Tag Archives: 1978

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ADELA HAS NOT HAD SUPPER YET (1978)

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Adéla ještě nevečeřela
AKA Dinner For Adele; Nick Carter in Prague; Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Nad’a Konvalinkova, Ladislav Pesek, Vaclav Lohinsky,

PLOT: Nick Carter (Dočolomanský), America’s Greatest Detective, is requested to come to Prague to solve the disappearance of a member of a prominent noble family. But even with the help of his local guide Inspector Ledvina (Hrušínský), countless gadgets, and his own American know-how and constant vigilance, it might just not be enough against his greatest adversary, The Gardener, and his creation Adela…

… and Adela has not had supper yet!

Still from Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet (1978)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It’s fun pastiche like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and high adventure like the Bond films—but done at a fraction of the cost, and more smartly, without getting in the way of the fun.

COMMENTS: We open with the sound of an orchestra tuning up, followed by a conductor leading the start of a symphony which is interrupted by flash cuts of a dime novel illustration and the sounds of a tack-piano. This battle goes on for a few seconds, with the illustration and piano winning out and the credits beginning. High culture and low culture merged into entertainment, which is a pretty good encapsulation of the work of Oldřich Lipský: pastiche and parody merged with satire and (subtle?) commentary.

Adela is another good-natured lark, much like the director’s earlier Western parody Lemonade Joe. This time, the parody features Nick Carter, a dime-novel detective who was a major character of pop culture in the early 20th Century. In this iteration, he’s a combination of Sherlock Holmes (of whom he has an autographed photo and a note of admiration) and James Bond (with an array of gadgets to assist him). “America’s Greatest Detective,” as the sign on his door states, he effortlessly defeats several perpetrators even before the story gets properly underway.

The adventure melodrama is a standardized form, but the basic plot can take a myriad of variations. In this case, it’s also a Victorian slapstick yarn, with hints of steampunk on the fringes. Plus, it’s actually fun and funny. Lipský’s comedy stagings are almost flawless: only Blake Edwards (specifically The Party and The Pink Panther Strikes Again) comes close—although Lipský was more consistent. Think how much better The Great Race would’ve been if it were a Lipský film…

It’s all very genial and innocent, although there’s a tinge of satire present. Czechs are ribbed, from Carter’s description of them as “down to Earth types,” to Inspector Ledvina’s constant consumption of beer and sausages. America is also gently mocked: “America’s Greatest Detective” lives in New York, “America’s Greatest City,” and as Nick himself affirms, “Americans do everything grandly”. But there’s also American arrogance; “Europe is decay,” Nick states to Ledvina during a limburger lunch, and American puritanism surfaces during his encounters with women, both those who are attempting to kill him and those who are slightly friendlier.

Made more than a decade after Lemonade Joe, this was Lipský’s second of three collaborations with write/animator Jiří Brdečka. It was followed by The Mysterious Castle In The Carpathians with much of the same cast. As with Mysterious Castle and Lemonade Joe, Brdečka’s experience as an animator adds to the visual humor; a reference to the Escher portrait ‘Hand With Reflecting Sphere‘, running gags in the background set up early which pay off in the last third of the film, and Brdečka’s animation of the Gardener’s backstory. Jan Svankmajer assists with animating Adela (a man-eating plant with as much personality, but not the vocabulary, of The Little Shop of Horrors‘ Audrey II)—mainly when she’s having her supper.

Like Mysterious Castle, Adela got its first U.S. home video release on a Deaf Crocodile Blu-ray, with a new restoration and a commentary track from Czech film expert Irena Kovarova and film critic Tereza Brdečková (Brdečka’s daughter). Like the previous release, the extras are weighted towards Brdečka’s career rather than focusing on just Adela. Four of Brdečka’s animated shorts are included; Badly Drawn Hen (Špatně namalovaná slepice), Forester’s Song (Do lesíčka na čekanou), What Did I Not Tell The Prince (Co jsem princi neřekla) and The Miner’s Rose (Horníkova růže). The deluxe limited edition includes a 60 page booklet with essays by Walter Chaw and Jonathan Owen as well as excerpts from the 2015 book “JIŘÍ BRDEČKA: Life-Animation-Magic,” with storyboards from Adela and the shorts.

