Films Catch Up 13

More films I watched last year.

1. Donovan’s Brain

Dr Patrick Cory has removed a monkey’s brain and is keeping it alive in a tank. Because this is obviously horrific he lives up in the mountains, with just his wife Janice and his assistant Dr Frank Schratt. When a plane crashes the rescuers call him to the scene; there they discover the dying body of ruthless tax-evading businessman Warren Donovan. Unable to save his body they secretly and successfully extract his brain.

While asleep Cory starts to write in Donovan’s handwriting, dreams strange things. As time goes on he is able to access a secret bank account, after which he takes Donovan’s hotel room, buys suits like Donovan and smokes Donovan’s cigars. He puts off Donovan’s children, brings in Donovan’s business associates, is investigated by the tax inspectors. However a freelance news photographer has stumbled onto the fact that Donovan’s brain is missing and blackmails them.

Donovan is able to get hold of the photographer’s mind and has him crash his car; during this time Cory breaks free. This gives them the clue they need; Donovan can only control one mind at a time. There’s a deadly showdown and a rather anaemic epilogue.

Watch This: A fun dark science fiction thriller with some good bits as Cory changes his looks and habits, and a touchstone for brain transplant stories
Don’t Watch This: It’s very silly, and you know how these sorts of films end up

2. The Tomb Of Ligeia

There’s a funeral, and through the window in the coffin we see a young woman. This is Ligeia. There’s a black cat and her widower Verden Fell (Vincent Price) is haunted by her blasphemy and reluctance to die. He lives as a recluse in a partially ruined abbey, wearing dark glasses as his eyes are sensitive to light.

Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd, who also plays Ligeia), being courted by Christopher Gough, comes across the graveyard. Injuring her foot when the cat spooks her, she encounters Fell, who takes her back to the Abbey. An old friend of Gough before he became a recluse, Rowena is intrigued. (There’s some rather tiresome business where her father thinks that Fell is the doctor).

Fell and Rowena marry. There are strange occurrences in the abbey, visions, accidents and the cat hates Rowena. Fell decides to sell it and leave but there are complications. It seems that the abbey was in Ligeia’s name, and that there is no death certificate (due to the property crossing a county boundary). In other words, according to the law she’s still alive, and still Fell’s wife.

Inevitably this legal metaphor becomes literalised. Another Roger Corman adaption of an Edgar Allen Poe work with Vincent Price, this is a very serious one, and uses the real Castle Acre Priory to good effect as a location. Plus a mysterious bell ringing scene, something always to be looked forward to.

Watch This: Cool gothic horror about love and death
Don’t Watch This: The romance makes no sense and the comic relief father is just annoying. Also cruelty to a cat.

3. Woman On The Run (1950)

A gangster has ripped off his boss, and is being extorted in a car. The gangster, Danny Boy, kills the extortionist, Joe. He’s seen by Frank Johnson, an artist who’s walking his dog. When the police get there they learn that he could identify the killer. But when the lieutenant points out that the killer tried to shoot Frank and only missed because he was aiming at his shadow, he vanishes.

The police call in at the house where Eleanor Johnson reveals their marriage has been on the rocks, also the art hasn’t been all that successful, also Frank has a heart condition. The tall house is on a hill (the film is set in San Francisco) and although the police leave a guard, a reporter sneaks in, helps Eleanor leave to go about her business. Offering money for a story the two of them try to track Frank down, following his path, learning more about his life. Eleanor comes to a new understanding of their relationship.

There’s a moderately good twist revealed at the midpoint and a slightly convoluted ending sequence.

Watch This: Some good locations and sets combined with the clever idea of an investigation into a husband by the wife
Don’t Watch This: After the twist the film just rolls down a predictable melodramatic path

4. The Trial (1962 Film)

Orson Welles' adaption of the Franz Kafka story. Josef K wakes up to discover detectives in his room. Some people from work are in the next room. He’s told he’s under arrest. They won’t tell him the crime.

He progresses through various stages, being told not to do things, being warned. He stands up at a trial and demands justice but nothing much happens. He consults a lawyer*, and an artist, and a priest.

The Brutalist architecture and slightly off-putting design of the sets combine with use of unusual angles and focus in the film to enhance our feelings of confusion and alienation.

Watch This: A fantastic adaption, with a good performance from Anthony Perkins as Josef K, a man who everyone wants something from but can’t tell him what
Don’t Watch This: The ending, while conclusive, does not satisfy

* In theory he might have learned something of the charges there if he hadn’t been distracted by the lawyer’s mistress; still we know the shape of the story by now. Even had they been laid out it would have been impossible to refute them, or even be sure if he was innocent or guilty.

