Political theory and practice

The Vampire’s Ghost (1945)

IMDb meta-data is 59 minutes of runtime, rated 6.0 by 301 cinematizens

Genre:  Horror

Verdict:  Some nice touches

A world weary Bar Owner (BO) in the heart of the Dark (because is little is known about it) Continent in Bakunda on the Unseen River, perhaps, in southern Chad speaks in riddles.  We know from the get-go he is…The Vampire.  What else could explain his clean clothes, perfect diction, and shy mien.

BO is urbane, European, hyperthyroid, patient, and oblivious of either money or sex.  ‘What is wrong this guy, indeed,’ chorused the fraternity brothers!   Meanwhile, locals — not the Europeans — are dying from bites in the throat.  Got it, so far?  

While the six Hollywood Europeans we see, including the studio-contracted woman who has the screaming and fainting duties of the era, stand around, the natives are sure a demon is loose.  They use their iDrums to communicate.  The Europeans are sure it is an animal and set out to trap it.  Fewer return none the wiser.

Meanwhile, we see that the BO can bug his eyes out something incredible, even more than the fraternity brothers do when a professor assigns r-e-a-d-i-n-g!  (‘As if!’)  When bug-eyed, BO is dangerous.  

It takes Hero a while to figure it out and then he falls sway to the bug-eyes himself.  His will is so weak he might have been acting the part written for the screamer. That is nice since it is usually the woman who succumbs, though to be unfair she, too, does later but Hero was first to go all silly putty.   

There is a neat shot when we, along with the native servant, see the tea cup in the mirror but not BO’s hand holding it. Though surprised Native does not go all stereotype but instead begins to realise well before the Europeans what has to be done, namely calling Buffy!  This is another nice touch endowing the black servant with wit, self-control, and insight.  Credit the writer for this touch.

Another very noir scene has BO’s shadow following a minor ruffian and encompassing him as he — BO — has a bite to drink. This is the first European to get it. Had this scene been in an A-film, it would be studied in film schools for the superb staging.  Credit the director for this touch. 

BO plays his role as the life-weary (ghost) vampire straight with no melodrama, if anything it is under-acted, and the more effective for it.  Credit the actor for this touch.

The natives are shown to be well ahead of the Europeans in sussing the deal and acting against it, however Africa is presented as a sensational mash-up of witchcraft, voodoo, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bunkimism, rather like an ABC news report. 

The screenplay was a rarity of 1940s Hollywood: written by a woman, Leigh Brackett, who also wrote the Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), and Stars Wars (1980), and many episodes of The Rockford Files.  She also published a host of Sy Fy short stories, and was married to Captain Future himself, Edmond Hamilton.

The gaunt and ever morose John Abbott played the Ghostly Vampire BO with measured ennui. He did many television program and will be recognised by viewers without knowing his name.  He was delightful as the embezzling Shakespeare quoting Studio Head in The Falcon in Hollywood (1944).  Despite a mien of MittelEuropa he was born Albert Chamberlain Kefford in Kensington, London England and worked in the British Embassy in Moscow during World War II before landing in Hollywood. Regrettably his service in Moscow haunted him later when the real Monster of Hollywood HUAC went looking for cheap headlines and he was blacklisted for a time.

This film was released on 21 May 1945 in the middle of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa which saw 75,000 American casualties on this tiny island.  The Japanese losses were equal if not even greater. That action was taken to indicate what an invasion of Japan would be like.  Beyond hyperbole.  

The Pharaoh’s Curse (1957) 

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 4.7/10 by 511 cinematizens.

Genre: Boring

Verdict:  Ibid.

The audience is restless and Captain Storm with no first name tries to tame it riding off into the Mojave desert with Miss Canfield.  Ziva appears and disappears into and out of nowhere which leads Storm to close questioning, but not as close as the fraternity brothers had hoped. 

Out there in the Burbank backlot they find …. sand, a lot of it. While all the accoutrements are allegedly British (see below for more on the accoutrementa) all of the principals are Yankee Doodle but at least they do not affect pretend-accents.  Storm is impossibly handsome but remains stiffly correct at all times with Miss Canfield.  

