FEATURING: Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, Yvonne Elliman

PLOT: The last days of Jesus Christ, including the Last Supper, his betrayal by Judas, and his

crucifixion – sung to a propulsive rock score composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though the very premise – a rock ‘n’ roll passion play – is inherently offbeat, and this particular version is laced with anachronisms and unusual characterizations, this is at heart a straightforward, earnest account of the story.

COMMENTS: When Superstar debuted on the Broadway stage in 1971, the very notion of a rock-n-roll passion play must have carried an unmistakable air of sacrilege. (Although another pop-oriented take on the story, “Godspell,” premiered off-Broadway the same year, and a film of that musical also came out in 1973.) But the show struck a chord with audiences; spawned from a concept album that had sold millions of copies, the musical ran for nearly two years on Broadway and spent eight years on the London stage, closing as the longest-running show in British history. A film version was probably inevitable; that the adaptaion would be placed in the hands of the director of In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair might not have been.

To Norman Jewison’s credit (the screenplay is credited to him and British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg), the movie faithfully retains the show’s determination to treat its characters as human beings, rather than the religious icons they have become. Lyricist Tim Rice sparked some controversy by suggesting that he and partner Andrew Lloyd Webber simply wanted to portray Jesus as a man, but they doggedly stuck to that vision, and the results are intriguing: Jesus is beleaguered and plagued by doubts. Judas is a buzzkill true believer, hectoring Jesus for being insufficiently pious and ultimately betraying the man he idolizes out of a sense of moral outrage. Pilate is the most reasonable man in Judea, Mary Magdalene is hopelessly confused, and the apostles are shiftless hippies. It’s probably not the version taught in Sunday school, but it lends the events a greater dramatic heft.

If Jesus Christ Superstar is controversial, it’s because it doesn’t traffic in the more mystical religious elements of the Easter story. No miracles, no resurrection. Instead, characters are trapped in a story over which they have no control. Foremost is Jesus, who implores a silent God to explain the reason for a sacrifice he cannot evade. Yet, he sees not explanations, but only the predetermined tragedies of all he encounters. He predicts Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial, to their great puzzlement. “You have nothing in your hands,” he tells Pilate. “Everything is fixed, and you can’t change it.” Faith accepts predestination, but it often does so in the service of a greater plan. That purpose is denied in this telling of the Christ tale, which adds one more disorienting effect in a film that’s already off-kilter.

The film version makes it clear from the outset that reality is in flux. Our cast arrives in an old school bus and begins setting up during the overture. Scenes take places in huge, empty vistas or on the sites of old ruins, like ghosts resurrected on the spot. (The film was shot on location in Israel). Roman soldiers carry machine guns, tanks and fighter jets menace the countryside, picture postcards are sold alongside the moneychangers at the temple. Perhaps most bizarre is a visit to King Herod, who mocks Jesus to the tune of a jaunty vaudeville number. These touches bolster the ahistorical musical style and reinforce the theme of a performance, rather than a true re-enactment. Indeed, in the show’s best known number, “Superstar,” Judas returns from the dead in a white suit appropriate for a Vegas-era Elvis, descending from the heavens on a shiny cross and surrounded by flashy dancing girls. Heck yes, it’s jarring, but fits the overall tone.

Ultimately, however, the weirdness is on the fringes. The story itself is strictly according to Gospel, sometimes to the detriment of the movie. For example, after he is turned in, Jesus is mostly reduced to standing by mutely while others debate his fate. It’s tough when the main character is silent for nearly half the film, although it does magnify the portrayal of Judas as misunderstood martyr (bolstered by Carl Anderson’s powerful performance).

If you can’t buy the Gospels as a rock opera, then Jesus Christ Superstar will seem unavoidably strange. If you can, then the film isn’t even the strangest production of the rock opera (a good candidate for that title might be the concert performance starring the Indigo Girls as Jesus and Mary Magdalene!)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…director Norman Jewison surfaced as Ken Russell in this frenetic, all-too-often rhetorical, machine gun/tank/airplane-strewn Saint Vitus’s dance in the desert.” – Don Druker, Chicago Reader

FEATURING: Françoise Pascal, Hugues Quester (as Pierre Dupont)

PLOT: Young lovers go mad when they are trapped in a cemetery overnight.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Iron Rose‘s wonderfully funereal setting and muted weirdness isn’t powerful enough to overcome it’s lack of events. Its slow-paced visual poetry is hit-or-miss, resonating strongly with some viewers while boring others stiff. I’m in the latter camp, I’m afraid; I believe there are brisker, more agreeable vehicles to represent Jean Rollin on the List.

COMMENTS: To many fans, La Rose de Fer represents the distilled essence of Jean Rollin: trancelike atmosphere, poetic visuals, and quiet, dreamy symbolism. With it’s couple making love all over a graveyard, rolling around in passion amongst the skulls and femurs, it’s also the most blatant example of the director’s desire to play matchmaker between Eros and Thanatos. And, while it’s correct to say Rose is pure Rollin, the very integrity of vision shown here exposes the director’s flaws even more than his virtues: his seeming indifference to character and story, his stilted faux-Symbolist dialogue, and, especially, his tortoise-influenced method of pacing. Rose begins on Rollin’s famous beach that appears in almost all of his movies; Françoise Pascal, the stunning and exotic half-Mauritanian actress/model, finds the titular mineral flower washed up on shore. She then walks through a field and a deserted French town; six minutes later, the plot begins as a young poet toasts her at a wedding reception with a ditty about death. The two arrange for a date and, after hitting it off quickly, end up in a magnificent French cemetery for a picnic and a little lovemaking inside a tomb (despite the girl’s initial reticence). The boneyard is almost deserted except for a few odd visitors, including a clown in full makeup who places flowers on a grave. When they emerge from the crypt in post-coital bliss, they find that night has fallen early, the boy has lost his watch, and the path they came in on appears to be missing. Although the scenario sounds like an promising blend of Freud and the Twilight Zone, it takes thirty minutes of plodding setup to reach this point, and when we finally do, Rollin offers us too little payoff for our patience. The boy remains sane and logical, trying to figure a way out of the maze, while the girl goes off her rocker, undergoing several radical personality shifts that end with her succumbing to the allure of the grave. There’s a near-rape and a reconciliation when the two make love on top of the dried bones in an ossuary, but mostly the couple just wander around the Gothic grounds looking lost. Just when you think former Penthouse model Pascal was the first actress to ever successfully insert a “no nudity” clause into a contract for a Rollin movie, there’s a dream sequence where she returns to the beach for some tasteful full-frontal frolicking in the sand. The saving grace in this morbid noodling is the scenic cemetery itself, a monumental site which Rollin exploits with his usual above-par cinematography. It’s a verdant park setting with forests of gray gravestones, cobwebbed crosses, and wrought iron fences. The site features a remarkable variety of monuments, from tombstones bigger than a man to pauper’s graves marked with black iron crosses, with moss-covered cherubs and loose skulls lurking in every corner. It also looks legitimately labyrinthine; with every few steps the architecture and topography seems to change, so it’s easy to imagine yourself lost there if you were unfortunate enough to be locked in behind the iron gates after closing time. Tombstone tourists will want to check it out for the scenery alone (fans of Pascal’s generous dimensions might want to check it out for similar reasons). Caution is advised for other visitors. Watch The Nude Vampire or Shiver of the Vampires first, and ask yourself: would I prefer this movie if it had less plot, no lesbian vampires, and focused more on pure atmosphere? If the answer is “yes,” then by all means give The Iron Rose a spin in the DVD player.

Redemption Films remastered DVD contains the 1965 Rollin short “Le Pays Loins” (“The Far Country”) as a bonus feature. This black and white film about a couple lost in a dreamlike reverie in a nameless North African city is more straight surrealist than horror-surrealist, and shows Rollin’s obvious roots in art cinema. Due to its more digestible length I found it slightly preferable to The Iron Rose, although it ends unsatisfactorily with a sudden thirty second freeze frame (it’s such an arbitrary conclusion that I’m not sure if this was the intended ending or an error on the disc I received).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”Wonderfully evocative in its cinematography, and downright sexy/weird with the conflicted performance of Francoise Pascal…  Just experience it, and groove on director Jean Rollin’s marvelously sensual tone poem of eroticism and death.”–Paul Mavas, DVD Talk (DVD)

“If you don’t eat, you won’t die.”–Ugo, La Grande Bouffe

DIRECTED BY: Marco Ferreri

FEATURING: Phillipe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Andréa Ferréol

PLOT: Four middle-aged, upper middle-class men (a judge, a TV personality, a pilot and a chef) hole up at a country villa to feast; it is gradually and casually revealed that they plan on eating themselves to death. They gorge themselves constantly, but the pilot can’t stand to go even for a day without sex, so prostitutes are invited to join them—along with a schoolteacher who attaches herself to the group willingly. As the gluttonous orgy continues the whores flee in disgust, but the teacher joins in the bacchanalia with gusto.

