The Realm of Ryan

The Spider in The Pain Emperor

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sat, 18 May 2013 05:24:00 +0000

The Pain Emperor (1935)
By Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge

May has turned into “Pulp Hero!” month for me. It started when I found out that the 1994 movie The Shadow was arriving on Blu-ray. Soon after, the news hit of a new Doc Savage movie getting underway. The time was right to read some Shadow and Doc Savage adventures. Now, I must complete the classic pulp hero trilogy with a Spider adventure. But don’t expect me to read two Spiders in a row, like I did with Doc and the Shadow. The Spider’s lunacy and lack of logic is exhausting. Twice before I’ve read three Spider novels back-to-back, when I reviewed the collections The Spider: City of Doom and The Spider vs. The Empire State, and I nearly lost my mind. This time I’ll keep the most violent and palsied of pulp heroes restricted to a one-shot.

If you need a quick primer on what The Spider is all about and some background on him and his main writer, Norvell Page, the opening of my review of The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham provides a concise overview. I think people need a bit of a warning when approaching something as blood-crazy as these books.

The Pain Emperor was published in the heady first two years of the Spider’s red reign on the newsstands. It followed The City Destroyer, one of the most disturbing pieces of pulp I’ve ever come across. (You can find it in The Spider: City of Doom collection, if you’re strong enough.) It opens in the thick of things with a new hero in New York, a masked figure who calls himself the Avenger. Normally, Richard Wentworth, a.k.a. The Spider, would welcome having another vigilante to help him with his tireless work slaying evildoers. But after the Avenger wounds Wentworth’s faithful chauffeur Jackson when the man tries to help a girl whose brother got himself into gambling trouble, Wentworth begins to suspect the Avenger may be a crook who uses his Robin Hood antics as a cover.

Wentworth has another reason to be suspicious. On the same day of the Avenger’s biggest heroic coup, forty-three people died from poison in canned food. After the Avenger lays a trap at a gambling den to reveal that Richard Wentworth is actually the Spider, the radio reports that seventeen women were horribly disfigured earlier that day from acid put in their cosmetics. Using the completely circumstantial evidence of the proximity of the Avenger’s actions with these occurrences of consumer terrorism, Wentworth deduces that the Avenger is connected to the horrific attacks on the citizenry.

Putting aside the leap of logic here—which is par for the course in the Spider’s world—author Norvell Page does a commendable job crafting the early chapters that set up these overlapping events while delivering the initial blast of action. Page plotted out the openings of his stories carefully, and then pretty much shifted to first draft by the end, when the manic mood took over. As The Pain Emperor begins, Page leans back a bit from his customary gruesomeness: the deaths from food poisoning and the disfigurings from acid are details on the fringe. Instead, Page focuses on setting up a bind for the Spider when the Avenger’s trap ends up putting a piece of evidence in the hands of this new “hero” that can link the Spider to Wentworth. (However, throughout the series it seems the whole planet knows Wentworth and the Spider are the same person by the end of each story, so it feels odd Wentworth is so concerned about it now. The Spider has the worst kept secret identity in pulp hero history.)

During these opening chapters, Page also starts setting up the mystery of the true identity of the Avenger by using the shotgun method of firing out names of numerous suspects, sometimes packed into the space of one paragraph. It’s likely that Page had no idea who was behind the crimes while he was writing these chapters, and he keeps clumsily inserting the suspects into the plot to remind the readers of their existence. However, The Pain Emperor is a rare case where the reveal of the villain at the end makes sense instead of feeling like the Spider yanked a name of a minor cast member out of a hat.

Newspaper reporters immediately latch onto the Avenger’s evidence—and he keeps collecting more—and hassle Wentworth about whether he’s the Spider. The first reporter to show up, and the one who is the most tenacious, is Eddie Blanton from the Press. Eddie even follows Wentworth when he pursues the Avenger to Chicago on the suspicion that a gangster named Martin is masterminding the killings.

The death toll ramps up even before the Spider makes the leap to Chicago: the canned food poisoning and face-eating cosmetic incidents pass the thousand mark, with Wentworth showing much more concern over the disfigured women than the outright murders. In a humorous bit, Wentworth notices women in the city looking rumpled because they’ve stopped wearing make-up. This immediately calls up memories of the 1989 Batman movie, where the Joker contaminated beauty products with Smilex, causing Gotham City to go on a toiletries fast reflected in the frazzled and unshaven faces of news anchors. I doubt anybody involved with Batman read The Pain Emperor, but it shows how influential the Spider was on the creation of the Caped Crusader in the late 1930s. Early Batman comics might have come right from the pulpy pages of The Spider Magazine, and the Joker would have fit easily into the rogues gallery of Richard Wentworth. (The Spider would have killed the Joker at their first meeting, however.)

The logic of the plotting soon frays apart as Norvell Page goes into his standard rush of one thing after the other. The Spider stops in Chicago only long enough to almost get killed before he makes a desperate run back to New York, during which he pulls the mind-boggling stunt of blowing up his own plane so he can parachute out of it and try to “hitchhike” onto a train. There are a few big action set-pieces—the Spider trapped in a subway tunnel, a huge chase with taxis and mobsters and cop cars—to keep readers interested as the events turn into the usual first-draft blur. Right before the climax, Wentworth and the love of his life Nita share a touching scene where she makes a strong plea for him to leave his crusading, which has never rewarded him: “How has humanity repaid you?” she asks. It’s a honest, dramatic moment delivered among the blazing fire of automatics.

The finale, a public meeting between the Spider and the Avenger arranged before a committee to deal with the poisonings, packs a punch amidst the standard frenzy where the Spider has to kill enough people to reach a solution. Wentworth’s breathless explanation of what happened makes some sense (as I mentioned before, the Avenger’s true identity is a more solid mystery than Norvell Page often devised), but it’s the sudden and decisive death of one of the long-running supporting characters from the series that closes The Pain Master on a more memorable note than the book seems to otherwise deserve.

However… the dead supporting character would return to the regular cast three issues later—with no explanation for the resurrection whatsoever. Did Norvell Page plan it this way? I’m positive he didn’t. It was a spur of the moment shock-ending he needed, and after a couple more magazines come and go on the stands, who’s gonna notice the difference? Perfect Spider illogic. Hats off to Walter B. Gibson, who slew a major supporting character of the Shadow’s in Gangdom’s Doom and kept him dead for the rest of the magazine’s run.

(Even casual readers will know about Page’s playing underhanded with death: The Pain Master is packaged in a Carroll & Graf 1992 paperback with Death Reign of the Vampire King, which was published later but has the dead character quite alive in it.)