They find the diggers desecrating tombs and stealing, ah, exporting, ancient Egyptian artefacts, even a tomb with many dire threats in the cartouches that adorn it does not stop them.  The Europeans dismiss such superstition, but not the mandatory Egyptian present who goes all pale and wobbly like a Republican Senator getting orders from President Putin.   

By the osmosis of screenwriting the spirit of the long dead Pharaoh passes into the body of this Gypo who goes all mummy right down to the linen wraps and proceeds to drink blood, first from the horses then the Red Coats: Red Coats = red blood.  See, just like the aforementioned Senator: A bloodsucker. The stalwarts chase him around the one-set corridor as their number dwindles, along with any interest of viewers, to … the End.

After all the chasing Mummy is revealed to be wearing striped pyjamas!  No wonder he did was angry. Will no one respect the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the hotel burial chamber door?  The desecraters get their deserts, slurp, and then the swaddled Gypo retires, or something.

The medic says ‘eviscerated’ when he means ‘ex-sanguinated.’  The Brit uniforms in this 1902 setting are American WWII Army surplus. They venture into the trackless desert of Bronson Canyon on horses, not camels.  And so on and on.  There are able supporting actors in the cast like Ben Wright and Guy Prescott who have nothing to do.  It is a throwback in story and staging to 1940s curse of the Mummy films done so badly it is wonder it had a theatrical release in February 1957 in the same month that a mesmerising Seventh Seal opened.  How’s that for a comparison:  4.7 for this and 8.2 for the latter.  Even so, 4.7 seems way too high for something that cannot be watched, though reading the User Reviews on IMDb confirms my faith in the idiocracy.   

Murder by the Clock (1931) 

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.3 by 229 cinematizens.

Genre: Old Dark House wanna be.

Verdict:  Femme très fatale.

Holding court in an Old Dark House, elderly Russian mother Putin confronts her two adult sons, both Republican Senators, one a retard and the other a spineless alcoholic.  Decisively she decides then and there to leave her considerable fortune, acquired how is unknown, to the spineless alcoholic who has a very blonde wife in slinky silk and cosy furs.  Elderly Mother is hale and hearty and it may be many years before she croaks.  (Not now, sniggered the fraternity brothers.)

Fearing pre-mature internment in the gigantic family mausoleum across the street Elderly Mother has a baleful horn installed there for her to trigger if she wakes up dead.  Well, anyway.  

She signs the will in front of the assembled leeches and so signs her own death warrant. Blonde wife with the subtlety of a sledgehammer reminds sodden husband-son that Elderly Mother may live on for years before they see a thin dime so that she can buy new shoes and a sofa. The prospect of years and years and years of Blonde nagging is more than he can bear. 

He comes home the next day to tell her that he has murdered his mother.  Another day at the office.  Blonde feigns shock and surprise but speeds to her paramour to encourage him, without quite saying it, that now is the time for him to murder the husband, which he does.  Then she turns to the retard and encourages him to murder the paramour without quite saying it in express words.  She will do anything to get those $5,000 Christian Louboutin stiletto shoes encrusted with blood diamonds!  Move over Imelda!  And that sofa of human skin.  

Paramour is new to murder and does not quite finish the job on husband so Blonde takes over (and makes a rookie mistake herself).  

While all these bodies are piling up Plod is nosing around, and Blonde tries her wiles on him, but he is a eunuch and his first friend does not respond.  Her full frontal advances convince him she is up to no good, after all he has looked in the mirror and he knows that he is not in her looks league.  Thereafter follows a cat-and-mouse game between Blonde and Plod. Bernie Olds figures as a beat cop before he got promoted to plain clothes in the Maltese Falcon (1941) and dropped the phoney Irish accent.  Plod never does find the one secret passage in this wanna be Old Dark House, and has to be lead to it by someone or other.  

The mausoleum horn figures in the denouement, after which Blonde goes off in cuffs to suborn the judge and jury into a not guilty finding, so she can find someone to murder Plod.  Say what you like about her, she doesn’t quit.  

Lilyan Tashman as Blonde is ruthless, unscrupulous, and selfish enough to be Republican Senate Leader.  Plod is hopeless enough to be Barnie.  

