IMDb meta-data: 1 hour and 1 minute to treacle time, rated an astounding 5.2 by 277 masochists.
Verdict: a creature feature devoid of both.
Universal Studios broke the gender barrier in creature features with a trilogy of wild, captive, and jungle women films. This is the second instalment on this mercifully short-lived franchise.
The first was ‘Captive Wild Woman’ (1943), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. This earlier film was a masterclass in making something from the nothing on a micro-budget. A third of that film’s one hour time was clipped from a still earlier Universal film, ‘The Big Cage’ (1933). But director Edward Dymtryk did it so well, there was no distraction. Not so here.
About a quarter of the runtime of this treacle is excerpted from ‘Captive Wild Woman’ (which excerpts include scenes from ‘The Big Cage’ as explained above). In this movie the underside of the weave shows. To accommodate this earlier material much of this script is set out in flashbacks. Long before Roger Corman this studio had learned to plagiarise itself.
Evelyn Ankers is top billed but has but one opening scene of three minutes and then disappears. In fact that scene is a lift from ‘Captive Wild Woman,’ recycled here. Ditto Dr Adams. The ever reliable Douglas Dumbrille has one early scene and is gone.
There is no jungle and no woman to speak of, though Acquanetta reprises her role as Cheela the ape come human. This time she speaks. What a mistake that was. Silent, she had mystery. Speaking she had adenoids.
A screen shot of Cheela from the earlier film is included for, the fraternity brothers timed it, five seconds, and that is it. That does not a creature feature make.
Not only is there no creature in this feature, there is also no mad scientist. In the earlier film John Carradine filled this vacuum perfectly. Here we have a kindly doctor who by circumstance finds the ape woman on his rounds. J. Carrol Naish brings a calm and reflective intensity to this role, which in other material would have been compelling, but here, it is undercut by the crude simplicity of the sieved pot boiler in which the role is immersed.
Universal had made a place for itself in cinema-land in the 1930s with horror films. Indeed some pundits credit it with establishing that genre in films with such masterpieces as ‘Frankenstein’ (1931). In this franchise it previously broached the gender line with ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935) where Elsa Lancaster stole that show.
How low could Universal go? Well, that will be seen in the third movie in this Jungle franchise, ‘Jungle Captive’ (1945). Scuba gear maybe required.
‘109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos’ (2006) by Jennet Conant.
Good Reads meta-data Rating: 4 from 1,234 votes. 425 pages.
Verdict: not the biography of Oppenheimer I was looking for.
The development of Atomic Bomb in twenty-seven months on a mesa in New Mexico is quite a story from theory to practice.
The book offers a near day-by-day account mostly of the administrivia of Los Alamos. Largely told through the subsequent recollections of the office manager of the project, located at 109 East Palace Street in Santa Fe, Dorothy McKibben, who adored Oppenheimer. In silence the author credits Dorothy with a remarkable and flawless memory for conversations because she recalled them years later without the benefit of diary or any other written record from the time.
Only 40% of the way through the book did this reader notice any discussion of the engineering, technical, and scientific endeavours. Apart from listening to complaints about laundry and indulging the pranks of immature minds, Oppenheimer never comes into focus in these pages despite his image on the cover and his name in the title.
These impressions are not helped by the slangy style of exposition and the credulity of the author who takes as fact whatever a favoured source said. This reader got no sense that any assertions were double checked. In addition, facts were scarce. I never did get an idea how big the operation was. Only more than half way through are some numbers mentioned, e.g., 3,000 but given the one-eyed perspective of the author I was unsure who was included in that number.
I said one-eyed because the author is always on the side of the scientists, say when they complained about secrecy and security and seems repeatedly to belittle both the GIs who built most of the set-up and the intelligence agents who censored the mail, kept strangers away, demanded to see passes, and so on.
The immaturity of many of the scientists involved is breath-taking, the more so later when some of the same individuals took it upon themselves later to pontificate about the use of the Bomb. Even the fraternity brothers paled at some of their antics. While some of these draft-exempt scientists were planning panty-raids, in 1944 the Pentagon was sending 2000 yellow telegrams a day to mothers and wives.
Most of the Europeans on the project were more serious because Naziism was a reality to them, and not a newsreel. Indeed so focused were they on Germany that when the war ended in Europe many wanted to quit the project. They had so quarrel with Japan since it had no bomb and no prospect of one. Their goal was to get to the Bomb before the Naziis did.
At this point Oppenheimer was, it seems, crucial in motivating them to work ever harder, far from quitting. That he did this is, however, not explained by anything in his nature or character developed earlier in the book. Yet it was certainly crucial and he was the one who did it. We did get earlier the grudging admission by one of his many critics that Oppenheimer, despite his dilettantish pre-war mien, had proven adept at getting all those (egotistical) scientists to talk to each other. No mean feat that. More exposition of how that was managed would be welcome.
There are many assertions that Oppenheimer was attractive to women, that he had blue eyes, and a confident manner. So what? There are many of these and none of them built the bomb. There had to be more than these superficial descriptions to explain his singular achievements as noted in the paragraph above. Using the word ‘charisma’ is neither analysis nor explanation.
Oppenheimer is the centre of the book, even if he is seldom on the page. His own disregard of security is numbing. Why did he do those things that later would look so damning? My own conclusion is hubris. In the first instance Oppenheimer was sure, because he was so much smarter than everyone else, he would never make a mistake and give anything away, no matter to whom he talked. Second, he was likewise sure he would always be able to talk his way out of suspicion. So he thought.
Instead he simply called attention to himself again and again, and it stuck. And he created a pattern that was at best reckless and at worst sinister.