BACKGROUND:

• All of the main actors use their real names. All four of the male stars were well-established (Mastroianni, of course, was an international star and sex symbol). Except for Noiret, each had worked with director Ferreri before. Each had also had prominent roles in weird films from other European directors (Mastrioanni, most famously, in Federico Fellini films, but Noiret appeared in Zazie dans le Metro for Louis Malle, Piccoli was a mainstay in Buñuel movies, and Tognazzi had small roles in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella and  Fellini’s Satyricon). The quartet would reunite with the director the next year for a surrealist rendering of Custer’s last stand called Don’t Touch the White Woman (starring alongside another weird favorite, Catherine Deneuve).
• The scatological content of the film scandalized some viewers at Cannes, but the film nonetheless won a FIPRESCI prize for Ferreri.
• At its British showings La Grande Bouffe was protested by infamous decency crusader Mary Whitehouse; her attempts to have the movie banned ironically led to modification of the Obscene Publications Act to exempt films with artistic merit.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The visions that will probably stick with you when you think back on La Grande Bouffe are scenes of four great European actors stuffing their faces with turkey legs, a castle made out of pâtés, and a pair of matching cakes shaped like breasts. Michel Piccoli dancing with a pig’s head is another strong candidate, as are the numerous gross scatological moments. But, the strangest and most lingering image may be the final one: sides of meat scattered around the villa lawn—a slab of beef wedged in the crook of a tree—and a pack of dogs sitting and looking attentively at the carcasses, making no move to eat.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: La Grande Bouffe takes an absurd premise—four men decide to eat

Brief scene from La Grande Bouffe

themselves to death—and plays it out with illogical realism, proffering no explanations or motives for what happens.  It’s an unnatural but straight-faced parable that suggests nothing about how we’re supposed to take it. It’s a grotesque spectacle, but a strangely engrossing one, with a fascination that comes largely thanks to a dream cast of 1970s Euroweirdos.

COMMENTS: In the course of their Grande Bouffe, the four suicidal gourmands scarf down oysters, kidneys for breakfast, crusty baguettes, cakes, quail served on skull skewers, turkey legs (convenient for gnawing on during sexual congress), a suckling pig roasted over a spit in the garden, Provencal pizza, steaming bowls of tortellini with cream and mushrooms, crepes doused in Cointreau, brioche dipped in milk, and a three-poultry pâté molded into a Faberge-egg cathedral, among other delicacies. The quartet (later quintet) nosh at all moments: in the bedroom, while picking out a tune on the piano, while taking schoolchildren on a tour of the grounds (a poet of local renown once lived there). In the beginning the mouthwatering spread may make your tummy rumble, but even before the gluttonous consequences—Michel’s flatulence, the exploding toilet— show up on screen, you may start to lose your appetite, as you imagine the men forcing all that food down their throats despite being stuffed full to bursting. As they get near the end of their blowout, each succeeding bite becomes a painful trial. Just look at poor sick Michel’s face as he lies on the bed, straining to swallow a spoonful of chestnut purée as his friends goad him on, telling him it’s a question of will and advising him to imagine himself as a starving child in Bombay.

One of the reasons La Grande Bouffe fascinates, even though not much really happens in the film, is because the men have chosen such an appealingly appalling form of suicide. If we have to die (and we do), why not go out with a banquet of food and sex, in an orgy of pleasure? The feast is at the same time tempting and revolting. In our daily food lives we restrain ourselves because we know the downside of overindulgence—indigestion, nausea, vomiting—but these men keep going at it, as difficult as it becomes. It’s a wish fulfillment fantasy for us to vicariously experience their hedonistic excesses; we aren’t given a free ride, though, because Ferreri makes sure we pay a price for our vicarious delight by giving us vicarious revulsion, too. We get an eyeful (and earful, thanks to the most egregious farting soundtrack ever attached to an arthouse film) of the result of that food after it passes through the debauchees digestive systems. The mixture of lust and disgust demonstrated here is the essence of decadence, simultaneously attractive and repellent.

In researching opinions on La Grand Bouffe, I lost track of the number of times viewers either confessed they did not get what Ferreri was getting at, or scolded him for giving no explanation for the men’s desire to eat themselves to death. Because the raw spectacle here is so hard to get a handle on, so unlike what we see in ordinary narratives, people constantly look for a reference point to compare it to.  The most obvious influence is Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), where the guests at a dinner party find themselves unable to leave (in what may be an explicit Angel nod, Marcello gets disgusted and in fact tries, but fails, to exit the feast). Distancing surrealism is not on the menu in Bouffe, however. The scandalous scatology and perverse sensibilities made some see it as a precursor to the 1975 shocker Salò, but the comparisons don’t go very far. Salò is rife with sadism and cruelty, which is noticeably absent in the genial La Grande Bouffe; all the debauchery is scrupulously consensual, there are no victims anywhere to be found. Bouffe shares many similarities with Peter Greenaway‘s The Thief, the Cook, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), although in that banquet there again is a layer of stylization and allegory standing between us and the material, which is missing in the Ferreri’s unvarnished film. The movie that Bouffe most resembles may be Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995), where Nicolas Cage steadfastly drinks himself to death, for reasons he’s forgotten, as faithful whore Elisabeth Shue takes care of him in his final days.

Shue’s Vegas hooker may have been the illegitimate cinematic daughter of Bouffe‘s Andréa Ferréol, who plays a similarly nonjudgmental caretaker to the four suicidal epicures. Andréa, a zaftig schoolmarm whose eyes light up at the idea of days on end of continuous eating and fornicating, may be this feast’s most interesting and troublesome character. She’s also a surprise co-star, holding her own against the four male acting titans. The five thespians hold the inherently implausible scenario together; there’s a real feeling of camaraderie between the four men, who seem to have known each other for decades, and the Rubenesque Ferréol convincingly worms her way into the pal’s hearts and beds as a party guest who immediately clicks with the assembly. Tognazzi, who plays the chef, was the least distinguished of the crew coming in to this film and exits with the same reputation, although he has a featured moment doing a Marlon Brando impression. Piccoli shows more depth; it’s slowly revealed that he’s a closet musician and philosopher, and probably secretly in love with Mastrioanni’s character as well. Speaking of Marcello, he has the most fun here, playing off his image as a ladies’ man. In Bouffe he’s ridiculously insatiable, insisting the party expand its roster to include three or four prostitutes because he’s unable to go half a day without sex. He’s also the only one of the foursome to show misgivings about the pact, which are apparent almost from the beginning (watch how, in the space of a second, his face goes from apprehension to bemused resolution after he announces “the feast begins!”)

Along with Ferréol, Noiret emerges as the most fascinating character, and despite his often passive personality he is in fact the movie’s driving force. A judge and the apparent ringleader of the cadre, he’s decidedly odd in his stiff mannerisms and his ironic concern with propriety (he insists on storing a fallen comrade in a meat locker rather than interring him because “the illegal burial of corpses is highly reprehensible.”)  He has a twisted sexual backstory that makes it entirely appropriate for his final meal to be a cake in the shape of ripe bosoms. He stands awkwardly at attention, staring straight ahead like a guard at Buckingham palace, on the two occasions where women service him. He’s repressed and droll, and where the other three men in some sense seem to “regular guys,” Phillipe is “off” by quite a bit, the kind of citizen who’s respectable on the outside but who you would not be shocked to find out is secretly a stalker, sex addict or serial killer. He falls in love with Andréa immediately after she shows him just a bit of attention and asks her to marry him. He persists in his ardor despite the fact that she insists on having regular intercourse with the rest of the company, often as Phillipe lies in the same bed. For her part, Andréa seems to return his affections, even though she seems to be more sexually attracted to everyone else at the party, and despite the fact that she knows he’s soon to depart this world. They make for a strange couple indeed.