The sheer gutsy craziness of “he’s dead—no he ain’t!” wrap-up to The Pain Master raises it higher on my “essentials” list for Spider novels, even though it is otherwise a middle-of-the-road entry in the series. Coming off the sheer horror of hordes of people dying in crumbling skyscrapers in The City Destroyer, the poisonings here feel distant. A death-toll of twenty-five thousand gets mentioned near the end, but the book never brings an immediacy to these deaths, with the one exception of the Spider watching a woman suffering from the acid in her cold cream. The people dead from the poison are only numbers, and the story is more interested in Wentworth trying to save himself from the police after the Avenger blows his secret identity. Since the cops and commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick are after the Spider pretty much every other novel, this isn’t anything new.

The title The Pain Master obviously is an editorial pick, as it has nothing to do with the story. Nobody calls himself “The Pain Master” at any time. The Spider vs. the Avenger would be a more appropriate title, although Page’s working title was “When Death Went Mad,” which makes just as little sense as The Pain Master. Not making sense—yeah, that’s what the Spider is all about. That and killing as many people as possible. I think Dead Men Live, which was a title of a Shadow novel, would fit best.

I stand by my promise. No Spider follow-up. Not for right now.

Doc Savage in The Mystic Mullah

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:33:00 +0000

The Mystic Mullah (1935)
By Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson

My second Doc Savage novel of this week comes fast on the trail of The Sea Magician. It was published two months later in the January 1935 issue of Doc Savage Magazine, story #23 of the series. When Bantam Books released The Mystic Mullah in its paperback line of Doc Savage reprints, it was book #9. That Bantam put it out so early in the line-up (The Sea Magician was pushed back to #44) indicates the editors thought it was one of the better stories. And they were right.

The Mystic Mullah is a typical Doc Savage adventure, and that isn’t a negative. It follows most of the steps that Lester Dent outlined in his essay for beginngers about how to write a short pulp adventure story. (You can read it here.) An exotic mastermind villain who claims extraordinary powers and constantly hovers over the hero as a danger; bizarre murder methods; numerous chases and shoot-outs; trips to exotic locations; Doc using plenty of gee-wiz gadgets; and a plot that runs at a breakneck pace as the heroes dash around following one action sequence after the other.

Read too many Doc Savage novels in a row and you will rapidly wear down from all this (in fact you may welcome the slower pace and more detective-oriented entries like The Sea Magician). But taken on its own, The Mystic Mullah is the juicy good stuff of high adventure in the 1930s. I wouldn’t place it among the best of the series, but it is definitely an exemplum of what Doc Savage was all about in his prime.

The bizarre murder method opens the story, as it often does. Khan Nadir Shan, the king of the Central Asian city-state of Tanan (fictional, of course) arrives in New York harbor seeking the help of Doc Savage against the power of the Mystic Mullah. Accompanying him is the beautiful Joan Lydell, an American whose father was a trader who lived in Tanan and is almost as popular in the city as its ruler. According to Joan’s telegram sent ahead to the bronze man, their fight against the Mystic Mullah is a matter “involving thousands of lives and possibly [the] stability of Western civilization.” But when the Khan’s servant Hadim goes to Doc Savage’s headquarters on the 86th floor of Manhattan tallest skyscraper, floating green snakes maerialize and break his neck.

This opening must have impressed somebody in Hollywood, since the green snakes appear in the disappointing 1975 adaptation Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. The movie may have used the snakes poorly (bad effects animation) but I can’t deny they are a pretty nifty device.

The Mystic Mullah soon makes his own appearance, or at least his face does. The villain materializes as a floating head among mist that gives orders to his cowering Tananese followers. When Joan Lydell is at last able to explain the situation to Doc Savage—it’s tough to slow down during the barrage of pursuits and kidnappings that hit every single chapter—we learn that the Mullah claims to have died a thousand years ago. He now wants to expand his hypnotic power over all of Asia, starting with Tanan.

The adventure takes Doc and his assistants from New York, to Siberia, and then to Tanan itself near Mongolia. (Ah, Item #3 on Dent’s list: “A Different Location.”) Despite the usual globe-hopping, the best set-piece occurs during the New York segment, when Monk and Ham face the Mullah’s killers inside a dinosaur attraction at a defunct amusement park. The action tends to blur together when moving this fast, but a weird setting like this stands out.

The identity of the Mullah remains a mystery until the finale, and Lester Dent manages never to tip off too early who will actually turn out to be behind the gizmos and soul slaves of the tyrannical green head. The enigmatic character of Oscar Gibson does a good job of destabilizing the story so that readers might believe that anybody (aside from Doc and his men, of course) might end up as the villain. Did the author pick the best person possible for the final reveal? Not quite, since it’s neither the most shocking nor the most logical choice, but given the high amount of thrills in The Mystic Mullah, it’s a forgivable slip. I didn’t figure it out ahead of time, and that’s worth something.

Doc pulls out some great gadgets. The best is using his shirt buttons and the lining of his tie to create an explosive to bust out of a jail cell. Admittedly, the buttons and the tie lining are made from unusual material, but Doc always thinks ahead.

Typical of the time period, The Mystic Mullah uses the racist “Yellow Peril” stereotype of sinister Asian villains and the general sense that “foreign and exotic = dangerous.” I expected this going in, since I’ve read enough pulps from the era to know the standard prejudices. And look at the Bantam cover, fer crying’ out loud! However, it surprised me how subdued the book is in its biases. Lester Dent still has his white folks save the day, but he doesn't indulge in comic buffonery at the expense of the Asian characters, nor does he trot out insults or slurs. For the mid-1930s, this is a pleasingly restrained use of the old stereotypes.

All five of Doc’s aides are back this time, since Dent could not convince publisher Street & Smith to let him continue his experiment of rotating them. Most of the time, it’s hard to keep straight what each of them is doing, and they spend half the book as captives to motivate chases. Now I can understand why Dent felt frustrated with having to use all of them all the time; he could easily have worked this book with only Monk, Ham, and Renny. The latter achieves the most of any of Doc’s men this time around. It would not surprise me if Lester Dent originally planned to feature Renny here the way he did Johnny in The Sea Magician, but his editor pushed him to use the (over)full cast.

As I come to the end of the second Doc Savage novel this week, and following upon reading two Shadow novels right before that, I realize I must complete the trio of famous hero pulps of the 1930s and read an adventure of The Spider. So goodbye sanity and plot coherence: here comes The Spider in The Pain Emperor!

Doc Savage in The Sea Magician

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 14 May 2013 23:55:00 +0000

The Sea Magician (1934)
By Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson

After hopes for a new Tarzan film collapsed (so close!) and also a new Shadow film (not that close), the recent news that Shane Black will write and direct a new Doc Savage film begs for the skeptical approach. However, with Black riding on the massive success of Iron Man Three, he definitely has the power to get this project done. I have too many near-misses on genre films I want to see, but if the new Mad Max film could finally get made, then I feel better hoping that this long-stalled adventure film will also make it to screens within a few years.