In 1931 talkies were still developing and it shows here.  Each actor stands still and articulates the lines slowly and clearly.  Movement and dialogue are kept separate.  

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 5.4 by 287 cinematizens. 

Genre: Mystery

Verdict:  5.4!  Inflation!  

Smooth PI takes an assignment.  An avuncular defence attorney who is successful in getting guilty villains off hires him.  Why?  No sooner are his guilty felon clients found not guilty by a jury of evangelicals, then they are murdered by strangulation.  Fearing that this mortality rate will harm his future business with villains he offers Smooth a wad to find the culprit.   

Smooth has no hesitation in taking the lucre from this representative of murderous villains.  However his new Wife objects, not on moral grounds, but because it will keep Smooth out at nights.  This is national news in the rags.  [Sure.] Indeed, Smooth’s every move is news and splashed over the Murdoch newspapers from the Props department.  Is he Princess Di in disguise?  

Plod is not motivated to investigate these killings.  But then one Plod is Shemp Howard busy looking for the other two stooges.  (Interest waning…)

Wife interferes with Smooth’s investigation.  Being independently wealthy Smooth lives in a palace with Mantan Moreland as a valet, whose acting talent exceeds that of Smooth, despite the despicable stereotype.  Lionel Atwill is utterly wasted as a red herring.  Wife shows some spark, dimmed by the tiresome constraints of the day that consign her fainting and screaming.

Smooth and Wife amuse themselves by phoning in false alarms to Plod.  [Sure.]  

Then a Republican in a wrap-around hoodie kidnaps Valet and Smooth and prepares to….[shudder] transfer Smooth’s brain — if it can be found — into Ray Corrigan wearing a gorilla suit.  ‘Poor Ray,’ cried the fraternity brothers!  Valet looks on, sweating, pale, and bug-eyed.  Smooth seemed bored by the whole mad scientist shtick.  What’s going on within the hoodie is unknown to the scriptwriter and stays that way.  Then by the miracle of a screen dissolve, Smooth is lounging in a hospital.  Valet has his eyes popped back in.  Wife screams and faints on cue. 

When asked how he got away from Dr GOP, Smooth says, with refreshing and irritating, honesty that he does not know (because it was not in the script).  Later when asked how the poison simulated strangulation he gives the same answer.  (Some coroner.)  

According to Rule One of the B-picture Krimi Writer’s Manual, the least likely suspect did it.  Yes, it was the avuncular lawyer and masked surgeon who got the villains off, then murdered them, and was preparing to swap Smooth for Ray, as above.  No more ‘Mr Nice Guy’ for him!  

Why Uncle did it is because…[gobbledygook].  Why he left a note initialed Rx with every corpse is never explained.  Like much else: Like why I watched it to the end.  Incredulity, perhaps, that it was so incomplete, haphazard, and uninteresting.  Could that level of incompetence be sustained for the entire running time, I asked?  Yes, I answered.  Bear that in mind when considering the White House.  

When Smooth is asked how he sussed it out, he says….. [see above].  

It was released on 17 April 1942.  The next day newsreels described Lt Colonel James Doolittle’s one-way mission to bomb Tokyo.  Doolittle had an MIT PhD in engineering and applied that to avionics. By some miracle 71 of the 80 volunteer flight crewmen survived.  The raid had no tactical effect on Japan doing little damage, but it did have a strategic effect that is sometimes neglected.  A few bombs fell within a kilometre of the Emperor’s palace, causing the Imperial Navy to pull back more than a thousand nautical miles from the Eastern and Southern Pacific the more intensely to patrol nearer Japan to forestall another such attack. That retreat allowed the American build up of shipping in the mid-Pacific, e.g., Noumea, and eased shipping to and from Australia and supported ANZAC combat in the Solomons and New Guinea.  

In addition, and in the main the raid raised US morale in the steady diet of bad news for months – Pearl, Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, Guam, Attu, Wake…  Morale and the demonstration the Japan could be hit, these were the two purposes of the raid and it succeeded on those scores.  Taking off in an armed B-25 from the deck of the USS Hornet has to be seen (on You Tube) to be believed.  The deck was less than half the prescribed length of the runway for these aircraft when loaded with bombs. They certainly could not land on the flight deck and so had to fly over Tokyo for a few minutes and ditch at map co-ordinates in China.  

