MANDINGO - Review By Greg Klymkiw - "Your wife craves for you to have wenches, son. Keeps her from havin' to submit." - James Mason

MERRY UKRAINIAN CHRISTMAS! Continuing the tradition of steering you towards awe-inspiring work in this season of goodwill, Greg Klymkiw's CFC presents a KLYMKIW FILM CORNER review of…

MANDINGO

(Yeah, I know. This has nothing to do with Ukrainians. Gotta problem with that?)

MANDINGO (1975) dir. Richard Fleischer
Starring: James Mason, Perry King, Ken Norton, Susan George, Paul Benedict

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Receiving critical jeers upon its release in 1975, Richard Fleischer’s film version of Mandingo, adapted from Kyle Onstott's best-selling sex and slavery potboiler and produced by the oft-loathed-and-scorned producer Dino De Laurentiis, did, like its recent cinematic blood-brother Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven’s All About Eve in a Vegas strip club) achieve considerable cult status as a bright jewel in the crown of unintentional high camp and laughs.

I recall a critic in the long-defunct Canadian-published film magazine Take One (the 70s version, not the 90s reincarnation) bestowing a Mandingo “Please Don’t Whup Me No Mo’, Massah” Award for the Worst Film of the Year. Quentin Tarantino issued a laudatory misreading which placed it in the pantheon of stellar lower-drawer laugh riots like the abovementioned Showgirls. Golden-Turkey-styled attention was also lavished upon it when critic Stephen Rebello included Mandingo in his tome on “bad movies we love”.

In spite of all these uncalled-for raspberries, I assert - wholeheartedly and with NO reservations - that Mandingo is a genuinely terrific picture. It has been the recipient of boneheaded derision for too long, now, and this is a wrong that needs to be made right.

The source material, like many other great pictures (The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws – to name just a few), is derived from a trashy, mega-potboiling novel. Mandingo was first published in the 50s and not only went through the roof on its initial release, but also continued through the 60s and 70s to be a huge seller – receiving countless reprints. Author Kyle Onstott also wrote sequels entitled Drum (which was eventually produced by De Laurentiis to an even greater scornful reception) and Master of Falconhurst – all three forming a sort of unofficial trilogy. All were set against the historical backdrop of the slave trade and featured explicit sex and violence that was, to say the least, uncompromising by the standards of the time (and by today's strangely conservative and/or politically correct standards, the novels might well be considered abominations of the most heinous variety).

As a kid, I remember the bookshelves of my local Coles bookstore in a north Winnipeg mall filled to the brim with the Mandingo/Falconhurst sagas, and like most healthy young lads, I devoured them (along with their aforementioned pot-boiling brethren) like a greedy baby hippo amongst a patch of delectable bull rushes. Upon his death, Onstott left one unfinished work which was fleshed out and published with the assistance of Lance Horner who went on to write several more sequels and then the torch was passed to Ashley Carter to generate even more sequels. None of these, however, were any good.

As a kid I was utterly bewitched by the lurid covers of bosomy dusky beauties and brutish slave traders brandishing whips and delightedly ascended to the heights of Heaven's gate by Onstott’s ripe prose style and wildly overripe dialogue. And make no mistake – while I read all the books in the series (including the Horner and Carter instalments), it was the Onstott titles that shone. Either Onstott’s research was insanely meticulous and reflected the horrendous, almost-surreal cruelty of the slave trade or he had one of the most depraved imaginations in 20th century literature. I strongly suspect it was a bit of both.

Mandingo was, of course, the crowning glory of Onstott’s trilogy and when, in my 16th year on this Earth I discovered that a movie version would be opening in my favourite downtown Winnipeg picture palace, the Metropolitan Cinema, I was in such a state of anticipation that I experienced the closest movie geek premature ejaculation. I harassed the theatre almost daily and pestered them with telephone calls inquiring as to the movie’s release date. Remember, this was 1975, when movie theatres actually had live humans answering the telephones, when release dates were not set in stone months (or years) in advance and when cinemas had “coming soon” or “next attraction” sign cards affixed to a film’s poster.

I used to see almost every picture playing at this theatre and eventually, the sign card on the poster case and the tag in front of the trailer changed to “next attraction” and within a couple of weeks or so, my dreams became a reality. On the opening Friday, I waited in line at the Metropolitan Cinema (a 2000-seat picture palace where I saw most of my favourite movies and where, interestingly enough, Guy Maddin shot Isabella Rossellini in the delightful short “My Dad is 100 Years Old”). I entered the theatre for the first noon-hour showing of the day. I recall most of the orchestra seats were taken, which should give you an idea how big a hit the movie was. (It also played first-run in Winnipeg for months.) Though the film was rated “Restricted”, I had manufactured a fine fake I.D. for myself, which, incidentally, was so fine that this was something I did for pocket money – manufacturing fake I.D.s at a price, of course – for many friends and acquaintances in my high school.

That, of course, is another story.

My anticipation was rewarded – I loved the picture so much I sat through it four times that day and would see it again many more times during its initial run and subsequent re-releases and repertory showings throughout the 70s and 80s.

Let it be written in stone now: Mandingo, without question, is one of the most powerful, lurid, shocking and downright entertaining movies – not only of the 70s, but of all time.

Set against the crumbling ruins of the stale, stench-ridden Old South breeding plantation Falconhurst, the film opens to the strains of a mournful blues tune composed by the legendary Maurice Jarre and sung by Muddy Waters as a group of black slaves are led down a dusty road and presented to a sleazy trader by the patriarch of this pit of sorrow and depravity, Warren Maxwell (deliciously played by the late, great James Mason – with his trademark mellifluous voice handling both the Southern drawl and the rancid, racist dialogue with all the skill and panache one would expect from a star actor of his stature).

We watch with open-mouthed horror and disbelief as the trader, played sleazily by the magnificent character actor Paul Benedict (yes, Bentley from The Jeffersons), puffs on a saliva-dripping, well-chewed and obviously smelly cigar as he inspects the teeth, testicles, hands and, among other body parts, anal cavities of the slaves who must remain stoic, with eyes averted as they are poked and prodded like animals at a county fair livestock auction.

What makes all of this so shocking (remember, this was pre-Roots and post-Gone With The Wind) is how matter-of-fact everything is staged and presented. The lip smacking and eye rolling – long attributed to the film are nowhere to be found in this opening, nor frankly, in much of the picture (except when genuinely warranted). It is played very straight. The actions of the characters are often crude, tasteless and over-the-top, but the cinematic treatment is most certainly not. In fact, the picture’s stylistic restraint on most fronts is what makes Mandingo so effective – as drama, as entertainment and as an expose of a dark period of 19th century history.

This is not to say there aren’t melodramatic aspects to the narrative borrowed by veteran screenwriter Norman Wexler from Onstott’s novel, but like any great drama they’re used to perfection. Besides, the notion that there’s something inherently wrong with melodrama is ridiculous anyway – there’s only good melodrama and bad melodrama, and director Richard Fleischer handles the melodramatic aspects of Mandingo’s story expertly. Besides, how can there not be aspects of melodrama in a movie aimed at the masses? Especially a movie set against a backdrop like this one.

And what a backdrop!

What a story!

Everything in this film is driven by the two simple needs of a father and how their fulfillment has tragic consequences. Warren Maxwell’s craving for a pure Mandingo slave for breeding and prizefighting is rewarded when his son Hammond (Perry King) returns from a business trip with the sleek, beautiful, powerful, caramel-skinned Mede (heavyweight champ Ken Norton). While Hammond trains Mede in the art of bare-knuckle fighting, Maxwell frets that his son is not married and that there will be no heir to Falconhurst. Again, Hammond fulfills his father’s wishes and, like so much chattel, adds Blanche (Susan George) to the Falconhurst stables, a blonde and beautiful Southern bell bride.

Much to Blanche’s consternation, Hammond also returns to Falconhurst with a new slave acquisition. Ellen (Brenda Sykes) is a stunningly sultry bed wench Hammond favours because he believes his new bride is not a virgin and also because he wrongly believes that white women do not want to be “pestered” sexually (other than for basic purposes of procreation).

In retaliation, Blanche blackmails Mede into servicing her needs sexually. Falconhurst becomes a miscegenation fetishist’s wet dream with all the white-black couplings inevitably leading to all holy hell breaking loose.

So what’s the problem? We have an unsparing look at the world of slavery adorned with dollops of melodrama. Why did critics hate this film and why did it earn the reputation as a howlingly bad (but entertaining) camp classic?

