeeding climaxes - a revolt of the slaves, some not all that impressive large set destruction and squeezed Haroun Tazzieff volcano footage.

Reg Park, who would foster the career of Arnold Scwarzenegger, was the most imposing of the cycle's champion body builder heroes. He manages some quite demanding stunting, including climbing the cave wall and driving the chariot at least once, though we can’t see whether there’s someone out front guiding the horses. Park was not muscle bound like Steeve Reeves, who kept on dropping Mylene Demongeot, while carrying her for The Giant of Marathon.  He was a passable actor - or at least half of one. In the Italian version Ivo Garrani pulls a double shift playing the King of Megalia and voicing Park as well. His timbre isn’t bad but Garrani has the familiar delivery of those busy dubbing actors of the day. Someone who looks like Park really needs James Earl Jones on the track. 

Fay Spain's Antinea & masked albino zombies.

There are traces of other hands in this one. The jokey anachronisms turn up again in screenwriter Ducio Tessari's Son's of Thunder and Mario Bava’s participation in the effects is now noted. These vary from dodgy models to the startling mirror shot in the scarlet passageway, where we get some of the film’s best material, with the black mask armored albino zombies, who are genuinely menacing. Cottafavi's on screen introduction to his TV "Antigone" Includes comment on the Armet masks which differentiate the Chorus from the crowd. Whether Bava and Cottafavi collaborated in person is an intriguing speculation.

Age has diminished this one. Details don’t register on the small screen - perspective adding to foreshortening on the classic sword used as a missile or the red jet of poisoned wine from Park’s inverted face in the blue lit room. The colour is better in the Italian copy but we are still a long way from the glories of the 70mm. version. 

Any notion that this one rates the kind of restoration effort that is being poured into Rosellini (or Burning an Illusion) would be treated with ridicule. However Hercules Conquers Atlantis deserves its place in popular culture. Even with a few rough edges, it is an immensely entertaining piece and, when you are settling in for a fun ride, it keeps on pulling you up with stylish pieces of staging or surprise references. Few films repay repeated viewing so well.

You can always check these out in Derek Elley's "The Epic Film: Myth and History" (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) which I have referenced.

Spielberg, Witney & English.

The new Indiana Jones movie has opened to a mixed reception. Its evolution is well known.

Back in 1977 George Lucas had had a phenomenal success with Star Wars (later re-birthed Star Wars Episode 7 - A New Hope ).  If a retread of  Flash Gordon could coin it, Lukas, Stephen Spielberg and their mates figured that they could clean up with the old Chapter Play format. They brought in a copy of Don Winslow of the Navy, a serial which Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor turned out for Universal in 1942 but they got bored and gave up watching a few episodes in. This was probably their first experience of the form since puberty and the real thing didn’t match their childhood memories. However its cliff hanger, with the hero menaced by a giant churning propeller, turned up in the resulting Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That was good for a five movie, near half-Century blockbuster series, which cemented lead Harrison Ford into superstardom. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the current release, cost three hundred million dollars. What had been an exercise in nostalgia has itself now been around long enough to generate its own nostalgia phenomenon, with Palace serving it up with a cup of tea on pensioner days.

My own exposure to serials had come with Saturday Matinee shows of the pre-television days, when neighborhood theaters competed in the number they could jam in to attract the highly selective kiddie public. I was ripped off. Columbia had a monopoly here, so in my most impressionable years I was deluged with the output of the Sam Katzman Unit. I won’t say it was the trough in the development of the serial form. The Weiss Brothers, for a while employers of John Wayne, could give them heavy competition there but Katzman’s serials were totally formulaic. In the same tacky locations, the same obscure support actors menaced a succession of scaled down comic strip heroes. Directors Thomas Carr and Fred F. Sears did their best. Veteran Spencer Benet never even tried. Later I would get a buzz out of The Man With Bogart’s Face’s camera panning from the Hollywood Sign to the mouth of the Bronson Canyon cave Katzman kept on using to introduce their own plaster studio cave interior. In every serial, they managed to re-cycle the hut they blew up on the back lot early fifties, even including the Athurian one, where it falls victim to a round bomb with a fuse hanging out of it.

