Here is an incredible cut out animated film that blows all others away! Sheer inventiveness, entertainment, fun , mystery, excitement etc.
Obviously influential to such filmmakers as Terry Gilliam and Harry Smith, these masters of the genre were giants of World Animation.
Check out this brilliant film from these early avant grade Polish filmmakers, it’s obviously a huge influence on Polanski’s great Two Men and a Wardrobe. More to come on the wonders of Polish Cinema and magical animation.
Compare it yourself!
OK here’s a weird one for you fans of Film Forno. Charlie Chan At Treasure Island, actually a pretty cool movie, directed by the super genius of genre filmmaking Norman Foster. Foster directed the amazing Mr. Moto films with Peter Lorre, also Zorro Tv show for Disney, episodes of Batman, and was greatly admired by boy genius Orson Welles , who brought him to RKO to work on some projects. Anyway it turns out that this film was a favorite of the infamous Zodiac killer of San Francisco. According to a book on Zodiac by Robert Graysmith, Leigh Allen (Graysmith has pegged him as Zodiac) loved this film as a boy. It takes place in San Francisco, it features a villan named Dr. Zodiac, who answers the phone ” This is Zodiac speaking.”
Dr. Zodiac
Zodiac Killer
And Chan says of him” is not ordinary criminal. He is a man of great ego. Criminal egoist find pleasure in laughing at police.” Words that fit the later Zodiac exactly! The Treasure Island in the title was a man made island north of Yerba Buena Island, constructed for the 1939 S.F. World’s Fair.
A lot of the action takes place there. Later it was converted into a naval barracks and base. Leigh Aleen spent time there as a youth as his father was an officer.
But even without the strange Zodiac connection the film is worth checking out. Very atmospheric and featuring Ceasar Romero who would later play the Joker on TV’s Batman, maybe re-uniting with Norman Foster as well.
Watch it for yourself and see courtesy of YouTube.
Here is the trailer for a documentary I saw on Netflix. It examines the relationship between Truffaut and Godard and places it in a historical context. It’s very informative and worth watching. It ends without touching on a very interesting point though, late in life after these two geniuses were on the outs, hadn’t spoken in years, Godard wrote to Truffaut. He need to sell Breathless, his breakthrough film, to raise money for a new project. The only problem was Truffaut had written the scenario and was therefore a part owner of the film. Godard needed him to sign off on the sale which Truffaut did, helping out the former friend that he now “hated”. If you are interested in the New Wave of 50+ years ago, check it out.
< 
< 
< 
I found this on Youtube. It’s a great story and more common than you would think. Hollywood logistics. But Rey is excellent in the role, the contrast between the sophisticated European enjoying a gourmet meal while Popeye is outside in the rain on stakeout, drinking bad coffee is delicious. So hats off to Friedkin for being open to making a mistake work for him. an important tool in the bag of tricks of any artist.
<
Look at this amazing color still from the production of Touch Of Evil, how cool, it makes it seem like it could be happening today not 57 years ago. That alley is probably still there in Venice, CA. Everybody talks about the opening shot, which I love, but the shot that also blows my mind is in the love nest apartment, where Quinlan plants the dynamite in the bathroom, check that out, it’s another very, very long take and the overlapping dialog plays like a radio play. It’s so masterfully done you don’t realize you’ve just watched a 5 minute take (or whatever legnth it is.) Watch it with the sound off then you can pay attention to the staging, there’s a lot of off camera dialog that directs your attention outside the frame. As Claude Chabrol said”Off screen dialog is extremely powerful.”
Another side note, I recently re-watched Godards Alphaville, Akim Tamiroff is in it as well as Toch Of Evil. In TOE he winds up dead with his tongue grotesquely protruding from his mouth, in Alphaville he keeps sticking out his tongue in the scene in his hotel room with the Seductress 3rd class and Lemmy Caution. Did Godard direct him to do that as a reference to TOE? The Cahiers du Cinema gang were the first to praise Welles movie as a masterpiece, the studio didn’t like it. He was a bit too far ahead of his time once again.
Here is a performance by my old pal Boone and his pal Steve Buscemi, this is where these two great actors got started, East Village guerilla theater. They had a big following back in the day. Check it out!
Here’s a clip put together from Vivian Kubrick’s behind the scenes footage on FMJ.
I’ve been thinking about this film lately so I watched a few clips on Youtube, I have a Japanese import dvd somewhere but I haven’t run across it in a while. The shots in the party scene are so amazing, so fluid, so space delicious , I don’t think their baroque splendor was reached until Fellini’s 8 1/2 and this was Welles 2nd film! The interesting sequence of Joseph Cotten trying on different types of clothing, shoes, hats illustrating the evolution of sartorial styles is unique in Cinema. The wonderful opening shot of the house and the horse drawn carriage that comes by and the orchestrated movement in the frame is unequalled in timing, simplicity, complexity. It’s not boring one shot that doesn’t move with a kind of Victorian vignetting, incredible. I read some where that Welles, enfant terrible of radio, recorded the dialog for the big dance scene as a radio play, worked with the actors till the timing was perfect, then played back the dialog on the set as they filmed and the actors had to say their lines in sync with the recording! It seems impossible but the scenes are obviously(to me) dubbed. And these are some intricately choreographed moving shots! With overlapping dialog no less. It really is unbelievable.
The way characters move from light into darkness, become silhouettes, then are illuminated again, so beautiful, tenebrae is the term for this dramatic lighting effect. The wonderful performances, all great.