That a skilled intelligence agent could learn much from what is not said, or from the lies told, these are tricks of the spy trade that Oppenheimer never considered, since his hubris meant he never thought anyone else could out think him.
His hubris had another strand. After the war, he could have gone back to Cal and time might have healed some of the wounds, but instead he haunted Washington, putting himself forward as Mr. Atom, advocating committees, and himself as a member. He was hard to miss. He had come to view himself as indispensable. Maybe he was, but the effect, given the two strands already mentioned, was to make himself into a target. He seems always to think he was an invulnerable Achilles.
While the author mocks the efforts of the security officers with the fact that they missed Klaus Fuchs, who was indeed passing information to Them, she seems to fail to see that the security officers were right. There were leaks. Fuchs, by the way, was not the only source of leaks but the most well placed.
Nor does the author indicate any effort at ascertaining, say by visiting the National Archives, whether German agents were active in the matter. Still less other Soviet agents who monitored Oppenheimer when he was away, as was often, from Los Alamos.
The drama accelerates quickly in the middle of the book, and we read less about bickering, picnicking, and laundry, when it is time to test Trinity.
The Trinity test at 10 seconds after detonation.
Though here, as always, is a squabble about the name which is dutifully recorded by the author.
Yet she sits on the fence about the use of the bomb. She quotes estimates of causalities of the projected November 1946 invasion of Japan and then in a rare footnote says this figure might have been fabricated. That is quite an accusation to make in a throwaway footnote. It is a fact, by the way, that the Pentagon planners had begun preparations for 500,000 American casualties from an invasion of Japan. It had also contracted for 10,000 yellow telegrams a day.
What president would not use the bomb in preference to such a toll?
Given the many uncertainties involved with the Bomb, the only way to go was to use it. Why? What demonstration would convince the Japanese? Blow up an uninhabited island? Not likely to be convincing. They would suspect a trick. That the Bomb would even work was always in doubt. If it did not work on the island, then it would serve no purpose but waste the weapon and do so in a way that nothing could be learned from the failure. And a failed demonstration would queer the pitch for another demonstration.
Moreover, the weapons grade uranium was so scarce and hard to use that wasting a Bomb on an island might mean another one was not available for some time. Furthermore transporting the Bomb to the Pacific was hard. The cruiser USS Indianapolis that delivered the first Bomb was sunk by a Japanese submarine a few days after completing that mission. (See ‘Jaws’ [1975] for confirmation.) Would the next ship transporting a bomb be sunk with it on board?
The prospect of besieging Japan into surrender was considered and rejected on many grounds. The Soviet Union would nibble away at Japanese weaknesses, while leaving the hard work to the United States. Little material support would come from a depleted England. The Chinese would turn full-time to fighting among themselves. During a prolonged siege the young, the women, and the civilians would suffer most as scarce resources would go to the defence forces. The result would be to cripple Japan for a generation or more without discrediting or displacing the war party.
Douglas McArthur always preferred manoeuvre and surprise to direct attacks, but he saw no other way in 1945.
The zealots in Japan were ready to fight on, and the example of Okinawa frightened everyone in the Pentagon. They would fight to the death unless the Emperor ordered them not to do so. To get to that order, the zealots had to be completely undermined. Hence the first big bang. It was made all the more dramatic for being a single aircraft. Japanese air defence spotted it but did not respond to its approach, assuming it was photographic reconnaissance.
In the two-day interval allowed for the Japanese to assess the destruction of Hiroshima, we now know what was unknown in D.C. at the time, that there was an abortive coup d’état, but it came to nothing. The second bomb, by the way, was not targeted on Nagasaki but bad weather took it there.
Back to the book in hand, the author seems to relish name dropping, as if everyone associated with a notable university is somehow a superior person. I could only put this down to an ingrained snobbery. This attitude shows also in the way those who were not blessed with such illustrious associations are portrayed. General Lesley Groves is one example. He, more often than not, is portrayed just one step away from Groucho Marx. Yet he oversaw an unprecedented and wide-spread effort of which Los Alamos was only a part, but he gets barely any credit, until, perhaps at the urging of editor, some condescending good words are applied toward the end. But overall the tone is, how could this nobody criticise these men from prestigious universities. Yes, Groves had an MIT degree, but he was but a student there, and in those days, by the way, MIT did not have the caché it does now, partly thanks to graduates like Groves.
Yet the text shows he was right about many things, like the irresponsibility of some of the scientists, about the need for secrecy, about the dubious nature of the undertaking, about the subsequent need to explain and justify everything done, and even the spies. More importantly, that he stuck by Oppenheimer as the right man for the job even though he did not like him.
The author has an admirable list of titles on related subjects.
So be it. Not for me. Reading this book but confirms my cynicism about the world of New York City publishing.
Regulators get a fail
Nice to see someone else asking about the responsibilities of the regulatory authorities in banking and financial service (cf. my earlier post on the regulators). Though disappointing not see cited John Braithwaite and Peter Grabosky, ‘Of Manners Gentle: Enforcement Strategies of Australian Business Regulatory Agencies’ (Oxford University Press, 1986). In this Australian empirical study the authors found there was neither enforcement nor strategy, but a great deal of ‘she’ll be right,’ while six-figure salaries were paid to the regulators, evidently on the assumption that nothing so untoward as enforcement would occur.
It seems little has changed. In the 1980s I was surprised to witness the hostile reaction to this book. I heard it denounced more than once as evidence that the authors did not understand the Australian way. That was about the same time the media was ridiculing Dutch bankers who had come to Australia to confront and complain about Alan Bond. The flag was raised and the Dutchmen sent packing. Hypocrisy is always amusing. The more so when it is wrapped in nationalism, since many Australians brag that they are not nationalistic in between bouts of hysterical nationalism frequently kindled by sports.