Naturally Protea, Pearl White, Dr. Mabuse and Fantômas were unknown to the Saturday Matinee trade but Columbia’s cuckoos in the nest also managed to keep the work of the great Republic teams out of all but the most down market area movie houses. Exceptionally I did manage to crack it for an Episode of Zorro’s Fighting Legion at Redfern Lawson. Little surprise that I was at pains to inject these into later film society events, pursued them into London’s Cartoon Cinemas, for a sustained innings at Langlois’ Paris Cinémathèque, where beautiful first generation copies played in original language four hour sessions and a swansong on Channel 24 before Mal Turnbull pulled their plug in lock step with Trumpy and US public broadcasting.

Well, hopes of a return of the old buzz survive the first reels of the new Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny. C.G. de-aged Harrison Ford arrives in German Uniform, trying to retrieve another mythic relic, the Lance of Longinus, which Adolf Hitler imagines will reverse his WW2 losses. However, rather anticlimactically, this proves to be a fake modern replica and attention switches to the Antikythera of Archimedes and the Fuhrer’s own archaeologist, Mads Mikkelsen no less, heading up a squad of Nazi goons, roughing up Indy’s side kick academic Toby Jones in (and outside) a variety of motor bikes, armored cars, trains in tunnels or bombed bridges. (Remember Lost Ark's “trucks - what trucks?”). There’s the usual gobbledygook about supernatural powers but Mads has worked it out. He plans a date with history.

An edit and socks are drying on the sixties tenement balcony clothes line while an authentically aged Ford's Dr. Indy bangs on his hippie neighbors’ door with a baseball bat, in a New York of Nescafe, Moon Walks on fuzzy TV, Angela Davis lookalikes, overhead projectors and quarter inch tape decks. Ford’s on the point of retiring and his history department presents him with a glass box clock, which he passes on to the first homeless man he meets on a traffic crossing. However his gloomy retirement is disrupted by a pushy, British accented young woman, who is the only one who had any idea of what his boring lecture on Mediterranean pottery was all about.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - Waller-Bridge & Ford.

 

 

Yes, it’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge the much publicised leading lady of Fleabag, who proves able to assert herself in the familiar Lukasfilm comic strip world, where despite all her determined athletics Cate Blanchette had been lost. Phoebe is Indy’s goddaughter grown and she gets to share in the pursuits, shoot-outs and grouchy one liners. Ford demands “Why are you chasing this thing that made your father crazy?” describing the relic changing hands between greedy owner-dealers and she comes back “That’s Capitalism.”

With a touch of the Werner Von Brauns, Mikkelsen meanwhile has got the inside track with the U.S. President, having enabled the Moon Shot and, after doing Space, he’s moved on to Time. Mads understands the significance of Archimedes’ dial, which has survived Toby’s instruction to Indy to have the thing destroyed.

Well, cut to the chase - literally - with the disposal of various henchmen and the dash through the Macy’s day parade on a traffic cop’s horse, like the one that Dennis Weaver’s Sam McCloud copied from Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff. This kicks off the succession of colourful locations, linked by the little plane’s dotted line on the map again.

Harrison Ford & George Lucas.

Here, rather than build excitement, the relentless scene changing and stunt action makes attention wander, in a two hour thirty four minute movie. Are the accelerated re-caps in the chapter breaks a necessary part of the experience? 

 

We get Ford/Indy touring the Arab world and the Mediterranean with another diversity hire boy sidekick in light-fingered Ethan Isidore, and Greek (!) Antonio Banderas’ deep sea diving introducing eels to evoke our hero's fear of snakes. Add a tunnel full of scorpions. The Tuk Tuk Material isn’t as imposing now that we’ve seen Gerard Jugnot do Pourris gâtés and what happens to that ride along Nazi aviator? 

