Some Came Running

"Wait, what...?"

"...are you the ONLY movie blogger who's NOT going to Comic Con, Glenn?"

Probably not, but thanks for asking, Franco Nero and David Hess.

The original idea was to run the reverse shot from this scene, with a more provocative text, but it is SO not safe for work that it would have been kind of counterproductive to do so.

Explication available upon request, in comments. Although it'll be more fun for me if someone else provides it. 

Unhip priest

Because I got nothing today, really, I thought I'd share some anecdotal material which you might find diverting. Last Sunday I completed my second film role, a snip of a bit of a cameo for a micro-budgeted indie whose director I think is a terrific and under-known talent. For reasons known only to himself, said director thought it would be cool to dress me up as a priest. (Perhaps he's doing me a favor, giving me a chance to show some range and do "holy" after going full sleazoid for The Girlfriend Experience.) This is a pretty easy thing to do, as it turns out—get the shirt, and the collar, and you're good to go, in a verisimilitude-boosting minimalist kind of way. 

We shot in the general vicinity of my neighborhood, and it was a great deal of fun, and it took hardly no time at all. Afterwards, my auteur told me I was free to keep the shirt and collar. This really blew my mind. I thought of the old Television song "Venus de Milo:" "Then Richie, Richie said, 'Hey man let's dress up like cops, think of what we could do!" Which line is of course followed with "Something, something, it said 'You'd better not.'"

Nevertheless. My Catholic guilt (The Force is strong in this one, believe you me) wrestled for a bit with my impish side. I thought it could be hilarious to park myself at an outdoor table at my local, array a bunch of Jãger shots in front of me, and down them one after the other, muttering (or shouting—hard to say what would produce the better effect) "The power of C****t compels you!" before each swallow. And asking "What the f**k are you looking at?" every time I received a disapproving glance. Comedy gold, I guarantee it, but with no one around to record it, what would be the point? So I contented myself with merely walking a few blocks down Court Street in the shirt, but even that gave me the willies after a little while. Yes, "something" surely did say "you'd better not"—that something being the reasonably sure knowledge that I was putting myself in a position where I could get the shit kicked out of me and completely deserve it. 

Of course I am hardly the first reprobate raised within the church to have indulged in such shenanigans...

 

Continental chicks in their underwear

Geez, this blog seems to be developing a sub-theme that it seems I'd be well-advised to nip in the bud. I'll work on that. In the meantime, above is the great Dita Parlo (whose name was most egregiously taken in vain by Madonna in what was, to my mind, the woman's most unforgivable sin), several years before VIgo's L'Atalante, failing to understand what's expected of her when she takes a job at a massive women's department store in Julien Duvivier's very diverting 1930 Au bonheur des dames. The picture is the subject of today's Foreign DVD Report, so named this week because the French disc of this film is generously region-free. At The Auteurs'. 

I believe this only strengthens my point...

See here.

EXHIBIT A: The "Unrated Fully Exposed Edition" Blu-ray disc of Miss March, with a cardboard band covering what is implied to be the naked torso of its female lead, former Eva Mendes stand-in (that's just a guess) Raquel Alessi.

EXHIBIT B: Close-up of cardboard band "warning," advising consumer not to open package in the vicinity of a wife or a girlfriend or any such thing. Oooh! Naughty.

EXHIBIT C: The Miss March package without band, revealing an entirely ordinary—some might even argue rather unimpressive by the standard clearly aspired to—shot of Ms. Alessi in a bikini, looking rather like she could hurt you if she wanted. 

Some will argue that anyone dumb enough to buy a copy of Miss March probably deserves the let down. And it goes without saying that Alessi does not, as the British put it, get her kit off in the film, either.

Tales from the Warner Archives #2: "My Blood Runs Cold" (Conrad, 1968)

In the midst of working on what my man Jack Torrance would refer to as "a new writing project," I come upon a road block which I decide would be best transcended via distraction. A 1965 serial-killer thriller with a supernatural edge starring Troy Donohue and Joey Heatherton and directed by William Conrad would appear to be just the thing.