Could it simply be that Mandingo retained many of the more salacious elements of its pulp literature source and, in fact accentuated them? In addition to the graphic depiction of slavery and miscegenation, the picture features the following:

- Incest.
- Infanticide.
- Whoring.
- Wenching.
- Graphic bare-buttocked floggings with belts, paddles and whips.
- Graphic lynching.
- A character being pitch forked into a vat of boiling brine water.
- No holds barred and to the death bare-knuckle fist fighting (replete with biting and scratching).
- Oodles of nudity and sex (including some magnificent buttock shots of Ken Norton and a truly delightful full frontal view of Perry King’s majestic genitals). Oh yeah, we get to see many of the ladies nude also.
- More whoring.
- More wenching.
- Have I mentioned the incest?

While this is certainly an extensive grocery list of depravity would this really have been enough to raise the lily pure ire of critics? This was, after all the 70s, a decade of movies replete with mean-spiritedness, nastiness, violence and all manner of permissiveness, so was Mandingo the nadir of this excess or was it something else?

Did Mandingo cut (as it were) too deep for critics to embrace its excess?

Was director Richard Fleischer’s uncompromising eye too much for them?

Fleischer was, after all, one of the most gifted major American directors who, like Howard Hawks before him, worked in a variety of genres (and often for “hire”) on over 50 pictures. This, of course, made it difficult for a lot of the myopic auteurist critics to pinpoint Flesicher’s “thing” and perhaps they needed to use “moral outrage” to equate Mandingo with some of Fleischer’s more obvious gun-for-hire forays into filmic folly such as the execrable Dr. Dolittle (with Rex Harrison, NOT Eddie Murphy) or the impersonal Pearl Harbor epic Tora Tora Tora (which still manages to put Michael Bay’s rendering of those events to shame). And of course, the critics of 1975 had yet to experience Fleischer’s 80s remake of The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond. If that had preceded Mandingo in the Fleischer canon, it’s conceivable those critics might have gone to the extent of forming an actual, literal lynch mob.

If truth be told, I've recently re-discovered the joys of Fleischer's Jazz Singer - especially Laurence Olivier's insane performance as Neil Diamond's father. (!!!)

As to the notion of "moral outrage" I must admit to having an intellectual knowledge of it and certainly have applied said knowledge emotionally to genuine atrocities, but I cannot say I have ever truly felt it towards any cultural artifact.

But in spite of all this, how could critics miss the boat on Mandingo? Fleischer, after all, won his only Oscar for a documentary and for most of his career he approached his subjects with the eye of a documentarian. From his noir classics at RKO (including The Narrow Margin) through to his stunning examinations of real-life serial killers in 10 Rillington Place (Christie), The Boston Strangler (DeSalvo) and Compulsion (Leopold and Loeb), Fleischer trained his camera on the dramatics by focusing, in an almost straightforward fashion on the mechanics of his subjects – he editorialized by non-editorializing. He even did this in his forays in action epics (The Vikings), fantasy (Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) and science fiction (Soylent Green). This straightforward approach almost always yielded thrilling work.

While scene after scene includes numerous instances of Fleischer's superb direction, the first public prizefight involving Mede is staggering in its brutal detail - not just the fight itself, but the slavering crowd assembled within the courtyard of a brothel to witness two human beings (though to their minds, animals) pummel, scratch, slash, bite, flip, kick, eye-gouge and hammer away at every part of their bodies, including their genitals, until one of them dies. Fleischer begins the scene with a terrific God's eye wide shot and eventually moves in to cover the fight itself - using a fine array of shots - many wide or medium to capture some excellent fight choreography and only moving in for closeups when absolutely necessary.

Edited by the superb craftsman Frank (Hud, Funny Face, The Molly Maguires) Bracht, there are no shots or cuts in this relentless sequence that are used for anything other than dramatic emphasis. Bracht, by the way, moved easily between romantic comedies, musicals, westerns and the occasional lurid melodrama (The Carpetbaggers - WOOT! WOOT!), so he was easily a good man for the job, handling Fleischer's superb coverage with both efficiency and, when needed, verve. I only wish more contemporary films used directors like Fleischer and editors like Bracht - who were able to shift from straight-up dramatic dialogue scenes to blistering action and back again. Just suffer through any J.J. Abrams and/or Christopher Nolan abomination to get my point.

In Mandingo, actors deliver their lines with (mostly) straight faces. When Paul Benedict’s slave trader admiringly refers to Warren’s son Hammond as a “right vigorous young stud”, it’s funny, but not because it’s campy, but because it’s true and rendered in a parlance that appears to be genuine - both to the period and the character. Benedict plays his role perfectly - that of a pretentious, flowery country gentleman who, most ironically, makes his fortune as a BREEDER of slaves.

As the attractive, blond, blue-eyed Hammond, Perry King swaggers into his first scene as the epitome of young manhood – especially when the film matter-of-factly informs us that on a breeding plantation, it is the master (or in this case, the “young master") who has the “duty” to break in the virgin wenches on the plantation. When Hammond protests that the latest subject of deflowering, the Mandingo slave wench Big Pearl “be powerful musky”, he does it with such a straight face that it’s not only darkly funny, but all the more powerful in the delineation between owners and slaves. Why wouldn't Big Pearl be "powerful musky"? The slaves live in abominable conditions in shacks surrounding the mansion. Hammond has no eyes for the horror he and his father are responsible for. This is also a perfect plot point in terms of character that is eventually challenged when Hammond begins to have genuine "human" feelings of love for his bed wench Ellen. The tragic implications of this eventually become very clear when Hammond, up against emotions that collide with what has been NURTURED into him, take various turns for the worst.

When Warren complains about his rheumatism, Paul Benedict, recommends that Warren place his bare feet onto the belly of a “nekkid Mexican dog” to drain the “rheumatiz” right out of the soles of his feet into the belly of the dog. This conversation, over dinner no less, is presented so unflinchingly and straight-facedly that we laugh – ALMOST good-naturedly at the period ignorance of the characters. However, during the same conversation, when the Maxwells' family doctor elaborates, with an equal straight face, that a slave boy would do just as well as a “nekkid Mexican dog”, the laughs continue, but much more nervously, and finally, not at all when it's explained - in detail - how a human being can be substituted for an animal.

One of the more amazing instances of how great the script is and how well it's rendered by Fleischer are several scenes that follow in which Warren sits in a rocker sipping hot toddies whilst resting his bare feet on the belly of a little slave boy. At first it's funny (especially since it is the normally erudite and charming James Mason in such a ridiculous pose), but the laughs eventually give way to being downright horrendous. And then, to offer a brilliant juxtaposition to Warren's stupidity and cruelty, the slave boy, hoping to get out of this demeaning activity and outwit his knot-headed owner, holds his hand to his belly and moans, “Ooooohhhh, Massah’s misery drain right into me.”

It is the film’s unflinching presentation of insane dialogue from Onstott and Wexler’s respective pens that has, I think, contributed to Mandingo’s reputation as a camp classic. When Warren explains to Hammond that wives want their husbands to have wenches because it keeps them from “having to submit”, it IS funny. When the babies of slaves are referred to as “suckers”, it’s at first darkly funny because it’s so shocking, but as it’s bandied about so frequently, it becomes sickening. When a slave’s miscarriage is straight-facedly referred to as “she done slip her sucker”, it’s especially NOT funny. It’s horrific, particularly as it follows a scene when a character threatens to “whup that sucker right outta” her belly.

If anything, Mandingo’s reputation might ultimately be getting mixed in a bit with its notorious sequel Drum which was not only critically reviled, but even upon the eve of its theatrical release, was disowned by the studio. Drum is pure B-movie – no two ways about it, but it’s also, in its own way, marvelous entertainment, crisply directed by Corman protégé Steve Carver and featuring the brilliant Warren Oates taking over the role of Perry King’s Hammond and Ken Norton making a return appearance as yet another character altogether. The film also features the legendary Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith (Lemora) as Hammond’s slattern daughter who favours being serviced by her Daddy’s Mandingo slaves and lying about them to Daddy when they do not submit to her. At one point, Hammond asks her if one of the slaves, Blaze, "be fiddlin'" with her. She replies how Blaze tricked her into playing a game with him wherein he tells her to close her eyes, hold out her hands and await a surprise treat. "And Pappy," she says in utter horror, "when I opens mah eyes, I looks down, and there, Pappy, there in my hands is is his . . . THANG!"

I remember first seeing Drum on a double bill with Mandingo in a Winnipeg Main Street grindhouse called the Epic. When I was a kid, the Epic was called the Colonial and was next door to two other grindhouses, the Regent and the Starland. Here in the stench of cum and urine, sitting on stained, tattered seats, my feet stuck almost permanently to the sticky floors and occasionally having to listen to old men getting fellated by toothless glue-sniffing hookers, I delighted, week after week to Hammer horror films, biker flicks and Corman extravaganzas.

