Film Forno

Wow! I just got an email from Mary, wife of Jerry, proprietor of Jerry’s Videos! Attached was an amazing song tribute to a bygone video store: Jerry’s ! I wrote about it when it closed here. Jerry’s Video’s closing left a big hole in our community and I’m so glad somebody did something to mourn it’s passing, namely Eleni Mandell and her band The Grabs. This song rocks ! It kicks ass! Check it out! Here is the link to the Grabs website. VHS!

I think this is the album with Jerry’s Video Store on it

Eleni Mandell-an incredible singer, songwriter

For your dreaming and listening pleasure, the great Santo and Johnny perform their hit Sleep Walk.

Check out this film of the great Django Rinehardt, the incredible thing besides his amazing musicianship is that his pinky and ring finger on his left hand were paralyzed in an accident and he still played like a genius! Inspirational.

I got a great album from a guy by the name of Tim Smith that I’d like to turn you on to. It’s called Caballero Del Mar by the band Primal Sky. There’s a lot going on in this mix of Surf, Latin, Jazz, Acid , Mancini, Morricone Music. The first track starts with a slightly laid back killer groove, with flute and sax calling and responding, acoustic guitar crashing like waves on the beach and then an amazing chorus of voices comes in like a 60’s Italian Spy Movie. The music just keeps on getting up, it never gets repetitive there’s do much going on, constantly evolving. All the tunes are great and very different. The 2nd track Rota La Ola has a really cool Spanish recitative vocal that grabs you and doesn’t let go and a cool almost New Orleans drummer working out underneath, a banda type accordion solo comes in, you just don’t know what to expect and that makes the album a lot of fun to listen to. It would make a great soundtrack for a cool beach party or it’s great to listen to while working on something, I’ve been playing it while I write lately.

Mr. Smith Goes To Huntington!

Tim Smith wrote and produced almost all of the tunes and he plays guitar on them as well, all the musicians are top notch, there’s a kick ass violin solo on Eres Hermosa, like I said you just don’t know what is going to turn up next! There’s a heavy surf connection to this album. I guess they are all beach living surfers that can jam, it comes across especially on Hijo Del Mar a kind of Caribbean Herb Alpert Groove. And Flamenco Beach rocks out like a Spaghetti Western soundtrack, hipped up and narrated by a demented Matador. Check it out. This is a great album, get your hands on a copy, apply liberally to your ears, you won’t regret it.

Extra Added Bonus- Tim with The Great Jack Palance!

The great L.A. born vocalist Kitty White has moved on to the next dimension, she’s singing up among the stars now, harmonizing with the music of the spheres or more likely soloing over it. She sang a duet with the King (Elvis Presley) in King Creole, dubbed the vocal of the lounge singer (Mady Comfort) in Kiss Me Deadly and sang the Farmhouse Lullaby in Night Of The Hunter. You can’t pick three more influential 50’s films to be involved with, from a super-coolness perspective! Fare Thee Well beautiful voiced Kitty, we’ll all hear you again in the Promised Land. I thought she had dubbed the little girl’s voice in the boat as they float down the river but I was mistaken, thanks to Preston Neal Jones author of the fabulous book Heaven And Earth To Play With, The Filming Of Night Of The Hunter for pointing this out.

Night Of The Hunter- Kitty’s vocals come in at 1 min. 42 secs.

Here is her voice in Kiss Me Deadly at 7 mins 39 secs. in from the top

Jack Nitzsche told me he really dug Michael Jackson’s song Ben the theme from the movie about a rat. I think this song says a lot about what it was like to be Michael Jackson. Here ’tis.

Here’s an interview with Franco De Gemini, he played the harmonica on the soundtrack of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West. It’s in italian but even if you don’t speak Italian you’ll get a lot out of it. What an incredible movie and what a magnificent score. I went to a screening of a restored version of this film last year, my friends at Triage Motion Picture Services did the restoration and it was beautiful. You can really see the attention to detail Leone put into making this film when you watch it on a big screen. But check out Franco and dig his playing of two notes that clash and how he bends notes and how he gave a voice to The Man With The Harmonica.

TCM has done it again, screened a somewhat obscure film I’ve never seen. The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane is a stylish thriller (sort of), a psychological fairy tale chess game, the board pieces consisting of a precocious blonde angel, sexy, innocent brilliant, deadly, an evil Prince, sadistic, pederast, coward, bully, with pretensions of refined debauchery, a teen aged limping magician, complete with top hat and cape, accomplice, lover, confidant, defender of his lady’s virtue, a large village policeman, slow, good natured, (later to write Jacques Brel is alive and living in Paris) and a racist Queen of a landlady, driving in her Bentley like the wicked witch.

