Monthly Archives: January 2017

The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima)
Directed by Kaneto Shindo
Written by Kaneto Shindo
1960/Japan
Kindai Eiga Kyokai
Repeat viewing/FilmStruck

[box] Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame. Hesiod [/box]

This is a hypnotically beautiful movie. If people could eat scenery, these folks would have it made.

The film is dialogue-free for the first 38 minutes and virtually dialogue-free after that.  It takes place on a dry, isolated island occupied by a single family of four.  During the summer, the parents must travel to a more populated island several times a day to collect water for personal use and to water their meager crops.  One of the boys attends school on the other island.  The other occupies himself with fishing.

With the exception of a sudden moment of violence part-way through and a tragedy toward the end of the film, we simply follow the daily lives of the people through the four seasons.  It is a life of unremitting toil, whether they are fetching water or not.  Very occasionally, the family takes an outing as a special treat.

Given the lack of dialogue or story, one might think this would be very boring.  Instead, it is mesmerizing and hauntingly beautiful.  I spent my time meditating on how people can work so hard with so much grace simply to survive. Other imponderables come to mind, such as why these people remain in this place. Perhaps they have or can see no alternative.  Recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a51IpDo_hVA

Clip

Jigoku (“The Sinners of Hell”)
Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
Written by Nobuo Nakagawa and Ichiro Miyagawa
1960/Japan
Shintoho Film Distribution Company
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Enma, King of Hell: Hear me! You who in life piled up sin upon sin will be trapped in Hell forever. Suffer! Suffer! This vortex of torment will whirl for all eternity.[/box]

This vision of Hell is enough to keep even the most ardent sinner on the straight and narrow!

Shiro is having a series of very bad days mostly due to his constant companion, the clearly evil Tamura.  First he lets Tamura drive his car and immediately flees after hitting and killing a yakuza.  The mother and mistress of the yakuza are on a mission to kill both men. Then his fiancee dies in a taxi accident.  Shiro was the one that insisted on taking a taxi.

It goes on and on.  Every time Shiro shows up, somebody dies.  Tamura is always leering somewhere nearby.

Most of the other characters in the film are also guilty of sins that have gone undetected thus far.  Finally, Tamura takes Shiro on a grand tour of the Eight Buddhist Hells that will greet all sinners who have gone unpunished during life.

The plot and acting are not up to much.  It is the cinematography, color, and nightmare vision of Hell that make the film worth seeing.  It would make a fitting Halloween double bill with Nakagawa’s Ghost Story of Yatsuya (1959).

Trailer (no subtitles)

Beyond the Time Barrier
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Arthur C. Pierce
1960/USA
Miller Consolidated Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box]Dr. Bourman: Yes, they are a dying race. There hasn’t been a new birth on this citadel in the last twenty years.

Capt. Markova: That’s where you fit into the plan, Allison. Make no mistake about it.[/box]

Mutants are much cheaper than monsters.

Test pilot Maj. William Allison finds himself in the year 2024. He is promptly arrested as a spy and finds himself thrown underground with blood thirsty mutants.  At the last minute, he is wanted for questioning.  It turns out that a plague ravaged the Earth in 1973 and caused the mutations.  The people living above ground are also slightly mutant, being entirely sterile – that is except for possibly the Supreme’s deaf-mute daughter Tirene.

Others have crossed the time barrier before him, but Allison is the only pre-plague traveler. The group plots to sent him back to his own time, where he can possibly avert the plague.

This is moderately OK but did not really float my boat.  The poor quality print available on YouTube did not help.

Trailer

First Spaceship on Venus
Directed by Kurt Maetzig
Written by Kurt Maetzig; adapted by Jan Fethke et al from a novel by Stanislaus Lem
1960/East Germany/Poland
VEB DEFA-Studio für spielfilme/Film Polski/etc
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] You can’t plan for the future, because some guy’s going to land in a spaceship with three heads and a big beak and take over everything. Paul Kantner [/box]

From behind the Iron Curtain comes an innocuous B sci-fi flick.