By the 80s, this grindhouse was the sole purveyor of cinematic sleaze in Winnipeg – alternating between standard action exploitation fare and soft-core pornography. Since I had missed Drum on its initial release, I was rather excited to catch up with it on a double bill at the Epic/Colonial. I even recall that the double bill was advertised thusly: “And now . . . the BARE ‘Roots’”. I was accompanied to this screening by two esteemed members of the faculty of English and Film at the University of Manitoba, Professors Stephen Snyder and George Toles (screenwriter of such Guy Maddin films as Archangel, Careful, Keyhole and Saddest Music in the World). It was a glorious afternoon and it was certainly a coin toss to determine what was louder, the sounds of our laughter or the sounds of toothless hookers fellating old men.

Mandingo is a genuinely great picture. In fact, I would argue that it is both a serious dramatic expose of slavery AND an exploitation film. Not that this means the picture is a mess and has no idea what it’s trying to do, but frankly, this notion that there even exists such a thing as “exploitation” films is something I find just a little bit idiotic. Film by its very nature as a visual AND commercial art form IS exploitative – it ultimately has to be in order to be successful. Like melodrama, it’s either good or bad. It works or it doesn’t. And Mandingo works – it communicates a truth as hard and blistering as we’ve seen on this subject. Frankly, not even the legendary television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots comes close to matching the sheer horror of Mandingo.

Alas, Mandingo has been released on a bare bones DVD and Blu-Ray with a mediocre transfer. Even the cover design is lackluster – Mandingo's original poster, a vivid take on the famous Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh pose from Gone With The Wind (but with a double dose of flame enshrouded miscegenation) was not only great marketing, but a more-than-apt visual encapsulation of the movie. One only hopes the movie eventually gets the home entertainment treatment it deserves – without, of course, too much emphasis on its supposed camp value and more on its quality as fine a motion picture to grace the canon of a truly great American director, the much-maligned and oft-forgotten Richard Fleischer.

And fellas don’t forget – your wife craves for you to have wenches.

Keeps her from having to submit.

That's some great advice for the 21st century, mais non, ladies?

Uh, just kidding.

Please don’t whup me no mo’.

Mandingo is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Legend Films

TARAS BULBA (1962) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis as Ukrainian Cossacks is a cinematic equivalent to a fine chub of Kubassa, a mess o' varenyky and driving a tractor with a jar of open liquor.

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the HOLIEST NIGHT FOR THOSE WHO CELEBRATE EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY FEASTS AND THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY, Klymkiw Film Corner gives to you…


Taras Bulba (1962) dir. J. Lee Thompson
Starring: Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis

****

By Greg Klymkiw

“Do not put your faith in a Pole. Put your faith in your sword and your sword in the Pole!”

Thus spake Taras Bulba – Cossack Chief! (As played by Yul Brynner, ‘natch!)

These days, there are few momentous events for lovers of cinema and, even fewer momentous events for those of the Ukrainian persuasion. However, film lovers and Ukrainians both have something to celebrate. Especially Ukrainians. The recent Fox/MGM DVD release of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba is (and will be), without question, as momentous an occasion in the lives of Ukrainians the world over as the execution of Saddam Hussein must have been to the entire Bush family of Texas.

As a pig-fat-eating Cossack-lover, I recall my own virgin helping (at the ripe age of four) of Taras Bulba with my family at the late lamented North Main Drive-Inn Theatre in the sleepy winter city of Winnipeg. Being situated in the ‘Peg’s North End (on the decidedly wrong side of the tracks), everyone of the Ukrainian persuasion was crammed into this drive-inn theatre when Taras Bulba unspooled there for the first time.

A veritable zabava-like atmosphere overtook this huge lot of gravel and speaker posts. (A zabava is a party where Ukrainians place a passionate emphasis on drinking, dining and dancing until they puke.) Men wore their scalp locks proudly whilst women paraded their braided-hair saucily. Children brandished their plastic sabers pretending to butcher marauding Turks, Mongols and, of course, Poles.

Those adults of the superior sex wore baggy pants (held up proudly by the brightly coloured pois) and red boots whilst the weaker sex sported ornately patterned dresses and multi-coloured ribbons.

All were smartly adorned in their embroidered white shirts.

Enormous chubs of kovbassa and kishka (all prepared with the finest fat, innards and blood of swine) along with Viking-hefty jugs of home-brew were passed around with wild abandon. Hunchbacked old Babas boiled cabbage-filled varenyky (perogies) over open fires and slopped them straight from the vats of scalding hot water into the slavering mouths of those who required a bit of roughage to go with their swine and rotgut. I fondly recall one of my aunties doling out huge loaves of dark rye bread with vats of salo (salted pig-fat and garlic) and studynets (jellied boiled head of pig with garlic) and pickled eggs for those who had already dined at home and required a mere appetizer.

One might say, it was a carnival-like atmosphere, or, if you will, a true Cossack-style chow-down and juice-up.

However, when the lights above the huge silver screen dimmed, the venerable North Main Drive-Inn Theatre transformed reverently into something resembling the hallowed Saint Vladimir and Olga Cathedral during a Stations of the Cross procession or a panachyda (deferential song/dirge for the dead).

Everyone sat quietly in their cars and glued their Ukrainian eyeballs to the screen as Franz Waxman’s exquisitely romantic and alternately boisterous musical score (rooted firmly in the tradition of Ukrainian folk music) thundered over the opening credits which were emblazoned upon a variety of Technicolor tapestries depicting stars Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis in the garb of the Cossacks – Ukraine’s mighty warriors of the steppes.

This screening and the overwhelming feelings infused in those who were there could only be described as an epiphany. Like me (and ultimately, my kind), I can only assume there wasn’t a single Ukrainian alive who didn’t then seek each and every opportunity after their respective virgin screenings to partake – again and again and yet again – in the staggering and overwhelming cinematic splendour that is – and can only be – Taras Bulba.

All this having been said, barbaric garlic-sausage-eating Ukrainian heathen are not the only people who can enjoy this movie. Anyone – and I mean ANYONE – who loves a rousing, astoundingly entertaining, old-fashioned and action-packed costume epic will positively delight in this work of magnificence.

The source material for this terrific picture is the short novel Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, a young Ukrainian writer of Cossack stock who is often considered the father of Russian fiction. He was a contemporary of Pushkin and the two of them were both friends and leaders of the Russian literary scene in St. Petersburg over 150 years ago. Prior to writing Taras Bulba, Gogol (this is the popular Russified version of his name which, in the original Ukrainian would actually be Mykola Hohol) dabbled in narrative poetry, held some teaching positions and worked in the Russian bureaucracy.

Gogol’s early fictional works were short satirical stories steeped in the rural roots of his Ukrainian Cossack background. Evenings On A Farm Near The Village of Dykanka (Vechera Na Khutore Blyz Dykanky) was full of magic and folklore in the rustic, yet somewhat mystical world of simple peasants and Cossacks. The material is, even today, refreshing – sardonically funny, yet oddly sentimental. It even made for an excellent cinematic adaptation in Alexander Rou’s early 60s feature made at the famed Gorky Studios and a recent Ukrainian television remake starring the gorgeous pop idol Ani Lorak. Gogol’s vivid characters, sense of humour and attention to realistic detail all added up to supreme suitability for the big screen.

Taras Bulba is no different. The material is made for motion pictures. Alas, several unsatisfying versions pre-dated this 1962 rendering. Luckily, this version is the one that counts thanks to the team of legendary producer Harold Hecht (Marty, The Crimson Pirate and Sweet Smell of Success in addition to being Burt Lancaster’s producing partner), stalwart crime and action director J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear, The Guns of Navarone) and screenwriters Waldo Salt (who would go on to write Midnight Cowboy, Serpico and Coming Home) and the veteran Karl Tunberg (Ben-Hur, Down Argentine Way, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and fifty or so other scripts). This was the dream team who were finally able to put Gogol’s Taras Bulba on the silver screen where it ultimately belongs.

For Gogol, Taras Bulba (in spite of the aforementioned literary qualities attributable to his rural stories) took a decidedly different turn than anything that preceded it or followed it in his career as a writer. Bulba sprang, not only from Gogol’s Cossack roots and familiarity with the dumy (songs and ballads of the Cossacks), but interestingly enough, he was greatly inspired by the great Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, of whom he was a big fan. This, of course, makes perfect sense since Scott’s swashbuckling adventures often dealt with Scottish pride and history at odds with the ruling powers of England. And so too with Taras Bulba.

