Tag Archives: 1966

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BUBBLE (1966)

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AKA Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Michael Cole, Deborah Walley, Johnny Desmond

PLOT: When a storm, and his passenger’s birth pangs, force a charter pilot flying a pregnant woman and her husband to make a sudden landing during a storm, the travelers find themselves trapped in a strange community.

 

COMMENTS: Another brainchild of Arch Oboler, The Bubble is an odd little curiosity. Oboler had a surprise hit with the first American 3-D picture, Bwana Devil, in 1952. Fourteen years later, he tried to replicate this success, despite the subsequent boom and bust of the 3-D fad. Not only do The Bubble‘s technical gimmicks hearken back to the 50s, its plot derives heavily from another cheap sci-fi horror flick made ten years previously, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But while Body Snatchers would earn a place in the American psyche, and become subject to numerous remakes (along with Night of the Living Dead, the zombie film these earlier efforts anticipate), The Bubble never gained quite the same degree of cultural cachet.

The Bubble begins in the heart of the action. A young married couple, Mark and Cathy, plan a brief stay in a remote mountain cabin before she gives birth to their first child. They hire a charter pilot, Tony Herric, to fly them to their destination but their plans go awry when they encounter unexpected bad weather and Cathy goes into labor. After losing radio contact, Tony makes a sudden descent onto what he thinks is a landing strip, but turns out to be a deserted stretch of road flanked by street lamps. Having no idea where they are, the trio seem to experience amazing luck when a cab pulls up out of nowhere.

“Cab, mister?” asks the driver.
Mark and Tony hurriedly explain how they need to get Cathy to a hospital ASAP.
“Cab, mister?” replies the driver, as though he hasn’t heard a word they’ve just said.

They manage to make it to the hospital, but since the baby is a month premature, the doctor insists on keeping him in a incubator for at least a week. While Cathy recovers in the hospital, Mark wanders empty streets, trying to find a working telephone. Having no luck, he finally runs into Tony at a bar that looks suspiciously like a saloon from a Western movie set. Here they encounter more odd behavior from the bartender. Like the cab driver, he’s a one trick pony. He polishes glasses and repeats the phrase, “What’ll it be, gents?,” but that’s it.

The 3-D action heats up a little when a cabaret dancer performs, her fishnet-stockinged legs projecting off the stage into the audience, which includes the very appreciative Tony. He then offers her a drink, and in an otherwise unexplained moment, the tray of beer bottles and glasses floats off the counter and flies across the room—

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGAN’S WAKE (1966)

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AKA Finnegan’s Wake

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DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute

FEATURING: Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson

PLOT: In a series of disconnected scenes, memories, and dreams, the passing of Finnegan, AKA Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, AKA HCE (and there may be many other names not yet known) is the occasion of a wake, an event which the deceased keeps attempting to attend despite his survivors’ reluctance for him to participate—or perhaps none of that happens.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The next time you hear someone complain that their favorite book was adapted for the cinema and the filmmakers weren’t “faithful to the original text,” just plop them down and make them watch this ridiculously successful effort to burnish the original medium through adaptation into a new one. Passages never claims to be a literalization of Joyce’s book, instead recognizing that its greatest advantage is the power of its twisted language and putting that front and center.

Still from Passages from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1966)

COMMENTS: “When is a pun not a pun?” the jolly bartender asks. It’s an unexpectedly galling question, considering that he’s inside a story that consists almost entirely of plays-on-words, that exists solely to celebrate the flexibility and incomprehensibility of language. The nerve of this guy.

James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the novel he spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life composing, is enshrined in history as, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “arguably one of the most complex works of 20th-century English-language fiction.” It makes pretensions to having a narrative, but if it is about anything, it’s about words, words, words, and their notorious malleability. Joyce gives nearly every sentence at least two meanings, exploiting meter and importing similar words from other languages and playing with time to such a degree that the last words of the book form a complete sentence with the first words of the book. It’s a 628-page fairground ride of a novel, and it regularly tops lists like “The 10 Most Difficult Books to Read” and features in stories like “This book club finally finished ‘Finnegans Wake.’ It only took them 28 years.” It’s a monument to inaccessibility. I haven’t read the whole thing. Have you?

