As with Fear Chamber, House was co-directed by Jack Hill and Juan Ibanez and co-stars south of the border sexpot Julissa. A murdered girl has been found by local villagers and, just like another recent victim, her eyes have been torn out.  Upon hearing the news, Matthias Morteval (Karloff) is mightily upset.  His friend and doctor, Emery (Angel Espinoza), tries to simultaneously caution and calm Matthias.  Dr. Emery reminds Matthias of similar murders in Vienna, involving Matthias’ brother Hugo.  Before a painting of his late father, Matthias pulls himself together and vows to rid their garden of the evil weed that has sprung up.  As the camera pans, we see that the eyes have been cut out of the fatherly figure in the painting.

With the aid of Dr. Emery, Matthias calls all of his relatives to spend the weekend at Morhenge Mansion.  Most of the greedy relatives believe the aged Matthias is going to include them in his will.  Lucy Durant (Julissa) is Matthias’ niece and, although she is not given to avarice, she  too arrives for the weekend with her fiancee, the bland Charles (Andres Garcia), who also happens to be an inspector investigating the recent murders of young girls.

Given Karloff’s health, his portrayal of Matthias is surprisingly sprightly, and he imbues the character with eccentricity, cynicism and a degree of empathy. Unfortunately, his co-stars are all painfully amateurish.  Among the relatives are Ivar (Quintin Bulnes doing his worst Peter Lorre imitation), Cordella (Beatriz Baz), and Morgenstern (Manual Alvarado).  Matthias greets them from behind his ominous organ (ala Dr. Phibes), insults them, and issues a warning about the family curse: a genetic “shrinking of the brain” that causes madness and murderous tendencies, such as those his late brother Hugo suffered.  Hugo died after gouging out his own eyes (so, that’s what happened to Ray Milland’s X!).

After Matthias retires for the evening, Lucy is introduced to the family vocation: the Mortevals are the last toymakers to the king, but neither Fred Astaire nor Mickey Rooney are anywhere in sight.  The Mortevals make killer toys, diabolical toys!  Toys which sadistic kings used to eliminate their enemies.  He!  He!  He!

Of course, with the introduction of a mansion full of life-size Chucky dolls one can expect the body count to rise considerably.  In this, the film does not disappoint; but there are plenty of other disappointments on hand.  Boris seemingly dies off early in the film, leaving us alone with the rest of the cast, and that’s not a good thing.

The slipshod cinematography makes much of the film quite difficult to see.  On the other hand, we hear far too much vapid dialogue which bogs down an epic middle section.  Ideas are introduced, then dropped.  The dialogue is equally wretched, but even worse is the inept, shrieking score.

Fortunately, Matthias’ death turns out to have been greatly exaggerated and Boris returns, not a moment too soon, for a grand, albeit  brief, ham-fisted, fiery finale.  Poor, mad uncle Matthias!  The finale, with the red-robed Boris madly pounding away at his organ of death, almost makes this endeavor worthwhile.  Almost.  The surviving protagonists do get the traditional escape from the collapsing ruins, even if you really can’t see them through the poor lighting.

House of Evil is so haphazardly composed that any potential is squandered.  This first of Karloff’s films with Hill and Ibanez (and the only one released during the actor’s life), it at least mantains the facade of being a standard period horror yarn.  Yet, in doing, House of Evil only winds up an aesthetic cousin to Ed Wood‘s Bride of the Monster (1955). The attempt, in both films, to adhere to genre cliches actually undercuts their potential for inspired lunacy.  The younger siblings of Karloff’s Mexican quadruplet show no qualms towards anecdotal waywardness.

This series is not going to be a revisionist look at those six films.  They are awful within the accepted meaning of the word.  Several of them, however, are downright bizarre products of their time, which now might be looked at as examples of naive surrealism.  The films are: House of Evil (1968), Fear Chamber (1968), Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), Cauldron of Blood (1970), Isle of the Snake People (1971), and Alien Terror (1971).

Fear Chamber ranks as one of the weirdest of the lot, and that is saying much.  It begins with pseudo-torture of scantily clad women.  The scene is soaked in garish sixties colors and a “bleepy” soundtrack.  The various female victims are tormented by a goateed chap, wearing turban, sunglasses (in an underground cavern), white gloves, and black turtleneck.  With “all the macabre horror of  Edgar Allan Poe” these poor sixties chicks are subjected to hot coals and boiling cauldrons.

The scene shifts to the crevice of a volcano where two scientists are “worried about strange frequencies!”  Psychotronic narration abounds. “I can’t believe that there exists an underground form of life.  If we find it we can electronically understand their messages!” one scientist tells the other (Julissa), who happens to be the daughter of Dr. Mantell (Karloff).

Karloff performs a subdued variation of his mad scientist archetype.  His scenes were shot in L.A., by Hill (who also scripted—sort of), while Ibanez shot the remaining scenes (and actors) in Mexico.  Karloff was wheelchair-bound at the time, so most of his scenes are staged behind an office desk or lying in bed.  Dr. Mantell heads the expedition which discovers the mysterious life form at the center of the earth! “It’s alive!”  It’s a rubbery rock of pure crystallized intelligence which, for the good of humanity, needs blood—but not just any blood!  When Baron Boris von Frankenstein hooks the rock up to his giant office computer, he discovers that the alien desires the “pure” blood of frightened young women, which will enable it to impart priceless information, mathematical formulae, and secrets of the universe!

So, naturally, Dr. Mantell’s assistants, a dwarf  (Santanon) and the scarred hunchback brute Roland (Yerye Beirute) go after buxom girls, clad only in their bras and panties.  Their job is to put the babes in a state of fright.  It’s pretty easy to do when you have a created Fear Chamber of tarantulas, pools of bubbling blood,  snakes, lizards, watery tentacles, hawks, skeletons, convenient cages, and shifting secret chambers at your disposal.  The sets are beautifully cheesy, with a sixties computer room adorned with reel-to-reel tape machines (providing lots of cool noises), seemingly bathed in Christmas tree color wheel lights.

Karloff and his henchman put on a mock black mass act and scare the beejeez out of a girl.  Once she passes out, Boris and gang trade their robes for hospital scrubs and do a quickie blood transfusion to the rock, who is now “happy to see them.”  The rock makes little dog whimpering noises as its being fed the red substance!

The only problem is the rock only makes empty promises, giving no real secrets.  As Karloff’s assistant says so poetically, “I don’t trust that thing.”  Roland bonds with the rock.  The rock bonds with the reel-to-reel computers.  The Fear Chamber employees are a tad over zealous in procuring girls.  The weird guy in the turban and gloves sneaks into girls’ bed chambers, the dwarf laughs and vanishes, and Helga the S & M assistant (Isla Vega) has equal cravings for Roland and girls, girls, girls!  All this adds up to disaster, in the form of the rock manufacturing a tentacle in order to grab girls and feed itself!  Helga could care less.  Those girls are just thieves and tramps!  Poor Boris discovers a conscience, and practically keels over.

Roland and Helga join forces and keep the supply of bikini babes a comin’.  Roland wants his rock friend to tell about the secrets of diamonds so he can be king of the world!  But, Helga warns, “you big fat idiot, it’s been lyin’ to us! There are no diamonds. Its just been sending messages, messages, messages to more of its kind,  more rocks below who want to take over the world!”

The flaming finale, incorporating stock footage of volcanoes, isn’t exactly Dr. No or even Edgar G.Ulmer, but it’s keeping in spirit with the rest of this mess of a film.  The lack of linear narrative in Fear Chamber is actually a plus.  One never walked into a 1970s chamber of horrors expecting a coherent experience.  Of course, the acting, apart from the ever-professional (but hoarse) Karloff, is, needless to say, atrocious.  Additionally, much of it is a lame excuse for late 60′s softcore vignettes, and there’s even a psychedelic rock and roll dance number with a Nancy Sinatra-esque “these boots are made for walkin’” babe in mini-skirt doing a strip tease.  On that level, this flick is a hoot, and best enjoyed as part of a baffling drive-in double feature experience.  I watched it with Mad Monster Party (1967) which, to me, made perfect sense given that both are essentially cartoons with Boris Karloff and cleavage.