Premature celebration time! Let’s read a Doc Savage novel! After going through two Shadow novels (The Devil Monsters and Gangdom’s Doom), it’s a logical step to make even if it weren’t for the good news from Mr. Black.

So, scanning across my shelf packed with old Doc Savage paperbacks and some of the new reprints from Nostalgia Ventures, I choose… The Sea Magician. This is Doc Savage #21 according to original magazine publication, and #44 in Bantam’s popular paperback series numbering. It was originally released in Doc Savage Magazine in October 1934.

The Sea Magician is less exotic and more down-to-earth than many of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novels from this early period. Most of the action occurs in England, with a short detour in France (which does not involve any of the heroes) and a conclusion on a fictional isle near Britain, Magna Island, an independent kingdom under crown protectorate. The story’s unusual hook is the appearance of the ghost of King John, wandering among a swampy land called “the Wash” where he died seven hundred years ago, apparently by poison. After a man in the Wash is killed by a wound from a medieval sword, brilliant geologist and archeologist William Harper Littlejohn (a.k.a. “Johnny”), one of Doc Savage’s five famous aides, investigates reports of the regal spook to see what gives.

The tale does not hold out the supernatural mystery for long. Anyone familiar with Doc Savage knows there will eventually be an explanation for the haunting, most likely the device known later from Scooby-Doo of a person masquerading as a ghost to frighten folks away from a criminal enterprise. In the second chapter, the “ghost” of King John takes Johnny captive, and we launch into the rest of the story wondering what exactly is happening in the Wash and who wants to hide what from whom.

The kidnapping of chemist and inventor Wehman Mills provides a hint as to what the villains are actually plotting. Mills claimed to have perfected a method of extracting pure gold from sea water that is cost-efficient enough to make anyone a billionaire. Wehman’s daughter Elaine tries to seek Doc Savage’s help after her father is seized, but she also falls into the clutches of the kidnappers. When a press agent starts promoting a gold-manufacturing plant on Magna Island, Doc Savage knows where to turn his attention. But the mystery still hovers around the Wash and why anybody would want to masquerade as King John’s revenant to scare people away. What does this swampland have to do with a seawater plant on Magna Island?

Although The Sea Magician takes a stretch to get into the serious action—which of course includes the requisite aerial battle—Lester Dent does deliver a solid payoff with a clever solution that makes sense of all the previous events. Dent got the idea of the gold-from-seawater process after meeting another pulp writer, Ryerson Johnson, who knew about confidence men in Florida who had proposed a similar device. What Dent eventually makes of it is a twist far more interesting than what it seems the villains are plotting initially. The King John ruse, which seemed nothing more than a randomly selected gimmick to get the novel moving, ends up neatly tying events together.

Monk’s line that concludes the novel is a great bit, too. It’s a moment where the reader will suddenly say, “Hey, he’s right! I never realized that before.”

The Sea Magician is a good adventure, although average for Doc Savage. It’s not wild enough a tale to match the highest tier of the series, and the villains are mostly comedy relief, like the haughty French actor Paquis and his Cockney partner Smith. Although the reveal of what the bad guys are actually doing works as a twist, the “surprise” villain identity is nothing of the kind, and I hope Lester Dent wasn’t thinking he was fooling anyone with this ruse. Dent also abandons some promising plot strands for too long, such as the prolonged disappearance of Elaine Mills after she gets the introduction of a major character, making for a uninvolving middle.

However, it could have been worse. Lester Dent revised the story at the request of Street & Smith editor John Nanovic, who wanted Johnny’s encounter with King John’s spook moved to the opening instead of buried down in Chapter VII. The restructuring gives The Sea Magician an excellent opening that helps carry readers through the slow muddle of the next few chapters. Lester Dent had excellent dramatic instincts, but this is a case where his editor had the right idea and seemed to know Dent’s strengths better than he did.

Only three of Doc’s aides show up: Johnny, Monk the chemist, and Ham the lawyer. At this point in writing the Doc Savage stories, Lester Dent wanted to reduce the number of supporting characters who appeared; it was tough to cram in all five of Doc’s helpers into each novel. Monk and Ham would always appear, while the other three (Johnny, Long Tom, and Renny) would rotate. This plot is mostly about Monk and Ham, the odd couple of the series, with Johnny out of the action for most of the first half, and Doc absent almost until the big finale. However, Dent was under pressure from Street & Smith to keep all of Doc’s supporting cast in action, and it would take a bit longer before the author was able to regularly use the reduced roster.

I can never read just one Doc Savage story at at time—the same with The Shadow—so I’ll have a report of another adventure up soon: The Mystic Mullah.

The Shadow in Gangdom’s Doom

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:37:00 +0000

Gangdom’s Doom (1931)
By Walter B. Gibson writing as Maxwell Grant

I promised when I reviewed The Devil Monsters that I would leap back to the early days of the Shadow and one of his classic-style adventures. This is almost as far back as I can get without re-reading The Living Shadow: published in the 1 December 1931 issue of the Shadow’s own magazine, Gangdom’s Doom is only the fifth story of the series. The character was coming together and his popularity taking off. For this novel, author Walter B. Gibson decided to have the Master of the Knight tackle head-on the public’s fear about the crime wave ripping apart the nation in the early 1930s. He sent the Shadow to Chicago, the capital of organized crime, and set him to the task of wiping out the empire of the mob.

Few Shadow novels speak so directly about the period in which they were written. The American public was sick of organized crime and pushed the government to crack down on the mob. They wanted the Volstead Act thrown out and these murderers with it. The transition from the hard-boiled detective of the 1920s to the “avenger detective” of the Shadow, a forerunner of the superhero, was a natural evolution of U.S. citizens’ desire for action against the legions of criminals.

But the Shadow also took into account people’s fascination with the mysterious world of crime that they openly detested: he was a ghostly, frightening figure himself, and allowed readers to thrill to the dark appeal of the soldiers of the underworld while watching an avenger out-think and demolish them.

Gangdom’s Doom opens on a shocker. Claude Fellows, one of the Shadow’s agents who appeared in the previous four novels, arrives in Chicago to begin his employer’s campaign against the rackets. Claude Fellows meets with Horace Prescott, a society booze-peddler who wants to escape the business. But before Fellows can get the man out of Chicago, killers gun down Prescott on the street. When Fellows heads to police headquarters to tell deputy commissioner Barney Higgins all that he knows about the Shadow’s plans, another machine-gun assault kills Fellows!

Yep, one of the Shadow’s supporting cast gets killed in the opening two chapters of the book. This is the only time that one of the Shadow’s agents dies, and it’s a gutsy story move that hooks readers within only a few pages. Here we see Walter B. Gibson plotting at his best, pulling his audience along at a relentless pace as each chapter ups the tension. The Shadow’s war against Chicago’s gangsters has hardly started, and already one of his most trusted men has gotten brutally killed.