Beautifully directed and photographed TLGWLDTL feels like a EuroHorror film, not quite a giallo ( no black gloved killers) but definitely closer to the Italian style of filmmaking than the American. Complete with a glimpse of a nude 13 year old Jodie Foster ( really her older sister Connie, body doubling her) that was cut out of the American release. Martin Sheen is excellent as the pervert neighbor who covets Jodie’s nubile body, but Jodie is amazing, a captivating, mesmerizing performance that dispels the incredulity this tale could easily raise. It’s worth watching sheerly for her genius. She has a magnetic, feral/angelic quality that makes it hard to take your eyes off her. The camera loves her would be one way to express it but it seems to me that some people can project their thoughts through the Cinema Eye (the camera lens) much more powerfully than others. Is that Acting? I think it’s more a psychic phenomena than a learned craft. The director,Nicolas Gessner, a Hungarian, does an excellent job. A true Euro director. He understands Film and manipulates it beautifully. One of the things I look for in a great filmmaker is a memorable image for the last shot of a film. True Cinema creators always have this, and this movie has a beaut.

The score is interesting, Chopin concerto played as source from a record, and wah wah guitar funk, so 70’s, another aspect that draws comparison with the Italian thrillers of that era. This film also serves as an example of how to make an excellent film with basically one location and only a few actors, it’s a great lesson in restrained resource filmmaking. It was based on a novel and the author(Laird Koenig) wrote the screenplay, so there was a lot of thought put into the story before the cameras rolled, you can tell. It won a Sci Fi award but I think Jodie should have gotten an Oscar for her work.

This is a killer clip of an orchestra in Italy playing the theme from Italia A Mano Armata (A Special Cop In Action, USA) an incredible piece of music by Franco Micalizzi. I have a story about this particular tune. I was working as an editor on Kill Bill. One day Quentin tells me that two great Poliziotto’s are playing at The American Cinematheque that night. So we go and see them, they were great. Italia A Mano Armata and Roma A Mano Armata. Cut to a few months ago. I’m working on Death Proof, QT cuts in a piece of music in the big car chase, it’s Italia A Mano Armata! He tells me he’s been wanting to use that music ever since we saw the films at The Cinematheque during Kill Bill! Enjoy! Have a glass of Nebbiolo!

I just found this video on YouTube. I directed, shot, and edited it for my pal Daniele Luppi. It’s a music video set to his tune Fetish Quartet from his album An Italian Story. Daniele did the score for my film One Night With You and his album features performances by a few of the same legendary musicians he employed on the soundtrack, mainly Alessandro Alessandroni and Antonello Vannucchi. It’s a great album, check it out. By the way Daniele has been busy working with Gnarls Barkley on some amazing tracks. Keep your ears open for their next collaboration.

I watched The Asphalt Jungle again after not seeing it for a long time. It’s an influential movie. Especially to Jean Pierre Melville. It might even be his favorite film.

A Street Out Of Melville

The DVD was part of a film noir collection and include some interesting extras, first was an introduction by the man himself, John Huston. It must have been filmed right after the film was made, it’s in B+W and Huston looks like he’s in his late 40’s. He says the movie is all about the characters, summing up with something like ” you might not like them but I think you’ll find them fascinating”. Now that’s my kind of movie!

The City=Hell
And the movie really is all about the characters, the way it’s filmed, the action, the details, it all serves to illuminate these beings, their strengths and their weaknesses or “Vice”. From the opening frames, the MGM logo with the roaring lion, the music creates a sense of foreboding, dread. The score is by Miklos Rozsa, it sets the mood and then there’s almost no score until the end. But it works very well. Melville did not use much music in his crime dramas, perhaps influenced by this. The first scenes are shot early on a foggy morning in what looks like Bunker Hill. “Crook Town” according to Raymond Chandler. A patrol car prowls the streets like a rouge shark hunting for the scent of blood. A figure ducks behind a pillar, it’s Dix, the magnificent Sterling Hayden in what I believe is his greatest role.

He’s One Intimidating Fellow

He’s pulled in by the cops and put in a line up. But he intimidates the eyewitness, staring him down with murder in his eye, and the corrupt cop can’t out intimidate the guy so Dix walks. We are introduced to a group of criminals, an underworld association of safe crackers, wheelmen, hooligans, brains, bookies, and a high priced mouthpiece.

