Tag Archives: Obscure/Out of Print

Capsules

CAPSULE: 3 DEV ADAM (1973)

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3 Mighty Men; 3 Giant Men

DIRECTED BY: Tevfik Fikrat Ucat

FEATURING: Aytekin Akkaya, Yavuz Selekman, Dogan Tamer

PLOT: Captain America and Mexican wrestling champion Santo travel to Istanbul to help defeat evil antiques stealer Spider.

Still from 3 Dev Adam (1973)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It has its illucid moments, but there’s not enough consistent high absurdity beyond its preposterous pop premise. I admit that when three laughing puppet heads inexplicably appear in the middle of a sex scene, I was strongly tempted to make this movie a candidate for the List. But, at bottom, if you take the copyright-violation costumes off the actors and you would have a mildly exciting, ridiculous, and extremely cheap action film; a fun oddity to be sure, but not in the same league as the weirdest movies of all time.

COMMENTS: I’m not saying this movie would make a great deal of sense if the villain weren’t a blatant Spiderman knockoff, but about 90% of what makes 3 Dev Adam look absurd to us comes from the “facts” we know about Marvel’s classic superhero. Here in the West we realize that Spiderman does not wear a green costume with a red cowl and an overweight arachnid on the back. We know that his eyebrows aren’t so bushy that they stick out of his mask by a good two inches. And, most importantly, we know that Spidey does not bury women up to their necks in the sand and then pumice their faces with the propeller of a motorboat. If Adam‘s director is to be believed, it was no problem to make Spiderman into a villain because Turkish moviegoers had no idea who he was, which begs the question: why bother to rip off foreign superheroes at all if your audience doesn’t know who they are?

Perhaps Turks were more familiar with Captain America and Mexican wrestling hero Santo than with Spiderman, because these two crime fighters are garbed more faithfully in suits that look like they might have been rented from costume shops in Manhattan and Guadalajara, respectively. But this brings up another issue: these two heroes don’t have any superpowers, Captain America doesn’t have a magic shield, and neither has a secret identity to protect, so there’s no obvious reason for them to get all Continue reading CAPSULE: 3 DEV ADAM (1973) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

TOD BROWNING’S THE MYSTIC (1925)

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Tod Browning‘s frequent collaborator Waldemar Young wrote the screenplay for The Mystic from Browning’s story, and it is clearly part their family of work together which includes The Unholy Three (1925), The Blackbird (1926), The Show (1927), The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), West of Zanzibar (1928), and Where East is East (1929).  The early knife-throwing act seen here could be a blueprint for the same act in The Unknown.  The Mystic (1925) opens in a Hungarian gypsy carnival.  The main attraction of the carnival is “The Mystic,” Zara (Aileen Pringle).  Zara is  part of a trio which includes Poppa Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and Zara’s lover Anton (Robert Ober).  Of course, Zara’s clairvoyant act is all illusion and Browning, as usual, lets his audience in on the trickery almost from the outset.

Still from The Mystic (1925)Conman Michale Nash (Conway Tearle) approaches the trio with a proposal to take their act to America, where they can bilk  naive, rich Manhattanites out of their fortunes. The New Yorkers make Zara’s seances a hit, although not all of the natives are so gullible, and the police are secretly investigating the scam.  To complicate matters, Nash puts the moves on Zara, and Anton is pushed aside.  Love does funny things, and soon Nash develops a conscience.  He becomes reluctant to swindle a young heiress.  The ever-jealous Zara believes Nash must want her for himself; but, Nash simply wants to reform and make a better, honest life for Zara.  Their relationship is reminiscent of the one between Priscilla Dean and Wheeler Oakman in Browning’s Outside The Law (1920), as are the familiar Browning themes of reformation and unpunished crimes.

Pringle shows considerable screen charisma; or, at least, Browning draws it out of her here.  Her performance compares to other great female roles in Browning’s ouevre: Joan Crawford in The Unknown and Lupe Velez in Where East is East.  In many scenes, such as the knife throwing scene, Pringle looks remarkably like Crawford; in close-ups, Pringle exudes the same soft sensuality and subtle anguish.  In other scenes, Pringle shares the bubbly quality that we see later in Velez’s performance. At other times Pringle calls to mind the mysterious exoticism of Edna Tichenor.  Unfortunately, Pringle and Browning never got to work together again.  The actress was reportedly difficult to work with; most of her co-stars considered he an intellectual snob.  Indeed, she kept company with many of the artisans and intellectuals of her day.  George Gershwin and H.L. Mencken were among her notable lovers and she was married, briefly, to author James M. Cain.  Pringle’s acting career never really took off, and she didn’t seem to care.  She remained active in films (mostly small parts, which included uncredited roles) up until the mid 1940s and died in 1989 at the age of 94.