It is 1985 and the era of peace and World Government has arrived.  America is part of one big happy family.  Scientists are investigating a location in Siberia where a meteorite had been thought to strike.  A rock contains a strange “spool”.  After months of work it is determined that the landing was by Venutians and laborous translation efforts reveal secret plans to conquer the Earth.  A spaceship to Mars is easily diverted for a mission to Venus.

An international team mans the spaceship and has various adventures on the strangely lifeless planet.

This is one of those flicks where the actors keep saying “Incredible!” and I am hard-pressed to find anything incredible going on.  The lack of an alien or monster keeps things mighty tame.  I don’t think the dubbed American version I watched hurt the film any.

Hell to Eternity
Directed by Phil Karlson
Written by Ted Sherdeman and Walter Roeber Schmidt; story by Gil Doud
1960/USA
Allied Artists Pictures/Atlantic Pictures Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Guy Gabaldon: [after shooting two soldiers] I understood that double-crossing speech! These men died without any reason. I didn’t want to kill them! You want to go to your army? All right, you go, but I’m going with you to keep you honest, and you’re gonna tell those people on this island that the war is over. Now let’s move![/box]

I would have rated this a standard biopic/combat movie had it not been derailed by an interminable gratuitous striptease sequence halfway in.

This is based on a true story.   During the depression, youngster Guy Gabaldon is caught stealing potatoes from a grocery store.  He then gets in a fistfight at school and an older Japanese-American boy tries to straighten him out and take him to his parents.  It turns out Guy has been living alone in absolute poverty.  His father is dead and his mother is in the hospital.  The older boy’s family takes Guy in.  After Guy’s mother dies, he is adopted.  Guy blends in perfectly with the family and learns to speak fluent Japanese as his adoptive parents speak no English.

Guy grows up to be Jeffrey Hunter.  After Pearl Harbor, his family is sent to an internment camp where the sons enlist.  Guy is drafted and becomes a specialist interpreter in the Marines.

Guy’s unit has a couple of days leave in Hawaii before they are shipped to the Pacific.  Guy is quite the ladies’ man and takes his buddies (David Janssen and Vic Damone) on a spree.  He manages to score several bottles of good whiskey.  The men then repair to a bar where Guy makes friends with a waitress with his Japanese skills.  A buddy is more interested in a supposedly cold Caucasian reporter.  The men and two women repair to the waitress’s apartment where they meet her stripper roommate.  It is then we are treated to a bunch of drunken leering and two stripteases.  The scene seems to go on for half an hour.

Suddenly the action shift to Saipan.  Guy is initially torn by his feelings about the Japanese.  After a couple of battles, he becomes almost too gung ho.  In the end, his Japanese skills allow him to capture more enemy soldiers than anyone in history including Alvin York.  With Sessue Hayakawa as a general and George Takai as one of Guy’s brothers.

Director Karlson, always lurid, lost me with the striptease and I never really got behind the story again.  The sequence was not so much offensive as really boring and pointless.  It’s an interesting story and might have made a good movie in other hands.

Trailer

The League of Gentlemen
Directed by Basil Dearden
Written by Bryan Forbes from a novel by John Boland
1960/UK
Allied Film Makers
First viewing/FilmStruck

[box] Stevens: It’s like being in school.

Lexy: I sincerely hope not.[/box]

Jack Hawkins leads an all-star British cast in this solid caper film.

Col. Norman Hyde (Hawkins) has recently been retired from the Army and isn’t happy about it.  He has never been in trouble before but that is about to change.  He believes he has developed a fool-proof plan for a bank robbery.  The plan relies on military precision and he gathers a group of disgraced, but expert, ex-Army officers.

The group gets along famously.  In the way of these things, we follow the planning and execution of the rather ingenious heist.  With Roger Livesy, Richard Attenborough, and Nigel Patrick among the robbers, Robert Coote as an old windbag, and Oliver Reed in a tiny uncredited part as a fey chorus boy in a theater production.

This might not be the most exciting heist film ever made but it is thoroughly enjoyable, mostly thanks to the cast.  You are kept guessing at what will happen next throughout and much fun is had at the expense of the army.  The ending didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Jack Hawkins was ill with the cancer that would eventually take his larynx during filming. You certainly can’t see it on screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3TQC3YCBC4

Trailer

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Seven Thieves
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Written by Sydney Boehm from a novel by Max Catto
1960/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

Tagline: They Will Hold You Like a Pointed Gun! “Al Capone” and “Little Caesar” in the most fabulous robbery that ever rocked Monte Carlo!