The film (while deviating somewhat from the book) maintains much of the structure, characters and spirit of Gogol’s work. It tells the story of Cossack chieftain Taras Bulba (Yul Brynner) and his desire to make Ukraine free from the oppression of the ruling nation of Poland. Though the Poles subjugate Ukraine, the Cossacks are willing (for a price and booty) to fight alongside the Poles against Turkish invaders. In addition to the pecuniary rewards, the Cossacks also get to use the Poles to help fight one of their enemies. When it comes to paying allegiance to the Poles, Taras steadfastly refuses to do this and, after committing a violent act against one of the Polish generals, the Cossacks all scatter into the hills to regroup and prepare for a time when they can go to war again – but this time, against the Poles.

Secured in their respective mountain hideaways, the Cossacks bide their time. Taras raises two fine and strapping young sons, Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Ostap (Perry Lopez). He sends his boys to Kyiv (the Russified spelling is “Kiev”) to study at the Polish Academy. The Poles wish to tame the Ukrainians, so they offer to educate them. Taras, on the other hand, orders his sons that they must study in order to learn everything they can about the Poles so that someday they can join him in battle against the Poles. At the Polish Academy, the young men learn that Poles are vicious racists who despise Ukrainians and on numerous occasions, both of them are whipped and beaten mercilessly – especially Andrei (because the Dean of the Academy believes Andrei has the greatest possibility of turning Polish and shedding his “barbaric” Ukrainian ways). A hint of Andrei’s turncoat-potential comes when he falls madly in love with Natalia (Christine Kaufmann) a Polish Nobleman’s daughter. When the Poles find out that Andrei has deflowered Natalia, they attempt to castrate him. Luckily, Andrei and Ostap hightail it back to the mountains in time to avoid this unfortunate extrication.

Even more miraculously, the Cossacks have been asked by the Poles to join them in a Holy War against the infidel in the Middle East. Taras has other plans. He joins all the Cossacks together and they march against the Poles rather than with them. The battle comes to a head when the Cossacks have surrounded the Poles in the walled city of Dubno. Taras gets the evil idea to simply let the Poles starve to death rather than charge the city. Soon, Dubno is wracked with starvation, cannibalism and the plague. Andrei, fearing for his Polish lover Natalia secretly enters the city and is soon faced with a very tragic decision – join the Poles against the Cossacks or go back to his father and let Natalia die.

Thanks to a great script and superb direction, this movie really barrels along head first. The battle sequences are stunningly directed and it’s truly amazing to see fully costumed armies comprised of hundreds and even thousands of extras (rather than today’s CGI armies). The romance is suitably syrupy – accompanied by Vaseline smeared iris shots and the humour as robust and full-bodied as one would expect from a movie about Cossacks. Franz Waxman’s score is absolutely out of this world, especially the “Ride to Dubno” (AKA “Ride of the Cossacks”) theme. The music carries the movie with incredible force and power – so much so that even cinema composing God Bernard Herrmann jealously proclaimed it as “the score of a lifetime”.

The movie’s two central performances are outstanding. Though Jack Palance (an actual Ukrainian from Cossack stock) turned the role down, he was replaced with Yul Brynner who, with his Siberian looks and Slavic-Asian countenance seems now to be the only actor who could have played Taras Bulba. Tony Curtis also makes for a fine figure of a Cossack. This strapping leading man of Hungarian-Jewish stock attacks the role with the kind of boyish vigour that one also cannot imagine anyone else playing Andrei (though at one point, Burt Lancaster had considered taking the role for himself since it was his company through Hecht that developed the property). The supporting roles are played by stalwart character actors like Sam Wanamaker as the one Cossack who gives Bulba some grief about fighting the Poles and George MacCready as the evil Polish rival of the Cossacks. Perry Lopez as Ostap is so obviously Latin that he seems a bit uncomfortable in the role of Ostap and Christine Kaufmann as Natalia is not much of an actress, but she’s so stunningly gorgeous that one can see why Curtis cheated on Janet Leigh and had a torrid open affair with Kaufmann during the shoot.

Taras Bulba is one stirring epic adventure picture. And yes, one wishes it took the darker paths that the original book ventured down, but it still manages to have a dollop of tragedy wending its way through this tale of warring fathers and their disobedient sons. And yes, as a Ukrainian, I do wish all the great Cossack songs had NOT been translated into English – especially since Yul Brynner would have been more than up to singing them in the original language. But these are minor quibbles. It’s a first rate, old-fashioned studio epic – big, sprawling, brawling and beautiful.

It’s definitely the cinematic equivalent of one fine chub of garlic sausage.

Taras Bulba is available on Kino Lorber Blu-Ray.

ANTICHRIST - Feel the pain

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the TWELFTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS, Klymkiw Film Corner gives to you…

Antichrist (2009) Dir. Lars von Trier
Starring: Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Antichrist is a movie that burns its reflection of pain into your memory like a branding iron – plunging itself through your cranium and searing your brain matter, creating that sickeningly sweet stench that only burning flesh gives off and remaining in your nostrils for (no doubt) a lifetime. The pain and by extension – the Passion – also stays with you.

A first viewing renders you drained, immobile, and numb and yet, paradoxically there are feelings of profound excitement – that you have witnessed an expression of emotion in ways that only cinema, of all the art forms, is capable of delivering. You are also breathless, and in spite, or maybe even because of the horror you’ve witnessed, you’re almost giddy with the desire to recall every beat, every image and every soul sickening moment of the experience. It’s a movie that demands to be seen more than once – it is a movie to be cherished, savored and devoured as ravenously and gluttonously as possible.

There’s simply no two ways about it – Antichrist is a great movie! It will be loved! It will be hated! It will be debated! And it will never be forgotten – neither by those who see it, nor by the sands of time! It’s a picture designed to live forever and will, no doubt, be Lars von Trier’s masterpiece.

Now, I will be the first to admit that my feelings about von Trier used to be mixed. In his early work, he was clearly a serious filmmaker who demanded the sort of regard one lavishes upon great artists, yet in spite of this, I often felt that the art, though dazzling, seemed rooted in spurious posturing. His motives (in spite of his visual gifts) seemed no more serious than any hack machine-tooling a product for the widest consumption possible. I must admit, though, he grew on me and with each subsequent effort I was constantly and increasingly reminded of the fact that all films and certainly most great films ARE exploitation – they exploit subject matter, human emotion and the audience – the best doing so with great panache.

And in this regard, von Trier is a master. The difference, of course, is that rather than working within genre and/or dramatic convention, his is the work of the high-toned, the intelligentsia (if you will) and his genre is that of the “art house film” and as such, he has developed his voice and craft to a sufficient degree that he has earned the right to be called “master” even though I still detest his pretentious early work like The Element of Crime and Epidemic. (Medea's heart is in the right place, but it too, finally stinks.)

This all changed for me with Europa, one of the most indelible screen portraits of post-World War II Germany ever committed to celluloid. Delivering a narrative which, I think, more than ably pointed a finger at America's complicity in the evils of Nazi Germany and in creating a literal act of hypnosis, von Trier plunged us into a nightmarish world that seemed to open the floodgates for one movie after another that brilliantly and entertainingly ripped down the bulwarks of cinema's borders whilst oddly adhering to them as well.

With Antichrist, von Trier has made a horror film – pure, though not so simple.

Alternately fueled by his clear love and respect for Strindberg’s great play “Miss Julie” and the work of filmmaker Carl Dreyer, von Trier ventures into the sort of daring territory we not only expect from him, but frankly, must demand of our greatest artists. As a horror film, however, it might not immediately be in the territory we expect, but certainly as it proceeds on its unrelenting journey, we know all to well that we are ensconced in the genre – not in a traditional manner, but certainly in its use of expressionistic elements.

At the end of the day, Antichrist creates exactly what we have come to expect from the genre of horror and it oozes a creepy quality that not only keeps us on the edge of our collective seats, but inspires the sort of revulsion that dares to make us feel resolutely unclean for having participated in this powerful, foul descent into human suffering. Goose flesh of the most unpleasant kind overtakes us as we watch the picture and when it ramps up to scenes of PHYSICAL torture and violence (the first two-thirds of the picture deal in psychological aspects of the above mentioned), one’s revulsion takes on dimensions that are almost indescribable.

The movie is broken into four parts, or “chapters” as von Trier labels them, which are bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue introduces us to the characters of a man (Willem Dafoe) and a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as they make love – the only sound accompanying their passionate coupling being a haunting aria by Handel. As they reach a pitch of orgasm, we follow their infant child as he wanders about the house and eventually perishes in a horrendous, tragic accident. The four chapters that follow are entitled “Grief”, “Pain” “Despair” and “The Three Beggars” as we experience the couple’s suffering and the man’s attempts to help his wife (he’s a psychiatrist) deal with her pain and in so doing, to assist himself with his own feelings of despair.