As weird as Phillipe is, Andréa remains the most interesting and troubling character because she breaks the movie’s template. The four men are all representatives of the bourgeoisie, the bored and decadent upper middle class. For them to enter into a pact to eat themselves to death seems like the type of simple satirical stab at that strata of society that leftist filmmakers were required to take to retain their credibility. But Andréa is a schoolteacher, presumably a virtuous member of the hardworking proletariat, and she proves as gluttonous and oversexed as the men—actually, more so. She forces the movie to widen its lend to accommodate her, making it more a portrait of humanity’s failings then an attack focused on a particular class. Some reviewers even criticized the inclusion of her character as destructive of the satire, but that’s only the case if you’re convinced going in that the movie should be a satire of the bourgeoisie. Ferreri doesn’t force that view upon us. He deliberately gives us no explanations, and none are needed. It’s obvious, predictable, and comfortable to read the movie as an attack on bourgeois consumerism. But perhaps that’s not the point at all. Perhaps the film is deliberately intended to be as senseless as life itself: you’re born, you eat, and you die.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the satire is implicit, and the action is strangely devoid of content, comedic or otherwise… a quiet and observant screed, a cousin to Pasolini’s ‘Salò’… laying waste to modern man and refusing to tell us how to feel about the process.”–Michael Atkinson, IFC.com (DVD)

“…no satire, no tragedy or insight, and no message. Just shocking brainless art posing as an allegory.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

“…a satisfying piece of surrealist satire, recommended to fans of boundary-pushing art-house cinema.”–DVD Holocaust (DVD)

IMDB LINK: The Big Feast (1973)

DVD INFO: The 2009 Koch Lorber DVD (buy) contains no extras other than a five-minute excerpt from the documentary The Director Who Came from the Future discussing the film and the scandalized reaction to it.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Irene,” who called it a “wonderful and quite bizarre movie… a kind of a modern burlesque, a farce reminding me of the Luis Buñuel films…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Ruth Roman, Anjanette Comer, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor, David Mooney [as David Manzy]

PLOT: A social worker becomes obsessed with a case involving a family with an adult son

with the intellect of a one-year old, who sleeps in a crib and wears a diaper.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Baby‘s infantilism premise, which is handled with an almost disconcerting matter-of-factness, is outlandish, but the film is fairly conventional in its execution.

COMMENTS: Although it has a minor cult following, for the most part The Baby is a fairly ordinary thriller with low production values.  Director Post had previously worked extensively in television, and his direction here shows it: it’s efficient, competent, but unexciting.  But the colorful material overcomes the pedestrian direction, and you can see why this one stuck in people’s memory: the film “stars” an actor in his twenties who sucks his thumb and sleeps in a crib, and no one in the movie seems to think this is the slightest bit odd.  His teenage babysitter even changes his adult-sized diapers without a second thought.  That The Baby is also filled with hints (and often more) of psychosexual perversity—infantilism, sadism, pathological possessiveness—doesn’t hurt its memorability quotient a bit.  And despite the movie’s made for TV feel, there are a couple of things that it does very well.  The acting is uneven, but Ruth Roman brings verve to her role as the bitter old matron who’s willing to do anything to keep her Baby.  She channels Joan Crawford’s looks, Suzanne Pleshette’s voice, and Shelly Winters’ orneriness; by the end, she’s become a Ma Barker-style family queenpin, masterminding plots and directing her two oversexed girls on kidnapping and rescue missions.  (Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the family’s “two sexually predatory sisters and a nonverbal idiot brother” sibling structure replicates the even weirder clan from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby [1968]). Roman provides so much bitchy fun that you wish she’d thrown all restraint out the window and gone into full bore Mommie Dearest histrionics (if she had, the film really would be the undisputed camp classic it claims to be).  The downside of Roman’s charisma is that she sets off the soap opera-level talents of the pretty but vapid actresses hired to play against her.  Speaking of bad acting, though, nothing beats David Manzy’s head-lolling, mouth-breathing performance as Baby.  His attempts at infantile mewling and babbling are embarrassing.  Maybe that’s why (some viewers report) in earlier television screenings of the film, Manzy’s voice was overdubbed with the cries of a real baby!  It’s hard to say Manzy’s performance is bad—we don’t really have any other adult infant characters like Baby to compare it against, and maybe this is exactly how a twenty-year old with the brain of a one-year old would act—but it is ridiculous-looking.  Besides Roman’s performance, the other thing that stands out about The Baby is the twist ending.  For most of its running time, the movie does the minimum necessary to keep you interested.  There will be long sequences of the social worker visiting Baby, lightly fencing with Roman and her daughters over the best interests of the child, and just when you start checking your watch and wondering whether this is all the movie’s got, bam—Baby will do something wrong and need to be punished, providing another kinky plot development that gives the film life again for a few more minutes.  The twist ending operates in the same way, coming after the movie has taken an unexpected but unsuspenseful detour into slasher movie territory for the climax, with characters being picked off one by one in a too-dark house.  Then, just as you’re about to yawn and put The Baby to bed, there’s a pleasantly perverse little jolt at the end that wakes you up and makes you look at the film with new eyes.

Severin Films re-released The Baby in 2011 in a widescreen version remastered from the original negative.  The movie had previously been available on DVD in a couple of inferior incarnations, one from Image Entertainment and in a no-frills full screen version from the now-defunct Geneon, a company specializing in anime.  Severin’s release  adds only a few extras—the original trailer and telephone interviews with director Post and “star” Mooney—but it’s the best presentation the film’s fans are likely to see for an almost 40-year old camp thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strangely interesting little curio. If you’re in the mood for something unabashedly off-the-wall, then it should be worth your while to check it out.”–porfle, HK and Cult Film News (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Eric Gabbard,who called it “weird but well constructed.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas

PLOT: A thief, who looks like Jesus Christ, silently wanders through a bizarre and depraved city with an armless and legless midget companion, participating in a lizard circus where toads are dressed like conquistadors, bearing a crucifix through the streets and eating from Jesus’ body, and meeting a prostitute with a chimp.  He comes to a giant tower in the middle of a busy highway and rides up a hook to the top, where a mystic with a menagerie introduces him to seven companions and purifies him by burning his feces and turning it into gold, among other rituals.  After preparation the assembled nine set off the find the Holy Mountain where the immortals are said to live, so they can displace them and become like gods themselves.

BACKGROUND:

• In preparation for making the film Jodorowsky studied with two a Zen master and with a disciple of Gurdijeff.  Part of his training involved sleep deprivation (he claims he went a week without sleep) and taking LSD for the first time.
• During filming, the Catholic church in Mexico was not happy with The Holy Mountain because of its apparent blasphemy, and the President Luis Echeverría’s regime was also angry with Jodorowsky because soldiers in Mexican uniforms were depicted massacring civilians.  There were public marches protesting the filming.  Per Jodorowsky’s DVD commentary, he left Mexico with the footage he had already shot to finish the movie in New York after receiving threats from government officials and paramilitary groups.
• John Lennon partly financed the film.  The budget was $750,000, a fairly extravagant sum for a film largely made in Mexico in 1973.
• According to Jodoworowsky’s DVD commentary, George Harrison wanted to play the role of the thief, but balked at playing a nude scene where the character has his anus scrubbed.  Sources at the time reported that it was Lennon who wanted the role and that he could not follow through due to scheduling conflicts.
• Jodorowsky dubbed the voice of the thief.
• Various “masters” the characters meet as they prepare for their ascent of the Holy Mountain were played by actual Mexican shamans and witch doctors.
• Due to disagreements between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein, The Holy Mountain did not receive any sort of legitimate home video release until 2007.  The same issues plagued Jodorowsky’s previous film, El Topo.  According to Jodorowsky, Klein became angry and vindictive when, thinking it was too commercial, the director abandoned a project to adapt the erotic classic The Story of O with the producer and instead pursued an opportunity to make George Hebert’s cult science fiction novel Dune (a project Jodorowsky never completed—David Lynch was hired instead to film Dune, which ended up as a flop and an embarrassment).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many candidates—the apocalyptic toad and chameleon circus with amphibians dressed as conquistadors and missionaries, the giant mechanical vagina art installation stimulated by a nude woman with a probe, the hermaphrodite with leopard head breasts that squirt milk onto a proselyte—that choosing a single representative image seems like an almost arbitrary exercise.  Still, there is one trick so stunningly beautiful and effective that Jodorowsky essentially uses it twice: the live birds that fly from out of the gaping wounds of corpses mowed down by fascist soldiers.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Holy Mountain plays like a cut-up version of the world’s sacred

Short clip from the “Neptune” sequence of The Holy Mountain

texts.   If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might come up with a narrative something like The Holy Mountain. Here, the cauldron is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s skull, and the stirrer was LSD, and an ex-Beatle gave the director and master visual stylist a small fortune to bring any elaborate and depraved fantasy he could dream up to shocking life.  The singularly bizarre results—the pure, undiluted essence of mad Jodorowsky—are unlike any film that has ever existed before, or ever shall be, world without end.