Harry Vincent, the Shadow’s best-known agent, arrives in Chicago two days later to pick up the case. The Shadow’s main targets are the city’s kingpin, Nick Savoli, and his principle lieutenant, Mike Borrango. Savoli is in competition with Irish gangster Michael Larrigan for control of the underworld. Vincent goes to work for one of Savoli’s men, Marmosa, who runs a gambling joint. Also arriving in Chicago the same day are two New York shooters of considerable repute. The first is a supporting villain character from the previous Shadow novels, Steve Cronin, who has come west to work as Savoli’s bodyguard. The other gunman is Monk Thurman, a thug with more quick-draw skill than anybody in town. Unlike Cronin, Thurman won’t hook himself exclusively to one side or the other in the coming gang war.

After a mysterious figure in black stops Cronin’s attempt to assassinate deputy D.A. Clarendon, the New York killer informs Savoli that Chicago now has a Shadow problem: “He’s liable to be anywhere—he’s liable to be anybody.” That’s a succinct description of the Shadow’s abilities in these early books, and why they are such a thrill to read.

The Shadow proceeds to Red Harvest and Yojimbo the crooks of Chicago into annihilating each other. The last few chapters have the city descending into a bloodbath of rival organizations filling each other with lead before the showdown between Savoli, Cronin, and the Shadow. Although the Shadow has no problem killing criminals in other novels, here he lets the evildoers take care of the job of offing each other. Perhaps he was showing off his manipulation skills.

Gibson discovered early in his career as the character’s main writer that the Shadow was flexible enough to fit into any type of crime or mystery plot. Gangdom’s Doom is an ideal example: Gibson abandons any aspects of murder mystery or whodunit for pure gangster melodrama. There are gats and speakeasies and hidden gambling dens and Tommy gun-hefting enforcers and hit jobs; just about everything a reader might expect from a mob epic (except, oddly, “dames”). Gibson lays on the gangster drama mighty heavy, too: the goons call their machine guns “typewriters,” professional killers are “torpedoes,” and there is a Sicilian assassin duo known as the Homicide Twins. The Shadow fits into all this without missing a sprocket hole, serving as the “mystery” of the story. He flits around the edges of the mob machinery, manipulating events and occasionally bursting into sinister action at the right points.

The Shadow is always an enigmatic figure—it’s his modus operandi after all to be inscrutable—but it is astonishing how little we know about him this early in his career and how effective that lack of knowledge is. The “Lamont Cranston” identity doesn’t even get mentioned (it was introduced in the second novel, Eyes of the Shadow, and the actual Cranston showed up in the third, The Shadow Laughs). The Shadow remains off-page most of the time, and usually when he’s present readers won’t realize it until later because the hero is sunk into one of his impenetrable disguises. The Shadow’s principle alter ego won’t fool most readers (Harry Vincent’s suspicions ID him early on) but the finale still works because Gibson knows how to deliver a climactic reveal. Strangely, some of the top villains get away with sentences lighter than death, perhaps because Gibson thought he might want to feature them as returning characters in later stories.

Gangdom’s Doom is well-executed and constructed with the right amount of appearances from its hero—and one stunner of an opening—but my personal preferences lean toward Shadow novels that are either in Gothic mode (The Grove of Doom) or dealing with dark SF superheroics (The Black Hush). It was harder for me to get involved in the gangland setting and the myriad of mob-types that show up here. I acknowledge this as an exciting piece of pulp plotting, but for me it falls in the middle-range of Shadow adventures.

Gangdom’s Doom was one of the Shadow novels that reached mass-market paperback through Bantam books during the late-‘60s and early ‘70s. Bantam tried to replicate the success of their paperback re-issues of the Doc Savage adventures, but the Shadow never took off the same way. Gangdom’s Doom was #7 in Bantam’s numbering for the series.

Harryhausen Flashback: It Came from Beneath the Sea

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:16:00 +0000

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Directed by Robert Gordon. Produced by Charles H. Schneer. Starring Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis.

With the recent death of one of the great forces for good in the history of movies, special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, I wanted to review one of his films that I hadn’t gotten to yet on this site. Some people may wonder what I was thinking in choosing It Came from Beneath the Sea for this honor, instead of one of his more colorful outings like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or One Million Years B.C. Your confusion is understandable: this 1955 B&W giant octopus flick is arguably the worst film with Harryhausen’s name on it.

But I felt the urge to go back to the beginning of Harryhausen’s career and his original modest step into auteur status. This was the first true “Ray Harryhausen” movie; he had already worked on Mighty Joe Young with Willis O’Brien, and then went solo on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms as the special effects director. But when Harryhausen teamed up with young producer Charles H. Schneer to put together a low-budget monster picture for Sam Katzman’s B-movie unit at Columbia, for the first time he had a level of creative control over the entire film. Harryhausen and Schneer would work together for the rest of their careers, with Harryhausen as the de facto director of their films even if some other journeyman’s name was on the credits. Quick, do you remember who directed Jason and the Argonauts? Of course you don’t. It’s a Ray Harryhausen film, not a Don Chaffey film.

Before we proceed into It Came from Beneath the Sea, allow me to define a term. Henceforth, when I mention an “octopus,” I am referring to the six-tentacled super-cephalopod that appears in this movie. The budget was so tight that Harryhausen could not afford the time to animate eight tentacles, so he reduced it to six and tried to use the mollusk’s body to block his biological trickery. If he called it a “sextopus,” the film might have gotten censored as smut in 1955. Therefore: “octopus.”

Our story opens cold with a grave narrator (the ubiquitous William Woodson) talking about science and weapons over stock footage. It must be the fifties! A text crawl after the credits repeats what the narrator has already said: mankind, beware your ignorance of the world’s marvels! (But your machines will eventually kill those marvels, so don’t sweat it too much.)

Hydrogen bombs have once again brought terror to humanity, or the part of it that lives in the United States: the awakening of a humungous octopus from the floor of the Pacific. The creature’s encounter with a Navy sub alerts the U.S. government, although at first they won’t act on the advice of the scientists who have identified the problem. But when the octopus sinks a tramp steamer and the survivors explain what they saw, the Navy gets serious about preparing to kill the creature when it nears the populated west coast of North America.

This sounds epic, but there are really only three characters in the story: submarine commander Pete Mathews (Kenneth Tobey), and the two biologists assigned to the investigation, Dr. John Carter (Donald Curtis) and Dr. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue, who had an affair with Howard Hughes when she was a teen). Dr. Joyce is young and attractive, and Pete is a man in uniform, so they fall in love for a few seconds until Pete pulls out the chauvinism. Then, in an unrelated incident, the giant octopus attacks San Francisco and everyone in the audience forgets there were characters in this movie in the first place.