Most of this is set against the backdrop of a remote cabin in the wilderness where much of the creepy qualities emanate from the natural world itself. This extended therapy session builds to one of the most sickening extensions of inner pain imaginable – where the internal becomes very external. It’s Strindbergian as all get-out, but von Trier doesn’t merely place a razor in “Miss Julie’s” hand, he takes us into the full-blown horror of the actions, which in Strindberg’s play are only implied.

The epilogue, which follows the orgy of horror, contains some of the most stunning images I have ever seen in a picture – images that are as heart-achingly beautiful as they are grotesque. And while von Trier is definitely in Strindberg territory, he does not separate naturalism from expressionism, but is quite happy to make use of both and, when necessary, blend these elements.

As to the charges of misogyny leveled against the film, I can only hurl out the invective, “Bullshit!” While von Trier does not fully attain a level of spirituality that infuses the work of Carl Dreyer, he is nevertheless playing in a similar sandbox in terms of exploring the subjugation and exploitation of women at the hands of patriarchy and/or organized religion. The relentless analysis forced upon Gainsbourg’s character by Willem Dafoe’s character takes on the creepy hysteria and austerity that Dreyer himself explored in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath and Gertrud.

That said, however, von Trier allows a turning of the tables that Dreyer could never have brought himself to actually do, though in fairness, I have some belief that if Dreyer were making films today, he might well have dared to cross into the same territory von Trier does in Antichrist – territory that is as horrific as it is uniquely and profoundly moving.

I reiterate – Antichrist is a great picture!

"Antichrist" is available on an astounding Criterion Collection Bluray and DVD. The picture had its North American premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and was theatrically released in Canada by E1 Films.

THE ASCENT (aka Voskhozhdeniye) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Susan Sontag called Larisa Shepitko's harrowing anti-war film "the most affecting film about the horror of war I know." Shepitko focused on suffering, slaughter and senseless strife and did so in a stunning allegorical portrait of Christ and Judas during the German occupation of Belarus. The movie was miraculously rendered under Communist oppression in the Soviet Union. Shepitko's eye, like a mad pit bull's jaws, clenched furiously on its quarry and never let go.

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the ELEVENTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS, The Film Corner gives to you…

The Ascent (1977) *****
dir. Larisa Shepitko
Starring: Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei Yokovlev, Anatoli Solonitsin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.) . . . A narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, and to feel. No photograph, or portfolio of photographs, can unfold, go further, and further still, as does The Ascent (1977), by the Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, the most affecting film about the horror of war I know." - Susan Sontag, Looking at War: Photography’s view of devastation and death, The New Yorker

Survival and sacrifice are at the forefront of Larisa Shepitko’s harrowing World War II drama The Ascent – only fitting since the film, at once simple, at the next complex, is ultimately an allegorical portrait of Christ and Judas in a world turned topsy-turvy by the senseless strife and slaughter during the German invasion and occupation of Belarus. That notion of faith, extracted as it is from the New Testament and applied to such issues as love and betrayal of country are completely at home within the context and backdrop so vividly and evocatively portrayed.

For the Ukrainian-born Shepitko, herself a student of Master Ukrainian filmmaker Olexander Dovzhenko, it is clear why this story resonated with her and why she applied such staggering Dovzhenkian compositions to the picture. Coming from Ukraine, a country and culture that had been under the yoke of occupation and suppression almost from its very beginnings and having been mentored by a brilliant filmmaker who himself had been repressed and censored by Joseph Stalin, the mixture of frank political material coupled with a story and central relationship derived from the opiate of the masses, is illustrative of Shepitko’s artistic bravery at such a relatively early stage of her career in the repressive Soviet regime that frowned upon anything that deviated from the State disavowal of all things based in faith.

The story is a simple one. It is also both tragic and compelling. Ultimately, however, it is the simple narrative backbone that allows Shepitko to inspire an audience’s engagement in the proceedings as well as opportunities for contemplation and reflection both during and after seeing the film.

Following a rag-tag band of partisans through the snowy steppes and forest of Belarus, we are introduced to our pair of mismatched protagonists, the hardened, practical Rybak (Vladimir Gostukhin) and the physically weak, but thoughtful Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) as they volunteer to journey through the bitter cold of the dangerous, Nazi-infested region to find food for the tired and starving freedom fighters. The journey begins to take, almost from the beginning, a series of increasingly disastrous and dangerous detours as Sotnikov becomes sicker with bronchitis and a bullet wound while Rybak becomes so intent upon survival that he begins to question all the sacrifices he is enduring. They both find themselves face-to-face with having to make the ultimate sacrifice for each other, those around them and most importantly, home and country.

Given that most of us are more than aware of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, it is also a testament to Shepitko’s cinematic storytelling prowess that we are still gripped by the proceedings in spite of having a good inkling of where the story will go. In fact, it is the inevitability of where things are headed that keeps us glued to the screen – we keep hoping against hope that the inevitable will be circumvented and, of course, Shepitko plays the portent with harrowing assuredness and style.

Interestingly, The Ascent is not dissimilar to another great Soviet war picture, Grigori Chukrai’s Ballad of a Soldier. On the surface, both pictures deal with soldiers who have a specific goal, but on their journey they face a series of obstacles and detours that painfully keep them from reaching their ultimate destination. The difference, however, is that Chukrai’s film (also full of lush, gorgeously composed exteriors in the Dovzhenkian mold) involves detours routed firmly in sacrifice wherein the central character is kept from visiting his destitute mother because he is continually sidetracked by being duty-bound to helping other people with their own challenges. In The Ascent, it is both betrayal and survival that provide the obstacles. This basic difference highlights why one picture feels romantic and the other is overwhelmingly tragic.

That said, “The Ascent” is equally powerful and perhaps even more so since the will to survive – at any cost – becomes so poignant. Sacrifice, which involves principles rather than that of the plight of individuals, takes The Ascent into (ironically) political territory that mirrors the struggles of everyone living within the Soviet system. As an audience we are forced to confront a system of repression (Soviet-ruled Belarus) that is also being occupied and repressed by a foreign aggressor (Germany). The enemy is sadly, from within and outside so that our characters are surrounded – almost in futility. The domestic collaborators with the Nazis are at once evil and altogether human. We understand the need to collaborate while condemning it at the same time.

Living in a system of repression like Belarus and under the yoke of a madman like Stalin, the Nazis provide a way out of the madness – an alternative to Stalin. Two of the supporting characters in this narrative are perfectly emblematic of this. One is a village elder (Sergei Yakovlev) who is a reluctant collaborator while the other is a local Nazi interrogator (Anatoli Solonytsin), a cold, practical bureaucrat. The former is a man who seeks safety in collaboration for his family and friends, while the latter is a pure opportunist – someone who is just as happy serving the dictator du jour (Hitler) as he would be engaging in a Stalinist purge. These dichotomous personalities brilliantly mirror Rybak and Sotnikov – especially since their journeys and the inevitable outcomes are so similar: suggesting, of course, that notions of sacrifice and betrayal, collaboration and resistance, good and evil are almost always grey areas in war, and in particular, within repressive regimes.

What is not a grey area in The Ascent is suffering – represented not only by the physical pain and death of violence, but by the land itself. Here is where Shepitko’s kino-eye is especially evocative. The bitter cold and the endless, bone-chilling whiteness of snow overwhelm all the exterior shots. One of the more intensely powerful moments involves Rybak dragging a sick and wounded Sotnikov through the snow – for what seems like forever – as Nazi bullets fly at them. Shepitko’s camera is like a mad pit bull’s jaws clenching at its quarry – it seems to never let go of these two men as they painstakingly make their way through the snow.

Throughout the film we see the actors enduring literal physical hardships. Seeing The Ascent again, I was reminded of the genius of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a movie that has suffered unnecessarily over the years due to the hype surrounding the mad German (and ethnically Slavic) director’s decision to force his own cast and crew to drag a riverboat through the jungle and over a mountain. When writing at an earlier juncture about Shepitko’s Krylya/Wings I was also reminded of Herzog – in that case, it was the documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly. Visually, Herzog and Shepitko are very different. Herzog’s visuals in drama and documentary, while stunning, have the immediacy of cinema vérité while Shepitko is rooted in the classical, sumptuously composed imagery her mentor Dovzhenko was known for. What Shepitko and Herzog share, however, is an unflinching search for truth in image, and in particular, the use of truth in image in the telling of stories cinematically.

Speaking of sharing, it is also worth noting that some of the finest war films of all time were made under the Soviet system – many of which put the best American examples of this genre to shame. That said, Ukrainians appear to have directed the very best Soviet war films. Olexander Dovzhenko (Arsenal, Schors and his WWII documentaries), Sergei Bondarchuk (Destiny of a Man, War and Peace), Grigori Chukrai (Ballad of a Soldier, Cold Skies, The 41st) and Shepitko have powerfully and evocatively portrayed the horrors and even glories of war and share Ukrainian ethnicity. Perhaps it is coincidence, or perhaps it is worthy of further study. In any event, it is certainly worth noting. It is also worth reiterating that all the abovementioned filmmakers come from a country that has always been dominated and repressed by other powers. With The Ascent, it is finally survival and sacrifice that drives the picture and makes it a film that is haunting, unforgettable and tragic.