Would this film retain an iota of interest without Boris’ presence?  Nah, but I’ll take this “pure” Karloffian trash over the mediocre bourgeoisie trash that Hollywood spews out weekly.  And I’ll certainly take it over the indie horror scene trash, which is rendered irredeemable without the benefit of nostalgia for a genre icon.

Surprisingly, the film has been remastered on the Elite label and it looks and sounds quite good.  It’s available on Amazon and, even on a decent label, it’s still cheaper than the snacks you just gotta have with it.

Director Gilberto Martinez Solares cast Lon Chaney Jr, clearly past his prime, as a dual mummy/wolfman which, of course, were the two characters that Chaney played most often in the 40′s Universal horror cycle.  Chaney is only briefly glimpsed as a mummy, and a rather well fed one at that.  The make-up job is something akin to a glob of silly putty.  The Professor, tired of Casimiro’s rotten blood, decides to steal the mummy for experimentation. The Doc and his assistant put the ancient Egyptian into a big Son Of Frankenstein (1939) contraption.  Briefly, a slumbering Chaney takes the place of Karloff’s monster on the table.  Lo and behold, the bandages come off and, underneath all of that, this mummy is dressed from head to toe in black just like Larry Talbot.  With the next full moon, our revived Pharaoh transforms into a Bud Westmore-like phlegmatic canine with a pronounced feathered Farrah Fawcett hairdo.  For a broad comedy there are some bloody (for its time) moments.  This Larry Talbot gorges on victims aplenty (which, I suppose, is why he looks even fatter in black fur than he does in white bandages). Among the victims are two women, something never seen in a Universal pic!  Larry dances around Casimiro a few times (just like he danced around Lou twelve years earlier) before aping out like King Kong to Valera’s Fay Wray.  The big, bad. pointy-eared Tex Avery lady killer climbs atop his building with babe in arms.  Yes, this is an amorous wolfman and, again, the movie gives us something Universal would never have resorted to (implications of bestiality, that is).

La casa del terror is only available in the Spanish language version, not that it matters.  The minimal plot is easily decipherable, if one actually desires to decipher it.  Yes, La casa del terror is a dreadful movie, but it’s unintentionally bizarre in its borrowing from virtually everything to produce a quirky, redeemable mess.  It’s certainly passable enough with a plate of cheap, store-bought cardboard pizza.

Not so with Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964), which incorporates footage from Casa that producer/director Jerry Warren mixed with The Aztec Mummy (1957-directed by Rafael Portillo) and added footage.  Warren bought the rights to the two films and, as he was apt to do, spliced them together with his own footage to produce an even more incoherent mess without once crediting Solares or Portello (making Warren a sort of prototype for more than a few contemporary indie filmmakers).  Warren’s footage looks like it was shot on a two dollar 8mm camera (my family had a better home movie camera back in the 1960s).  Ed Wood‘s films were, at least, decently photographed. What little one can make out in the “new” footage doesn’t help. Oddly, deciphering the foreign language film is an easier task than deciphering the English language atrocity. There is endless footage of a hypnotized woman in a pyramid and an aztec mummy that is the result of exchanged body fluids with the “other” mummy.  Or something like that.

It’s often joked that sex is like pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s good.  Not so with anything Jerry Warren put his hands on.  My advice with the latter movie is buy the 75 cent cardboard pizza and throw the DVD out with the irredeemable trash.

Nazario provides shelter to Beatriz’ homely prostitute sister, Andara (Rita Macedo) after she is wounded in a knife fight.  Andara has killed her rival and is hiding from local authorities.  The local Church learns of the living arrangement and accuses Nazario of improprieties.  Beatriz and Andara become Nazario’s Mary and Martha, but the paradox of the priest’s hypocrisy is that he pragmatically shuns Andara’s imaginative qualities, labeling it a “sickness.”  Yet, Bunuel invests this setup with an inviting sense of irony.  Nazario is himself the product of a delusional priestly calling.  Imagining himself to be an imitation of Christ, Nazario projects a disdain for his own welfare that is not self-contempt, but rather the publican advertising his asceticism.

In this, Nazario is a bland, literal-minded interpreter of Christ’ personality. He is unable to comprehend and assimilate the Jesus’ quixotic “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the spirit is spirit,” synthesized with the value of the messianic claim of gifted joy, abundantly imparted.

Nazario’s provision of sanctuary for his female disciples results in a house fire.  The loss of asylum and the sanction of the Church catapults the threesome into agnostic stations as they are pursued by the law.  A young village girl is believed to be healed by Nazario, despite the fact that medicine had been administered to the child before Nazario’s arrival. The three wayfarers come upon another village, ravaged with the plague.  Nazario seeks to assist a dying woman (in a scene clearly patterned after de Sade’s Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man), who refuses the priest’s impassioned and persistent offer to administer extremes unction. Rather, her dying desire is for the touch of her husband.  Much to his confusion and exasperation, Nazario’s priestly function is rendered impotent.

Nazario’s offer to join a road crew and work only for food creates a labor dispute which ends with the workers killing their foreman.  Beatriz’ mother accuses her daughter of carnal love for the priest.  Hysterical, Beatriz denies it, collapsing in a frenzy.  Of course, her fervent denial masks truth, which she belatedly realizes, rejecting her savior in favor of her abusive boyfriend.

Caught and imprisoned, Nazario encounters the two thieves on the side of his symbolic cross.  The unrepentant thief beats him.  The penitent thief confounds Nazario, telling him, “You are a good man.  I am evil, yet neither of us are of any use to the world.”  The wanderer, freed from prison, is offered a choice in the form of manna.  Nazario’s hesitant decision justifies Bunuel’s placid sympathy for the impoverished padre.

Buñuel once said that if proof of the existence of God was available, then his own approach to art and life would remain unaltered.  Simultaneously, if God were proved a complete myth, the aesthetic qualities of Buñuel’s existential letters remain the same.  Buñuel’s messages are neither Christian, nor atheist, but a synthesis.  He categorically denies the agendas of the agnostic, the seeker, the devout, and even the Surrealists in Nazarin.

There is reason Orson Welles astutely claimed that Buñuel was the most religious of all filmmakers. There is a story (most likely apocryphal—not that it matters), that a male acquaintance “caught” the famous atheist philosopher Martin Heidegger genuflecting before an icon.  Called out, Heidegger responded, “a rationalist like yourself would not understand.”  That quote could serve as a segue into Nazarin.

The Terror has finally been released in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and has rightfully received accolades for the remastering on the Blu-ray.  Unfortunately,the DVD part of the combo has had a high number of reported defects.  Regardless, the film looks beautiful in the Blu-ray transfer, rich with 1960s colors.  It finally looks nearly as good here as the excerpts we see of it in the Corman produced Targets (1968-dir. Peter Bogdanovich).  The transfer made me long to see The Terror on a drive-in cinema screen.

Seeing this film in a watchable print does reveal some merits. Besides the vibrant Gothic milieu, the film has an energetic score by Ronald Stein.  Jack Nicholson, while not the actor he would become, is better as an arrogant soldier than he was as the whiny son of the equally whiny Vincent Price in The Raven.  Another high point here is the very good performance by Boris Karloff.  It is unfortunate that Corman did not get to work with Karloff more than he did, because the actor might have been better suited to this director than was Price.  In the Poe-cycle Corman films, Price often projects a grating self-pity.  While Karloff was also a screen personality that audiences sympathized with, he was able to convey pathos in a less hand-wringing way.