The live action scenes in It Came from Beneath the Sea are pretty painful. They’re wooden, like much of ‘50s SF films, but even worse than that implies. There’s none of the hardboiled zip of The Thing from Another World or Them! keeping up the pace, or the Shakespearean dramatics of The Day the Earth Stood Still. It also lacks the lunatic charm of the Z-budget weirdies like The Hideous Sun Demon, The Giant Claw, or an Ed Wood/Coleman Francis movie. This is the most middle-of-the-road, unexciting B-movie product you can imagine.

Although the movie clocks in at a slender seventy-eight minutes, the scenes between the principles feel like they last a half-hour each, filled with talk, talk, talk. The opening with the submarine is ten minutes of Navy men staring at dials and knobs and talking about action we never see. Once the plot switches to the lab-coated science babble, it starts turning truly unpleasant. Occasionally, the movie tosses out an unintentional thrill like watching Dr. Carter inflate a balloon to impress the Navy brass with his knowledge. Most of the time viewers have to slog through exchanges like this between Dr. Joyce and doom-voiced Reporter #3:

“Where did you say the monster came from?”

“From the Mindanao Deep in the Pacific.”

“Are there any more from—down there?”

“Probably.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do we do about them?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“If you don’t, then who does? Thank you.”

All these scenes are drearily cheap looking as well. Ray Harryhausen never worked on a film with a rich budget, but usually the director and the crew hid the poverty better. The Naval intelligence project assigned to uncover a mystery crucial to national security appears to be operating unsupervised with only three employees. In response to the biggest news story since the Korean War, the media outlets of the world send only seven of the most bored reporters to cover it. At least they all have on official “reporter fedoras” and serious “newspaper overcoats.”

Like Godzilla and the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the octopus is supposed to be radioactive, but aside from a quick mention of this during the finale, nothing ever comes of it. The film just seems to forget about the idea after it fulfills its obligation to appear timely by bringing up radioactivity in the first place.

Donald Curtis as Dr. Carter and Faith Domergue as Dr. Joyce both deliver flatline performances. Tobey Keith as Pete Mathews shows them up constantly, and it’s not as if he’s ripping out the Laurence Olivier line reads. Keith at least has some presence and looks believably gruff and manly as a military officer; he’s the right type for this brand of B-picture, but needs more to work with to allow him to create anything memorable.

(I’d like to believe that screenwriter George Worthing Yates named Donald Curtis’s scientist character “John Carter” as a reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs. But that’s me just getting desperate. It is fun hearing lines like: “Operations to John Carter.”)

To sum up the “human drama” elements of It Came from Beneath the Sea: The blocking is flat, the sets crude and dull, the dialogue feels like placeholders, the directorial pace is horrendous, the acting subpar, and the narrator doing all the heavy-lifting for the plot starts to get hilarious. Have I mentioned stock footage? Yep, got plenty o’ that.

All right, let’s get to the damn octopus. Whatever else is wrong with the movie—and that’s nearly everything—the monster scenes are wonderful. They’re so clever and energetic they make the rest of the film look substantially worse. Harryhausen estimated that the total cost for all the visual effects-work in the film was $26,000. “…I was pressurized to cut costs wherever I could, and if we had gone any further, we might have ended up with a tripod on the screen. [Executive producer Sam] Katzman never really appreciated my cost-cutting attempts, a fact borne out when he once quipped that I charged $10,000 a tentacle. If only it had been true.” Even accounting for Harryhausen cutting down to six tentacles instead of eight, Katzman’s estimate is approximately $34,000 too high.

The octopus debuts in an attack on a tramp steamer en route to Honolulu. We get a good look at one of the large-scale tentacles built for close-up work, which Harryhausen operated using a screw device that slowly raised and unfurled them. A coating of glycerin created the effect of making the tentacles look wet. As impressive as these close-ups of the sucker-laced undersides are, the big “gasp” moment in the scene is the long shot of the octopus seizing the steamer and dragging it beneath the waves. Because water is difficult to animate, Harryhausen used a clever device to merge the miniatures into the plates of the ocean: optically adding an image of churning water where the models are supposed to meet the water. It’s a fine bit of sleight-of-hand that never draws attention to itself and lets viewers believe the octopus is creating a disturbance on the surface.

A long stretch between octopus attacks follows—no, not a romantic beach interlude!—but finally at [checks elapsed time on DVD player] 49:18 the cephalopod crushes a poor schlub walking on the beach, causing our heroes to immediately, bravely run away. Ten more minutes of patter passes with some stock footage of depth charges going off before we finally get into it: the octopus reaches San Francisco and attacks the Golden Gate Bridge, lugging itself up a strut, bursting its tentacles through the asphalt, and then ripping down the middle span.

The Golden Gate sequence is one of the famous icons of movie monster destruction, or any movie destruction of a global landmark. Because the city fathers were worried that commuters would not want to pay the toll to cross the bridge if they saw a giant octopus tearing it down, the filmmakers had to surreptitiously shoot their footage for the background plates. (And… seriously, City of San Francisco? My decision to use civil engineering is not negatively affected by whether I think a giant monster could crush it.)

Most films would rest content with the destruction of one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World for a finale, but It Came from Beneath the Sea has a superior follow-up: the octopus surfaces at the Embarcadero and causes havoc among the civilians until army men equipped with flame throwers repel the mollusk back into the water where the submarine can finish it with a torpedo. This is where the movie lets loose: for that measly twenty-six large we get a glorious amount of demolition and death. A tentacle shoves through the arch to the Oakland Ferry, a model seamlessly integrated with fleeing civilians to the right of the frame. The snake-like pseudopods then wrap around the clock tower and tear it down, and other arms crush people and smash through windows. The flamethrower fight is the killer moment, and the best sequence Harryhausen had achieved up to that time. The tentacle acts like a fantasy dragon facing down another fire-breathing menace, recoiling in screeching pain as the “knights” confront it.

After this, the wrap-up almost had to be a letdown. Switching the, ahem, drama back to Dr. Carter and Pete Mathews, the two heroes have to put on scuba gear and leave a trapped submarine to deal the final blow to the monster. Except for a model of the giant eye of the octopus, there isn’t much to see here or get excited about; it’s got nothing on the similar underwater climax from Godzilla the previous year. (Since that classic had yet to get a release in the U.S. in any form, the filmmakers certainly knew nothing about the similarities between them.)

It Came from Beneath the Sea demonstrates what Ray Harryhausen could bring to a movie. Try to imagine this film with off-the-shelf effects using a rubber puppet or blown-up footage of a real octopus. It would be unwatchable. But thanks to the miracles of Harryhausen’s technical artistry and his dramatic understanding of what audiences would love to see from a giant octopus attacking San Francisco, the movie leaves viewers with lasting images that erase the bad memories of everything surrounding them. It’s worth seeing the seventy-eight minutes of It Came from Beneath the Sea just to experience soldiers armed with flamethrowers repulsing humungous octopus tentacles from the Embarcadero. That’s the magic power of great special effects.