Ukrainians, it seems, and others who have lived under repressive regimes, have always known something about survival, sacrifice and war.

The Ascent is on the Criterion Collection Eclipse label DVD of the Films of Larisa Shepitko

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Director Peter Yates blends humanity with tough-as-nails brutality in this bonafide crime classic from the 70s

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the TENTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS, Klymkiw Film Corner gives to you…

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) dir. Peter Yates
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco.

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

The fate of Eddie Coyle, the title character of this grim Peter Yates-directed crime drama, is so clear right from the beginning, so infused with a profound and palpable inevitability, that one could wonder what the point is of seeing the film at all. The point, however, becomes quickly and abundantly clear.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a genuine masterpiece.

Right from Eddie Coyle’s first appearance – heavy-lidded, baggy-eyed, paunchy, world-weary and shuffling with the gait of a once-physically-powerful man now consigned to the throbbing aches of late middle age – we pretty much know he’s doomed. Late at night and under the cold glare of fluorescent lights in a cafeteria-styled diner, Eddie places a slice of rubbery pie and a cup of coffee onto his tray and joins the table of a greasy, long-haired, bug-eyed young thug.

Wolfing his pie down between slurps of watery coffee, Eddie’s manner is been-there-done-that as he negotiates with the thug to purchase an ordnance of powerful and highly illegal handguns. The thug’s clearly an upstart, oozing bravado – peppering it with promises he might clearly not be able to keep. Eddie sets him straight - almost like a schoolteacher lecturing his young charge. Holding his battered fist in front of the thug, Coyle explains how he has twice the number of knuckles most people have. Eddie's nickname is "Knuckles". His hand was crushed - punishment for lousing up a job based on a false promise.

But Eddie’s not bitter. It’s business, he explains. It’s "The Life" – a life he chose in the only world he ever felt comfortable in. But now, Eddie needs a big score and he needs favours. If he can’t get them, he’s headed straight for hard time. His wife will have to collect welfare and his kids will face the cruel taunts of their classmates for having a no-account Dad. It would seem Eddie needs a miracle. He needs more than that, though. What Eddie really needs are friends. Right now, he has none – at least none that he can count on.

Promises are cheap. So is life.

Robert Mitchum, one of the screen’s most legendary and charismatic actors, is Eddie Coyle. Playing everything from cops to cowboys to soldiers and everything in between (including his stunning turns as the evil Max Cady in Cape Fear and the malevolent psycho lay preacher in Night of the Hunter), Eddie Coyle is a role that not only fits Mitchum like a well-worn baseball glove but is, I truly believe, his best role and quite probably his greatest performance. Mitchum serves up a hardened criminal – albeit a marked, desperate one who knows what he needs to survive, even if it means succumbing to the lowest rung of his kind and turning stool pigeon to cops who seem, frankly, no better than the criminals they seek to incarcerate.

As a director, Peter Yates was certainly no stranger to the crime genre when he made The Friends of Eddie Coyle. He’d already directed the Donald Westlake heist picture The Hot Rock, the gritty British-produced Robbery (a realist, almost semi-documentary-styled dramatization of 1963’s notorious “great train robbery” starring Stanley Baker), numerous episodes of such classic TV crime series as Danger Man and (one of my personal favourites) The Saint. Last, but certainly not least, Yates helmed Bullitt, the slam-bang Steve McQueen detective thriller that set the bar for all cinematic car chases that would follow. There was always, however, another side to Yates who gave us the gentle comedy of Breaking Away and the tragic gay love story The Dresser. It is finally this combination of the macho stylist and the gentle humanist that made Yates a natural to direct The Friends of Eddie Coyle. These seemingly dichotomous qualities Yates possessed are probably what make the picture so great.

The other, of course, is Yates gift with getting the most out of locations. While Bullitt, showcased Steve McQueen’s baby blues, Jacqueline Bisset’s feminine perfection and a car chase that has seldom been matched, it most brilliantly and stunningly extolled the virtues of the city of San Francisco.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is set in Boston and the last time I checked, it was and is a city of great beauty. You’d never know it from Yates's grim eye. He goes well out of his way to show us a Boston that nobody, save perhaps Eddie Coyle and other underworld denizens would bother to live in. In seedy cafes, dank bars, endlessly indistinguishable parking lots, near-tenement slums, lifeless suburbs, cold, almost Kafkaesque inner city cement financial districts and other equally unflattering locales, Yates and gritty, versatile cinematographer Victor (Dog Day Afternoon, The Gambler) Kemper train their lens on the non-descript and do so with harsh light, available light or no light at all. And lots of grain. Glorious chunks of swirling, dancing grain.

Paul Monash’s excellent script beautifully distills George V. Higgins novel of the same name. Higgins, a former prosecuting attorney turned crime writer always displayed a knack for dialogue that crackled with life and constructed narratives that defied typical crime story structures.

One of the odd things about Monash's script and Yates's adherence to it is the strange focus upon the nasty, brutal crimes committed as a result of Coyle’s efforts. Coyle is peripherally involved as a supplier to the criminals, but Yates and Monash lavish considerable attention and detail upon the various bank robberies that take place – none of which ever directly involve the title character. Not only is this an opportunity for Yates to dazzle us with his virtuosity as a filmmaker, but narratively and cinematically, it drives the nails of truth into us - that Eddie's dealings have serious consequences. His crimes are very real and not at all without victims.

And though our “hero” never gets so much as a moment to brandish a weapon, (which is, in and of itself highly unconventional for any crime picture), we are flung back to the reality and inevitability of Coyle’s eventual demise. Yates never lets us forget just how doomed poor Eddie is. Nowhere is this more haunting and downright moving than the heart-achingly tragic sequence where Coyle’s “friend”, the two-timing killer Dillon (Peter Boyle) takes him to a Boston Bruins hockey game, plies him with endless pints of beer and engages in pleasantries, all the while knowing that at the end of the evening, he has been entrusted with the mission to blow Eddie Coyle’s brains out.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw The Friends of Eddie Coyle as a kid with my ex-cop Dad. It was a movie that stayed with me and haunted me for the thirty or so years since first seeing it.

What I don’t think I’ll ever forget was my Dad’s response at the end of the movie. “That’s the way it is, kid, that’s just the way it is,” he said to me, with more than a little sadness in his voice, and with many long years under his belt dealing with guys just like Eddie Coyle.

Seeing the movie now, those words still hold true. Only now, I’m able to see Eddie himself, lumbering through the inevitability of his doom – those same words emblazoned, no doubt, on his brain.

That’s just the way it is.

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" is available on a terrific Criterion Collection DVD.

CHARLIE CHAN and the genius of Norman Foster - forgotten auteur: Reviews By Greg Klymkiw of CHARLIE CHAN IN RENO, CHARLIE CHAN AT TREASURE ISLAND & CHARLIE CHAN IN PANAMA

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the NINTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS, Klymkiw Film Corner gives to you…

WHO THE HELL IS NORMAN FOSTER? You dare even ask? Well, it wouldn't surprise me. Norman Foster was, without question, one of the most overlooked and underrated directors of American cinema.

Foster began his career as an actor - a dashing light leading man who was married to the ravishing Claudette Colbert until the mid-1930s when they divorced and he turned his attention to directing. Foster was a natural on the set and as a contract director at 20th Century Fox he sometimes delivered up to five feature films per year.

Foster's richest output was for Fox and the studio's wonderful "Mr. Moto" series which featured Peter Lorre (a Hungarian-Jew) as the Asian adventurer-sleuth. Lorre utilized his natural odd looks to such good effect in the title role of that series, that many have mistakenly assumed his eyes were taped back to give them and Oriental slant and that he'd been outfitted with a magnificent set of gleaming buck-tooth choppers. Foster's direction of this series of films was crisp and often thrilling. He reinvented the second feature mystery thriller by imbuing his hero with the personality and prowess of an adventurer. (One sees many Foster touches in the works of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.)

When Warner Oland, the beloved star of Fox's hit Asian sleuth series "Charlie Chan", died after a long illness, the studio needed to find some way to keep the successful franchise going. They hired Sidney Toler to replace Oland and after a successful debut, Fox looked at the stellar box office of the "Mr. Moto" series - a result of Norman Foster's thrilling direction - and they brought the dashing stylist on board for the second Chan of the Toler era and then, several others.