As far as the script, it is surprisingly somewhat coherent for something that was slapped together.  Nicholson is Lt. Andre Duvalier, a soldier in Napoleon’s army.  Inexplicably, he gets separated from his regiment.  He sees a mysterious, beautiful woman (Sandra Knight).  He is told her name is Helene, and he attempts to follows her  into the sea.  Duvalier believes that she has committed suicide.  He is attacked by a large bird and wakes up in the home of the old witch Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) and her mute henchman Gustaf ( Jonathan Haze).  Duvalier’s search for Helene leads him to the castle of  Baron Victor Von Leppe (Karloff) who lives alone there with his servant Stefan (Dick Miller).  The Baron has a painting of Ilsa, his wife, dead now twenty years.  Shockingly (?), Ilsa looks exactly like Helene.  The nobleman has a black secret and a predictable revelation is in store, along with an unpredictable twist.

The opening sequence of Karloff descending down the castle stairs in the night is stylistically shot.  He opens a door and a skeleton pops out.  Animated birds of dread soar through the credits, enhancing the flavor.  Nicely done; except for those who prefer a coherent narrative, because there is no hidden skeleton in the film.  In this, The Terror is a bit like the pulp comic book covers which show a potentially exciting scene that never actually occurs in the story.  Not being religiously attached to linear yarn spinning, I liked the sequence.  Sandra Knight (Nicholson’s wife at the time) as the ghost of Ilsa, is beautiful, obviously pregnant in several scenes, and a distractingly bad actress.  Neumann and Haze have contagious fun with their roles.

A so-called spoiler alert (although it’s a bit nonsensical to have a spoiler alert for a fifty year old film, but in that in that I am keeping with the nonsensical spirit of The Terror): twenty years ago the Baron murdered Ilsa when he caught her bedding down the peasant Eric.  That’s a big no surprise.  Stefan disposed of Eric.  The ghost of Ilsa is exacting revenge via Katrina, who is Eric’s mother.  Stefan unloads the one genuine twist: actually, he killed the Baron and Eric has taken the nobleman’s place for the last twenty years.  That narrative bit will doubtfully sit well with the unimaginative reality-check geeks who will be quick to point out that Karloff’s Eric is at least thirty years older than his “mother,” portrayed by Neumann.

Karloff excels in the confrontation finale.  Ilsa is coercing Eric into suicide (so they can be joined together in the abode of the damned).  Eric resists, fearing eternal damnation, but finally consents with thinly veiled resignation masking glee.  Karloff does the scene justice.  Earlier, he is as good at menacingly evading Duvalier’s inquiries.

The finale is everything you would expect in this kind of product: a flooded castle (with a really bad double for Karloff) and a corpse which melts after a kiss (Sandra Knight, after Jack plants one on his wife’s lips).  The special effects add up to what looks like a gallon of butterscotch syrup poured onto her face.

Still, the legend behind this film is just plain fun, even if it’s more myth than fact, even it’s more product than art, even if it’s more entrepreneur Corman than craftsman Corman. And, hell there is Karloff!  So, if anyone within close vicinity has one of those massive TV screens and a disc of drive-in snack bar commercials, then I have got The Terror and the pizza, and we’ll imagine it’s 1963 all over again.

In actuality, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), contrary to the repeated myths, was not a millionaire banker.  He was a successful stock broker.  He did not quit his job.  The stock market crashed and he lost his job.  Gauguin, who had been a “Sunday” painter for years, felt that this was reason enough to pursue painting full time, something he had been longing to do.  It was with this that his wife left him.  Gauguin did not desert his wife and five children.  His wife rejected him after he lost his income as a stockbroker.

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak attempts to set the record straight.  “What’s to like about this man?,” Januszczak asks.  “First of all, there is the art, which needs no defense.  Gauguin painted some of the world’s most alluring woman and put them into several of the world’s most gorgeous pictures, but what I really like about him is that he did it for big and noble reasons.”  And then, most aptly, he says, “There is always more to a Gauguin than meets the eye.”  Januszczak covers those “big and noble reasons,” but falls a little short in the “more than meets the eye” comment (more on that later).

Januszczak follows Gauguin’s travels.  “Take it from me that he had guts by the barrel-load and with the life he lead, he needed them.”  Januszczak takes the viewer through Gauguin’s early history: the premature death of his father, the strict Catholic upbringing in a boarding school as Gauguin was prepped for the priesthood.  Gauguin was having none of it and, of course, he was on his way to his own brand of vocation; but first, he ran off to sail the seven seas.  After a seven year stint in the navy, the twenty-three year old Gauguin landed a job in the French Stock Exchange through the assistance of his late mother’s lover.  Gauguin remained in that position for eleven years.  During that time, he met and hurriedly married Matte.  “This was a tough woman. She smoked cigars, loved dancing and parties, expensive dresses.  She thought she was marrying an up and coming financial wiz kid.  What she didn’t know was that her Gauguin had a terrible secret.  He had got interested in art!”  Most fatefully, Gauguin met numerous painters, including Pissarro and Cezanne.  For Matte, this would prove to be a Pandora’s box.  Gauguin’s great granddaughter, Mette, expands on this: “I don’t think she had any idea of his passion for art.  She saw it as an interesting hobby that kept him out of the bars.  It was a safe hobby for a man to have.  But that began to change.  And she said to my grandfather that she really had no idea that this was in him.  It was really quite a shock to her.  I don’t think she had any real interest in art.”  With the recession, “Matte was reluctant to cut back on her maids.  Gauguin was reluctant to cut back on his art.”  Their posh house had to be sold, and the family bought a less expensive home where Gauguin had his first studio.  Januszczak wanted to take his cameras in there but, “Nuns don’t like to let Gauguin through the door.  They shouldn’t have worried.  Gauguin’s painting here are among his most lyrical, including his paintings of the church.”

During this time,  Gauguin wrote his occupation down as “artist” on his fifth child’s birth certificate.  “It was hard on Matte.  She was so fond of elegant dresses and parties.  She wasn’t interested in poverty.  This was not what she married Gauguin for.  When her uncle turned up on a boat bound for Denmark, she got on it.  She did not consult Gauguin.  He cashed in his life insurance early and followed her.”  It was a humiliating six months in Denmark.  A job as a waterproofing salesman in Copenhagen was disastrous.  Gauguin hated Danish businessmen, and they hated him.  Through political connections, Matte got a job with the conservative Prime Minister giving French lessons to diplomats while  ”Gauguin, the embarrassing bohemian she brought back from Paris, was banished, out of sight, to the attic.  In this little room Gauguin painted his first self-portrait.”  Matte was constantly embarrassed by her husband, his opposing political views, the way he dressed, his lack of income.  She and her family ganged up on him and threw him out.  This happened in 1885, and it is the true beginning of Gauguin’s life as an artist.

Back in Paris, Gauguin took up pottery.  His first works in this medium harked back to primitive imagery and unbridled sexuality.  There is little doubt that Gauguin, deemed a penniless vagabond, felt impotent, belittled in the eyes of his wife, and erotic pottery was his response.  In 1887, Gauguin, with the painter Emile Bernard, spent time painting in the artist colony of Pont-Aven.  At first, Gauguin made his bed with the Impressionists, but he found the movement too stifling.  The artist found his own voice and, posthumously, he came to be seen as one of the fathers of the Symbolist school, of cloisonnism, and of Synthetism.  Gauguin also became fascinated with Theosophy, a kind of philosophical blend of various religions and cultures.  Mystical symbology, Japanese art and primitivism came to have much impact upon his work.