5. Les Bicyclettes De Belsize

In Hampstead a man goes cycling, and singing. He crashes to find himself being stared at by a child, who introduces herself as Kate, He cycles off with Kate following, Singing about how great it is to be young and have no responsibilities. He crashes again, this time into a billboard of the model Julie.

At a print shop he finds posters of Julie and, coincidentally, she’s at a fashionable party across the road, where she sings about how it’s fake and wishes she could find true love. The two see each other, fall in love through the glass window, then Julie is rushed away in a car to a fashion shoot; the two find each eventually (and by eventually I mean, this is a short film, 29 minutes long).

The most interesting bit is the opening where the camera sits on a roof and looks out, seeing people go about their business on streets and especially through windows, all in one continuous shot. The effort to find the location, then put people into various rooms across the area, then have them all do their scripted bit in schedule, and all for the establishing shot/ opening song, and for this rather slight short film, absolutely amazing.

Watch This: Interesting musical film about bicycling through Hampstead (not Belsize) in the late 60s
Don’t Watch This: It’s very slight

6. A Few Good Men

There’s a marine who’s bad at being a marine, and he’s in Guatanamo Bay, a US naval base in (hostile) Cuba. He wants off the base, so he writes to everyone. When he learns about a negligent discharge, a shot across the wire into Cuba which has been covered up, he threatens to go to the Inspector General.

In command are two marine stereotypes, the colonel (Jack Nicholson) who is a rock-chewing hard-case and his second in command, the lieutenant colonel who is the warrior-scholar. The lieutenant colonel suggests transferring him off; the colonel decides to train him. This involves ordering two marines in his platoon to perform a “code red,” an unofficial punishment where they shove a sponge down his throat. He dies.

The colonel’s in line to join the national security advisor’s staff or something like that, anyway this would be embarrassing so someone senior wants to deal with it quietly. The two marines are charged with murder so that’s not simple. Most of this gets revealed later in the film as the investigation and trial develop.

There’s a softball player (Tom Cruise) who has woken up to discover he’s a lawyer, though it’s not clear if he’s figured out he’s in the Navy. Anyway he gets the case; he’s new, never gone to trial, always pleads for a deal. He’s up against another lawyer, who’s a basketball player, more experienced (Kevin Bacon). He’s pushed into actually defending the case by another Navy Lawyer (Demi Moore), also not a trial lawyer, and because the two marines refuse to accept the plea as they don’t think they did anything wrong.

There’s some good stuff here about how civilisation is kept safe by guys doing things we don’t want to know about, but also the irony of this, in that they didn’t keep a guy safe, and also the fence at Guatanomo Bay is not actually defending civilisation. And every now and then it drops the ball a bit, almost everyone ought to have got themselves court martialled, and a couple of times the trial descends into farce. But it's well acted, a film with something to say and a stylish way to say it.

Watch This: A clever, elegant and occasionally funny film asking actual questions and offering a few answers, a couple of truths
Don’t Watch This: You can’t handle the truth

7. M3GAN

Gemma works for toy company Funki and they want her to make a cheaper, less capable version of their animatronic doll. She wants to make a much more capable, much more expensive doll, with an experimental AI. Then her 8 year old niece Cady is in a car accident where her parents die and Gemma becomes guardian. Combining the two responsibilities, Gemma activates M3GAN* to be her companion.

M3GAN is very good with her, downloading the best information on how to look after a child, especially one who has been traumatised. So good that Cady bonds with her, and throws a tantrum when she can’t be with M3GAN. So good that when Gemma demonstrates M3GAN it’s a great hit at the company.

So good that M3GAN will do anything to protect Cady. Anything at all.

Where this film is interesting in it’s retread of Frankenstein as fable, is in creating the robot as doll, and as child companion and protector. When in the last stages it falls into the familiar steps of rampaging monster-robot it goes back to being fine. But at least it had something to say for the first hour!

Watch This: A creepy robot film with things to say about parenting and how that is sometimes outsourced
Don’t Watch This: The creepy robot kills a dog

* The “M” in “M3GAN” stands for “M3GAN”**

** In fact it’s Model 3 Generative ANdroid.

8. Kingdom Of The Spiders

It’s 1970s Arizona and a calf on a farm has died mysteriously. The local vet “Rack” Hansen (William Shatner) sends off samples to the university in Flagstaff. They respond by sending Diane Ashley, because it’s full of spider venom. She initially runs into Rack at the gas station, mistaking him for the attendant.