A propos of the regulators, I infer from what is not said in O’Brien’s piece that the Royal Commission is carefully steering clear of bringing their role(s) into question. Is that discretion itself another instance of manners gentle?
By chance the other night I spoke to a graduate who works for an unnamed regulator and asked about all of this. In reply I got the corporate line about the technicalities of the legislation. My informant pretended to believe it, and politely I pretended to take its seriously. Ah uh. Regulators who find that their legislation is inadequate have, often, a legal responsibility to point that out to parliament, and, always, a moral responsibly to offer some sort of warning. Sailing on is not an option.
O’Brien also omits the role of the media and those financial wizards in newspapers, on radio, and the television telling one and all about money in all its sizes and shapes. It seems that all those financial reporters were too busy pontificating to do any investigating and reporting. The independent ABC and the independent Sydney Morning Herald were as silent on this subject as all the other, numerous media outlets, despite their loud and frequent claims to superiority.
Not only are they passed over, but even let off the hook on reporting about the Royal Commission because the Commission publishes on Fridays. Evidently no reporter can be expected to examine material appears on Friday. Must remember that.
Cut and paste this link into a browser to see the article:
http://www.afr.com/business/banking-and-finance/justice-deferred-hubris-incompetence-and-lost-opportunity-in-the-australian-finance-system-and-its-regulation-20180522-h10efl
‘Circe’ (2018) by Madeline Miller
Good Reads meta-data is rating 4.4/5 from 10127 litizens. 352 pages.
Verdict? Marvellous.
Circe is a daughter of Helios, a Titan. Sounds better than it is.
The Greek world is full of gods in a bewildering array of statuses, ranks, powers, egos, and so on. Zeus defeated the Titans and most were destroyed in the Divine War. Only the most essential, like Helios, survived. He is one of the most important remaining Titans but no Titan is important among the Olympians. Over the eons he has sired many children. Every deity is important to mortals. Some are gods, some are demi-gods, some are titans, some are nymphs, some are mortals, some are half-animal, and so on and on. This is a family tree for the LDS to sort out.
The book is a biography of one such child, Circe. Though ageless and immortal, she changes over time from a sulking metaphorical teenager trying and failing to win the approval of her aloof father to become a witch with witch’s brews. She and Flavia, whose books are reviewed elsewhere on this blog, would make quite a pair.
While immature in her father’s house, she transgressed by giving wine to a suffering Prometheus before he was sent to Alcatraz. For this sin she was exiled to an island dot far away to pass eternity alone with pigs. Later clever Circe finds a way to blackmail Helios with her sin.
Over the centuries in this insular retreat she meets passers-by, and she learns of the mortal world from these experiences. For a time she is befriended by Hermes, though he does so only for his own amusement and when no longer amused he is no longer friend.
None of the echelons of the immortals will have anything to do with this outcast, apart from Hermes who is partly spying on her for Helios, and so she takes an interest in the mortals who find the shore. She welcomes some, careful to keep her yellow eyes concealed for they declare the godhead, and regrets it.
One betrays her trust. Another rapes her before she can utter a spell, but she takes revenge by increasing the population of the sty.
Thereafter, she is much more cautious. Then one day wily Odysseus comes and she finds she cannot, nor does she want to deceive this deceiver. What a fresh and vivid portrait of this marriage springs from the pages. Marvellous. Yes, the story is well known but this is a telling Homer would envy.
Finally he leaves, not knowing that she is bearing his child, a son. This is a circle that closes in the remainder of the book.
With the great learning that underlies the book, the author explains much. One example will suffice. Why are the gods so capricious with mortals? Think about it. If mortal life was easy, then mortals would have no reason to pray to the gods and make sacrifices. While the gods do not need these prayers and sacrifices in any material way, together these offerings are how the divinities establish status (along with their powers) among themselves. They are counters in the social snobbery of the Olympians, nothing more. But since the gods have no other pastime but that snobbery, it is the only game in town.
The worse the harvest, it follows there will be more the prayers and sacrifices. The more children and women who die in childbirth, the more the prayers and sacrifices. Of course, to keep the wheel spinning the gods must occasionally allow a good harvest, and for child and mother to survive birth. But only now and then when it pleases them. Sounds about how casinos work, come to think of it.
Odysseus did in time return to rocky Ithaca, but as with many a war veteran, the man who came back was not the one who went away. He is changed. That change is the dynamic of the latter part of the book. He returns short-tempered, easily bored, lustful, violent, and voting Republican. Yet in some ways he is what he always was. This schizoid duality makes sense in these pages. Penelope plays her part, too.
Madeline Miller
The author brings this world of the gods to life with razor sharp insights, exhilarating prose, penetrating details, and a profound compassion. Yet no punches are pulled. None. The violence rips the page. The arrogance of the gods burns the eye of the reader. The duplicity of mortals in this world is bottomless. All this is true, yet Circe delights in spring flowers and warm sand underfoot. Penelope abides. Telemachus is straight as an oak.
Her earlier book ‘The Song of Achilles’ is reviewed elsewhere on this blog with the same acclaim.
While pulling these remarks together I noticed a number of deprecating reviews, many of them video, by mouth-breathers (in Jim Rockford’s phrase). It was amusing to watch a couple of these pygmies.
‘Mars’ (2016)
IMDb meta-data is this 13 one-hour episodes rated 7.5 from 7501 cinemitizens
Verdict: Excellent and a relief after the sappy hyperbole of ‘Mission to Mars’ (2000), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. But it bogs down, running out of story while the camera goes on and on.