Ray Harryhausen and Charles H. Schneer must have learned plenty about producing films from their experience here, because their next project together, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, is top grade B-movie science fiction and one of the classics of the decade. Short learning curve! And consider this: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was a mere three years away.

Remembering Ray: 10 Great Harryhausen Effects Sequences

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 08 May 2013 01:47:00 +0000

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Yes, that is a photo of me with special effects wizard and creator of dreams, Ray Harryhausen. I met him at a signing in 2004 at the (now gone) Lazer Blazer DVD store in Los Angeles. He signed my copy of An Animated Life, which was a gift from none other than John C. Hocking.

For the last few years, the idea squirmed around unpleasantly in my mind that I might soon hear the news of Ray Harryhausen’s death. Like his long-time friend Ray Bradbury, a fellow L.A.-area geek who also ended up becoming a legend in the worlds he loved, Harryhausen was a man of great longevity. But he was in his nineties and it was impossible not to imagine the day I would wake up to the headline: “VFX Pioneer Ray Harryhausen (1920–201?).” Still, I wasn’t prepared for it when it finally happened—today. The news struck like a bolt from Olympus, and then the ground split open and the Styx beckoned.

I have no need to explain Ray Harryhausen’s life to most of my readers. You know him. You love him as much as I do. Seeing Clash of the Titans in second grade changed my life: not only did it take a kid who loved dinosaurs and made him into someone who loved all monsters, but it opened that kid’s mind to Greek Mythology and consequently all history, so one day a History Degree would hang from his wall. Through Ray Harryhausen, I first began to love the techniques of filmmaking. Through Ray Harryhausen, I discovered film composer Bernard Herrmann and became an obsessive movie music lover. Through Ray Harryhausen I found heroic fantasy. The whole damn thing is his fault. I told him this when I met him, and he laughed because I’m certain I was only the nine-millionth person to use that same line on him.

Instead of giving the Great Wizard a standard obituary, I want to remember him through ten sequences from his films that do the best job of showcasing what made him an artist of visual effects, a Rembrandt of film magic. These are simply my ten favorite moments, yours may differ, although there’s a few on this list that I guarantee (Medusa) that (Medusa) we’ll (Medusa) all (Medusa) agree (skeletons) on (Medusa).

#10. Balloon Escape and Crash from Mysterious Island (1961)

Let’s begin with a sequence that has no stop-motion animation anywhere in it. Because Harryhausen is so closely associated with stop-motion effects, people often forget that he was an all-arounder when it came to visuals. The First Men in the Moon and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver depend more on model work and optical trickery than stop-motion, and all of it is wonderful. But the best work in this arena that the master did is the opening of Mysterious Island, where Union prisoners of war commandeer a Confederate hot-air balloon and get swept off into a storm that eventually smashes them onto the shores of the title location. It’s a great melding of tension, mood, and model work that grabs viewers by the throat right from the opening.

#9. Flying Saucers Crash a Beltway Insider Party from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

I’ve found room for only one sequence from Harryhausen’s black-and-white SF movies on this list, and ironically it comes from a film that he didn’t care for much. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers may not feel like a “Harryhausen” film, but it’s one of the great ‘50s Cold War science-fiction flicks. Audiences really get to see alien vehicles in action, and in the finale the movie goes for broke when the military’s ultrasonic guns knock down the saucers over the nation’s capital. The saucers don’t just crash — they crash into the Lincoln Memorial, the dome of the Capitol, and the Washington Monument. In a word: brilliant. Best of all is the collapse of the Washington Monument, which crushes some poor tourist saps looking for a photo op on the lawn.

#8. The Creation of the Homunculus from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

This is a great “actor” moment for a VFX creator. Harryhausen preferred to call his on-screen marvels “creatures” instead of “monsters,” and although I embrace the word “monster” with unconditional love, I understand where he made the distinction. Some of his stop-motion creations had personality to them beyond simply providing a threat: the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, the star of Mighty Joe Young, the troglodyte from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. The finest example is the creation of the second homunculus in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which shows Harryhausen giving his best “performance” as one of his creatures. The winged beast inches toward life, and the wizard Koura (Tom Baker) has to win its trust. It’s a marvel of acting through effects, and cheers to Tom Baker for working so well with something he couldn’t even see.

#7. Allosaurus Camp Attack from One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Ray Harryhausen didn’t have much creative input into One Million Years B.C. away from the effects sequences (he was loaned out to Hammer Film Productions as work for hire), but he had plenty of explosive scenes to execute in this romp with dinosaurs and Raquel Welch in prehistoric swimwear. The attack of a juvenile Allosaurus on the camp of the Shell People stands out for the variety of tricks employed. The dinosaur lugs up a man from the water, gets spears stuck in it, and tears away the top of a hut and knocks it over. It’s an excellent mix of live action footage interacting with the stop-motion animation that makes it seem as if the Allosaurus was right there on set. (It was a hog about craft services. Ate two caterers.)

#6. Dragon vs. Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Monster-on-monster fun! Harryhausen pulled out a couple of big beast battles in his career, such as the bizarre meeting of a saber tooth cat and a troglodyte in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and an Allosaurus against a circus elephant in The Valley of Gwangi. The clash between the sinister dragon with Robert Morley’s eyebrows and the cyclops with the satyr legs that concludes The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the most memorable of these fights. Harryhausen already built up the danger of both creatures, but there was no hint they might actually meet at the end. And then when it happens it’s like all the best moments of the great movie serials compressed into two minutes. And yes, I do feel sorry for the Cyclops at the close. That dragon is a jerk and he’d key your car door if he had working thumbs.

#5. Dino Ropin’ Yeeeha! From The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

The sine qua non of this movie. The whole pitch of The Valley of Gwangi (which started as a proposal for a Willis O’Brien project) is “Cowboys rope a dinosaur!” Harryhausen sure didn’t disappoint when it came time to show bronco busters trying to hogtie a full-grown Allosaurus — and failing. The choreography here is mind-boggling, just begging you to find out how in the world Harryhausen and the on-set crew pulled the damn thing off. Unfortunately, nobody went to see the film when it first came out (Warner Bros. changed hands and the new owners dumped the movie with zero push), and this fun mix of Western and monster movie remains criminally underrated with the general public. It is on MOD DVD at least.

#4. Skeleton Army from Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

You thought I’d place this higher, right? I have my reasons, all purely subjective, so please don’t kill me. But I acknowledge that most visual effects lovers and historians will rank this as Ray Harryhausen’s Sistine Chapel. The sequence is so well known that it almost requires no description. Three guys with swords against seven skeletons with swords. What more do you need? It’s insanity and I wonder why Harryhausen didn’t lose his mind from working on it. He lived for fifty more years after doing this.