Along with fellow painter Charles Laval, Gauguin spent some time in Panama, even working briefly on the Panama Canal.  He was fired, but he also contracted malaria from his stint there, and it would remain a health impediment throughout his life.  In Martinique, Gauguin wrote a naughty latter to Matte (who he never saw again after 1891) in which he describes an encounter with a woman and a fruit.  “Is it true?” asks Januszczak.  “I don’t think so.  It’s too much like the story of what Eve did to Adam.  Whether it happened or not, fruit as the symbol of desire began appearing in his paintings.”  This is one of the few concessions Januszczak makes to Gauguin’s use of symbolism.  The filmmaker does not delve too deeply into that “more than meets the eye” symbology.  Quasi-religious metaphors and primitive desires become an obsession with Gauguin, who readily identified with the outcast.

Gauguin’s work in Pont-Aven, Brittany, and Arles are more self-assured in composition and more exploratory than his later Tahitian paintings of “alluring women.”  His “Self-Portrait With Halo” (depicting himself both as Lucifer and as a saint), as “Christ In The Garden of Olives,” his “Vision After The Sermon,” “Yellow Christ” (which fuses elements of Buddhism with orthodox Christianity), and “Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ” are among his most startling, arrogant, and masterful canvases.  Gauguin’s ludicrous, self-pitying empathy with the betrayed Christ (painted after a woman he loved ran off with Laval) was “an unlikely route to great work.”

Of course, the nine weeks Gauguin spent with Van Gogh in Arles (1888) resulted in Van Gogh’s infamous lopping of of his ear lobe.  The collaboration between Van Gogh and Gauguin was doomed from the start.  Each artist had found his own (very different) path before their stay at the Yellow House. Regardless, they respected each other’s work, and Gauguin inherited from Van Gogh an admirable “Greed for Yellow.”  Gauguin, like Van Gogh, suffered much from depression and had suicidal tendencies.  After his later, famous Gospel canvas “Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (‘A Buddhist message refracted through a Christian prism’ about the cycle of life), Gauguin, like Van Gogh, also attempted suicide (he failed, only getting sick from the arsenic he consumed).  The reason for this attempt (which, oddly, Januszczak does not discuss) is that Gauguin’s daughter Aline had died unexpectedly.  Gauguin’s remorse and sense of guilt overwhelmed him.  There is a single recorded memory of Gauguin’s public admission of failure.  A friend recalled “he burst into tears and sobbed, I let down my family and he ran out of the cafe.”

Gauguin’s sojourn to Tahiti sealed his fame and he went there twice, never actually finding his much sought after Eden.  Gauguin’s affairs with underage native girls is used as evidence of his hedonism, but as Januszczak explains, “Gauguin had been faithful to Matte for sixteen years before he gave into temptation.”  Incredulously, some art historians even want to hold his mix of Christian imagery with native figures as proof of inherent racism within Gauguin.  This is an absurdly Politically Correct assumption.  Such critics fail to mention that Gauguin also employed Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Pagan and even literary imagery (Edgar Alan Poe) into those same canvases.

Gauguin himself exaggerated his hedonism, claiming that one lover was thirteen when she was, in fact, fifteen.  Today, either seems shocking, but we are looking at te situation through twenty-first century filters.  It was much more accepted in years past; my own parents were married at the age of fifteen.  It was not that uncommon.

Gauguin sought to escape the phoniness of a bourgeoisie society which had deemed him a failure.  Tahiti was, he thought, his Lost Horizon, but he found the influences of Christian missionaries had infected the culture there.  He was, yet again (at least psychologically) exiled.  Januszczak gives an amusing anecdote regarding Gauguin’s frequent clashes with Church clergy.  A bishop had riled him and Gauguin responded, in clay, by making the bishop into a horned devil.  “The bishop was not amused.”

Gauguin’s mid-life crisis gave way to serial affairs and eventually resulted in syphilis.  Ravaged with the disease and destitute, Gauguin, working as journalist in Tahiti, took sides with the natives against the French colonists, was fined, and sentenced to three months in prison for “libeling” the governor.  As he was appealing his sentence, on May 8th, 1903, Gauguin took a large amount of morphine and died of a syphilitic hart attack (or, as some have claimed, a suicide).

His last few paintings are among his most sublime images,  anonymous male figures on white horses, riding into the shore line.  Predictably, Gauguin became a huge success after his death and he was a major influence on Picasso (a whole book could be written about that).  Despite a few quibbles, Januszczak’s film is superb and an essential way to get to know one of the greatest painters since El Greco.  It is an apt and overdue tribute for which Januszczak deserves considerable credit and gratitude.

Still, I cannot help but think back to a few years ago when the Indianapolis Museum of Art spent untold millions to purchase and exhibit a large collection of Gauguin’s Pont-Aven works.  A life-size puppet of Gauguin greeted children at the festive grand opening.  Contrast this with Paul Gauguin himself, dying penniless, in the middle of the night, in the mud, in a hut, in agony, alone except for the company of his dog named Penis and never knowing if anyone really gave a damn whether he painted or not.

And Paul Gauguin was an immoralist?

Still, I was not prepared for his version of Handel’s perennial favorite, Messiah (2010).  Guth’s staging has been called agnostic, and that might be an apt description according to the traditional meaning (as opposed to contemporary interpretation) of the word.  Simultaneously, this may also be the most “Christian” filmed religious narrative since Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture (1991).  Guth’s Messiah makes an overly familiar yuletide narrative startling again.  This production was staged for the 250th anniversary of George Frideric Handel’s death.  I believe Handel would have approved.

The history of the composition is well known.  Handel was in ill health, destitute, and on the verge on being sent to debtor’s prison when he received a commission from librettist Charles Jennens to write an oratorio on Christ’ Nativity, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension.  The libretto was a pastiche, borrowing from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayers.  Handel composed it within three weeks and insisted on its being performed in secular theaters, as opposed to churches.  Handel’s decision was harshly criticized by the churches, but it was an enormous success.  Handel paid off his debts and used his extra earnings from “Messiah” to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and give comfort to those in prison.

Musically, this Messiah is not short-shifted.  Jean-Chrstophe Spinosi conducts the period instrument Ensemble Matheus with imagination, style, and lucid insight.  He is helped enormously by the artistically superior cast of Susan Gritton, Cornelia Horak, Martin Pollmann, Bejun Mehta, Richard Croft, and Floran Boesch, and the support of the Arnold Schoenberg Chorus (who are far from anonymous.With commendable personality, they actively participate in the performance).

As in many of his operatic productions, Guth brings additional characters into the drama.  Nadia Kichler is the angel Gabriel as a “sign language perfomer” (or so she is referred to).  Her expressive gestures, unseen by the other characters except when embarking on an existential plane, is, perhaps, a type of choreographed/ signed glossolalia as visual poetry (echoed by the sublime chorus) rather than actual sign language.  Either way, she is a bewitching phantom figure who appears throughout the story in various guises.  Guth tells the tale of three brothers, one of whom is the symbolic Christ (dancer Paul Lorenger).  Lorenger’s Christ is a suicide, a failed businessman, and a spouse deprived of all virility.  He is dressed in gray anonymity and his gaunt, saturnine presence is as captivating as Kichler’s Gabriel.

Messiah opens at the businessman’s funeral.  His two brothers round out a dysfunctional trinity.  The elder brother (bass Florian Boesch) is the iconoclastic addict, always on the verge of rage.  The younger, sensuous brother (alto Bejun Mehta) is riddled with guilt over having betrayed both his wife (soprano Susan Gritton) and his dead brother.  His recent affair with his late brother’s wife (soprano Cornelia Horak) looms large, a crackling whirlwind of guilt.

While iconoclastic in content, this Messiah is orthodox in context.  Much symbolism is at hand.  The funeral feast serves as the Eucharistic table.  The ghost of the despised and rejected of businessmen resurrects and dances through a flashback of suffering stations, even mimicking the beating and the falling of Christ on the way to Golgotha.  The businessman’s wife dries the feet of her lover with her hair, as Magdalene dried the feet of Christ.  Lighting designer Jurgen Hoffmann evokes the banality of a barren capitalist society with all the scorching frigidity of an Egyptian desert.