A docudrama about the first Mars landing in 2033 interspersed with 2016 talking heads describing the technical, scientific, and human problems that have to be surmounted to get there. These details are larded with some elevated rhetoric about the purpose in going to Mars.
Purpose? ‘Because it is there,’ that is the distillation of that rhetoric. We see twice the same clip from Jack’s speech in Houston about it being hard, as a justification for the commitment. (I stood at that podium in 2018.) He and Edmund Hilary have a lot to answer for. On this point there will be more below.
Still it was refreshing to hear the optimism and determination from the enthusiasts like Elon Musk who are trying to make it happen. Happily Richard Branson did not put in an appearance to steal the scene with his look-at-me camera mannerisms. Though NASA is represented among the talkers, one theme is that private enterprise can go where no government is willing to go. That would seem pertinent now since the current NASA Administer-nominee wants to eliminate from its charter ‘the expansion of human knowledge’ because God does not like that.
In later episodes I learned that the early Moon missions were trials for Mars in the minds of the NASA scientists and others. Moon was a stepping stone to Mars. That is much emphasised, and it completely escaped me at the time when the Moon seemed enough. However, though it is passed in silence in this telling, Moon was the strategic goal for the military, whose role in space is omitted. Yet those rockets belonged to the US Air Force. There was certainly much popular speculation that near space or Moon would offer an invulnerable missile platform.
As the talking heads lay out how it would go, we cut to a dramatic sequences where it is acted out. In reality, no vampires, zombies, meteors, cave women, enlarged spiders, hostile natives, or man eating daisies are needed to make a mission to Mars deadly. (These possibilities have all been covered in the Mars filmography on this blog.) There are many things that can go wrong, and inevitably some of them will.
Gravity kills. Elemental that. The first death is a fall. A lung is punctuated by a broken rib. Nothing can be done and….
The fall occurs because a fuse blew upon entering the Martian atmosphere and while Captain was replacing it the planet’s gravity clicked in and he fell. Bang.
Because the fuse was not replaced they land a long way for the base camp that had been prepared by robots. To get there, they will have to walk with the dying captain.
Can they walk 75 kilometres before the oxygen in their backpacks runs out? And before the fraternity get bored?
We have a polyglot crew, and also interspersed are fictional pre-flight interviews with them. The point is I guess to indicate what kind of person signs on for this and perhaps to inspire such persons. To me, these were insipid but perhaps my jaded ear was listening.
One of the sticking points from all the talking heads is a double whammy. Everything done on approaching Mars will be done for the first time. No amount of testing. No simulations. No nothing is a Mars test. Mars tests have to be done on Mars.
Moreover, for everything there is only shot. Miss and that’s it. Either you die or return to Earth. If the window of landing is missed it is back to Earth. If the ship hits the atmosphere at the wrong angle, it burns on descent, or crashes on landing, or misses the site by kilometers, or worse, and spins off into space.
I liked the realism. I liked the honesty that things will go wrong. I liked it that the struggle to walk is plainly a struggle, and so on.
Because it was not a military operation, the chain of command was unclear to me. I said ‘Captain’ above but the term is not used.
Later there is an explanation for the failure to continue with Moon. Again it passed me by at the time. the near failure of Apollo XIII caused the Nixon administration and Congress to think twice. No one wanted the public responsibility of a mortal failure. The compromise result was to concentrate on near space with the shuttles. The irony is that deaths occurred, and the Reagan administration did what others did not have the conviction to do, go on.
However by episode six I found it repetitive and boring. On Mars we see much trudge and toil without sufficient explanation of purpose. Are they doing science? Preparing for colonisation? Waiting for the next catastrophe? Looking for new script pages? There is a lot of marking time, leaving the actors little to do.
The death of the botanist was a missed opportunity to this viewer. It just seemed too pat and almost a photocopy of the death of Captain earlier, walking into the light. What killed him was the ten-week dust storm and that was not brought home. Instead it seemed he just went stir crazy. If so, it was some selection process that yielded him for the job. Others were killed in that incident but only the botanist is mourned.
The 2033+ segments divide between the crew on Mars and head offices in London and Vienna. (No idea why two except to offer different cityscapes.) The latter seems pointless. Much posturing. It does allow one of the players a dual role. BFD. There seems to be the usual back biting and bickering, but it adds nothing to the focus: Mars. Nor is the office politics well realised. Most of these episodes are board meetings where twelve extras sit silently. One images the members of the board are as bored as the viewer.
The 2037 press conference seemed silly. The vultures of the press are seated in an orderly manner, already unrealistic, meters away from the podium. Why? So that when the revelation is announced they can be viewed from above swarming the podium like the amoeba in an earlier microscope image. It looks staged because it is. It seems heavy-handed because it is.
Only a few so-called critics’ reviews are attached its entry on the IMDb, and none of these is from a significant media source like the ‘New York Times.’ Nor are any from the Sy Fyians who cover the fictional accounts of Mars. Finally there are only a half dozen of them, which is a small number for a recent release. Odd. I did find the NYT review which is lukewarm for the kinds of reasons given here.
In addition, the IMDb critics are mostly negative. Some complain that it is neither fish nor fowl. Neither is it a sustained documentary, nor a fiction. Yep that is right but it is also irrelevant since it sets out to dramatise some of the points made in the documentary. This criticism is like saying Impressionist painting is too colourful. That is the point.
Others fault the acting. Huh. I thought the acting was fine. Though the players are all unknown to me, they seemed to fit the roles they had. They were young. They were stupid brave. As I read this criticism it dawned on me that the writers perhaps wanted a Hollywood name. Not me when I recalled the acting I have seen in Mars films from Hollywood names, mugging, soulful pouting, gung-ho nonsense, selfie sticking, and the like. Whereas I concluded the use of unknowns was a good choice to place emphasis on the mission rather than on the personalities, and the pre-conceptions audiences bring to Hollywood names.
