Monthly Archives: May 2020

Medium Cool
Directed by Haxell Wexler
Written by Haxell Wexler
1969/US
IMDb link
First viewing/Netflix rental

[asked in 1969 if he could see himself making a film in exile because of his social and political views] I’m proud to say I get regular visits from the FBI, but I’ll never become an exile. I think this is a great country. That’s precisely why I feel I have an obligation to keep examining the freedoms that are rightfully ours. We all have that obligation–to see that they don’t get away from us. — Haxell Wexler

The perfect old movie for these times.  Things weren’t all that different in 1968 than they are now, sad to say.

The film was shot on location before and during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  John Casselles (Robert Forster) is an apolitical and ambitious photojournalist eager to be in the middle of things.  He has a beautiful blonde girlfriend with whom he frolics.  He covers such 1968 events as the Robert Kennedy Assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination, and riots in the lead-up to the Convention.

John kind of drops the girlfriend after he meets Eileen (Verna Bloom), a young widowed mother from rural West Virginia who is now living in Chicago with her strong-willed 13-year-old son.  John finds himself drawn closer into the violence and political uproar outside the Convention Hall.  In the meantime, Eileen’s son goes missing and she spends the remainder of the film searching for him through the crowds and confusion of protestors and heavily armed National Guardsmen.

I thought this was very interesting as a time capsule though perhaps not so riveting as a film.  Wexler is a much better cinematographer than he is a director or writer.  The film looks beautiful but the plot seems somehow contrived.  Some of the acting by the unknown cast is a a little stilted.  Wexler wears his political heart on his sleeve and this is a film that takes sides.

Is there anything that looks sillier in 2020 than a hippie?  I identified at the time but now they look kind of ridiculous.  The film has a timely score by Mike Bloomfield with some incidental music by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

La residencia (The House That Screamed)
Directed by Narciso Ibañez Serrador
Written by Narciso Ibañez Serrador; story by Juan Tebar
1969/Spain
IMDb link
First viewing/Amazon Prime (Shout Factory channel)
They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They

Sra. Fourneau: This school specializes in students whose character is, um, shall we say, um, difficult, and there are a few among them who, in spite of their youth, have not exactly led exemplary lives. In order to bring them back to the right path, I must run this establishment with a firm hand.

Director Narcisco Ibanez Serrador turns the classic camp “slasher in a girls boarding school” premise into a pretty darn solid thriller.

The setting is 19th Century France.  Sra. Fourneau (Lili Palmer) rules an isolated girls boarding school with an iron hand with the assistance of sadistic senior student Irene, who is a mean hand with the whip.  She carries motherly love for her son Luis to almost incestuous extremes.  Bastard orphan new girl Therese begins seeing Luis secretly.  Several girls run away, never to be seen again.  Both these factors only cause the butch headmistress to further tighten her grip.

Lili Palmer is excellent and the production values are top notch. The movie takes all the usual titillating tropes of this particular genre of horror to the max.   It manages to pull off a scary thriller that is more than a guilty pleasure by taking each element sereiously.  I watched this in a dubbed version with numerous commercial interruptions from “Elvira”, a longtime US late night movie host.  I enjoyed it and imagine it would be even better in the original Spanish version.

Cactus Flower
Directed by Gene Saks
Written by I.A.L. Diamond based on a Broadway play by Abe Burrows – original play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy
1969/US
IMDb link
First viewing/Amazon Instant

Dr. Julian Winston: Well, it’s different for a man. If a man is with a younger woman it looks entirely appropriate, but when it’s the other way around, it’s disg…
Stephanie: Well, you go to your church and I’ll go to mine.

A great cast is largely wasted in this pleasant but predictable romcom.

Dr. Julian Weston (Walter Matthau) is a New York City dentist, a confirmed bachelor and a ladies man.  A central part of his practice is his no-nonsense dowdy nurse Stephanie (Ingrid Bergman).  Julian has been having an affair with much younger free spirit Toni Simmons (Goldie Hawn).  He tells her he is married so she won’t get any ideas.  Toni’s cute young neighbor Igor Sullivan may have an ulterior motive for constantly barging in on their trysts.

Igor and Toni’s friendship makes Julian jealous and he decides he must marry her.  Toni insists he produce his wife.  Julian selects Stephanie as the stand-in, not knowing that behind her business like exterior lie more tender feelings.  Jack Weston plays Julian’s friend that is corralled into standing in for Stephanie’s lover.

A Married Couple
Directed by Allan King
1969/Canada
IMDb link
First viewing?/Criterion Channel

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell-or in an unhappy marriage-not knowing which would be the severest. — Lord Byron

This fascinating “actuality drama” takes an intimate look at the breakdown of the marriage of two intolerable people.