So there is enormous praise to be extended to Mary Ellen Bute’s ambitiously foolhardy decision to actually try and visualize Joyce’s wandering scenarios, because it makes the effort of reading the book seem both achievable and desirable. Her film uses an adaptation created by Mary Manning in 1955 staged by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but while all the language comes directly from Joyce’s text, she makes two key innovations that neither book nor stage could offer. The first is the use of tools of cinema; framing, closeups, and editing keep the language moving and prevent the focus from wandering away, while visuals can create a level of surrealism commensurate with the text. A film that looks like it will be stuck in the hall of the titular funeral party can transform unexpectedly into a burlesque show, while what has been a stagebound production through the halfway point suddenly steps out into nature.

Bute’s second contribution may be even more important: most of the film is subtitled with Joyce’s text, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to both hear and read the language and appreciate the multiple meanings and sneaky substitutions that Joyce has peppered throughout the book. (Here, “throughout” should be taken to mean “in every damn sentence.”) You know who would agree? Joyce’s countryman Samuel Beckett, who said of the original book, “You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” The film version honors this fact, dramatizing Joyce’s maddening doggerel and giving sound and shape to the words so that you cannot miss his fantastical leaps of rhyme and oronym.

It’s nice of Beckett to show up, because in reviewing a pair of films based on the works of this fellow son of the Emerald Isle, I twice made the observation that there was nothing weird about the films that wasn’t already weird in the original plays. One might expect the same to be true of these excerpts from Joyce’s novel, given that scenes have been adapted as faithfully as possible. However, the transition from prose to moving image puts the absurdism into a wholly new context. Film doesn’t just repeat the weirdness of the original; it highlights it. By the end, as HCE marches off into the sun to the strains of composer Elliot Kaplan’s oddly emotion-drenched score, I don’t have any more of an idea of what’s going on than I did at the start, but the urge to explore the puzzle further is invigorating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie creates literal visuals to go with the flowing imagery of the book that rapidly moves and shifts between scenes as in a dream… probably best taken in smaller doses. .” – Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

(This movie was nominated for review, in a small bit of wordplay, by “Finnegans Cake”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FATA MORGANA (1966)

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AKA Left–Handed Fate; Fata/Morgana

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DIRECTED BY: Vincente Aranda

FEATURING: Teresa Gimpera, Marianne Benet, Antonio Ferrandes, Alberto Dalbés

PLOT: When a literature professor predicts an advertising model will be the next victim of a black-gloved serial killer, a secret agent sets out to save her life.

Still from Fata Morgana (1966)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Inspired by quick-change artist extraordinaire Leopoldo Fregoli, Fata/Morgana dons the garb of several genres (fumetti, spy thriller, science fiction, giallo) only to disrobe just as quickly. Set during an unspecified cataclysmic event anticipating ‘s The Falls, the viewing experience mirrors an unsettled narrative reality. The killer’s identity is revealed early on but leads to an entirely unexpected outcome, and a closing scene eerily similar to Blow–Up‘s contentious and equally inconclusive ending (released the same year). Like the main character, the viewer is adrift amidst a world of shifting symbols. The eclectic style, along with the mysterious backdrop, ambiguous characters, and a uniquely bizarre murder weapon combine to create a Pop Art concoction with a seriously unhinged vibe.

COMMENTS: What would you do if you accidentally bumped into a blind man on the street and he said you were going to be murdered today? Poor Gim understandably freaks out. She doesn’t want to die, but she’s decided to stay behind while the rest of her unnamed city’s residents flee en masse. A mysterious catastrophe has occurred in London, and fear of it happening in other cities has rapidly spread around the globe.

Introduced via comic book panels set to an uptempo jazz beat, Fata Morgana aligns itself with the artistic sensibility of European adult comics and the beginnings of the giallo craze (‘s Blood and Black Lace was released two years earlier). The Professor (Ferrandis) prepares to present a lecture on the career of an unidentified serial killer, seen in black and white photographs clad in classic fedora with black trench coat and leather gloves. His victims are all young female models. The Professor’s careful study of horror literature, advertising imagery, and popular films leads to his “premonition” that cologne spokesmodel Gim (Gimpera) will be the killer’s next target.