 

Phoebe’s change of heart is like the attempt to give our hero a back story with the Shia LaBoeuf character from Ep. Four evoked as a Nam vet, not to mention the new happy ending. More promising is seeing our hero mesmerised by the Siege of Syracuse, after a lifetime of study, though it’s that same destructive Indy, melting off the millennia-old inscription to get to the gold disk. None of this resonates the way it needs to. 

The cast are great and technical work is faultless but we’ve been there, seen that.

By accident, Dial of Destiny surfaced when I was half way through the so nice You Tube copy of Republic’s l940 vintage, twelve episode King of the Royal Mounted, handled by William Witney and John English in their prime. Identical hopes shape the exploits of both Dr. Indy and Sergeant King. Seeing the productions together was extraordinarily revealing. I came away with some disturbing conclusions about popular entertainment. 

Allen Rocky Lane.

Before America's entry into WW2, Allen Rocky Lane couldn’t be seen to be opposing Germans so he was up against “the World’s Largest Secret Espionage Organisation” which sends an implausibly under-manned Submarine into Mackenzie Sound to drop off Master Spy Robert Strange. The bad hats have discovered that Compound X, previously used to cure Polio can be deployed in magnetic mines to wipe out the allied U-Boat blockade. ( "...and I thought you wanted to help with infantile paralysis")

The R.C.M.P. appear to be at a distinct disadvantage as Strange, scar-faced Harry Cording and busy Bryant Washburn (memorable opposite Joseph Schildcraut & Bessie Love in the De Mille Young April) have a seemingly unlimited force of expendable pug uglies (career serial henchman Jack Ingram isn’t even listed on the paper work) while the Mounties are restrained by the fact that wardrobe can only manage half a dozen uniforms, with their pointy hats and pistols on lanyards. This is particularly problematic when they have to parade the entire contingent for Herbert Rawlinson’s funeral.

Just like Dial of Destiny, this one catches us off guard by killing off good guys. Similarly they back-story their characters, with Lane the son of station commander Rawlinson, having to prove himself a worthy successor and sub-hero Robert Kellard and heroine Lita Conway, brother and sister who grew up in the forest environs of their dad‘s Caribou Pitchblende Mining Company, knowing the hidden locations of trails and auxiliary shafts. This interest in pitchblende anticipates the WW2 F.B.I. putting agents onto Alfred Hitchcock when he referenced it for Spellbound. 

Like Waller-Bridge and sixty years before Me Too, Conway has to be shown an active participant, dropping flares from her stolen plane and swinging onto the rope that prevents trapper Bud Buster’s spiked bear trap from descending on Rocky.

King of the Royal Mounted - Washburn, Lane & Strange

.

Regulars will already have seen those transfers between galloping horses or speeding speed boats exploding on the rocks, the plane crash, the timber finish van going off the highway, reproduced as miniatures by the Lydeckers, who MGM had to borrow from Republic to generate Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Their submarine, shown up by surface tension in the studio tank is not up to standard.

Our hero must of course also face the back-projected forest fire, a great big timber mill saw which takes a real long time to get nearer and nearer to Rocky, a train crash (the Mounties are remarkably ineffectual in protecting national infrastructure), a vat of bubbling chemicals in a substantial studio treatment plant and, particularly striking, a genuine dam spillway which Sergeant King gets sucked through.

The keen eyed will spot our hero metamorphosing into Dave Sharpe for these exploits, though Lane does turn up in the reverse angles or struggle back to the surface after the high dives. The stunt work, always deft at Republic, is particularly vigorous here but we can’t help noticing they impose a tree branch between the camera and the double who does that nice vault into the saddle.

Lane could manage a couple of expressions - dauntless and brow furrowed, which gets him through. His Sergeant King shows up again in Witney’s imaginatively titled 1942 King of the Mounted. He went on to front a series of Rocky Lane B westerns. Sidekick (“Take over Tom”) Robert Kellard also stayed with the force, heading up Perils of the Royal Mounted in 1942.