I say ‘unknowns’ to admit my ignorance, not to denigrate the players.
But I would say on further viewing that the script gives the players little to do after the first four episodes.
The Jordanian Tourist Board got pipped on this one. The Mars outdoors scenes were filmed in Morocco. Seems appropriate since Moroccan leather binding on books is always red. To judge from the extensive terminal credits most of it was processed in that capital of cinema, Hungary. I noticed in the credits a ‘Data Wrangler.’ But by episode six there was a Data Wrangler, a First Assistant Data Wrangler, and — guess! — a Second Assistant Data Wrangler. It runs to twelve parts in all so what can we expect for this entry at the end?
‘Captive Wild Woman’ (1943)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated at 5.7 by 584 cinemitizens.
Another lie from the marketing department, since as explained below the ape could not carry off that woman, for it was herself. Got it? Read on.
Verdict: a masterclass is making something from nothing.
John Carradine, before he became a caricature of himself, is in top form as the scientist who goes on and on, and changes from a charming genius to a mad and bad scientist.
He finds a way in the script to transfer the secretions of glands from one animal to another. This transference leads to a transformation. The dog receiving rabbit secretions becomes a rabbit! ‘Would it work for Trumpettes,’ asked the fraternity brothers! ‘Could they be made human?’ Or is that too much even for a scriptwriter to conceive.
Suspend that disbelief and go along for the ride.
In the early stages of these experiments his findings, somehow, aid human patients. He publishes his work in learned journals. This being the first time in the Mad Scientist Genre I have seen where publications figure. He presses outward on the boundaries of knowledge, narrowing his eyes and lowering his voice. Can a nationally competitive grant be far away?
Then by chance through a new patient he goes to an animal circus and sees a very pliable stunt man in an ape suit. The idea hatches.
He will transfer human secretions into this ape, who then become a human woman. Stuntman to human woman, presents no problem for the scriptwriter. The transference drains, i.e., kills the human patient. ‘They have (unknowingly and involuntarily) sacrificed their pitiful lives for the advancement of knowledge,’ Carradine intones, as only he could. It is a small price (for someone else to) pay for his career.
Hmm. I might have believed it if he had said that they were killed to fatten his CV, meet his KPIs, or win a nationally completive NH&MRC grant. That would be credible in the world McKinsey has made.
Other mad scientists who play god usually have a purpose: sometimes they want make slaves of others, to make superhumans who reach the stars, or plumb ocean depths, vote Republican into eternity, or get tenure. Not in this case. He wants to do it because he can. Mad science for mad science’s sake. Nothing instrumental involved. Pure research!
Something from nothing? About a third of the short run time is excerpted from an earlier Universal movie called ‘The Big Cage’ (1933) about an animal circus, featuring Clyde Beatty (1903-1965) who was a remarkable lion tamer, animal trainer, and circus impresario. Director Edward Dymytryk cut and pasted these excerpts so well that the seams do not show. In this he was added by great lighting, make-up, and editing. Doc Adams was cast as the animal trainer because he resembled Beatty as he had been in that earlier film. All in all, the film is technically superb and the print I found on You Tube was clean and crisp.
The result is a rattling yarn. Carradine succeeds but finds a stinger at the end. Doc Adams cracks the whip. Evelyn Ankers, Martha Vickers, Fay Helm, and Acquanetta kept the fraternity brothers watching.
Evelyn was married to a personal favourite, Richard Denning, who was away at war when she made this film, hoping the yellow telegram would not come.
Ankers and Denning together in the 1950s.
Martha Vickers’s single line in the film is ‘Well, I…’ But she lies around comatose in a hospital bed. She was preparing for her role in ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946). Fay Helm injects some humanity when she tries to stop Carradine. Of Acquanetta the less said, the better, but her make-up and transitions set a new standard for the genre. She speaks not word one. Correct. Completely silent. Considering what she did to her few subsequent roles that was a good choice. It is said that she was difficult with whom to work. At the time and place, for a woman that was often code for not being sexually compliant.
The entrepreneurial Crash Corrigan (1902-1976) was the stuntman in the ape suit. An acceptable ape suit was expensive and time-consuming to make. Genre horror pictures were then by definition quick and cheap, so they had no time and no budget for such matters. Corrigan saw a market niche and made it his own and passed out business cards: ‘Have ape suit, will travel.’ He was in demand for about a decade for horror movies, commercials in cinemas and later on television, openings of stores and malls, extravagant Hollywood parties, USO tours, charity fundraisers, Trumpette conventions, and more.
Crash started out in B-Westerns where he did his own stunts. In time he concentrated on stunt work which he found more interesting and less taxing than remembering and delivering lines. He got the nickname ‘Crash’ as a college football player for his open field tackling, not for his automobile driving.
He showed entrepreneurial flair again when he bought a ranch in the Simi Valley and rented it out as set for movies, serials, and television shows. He also staged western shows there for tourists. Crash knew how to make cash.
John Carradine developed the habit early of taking any part he could get, because he wanted the money to pour into his Pasadena Shakespeare Company. And pour money into it he did, but in the end it failed, but by then he retained the habit of answering ‘Yes’ when a part was offered. See his subsequent career.
Edward Dmytryk (1908-1999) directed such movies as ‘Caine Mutiny’ (1954) and ‘The Left Hand of God’ (1955) both starring Humphrey Bogart. He worked his way up the pecking order, starting with B genre films like this and ‘The Falcon Strikes Back’ (1943) to ‘Cornered’ (1945) and on to ‘Crossfire’ (1947) and ‘Mirage’ (1965), for a total of fifty-six credits.