But My Blood Runs Cold turns out to be quite a bit, well, tonier than its particulars would make it appear. Granted, its opening minutes—a 19th-century flashback that Conrad places a scrim of optically-printed parchment behind—is on the goofily faux-refined side, and who does that plummy but gruff voice reciting poetry belong to...

...but our own auteur himself. (Personal note: Ever since watching Bride of Frankenstein together years ago, My Lovely Wife and I only ever refer to the above Romantic poet as "George Gordon, Lord Byron!", exclamation point included.) And the sight of Joey Heatherton in period dress does give one a real who-knows-what-to-expect presentiment. 

But the picture rather quickly settles in to a mode of contemporary melodrama not that far removed from the work Donahue did with Delmer Daves just years earlier, and then-sex-kitten Heatherton is, to my eye, a more creditable performer than Connie Stevens. I know, I know—you're gonna have to see it to believe it. Heatherton plays a standard-issue self-destructive young heiress who meets "drifter" Donahue (who really puts on his best Rock Hudson voice here) after knocking him off his motorcycle in a road accident. Donahue's character calls himself Ben, insists on calling Heatherton's Julie "Barbara," and has an interesting story about how the two were lovers a century ago. Julie's dad, a ruthless businessman played by Barry Sullivan, doesn't like it, and neither does Julie's basically-okay-but-sort-of-spineless paramour Harry (Nicolas Coster). Julie's aunt (Jeanette Nolan in faux Agnes Moorehead mode), on the other hand, is intrigued, particularly because this stranger has all of the facts about a generations-ago family romance dead on. 

Conrad refuses to overplay the supernatural hoo-ha aspect of the scenario (the screenplay is by John Mantley, from a story by John Meredyth Lucas) and hones in on the poor-little-rich-girl domestic dramatics in a fashion that's both fluid and slightly, slyly, self-conscious. "Father, please, you sound like something out of East Lynne," Heatherton's character protests at one point. Even when one very real corpse turns up, Conrad's perspective is one of near-disinterest. One might expect such an approach to yield the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water, but instead one is kept pleasingly off-balance, at least up until the sadly inevitable "he's-both-a-delinquent-AND-misunderstood" plot reveal/climax. 

Which is not to say that the picture entirely lacks in the lurid perversity department, where I was expecting it to deliver most. There's one scene in which Heatherton, doing some restoration work on a family beach house, turns on the radio and starts doing an entirely unmotivated dance number to some fake Jobim/Gilberto grooves. Conrad, who by his friend Anthony Burgess' account was as much an ass-chaser as he was a Shakespearean, begins the sequence thusly:

Then Joey really gets into it: 

...Endust, take me away!

Donahue's impassive reaction shot (he's snuck in and is watching) is a real keeper:

No, don't get too excited there, fella. 

Thoroughly minor stuff, to be sure, but entirely worthwhile for genre fiends, Bill Conrad boosters, and doubters of Joey Heatherton's acting chops. You WILL believe!

Katherine Heigl is not going to let you see her breasts, ever

"...and that goes for you, too, Butler!"

I should be quick to point out that the above is merely an observation, not a complaint. While I do, of course, suffer from the affliction of the typical heterosexual male in that I would raise no objections should Katherine Heigl decide to change her position on this matter, prudence and good taste and other factors compel me to aver that I do not consider the pursuit of a gander at Ms. Heigl's bared rack to be a force that gives me meaning. That said, I bring up the issue because I see that Ms. Heigl has another R-rated "raunchy" comedy due in theaters, which, I see from the commercials, contains a vibrator joke that was stolen either from The Sweetest Thing or The Naked Gun 2 1/2; The Smell of Fear, I can't quite tell which. And I see that the R rating is "for strong sexual content," rather than nudity. And I recall that it was Heigl, in Knocked Up, who, at least to the best of my knowledge, gifted cinema with the exceptionally dubious notion that smokin' hot chicks love nothing better than to keep their brassieres on while doin' the monkey. 