COMMENTS: The first thirty or forty minutes of The Holy Mountain are as astounding, intense and hallucinatory an experience as anything any weird movie alchemist has ever conjured.  It contains imagery so sacrilegious it would make Buñuel spontaneously give the sign of the cross, and so confusing it would make David Lynch throw up his hands in frustration.  This extended opening segment may be as fine a work of surrealism as has ever been filmed; for pure passion, audacity and agonizing irrationality, the thief with Christ’s face’s journey through a depraved, nightmarish Mexican city is hard to beat.

Though many find The Holy Mountain‘s narrative weak (if not frustratingly obscure), the story does easily break into three acts: the Thief’s adventures in the city, his apprenticeship to the Alchemist inside the tower, and the trip to and ascent of the Holy Mountain itself.  Each segment has its own aesthetic sensibility, while retaining their essentially demented Jodorowskyness, and together they form a loose allegory about the soul’s quest for enlightenment: from living in a corrupt world to the first stirrings of a spiritual sense to the actual climb towards enlightenment.

The film begins with a prologue featuring the Alchemist (played by Jodorowsky), his downturned face hidden by a ludicrously broad-brimmed sombrero, as he shaves the heads of two nude women.  The episode has nothing to do with the main narrative but imparts a ritualistic air to what follows.  The credits then roll, over a series of reverse zooms revealing flamboyant dioramas decked out with cryptic symbols—a blue eyeball surrounded by azure peacock feathers and shiny turquoise beetle shells—before the view shifts and the camera alights on the face of a bearded man covered in flies.  A dwarf with stumps for arms and legs drags himself to the sleeping body and wakes him; after some adventures involving a mock crucifixion and stoning by a group of boys with green genitalia, the pair wander from the desert into a city.  The metropolis is a riot of perversion and decadence: brown-skinned soldiers parade in the streets carrying crucified, gutted goat carcasses, and execute dozens of civilians in the city square while white faces laugh and take pictures from inside the air conditioned comfort of a tour bus.  The Thief gets a job working in the “Great Toad and Chameleon Circus,” where costumed reptiles re-enact the conquest of Mexico in a bloody spectacle, and then serves as the model for a wax Christ made by four obese entrepreneurs, three of whom dress as Roman centurions and the fourth as the Virgin Mary (in drag).  Angered by his experience, the Thief first eats the face off his likeness, which is filled with dough underneath the wax visage, then ties balloons to the statute’s legs and releases it to fly to the heavens.  Uniformed prostitutes (including a child) prowl the streets and cathedrals; they follow the Thief, and the one who carries a pet chimpanzee with her is particularly attracted to him.  He comes to a large red tower in the middle of a highway, before which peasants are holding a banquet; a large fishhhook descends from the tower. On the end of the hook is a bag full of gold, and the peasants place food on the hook.  The Thief, spying the gold, throws the food off and climbs on the hook itself as it rises to a hole at the top of the tower.  And those are just the main highlights of the tour; there are two or three stunning, never-before imagined scenes per minute during this astounding first half hour, whose never-ending stream of images assault the viewer like a swarm of surrealist bees.

There is an inconsequential amount of dialogue during this amazing, lysergic sequence, which makes the proceedings all the stranger.  The soundtrack (by Jodorowsky and free-jazz legend Don Cherry) consists of Hindi drones and percussion, Tuvan throat singing, pan flutes, gongs, buzzing insects, classical dirges, a bit of melodious cornet improvisation by Cherry, a German march for the conquest of the chameleons, and a waltz with muted trumpet and xylophone to which the soldiers slow dance with each other.  The vast, eclectic, exotic instrumentation changes form almost as often as Jodorowsky changes visions—we find ourselves bathing in a new and unique musical environment every minute or so—and the orchestration is always in perfect harmony with what’s going on onscreen.  Like the imagery, this musical invention can’t quite sustain itself for the picture’s entire running time, but it’s a masterful achievement while it lasts and adds immensely to the sensory saturation.

The magic continues as the Thief enters the Alchemist’s abode: first, in a magnificent rainbow room where the master waits on his throne of goats with a camel and a naked Nubian woman tattooed with Hebrew characters and astrological symbols.  The remaining sets in the sanctuary are equally opulent.  The Alchemist’s marble pool comes complete with a bathing hippo.  He has a hall of mirrors with an obelisk.  Rooms are decorated with occult symbols on the floor, and they spin; everything is painted in vivid primary colors.  One circular room is lined with Jodorowosky’s surreal interpretations of Tarot cards.  In this section’s centerpiece scene, the Thief is encased in a glass bowl on top of a brick apparatus with braziers and copper tubing; the Alchemist burns his excrement, tuning it into gold while the fecal smoke flows into the bulb and chokes the thief.  Meanwhile, the nude woman plays a cello and a pelican strolls around the machine.  More rituals ensue, as the Thief is further purified and absorbs obscure Zen lessons at the feet of the Master.

The tone abruptly changes from mystical to satirical/absurdist when the script introduces seven new characters, fellow seekers like the thief, each associated with a planet.   The previous segment featured some incisive, blackly comic moments—as when a soldier begins to rape a tourist’s wife, and the enthralled man tries to capture the amusing native antics with his camera—but these were tiny pointed shards of ridicule poking out from an illogical, nightmare mass.  The segments here are blades, forged for cutting.  In voiceover, each of the initiates describes their backstory on their home planet: they are Important People. Mars is an arms dealer, Jupiter a millionaire, Neptune an enforcer, and so on.  Jodorowsky uses these segments to take scattershot aim targets including militarism, consumerism, modern art, political propaganda, fascism, and even the modern art and architecture scenes.  There are many memorable images in these mini-movies.  Mars designs a line of munitions targeted at the various religions (Judaism gets a multi-barelled gun shaped like a menorah).  Saturn is a toy designer who develops her product line with future wars in mind; her computers predict a conflict with Peru in the coming generation, so she designs a series of anti-Peruvian amusements for kiddies.  The castrating chief of police for the autocratic Neptunian despotism gets perhaps the film’s best line: “Your sacrifice has completed my sanctuary of 1,000 testicles.”  Weirdness continues to permeate these sequences, and the planetary excursions allow Jodorowsky to broaden his already wild palette.  But the comic tone is a jarring change from the formerly mystical atmosphere and themes, and the constant narration is a significant stylistic departure from the near wordless silence that came before.  Perhaps Jodorowsky meant these digressive excursions to provide a lighthearted breather from the intense surrealism that came before; it feels like, halfway through the film, he’s drifting off point.

One of the minor issues with The Holy Mountain is that each successive sequence becomes slightly less surreal and less intense than the one that came before it; which is not to say that the final act isn’t astoundingly weird, by ordinary cinematic standards, but just that what came before is so dreamlike that Jodorowsky faces an impossible task trying to top himself.  After some more purification rituals, the group, under the direction of the Alchemist, leaves the tower and ventures out toward the Holy Mountain, where they intend to displace the Immortals.  This journey is shot entirely out of doors, with the cast, now with shaved heads, dressed in dull brown robes or Olympic jogging suits (when they aren’t nude, that is).  This new naturalistic style (Jodorowsky calls this portion a “documentary” of the group’s spiritual quest) robs the film of two of its greatest strengths: set design and costuming.  Previously, whether we were in a depraved urban dystopia, an arcane alchemists lair, or an art exhibit on Jupiter, there was always some amazing detail to draw the eye, some Hermetic symbol or freak or weirdo wandering around the frame.  Now, things are relatively restrained; Jodorowsky spends more time tossing out aphoristic bonbons drawn from Buddhism or rabbinical literature than he does conjuring menacing visions.  There are only two sections that truly liven up the weirdness here.  The first is the Pantheon Bar sequence, where the questers meet a drunken carnival of fellow seekers who began following the path of enlightenment but were distracted by a weakness of their own ego and stopped at the base of the mountain, abandoning their ascent.  The most notable of the caricatures is a gentleman in a feathered hat with a stoned expression who informs them that “the cross was a mushroom–and the mushroom was also the tree of Good and Evil.”  (Jodorowsky mocking acidheads seems to be the definition of biting the hand that feeds you).  The second manic sequence occurs when each of the members of the team has a dream just before reaching the summit.  The director goes all-out grotesque here: the visions include animal sex, hermaphrodism, castration, ejaculation, and lactation.