Richard Croft as the presiding minister/Pharisee wrings his hand and waxes frustration, giving an unflattering depth to what could have easily been a two-dimensional role.  Sopranos Gritton and Horak sing and act with clarity and dramatic conviction.  The three brothers are a fascinating, contrasting trinity.  There are even moments of humor (involving boy soprano Martin Pollmann) but, as usual with Guth, the humor is disconcerting.

Guth and his set designer Christian Schmidt have expertly created a surreal moment in time, after the long flashbacks, when the surviving participants are left wondering what to do, like earth-bound apostles after the ascension.  It is a relevant moment without a conclusion, and I suppose that could also be said about the season itself.

A Busy Day features Charlie in drag, trying to disrupt a parade in a shameless rip-off of his previous Kid Auto Races At Venice.  A Fatal Mallet also stars Sennett (a rare appearance, and for good reason—his acting is more uneven than his directing) fighting with Charlie over girly girl Mabel.  They are both dull Sennett products exhibiting little craftsmanship or art.

The Knockout is a half hour long, an epic for Keystone.  It is basically a Fatty Arbuckle boxing vehicle with Charlie coming between prize fighter Fatty and Edgar Kennedy.  Chaplin’s ballet-like brand of slapstick (barely) salvages the film, and The Knockout again makes it abundantly clear why Chaplin quickly outshone his peers.

Mabel’s Busy Day is an eccentric step up.  Mabel is the much put upon, unkempt hot dog vendor at a race track.  Charlie, as a dandy, arrives amidst much shenanigans, including dance-like slapstick with some Keystone Kops.  Charlie spies the patrons abusing poor Mabel.  He comforts her and, when her back is turned, he steals her hardware to go into business for himself, with predictably disastrous results.  Chaplin here is without sympathy, even if he ends up as abused as the girl he himself abused and, realizing what she has been put through, finds enough pity for her to accompany her through the iris out.  Again, the odd chemistry between Charlie and Mabel inexplicably works, although Chaplin would find more apt female counterparts later in his career.

“Laughing Gas” (1914, unrestored)

Chaplin co-wrote Mabel’s Married Life with Norman and, although Sennett officially directed, it is moving towards the style film historians will later term “Chaplinesque”; it is easily the best of the Sennett-directed Chaplin Keystones.  Charlie and Mabel are a married couple out on a Sunday promenade in the park.  Charlie grudgingly shares his banana with the Mrs.  He momentarily steps into an inn, which gives Mack Swain ample opportunity to stop and flirt with Mabel.  The little fellow doesn’t have much substance compared to big Mack.  Mack’s wife (Eva Nelson) arrives in time to put a temporary stop to the antics of the trio.  Charlie blames Mabel and sends her home, which gives him plenty of time to return to the bar.  On her way home, Mabel buys a life-size dummy (?) from a shop.  When the store’s delivery boys arrive with the dummy, Mabel is embarrassed to be caught only in her PJs (it is 1914).  She wraps a leopard skin rug around her torso and sends the boys packing.  While Mabel engages in balletic slapstick with her new boy toy, Charlie is engaged in slapstick of a more, inebriated violent nature with Big Mack and locals at the inn.  Worn out by the dummy, Mabel jumps into bed.  Charlie staggers into their apartment and predictably mistakes the dummy for Mack.  Charlie’s fight with the dummy is classic Keystone.  When he believes Mabel has been unfaithful, Charlie starts straggling her, much to the horror of eavesdropping neighbors.  The dummy gets in a few more whacks at both Charlie and Mabel before she pulls off the dummy’s hat, much to Charlie’s amusement.  Charlie and Mabel end their silly fight with a kiss.

Laughing Gas was written and directed by Chaplin, and with him now fully in control, we see a vast improvement over the previous Keystone efforts. This is a frantic, delightfully amoral short with the Tramp as a janitor for a dentist, and he’s particularly cruel to his employer’s patients and to a dwarf assistant (Joseph Sutherland).  Charlie’s boss is Dr. Pain (Fritz Schade) and Charlie is not above flirting with Mrs. Pain (the underrated Alice Howell, a favorite of Stan Laurel’s).  On the way to the pharmacy Charlie knocks out Mack Swain’s teeth with a flying brick, thus giving Dr. Pain yet another customer (Chaplin later reworked that business in his debt feature, 1921′s The Kid, he and Jackie Coogan intentionally throw bricks through windows to drum up paying customers for their glass replacement business).  There is quite a bit of erotic interplay between Charlie and Alice, then between Charlie and patient Helen Carruthers, whom Charlie takes advantage of when he takes pliers to her nose in order to plant a kiss on her lips.  Charlie steps on customers, brutalizes them, mocks clergymen, and clearly only cares for the pretty girls.  He is an unrepentant hedonist (a fact which predictably endeared this incarnation of the Tramp to many of the Surrealists).

The Property Man is the first two-reeler solely written and directed by Chaplin. He plays a prop man at a vaudeville theater. Charlie likes to drink beer backstage, smoke cigarettes, bark orders, and brutally abuse his elderly, Quasimodo-like assistant (Josef Swickard).  Charlie gets kicked around by the Strong Man (Jess Dandy), but Charlie, in turn, callously kicks his assistant in the face.  Charlie flirts with the Goo Goo Sisters (Vivian Edwards and Cecile Arnold) and cleverly utilizes the stage props in numerous slapstick gags.  Mack Sennet shows up as a patron who boos the bad acts and cheers the (unintentional) funny man Charlie.  Chaplin would later rework and draw out this idea in The Circus (1928).  The chaos climaxes with Charlie taking a hose to all, another gag he would revisit in the inferior A King in New York (1957).  Despite the crudeness, Chaplin’s sharpening skills paint him as our protagonist.

The Face on the Barroom Floor is an oddity in the Chaplin Keystone cannon.  It is a satire of the Hugh Antoine d’ Arcy poem, telling the tale of an anti-social vagabond who strolls into a tavern and (after spitting on the ass of a sleeping patron?!?) solicits multiple drinks from the local sailors as he recounts his fall from grace.  Through flashback Charlie narrates his life as a successful painter (painters were a lifelong source of romantic fascination for Chaplin), ruined when his love (Cecile Arnold) runs off with his model (Jess Dandy).  The d’ Arcy poem is quoted throughout the short, and Chaplin contrasts the tuxedoed painter with the filthy, dejected vagabond.  The painter unwittingly sits on his palette, eats his paint, and sullies his clothes.  As the vagabond, Chaplin obsessively sketches the image of his lost love on the tavern floor, but, in his drunken state, he only manages a shoddy smiley face.  Violent barroom antics ensue when the locals try to kick him out.  The vagabond collapses, falling face down in his own drawing (in the poem, the vagabond falls down dead).  Barroom Floor is not so much a comedy as a brief, dramatic sketch in which Chaplin’s screen persona acknowledges and celebrates being an annoyance.  Although Chaplin’s acting here is more advanced than in the earlier efforts,this is a film which would have benefited from the nuanced pathos of later Chaplin.  Still, it’s an interesting, ambitious attempt to break free of formula.

Recreation is another park comedy, in badly deteriorated condition.  The Tramp is suicidal until a pretty girl (Helen Carruthers) happens along.  Charlie’s newfound zest for life gets short-shifted when her sailor boyfriend and the Kops come along to spoil things.  It all ends with brick throwing and everyone in the lake.

In The Masquerader Chaplin and Arbuckle start off, as themselves, in a typical day at the film studio.  Fatty inexplicably vanishes after Charlie transforms into the Tramp and the cameras roll.  Charlie flirts with a couple of dishy tomatoes, misses his cue, and gets sacked by the callous director.  What’s a Tramp to do?  Charlie dons his best Mrs. Doubtfire, gets a job as an actress, and flirts with the boys before his ruse is discovered and he winds up at the bottom of a well!  Since it’s a one-reeler, there is no real time to milk the potential (Chaplin will do that in Essanay Studio’s 1915 A Woman), but this is a resplendent sketch.