The question of who gets naked in Hollywood product—not to mention the how and the why—has as much to do with hierarchy and power as it does with personal comfort level and such. See, for instance, Sarah Jessica Parker relative to her costars in Sex and the City, both the series and the very wonderful film spun off from it. The makers of Knocked Up would, I am sure, loved to have had Heigl go topless in that film, just as the makers of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (who are not unrelated to the makers of Knocked Up) would have preferred to have Kristen Bell ride Russell Brand sans bikini top in that film. Factors in their inability to achieve such aims include the actresses' agents and what clout they wield, the fact that both performers were "transitioning" from network (or at least non-pay-cable) television fare to cinema, and a post-Maxim lad culture that arguably values withholding—a bit of tease, you know—more than the full reveal.  

Still, in Heigl's case her coyness carries a bit of an extra frisson, as it were. For who among us can forget her thoroughly committed participation in 1994's My Father The Hero, a picture that, its PG rating notwithstanding, makes Judd Apatow's films look like sermonettes? The film's constant intimations of pedophilia and incest were so unstinting, so crass, so nudge-you-in-the-ribs-slimy that they ceased to be intimations at all. And through it all there's Heigl, insouciant in a one-piece bathing suit with a thong back. 

The reaction shots of Gerard Depardieu, as Heigl's father, are an interesting study in a particular manifestation of the Kuleshov effect. 

My Father The Hero is that rare and repellent bird, a mainstream Hollywood picture that is more pornographic than an actual porno. And it certainly gave pervs of all stripe the hope that Heigl, as uninhibited as she played in it, would follow in the noble footsteps of Linda Blair and Allysa Milano and others too numerous (and in some cases sad) to name, and get out those ta-tas for the lens at the nearest legal opportunity, or post-legal-opportunity financial crisis.

But it was not to be. I imagine the fellows at Mr. Skin would call this a case of "jailbait and switch." 

In the swim

My Topics/Questions/Exercises of the week are up over at The Auteurs', and I must say we've got a couple of doozies over there. Jump in!

Affinities

The Bed Sitting Room, Richard Lester, 1969

Bubble, Steven Soderbergh, 2005

The men in my little girl's life

Last week Jeffrey Wells posted a bit of a sneak preview of Criterion's upcoming DVD and Blu-ray disc of Roman Polanski's fabulous 1965 Repulsion, and I was kind of amused by the "two cents" put in by one commenter: "[Catherine] Deneuve's character is kind of a drippy pain in the ass." It's funny, because, you know, he sounds exactly like an American version of one of the male characters in the film itself!

More than just a tale of madness, Repulsion is the story of a woman who breaks apart under the weight of sexist oppression that better-adjusted females contend with and largely shrug off on a day-to-day basis. I'll leave it to others to ruminate on the irony of Polanski having made not one, but two of the best, most sensitive pictures about how a patriarchal society can crush women: this one and Tess, filmed in 1979 after Polanski's departure from the United States.

The cracked porcelain beauty of Deneuve's Carol is fascinatingly refracted by the varieties of ugliness embodied by the film's male characters, all of whose portraits are etched in acid. You'd almost think Polanski was man-bashing or something! 

Gentle readers, meet...

Mike Pratt as "The Workman"

This rough and ready sort, standing outside a tent that leads to the underground lair where he does his mysterious toil, ogles Carol as she hurries through a London intersection, drawling "How about a bit of the other, then?" He will return in Carol's nightmares and daymares of rape and violation later in the film.

Ian Hendrie as "Michael"

The boyfriend of Carol's sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). A smug, faux-sophisticated, peevish piglet who refers to Carol as "Cinderella." Rude bastard: takes up all the shelf space in the bathroom and leaves his toothbrush in Carol's water glass. Also, he should grow some fucking hair. Bonus points: Sorry, girls, he's married!

Mr. Lonely

I take a look at the great Nicholas Ray/Humphrey Bogart/Gloria Grahame collaboration In A Lonely Place, from a spirituous perspective, over at The Auteurs'. A great new 35 mm print will be screening at New York's Film Forum beginning Friday; at the 7:40 p.m. screening that evening, Ray's wife Susan will introduce the film.