Born in Canada he was an orphaned juvenile delinquent in San Francisco who was proud of his Ukrainian heritage. He started working as messenger boy for a studio and then projectionist where he learned the technology, film editor to become the lead director for RKO’s A-Picture department.
He was imprisoned by HUAC for refusing to answer questions, being one of the Hollywood Ten used by that execrable body to publicise itself. His name and his father’s origins in Russia, made him an early and easy target, and his defiance made great copy for the vultures of the media and the Committee.
‘Them!’ (1954)
IMDb meta-data: run time 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated a paltry 7.3 by a mere 16,696 cinemitizens.
Verdict: Classic.
Any circle drawn around the best Sy Fy movies of the 1950s, the decade when the genre was at its peak, includes ‘Them!’ It is a gem in every respect and retains the capacity to startle even jaded recidivist viewers like the fraternity brothers.
Before all that judgemental stuff though, first comes the set up. We start with a Cessna spotter aircraft flying over a desert dotted with Joshua Trees, the pilot in radio communication with two state patrolmen cruising down an empty highway in the high bright sun. The flyer spots movement and circles in on it. It is a child walking determinedly through the bleaching sun.
Sandy Descher
The patrolmen divert their car into the sand, to catch up and grab this nine-year old in a bathrobe with a broken doll. They have to grab her because she just keeps striding into the distance. She is mute and wide-eyed in shock, and she steals the show. Who is she? Where did she come from? Someone must be looking for her.
But who and where?
As darkness falls the police officers find a vacation trailer, ripped apart, and pieces that match her doll but no people, dead or alive. Further along at a gas station they find another scene of devastation. Picture an end of semester beer bust at Sig House and there it is: a disgusting mess. In each place sugar is much in evidence to we viewers but not remarked on by the plod. They radio all this in and a response is mobilized. One of the troopers, wearing a red undershirt, stays at the gas station to look around while the other drives to the hospital to see the child. Oh, oh.
Earlier Mr Pomfritt had collected her in an ambulance in a great scene. The three adults loading her hear a sound on the desert winds and look back at it, while behind them unseen she rises from the stretcher with a look of silent terror and falls back comatose. Marvellous.
The patrolman who stayed behind meets the fate of all Red Shirts. That’s why the fraternity brothers never wear Red Shirts.
They find footprints of a sort and make casts and take photographs. Since the trailer was rented by an FBI agent on leave, that bureau sends in Marshall Dillon to sort things out. He dutifully reports everything up the pipe to DC.
Next thing two myrmecologists show up and the plot thickens. After the ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ Edmund Gwen turned to ants along with his very professional daughter. These two are bug hunters worthy of Starship Trooper badges.
Spoilers follow.
The Trinity nuclear tests ten years ago at Alomogordo have produced some giant mutant ants now roaming the desert in search of…sugar.
Santa confirms this with the shocked child by giving her a sniff of ant juice. She utters the title!
Unforgettable to see her small face contorted in terror saying ‘Them!’ If she had said ‘The Thing!’ It would have been an whole other story because, as the fraternity brothers know, Marshall Dillion in a rubber head prosthesis was that Thing in the earlier movie of that title, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
She is so compelling not even that notorious scene stealer James Whitmore had a chance, he of he mugs, eye brow wiggling, ear pulling, and snorting expertise.
Oddly for the time and place no one wonders if a woman can be a scientist or makes any stupid jokes about her. Just as well because later she is a dab hand with the flamethrower. Mostly the chaps stand back and let her get on with it. Very wise, chaps.
Santa gives lectures and prognosticates, but with Gwen it is almost fun listening to him. The mutant ants are going to take over the earth unless some Rid is applied soon and in a big way. Does Rid work on Trumpettes, asked the fraternity brothers?
The business is so dire that it is top secret and kept that way. Ha, as if some grunt won’t spill the whole story to a jackal of the press for a five spot. Well it is a work of fiction. The media then would exercise its responsibility to scatter confusion, panic, and destruction.
While on the fictitious nature of the film, there is quick and general agreement along the Potomac to act and to follow Santa’s direction. What does someone from the North Pole know about ants in the desert is a question no one asks. Both army and police personnel are serious, sober, sane, and disciplined, so we knew it was fake news. Not a self-serving careerist is in the lens frame.
The bugs head for the sugar capital of Lost Angeles! Bug hunting season opens in the sewers of Tinsel Town. Dr Daughter is ruthless and wants to kill them all! None of that scientific impulse to keep one alive for study. In fact she insists not just that they be killed, but also that when dead they be burned to ashes! The fraternity brother cringed on the sofa.
The police uniforms were a thing of wonder with braid, insignia, badges, stripes, chevrons, epaulets, gaudy enough for this month’s African dictator for life.
Something like this.
A reformed Mr Pomfritt after he went bad in ‘The Man from Planet X’ (1951), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, rides the ambulance.
It was filmed in the Mojave desert, or a facsimile thereof, with those Joshua Trees. How is it that a film set in the desert Southwest does not include any Latinos or Native Americans remains a good question. But it doesn’t and it has plenty of white-bread company in the genre.
On the other hand Davy Boone (figure it out) and Mr Spock are also present.
Mr Spock under cover.
The project had started as a big budget, Colour, and 3D picture from Warner Brothers. Uh uh, but Jack Warner always blanched at big budgets and even before the first shot it had been cut back to black and white and a flat 2D.
‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ (1957)
IMDb meta-data hour and 21 minutes, rated 7.7 by 13,422 cinemitizens
Verdict: Deserves a higher rating. Much.