The great cast promised a better picture than I got.

Everybody in Cannes loves kindly old “Professor” Theo Wilkins (Edward G. Robinson).  But there is more to the Professor than meets the eye.  He pays recently released convict Paul Mason’s (Rod Steiger) ticket from America and tries to get him interested in his elaborate plan to rob the casino at Monte Carlo.  Paul is intially reluctant but gradually becomes convinced, especially when he is given the role as unquestionable leader of the operation.

The Professor has already lined up a number of accomplices.  These include saxophonist Poncho (Eli Wallach) and exotic dancer Melanie (Joan Collins).  After a slow build-up, we follow the planning and execution of the heist.  With Sebastian Cabot as the director of the casino.

The first half of this movie really dragged for me, the pay-off wasn’t all that exciting, and the film has a really odd ending.  The whole thing feels over-written.  It does have the distinction of being the only film in my memory in which Rod Steiger has a romance.

Seven Thieves was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.

Trailer

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Directed by Karel Reisz
Written by Alan Sillitoe from his novel
1960/UK
Woodfall Film Productions
First viewing/FilmStruck
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Arthur Seaton: Don’t let the bastards grind you down![/box]

Albert Finney made his name with this great portrait of a total louse.

Arthur Seaton (Finney) hates his job as a lathe operator in a factory somewhere in the north of England.  He gets his only joy at work by playing pranks on other workers and then lying about it.  He lives for the weekend when he spends his time getting roaring drunk and having an affair with a co-worker’s wife, Brenda (Rachel Roberts).  Eventually he begins also dating proper young Doreen (Shirley Anne Field).

Arthur lives with his conventional working class parents who are mostly glued to the TV.  At home, he enjoys playing pranks and assaulting neighbors and then lying about it.  In fact, he lies about everything, at times just for the hell of it.  Brenda’s pregnancy with his child may be the only thing that will make him grow up.  But not before he gets his comeuppance.

This is one of the Angry Young Men film that was rocking British cinema in the early 60’s, complete with a little mild rock and roll.  As you can tell from the plot summary, I did not like Arthur.  He’s less angry than anger-provoking.  However, I liked both Finney and the film.  He is just perfect as a cocky, conceitedly handsome bloke without manners or morals.  Director Reisz created some striking images and the film is beautifully lit by cinematography great Freddie Francis. Recommended.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.

Clip

The Story of Ruth
Directed by Henry Koster
Written by Norman Korwin
1960/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Ruth: [to Naomi] Entreat me not to leave you, or to keep from following you. For where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.[/box]

This is the rare biblical epic I thought was watchable.  Not great, mind you, but watchable.

The plot  is an embellished account of the biblical story of the Moabite who converts to Judaism and becomes the ancestress of David.  Ruth’s father sells the beautiful child to the temple of the god Chemosh.  She barely escapes ritual sacrifice and grows up to become a priestess of the temple played by Israeli actress Elana Eden.  One of her duties is to escort little girls to the ritual sacrifice alter.  In doing so, she meets Mahlon (Tom Tryon) an Israelite goldsmith who has been hired to make the victim’s crown.  They are instantly attracted and their conversations about his God give her serious misgivings about her role at the temple.

Ruth, who had been slated to become one of the King’s consorts, and Mahlon get into a world of trouble.  At the last minute, they are able to marry.  Soon thereafter she is a widow.  She departs for Judah with her mother-in-law Naomi (Peggy Wood).

The two women are destitute and resort to gleaning bits of grain from rich men’s harvested fields.  Ruth is persecuted due to her Moabite origins.  She is spotted by her husband’s kinsman Boaz (Stuart Whitman) in his fields.  He defends her and the rest is (biblical) history.  With Jeff Morrow as Boaz’s rival.

I think I could tolerate this one because it has the grandeur but not the pomposity of many of the other films in the genre.  The whole thing comes off as sincere and the acting, if not wonderful, is earnest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VCdkeIr6Ew

Trailer (in English)