Lipský disappears a bit from the discussion; but Brdečka benefits from having 1) a direct living relative still able to beat the drum for his accomplishments and 2) having been an integral part of the . There’s still a lot of Lipský left to premiere on USA-friendly home video, so future releases may rectify the slight against Lipský, if indeed there is much bonus material on the director.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The dialogue, in subtitles, is strictly 70’s streetrap, and its non sequitur placement in the turn-of-the century provinciality is hysterical. The performances are well timed camp, and the entire colorful romp is strictly for fun.”–Michael Lasky, Bay Area Reporter (contemporaneous)Still from Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet (1978)

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet [blu-ray]

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet [blu-ray]
  • The beloved Czech cult comedy / horror / mystery about a handsome but bumbling detective and a man-eating plant
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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ADVENTURES OF PICASSO [PICASSOS ÄVENTYR] (1978)

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DIRECTED BY: Tage Danielsson

FEATURING: Gösta Ekman, Hans Alfredson, Margaretha Krook, Lena Olin, Bernard Cribbins, Wilfrid Brambell

PLOT: The life of the legendary Spanish painter, told with a  questionable level of veracity.

Still from The Adventures of Picasso (1978)

COMMENTS: In a few weeks, a motion picture will make its streaming debut purporting to tell the remarkable story of pop music’s crown prince of parody, . Weird promises to cover every step of the master accordionist’s life and, whenever possible, to subvert the proceedings with lies and misdirections. It’s a fitting approach for someone who has built a career out of taking familiar sounds and destroying them from within.

What it won’t be is unprecedented. The grand womb-to-tomb biopic has been assailed before. Its conventions have been savagely parodied. We’ve seen lives thoroughly misappropriated with falsehoods and flights of invention. (And that’s to say nothing of legitimate productions that shred the truth to achieve better storytelling.) It turns out that a leading exemplar of the ridiculous film biography hit screens years earlier, the product of a Swedish comedy duo who wondered what it would be like to make an authoritative biography when you have virtually no knowledge of the subject.

Like a book report by a student who did absolutely none of the reading, this take on the life of Picasso is drenched in flopsweat. Within the first 15 minutes of the movie, the pieces of the Picasso legend are already falling into place: young Pablo has established his bonafides at art school (successfully painting a nude after seeing the model for a split second), relocated to Madrid, adopted his trademark striped shirt and white trousers, and invented cubism. Having burned what few facts they have available, the filmmakers pivot to wildly making stuff up. Did you know that Picasso was gifted with a vial of magical ink by a woman he saved from a pair of foul brigands? Maybe you recall his illustrious contemporaries, who evidently include Ernest Hemingway, Erik Satie, two Toulouse-Lautrecs, Puccini (and his real life Mimi), Vincent van Gogh, and even Rembrandt. And who can forget the real story of how a petty artistic quibble between Churchill and Hitler presaged World War II. (No wonder Picasso would seek refuge in America, despite the notorious Art Prohibition of the Roaring Twenties.) The Adventures of Picasso is the movie equivalent of converting text into Japanese in Google Translate and then back.

One of the film’s most inventive techniques is the choice to dispense with dialogue altogether. Actors speak in grunts and gibberish or spout cursory and irrelevant phrases in pidgin versions of various languages. (A persistent chanteuse sings lyrics that are actually a recipe for a Finnish fish pastry.) Even the headline of the traditional newspaper carrying the word of the outbreak of World War I reads simply “BOOM KRASCH BANG!” Only the narration is necessary to carry the story forward, and you get a different version depending upon your native tongue. (English-speakers like myself are treated to comic actor Bernard Cribbins, in his role as Gertrude Stein.) The filmmakers have thus given themselves an out: don’t understand what’s going on? No worries; you’re not supposed to.

While writers Danielsson and Alfredson will do anything for a joke, they show surprising empathy for the Picasso they’ve created. There’s an extended skit where the onscreen Picasso is forced to do whatever the narrator dictates, and that typifies the notion that Picasso ultimately had no agency, a victim of his own success. His father is a relentless huckster; when his dicey hair tonic instantly produces Picasso’s famous baldness, the old man immediately sells the locks to capitalize on his son’s fame. Throughout the rest of his “career,” dear old dad will be there, making friends with history’s greatest monsters and looking for the quickest way to make a buck. At the end, the great artist is nothing more than an exhibit himself; his home is a theme park and his doves of peace are trinkets to be sold. In this telling, Picasso doesn’t so much die as drop out, leaving our materialistic world behind.