Jodorowsky’s finale is notoriously controversial, but ending this movie was an impossible task.  If the Thief’s journey is an allegory for the soul’s journey towards Ultimate Reality, then how could the director film God?  What could he do that would exceed the fractured visions that started the movie?  Jodorowsky doesn’t even try; what he does, instead, is basically to topple his entire house of cards with a wave of his hand.  The Thief discovers that he could have ended his quest an hour ago, when he met a nice girl.  Everyone goes home.  With this ending, Jodorowsky seems to be saying that the character’s search for metaphorical enlightenment was itself an illusion.  Of course, all the blood, sweat and cerebral juices the cast and crew spent bringing this bewildering and extravagant spectacle to life belie that conclusion.  But, unable to drop an enlightenment bombshell at the film’s climax, this was the best the director could do.

Is Jodorowsky a Surrealist?  The tableaux he creates are shocking and appear irrational, but to him each image has a particular, specific symbolic meaning.  The key part of that sentence, perhaps, is “to him,” because he rarely provides his audience the necessary clues to divine the meaning he’s propounding.  Viewers pick up bits and pieces of his intended message; it’s easy to see, for example, that the transvestite Virgin Mary selling crosses to tourists represents the Catholic Church distorting the true meaning of Christ’s message.  When the Thief goes on a rampage and wrecks the crucifixes, most will catch the reference to Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple.  But in a film where the director references nearly every mystical or occult tradition the world has ever produced, scrawling Taoist symbols on the hide of a passing elephant, how could he expect anyone to catch all the details and follow his overall argument—if, indeed, he has one?  Listening to his commentary on the DVD helps explain what he had on his mind on a scene-by-scene basis, but his exegesis only confirms that he isn’t consistent with his symbolism.  At one point he tells us that the Thief’s legless and armless friend represents his divine spark within (when he first awakens his body from its drunken coma).  Later, we are informed that the very same character represents the monstrosities of the ego (when the Alchemist demands the Thief throw the freak over the side of a boat to cleanse his soul).  How are we supposed to follow along if the author won’t even keep his own symbolism constant?  A thirtieth degree Mason couldn’t decipher a third of the symbolism of The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky’s method is to flit about from concept to concept as the mood strikes him, like a schizophrenic doctor of comparative religion, and he never paints a consistent portrait of the soul’s progress to enlightenment.  The result is that, although it he intends each image to have a precise symbolic meaning, the key to unlocking their meaning is locked inside the author’s mind.  The Holy Mountain is meant as a Symbolist work, not as unconscious nonsense; but the end user, unable to decipher the film, experiences it as Surrealism.

Is Jodorowsky a mystic?  He tosses every esoteric reference he can think of into The Holy Mountain, and the breadth of his knowledge of cabalistic traditions of the world is truly impressive.  But you can’t make a lush, sensual, psychedelic film and promote authentic mysticism at the same time.  True mysticism, what Aldous Huxley called “the perennial philosophy,” involves asceticism, the denial of the body and even the imagination, an absolute abnegation of the ego and the senses.  It seeks and longs for what appears to be nothingness.  Along the journey Jodorowsky pays lip service to the necessity of dissolving the ego, but it would be hard for a novelist to conjure up a more narcissistic character than this director.  After all, here he casts himself in the role of an ascended master and spiritual teacher (admittedly a step down from his role as a messiah and demigod in El Topo).  The contemporary Jodorowsky reveals that his earlier self was convinced that this film would change cinema and change the world, hardly the position of an ego-less master who has transcended pride.  Most of all, Jodorowosky is obviously intoxicated by his own superlative creativity and imagination—and rightfully so.  But a true mystic views imagination as a relic of the ego and an enemy to enlightenment; imagination can only work on things brought to it through the senses, which obscure the Divine.  Consider the words of another mystic who wrote about a spiritual journey up a metaphorical mountain, St. John of the Cross in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, who asserted that those who wished to ascend must rid themselves of imagination and visions:

All these imaginings must be cast out from the soul… Whether beginners or more advanced, all must learn to abide attentively and wait lovingly on God in a state of quiet, and to devote no attention either to imagination or its working…  the soul must take care not to lean on visions that take place in the mind… they perturb it, and for this reason the soul must renounce them and strive not to have them… If the spiritual director has an inclination towards revelations of such a kind that they mean something to him, or satisfy a delight in his soul, it is impossible for him not to impress that delight and that aim on the spirit of his disciple… From his inclination toward such visions and the pleasure he takes in them, he develops a certain kind of esteem for them… In this lies a great delusion.  Ascent of Mount Carmel, BOOK TWO, Chapters 9-13.

This warning from a certified mystic that imagination is a false path to enlightenment could have been specifically addressed to Jodorowsky, the great magician and alchemist of cinema who hopes to change the world through the elaborate symbolic visions he constructs for the masses.  St. John of the Cross would likely see Jodorowsky as one of those stuck in the Pantheon Bar at the foot of the Holy Mountain, believing he has already reached the peak and found the answer when he has not even begun to ascend the slope yet.  Perhaps it was his knowledge of texts like this that explain Jodorowsky’s apparent, sudden rejection of mysticism at the end of the film.  If the mystics say that imagination can only take you so far, well, then, the creative soul can play the same game and turn it around; mysticism can only take the imagination so far, and then it must abandon it and follow creativity’s own path.

Jodorowsky uses the techniques of the Surrealists and the symbolism of the mystics, but he himself is neither a Surrealist nor a mystic.  He’s more of a madman and a Fool, trusting and delighting in his own deranged visions.  And cinema is enriched by his injection of his own singular brand of madness.  No one else could have made the astounding, narcissistic, and utterly beautiful The Holy Mountain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“All the classic surrealist techniques are called into play, like when a young woman is shot down by police, and doves fly out of the wound. But finally, ‘Holy Mountain’ is all surface and very little meaning.”–M. Goodwin, Take One (contemporaneous)

“…an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (2007 rerelease)

“…suggests what might have resulted if Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and George Romero had all dropped acid and made a movie together.”–Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. – Films – The Holy Mountain – the closest thing to an official site, this is the homepage for producer/distributor ABKCO.  It contains a long synopsis of the film and a couple of stills, but there is also a five minute documentary featurette mixing scenes from Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain with an interview with Jodorowsky

IMDB LINK: The Holy Mountain (1973)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Holy Mountain – The Holy Mountain page at “The Symbol Grows,” a Jodorowsky fan site, contains little specific to this film, but search the site for images of vintage posters and a relatively extensive Jodorowsky bibliography

The Holy Mountain (1973) at Mubi – the trailer, synopses, and links to forum discussions involving the movie

DVD INFO: The Anchor Bay DVD (buy) features a typically fascinating (Spanish language, so be sure to turn on the subtitles) commentary by Jodorowsky, who at times seems affectionately bemused by the passion of his younger self.  Other extras include deleted scenes, also with commentary, and a five minute feature where Jodorowsky explains the philosophy and symbolism of the Tarot, and the original trailer.  Joe Byrne, who worked on restoring the film, gives a technical but nonetheless very interesting explanation of the restoration process; segments of the film are shown in split screen, with the original print shown on one side and the restored version on the other to dramatize the improvement.  One final extra shows photographs of the working script, which is itself almost nonlinear; it’s full of markups, notes, crossouts, scrawled amendments and doodled alchemical symbols.

The Holy Mountain is also available (with all special features listed above) as a key component of Anchor Bay’s The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (buy).  Also included in this collection are Fando y Lis, El Topo, and the documentary The Jodorowsky Constellation.  Soundtrack CDs for El Topo and The Holy Mountain round out this very cool collection.

Anchor Bay plans blu-ray releases of both The Holy Mountain (pre-order) and El Topo on April 26, 2011.

(This movie was nominated for review by too many readers to list individually. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Paul Naschy

PLOT: The head of a medieval warlock possesses the bodies of young people staying at an

isolated country estate, turning some into zombies and causing them to kill each other.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Horror Rises is a worthwhile, but not quite exemplary, illustation of the tendency of 1970s Eurotrashy fantastique horror  to elevate atmosphere and effect over sense and logic.  Made out of equal parts camp, decadence, and incoherence, it’s a decent choice for a midnight viewing some evening when you don’t want to think too hard while getting some pre-bedtime chills.