#3. Duel with the Skeleton from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Yes, I prefer the earlier skeleton fight, where it’s a one-on-one duel, over the larger version done five years later. More than any other sequence in Harryhausen’s career, this is the one that identified him as a stylist, a visionary with a particular way of communicating with audiences. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is packed with wonders, but Kerwin Mathews facing a relentless animated skeleton armed with sword and shield in a wizard’s cavern is something that still leaps off the screen with its ingenuity and its feeling of a single, brilliant mind conducting it. It also has one of the greatest music cues ever composed, courtesy of Bernard Herrmann, backing it up.

#2. Kali from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

Ray Harryhausen found a way to take the multi-skeletal madness of Jason and the Argonauts and mold it into a single figure: a living six-armed statue involved in a maddest-of-the-mad sword duel. The animation feel effortless, the pacing delirious—it’s a sequence to savor again and again for the mastery on display. The best scene in the best film of Harryhausen’s career, and therefore the only thing that could top it is…

#1. Medusa from Clash of the Titans (1981)

Clash of the Titans was Harryhausen’s final movie, and when it came out the small world of special effects was rapidly changing into an industry. Harryhausen’s effects seemed a bit… “quaint” in 1981. But time has erased that, and now Clash of the Titans stands as a superlative celebration of the art of stop-motion animation since the days of The Lost World. Viewed this way, the Medusa scene is Harryhausen’s grand farewell and his masterpiece. It isn’t just the brilliance of the movements of the Medusa figure that make this such a stunning sequence; it’s how suspenseful and moody everything is as Perseus prepares inside the Gorgon’s hellish temple to slice off her head. This is Ray Harryhausen at his “directorial” top-notch, choreographing a complete moment of cinema that drenches viewers in fantasy. Few scenes of the fantastic in the history of movies are anywhere as awe-inspiring.

Anything I write about Ray Harryhausen to close this post would feel inadequate, so I’ll let the man speak for himself:

I love the films I was fortunate enough to have been involved with, and although the years spent on them were sometimes tiring, they were also fun. They were certainly not wasted years. How could they be? It is gratifying to know that my work bridged the years between Obie’s pioneering work and the new science of computer special effects and that the films have given so many people so much enjoyment and inspiration. While I don’t miss the stress and strain of moviemaking, I regret that I shall not now be able to put on celluloid some of the other creatures, lost lands and adventures still lurking in my imagination. It won’t be me, but maybe one day someone will again have the courage to make a picture that is pure imagination and adventure with real heroes and villains, two of the greatest assets in the history of moving pictures, or for that matter, any visual storytelling.

The Shadow in The Devil Monsters

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 07 May 2013 07:09:00 +0000

The Devil Monsters (1943)
By Walter B. Gibson writing as Maxwell Grant

This coming June contains a small but important event for fans of the pulp hero the Shadow: the Blu-ray release of the big-budget film version starring Alec Baldwin and directed by Russell Mulcahy. After a decent first weekend in July 1994, that movie sank like a mob stool pigeon tied to a safe dumped into the East River. (I saw The Shadow in theaters on opening night and the crowd seemed enthusiastic; I thought it would be a hit.) In anticipation of the first widescreen release of the film since its original laserdisc pressing, I’ve gone back to The Shadow stories written by Walter B. Gibson, picking up where I left off a few years ago with The Devil Monsters, the second novel in Nostalgia Venture’s The Shadow #13. The first novel in the volume is the superlative Six Men of Evil from 1933. The leap forward of a decade to The Devil Monsters, which appeared in the 1 February 1943 issue of The Shadow, is a disconcerting one. It isn’t a horrible shift, but this is still one of the least enjoyable Shadow novels I’ve finished.

Will Murray, the greatest living expert on the Shadow’s history, has apparently called The Devil Monsters the worst Shadow novel that Gibson wrote. I can’t find his exact quote, but a Shadow review site makes a reference to it. Murray asked Gibson when the author was alive about The Devil Monsters, and Gibson remarked that it was a “change of pace.” It may have also originated as a comic book concept. Gibson was also scripting stories for The Shadow Comics at the time; Anthony Tollin in his essay “Four-Color Shadows” writes that “the novel’s plot almost certainly originally developed as a comic book storyline.” It has the sort of visual stimulus that the young readers of comic books from the era would have devoured.

The Shadow, in his Lamont Cranston guise, drives out to the town of Glendale (a fictional New York location, not the Southern California city) to investigate reports of bizarre monster attacks. His excuse to make this tour of Glendale is an invitation from James Farman, a member of the ritzy Cobalt Club to which Cranston also belongs. The mysterious monster appearances may have a connection to Compeer Chandos, an eccentric who lives in a castle and grows exotic plants. Around Chandos in the town is a drab collection of supporting characters who function as potential suspects for the master of the monsters. There’s also weak stab at the type of stand-in hero figure that Gibson often used in his Shadow stories: an insurance investigator named Stan L. Weldon. In Gibson’s glory days, these heroes were lynchpin characters who let the Shadow keep to the umbrageous regions matching his name. But Stan isn’t much of anything, and the Shadow—in his Cranston guise—is on the page just about as much as he is.

It’s hard to lock down where Gibson wanted to take this plot. The “devil monsters” of the title remain liminal figures for three quarters of the short book; the Shadow spends more time punching dogs (mastiffs, very big dogs, but dogs nonetheless) in his investigation into the happenings in Glendale than facing monstrosities. The possibility exists that the creatures are actually a ruse of some kind, maybe mechanical or hypnotic. This sort of revelation fits in with the way Gibson usually had the Shadow’s adventures unfold.

However, the Shadow discovers what readers who looked at the cover of the issue already knew: the devil monsters are actual monsters. Dinosaurs! Prehistoric beasts! A giant mole! Super scorpions! Fantasy creatures like the basilisk and the fire-salamander! Behind this menagerie of the weird is a villain who calls himself “Monstradamus,” creating a vague link between himself and Nostradamus that makes no sense. (Was Nostradamus fascinated with giant monsters in his quatrains? I must have missed those prophecies.) Monstradamus, in his brief villain speech to the captive heroes, explains that he’s uncovered all these creatures by scouring the world. Sneaking a Diplodocus into New York State and his mansion must have been quite a feat.

This is Gibson’s “change of pace,” slamming science-fiction beasts better suited to a Doc Savage story into the mystery-shrouded Gothic realm of the Shadow. Standard M.O. for a Shadow tale is that the bizarre occurrences are clever deceptions by the villain, the Shadow, or both, and the solution ends up more fascinating than the supernatural hints. Gibson sometimes included science-fiction elements, such as the darkness ray in The Black Hush. But a barrage of crazy monsters that aren’t anything else but crazy monsters is weird and extremely out of keeping with the rest series. Gibson created an ingenious variety of stories over his career with the Shadow—but there is such a thing as getting too varied… and here it is, ladies and gentlemen.