Because of the lack of usual Browning stars, The Mystic is an interesting, lesser known film in the director’s canon.  Not only is it thematically related to his other films, but it also shows the idiosyncratic continuity of his taste in actresses and his ability to mold actors, whoever they were.

Note: the luxurious costumes for The Mystic were the work of legendary French designer Erté.  Erté, who was a big fan of Georges Méliès, later said it was a thrilling experience to collaborate with such a distinguished surrealist as Tod Browning.

Top 10 Lists

WHERE’S THE WEIRDNESS?: TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES NOT (YET) AVAILABLE ON DVD (IN THE US)

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We frequently get requests to review certain movies that are unavailable on DVD in the United States.  In this digital age when even cigarettes are electronic, it seems every movie ever made should be legally available to watch, somewhere. Surprisingly, that’s not the case.  Sometimes movies are hung up in rights disputes; often, the ones we’re most interested in are so weird and specialized they fall through the cracks.

But truly strange stuff is showing up on DVD and Blu-ray all the time.  Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a surrealist classic and a film school favorite, but it didn’t debut on DVD until 2009.  The bizarre haunted house horror Hausu (1977) was ignored and forgotten on release, but was rescued from obscurity more than thirty years later by no lesser entity than the Criterion Collection.  Even something as odd, ignored, and seemingly uncommercial as 1977’s Death Bed: The Bed that Eats—a movie that critics are still unable to confidently classify as incompetent exploitation or self-aware joke—recently showed up in the DVD ranks.  Many fans of cinematic marginalia grew up assuming that Skidoo, Otto Preminger’s 1968 counterculture satire bomb featuring Groucho Marx as God, among other oddities, would exist forevermore only as a brief plot synopsis in dog-eared movie guides, with a turkey symbol eternally etched next to it.  Skidoo was buried, maybe out of deference to the embarrassed stars (besides Marx, it also featured Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, singer-songwriter Harry Nillson and a host of distinguished character actors); but in 2008, Skiddoo showed up on TV, and this July it will make its first appearance on DVD.

The point is, we’ll never give up on anything appearing anymore, so long as someone, somewhere thinks there’s a buck to be made off of it.  There are a number of movies we’re going to hold off on reviewing immediately because they may get a release in the future.  We’ve listed some of the rarest and most important ones below.  In keeping with the venerable Top 10 tradition, we’ve limited ourselves to a decemvirate of titles, but believe us, there are a lot more missing movies out there. We skipped over some high-interest titles which are still available on Region 1 DVD but are extremely rare, such as Institute Benjamenta and Survive Style 5+.

10. Arrebato [Rapture] (1980).  Made in the years after the demise of Franco and film censorship, Arrebato, a drug movie about a filmmaker who believes his camera has a mind of its own, has an enraptured cult following in Spain.  The ideas here are sometimes said to anticipate David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome.  Neil Young (the film critic, not the Canadian songwriter) is one of few English speakers who’s seen and reported on it; he was less than unimpressed, calling it “a mind-blowingly pretentious exploration of creativity, madness and the addictive world of cinema.”  We’d still like the opportunity to judge for ourselves, since mind-blowing pretension is frequently a virtue in the weird movie realm.  In November 2010 Arrebato was released in Region 2 edition by the respected German company Bildstörung, with English subtitles.  Whether there will ever be enough interest to get it released on these shores is another question.


Clip from Arrebato

9. Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968).  Japanese sci-fi with a plane crash, UFOs, and alien blobs that turn their victims into vampires.  The visuals are unreal and stylized but very striking, almost expressionistic; Quentin Tarantino paid homage to Goke with the airplane flying through the blood red/orange sky in Kill Bill.  This film occasionally shows up on Turner Classic Movies late at night; if TCM can get the television rights, they likely can clear the video rights too.  Don’t sit on this masterpiece of classically odd Japanese camp, Ted Turner!