COMMENTS: Most of the plot developments in Horror Rises from the Tomb need to be prefaced with the phrase, “for unclear reasons…”  When invited to a seance with a medium, swinging playboy Hugo suggests they contact an ancestor of his who was hanged for practicing witchcraft (and vampirisim and lycanthropy), then decapitated so his head and body could be laid in separate graves to prevent him from rising from the tomb.  The same warlock ghost has been haunting Hugo’s artist pal, dripping blood from his severed head on his canvases.  After successfully contacting the spirit, Hugo, the painter and their girlfriends travel to Hugo’s isolated country estate to go digging for the head but are waylaid by bandits, then rescued by vigilantes who execute the criminals on the spot.  Upon arriving the foursome hires village locals to dig up the head, or buried treasure, whichever they find first.  Halfway through the movie, after the cast is mostly dead or possessed, the caretaker’s daughter remembers that her father hid a magic talisman that would protect them from any evil spirits that would rise from the nearby tomb in a well.  Besides possession, the warlock also creates a mini-army of walking corpses, and when daylight comes Hugo goes to dredge up their corpses from the river (where he dumped them earlier—for unclear reasons) and burn the bodies, even though he already incinerated them the night before.  And so it goes. The storytelling is jumpy—characters are killed off before you even realize who they are—and awkward editing exacerbates the problem.  According to legend, star Naschy took anywhere between two days to a week to write the script, and it’s easy to believe.   You go into every story segment presuming it’s not going to make sense, and you’re surprised when, on reflection, there’s a hidden logic to some development.  Besides writing the script, Naschy is also credited as playing three roles (the warlock and Hugo are two of them, but somehow I missed the third one). Horror Rises gets by on atmosphere—beautiful, misty Spanish scenery; gorgeous doomed women in gauzy nightgowns; floating heads; zombies; Paul Naschy flinging his black cape about and keeping his bushy arched eyebrows flying at full mast.  There’s also a screechy organ score that is irritating but effective in keeping you on the edge.  The decadent exploitation, in combination with the disjointed storytelling and jittery editing, produces a comic-nightmarish effect typical of 1970s Eruohorrors; it’s a style that can become addictive if you give yourself over to it wholeheartedly.

The version of Horror Rises from the Tomb reviewed here is the edited, full frame version, likely compiled for television broadcasts, that’s commonly found in multiple-movie bargain packs.   This edition cuts out the abundant nudity and most of the gore (including, reportedly, heart-eating) and runs 10-15 minutes shorter than the uncut film.  The frequent edits to produce a TV-friendly, PG-rated product likely increase the incoherence factor, but given the movie’s edited in the purely expository scenes, I don’t believe the complete version makes significantly more sense.  The out of print but widely available BCI/Eclipse DVD contains both cuts of the film, along with a third “clothed” version intended for European distribution that substitutes alternate takes for some of the nude scenes but keeps the blood and guts intact.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…there was no denying the strange, unsettling otherness of this film as I watched it in a dark room, illuminated only by my portable black-and-white TV set.”–Troy Guinn, Eccentric Cinema (remembering a 1970s TV broadcast)

DIRECTED BY:  Robert Aldrich

FEATURING:  Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Keith Carradine

PLOT: A maniac conductor sadistically stalks hobos along his Depression era freight,

smashing their skulls with a club hammer when they try to ride the rails.  NO ONE rides his Number 19 train for free.  Evil incarnate, he exists only to hunt men.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Emperor Of The North Pole may not have the requisite look, feel, or scary music, but it is very much a horror movie.  Instead of the supernatural, the monsters are men.  The killer is no cloaked slasher striking by night, but a crazy-eyed, obsessed railroad man, insane with twisted rage, filled with frothing blood lust, armed with cruel and unusual instruments of punishment.  He gets his kicks by smashing in skulls and he strikes in broad daylight unrestrained, with complete impunity.  This incongruency—a horrifying film that masquerades as a suspense drama by telling an unconventional, real-world story—makes for an unusual viewing experience.  Add larger-than-life archetypal characters; bizarre, colorful monologues; and a deceptively simple plot about a symbolic evil vs. slightly-less-evil struggle, and the result is a riveting, weird movie.

COMMENTS:  Pastoral Oregon locations set an illusory bucolic tone in the opening shots of Emperor Of The North Pole as a steam locomotive winds its way through rural woodlands.  This is Union Pacific’s Number 19 freight, and it has a madman on board.

It is 1933, the depths of the Great Depression, and 1/4 of Americans are unemployed.  Many of them are literally starving to death.  A mobile army of homeless men roams the country looking for temporary work, stealing rides on the rails.  They are nomads who live by no law but their own, and the Railroad Man is dedicated to their destruction.  On the Portland route, that man is Shack (Borgnine), a ruthless conductor who enforces the “paying passengers only” rule with deadly reverence.

Railroads don’t like it when you stow away on board or trespass on their tracks.  Today they employ a battalion of federally licensed, armed railroad detectives to catch you, and these men behave like real bastards when they do.  But in 1933 even the railroads were hard up.  His actions condoned by underfunded, undermanned, corrupt law enforcement, Shack takes the job of controller, making sure that no one rides for free.  Drawing from his own sadistic black book of dirty tricks he patrols his train like a monstrous gargoyle, perpetually on the lookout for bums.

Relentless and Argus-eyed, Shack is a real-life Terminator: he can’t be reasoned with, he can’t be bargained with, he has no mercy to appeal to, he is hard to kill, and he will never, ever stop.  Shack has a savage arsenal of bizarre, creepy weapons at his disposal, but his favorite is the engineer’s heavy, double-headed club mallet.

When Shack, creeping along the speeding 19′s boxcar catwalk, finds a tramp riding on the frame of a hopper car, he sneaks up on the hapless man.  The bum, enjoying a sandwich, is blissfully unaware of the danger.  With a fell swoop of the club hammer, Shack smashes the man’s skull.  His head laid open, dangling between cars, the hobo begs for his life before being sucked under.  In a spectacular, graphic sequence the rail cars’ sharp under-hangs ensnare the tramp and violently wad him up before the heavy wheels slice him in half like a biscuit.

For the Railroad Man, his pension and gold watch are at stake.  For the hobo, it is a matter of survival.  But for both, there is also pride.  Shack is determined the hobos not see him as a free ride.  He is humiliated and taunted when the hobo community marginalizes him by defying his rules.

The hobos hate Shack, but they also want to prove themselves to each other.  To be a master hobo, a skilled man of the road who can survive in style and avoid arrest, is to become “Emperor of the North Pole,” king of the tracks.  The term is cynically self-deprecating.  Penniless, desperate, with no past, no future, no clout and nobody to vouch for them, the hobos perceive that they lead a futile, near meaningless, existence.  Anybody presiding over the North Pole would be emperor of a worthless desert.

In this context, the alpha male tramp of the West Coast hobo “jungle” camps is the admired A-Number One (Marvin).  A#1 is determined to prove himself Emperor Of The North Pole by successfully riding notorious Shack’s Number 19 all the way to Portland.  He is dogged by a swaggering, inept, tag-along, upstart named “Cigaret” (Carradine).  Using numerous tactics to sneak aboard and avoid detection on the 19, A#1 is caught between Shack’s criminal tactics and Cigraret’s malicious recklessness. Despite A#1′s paternal attempts to mentor him, Cigaret continuously betrays A#1 out of a sense of misguided competition.

In trying to derail Shack, A#1 and Cigaret nearly derail the entire train.  To distract and misdirect Shack, A#1 and Cigaret do their best to compromise and professionally ruin him with a series of sidetracking stunts.  But the stunts are not mere jokes.  They are heavy, malicious felonies which endanger the hobos, other trains, and entire crews with imminent bloody death.

While the ‘bo’s believe Shack deserves killin’, their actions justify Shack’s murderous rampage as well.  Like a runaway train, the perverse feud escalates beyond the boundaries of any sensible limits.  The locomotive steams and roars.  The whistle shrieks.  The pistons churn.  The black smoke streams into the sky.  The trio of enraged men highball over the steel rails.  Their murderous plots against each other descend into a maelstrom of frothy, blood-soaked madness.  As they barrel along among the swaying cars of the speeding train, the inflamed trio hurtles toward an ultimate gladiatorial showdown to determine who will be Emperor Of The North Pole.

Writer Christopher Knopf’s deceptively minimalist script was tailor made for Robert Aldrich’s now familiar themes: men in their primal state squaring off against each other, the ultimate confrontation, man against environment, life as arena, life as a game, men and machines.  The characters are simplistic and archetypal, and the space they occupy, like a gladiatorial ring, is very small: the area enclosed by two rails.  The universality of these simple building blocks enabled Knopf to forge an engrossing adventure to which audiences can easily relate.

Knopf considered the political tempo of the times, the populist social attitudes of the downtrodden, the quest for survival, the attitudes of the elites; i.e. the fabric of society and its rules.  He rendered these factors down into a raw story about a conductor who won’t have hobos on his train and the two hobos bent on defying him.  The result is powerful and directly accessible without being dumbed down.