By contrast, Dial of Destiny involved a slate of A-Listers and the skills of flocks of the best technicians drawing on an extra sixty years of technical advances. You can see three hundred million dollars on the screen. The same aspirations are at play. The makers also swell their theme as the familiar silhouette of their adventurer hero races from one peril to the next. I was almost embarrassed to feel that knee jerk excitement, when Sergeant Rocky galloped through the piney woods, as Californian Redwoods doubled for the Canadian wilds, to the strains of Cy Feuer’s small studio musician orchestration with a bit of “The Maple Leaf Forever” thrown in. However I got bored with Indiana Jones’ relentless parade of genuine location action set piece spectaculars, propped up by John Williams now familiar march. Dial of Destiny echoed the let down represented by the 1932 Pál Fejös 1947 Jean Sascha and 1964 André Hunebelle Fantomases or the 1963 Georges Franju Judex. Let's not start on the later Perils of Paulines.

Now this is, to my surprise, not the way the nostalgia mechanism should work. I belong to the Lukas-Speilberg generation. I followed Harrison Ford's exploits over five decades, while Witney and English were never part of my childhood picture going. Their cut price efforts should have been out classed. However, while the adventures of Indiana Jones now merge in my memory, after a life time I have distinct recall on Reed Hadley’s Zorro, Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel and Henry Brandon being Fu Manchu. 

Maybe I value these because it was so much more effort to find them but I can’t help feeling that the difference is that Republic’s hard-scrabble units had an understanding and a sympathy with the form that the super spectacle guys would never achieve, because deep down they felt they were on a holiday between their serious efforts. That’s an educated guess but I do find myself coming back to it in the time I spend on these. Of course, I’ll never know the real truth, always assuming there’s a real truth to know. 

Barrie Pattison 2023.
 

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Modelo 77 - Miguel Herrán

Another Spanish Film Event is a reminder not only of the strengths of Hispanic film culture but also the fact that so little of it reaches us. Checking the credits of  conspicuously talented people with work on show, throws up lengthy filmographies - lists of films that are totally unfamiliar and are regrettably likely to stay that way. These events, like their Italian counterparts, are frequently the highlight of the viewing year and this one did offer a couple of exceptional films.

Bucking the trend is director Alberto Rodriguez, whose La isla mínima / Marshland was an international hit. (Article 19 the Hindi version and Fieiesland, a German one, also impress) These and Rodriguesz' 2012 Grupo7/ Unit 7 and El hombre de las mil caras / Smoke & Mirrors have had limited showing here. That's already enough to convince us that he is a substantial talent.

Rodriguez' new Modelo 77 / Prisoner Seventy Seven was on view. Well on the way to be the best ever prison movie, this one manages to narrow its context so that we are not considering the excesses of the Franco period but abuses that the democracy that followed was not ready to confront. Rodriguez has staked out his territory with this film and Marshland, rather as Curt Maetzig did with post WW2 Germany.

We follow current Spanish A-Lister Miguel Herrán, as he is inducted into prison for an embezzlement, that he claims he didn’t commit. He’s given his bucket of water after a strip search and a guard makes him an offer for his suit, telling him he’ll lose it anyway to the hard case inmates.  Herrán rapidly learns about outrages by the authorities and the prisoners. An over worked court-appointed lawyer tells him it’s likely to be four years before his case comes to trial. His lady friend isn’t up for a visit but her dewy eyed, red headed sister Catalina Sopelana comes to see him.

The film is a growth or an enlightenment, as we lean the things Herrán learns - don’t step on the newly disinfected floors to avoid ulcerated feet, don’t believe in prisoner’s rights or the press, don’t look to the authorities for any protection. The judge presented as a an arbitrator is a disguised cop from another jurisdiction. They demand the prison guards supervise their post demonstration return to the cells, rather than the riot squad who will lay into them with batons. 