Lon The Mouthpiece and Cobby The Bookie

Also a rough police commissioner, he tears up the corrupt Lt. Ditrich’s ass in an early meeting. I can’t help compare this angry top cop to the Inspector in Melville’s Le Circle Rouge. But the Inspector is more cynical, sure everyone is corrupt while the american is still believing in some, still naive in a way that feels distinctly american. Dix to me is the hero of this piece. He is the post war, traumatized American male. He dreams of the Kentucky horse farm he grew up on. How great it was, his only goal in life is to get enough money to buy it back and to do that he must struggle in the dirty city, the asphalt jungle.

Doll loves Dix, The Only Guy Who Treated her Square

He tells Doll, his taxi dancing girlfriend, of his life back in Kentucky, of a particular Black Colt, the best horse they ever raised, and how everything went bad one year, the corn crop failed, the colt broke his leg and had to be shot, and his father died whereby they lost the farm. He is every American, naive, not understanding the horror that can overtake them at any moment. I’m referring to WWII and the devastating effect it had on our collective psyches. Dix just wants to get back home but as Doc Riedenschneider and Thomas Wolfe would tell him, you can’t go home again. Home to Dix is innocence, clean water, air, 30 acres of blue grass, heaven.

Doc, The Big Brain

Anyway this is a caper movie , a brilliant plan by the “Doc” (Sam Jaffe). Interestingly played as a German complete with accent. A mastermind, he’s figured out this heist down to the smallest detail. Unfortunately when you add violence to the mix, things can go wrong and they do. Huston keeps the action simple and real. I love his fight scenes. My favorite is the bar fight in The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, when Bogie and Tim Holt take on Barton MacLane. You feel the struggle, the brutality just like a real fight, it ain’t pretty.

Dix Slugs The Watchman, His Gun Hits The Floor and Goes Off. The Safecracker with a New Baby catches it in the Gut. Just Unlucky, I guess.

The Doc’s vice is chicks, young, beautiful babes. Huston sets this up with a revealing detail. Doc can’t help scope a girly calendar when left alone in the bookie joint.

Doc’s Vice

James Whitmore plays Gus, the hunchback wheelman. He likes Dix, going out of his way to pay Dix’s gambling debt, to keep Dix from pulling another heist.

Gus The Hunch Loves Cats

Louis Calhern is Uncle Lon, the crooked lawyer that lives beyond his means and Marilyn Monroe is Angela, Uncle Lon’s plaything. Man is she sexy, just the way she shifts around on a divan makes your temperature rise.

Marilyn Sleeps On Uncle Lon’s Couch

The movie is shot beautifully. A lot of low angle two shots with one character in the foreground that show the ceiling of the room, creating a claustrophobic sense of everyone being trapped in little boxes, Dix’s room, the bookie joint, Gus’s luncheonette. Greg Toland and Orson Welles shocked the film world by showing ceilings in Citizen Kane. Sets were usually built without ceilings, a throwback to silent days when light came from glass roofed studios. Huston took that idea and ran with it. Maybe the ceiling represents the city, especially to Dix who grew up on a farm, outdoors with the sky for a roof. Harold Rossen did a great job, so atmospheric. It’s true Noir camerawork, with characters facing the camera as another speaks behind them. Rossen was nominated for an Oscar for Cinematography but lost out toThe Third Man! Gee, were movies better then?

Classic Noir Composition

And as the film progresses and the only characters still on the loose are Dix and Doll, Huston moves into Close Ups.

Huston moves in closer

Now that he’s got the audience invested in these people he shoves them in your face. It works like gangbusters.

And Closer

Another thing, watch the heist carefully. Where another director would focus on the drill bits and tools, Huston keeps us on the faces, the heist is portrayed purely through character.

The Heist Plays Out In Faces

There are a lot of little details about everybody that creates more 3 dimensional beings out of them. The fact that the safe cracker just had a baby, that Gus loves cats, that Lon has a sick wife. Backstory for everyone. The sets are great too, bare lightbulbs, pints of whiskey, dirty glasses. It gets under your skin. There’s a street at the begining that looks exactly like one in Melville’s Le Samourai. This nighttime world of people knocking on each other’s doors at 3AM, Melville’s milieu. Also, horses play a big part in Huston’s films. Reflections In A Golden Eye and The Misfits come to mind immediately. Towards the end of Le Doulous Belmondo stops off at a barn and checks out his horse before heading up to the main house where his killer is awaiting him. Is this an homage to Huston’s horse obsession? Quentin Tarantino has said that Melville did for the Crime Film what Leone did for the Western. I guess so, took elements from the Hollywood films they admired, stylized the heck out of them and revitalized a genre. This is one of Huston’s top two films, the other being The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. In the end Dix makes it back to his farm, he gets to lie in the green grass under the beautiful sky surrounded by the horses he loved.

He Loved Horses More Than Anything

But he had to pay a high price, the price we all have to pay to get to Heaven.

Heaven