Two Sinatra-styled duets:  His New Profession teams Chaplin with Charley Chase.  Chaplin is looking through the Police Gazette in the park when Chase hires the Tramp to look after his inconvenience: a wheel-chair bound uncle, thus freeing Chase to tend to a pretty girl.  Chaplin wheels the annoying crippled guy around the pier.  The Tramp wants a beer and steals money from another annoying crip.  Predictably, chaos escalates with the two paraplegics engaging in wheel-chair slapstick, and Chaplin trying to steal Chase’s girl.  Throw in a couple of Keystone Kops and bodies falling from the pier and this winds up as a representative example of early cinema anti-PC amoralism. The Rounders is Chaplin’s only genuine teaming with Arbuckle, and that is regrettable because they make a charismatic pair.  Charlie and Fatty are a couple of married rounders.  Charlie is married to the abusive dyke Phyllis Allen, while Fatty abuses Minta Durfee.  Al St. John and Charley Chase make cameo appearances, but it’s Chaplin and Arbuckle who serve as rudimentary precursors to the Laurel and Hardy brand of team comedy.  The scenario is thin, but primitively amusing.  The two disdainful hubbies pair up for a night of the town and much pouring of liquor.  The wives will come a-hunting; the boys will find refuge in a park and a sinking rowboat.

The New Janitor has a more intricate plot.  Charlie is a janitor working in a bank firm.  One of the junior managers (John T. Dillon) is being blackmailed for unpaid debts, and plans to steal money from the vault to pay off his blackmailer.  Meanwhile, Charlie gets fired for dumping a bucket of water onto the bank president (Jess Dandy).  Bank employee Helen Carruthers catches Dillon in mid-thievery.  She yells for help.  Charlie, on the verge of clearing out, hears her, foils the robbery and gets mistaken for the thief.  The real culprit is finally revealed and Charlie is rewarded with a raise.  Chaplin would remake the film, as The Bank (1915), at Essanay Studios.  Chaplin’s later trademark sentimentality is in evidence here, albeit subdued.

Those Love Pangs pairs Chaplin with Charles Conklin again as rival mashers, fighting over a bevy of women.  First they compete over their landlord (Helen Carruthers), then reliable Keystone regulars Cecile Arnold and Vivian Edwards (as prostitutes!).  The girls prefer Conklin, which prompts suicide attempt by Charlie, put a stop to by a Kop. Chaplin winds up with the girls and, of course, it ends in chaos at a local cinema.  Chaplin alone makes it watchable with idiosyncratic vignettes which have nothing to do with the narrative.  He perfects his cigarette kicking here and turns his cane into a toothpick.

Dough and Dynamite is another two-reeler and became the biggest hit among Chaplin’s Keystone films. Charlie is a waiter who outdoes himself in his abuse towards a customer.  He and fellow waiter Conklin are forced into the kitchen when the bakers go on strike.  Naturally there is frantic slapstick hijinks aplenty, but it’s Chaplin’s slower paced characterizations that make this a Keystone stand-out.  He turns dough into bracelets and rings, and with powder on his hands he intentionally and unintentionally gets his floury hands on the daily duties of several dames, including the boss’ wife (Norma Nichols).  Big boss man (Fritz Schade) sees Charlie’s handprint where it don’t belong, and it ends in an apocalyptic, dough-slinging finale.  The boys are unaware that the striking bakers have planted dynamite in a fatal loaf, and at the end the war-weary Tramp emerges from a sea of bread, bricks and mortars.

Mabel was back with Chaplin in Gentlemen of Nerve and, although a nominal film, it is good to see them together again.  Charlie is Mr. Wow Wow who, with Mr. Walrus (Mack Swain) sneaks into the track.  Charlie spies a pretty girl with a soda, plops down next to her, and steals sips.  Mabel is saddled with the roving eyes of Charles Conklin; eventually she winds up with the more appreciative Chaplin.

Chaplin is a piano mover in His Musical Career, a precursor of sorts to Laurel and Hardy‘s Music Box (1932).  It’s exactly what you would expect, with Charlie having an extremely rough go of it, ending up in a lake.  Laurel and Hardy improved on the subject, but Chaplin’s influence on the later film is undeniable.

His Trysting Places is a two-reel ensemble piece and all the better for it.  Chaplin and Mabel are a not so blissfully wedded couple.  She is stuck with the cooking and the infant.  She hands the baby to Charlie who takes the tyke in arm like an old suitcase.  Charlie clearly can’t be bothered with the brat, and hands his son a real pistol to play with so he can read the paper uninterrupted.  In striking contrast, we see the happy domesticity of Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen.  Chaplin edits these sequences like a string duet, and laces it with swelling cynicism.  Charlie and Mack run into each other in a nearby restaurant, and there is a scene with them fighting over food, including a chicken leg (prefiguring their starvation scene in Chaplin’s masterpiece, The Gold Rush, in which Mack imagines Charlie to be a chicken).  On their way out of the ensuing chaos, Charlie and Mack mistakenly grab each other’s coats.  In Mack’s coat is a letter, to his wife, suggesting a romantic meeting at their trysting place in the park.  In Charlie’s coat is a list for baby’s grocery needs.  Naturally, Mabel finds Mack’s letter in the coat she believes belongs to Charlie.  Convinced her husband is having an affair, she wallops him and then goes to find the other woman at the rendezvous spot.  At the park, Phyllis discovers the grocery list in her husband’s pocket and is convinced he is hiding an illegitimate child.  It all plays out like an identity mix-up from “The Marriage of Figaro.”

Charlie and Mack do a wife swap in Getting Acquainted.  Here, Charlie is married to Phyllis and Mack is married to Mabel.  This movie is noteworthy as the last teaming of Chaplin and Normand.  It all takes in the park, and the respective husbands are ambitious about dropping their wives to flirt with other girls around.  A Kop from the flirting patrol tries to quell the Don Juan syndrome.  The usual park slapstick is present, but it’s subdued for a Keystone comedy, and there is a prevailing farewell sentiment hovering over the film.

His Prehistoric Past was Chaplin’s final film for Sennett, and it sounds far more promising than what it actually delivers.  Chaplin dreams he is strolling through a prehistoric park.  Mack Swain is a rival neanderthal.  It could have used a Raquel Welch or a dinosaur or two.

Tillie’s Punctured Romance was Keystone’s first feature, and the first feature comedy film of any kind.  Although made before Getting Acquainted, it was released several months later.  The star here is Marie Dressler, who also starred in the Broadway musical on which the movie was based.  Chaplin, as a city slicker, steals everything but the camera.  Mabel is Charlie’s ex, and knows that Charlie is after Marie because of a potential inheritance from her rich uncle.  The Keystone Kops are also on hand, and although feature length slapsticks usually outstay their welcome, Tillie does not (neither do most of the Abbott and Costello features, or any of the Three Stooges movies).

“Chaplin at Keystone” also features a 1916 animated French short, Charlie’s White Elephants, which crudely pays homage to Chaplin and Arbuckle.  “Inside the Keystone Project” is a documentary which follows the painstaking, eight year restoration of the films.

Chaplin perfected the short film format during his stay at Mutual Studios.  Many critics consider his Mutual shorts to be his best.  There is much to be found as well in the Essanay shorts, made between Keystone and Mutual.  Keystone co-stars Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle would each have tragic falls from grace, while Chaplin went onto unparalleled success.  Indeed, he is almost the only silent star whose films are still regularly revived.

Earlier this year, Flicker Alley released the restored Keystone Chaplin shorts.  That restoration was long overdue.  For years, public domain labels had churned out DVD prints that were so execrable as to be virtually unwatchable.