Every shot is carefully assembled as if it will be a still photo submitted for exhibit.  Each frame showing a character is an artistic portrait.  The selection of shots and the way they are edited is expressive and precise.  Additionally, Aldrich used a fine grain film stock which reveals very sharp detail.  The resulting visual impact dramatically emphasizes the action.  This gives everything about the film a larger than life feel, and reinforces the conceit of archetypal characters in an archetypal situation.

Emperor Of The North Pole was re-released on DVD in 2006.  The DVD reflects that the original film print was carefully preserved.  The re-release has dazzling sharp picture quality.

Emperor Of The North Pole was inspired by Jack London’s On The Road and From Coast To Coast. It was shot along the Oregon Pacific and Eastern short line railroad near Cottage Grove, where Stand By Me (1986) was filmed in 1985.  Viewers who see both will recognize the distinctive countryside.  Stand By Me was the last of several motion pictures to be filmed on these tracks.  The first, in 1926, the was The General, Buster Keaton’s famous period piece about a Civil War locomotive chase.

Surviving for over 90 years, the Oregon Pacific and Eastern was constructed in 1901 to bridge Cottage Grove southeast to the Bohemia mining district.  The last train ran the line in the mid 1990s.

The steam locomotive and trains used in the filming of Emperor Of The North Pole were part of the actual working stock of the railroad, still in use in the the 1970′s.  Shack’s Number 19 locomotive featured in the movie is a 1915 Baldwin 2-8-2.  It pulled excursion trains well into the ’70′s along the Oregon Pacific and Eastern (pictured below).

Old #19, Oregon Pacific and Eastern – photograph by John Goldie

Number 19 still runs today, pulling the “Blue Goose” excursion train on the Yreka Western Railroad between Yreka and Montague, California.

The terms “hobos,” “tramps,” and “bums” have been used interchangeably in this recommendation for purposes of convenience.  This is actually not correct usage, as the names have distinctly different meanings.  Here is the rule for remembering them: a bum sits and loafs, a tramp loafs and keeps moving, but a hobo works and moves, and he is clean.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an unusual, uncompromising and much underrated film.”–Film 4

DIRECTED BY:  Corrado Farina

FEATURING: Carroll Baker, George Eastman, Isabelle De Funès, Ely Galleani

PLOT: A fashion photographer is beguiled by a lesbian witch who seeks to dominate,

seduce and consume her.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Bab Yaga is straight Euro-thriller.  While such films have an unconventional feel by US standards, the style is characteristic of this distinctive 1960′s-’70′s genre, and therefore very conventional on its own terms.

COMMENTS:  Baba Yaga is a very stylish Italian occult film in the Euro horror tradition of Suspiria.  It is based on artist Guido Crepax’s highly stylized graphic novel about a sorceress who tries to bewitch a fashion photographer.  Crepax adapted the novel from his risqué S&M comic .

Valentina (De Funès) is an up and coming fashion photographer with a knack for controversial shoots.  After she has a chance encounter with the fashionable and alluring society matron Baba Yaga, her life takes strange and eerie turns.  Yaga discovers Valentina on a darkened street, becomes attracted to her and begins to inject herself into the young shutterbug’s life in odd ways.  Yaga develops a strange fixation on Valentina, one that is more than platonic.

Yaga lives in a striking Gothic Revival mansion, it’s interiors bedecked with layers of satin, red velvet –and heavy leather in the boudoir.  While the house is very luxurious, it is in need of a few repairs.  There is a nasty hole under the oriental rug in the drawing room—the opening of a bottomless pit to Hell.  It is only fitting to have an eccentric home, because the owner isn’t exactly mainstream.  Babs is taken with keeping vipers and Australian fruit bats for pets, has some creepy taxidermy a la Norman Bates, and owns a collection of cursed curios.

In a gesture of benevolence, Baba Yaga gives Valentina a large Victorian doll “to protect” her.  Valentina counters that she doesn’t need any protection.  Well, she does now!  The doll, named Annette, sportingly attired in a skimpy leather bondage and discipline suit has a mind of her own.  When Annette isn’t coming to life and parading her bare-breasted charms, she is busy stabbing Valentina’s models with a sharp, poisoned hat pin.

In the meantime, Valentina has been having sexually twisted hallucinations involving Nazis, cruelty, bottomless pits, and Baba Yaga.  It seems that Signora Yaga has plans for Valentina that are a tad unconventional.  She wants to bestow upon her wealth, success, beauty and cosmic secrets.  In return all Yaga expects is total psychic and sexual subordination.  This includes submission to a little S &M, such as a good periodic whipping, and complete domination over Valentina’s sex life.  And Signora Yaga would also like a an occasional kiss and a feel here and there, maybe more as the mood strikes her.

Crepax’s comics were better known in the 1960′s-70′s.  His style has been compared to Frank Miller’s Sin City books.  Adapting Crepax’s otherworldly, abstract visual storytelling produces a dreamlike, stylized, and optically imaginative film.  The set decoration and art direction are explicit if not extravagant, similar to the production quality of Suspiria.  The backdrop of 1970′s fashion and Italian pop culture adds a swank, bold, but not over-the-top cinematic quality that is a treat for the eyes.  The focus of Baba Yaga is on striking images and concepts more than it is on sheer horror.  The film is more stylish than bloody, and more pensive than suspenseful.  In other words, it is slow; however, the lack of spatter is counterbalanced by a generous infusion of chic, arty nudity.  Baba Yaga will appeal to fans of Roger Vadim and Dario Argento.

The name Baba Yaga comes from a particularly colorful occult story in Russian folklore.  Baba Yaga is played by actress/sex symbol Carroll Baker (Baby Doll).  Baker is still active in film and television.  Actress/fashion model Isabelle De Funès is well cast as Valentina.  George Eastman can be seen as The Grim Reaper in 2008′s Grindhouse Universe.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Weird’ [is] the operative word here.  Though framed by a simple story, director Corrado Farina’s approach to the film is every bit as avant garde and surrealist as its source material… the plot had me scratching my head in bewilderment, compelling visuals kept me watching.”–Brain Lindsey, Eccentric Cinema (DVD)

“O Lucky Man! is a film about the real world.  I think that everything in it is recognizable to people who look around with open eyes and can see the kind of world we’re living in.  But of course it makes it’s comment through comedy and through satire, because I think the world today is too complex and too mad and too bad for one to be able to make a straight, serious comment.”–Lindsay Anderson

DIRECTED BY: Lindsay Anderson

FEATURING: Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Helen Mirren, Arthur Lowe, Alan Price, Lindsay Anderson

PLOT: Mick Travis is an eager, ambitious trainee at a coffee company who gets a big break when the firm’s top salesman in the Northeast territory goes missing under mysterious circumstances and he’s picked to replace him.   With his engaging smile and can-do attitude, his career begins promisingly, but soon a sting of unfortunate coincidences befall him.  A plague of strange events drive him across the 1970s English landscape, as he is mistaken for a spy, volunteers for medical experiments, falls in with a touring rock band, becomes the personal assistant of a ruthless capitalist, goes to prison, and works at a soup kitchen.

BACKGROUND:

• McDowell is Mick Travis in this film.  He played a character of the same name in three of director Lindsay Anderson’s films, each completed in a different decade: If… (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and Britannia Hospital (1982).  Other than sharing the same name, there is no evidence that Mick Travis is intended to be the same character at different stages of life.
• McDowell came up with the core idea for the script, drawing on his own pre-fame experiences as a coffee salesman.  McDowell worked on the script with screenwriter David Sherwin (If…).  In an interview, McDowell recalls that he was having trouble thinking of an ending and Anderson asked him how his real life adventures as a coffee salesman ended.  “That’s your ending,” Anderson told him.
• This was McDowell’s next project after completing A Clockwork Orange in 1971, cementing his position as the most important weird actor of the early 1970s.
• Director Anderson had tried to make documentary about singer-songwriter Alan Price before he began O Lucky Man!, but could not obtain funding to license the songs.  Anderson instead invited Price to write the songs for this movie and to appear as the leader of the touring band in the film.
• Almost all of the actors in the film play multiple parts.  Arthur Lowe won a BAFTA Best Supporting Actor Award for his triple-role as Mr. Duff, Charlie Johnson and Dr. Munda (in blackface).

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The final party scene, with the entire cast dancing to the theme song while balloons drop from the ceiling, although the shot of Dr. Millar’s medical experiments is unforgettable as well.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As if Mick Travis’ improbable class-trotting adventures across

Short clip from O Lucky Man!