  Alberto Rodriguez

As the film progresses, Herrán plausibly changes from an indignant victim, to a protestor, whose hopes center in the P.R.A. association getting the Amnesty given to the political prisoners extended to all the inmates, to someone hardened by the failure of self mutilation, roof top sit-ins and hunger strikes, to a stoic who has chosen to abandon all hope.

This is played in authentic jail setting - the entry rotunda, the community of the yard, solitary, the wings dominated by prisoner bosses (one makes a decent living to support his family out of contraband beer and luxuries) - all things we’ve seen in other prison movies, though rarely with such conviction. To the indistinctly shown Guards, brute injustice is a way of life. Inmates, who we see more of, get varying sympathy. Herrán is witness to a vicious murder.

The thing that elevates Prisoner 77 is  the depiction of the fellow prisoner character played by Javier Guiterrez, unrecognisable from his lead in Marshland. He first surfaces as an aggressively territorial cell mate we take to be a minor character, gradually shifting to the center of attention, becoming the individual Herrán depends on and finally the one person who may halt his disintegration.

One of the nicest touches is the scene of the guards burning Guiterrez treasured paper back library, not realising that his stock of hashish is hidden in the spine of one volume, giving the bystanders a high.

With Marshland and Prisoner 77 on his C.V., Alberto Rodríguez rates as one of the most important film makers now working.

There’s a community in the films that I find myself seeking out - the westerns of Anthony Mann, the shockers of Dario Argento & Paul Naschy and currently the comedies of outrage of Álex de la Iglesia. They make us feel pain, heat, grubbiness, sex, danger and exhilaration. It’s not a surprise to find that de la Iglesia was a product of comic strips and film societies, with an imposing history that includes Comunidad, Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus, 800 Bullets, Witching and Bitching and his less involving English language work. Most movie authorities pretend these don’t exist and we are quite a few behind here, even with diligent scanning of the Spanish Film events.

Four's a Crowd.

De la Iglesia’s new (well last year’s) El Cuarto Pasagero / Four's a Crowd is our man at his most show-offish. They ought to run it in film schools to show how a film about four people in a car can be full of movement and visual interest - and it can involve you with characters you would struggle to avoid in real life. Actually they ought to run it in film schools just to give the students a break from people telling them about Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

It’s another one about Ride Share cf.  Martín Cuervo’s Con quién viajas / Carpoolers. Fifty year old Alberto San Juan has a regular Friday night run from Bilbao to Madrid in his polished car, in order to get close to twenty year younger Blanca Suárez (the daughter from The Skin I Live in) and now he’s rehearsing the marriage proposal he’s prepared, before ripping it up and shoving the pieces in the glove compartment on his way to collect her with her familiar striped case. Before he can get started, the car fills up with extraordinarily annoying Ernesto Alterio and Suárez’ perfect match, bearded, handsome, guitar playing, Taekwondo expert Rubén Cortada, who is her age and fresh from charity work with the South American dispossessed.

It’s not long before Alterio is putting together the torn up pieces of San Juan’s proposal and filming him in the highway shop brawl, that Alterio started, to put on the cloud, and the Guardia Civil are making San Juan walk the white line. Even driving off,  leaving Alterio while he pisses in a field, doesn’t solve San Juan’s problems. He finds himself dulling his frustration with brandy, while he watches Cortada ending a naked swim, in the pool at the futuristic hotel, by rubbing down Suarez with grape seed and honey.

Just when they need to accelerate away, the group face the giant week end traffic jam. (Eat your heart out the late Jean Luc Goddard!) Not unlike Speed, the film falls away when it opens out and they leave the car to get into a shoot out, while a couple is watching Marienbad on their stalled car’s TV, and Cortada whose hands are classed as deadly weapons, has to use his fingers of death in a face off with Iglesia regular, hovering, genuinely menacing drug dealer Carlos Areces.  