The Adventures of Picasso certainly takes an unusual approach to biography; if you come hoping to learn anything about the creative mind behind “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” or “Guernica,” you will surely be disappointed. And even the deeper truth that may be lurking within seems suspect; the real Picasso was far from an innocent and was in full control of his brand. But there’s something almost noble about the notion that if you can’t get it right, then by all means get it completely and utterly wrong. Or, as another great biographical subject once observed, “It doesn’t matter if it’s boiled or fried. Just eat it.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Adventures of Picasso‘ is billed as ‘a lunatic comedy,’ and while it does achieve that feeling on a couple of rare occasions, for the most part it’s like a bad dream… The film’s strategy is to make everything as feverishly absurd as it can be…. But too much of it has the ring of desperation. It’s all too frantic for words.” Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Ettin, who called it a “[S]wedish surreal comedy” that ” [I]’m sure you will like.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)        

Capsules

CAPSULE: JUBILEE (1978)

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DIRECTED BY: Derek Jarman

FEATURING: Jenny Runacre, Jordan, , Nell Campbell (as Little Nell), Jack Birkett, Richard O’Brien

PLOT: Queen Elizabeth I requests her court sorcerer to summon the spirit Ariel to show her Britain’s future, and witnesses a bleak vision of apocalyptic decay.

Still from Jubilee (1978)

COMMENTS: An occasionally brilliant and often muddled mess of an artwork, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee lurks in a strange netherworld of identification. This is, admittedly, a typical “problem” for the movies that end up on the shores of this weird internet isle of ours, and it is a credit, in a way, to Jarman’s particular particularity that his movies tend to be both too weird to be arty while also being too arty to be weird. It’s a strange categorization, to be sure, and the call I made in not considering Jubilee Apocrypha-worthy was a tough one.

Jubilee is an Elizabethan period piece that flashes forward to then-contemporary 1970s London, which was in economic doldrums and still riddled with bombed-out, clapped-out, and otherwise derelict streets and homes. The narrative seems full of plot holes, but that fits nicely with the punk aesthetic that Jarman was, depending upon your perspective, either cynically celebrating or subtly satirizing. Clothes full of holes, ‘zine literature smashed together from ripped-up sources, and even punk’s musical style: all of it was intended to reflect decay, despair, and anger. These elements dovetail in Jubilee as we watch a loose gang of nihilistic young women spend their time breaking things and people, all while incongruously sucking up to the mysterious, flamboyant, and giggle-prone one-man superpower, “Borgia Ginz,” a music and media mogul.

The tone of Jubilee veers in as many directions as the scattershot narrative. There’s a heartwarming (if controversial) romance between two men (who are possibly brothers; the explanation is neither clear nor reliable), who eventually allow a young female artist into their relationship. But there’s also malignance. “Bod” and “Mad” (two of the girl gang members, possibly lovers) wantonly harass and then beat up a diner waitress early in the film, and then continue this cruel streak throughout. “Amyl Nitrate”, played by Punk-era icon Jordan, oscillates between petulant monologues (in the form of her world history she’s writing) and tender gestures with “Crabs” (Little Nell, whose status as the most convincing actor in the movie is saying something). And of course, what 1978 anarchic-socio-commentary-guerilla film would be complete without a young Adam Ant (then something of a nobody) as the latest protégé of Jack Birkett’s other-worldly, hyper-energized Borgia Ginz?

Derek Jarman was an artist of considerable talent: be it in the world of painting, production design, or direction. He was also someone to whom no friend or overseer (if there were any) could say “no.” While this allowed for a far more interesting oeuvre than might have existed otherwise, it was also to that oeuvre’s occasional detriment. What could have a tighter, tidier Jubilee looked like? I know, I know: I just lamented a lack of tightness and tidiness in a punk movie about the punk ethos, so perhaps I’m missing the point. But bearing that in mind, even I couldn’t help but be impressed with this glorious mess of style, pathos, music, and philosophy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Jubilee might be most appreciated by those who are able to embrace its cult movie aspects. Its enigmas and failings may not always be as compelling or as endearing as those found in the best-known cult films but some of Jubilee‘s idiosyncratic content does work to position the film squarely within the wild terrain of the cult film corpus.”–Lee Broughton, Pop Matters (Blu-ray)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANITOU (1978)

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DIRECTED BY: William Girdler

FEATURING: Tony Curtis, , Michael Ansara,

PLOT: Karen has a problem: there’s a zit on her back which is growing into a tumor that is the manifestation of a 400-year old native American medicine man, which will require the help of psychics, computers, and another medicine man to deal with.

Still from The Manitou (1978)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The late Blu-ray release caused a missed connection with the List, now closed. Otherwise, this movie combines the raving premise, bonkers execution, and deadpan seriousness that defines the finest of our so-bad-its-weird curations. The cacophony of an exploding typewriter, an indoor blizzard, a licorice spirit melting out of a table, and a frozen head crashing through a window ensures that everyone will have a favorite indelible scene.