Gim meets with friends and attends her modeling shoots, trying to retain some semblance of normality. Someone slashes her car tires, so she’s left to walk deserted streets between appointments. Her chance encounters with the city’s remaining inhabitants become increasingly threatening. A gang of silent teenage boys roams the city stealing billboards and appliances to create their own modernist clubhouse. The Professor gives a lecture on how to identify the victims of future crime, then stalks Gim while wearing a series of improbable disguises. Miriam (Benet), a survivor of the London event, spends hours in an “art chamber” staring at sculptures, before wandering the city in an aimless quest to find her lover Jerry (though enigmatic flashbacks suggest he’s already dead). Meanwhile, Agent JJ (Martí) desperately tries to save Gim from the killer while being thwarted by The Professor and everyone else he meets.

All Gim’s friends spout philosophy while trying to process their own impending doom in revealing yet pretentious dialogue:

“When we are awake, we all live in the same world, but when we dream, each lives in his own.”

“A chessboard has no place for dreams. Who wins in chess, loses in life.”

“To be or not to be. To die. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream,” Gim chants in stream of consciousness while displaying a bottle of cologne. “But I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

“Very good, very good. Repeat just the last sentence,” says the photographer, “but this time smile.”

Like Blow–Up seen from the other side of the camera, the female model grapples with the deceptive nature of photographic images, well aware of advertising’s false promises. In a collapsing world, do luxury goods and status symbols still have meaning? When official loudspeakers announce that people can actually live without “superfluous objects” and all you need to start a new life is a suitcase small enough to carry onto a plane? The anti-consumerism now seems like another random element in a narrative constructed of jumbled ideas, but Fata Morgana‘s themes obviously resonated at the time of its release. Echoes can be seen in films by directors as disparate as , , and Peter Greenaway.

The tone, alternating fatalism and optimism, still feels relevant today. In the end, the professor’s theory proves to be wrong, the London event goes unexplained, but Gim’s valiant struggle to maintain her humanity continues. She keeps walking, leaving the city behind as the camera moves away from her until a green field fills the frame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a wild, disorienting, surreal mash-up of Pop Art, science fiction, thriller, and horror.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters (Blu-ray)

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]
  • First U.S. Blu-ray release for this 1960’s psychedelic Euro-thriller.
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAPPAQUA (1966)

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DIRECTED BY: Conrad Rooks

FEATURING: Conrad Rooks, Jean-Louis Barrault, William S. Burroughs, Paula Pritchett

PLOT: A wealthy young American travels to Europe to receive treatment for his alcohol and drug addiction, fighting his urges, reflecting on his hedonistic past, and dreaming of more tranquil times.

Still from Chappaqua (1966)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: With a sometimes-poetic, sometimes-pretentious look at the travails of drug addiction and a fervent dedication to nonlinear storytelling, Chappaqua is messy but unusually sure of itself. There’s little doubt that first-time filmmaker Rooks got exactly the movie he wanted, and that movie is a surreal anti-narrative that by turns puzzles, annoys, and astonishes.

COMMENTS: The opening crawl is essentially the hero’s confession: in an effort to combat the alcoholism that began at the age of 14, our protagonist—Russsel Harwick, the alter ego of writer-director Rooks—turned to an impressive number of alternatives, including marijuana, hashish, cocaine, heroin, peyote, psilocybin and LSD. It’s the peyote that offers hope of breaking the cycle of rotating addiction, as a nightmare convinces him he’s hit rock bottom and leads him to seek a cure. Enjoy this moment; it’s the last time in Chappaqua where anyone makes an effort to explain what’s going on.

Chappaqua is Conrad Rooks’ barely disguised autobiographical account of his own struggles with drugs and drink, and he is bracingly frank about the depths to which he fell. He is selfish, rude, prone to breaking rules, and pathetic in pursuit of his next fix. We get to see what it’s like to operate in a drug-induced fog through such tools as an unsteady handheld camera, comical shifts in tone and perspective, and even a shocking black and white posterized vision of Manhattan. As a visualist, Rooks is rich with ideas. On the other hand, Russel is kind of unbearable to be around. (When he tussles with Burroughs in the writer’s cameo as an intake counselor, I half-hoped that Burroughs might pull a page out of his own history and shoot him.)