Everyone’s worried that it might be contagious and call for a quarantine, which would close down the country fair that’s due soon, the big event in town. The mayor tries to pressure Rack who blandly waits on results. Out on the farm they find the dog is dead; spiders again. The farmer remembers that there’s a big spider hill out the back. They go there and there are lots of tarantulas, something very unusual. Ashley reckons that pesticides have killed off their normal prey so they are combining to attack larger animals.

They go to burn the spider hill, but many tarantulas escape. When the farmer drives into town, they attack him and his truck goes off the road killing him. When they find him he’s covered in web. In the meantime Ashley has discovered that the spider venom is stronger than normal*.

The mayor wants them eliminated so orders the erratic drunk cropduster pilot to spray them with poison, though Ashley thinks this is a bad idea as spraying stuff caused this, and given a chance birds and rats will eat them**. Inevitably the tarantulas have reached the airfield and attack the pilot in flight so he crashes.

The spiders attack the town, killing Rack’s widowed sister-in-law, he and Ashley rescue his niece. They regroup at the lodge Ashley is staying at with a handful of mismatched locals and guests. The town is overrun, with car crashes and people running in panic, the telephone switchboard operator killed. Those trapped in the lodge are under siege.

The slow start is a fun look into a rural town, where everyone knows each other, and is caught up in their own concerns. But also one that is connected to the outside world, Rack the country vet perfectly capable of keeping up with the big city*** scientist with her fancy car. Also lots and lots of spiders, plenty of tense scenes where no one knows that about a thousand spiders are going to appear.

Watch This: Spider scares, Shatner doing a bit of acting, a look into small town life
Don’t Watch This: There’s no resolution, just spiders.

* I thought this is an unnecessary escalation; the danger from the tarantulas is when there are hundreds of them on screen, fake and real. It turns out that normal tarantula venom is equivalent to a bee sting so maybe not! Apparently they got 5000 spiders for the film, which caused a number of problems, mostly because tarantulas are cannibals (Ashley notes this, it's unprecedented for them to cooperate) and they shed bristles in large numbers which caused itching and soreness. Tarantulas not taking direction well, fans and air tubes were used to move them. This is from a period before “no animals were harmed in the production of this picture”.

** Sadly no sequel, the Kingdom Of Birds And Rats was ever made; having feasted on tarantulas the rats and birds are now starving and driven mad by spider venom, they move in on town etc.

*** Flagstaff, Arizona, 1970 population 26 000

9. Bulldog Drummond Comes Back

Phyllis Clavering, Bulldog Drummond’s fiancée, is kidnapped by the wife and brother-in-law of a murderer Drummond sent to the gallows. They leave rhyming clues and gramophone records to lead him to various places, including a pub they keep returning to. It’s a long and convoluted revenge.

Drummond’s manservant Tenny and friend Algy bumble about trying to get one step ahead of the villains. Ineffectually it seems, as the gramophone records must have been pressed in advance so if they forced them off track they would no longer make sense. As he’s been warned not to contact the police, Scotland Yard Commissioner and friend of Drummond, Colonel Nielsen, adopts a variety of unlikely disguises.

Watch This: A higher concept Bulldog Drummond with rhyming clues and a cat and mouse villain
Don’t Watch This: Even by the standards of this series it makes very little sense

10. Fantastic Voyage

Grant arrives on a plane with a scientist, Benes. Handing him over he goes home. There is an assassination attempt on Benes; as we soon learn he’s left in a coma with a blood clot in his brain.

Grant gets called in to the headquarters of CMDF a cool underground base of a super secret American military organisation. It stands for Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces*. The Americans can shrink things down to being tiny… but only for an hour. The “other side” can do the same. Benes might be able to make it last longer. They have a plan to get rid of the blood clot.

They have an experimental submarine, and the pilot of it. They have two doctors, one the head of the medical team at CMDF (Donald Pleasance), one a brain surgeon with suspect political opinions**. The brain surgeon has an assistant (Raquel Welch) who has a laser. And Grant is there ostensibly as a frogman, and to make sure there’s no enemy action. They’re going to shrink them, inject them into the blood stream, sail through the brain and destroy the blood clot.

There’s enemy action, damaging the laser. Grant can’t figure out who did it. But there’s not time for that. Travelling through the body turns out to be harder than they thought. Also more psychedelic. They get lost and have other problems. And they’ve only got an hour.

A classic science fiction film whose science, politics and effects have been left behind. Yet behind all that there’s a good family-friendly adventure film.

Watch This: A silly adventure into the depths of the human body that manages to maintain some tension
Don’t Watch This: It’s just some people hanging out with the blood cells

* Not, as Grant suggests, the Consolidated Mobilization of Delinquent Females

** They never say explicitly that the opposition is the Soviet Union, and the exact nature of his dangerous beliefs isn’t made clear.