COMMENTS: Today is a very special episode of Pete’s Punishing Picture Show, not the least of which because it touches on one of my favorite perversions side hobbies: collecting bad ripoffs of The Exorcist (1973). From Bollywood to Italian giallo, Exorcist rip-offs form their own genre; you can trace the demon shock wave of 1973 rippling through cinematic history around the world. The Manitou hides behind North American native hoodoo instead of Catholic demonology, but it can’t fool us; it follows the exact same structure act-for-act. Its chief innovation is that by late third act, it gets bored with retrodding Exorcist ground and opts to mix in some Star Wars instead, generously garnished with psychedelic space gloop from 2001: A Space Odyssey for good measure.

Wasting no time in trifling details like character development, The Manitou starts at a hospital as a doctor tries to explain the strange growth on the back of a patient’s neck. The patient is Karen (Susan Strasberg), whose estranged ex-boyfriend Harry (Tony Curtis) is a phony psychic making a living as a freelance Tarot card reader for wealthy widows. Just to nail a pin on how phony he is, he wears a Cookie-Crisp-blue wizard robe and a fake mustache that he peels off and pastes on a pillar en route to his tumbler of scotch at the end of a hard day’s work as a flim-flam artist. But when Karen consults him about her lump problem, he is confronted with real-life black magic, since all attempts to treat the lump with conventional medicine lead to everything going haywire. Harry makes the rounds of his not-fake psychic friends for a séance here and a consultation with a professor of native American studies (a well-cast Burgess Meredith) there, and eventually is led to the conclusion that the lump on Karen’s neck is a reincarnated 400-year old native American medicine man, who is possessing Karen as a parasitic host on his way to being reborn.

The evil influence of the Lump even drives a random client of Harry’s to levitate out of her chair and fly downstairs, killing her, a homicide never to be brought up again. Out of his league when confronted by reincarnated witch doctors, Harry has to drive out to a reservation to recruit John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara), a gruff medicine man who is also the most offensive racial stereotype in film since Mickey Rooney’s buck-toothed Chinaman in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The whole movie drowns in Disneyfied Injun-Joe buckskin clichés, as Singing Rock executes heap big pow-wow mojo (it involves rattling little leather drums a lot) to contain “Misquamacus,” the name of Karen’s manitou. Misquamacus devoted himself to the dark side of the medicine force, so his coming back is a bad thing. But come back he does, ripping a hole out of Karen’s back as he is birthed into a midget character resembling a slightly chewed cinnamon gummy bear. Misquamacus and Singing Rock spend the rest of the movie in a no-holds-barred Injun magic fight, turning the hospital into a frozen ice cavern straight off the planet Hoth and freezing cheerful nurses into meat popsicles, manifesting lizard spirits, and eventually transforming Karen’s hospital room into an outer space dimension with her bed flying in the middle of it. But Singing Rock marshals the forces of the hospital’s DEC-era computers (“White Man magic!,” he explains) to help in the battle.

As Singing Rock dispenses his medicine-man-wisdom-of-the-day about how the White Man pisses off nature spirits—shame on us!—we soberly realize the consequences of our faithless high-tech lifestyle. Actually, no, not a stinking minute of this movie makes sense, with none of it explained except via Tonto-logic. Nevertheless, it is done with strident deadpan seriousness all the way through; everybody involved seems smugly sure they’d have another Exorcist on their hands. While exteriors are gorgeously shot in San Francisco, the interior sets carries this studio-bound film into made-for-TV funk, feeling like the nuttiest episode of General Hospital ever made. The numerous special effects don’t date themselves to a minute past 1978, giving every “hadouken” laser blast in the medicine-magic battle a distinct early “Doctor Who” flavor. Insult to injury, Tony Curtis has never been so badly miscast. His streetwise Manhattan borough delivery demolishes every line he speaks. The Manitou is one of those movies where nothing works, and yet the entire 104-minute running time is hilarious entertainment that will never bore you for a second. It could be one of the greatest specimens of unintentional camp ever made. Just be sure if you get a zit on your neck, treat it with some Clearasil and take care of it the easy way.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The plot can easily be summarized, but first this announcement: If you happen to be drinking hot coffee at the present moment, please set your cup aside, because elements of the scenario might cause you to begin shaking with helpless laughter and you could spill the coffee on your rug, dog, cat, mate or newspaper.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, contemporaneous