Foster proved to be the right man for the job. He infused life into the old chestnut and also contributed to making a huge star of Sidney Toler.

Foster's career after being Fox's go-to guy for Oriental sleuth thrillers was equally stellar and one wonders why he's been forgotten.

It’s possible Foster has been passed over for serious critical scrutiny and regard because much of his work was buried within the world of second features of the 1930s and 1940s. It might also be due to rumours that it was Orson Welles who designed and mostly directed (un-credited) the noir classic "Journey Into Fear". Welles was the star and Foster is officially credited with directing and while Welles’s influence in that picture is obvious, one can easily look at Norman Foster’s early work in the Fox second features he directed, note his exciting use of low-key stylings and crisp pacing and furthermore argue that he was possibly one of the many influences Welles himself "borrowed" from with both skill and abandon.

Welles denied he had anything to do with directing "Journey Into Fear", but still the rumours persisted. Given that Welles was working at RKO, a studio noted for its many low budget efforts, it's not a stretch to assume he had his eye on the work of someone like Foster who created veritable mountain chains out of ant hills - using a myriad of in-camera effects and opticals to extend the scope of his pictures. Foster, in turn and no doubt, had his eye on Welles. In fact, one could even argue that after his terrific work in "Journey into Fear", Foster’s direction of the great noir-ish melodrama "Woman on the Run" might well have given Alfred Hitchcock an idea or two for "Strangers On A Train."

In later years, Foster was responsible for directing a lot of extremely cool television drama in the 50s and 60s including a huge number of live television dramas, "The Loretta Young Show", Disney’s fantastic "Davy Crockett" dramatic specials with Fess Parker, the thrilling Disney "Zorro" series and he even dabbled in directing episodes of "Batman" with Adam West and "The Green Hornet" with a very young Bruce Lee as Kato.

Norman Foster, to my mind, is a great and unfairly neglected talent.

Here then, for your pleasure and interest are a few reviews of Norman Foster's entries in the magnificent series of mysteries that featured everyone's favourite epigram-spouting detective of the Oriental persuasion - CHARLIE CHAN!

Charlie Chan in Reno (1939) dir. Norman Foster
Starring: Sidney Toler, Ricardo Cortez, Phyllis Brooks

***

By Greg Klymkiw

Reno, Nevada.

What a glorious setting for a movie.

It was also the setting for many a divorce when our parents and their parents’ parents and their parents' parents' parents needed a quickie nuptial-severance in that fine, old age when family values ruled over the more modern conceits of me-first selfishness. Even in those days, though, divorce, while less common than in contemporary times, was a reality and Reno was the town to do it - in the middle of nowhere, away from prying eyes and remote enough to avoid the shame and scandal of attacking the vestiges of Holy Matrimony.

Charlie Chan in Reno was officially the second entry in Fox’s Charlie Chan series reboot starring Warner Oland’s replacement Sidney Toler. It also happened to be Norman Foster’s first kick at the directorial Chan-can and the picture's definitely a fun little mystery with Chas and Number Two Son amidst a bunch of hot babes in Reno waiting to make their divorces legal. It’s a bit like George Cukor’s The Women, but with lots of laughs and dollops of suspense.

Plot-wise, it's simple stuff. Against the seedy backdrop of furtive divorce, one of the aforementioned babes is accused of murder and it’s up to Chas to wade through the massive number of other suspects to find the true killer.

The cast is first-rate. Toler delivers his epigrams and theories with considerable Cheshire-Cat-like aplomb while [Victor] Sen Yung as Number Two Son Jimmy stumbles and bumbles his way through Reno with his usual comic flair. In support of our leads, there are a number of terrific performances – mostly of the comic variety. Slim Summerville, the wonderful character actor who is most memorable in films like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page and the numerous silent and sound comedies he appeared in, stars as the irascible and often befuddled Sheriff Tombstone, a local Reno law enforcer who can’t make head nor tail out of the methods of the sly Asian dick. He's an inbred hick Inspector Lestrade to a poker-faced Asian Holmes.

Also gracing the screen is comic stalwart Eddie Collins as a dopey cab driver whose gift for gab is, for most of his clientele anyway, a curse, not a blessing. The bevy of beauties adorning the picture include the earnest, but gorgeous suspect Pauline Moore, the slobber-inducing guttersnipe murder victim Louise Henry, the ravishing Phyllis Brooks and the sultry Kay Linaker (who in the 50s would write the screenplay for the classic creature feature The Blob).

While this picture is blessed with Foster’s visual panache, it’s a bit closer to the earlier Chan pictures and doesn’t reach the dizzying heights that would follow in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island. Foster appears to be getting his sea-legs with the series. In spite of this, it's still a terrifically entertaining mystery and like much of Foster's work, never feels like the second feature it was meant to be.

Like many of the Fox second features directed by Foster, it’s A-list entertainment all the way.

Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939) dir. Norman Foster
Starring: Sidney Toler, Victor Sen Young, Cesar Romero

***1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

Norman Foster directed this third entry in Fox’s Charlie Chan series reboot and this is one of the best of all the Chan pictures. Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, starring Sidney Toler, the man who filled Warner Oland’s shoes when Oland died, is an extremely cool mystery set against the backdrop of the San Francisco International Exposition wherein our venerable Asian detective investigates the death of one of his best friends.

Charlie’s sleuthing leads him into the mysterious world of magicians, psychics and other eccentrics of San Francisco high society. With the help of Number Two Son (the wonderful Sen Yung) and a magician (played with high camp flair by Cesar Romero), this is a really juicy mystery thriller with many moments of genuine suspense.

This is no surprise. Foster’s direction in the Toler Chan films really injects life into the series and they rival and at times, downright beat even some of the better Chan films from the Warner Oland period. This film, in particular, moves like a speeding bullet and it's probably one of the earliest serial killer movies.

The Fox Cinema Classics Collection DVD release of Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (part of Volume 4 of the Chan Collection) includes a full commentary track and a couple of terrific documentary featurettes. The most amazing of these mini-docs trace the potential influence of this film upon the notorious Zodiac killer. It's a most convincing and chiller postulation. Great directors have been known to influence a plethora of psychos and the arguments put forth in the doc are not without merit.

And it's no surprise that Norman Foster was one of the first directors in film history to place a magic bean deep into the mind of a real-life whack job - a bean that sprouted into one major twisted beanstalk within the diseased psyche of a notorious killer.

Charlie Chan in Panama (1940) dir. Norman Foster
Starring: Sidney Toler, Sen Yung, Lionel Atwill, Jack La Rue and Jean Rogers

****

By Greg Klymkiw

Charlie Chan in Panama crackles with excitement and it bears Mr. Norman Foster’s exquisite individual stamp of always-effective key lighting, his rich and crammed to the brim frame compositions and pacing (in narrative, action and dialogue) that careens with the ferocity of a rollercoaster. Foster always delivered the goods and this picture is no exception as it is truly the greatest Chan of them all.

Along with Erle Ford’s delightful Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise and Lynn Shores’s eerie Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, this thrilling Panamanian-set mystery adventure is one of three terrific Chan pictures released by 20th Century-Fox in 1940. It is also a wonderful entry in the various series-styled pictures that brought their heroes into the world of war and espionage. During this time it was not uncommon for characters such as Tarzan and even Sherlock Holmes to be in the thick of battling Nazis and other assorted evil threats to the American – and by extension, democratic Western way of life.

Here we have Chan assisting the American “secret service” to thwart a potential terrorist action to destroy the Panama Canal. Sidney Toler, the more genial Chan thespian to the fabulous, but decidedly dour Warner Oland, is on undercover assignment in the guise of an Asian entrepreneur who runs a small shop specializing in – I kid you not – Panama hats. A murder occurs right in Chan’s store that sets the wheels in motion for an action-packed and downright suspenseful mystery-thriller set against an exotic world of back-alley stores and markets as well as a nightclub jammed with American and European expatriates (pre-dating, but not unlike Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca). That Foster comes close to recreating this world semi-realistically on a Fox back-lot is one of many testaments to his considerable prowess as a filmmaker.

The Chan pictures are always replete with magnificent acting. Toler, as usual, delivers Chan’s Cheshire grin and epigrammatic sayings with humour and considerable aplomb. Sen Young, also as per usual, bungles about hilariously as Number Two Son Jimmy. The supporting cast offers the expected delicious mixture and we are treated to the demented Lionel Atwill (Son of Frankenstein’s oft-parodied wooden-armed Inspector Krogh) as a novelist with more than a few secrets. Jean Rogers, the luscious beauty queen and former Flash Gordon battling babe Dale Arden, appears as a slinky songstress with a mysterious past and lest we forget, Charlie Chan in Panama features the ever-delicious scumbag Jack La Rue as the sleazy club owner Manolo who is blackmailing the aforementioned dish into spying.