It’s no small accomplishment that, without softening his dreadful characters, de la Iglasia catches our sympathy - even for Alterio, finally seen plotting a “Love Program” where homeless orphans will be recruited to smuggle bricks of hash. The cast is full of people the director has worked with before. Acares was the second clown in The Last Circus, Suarez was in El Bar and Alterio in Mi gran noche and de Iglesia’s Spanish version of Perfect Strangers. The pixieish Carolina Bang, now Mrs. de la Iglesia, figures on this one as producer. The technical work is exceptional. 

 

I wanted to see El Te$t because Four’s a Crowd’s Blanca Suárez and Alberto San Juan were back heading that one's cast and there they were but I had to stare to find them in their new make overs. Even busted back to the film’s grandfather character and with his head shaved, Antonio Resines however was instantly recognisable. I’d have bought a ticket just for another look at the star of  Acción mutante and El Embrujo de Shanghai - or any of his other 172 movies. Now there’s a great idea for a retrospective.

In an awful wig, that’s part of the plot, Miren Ibarguren is a wife who has bought the entire activist agenda, assuring her associates that she only uses sustain-ably sourced products and not lettering her child go to First Communion - to Resines, the kid’s grandad’s dismay.

The script pivots on a test proposed in pop therapist Suárez’ best selling self help book, where the subjects must chose between ten thousand pesetas now or a million in ten years time. Ridiculously successful old friend Carlos Santos was once a street musician playing with San Juan, now Ibarguren’s husband and struggling to keep his failing bar business running. The couple visits Santos’ mansion, served by voice activated robots, for a dinner, where they will be joined by his glamorous new squeeze, Suárez. 

The evening exposes all the tensions between them, not unlike what we see in the much versioned Perfect Strangers. I suspect they wanted something closer to An Indecent Proposal. Resines turns up with the couple’s pre-teen daughter, who he was baby sitting and had to bribe with the sugar treats Ibarguren has forbidden. His is the surest comic touch getting a laugh with everything he does. Things build to a great scene where all the dreadful strategies, that the Suárez’ book outlines, look like actually working. Meanwhile she is getting stuck into the booze and pills combination that killed her sister.

The outline of writer Jordi Vallejo’s stage success is always visible but director Dani de la Orden has imposed an attention holding film form. We end up with a slick movie with strong performances, that near to convinces us there’s substance behind the clever gags. The final coda is implausibly sunny but you can’t have everything.

 

I felt some sales resistance to Alfonso Albacete’s La novia de América / My Father's Mexican Wedding.  It homes in on the Mexico-Spain interface, not exactly my keenest interest, and it fields those now popular favorites - gay couples and transvestites - currently in some over supply. I’d never found them fall about funny in Almodovar's movies.

My Father's Mexican Wedding.

It took a while to warm to the film - till about the time a pair of kidnappers in luchadores masks make off with the sister in law ring-in bride trying to usurp the place of voluptuous computer-fiance Diana Bovio, in mature Ginés García Millán’s second wedding. The in-law’s escape from the jilted butcher’s meat store, wearing the purloined wedding dress, freaks out the populace, who take her for la Lorna.

Director Albacete’s background is in raunchy Spanish comedies, which don’t get to play here. Miren Ibarguren again heads up the cast, in this one as Millan’s grown daughter. She jets out for the wedding with her brother Pol Monen, who is in a bind because he knows their stern dad will give him a hard time over his gay lover, passed off as a personal assistant.  The Spanish lot are greeted at the airport by bride to be Bovio’s brother Christian Vazquez’ car, packed with uninhibited Mexican in-laws and taken to their ethno-colourful extended family home, for comical culture clash.

Miren finds the viewers of the Video seminar, she’s trying to run from another continent, craning to one side to get a view of this action behind her and her own attention is caught when she finds Vazquez soaping up in the shower. The priest has to compete with the leads for the microphone when the ceremony doesn’t go to plan. Some of the routines are uncomfortable - signing the pre-nup or the gay lover as a master chef, overcoming the elimination of the suitor-butcher but the cousin’s final drag act spectacular carries the day.

Vivid colours, personable cast and loads of folklorico detail.