Grant Williams gradually finds his clothes are getting bigger. Hmmm. Is it the new laundry detergent? Is he losing weight? Is his ego diminishing? He consults Mr Pomfritt (in a very early role) and finds it is none of the above.
Act I is the shrinking Grant, which was caused by a freak combination of exposure to pesticides and then later to radiation in separate incidents, each an accident. Separately each exposure was harmless but in sequence… While medical science is mobilised, Grant denies this is happening to him. But then medical science fails.
Act II, Grant reacts in anger to his loss of stature. He lashes out at his wife, gamely played by Kansan Randy Stuart. He becomes ensconced in a doll house with ever smaller Ken Doll clothing. There is some bargaining here as for a time his shrinking seems arrested, but only for a time.
Grant becomes a media spectacle as the meat eaters nearly batter down his door to get pictures of this living Ken Doll freak with the sensitivity we have come to expect of the free media. The vultures can never get enough dead meat. That kindles a siege mentality in Grant.
Act III, the cat! The one-time pet cat has to be kept out of the house now, and, [see if you can guess] it sneaks in one day as Randy is leaving for work. Someone has to earn a crust since micro-Grant is no longer payroll material.
In the battle with the cat, Grant is shut into the cellar, and the final act is his struggle to survive in the vast, inhospitable reaches of this savage world of half empty paint cans, off cuts from carpets, cracked tiles, battered suit cases, a rusty lawn mower, a leaking water heater, a gaseous furnace, and the cellar wild life that is larger than he is. He is at first depressed but then wills himself to continue. There are some great moments here as this mini-Tarzan struggles against the odds in this terrifying yet mundane world.
But he continues to shrink and he comes to accept his fate as cosmic unity, or something. The end.
The master narrative is that as Grant changes physically, he also changes emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The mental changes born of frustration and fear drive a wedge between his only solace, Randy, and himself. He knows he is doing it, but cannot stop himself.
The ending is downbeat. The wife thinks the cat got him. End of cat is implied. But there is no feline autopsy to be sure, as recommended by the fraternity brothers. She moves out of the house leaving the ever diminishing Grant to his fate in the basement wilderness. It is inhospitable enough to be Mars or New Jersey to mini-Grant.
There are fine setups and shots of the kind that made director Jack Arnold’s name. The performances are exact. The special effects work. There are two sidebars that illustrate the downward spiral that Grant is in. There are no villains to make it black and white.
It is a character study. This happens and the is how people react.
When the Hollywood remake comes, it can star Tom Midget. No special effects will be needed.
In a masochistic effort to watch all the many freely available John Agar movies so that I might have ontological dinner party bragging rights, I tried to watch ‘The Attack of the Puppet People’ (1958) but found the sludge so deep that I became mired, and instead read about it and to discover it was an imitation of ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man,’ which had much better reviews so I had a look and I am glad I did.
I find slipping the word ‘ontological’ gratuitously into a conversation usually stops the quibbles.
The fraternity brothers mainly slept through this one. ‘Too wordy,’ one of them drooled. ‘A house cat does not make a Creature Feature,’ muttered another.
‘Mission to Mars’ (2000)
IMDb meta-data is: 1 hour and 54 minutes of Dali time, rated at 5.6 by 64,947 cinemitizens
Verdict: Morons on Mars in a pastiche of previous films.
Verdict: As always, Roger Ebert nailed it: A hundred million dollar production with a ten cent script. Think what NASA could do with that money. Plus it is double sappy.
It is a Mars rescue mission that ends with comic book CGI. The players try, but well it gets trying.
In 2020, a mere two years from now, all is peace and harmony on Earth (as if) and the World Space Program sends Dan Cheadle with three others to land on Mars, and where they quickly prove they were never Boy or Girl Scouts.
1. All four of them ride around Mars together in their jeep, leaving no one in reserve back at base.
2. They stand motionless when the storm breaks rather than taking cover, or getting in the vehicle and scooting.
3. Motionless, they also stand close enough together for one CGI rock to finish three of them. ‘Spread out,’ those are often words of sergeant wisdom.
4. Moreover, none of them notices the very conspicuous white protrusion on the top left of the hill that then spits dirt at them. Even the fraternity brothers noticed that.
One of the four survives, and by the way, we never find out how or why, though he refers to himself as having been spared, and that implies selection. Now he has to be rescued.
Of course he will be. There is none of the technical, social, or political dimensions to this undertaking that are set out better in ‘The Martian’ (2016). Cheadle’s wife is never informed of either the deaths or his survival. Yet she and many other wives are much in evidence in the opening barbecue derived from ‘Apollo 13’ (1995). Thereafter she and they are forgotten. In the credits they are styled ‘NASA wife 1,’ ‘NASA wife 2,’ and so on. The high horse sighed: every character in a Sam Peckinpah movie always had a name. Every character actor in a Frank Capra movie had screen time, else why have them. Not so here. Might as well have been CGIed.
Oh, except for the wife who goes on the mission as half of a married couple. Sure that would be NASA policy. For fun read the acknowledgement of NASA in the terminal credits, and then try to figure out what the convoluted wording means.
The scriptwriter’s old friend, the meteor puts in an appearance at the most (in)opportune time. Bang. Equally predictable these days are the product placements that feature on the NASA hardware. Likewise to be expected is the piteous piling up of a tear-jerker back story, about a dead wife, though we find out nothing about her, she is much displayed as eye candy.
The rescue mission is a failure and lands three astronauts with no gear, equipment, or good dialogue. Their situation is desperate from the get-go and they are there to find Don, if he is still alive. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. So what do they do first? Well, on behalf of the World Space Mission that sent them they plant a USA flag. Not kidding. That is what they do.