Manolo’s club is also a marvel of atmosphere. Then again, the whole film is overflowing with atmosphere – ceiling fans galore, bright nightclubs with marimba bands, shadows aplenty and oodles of evocative single key lighting effects. Not only is director Foster on the ball; he is aided by stunning production design and the unparalleled cinematography of Virgil Miller. Miller was the pioneering Director of Photography on the early Technicolor extravaganza Garden of Allah in addition to numerous Moto, Chan and Sherlock Holmes pictures. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until the 50s when both Foster and Miller were recognized with Oscar nominations – but for a movie far removed from the magical, stylized studio worlds they were known for, but the vérité-styled semi-documentary Navajo which was closer to the tradition of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North.

All in all, Charlie Chan in Panama is a first-rate entry in the Chan series – so much so that one does wish that Foster and his numerous collaborators had more critical and awards recognition. At the end of the day, however, they had the greatest recognition of all – audiences. With this film and many others, Foster and company generated hit after hit – proving, of course, that audience recognition should ultimately be the highest form of recognition for filmmakers.

Who else would and should they be making pictures for if not the audience?

Charlie Chan in Panama is available on DVD as part of Volume 5 of the Charlie Chan Cinema Classics Collection from 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Eisenstein extolled the virtues of totalitarianism and the butcher Stalin, but escaped Riefenstahl's pariah status

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the EIGHTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS, Klymkiw Film Corner gives to you…


Battleship Potemkin (1925) dir. Sergei Eisenstein
Starring: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, Prokopenko

****

By Greg Klymkiw

I feel sorry for Leni Riefenstahl – that dazzling filmmaking genius who directed Triumph of the Will – a film that continues to send shivers down one’s spine with its staggering artistic virtuosity and the creepy realization of what its intent actually was. Frau Riefenstahl was and still is hated for making a film that extolled the values of a butcher (Hitler) and a regime of utter evil (Nazism). That Riefenstahl made Triumph of the Will is undeniable. That, in its thrilling depiction of the Nuremburg rally, it played a considerable role in convincing the German people to march behind Adolph Hitler is also undeniable. However, that it is also a stunning, groundbreaking piece of cinema is also undeniable.

Why then, is Riefenstahl’s Soviet brother in crime Sergei Eisenstein not equally reviled? He too extolled the virtues of a butcher (Joseph Stalin) and an evil regime (communism), he too was good at pretending he was unaware of his complicity in a regime of evil and most notably, he too was a genius that produced a stunning, groundbreaking piece of cinema – the great Battleship Potemkin.

Riefenstahl and Eisenstein walk as one, yet one is hated, the other is not.

The Triumph of the Will and Olympia are reviled, yet Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky are not.

What gives?

Is one form of propaganda any worse than another?

Are the goals of Rambo (presented, within its own context as artfully, yet as ham-fistedly by Sylvester Stallone) any different from the goals of Riefenstahl and Eisenstein?

At the end of the day, the answer must clearly be – NO!

These thoughts occurred to me as I noodled over the notion of reviewing Battleship Potemkin (restored and recently released by Kino in a dazzling Bluray DVD special edition) and I wondered if it was possible to review such a milestone of cinema and still find something new and/or interesting to say?

Probably not, was my initial thought.

However, it is certainly not without merit to look at Battleship Potemkin from the perspective of what it ultimately is as a finished product – propaganda, pure and simple.

No mere entertainment (though chock-full of considerable entertainment value), Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin exploded upon the world of cinema in 1925 with its stunning use of montage, so powerful a piece of pro-revolutionary propaganda that many countries banned it outright (for fear of inciting violence against the respective governments). Even Jolly Joe Stalin eventually pulled it from circulation in the Soviet Union, as he feared the film might incite violence against his own delightful regime of butchery.

Watching it now - outside the context of the world in the first quarter to the middle half of the twentieth century – it is safe to note that Battleship Potemkin won’t be inspiring any revolutions, riots or violence against despots. However, it still exudes the power to inspire, though much of that inspiration has (and continues to be) inspiration of another kind – namely, the inspiration artists thrive on from the work of other artists to make their own work move forward in new and exciting ways. Battleship Potemkin is nothing if not influential upon ALL cinema.

I always find it both interesting and amusing to note that young film students, upon seeing Eisenstein’s masterpiece for the first time, are shocked to see a silent movie “ripping off” the baby carriage on the steps of the train station sequence in Brian DePalma’s gangster epic The Untouchables - until a few of them figure out that it was “conceivably” the other way round. In Eisenstein's film, the "ripped off" scene I’m referring to is the famous Odessa massacre sequence and the teetering baby carriage that eventually careens perilously down the steps of the famed Ukrainian seaport.

This key set piece in the picture – the Odessa steps massacre – replete as it is with its staggering editing and evocative images is bracketed by the simplest of plots. This, of course, comes as no surprise since it was the drama of politics that mattered most to Eisenstein. Plot was there to serve the political will – nothing more and nothing less. And not only is it obvious that Eisenstein didn’t much care about plot, but that he most certainly had no use for character.

His job was to present a thrilling and exciting depiction of working class solidarity. He also wished to experiment with his own notions of film editing since he and many other Soviet filmmakers of the time were not only pioneers in the area of cinema, but were eggheads of the highest order – writing endless tomes of film theory that film students to this day must wade through. In fairness, this early Soviet film theory actually made practical sense in contrast to the knot head academics that rule most academic studies of cinema these days. (Cinema as a post-modernist organic process of light and motion, anyone?) With Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein wanted to achieve maximum emotional impact from his cutting style and his goal was to rile up the audience to favour the mutinous actions of the proletariat.

The simple plot served as a lovely backbone for Eisenstein to work his propagandistic magic.

In a nutshell, this then, is the “plot”:

The working class crew of the title vessel has just about had it with the poor conditions imposed upon them by the evil Czarist overlords. Rotting meat, floggings, hangings and an impending mass firing squad, inspire our grubby proletarians to mutiny. The good folk of Odessa happily get wind of this nose thumbing in the Czar’s general direction and they congregate by the pier to wish the seamen well. The noble Cossacks make a surprise appearance and slaughter the good folk on the majestic steps of Odessa. Nobody is spared. Old coots. Women. Children. All of them are rendered to bloodied heaps of meat under the blazing sun. The Czar, then sends a whole passel of warships to hightail after the Potemkin and just when we figure the grubby mutineering prolies are about to be blitzed, all the other grubby proles on all the other warships mutiny also and refuse to fight against their working class brethren.

Yee-fucking-haa! Commie-style, of course.

The above “plot” was also supposedly based upon fact and presented as such. That the massacre on the steps of the sunny seaside port of Odessa was a figment of Eisenstein’s imagination mattered little to the communist butchers who ruled the Soviet Union. All that mattered was the propagation of the lie of proletarian solidarity.

So it should be.

That is the goal of propaganda (and entertainment, for that matter) – to lie. And if Eisenstein were Pinocchio when he made Battleship Potemkin, his proboscis would, no doubt be elongated to swaggeringly astounding proportions. (It has been whispered that one of Eisenstein’s other appendages would engorge to astounding proportions as well, so perhaps he was Pinocchio after all. But, I digress.)

It is also of interest to note that Josef Goebbels, Mr. Nazi Propaganda himself, was a great admirer of Battleship Potemkin. He wished such a film could be made for National Socialism and, he further opined, that such a film would prove to not only be a tremendous hit in Germany, but a most useful instrument in rallying the troops (so to speak). Eisenstein himself was appalled with this notion and attempted to distance himself from Goebbels’ adoration by issuing a letter of rebuff.

But of course, one can never extricate oneself from those who love or loathe one’s work and Eisenstein’s pathetic attempt at extrication certainly didn’t stop Goebbels and cannot even begin to deny the impact Eisenstein and Battleship Potemkin had upon Nazism. Goebbels also admired Dziga Vertov and his “documentary” approach in such works as Man with a Movie Camera. Blend this “Kino eye” with social realism (plus dollops of Teutonic superiority, as it were) and you eventually get something resembling Leni Riefenstahl.

With this in mind, then, let us redress the injustice foisted upon Frau Leni Riefenstahl. Her spirit and spinning corpse both need to rest easy. She was no better and certainly no worse than Sergei Eisenstein. (Or, for that matter, Sylvester Stallone.)

Eisenstein, like all great propagandists, was happy to wear extra-comfortable kneepads when supplicating before his butchering leaders.

Nothing was sacred,

He needed to keep make films.

And for this, we should all be thankful.

With Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein ultimately did what ALL filmmakers should do.

He put on one hell of a good show.

Battleship Potemkin is available on Kino Lorber DVD and Blu-Ray.