Japanese reprisals against Chinese civilians as they searched for the down pilots led to tens of thousands of rapes and murders.  While such a search had been anticipated, the scale and savagery of it surpassed any expectation. Japanese history, I am told, is silent on such reprisals but long on the damage done by Doolittle’s Raid.  

Phantom of Chinatown (1940)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes of runtime, rated 6.2 by 449 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict:  Odd Coupling

At Southern University up north learned professor John or Cyrus Benton (the props department could not make up its mind about his first name) back from a harrowing expedition to the Gobi Desert in the interior of Mongolia gives a lecture — the fraternity bothers fell asleep instantly at this point — on his discoveries, which include…[gasp] a map to the Ming emperor’s legendary temple of Eternal Shopping Mall.  With the lights dimmed for PowerPoint he talks while the film of the expedition runs behind him.  

Dimmed lights, steady drone, cool night air, no wonder the fraternity boys dropped off. 

As Prof’s lugubrious presentation nears the punch line…he keels over and a mêlée ensues as everyone tries to take a selfie with the corpse, because corpse he is.  Plod arrives and declares it a natural death due to PowerPoint overexposure, but Mr James Lee Wong soon undermines that conclusion.    

Casting notes:  Grant Withers plays Plod as only he can: a perfect fit.  This Plod is loud, impatient, stupid, patronising, inept, ranting, incoherent, slow-witted, pompous, inconsistent. and a fool.  In short, he is presidential material.  Withers played this stereotype repeatedly, and he must have brought his own felt hat because he always has it on.  

Boris Karloff played Mr James Lee Wong in five previous film with quiet dignity, a respectful authority, and a certain dry wit.  Karloff’s contract ended and with a contempt for the viewing public now equaled everyday by the News Corporation, the studio cast the diminutive Keye Luke as Wong.  Not even as the nephew of Wong but Wong himself.  Still it is the first, and for years the last time, a Chinese actor was cast to play a Chinese lead.  Progress of a sort.  But in this rendition Number One Son does not have the gravity or grace of Karloff.  He does, nonetheless, hold his own against the village idiot Plod, but that is not a high bar.  

The ethereal Lotus Long is cast as Benton’s loyal assistant Win Len, and endures some of Plod’s groping efforts at humour.  For that alone she deserves a round of applause.  He is clumsy, vulgar, and oafish as he dismisses Chinese as savages, and she is glacial and reserved as he tweets out garbled non-sequiturs.  Now who does he remind me of….  

There is another point when Plod is yucking it up about taking anything Chinese seriously apart from Chop Suey when one of the villains no less points out to him that Genghis Khan ruled the world long before Europeans were using soap. [Was this a personal hygiene hint?] It is all way beyond the fourth grade level Plod attained by cheating.  Presidential indeed. 

Going for gold, Plod makes a meal of the absurdity of burying any Chink in a tomb and then digging it up.  Mr Wong replies that a Chinese expedition is scheduled to dig up George Washington soon.  That comparison passes way over Plod’s head.  

These are pretty pointed remarks though they are passed off as throw-away lines. Let’s credit George Waggner who wrote the screenplay and director Phil Rosen for retaining and staging these lines.   

As between Plod and Wong, the race goes to Wong, but he lets Plod think he figured it out.  It may have been a step forward to cast a Chinese to play a Chinese lead, but Luke is not convincing, scowl though he might.  

Lotus Long was half-Japanese but from the latter 1930s she pretended to be Chinese to avoid the opprobrium increasingly directed at Japan. Thus, when most Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned, she was not.  Though in 1946 she played Tokyo Rose in a film of that name. She married a cameraman because he made her look so good, she said, and they stayed married for fifty-six years until his death.  She played Eskimos, red Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and other stereotypes in a mere twenty credits.  She quit the business in the 1940s and devoted herself to philanthropy.  Cinematizens loss.  

Grant Withers played this painful fool so routinely the fraternity brothers have come to think that it is the real man.  Maybe he watched too many of his own 202 films. They certainly sap my will to watch.