The film chronicles the daily struggles of Billy and Antoinette Edwards, their toddler son Bogart, and their dog Merton.  He is writes ads for a living.  She’s a stay-at-home mother.  They appear to be well-educated and relatively well-off.  Director Allan King lived with the Edwardses at the time and the family appears to ignore the camera, if that is even possible.  At any rate, Billy feels free to spend most of his time at home in his underwear and the couple argue and reconcile freely in the bedroom.

Billy likes to do a lot of yelling and dishing out orders.  He believes that the fact that he is the sole breadwinner gives him total control over the family finances.  I found him absolutely insufferable.  Antoinette likes to wind him up by endlessly talking about some expensive object she covets, like a harpsicord.  She appears to have lost all respect and physical desire for her husband and loves making him jealous.  She is equally insufferable.They are both expert game players and frustrated manipulators.

There is no voice-over narration nor interviews in this film.  It is amazingly raw.  But could the participants really ignore the camera?  How much of what we see has changed due to its presence.  I’m kind of fascinated by relationship dynamics and I was glad I saw the film.

The Olympics in Mexico (Olympiada en Mexico)
Directed by Alberto Isaac
Written by Alberto Isaac and Fernando Macotela
1969/Mexico
IMDb link
First viewing/Criterion Channel

“If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight.” – Tommie Smith, Gold Medalist 200-meter sprint 1968 Mexico City Olympics

Well, we can’t see the Tokyo Olympics so I settled for this nicely made documentary on the Mexico City Olympics

This has everything you would expect from a straight-forward Olympics documentary – highlights, athletic feats, culture and scenery.  Oh, and one very memorable award ceremony …

Back when we had idealism, live sports, and a regularly scheduled Olympic Games, Mexico City recorded its days in the sun with this very nice documentary.  It isn’t Olympia (1938) or anything.  I believe the Criterion Channel has all the films from Criterion’s huge Olympics box set available for streaming.

The Olympics in Mexico was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Features.

Horrors of Malformed Men (Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû)
Directed by Teruo Ishii
Written by Teruo Ishii and Masahiro Kakefuda from a novel by Rampu Edogawa
1969/Japan
IMDb link
First viewing/Amazon Instant
They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They?

“I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

This one didn’t wow me.

The plot has a lot of the feeling of Island of Lost Souls (1932) although it derives from different source material. A medical doctor begins to have hallucinations and is eventually committed to an insane asylum. He becomes acquainted with his apparent doppelganger, a dead man. He is lured to an island run by a mad scientist who has surgically deformed men and women with plans of creating a super-race.  The doctor goes on to experience various horrific and sexual adventures.

This is apparently something of a cult classic.  It is indeed sufficiently weird and inept to merit that status.  I was looking for decent creatures and a few scares.  The film failed to deliver in this regard.  It does feature a lot of bare breasts for connoisseurs of that kind of thing.  The below trailer represents the movie pretty well.

Sweet Charity
Directed by Bob Fosse
Written by Peter Stone from the Broadway musical (book by Neil Simon) and the film “Nights of Cabiria” by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Faiano
1969/US
IMDb link
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

Vittorio: Without love, life would have no purpose.

Bob Fosse’s directorial debut is an entertaining way to spend a Lockdown afternoon.

The plot is borrowed from Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957).  Gulieta Massina’s plucky Roman prostitute is replaced with a New York taxi dancer named Charity Hope Valentine (Shirley MacLaine).  Her name catalogs her general outlook.  She is famous for her series of ill-chosen boyfriends who usually run away with her money.

As the movie begins, Charity is dumped (literally) by her worthless boyfriend Charlie, who also steals her purse.  Charity returns to work at the dance hall, where she has to admit yet another failure to her cynical friends.  Her life grows increasingly distasteful to her and she tries her luck getting an office job.  This doesn’t go well either and she gets stuck in an elevator.

Fortunately, she is stuck with Oscar (John McMartin), a cute claustrophobic actuary.  He is a complete square and Charity lets him think she works in a bank.  Can this odd couple make a go of it? With Stubby Kaye as the dance hall owner, Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly as Charity’s chums, Ricardo Montalban as a film star, and Sammy Davis Jr. as Big Daddy, founder of a hippie church.

I worked on a junior college production of this and have a lot of affection for the songs and the story.  Bob Fosse does an okay job with his debut directing effort.  The dances are fabulous but other elements seem gimmicky and dated.  For example the numerous examples of slow motion or stop action frolicking to indicate joy just scream late 60’s.  The musical numbers are strong enough to overcome any such small niggles.

Sweet Charity was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Art Direction – Set Decoration; Best Costumes; and Best Music, Score of a Musical Pictures (Original or Adapted).