Japanese trailer for Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

8. Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets [Sho o suteyo machi e deyou] (1971).  A Continue reading WHERE’S THE WEIRDNESS?: TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES NOT (YET) AVAILABLE ON DVD (IN THE US) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

TOD BROWNING’S THE SHOW (1927)

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The screenplay for The Show (1927) was written by frequent Tod Browning collaborator Waldemer Young (with uncredited help from Browning).  It is  (very loosely) based on Charles Tenney Jackson’s novel, “The Day of Souls.”  Originally titled  “Cock O’ the Walk,” The Show is one of the most bizarre productions to emerge from  silent cinema, nearly on par with the director’s The Unknown from the same year.

John Gilbert plays Cock Robin, the ballyhoo man at the Palace of Illusions.  A character with the name of an animal is a frequent Browning trademark, and Gilbert’s Robin is a proud Cock indeed, both the character and the actor.  The Show amounted to punishment for star Gilbert, who had made what turned out to be a fatal error.  When co-star and fiancee Greta Garbo failed to show up at their planned wedding, Gilbert was left humiliated at the altar, where studio boss Louis B. Mayer made a loud derogatory remark for all to hear.  Gilbert responded by thrashing Mayer.  Mayer swore revenge, vowing to destroy Gilbert’s career, regardless of cost (at the time Gilbert was the highest paid star in Hollywood).  Mayer’s revenge began here and climaxed with the coming of sound, when he reportedly had the actor’s recorded dialogue manipulated to wreck Gilbert’s voice and career.  Whether Mayer’s tinkering with Gilbert’s voice is legendary or not, Mayer did intentionally  set out to give Gilbert increasingly unflattering roles, and the consequences were devastating for Gilbert.  Having fallen so far, so fast, Gilbert took to excessive drink.  He actually had a  fine voice and starred in a few sound films, including Tod Browning’s Fast Workers (1933) and with Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) (she insisted on Gilbert, over Mayer’s strenuous objections).  Gilbert died forgotten at 37 in 1936, and became the inspiration for the Norman Maine character in a Star is Born (1937).  The Show was the first film after Gilbert’s aborted wedding incident, and instead of playing his usual role of swashbuckling matinee idol, Gilbert is cast as a cocky lecher.

Still from The Show (1927)Cock Robin is the barker for a Hungarian carnival, dazzling the ladies and bilking them of their hard earned silver.  He ushers patrons in to the  show with the help of “The Living Hand of Cleopatra,” a disembodied hand akin to Thing from “The Addams Family.”  Among Cock’s unholy trio of mutilated-below-the-waist attractions is ‘Zela, the Half Lady.’ “Believe me boys, there are no cold feet here to bother you!”  Zela is followed by ‘Arachnadia! The Human Spider!,’ a heavily mascaraed, disembodied head in a web (played Continue reading TOD BROWNING’S THE SHOW (1927) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

TOD BROWNING’S THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR (1929)

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The Thirteenth Chair (1929) is Tod Browning‘s first sound film and a real curio.  Like a lot of early sound films, it is bogged down with wax museum staging.  Chair is yet another drawing room murder mystery, taken from an antiquated stage play, but being a Tod Browning production, the film cannot resist its own latent, deviant infrastructure in the acutely bizarre casting of  Bela Lugosi as the well-dressed Inspector Delzante.

Still from The Thirteenth Chair (1929)In the original play, the character of the inspector had a different name and was played for laughs.  The Thirteenth Chair was an all around testing-the-waters kind of film; a test handling that new invention called sound, which neither Browning nor the production team were comfortably with (all too clearly).  The main test here, however, was for the upcoming role of Dracula, and for that reason Browning grabbed Lugosi, who had made the vampire role a mega hit on the stage circuit.

Lugosi’s make-up, with sharply accented eyebrows, is patterned after the make-up he wore as Dracula in the play version of Bram Stoker’s tale.  His mannerisms are pure vamp, not at all what the role of the inspector originally called for.  His first appearance is shot from the back.  He is in a police station, dressed from head to shoes in white, but when he turns towards the camera, he delivers the lines as only a Transylvanian Count would.  Thankfully, Lugosi is wildly disproportionate to the role and serves as an almost surreal red herring for the film.  This may have been a test project for Browning, but he had to make it interesting for himself, and he did so first with the eccentric casting of the “Living, Hypnotic Corpse” as the inspector.

Lugosi beautifully mangles the English language, as per his norm, but his handling of the Continue reading TOD BROWNING’S THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR (1929) →