In 1914, his first year at Keystone, the Tramp is in his infancy, and his later self is only occasionally glimpsed.  Making A Living (1914) is notable mainly as Chaplin’s screen debut.  The Tramp is not yet born; rather, Chaplin appears as a swindling, Don Juan-like English dandy who foreshadows few characteristics of the famous persona.  This mess of a film was directed by the Austrian native Henry “Suicide” Lehrman (so nicknamed by stuntmen because Lehrman, unconcerned about the danger of stunts, was risky to work for).  Lehrman later dated actress Virginia Rappe.  At the time of her death in the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Lehrman testified against Arbuckle at the trial and capitalized on the publicity.  In the Chaplin at Keystone collection Lehrman appears as a reporter in Making a Living and as a film director in Chaplin’s second released film Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (which he also directed).

Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. is the film in which audiences first saw Chaplin as the Tramp.  This vast improvement over Chaplin’s debut was entirely improvised, shot in less than an hour.  The Tramp shows up at an auto race and, spying a film crew, becomes obsessed with being the center of the camera’s attention.  The race crowd is at first curious and then entertained by the intruding Tramp, who interacts with them.  In his second film, Chaplin proves more innovative and considerably more talented than any of his co-stars or even his biggest influence at that time, Max Linder.  The Tramp is sparkling and animated as the unashamed egoist, an extroverted, defiant “little man” whose stubborn spunk and ambition rise to the forefront when he, unsuccessfully, tries to convince the director and crowd that he is far more interesting than a silly race.  This is one the funniest and most compact of the Keystone Chaplins.

Though released after Kid Auto Races, Mabel’s Strange Predicament was actually the first film in which Chaplin donned the Tramp persona.  This film co-stars Mabel Normand, whose home-spun shop girl persona is still unique in the annuls of film history.  Mabel’s tragic life and premature death is the stuff of legend, befitting Jerry Herman’s splendid, underrated 1974 musical “Mack and Mabel” (the CD recording features the inimitable Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters). Normand’s films are still neglected, although three of her features,  Mickey (1920), What Happened to Rosa (1921) and The Extra Girl (1923) have been released on DVD and are good showcases for her screen persona.  Normand herself (awkwardly) directed Mabel’s Strange Predicament.  Although Chaplin was undoubtedly the superior craftsman, Richard Attenborough’s unflattering portrait of Normand in his pedestrian biopic Chaplin (1992), starring Robert Downey Jr. as Chaplin and Marisa Tomei as Mabel, is inaccurate and unfair.  Normand clearly influenced and mentored Chaplin, and she was actually the only one of his Keystone directors with whom he had a mostly amiable working relationship.  Chaplin does a convincing drunk act as the ever amorous Tramp who, after pursuing several other girls, comes across Mabel’s sexually provocative (for its time) after-hours pajama girl, locked out of her room by a dog and a bouncing ball.  Chaplin and Normand play off of each other fairly well here, though it’s solely due to their idiosyncratic mismatch.  Despite the stars’ odd chemistry, the film is melodramatic and overstays its welcome. Chaplin’s inebriated Tramp makes later lush acts, such as Dean Martin’s, seem comparatively cartoonish.

Much was made over the recent discovery of the believed-to-be-lost A Thief Catcher, directed by Ford Sterling, who is actually the star here.  Chaplin has a bit part as a Keystone Kop, which is mainly of interest as a precursor to his role as policeman in the later Mutual masterpiece, Easy Street (1917).  Harold Lloyd once claimed that Sterling was the best of the silent comedians.  Today, looking at Sterling’s work in front of and behind the camera, Lloyd’s proclamation seems dubious.

Between Showers is the last Chaplin film directed by Lehrman.  It again stars Sterling, and it is one of the flattest of the Chaplin Keystones.  Sterling and Chaplin star as the Masher and the Rival Masher, who engage in embarrassingly rudimentary slapstick over damsel-in-distress Emma Clifton.  Clifton is seeking gentlemanly assistance  in crossing a muddy puddle.  Chester Conklin, in his typical and dull kop routine, disrupts the menage a trios.  Between Showers is mostly notable as the film which introduced the Tramp’s shoulder shrug, skid, the “Tramp walk”, the nose-thumbing, and the adolescent hand-over-mouth laugh.

A Film Johnnie was directed unimaginatively by George Nichols. The Tramp waxes amorous over Keystone girl Virginia Kirtley after seeing her in a western at the nickelodeon.  Charlie signs up as an extra in Kirtley’s latest film.  Not for the last time, the Tramp will mistake a film shoot for a real-life damsel-in-distress situation.  Naturally, chaos ensues.  Along the way, Keystone’s roster of stars, including Fatty Arbuckle (playing himself) appear to lend Charlie support.  Another Chaplin trademark bit is introduced here: utilizing a prop for something other than its usual purpose: a pistol is used first as toothpick and later as a lighter for his cigarette.

While Keystone founder Mack Sennett was uneven in his duties as a producer, he was even more uneven as a director.  Sennett was behind the camera for Tango Tangles, which mainly features Sterling and Arbuckle, with an out-of-costume Chaplin stuck on the sidelines.  Chaplin, fresh faced and appearing, uncomfortably, sans makeup, looks every bit the bland romantic lead type of the period.  Tango Tangles was filmed at the Venice Dance Hall and stars Minta Durfee (Arbuckle’s wife at the time) as the much fought over hat-check gal.  Despite his handsome looks and awkward exposure, Chaplin does a convincing drunk again, albeit briefly.  Arbuckle, perhaps surprising to contemporary audiences, is quite athletic, despite his girth.  In this, Arbuckle prefigures the equally athletic (and even more rotund) Oliver Hardy.

Nichols was back to directing Chaplin in His Favorite Pastime. Chaplin thankfully returns to the Tramp characterization, and although this is a better film than its predecessor, it is a sore spot in being one of the few Chaplin films which features blackface comedy.  Of course, Chaplin did not direct or write this one, and the star’s well-known disapproval of racist portrayals in film is in sharp contrast to peers such as Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, all of whom had no qualms about resorting to blackface for yuks.  Chaplin’s discomfort with stereotypes placed him well ahead of his time.  Peggy Pearce was his love interest, and she is the first of Chaplin’s many co-stars with whom he had an off-screen relationship.

Cruel, Cruel Love is another Nichols-directed Keystone short.  Chaplin and this director had a turbulent working relation, and it shows.  The star was clearly out of Nichols’ league, and what little there to enjoy about Cruel, Cruel Love is most likely due to Chaplin’s contributions.  Chaplin plays the aristocratic Lord Helpus (indeed) who decides to poison himself after he mistakenly believes he has been rejected by Minta Durfee.  Thanks to his amused butler (Edgar Kennedy) Helpus mistakenly drinks water instead of poison and imagines himself (briefly) in a Georges Méliès-styled hell.  Always one to rework an idea, Chaplin later expanded on the mistaken poison gag in his black comedy, Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

The Star Boarder again co-stars Minta Durfee.  Nichols directs Chaplin for the last time and Chaplin’s later, daintily OCD Tramp who would appear in his pictures for Mutual is briefly glimpsed.  Durfee is the Tramp’s landlord and she clearly likes him better than her brutish husband (Edgar Kennedy) or her terror of a son (Gordon Griffith).  There is a brief, out of place tennis-match-as-aphrodisiac between Chaplin and Durfee.  As in many later Chaplin films, it is a sequence that fits poorly with the rest of the narrative that is most memorable.

Mabel at the Wheel was the first of Chaplin’s two-reelers, and was co-directed by Normand and Sennett .  As written by Normand, Chaplin here is in a Ford Sterling-like villain role (at which Chaplin is far betterthan Sterling).  Normand is the nominal star, but Chaplin steals every scene he is in, and Normand the director lets him (she was far more generous to ‘competitive’ talent than Chaplin ever would be).  This is a handsomely mounted film dealing with an auto race and has Chaplin atypically behind the wheel (unlike Keaton, Chaplin was a bit of a technophobe who never learned to drive).  Although Mabel at the Wheel cannot be categorized as a “Chaplin” film, it is Keystone at its near-best, chock-full of period spectacle and dastardly villains.