And yes, it’s that William S. Burroughs. Rooks hung out in New York with a number of future leading lights of the counterculture, and has said that he made Chappaqua after efforts to bring Naked Lunch to the screen fell through. But Burroughs is still a big part of this film even aside from his cameo, as Rooks used the author’s cut-up technique, deliberately editing out of order and throwing scenes in at random places, sometimes overlaid atop other scenes.

How Conrad Rooks came to be in the company of the likes of Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (a fellow cameo beneficiary, annoying crowds by the Central Park reservoir by chanting and playing a harmonium) is a major component of any discussion of Chappaqua. An Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAPPAQUA (1966) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HALLUCINATION GENERATION (1966)

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AKA Hallucination

DIRECTED BY: Edward Mann

FEATURING: George Montgomery, Danny Steinmann, Tom Baker, Renate Kasché

PLOT: A young man becomes embroiled with beatniks, drugs, and…  murder!

Still from Hallucination Generation (1966)

COMMENTS: Hallucination Generation is a cautionary tale about the dangers of vacationing in Ibiza, doing free drugs, and falling in love. This is not your typical ‘60s scare-tactic film, though. For one thing, it’s full of beatniks, not hippies. For another, the first (and only) freak-out doesn’t start until the halfway mark, meaning writer/director Edward Mann is either bad at exploitation or he’s trying to make a real movie here.

Danny Steinmann, who would later helm the likes of Savage Streets (1984) and Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985), plays our lead, William Williams. Bill Williams goes to Ibiza on vacation and falls in with a group of layabouts who follow Timothy Leary-esque guru Eric (George Montgomery). It’s all bikini babes and smoking pot out of two-foot-long pipes, until Bill falls in love, immediately gets married, and is cut off by his wealthy family. After determining that his terrible poetry isn’t going to support him and his new wife, instead of getting a job, Bill flees back to Eric’s, solo.

As the drug-pushing guru, George Montgomery may be the best part of this movie (besides the psychedelic special effects). He was well known for his chiseled good looks and his work in dozens of Westerns, even guest starring on “Bonanza” the same year Hallucination Generation came out. Sinking his teeth into something different, Montgomery goes for it here. The “enlightened” Eric is mean to his son and cheats on his wife, spouts ridiculous wisdom, and he hatches a plan for Bill to steal from a timid old man in Barcelona.

Finally, some LSD! Eric uses it to brainwash Bill into agreeing with his plan. (Drugs are bad, kids!) In this early attempt to represent an acid trip on film, photographer Paul Radkai and editor Fima Noveck are constrained only by the technology at hand: quick cuts, loose focus, a gun turning into an animated bat, color swirls, painted faces, fractals, rats, more animation, naked women, masks, more swirling colors.

Two versions of Hallucination Generation are included on Blu-ray: one is black and white, the other is tinted pink (although distributor Diabolik calls it “sepia”). The pink one has the trip effects in color.

As far as cautionary tales go, Bill’s dialogue while dosed doesn’t seem well-crafted to warn people away from the drug: “Don’t want to go too far in, I would get to like myself.” “Why question? It’s enough just to be.” Of course, he’s also yelling, “It’s bad!” between statements of self-transformation, which is pretty convincing.

Still from Hallucination Generation (1966)

There’s a botched robbery, a murder, a weird pick-up, and the climax has fantastic funky architecture and giant sculpture. But really, the whole second half of the movie feels tacked on and too long. There are fun details, like, where did the dog on the bed come from? Or where will Bill’s wife’s accent be from in this scene?

Hallucination Generation has pacing problems, acting problems, and equipment problems (e.g., unintentional shaky cam). But it’s also a time capsule, a pre-hippie bad-beard-beatnik psychedelic freak-out-in-Ibiza time capsule. And for a certain kind of viewer, it is right up their dark, prostitute-filled, Barcelonan alley.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this is the type of boring flick that could give illegal psychedelic drugs a bad name! Fun for the tolerant Acid Flick completist though.”–Steven Puchalski, “Shock Cinema”