 

Joaquín Mazón’s La Vida Padre / Two Many Chefs was made to order for a festival opening night crowd. The Paddington audience I saw it with gave it a standing ovation.  It’s a formula crowd-pleaser by assured craftsmen, mixing food porn with appealing characters and some more trendy gay gags, all wrapped round a soft core of sentimentality.

  Too Many Chefs - Elejalde & Mazón.

Chef Enric Auquer is already stressed by the prospect of a royal visit to the Bilbao family restaurant he now runs, after his father abandoned them three decades back, when the bum Auquer nearly runs over turns out to be veteran Karra Elejalde (Only the Rain), the missing father. The old man has blocked out the intervening years and is convinced that Auquer is trying to have his way with him, when he drives him off to the restaurant where Elejalde immediately takes over again. The staff have to be assured that the smelly hobo is in fact an ace chef whose skills may placate the visiting Michelin star food critic.

Subplots involve appealing doctor Megan Montaner, who we are likely to see again, Auquer’s dope dealing brother and the search for the secret sea urchin recipe which Elejalde is determined to keep from Catalonian agents, leading to his  camper filled with souvenirs of his meetings with master chefs in his world travels. Seeing this engulfed in flames motivates the sunny ending ... and there’s another robot vacuum gag.

Tomorrow We Fix the World

In established director Ariel Winograd's Hoy Se Arregla el Mundo, things are not good for TV producer Leonardo Sbaraglia (Una pistola en cada mano / A Gun in Each Hand). His long running TV show "Today We Fix the World" is getting shaky. It looks like we are in for another media satire but this element loses importance when he argues with his separated wife and she tells him that young Benjamín Otero, the boy they raised for nine years, is not his biological son. She immediately gets wiped off in a traffic accident - an indication of the film’s curious attempt at unexpected switches of tone. 

This leaves the kid without both a mother and a father. Otero reproaches Sbaraglia with never being a real dad. The rest of the picture is Sbaraglia trying to find the boy’s birth  father, assisted along the way by therapist Charo López - unremarkable episodes where they examine possible candidates, including an amusement park clown and a family man giving a birthday party for his daughter. Most of these could advantageously be removed, reducing the film’s long hour and fifty three minutes. Hopes do occasionally rise only to subside almost immediately. Both the the stars of the splendid Tiempo de valientes turn up. Luis Luque as the TV show’s bogus medico, whose drinking is revealed to be caused by fear he’ll be exposed, comes off best, with people urging Sbaraglia to consult him. Potential parent Diego Peretti is just wasted.  

Winograd handles a reasonable budget with some slickness but the film is not funny and not involving.

 

Daniela Fejerman and Elvira Lindo’s Alguien que cuide de mÝ / Someone Who Takes Care of Me attempts to shoe horn AIDS, good living, culture and women’s issues into a Hispanic Multiplex feature.

Aura Garrido

.

It kicks off with glamorous Aura Garrido in the spotlight, accepting her Goya award. She’s the youngest of  three generations of  a family of actresses, who find themself sorting out crisises enough for a couple of Joan Crawford movies.

Garrido has gotten the lead in a stage production of Ibsen’s “The Seagull” directed by her stepfather-become lover. Her mother Emma Sußrez (the most familiar face after her Julio Medem films) puts herself forward for a bit of life imitating art, in the play’s actress mother part. While this is happening, she is in financial stress over the flat she wants to buy, needing the proceeds from the sale of Granma Magui Mira’s home in the now up-market river district, which holds the old woman’s memories. Added to which Sußrez has a secret!

Her leading man shows an interest in Garrido, who proves to have a great build, while Sußrez’ gay companion Pedro Mari Sßnchez steals performance honors from the women who are working hard for them.

Throw in some black and white flashbacks to Garrido’s youth as young Anastasia Russo, and Sßnchez long-past TV productions, along with the contrast of “serious” theatre and Sußrez’s tele novela role - and the best Latin production values. I got bored with it all.

Barrie Pattison 2023.