1970s Britain weren’t strange enough, Lindsay Anderson sprinkles weirdness and non sequiturs throughout, including Kafkaesque interrogations, a half-man half-hog, and an unexpected breastfeeding scene. Any film in which a boarding-room neighbor inexplicably gives a young man a “golden” suit and sends him out into the world with the sage advice “try not to die like a dog,” is tipping to the weird end of the scale.

COMMENTS: The standard line on O Lucky Man! is that it is a satire on the capitalist system.  (No lesser authorities than the Netflix DVD sleeve and the IMDB plot summary proclaim it so).  The first Mick Travis film, If… (1968), with its uncritical (but possibly ironic) praise of revolution for revolution’s sake, was championed by the counterculture, and certainly suggested Anderson was coming from the far left.  The opening prelude to O Lucky Man!, a silent film parody which features McDowell as a third world peasant who gets his hands chopped off for stealing a coffee bean, reinforces the “attack on capitalism” interpretation. Mick begins as a salesman, obsessed with how much he can make in commissions, and continues, through a roundabout journey, to strive for success within the system, even bargaining for a higher price to sell his body for medical experimentation. Eventually his ambition allows him to work his way into the inner chambers of a ruthless industrialist and his corrupt political pals to witness firsthand their plot to crush an insurgency in an African country using chemical weapons so they can build a 500 room hotel resort.  A corrupt judicial system, in cahoots with the moneyed interests, sends him to jail.

So far, so ideological.  But then, a funny thing happens.  Mick reforms in jail; he reads the works of Bertrand Russel and other philosophers, and puts greed behind him to become an altruist and a humanist.  Released from prison, he ventures into the East End of London with pure intentions, bent on helping the less frotunate and what happens?  While he preaches about the inherent goodness of man, pickpockets steal the little bit of money has had left.  Graffiti in the ghetto proclaims that “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”  He joins a soup kitchen, but a gang of ungrateful bums assault him for sport and knock him unconscious with a garbage can.

Truth be told, O Lucky Man! wasn’t popular with the left when it was first released.  The poor were depicted as nothing more noble than rich people without money; just as eager to rob, manipulate and abuse those even worse off than themselves.  And this debauchery is depicted not as a feature of a corrupt political system, but as a key feature of human nature.  Reflecting on O Lucky Man! in 1994 Anderson said, “I’ve never been a socialist.  I’ve never understood how people think that socialism could work because I have always believed in original sin.” (Note that his boss insists Mick eat an apple before setting off on his journeys as a salesman). On the commentary track, scriptwriter David Sherwin reminds us that Britain was heavily socialist, and fairly authoritarian, when O Lucky Man! was written, and that the political order being satirized is actually the socialist order. The corporate, capitalist powers may be ruthless, but the policemen who steal cheese from a car accident victim, the doctor who vivisects his patients in the name of scientific progress, and the military men who kidnap and torture accidental trespassers (asking them such bizarre questions as “Do you believe in the fellowship of man? Think carefully…” during interrogations) were all representatives of the established, supposedly enlightened order.  Mick is an aspiring capitalist because he was born in a society where money is considered the only measure of success. He unthinkingly adopted the dreams that were spoonfed to him from the cradle.  Had he been born in a Communist country, it’s easy to imagine him turning his ambition towards rising in the party ranks, with just as much luck and satisfaction as he has in succeeding at business.

The other, and more accurate, standard line on O Lucky Man! is that it’s a modern version of Voltaire’s “Candide.”  O Lucky Man! fits loosely into the literary genre of the picaresque, tales of the misadventures of an often naive or deluded protagonist as he journeys across a landscape that provides plenty of opportunity for the author to satirize a wide variety of targets.  The model for this type of narrative is “Don Quixote,” but “Candide” is probably the most often imitated.  In Voltaire’s book, Candide naively believes the theory fed to him by Professor Pangloss that humans live in “the best of all possible worlds” and continues to profess this counterintuitive optimism almost up until the very end: despite his continual counterexperiences of being conscripted, shipwrecked, and caught in earthquakes as he travels the world witnessing its misery.  Similarly, Mick Travis’ upbeat optimism and can-do attitude convince him that success is always around the next corner, despite being tortured, experimented on, and wrongfully imprisoned.  Mick continues to indulge in the same madness over and over, following the dream he’s been conditioned to dream and never learning his lesson, until finally he is beaten down so far that his innocent smile is stripped away from him.  (Perhaps this cycle of cluelessness explains why Mick encounters the same cast members palying different roles wherever he goes, but never notices).  It’s only through these hard adventures that he loses his innocence and finds his individuality.  Candide eventually learned to withdraw from the corrupt world and to “cultivate his garden.”  The similar lesson that Mick learns about what truly constitutes a “lucky man”  is encapsulated in Alan Price’s lyrics to the theme song:

If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely
You are a lucky man.
If you’ve found a reason to live on and not to die
You are a lucky man.
Preachers and poets and scholars don’t know it,
Temples and statues and steeples won’t show it,
If you’ve got the secret just try not to blow it -
Stay a lucky man.

The satirical, picaresque structure invites comic exaggeration, and Anderson pushes his critique of modern life to the outer limits.  Everyone, and every institution, is corrupt and venal.  There are secret army experiments, mad scientists, and people plunging out of buildings to their death who are replaced and forgotten moments after they hit the ground.  There are sex parties for the small-town elite and vicar’s wives who give of themselves beyond the call of duty.  There’s the huge cast playing recurring roles. There’s Alan Price’s band, who appear as a Greek chorus whose new album is coincidentally composed of songs that directly comment on Mick’s experiences.  There’s absurd non-sequitur dialogue and non-sequitur coincidences.  There’s unhelpful intertitles, and a couple of times when the movie turns into a silent film.  There’s the fact that the film takes a metamovie turn for the finale.  It’s all very artificial and even grotesque, and yet, as a commentary on the madness of then (and still) modern life, it feels real on a deeper level.  Unreal details aside, this is what life is like, this is how people are, this is how it feels to live in a society which (as Sherwin says in the film commentary) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

O Lucky Man! is a flawed film, but its flaws are forgivable because they come from having too many good ideas rather than too few.  At three hours, the film is just too damn long, and it’s not always filled with fascinating incidents.  The beginning drags on too long with too little of interest—despite the wonderful coffee kissing scene—before things start to rev up when Mick gets his golden suit and his second assignment from corporate headquarters, which sends him on his first real adventure.  As movies based on wanderings from set-piece to set-piece tend to go, not all of the adventures are equally entertaining or successful, and sometimes Anderson’s experiments in form seem pointless.  But when Anderson’s on—as in the scene where the rich and the powerful drink champagne look on approvingly as a series of stills depict the victim’s of military “honey”—he’s can be as powerfully dark and moral as anyone.

Even when the film lags, McDowell’s performance is still endearing.  His Mick is naive but infectious, and even a bit rakish; the audience pulls for him, although we know he’s about to make another disastrous decision.  He’s the kind of guy who has a beautiful woman in his arms but is distracted by admiring the skyscraper in the distance instead, wondering how much it cost to build and how he can raise the money to afford to do the same. He never stops to think that the reason men raise the money to build massive skyscrapers is so that they can coax beautiful women to fall into their arms.  We desperately want this guy to come to his senses.  We watch to see if, and how, he ever will.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque but consistently intriguing, this is a spectacular, sprawling satire built around its surreal set-pieces and driven by a charismatic performance by McDowell.”–Film 4

“…the coffee-salesman idea is really just a starting-point for a wild, ramshackle series of picaresque episodes, through which we (and he) move with the kind of sinister illogic more usually to be found in particularly vivid nightmares.”–Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lounge (festival screening)

“…a film that approaches its material not in the manner of a Swift or an Orwell, but as the Carry On team might under the temporary influence of surrealism.”–Time Out Film Guide

IMDB LINK: O Lucky Man! (1973)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

An Extended Review of O Lucky Man! - Well-researched analysis of O Lucky Man by DVD Beaver’s Peter Hoskins includes quotes from Anderson’s out-of-print newspaper article about the film, “Stripping the Veils Away ”

Trailers from Hell: Allan Arkush on ‘O Lucky Man’ – Director Arkush comments on the film’s trailer

DVD INFO: The Warner Home Video release (buy) spreads the three-hour feature film over two discs (perhaps unnecessarily).  Bonuses include commentary from star McDowell, scripter David Sherwin, and songwriter Alan Price (speaking separately), the original trailer, and a contemporaneous 5 minute segment of “Innovations in Entertainment” covering the film for British television.  The second disc contains the 90 minute documentary O Lucky Malcolm!, a career retrospective of Malcolm McDowell’s work, which is a must for the actor’s fans.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “N. Vo.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)