The movie does have a kind of a downer tone that was out of sync with it’s time, WWII and all, probably why it tested poorly, but it was ahead of it’s time, it plays better now. Watch Joseph Cotten’s speech about the impact of the automobile on civilization, brilliant .
The idiotic regime that replaced Schaffer at RKO hated Welles, so did a lot of people in Hollywood, they resented this upstart and they didn’t understand him so they tried to destroy him. And they did a pretty good job, even though it was at a high price to themselves! If they had not reclaimed the silver from the original negative of Amersons by melting it down, they would have been able to release the Directors cut in theaters all over the world, on VHS, dvd, Blu Ray. They would have made a fortune from it. As a fortune was made from Citizen Kane over the years. I can think of no other lost film I would rather see than Welles cut of Ambersons. It’s like a dream, the idea of going into a theater and seeing the whole thing. Welles went to Rio to shoot “IT’s All True” before Ambersons was completed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had persuaded his friend to take on this project to foster good feelings between South America and the USA, keep them from joining the Fascists. I read that Robert Wise sent a work picture and track down to Rio for Welles to watch and comment on. No one seems to know what happened to that print. Could it still be down there in rusty cans, in storage somewhere, in an old warehouse. The heat and humidity might have turned the nitrate film stock into highly explosive goo but maybe there’s a chance it was put in a cellar somewhere, a vault, and it exists. Lying there in the darkness ,the plastic realization of a young man’s genius, like frozen thoughts, Donovan’s Brain in it’s fish tank, waiting.
Welles on the Ambersons set, Robert Wise the editor 2nd from left. Welles blamed him for the hatchet job
Ambersons was one of the favorite films of Jean Pierre Melville. He speaks of it in a book of interviews I once read. He comments on a scene between Joseph Cotten and Anne Baxter (playing his daughter). How Mellville remembers seeing the “cottony trees” they were walking through even though the scene is in a close 2shot and you don’t get a good view of the surroundings, Welles created this unseen world in the viewers minds by the actors voices, a direct link to Radio.
I might as well mention Tim Holt. Son of Cowboy star Jack Holt ( a Jack Holt Western is playing at a theater Tim and Anne Baxter walk by in the film)
Holt never really wanted to be an actor but he was born into it, Hollywood Royalty, a member of the Beverly Hills polo club. This was a big year for Tim, he appeared in Ambersons and The Treasure Of the Sierra Madre, not bad!
Welles did not appear in Ambersons but he did the voice over, and narrated the credits at the end, one of the first times a film appeared with no letters on the screen (other than the RKO logo and the main title). Once again Radio rears it’s antennaed head.
Future filmmakers beware! Never walk away from your film before it’s finished! Even if FDR and Rockefeller are beseeching you to do so! This action on Welles part not only “ruined his best film” but put a huge dent in his fledgling yet stratospheric career. A pattern that repeated itself throughout his films, he left Touch Of Evil to go down to Mexico to set up a new project, but that film fared much better than Ambersons, they even recut it following a 100 plus page memo Welles left behind. Oh well if only somebody stumbling out of a World Cup match wanders by mistake into an old film vault and kicks over a box and cans marked RKO spill out otherwise we’re left with the image from the end of Citizen Kane but it’s not Rosebud that’s consigned to the flames, it’s the missing negative of The Magnificent Ambersons.
I just heard from someone that knew Lowell Grant that he sculpted the original Bob’s Big Boy character that stands in front of their restaurants. Crazy! Lowell really got around! Thanks to Hutton Wilkinson for the information.
Here’s some interesting documentaries on that super genius Orson Welles that I discovered on Youtube. They are really worth watching, the one about Citizen Kane demonstrates how little Orson knew about film grammar when he arrived in Hollywood. But he surrounded himself with talented people and absorbed everything like a sponge.
Here’s a piece about the restoration of Touch Of Evil.
Jacques Demy came to L.A. in 1968 and made a film, Model Shop. I knew nothing about this film when I watched it and I suggest you watch it in the same state of innocence, you will be rewarded with a delicious surprise. Like other European directors who came to Hollywood to make a film, Demy finds the extraordinary in our ordinary, beauty in plain sight, yet invisible to most Americans who take it for granted or in the case of L.A. (where Model Shop is filmed) downright hate it. The comparison that comes to mind is Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a much maligned film that I like. Both of these films were flops at the Box Office but so what, they capture a Los Angeles at a point in time like a fly trapped in amber.
With the sucess of Easy Rider and other counter culture films, producers were desperate to cash in on the youth craze and gave young directors like Demy a shot. Anouk Aimee is wonderful, so beautiful, so feminine, so mysterious.
Do yourself a favor , do not watch the trailer or read anything about Model Shop, just watch it. It’s photographed by an ex-pat Frenchman who moved to Hollywood, Michel Hugo and he does a wonderful job, the Technicolor portrait of L.A. is stunning, and the locations are great. It looks like they filmed in the real places in the story. I met Michel many years ago when he was teaching a cinematography class. He also shot the 1st Kolcack, The Night Stalker, one of the best TV movies of all time. Gary Lockwood is good, enigmatic, handsome. All American. He was fresh off his big role in Kubrick’s 2001,
Demy wanted an unknown actor he found, Harrison Ford but the studio said no, here is some footage from a screen test Ford did for Demy.
I guess Anouk was reprising her character from Demy’s first film Lola, but I haven’t seen it yet so I’ll report back after checking it out. Anyway take a trip down Memory Lane, the 60’s , psychedelia, Vietnam, the music of Spirit and check out Model Shop.
Bonus Added Update! I just watched the latest episode of Mad Men and it opens with Don Draper watching a movie in a theater, and it’s Model Shop! Crazy man!