Chaplin once said “all I need to make a picture is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.”  Twenty Minutes of Love is the first film for which Chaplin gets co-directing credit (along with Joseph Maddern).  Chaplin uses that already well-worn formula but, unfortunately, it results in a too-standard park comedy with co-star Minta Durfee hopelessly cute in her Mother Goose-like getup.

Caught in a Cabaret is another Mabel Normand film and Chaplin’s second two-reeler.  Again,Normand the director points the actor’s spotlight on her co-star.  Additionally, she co-wrote the film with Chaplin, and was instrumental in building up his character.  Caught in a Cabaret is superior to the previous Mabel’s Strange Predicament and feels, at times, like a precursor to what is, arguably, Chaplin’s greatest feature, The Gold Rush (1925).  The Tramp is fully encased in Keystone edginess here as he is determined to impress an out-of-his-league high society girl.  He works as a waiter in a cabaret under the dictatorial Edgar Kennedy.  Although we are meant to root for the Tramp here, our sympathies are not unreserved.  He is rude and selfish and the film opens with him mistreating a female customer by stealing her drink.  During lunch break, the Tramp is taking his canine out for a walk (to attract the fairer sex) when a young boy (Gordon Griffith) tries to steal his dog.  Charlie does not hesitate to violently knock the tyke to the ground.  Next, the Tramp comes upon a “society bud” (Normand) as she is being mugged in the park.  The Tramp chases off the mugger while Normand’s sissified, rich boyfriend (Harry McCoy) helplessly cowers from afar.  Charlie passes himself off as the Greenland ambassador Baron Doobugle and Mabel takes her hero home to meet the kinfolk.  Mabel invites “The Baron” to a party and Charlie hurries back, quite late, to his job with the jealous McCoy following him.  Fellow waiter Charles Conklin is quick to inform Kennedy of the Tramp’s tardiness, which will reap Conklin a thorough beating from the Tramp shortly after.  Of course, Kennedy gives Charlie a firm scolding.  Regular Sennett heavy Mack Swain appears to annoy hostess Minta Durfee; Chaplin puts a stop to that with the end of a mallet.  Charlie plays the ladies man at Mabel’s soiree and he is literally the life of the party, further arousing Kennedy’s jealousy.  Once Charlie leaves (to get back to work again) Kennedy hauls the partygoers off to the cabaret to expose his nemesis’ true identity.  A barroom brawl results and Mabel ends the film by taking a brickbat to her phony Baron.

Chaplin’s next film for Keystone would be Caught in the Rain.   It would be his first real film as both director and star.  Caught in the Rain will lead off the second part of the “Chaplin at Keystone” series next week.

Wozzeck and his friend Andres are cutting sticks in a field as the sun sets.  Wozzeck tells Andres of horrifying visions and Andres unsuccessfully tries to offer Wozzeck reassurance.  Wozzeck visits The Doctor.  The Doctor scolds him for abandoning his diet. The Doctor, who is obviously insane, is delighted, however, when Wozzeck tells him of the violent visions he has been having.  Meanwhile, Marie notices the regiment’s Drum Major, and the two begin an affair.  The Drum Major gives Marie earrings as he parts.  Feeling remorse for her infidelity, Marie sings her child a lullaby.

Wozzeck returns him and tells Marie of his hallucinations.  Marie is disturbed and the tension between the two of them escalates when Wozzeck notices Marie’s new earrings and begins to question her about them.  Wozzeck’s jealousy engulfs him, and he becomes wild with visions of blood.

The Captain and the Doctor are are engaged in conversation on the street.  The Doctor is giving the Captain a terminal diagnosis when they encounter Wozzeck.  The Doctor and the Captain mock Wozzeck, telling him of the affair between Marie and the Drum Major.  Wozzeck flees to a tavern where he discovers Marie and the Drum Major dancing.  The tavern idiot confronts Wozzeck, telling him ‘I smell blood,” which, naturally, sends Wozzeck into a frenzy.  In the barracks, Wozzeck gets into a fight with the Drum Major, who knocks Wozzeck down.

Later, Marie reads of the gospel account of the woman taken in adultery.  Overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, Marie joins Wozzeck for a walk in the forest.  A blood red moon rises as they are walking, and Wozzeck slashes Marie’s throat.  Wozzeck throws the knife away, and heads

back to the tavern to escape his blood dreams.  In the tavern, patrons notice Wozzeck’s bloodied hands and question him.  In a panic, Wozzeck returns to the forest to search for the knife.  When he finds it he throws it into a pond, then discovers Marie’s body.  Wozzeck’s mental state deteriorates.  He becomes convinced that he did not throw the knife far enough, and fears that it will turn up on the shore.  Desperate to retrieve the waspon and wash off the incriminating blood, Wozzeck runs towards the pond.  The Captain and the Doctor pass by and hear Wozzeck’s anguished cries, but they are unconcerned.  Wozzeck jumps into the pond, but unable to swim, he drowns.

The next morning Wozzeck and Marie’s child plays on a hobby horse.  The neighborhood children mock him for his parentage when news arrives that Marie’s body has been found.  The children rush off to see the dead body, and Marie’s child eventually joins them.

“La Boheme” this isn’t.

Purists, who really should stay the hell away from anything written by the Second Viennese School, saw Bieito’s staging and immediately put the production’s necrophilia, Elton John impersonator, and excessive nudity on their epic lists of complaints.  Bieito was characterized as the quintessential Regie nightmare.  The purist hacks looked at their libretto/bible from a two inch distance and cried foul, failing to see past their paint-by-numbers preferences.  Bieito was predictably (and oh so boringly) accused of pulling juvenile antics.  To approach Berg’s nihilistic work as if it were a holy, chiseled museum piece is nothing short of  hypocrisy.

Bieito gets to the visceral spirit of Berg’s “Wozzeck” more than anyone before him and, I suspect, this production will be the reference version for many years to come.  Bieito sets his Wozzeck in a chemical plant, a post-industrial, apocalyptic wasteland.  Marie and Wozzeck abide in the plant’s lower level, wear tattered overalls,  and are stained with grime.  Pipes exude deadening pollution, and Marie’s home is an industrial container.  Her child frequently resorts to the fetal position to shield himself from his dreary existence.  He is covered in sores, wears a death-red jumpsuit and breathes through an oxygen mask.  Marie cleans herself off and slinks into a evening dress, ascending to the upper level for her affair with the upper class, the superficially exotic Drum Major (the Elton impersonator).  Marie, Wozzeck, and their child are anonymous to an apathetic world.  The Jeffrey Dahmer-like Doctor finds an appealing cadaver among the pile and simulates sexual push-ups with the corpse.  The sight sends the already fragile Wozzeck over the edge.  The harrowing finale has Wozzeck climbing into a drainage pipe as the nude, zombie-like chorus encircles Marie’s corpse.  The children throw industrial waste at Marie’s orphan.

Bavarian Franz Hawlata may possibly be the best Wozzeck on record.  Vocally, and in performance, his is a corpulent, rabid antihero.  Likewise, Angela Denoke’s Marie convincingly projects desperation and pathos.  Johann Tilli and Hubert Delamboye capture the banality of evil all too convincingly.  Amazingly, conductor Sebastian Weigle cuts through the staged refuse and delivers music of power and, yes, beauty.

The anticipated backlash spewed by hopelessly dull, bourgeoisie critics came fast and furious.  Would I want to watch this again anytime soon?  It nearly took me a year to revisit this film, and it will probably be another year before I brave it a third time.  Like all great art, this was not easy.  And this is great art which I recommend unreservedly to everyone but the operatic televangelists.