On Mars there is evidently plenty of water because all the actors stay shaved and clean. And the weather isn’t bad since the ripped up and open to the elements tent has green growing plants in it in Mars’s atmosphere, enough to feed them all. Green cheese is shipped in from the Moon to stock up the fridge.By the by the temperature on Mars at this moment is -100F, per the NASA Orion web site.
In a screenplay full of inane lines said with the self-importance of Hollywood, the prize goes to Don who buried his fallen comrades. Well, he dug and marked three graves but he only found one body, but ‘it didn’t seem right’ to make only one grave. Huh? Burn those calories. By the way, Don asks not one word of his wife back on the Earth, despite all the sap about the other two wives. OK, if he did, it was so incidental I missed it.
There is great photography and CGI special effects, including a tribute or two to ‘Space Odyssey 2001,’ the mandatory scenes of weightlessness, and an EVA. Although each is drawn out and out and out striving for epic length, when the additional footage adds nothing.
Spoiler ahead. The enigmatic face and the DNA are interesting and arresting, but they come so late and are trivialised into a comic book take. The alien DVD on evolution would make Disney blush, so lame is it. On the bright side, it would get the film banned in Alabama.
In another repetition of a previous film(s), our hero says he didn’t come this far to turn back now. An astronaut has to …. That he was on a one-way ticket was telegraphed for more than 90 minutes. Even the fraternity brothers got that message through the fog that envelops them.
The end.
For those who like mysteries, figure out how the surviving widow got the neck chain off her dead husband, floating in space out of reach, so that she could later give it to our hero.
Like other entries in the current Mars industry, it was filmed in Jordan. No doubt the Jordan Tourist Board remains hard at work in the Mars industry with its red lens filters.
‘Curse of the Swamp Creature’ (1966)
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 11 minutes of purgatory, rated far too high at 2.9 by 551 misguided cinemitizens.
Verdict: there is no curse, no swamp, and a creature in a rubber mask only appears in the last five minutes when all hope for diversion had long been abandoned.
Sick green seemed the right colour choice.
Three local villains in East Texas hope to trick geologist John Agar into finding undiscovered subsurface oil. The trio together score 99 are the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
The catatonic Agar will make said discovery by drifting in a flat bottomed boat along the Red River, calling it a swamp.
Deep within the ersatz swamp there is a wanna be mad scientist, Dr Dope, and his curvy wife, whom he keeps locked in a room so that she does not interfere with his research. This order of priorities baffled the fraternity brothers, as much does.
By the use of a dry ice bath Dope is trying to transmute individuals into a über creatures with the power to overcome maxed credit cards. His test subjects come from the local village. So far he has failed and he disposes of the bodies of his fails by feeding them to a swimming pool full of alligators. ‘Do alligators like chlorine,’ asked fraternity brothers?
Needing more unwilling specimens, Dope invites the geological exploration party of four to stay overnight in his house. Being lower case dopes, the accept. The dialogue of this soiree is so painfully inept that even the fraternity brothers cringed.
Meanwhile, the local villagers have noticed the decrease in their number and in response play bongo drums. A lot. Then some more. Having got that out of their systems, they dress up in face paint and hang Dr Dope in effigy. By this heap big medicine they hope to stop his inroads into to their number. Must be anti-vaxxers. That is colourful but….they decide torches would better thanks to the advice of a consultant in D-Movie schlock. They organise an angry mob of outraged villagers and…[tension does not mount].
Now that the members of the geological party are asleep on the floor of Dope’s one-room mansion, he selects the conniving woman in the party as his next specimen, syringe to the ready. Dipped into the dry ice bath, she’s dons the rubber mask with ping pong ball eyes. It is an unexpected and unexplained move for him to select the woman of the group. What does that do to the staples of Creature Features? Namely the creature caring off the babe.
When she comes to life, Dope siccs her on the approaching mob. Sicks, indeed. Agar, who barely knows her, appeals to her humanity, she who conspired in the earlier murder of an oilman, and must have been planning Agar’s demise. Had he not read the script? Well, that appeal didn’t work.
The resourceful Agar then tells her she is a monster because of Dr Dope! Good one! She turns on Dope. They struggle and together fall into the alligator pool. We see again for the fourth, or was if the fifth time, stock footage of feeding time at a zoo.
The production values are a film school fail. The mansion is just a house. When Dope drugs the woman he carries a pillow which is supposed to be her back through the living room where the three men in the geological party are sleeping on the floor, kicking and tripping over them, but they sleep on. Sure. Tired out after floating all day.
Yet they are later roused by noises from the very sedate mob. Speaking of that mob, what losers!
The mob comes with torches. With torches! Come on! This is Texas! Where are the AK-47s?
Credit, such as is due, the fact that there are black faces in this production. They are the VooDooing villagers whose dwindling number provided Dope’s unwilling specimens when out after dark. His only henchman is also black.
One drooling NRA member of the geological party assaults a young black women who works as a maid in the mansion and she out smarts him. Good! But not a high bar, outsmarting him.
This is another entry in the Texas film industry from the ego and bankroll of Larry Buchanan whose literal re-make of ‘Zontar: The Thing from Venus’ (1966) set a new standard for zero. It, too, featured Agar. Who else would do it? It was even worse than the tiresome original. Both Zontar pictures are reviewed elsewhere on this blog. ‘Read at your own risk.’
Admission: I watched it because I thought it related to ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) and his several misadventures in Florida. Wrong!
Sad to say that this is not the end. There followed: ‘Curse of the Swamp Creature’ (1994) and ‘Curse of the Swamp Creature 2’ (1997). I have not yet had the courage to find out any more about them.