But as bizarre as the finale with the weird creatures is, they only take up the last quarter of the book—and are definitely its best part. Compared to the ho-hum mystery plot, at least they’re exciting. Until Monstradamus reveals himself (a plot twist that will surprise nobody), The Devil Monsters is one of the dullest Shadow novels ever. Gibson seems to be going through the motions of setting up suspects and trying to create the illusion that something clever is happening in Glendale. But since there is no great deception occurring—the villain has a bunch of monsters!—none of this works. The sense of the mysterious that makes the Shadow novels so wonderful comes across here as superficial, making the last blast of mayhem at least lively despite how out of place it is. I’ve been bored for most of the book so having the Shadow tied up with giant earthworms so the villain can force him to stare into the eyes of a basilisk while a giant scorpion stings him at least assures I’ll pay attention.

For the first time in a Shadow novel, sidekick Margo Lane suddenly knows that Lamont Cranston is one of the enigmatic hero’s identities, where previously she only suspected the two might be the same person. Gibson provides no build-up to this; the Shadow changes right in front of Margo in the second chapter, and she makes no remark about it. It’s as if a crucial story where she learned the truth about the Shadow got skipped over. However, this doesn’t bother me since I don’t care about Margo Lane and would rather have her nowhere near the novels. The radio show created her as a love interest for Lamont Cranston, and the publishers pressured Gibson into including her in the magazine stories. In June 1941, the writer finally gave in and Margo appeared without explanation in The Thunder King. (For some reason, probably aesthetic, Gibson preferred the spelling “Margo” over the radio script’s “Margot.”) Loyal readers went ballistic over this intrusion from the radio program. It wouldn’t bother me if Margo actually added anything to the stories she appeared in. But she usually has little to do, and in The Devil Monsters she serves almost zero purpose and does not appear in the finale or even get a mention. Why did the Shadow (as Cranston) want to bring her along in the first place?

If Will Murray did indeed call The Devil Monsters the worst Walter B. Gibson Shadow novel of all time, I must protest. I haven’t read all of Gibson’s novels, but I have read one worse: The Mask of Mephisto is a trudge from start to finish. That could’ve used a basilik or two to wake me up.

I admire Nostalgia Ventures for releasing The Devil Monsters at all. The first of their Shadow releases emphasized some of the best of Gibson’s novels (as well as those of Theodore Tinsley, the most common fill-in author for Gibson). But it was a good idea to stir up the content and present something unusual, even if it’s poorer quality material. The Devil Monsters adds variety to the Shadow’s history and a peek into the evolving dominance of comic books. Although I would never recommend it to a newcomer, I’m glad to have The Devil Monsters available for the characters’ fans.

But the next Shadow novel I read will be something from the early thirties. I need to get at least one more classic in before The Shadow hits Blu-ray.

Summer Movies… Again: Iron Man (3) Three (III)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sat, 04 May 2013 01:22:00 +0000

Iron Man Three (2013)
Directed by Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley, Rebecca Hall, William Sadler, Miguel Ferrer, Jon Favreau, Ty Simpkins.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

For people worried that the individual Iron Man series within the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe was in trouble, have no fear: Iron Man is back on track because Shane Black has got your back.

Iron Man Three (yes, that’s what the end credits call it, and therefore it’s the official title) starts off the Marvel Movie-verse Phase 2 with a self-contained story that feels like a great five or six-issue comic book arc. You remember: the kind that Marvel used to pull off in the days before they “evented” everything to death with Skrull infiltrations and Norman Osborne conquering the world. I hear that currently the mad robot Ultron is doing the heavy lifting for Marvel’s crossover event. Maybe this means we’ll see him in Avengers 2.

This compressed approach for Iron Man Three was the correct choice coming off the huge success of The Avengers; the new Iron Man flick needed to show that Marvel’s individual heroes could still carry their own installments—their own magazine titles, so to speak—without the support of crossover mania. With Iron Man Three as the best of the Iron Man movies so far, it promises that Thor and Captain America will have superior returns in their own follow-ups. That will be quite a feat for Cap, considering how great Captain America: The First Avenger is. But it’s in the realm of the possible, as Shane Black shows everyone with Shellhead the Third.

This is a movie that will also ignite a huge debate over its changes to the comic canon. (Wait, what do I mean “will”? The battle has already started in a forum near you.) Although the script by Black and co-writer Drew Pearce uses the popular Warren Ellis Extremis storyline from 2005–06 as a starting point and features one of Iron Man’s main villains, The Mandarin, they have fashioned a story that stays true to its own internal character logic and freely jettisons major sections of Marvel Comics history both to goose the audience and give them unexpected thrills. It’s actually a touch annoying to write a standard “review” in the modern Internet spoilerphobe understanding for a film like this where I have to dodge talking about major plot points. The thrill in writing about a movie like Iron Man Three comes from getting geeky and detailed about how it toys with famous characters and undercuts expectations.

But I’ll play by the rules here—for now. You do deserve to see Iron Man Three knowing only as much as you’ve seen from the marketing. And that means I’ve negated the rest of what I am going to say. Nonetheless, onward…. and I do promise a minimum of “spoilers.” (I hate that word. Can we ditch it? I’ve found out “spoilers” before and yet not had the film “spoiled” for me. We need a better term. How about “twists”? There you go: we’ve already got a good word. Occam’s Razor Rules!)

Tony Stark survived the battle of New York, fought with aliens and an Asgardian god with adoption issues, and briefly flew through a dimensional portal. Understandably, Mr. Stark has some anxiety issues from it. The world has gotten way weirder since the time Stark tangled with his father’s old business partner over possession of a new power source. And lingering in Stark’s ears must be Captain America’s dead-on criticism that he isn’t anything without the metal suit. Now here is a Tony Stark that I can completely understand. The boozy jerk who slowed down the middle section of Iron Man 2 to almost a full stop was a poor center for a movie, but the panic-attack ridden jerk here is a breath of fresh air, and not just for Tony Stark, but for Robert Downey Jr. Re-uniting with Shane Black, who directed him in the sly Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, gets RDJ back with the right snap that isn’t all self-aware smug.

Tony Stark has gone just a bit lunatic from his Avengers experience, building nine hundred suits of armor for every contingency from gods to Galactus (yes, I know Galactus technically isn’t under Marvel Studios’ banner; I just like the alliteration). Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow in her best Marvel performance yet) is about all that holds Tony together while he blazes through triple all-nighters playing with his armor in the basement of his Malibu mansion.

Then along comes the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and an army of human fire bombs pumped with the Extremis virus… and suddenly Tony Stark’s beach home ends up at the bottom of the Pacific and an already stressed billionaire winds up walking around the snow-coated woods of Tennessee dragging a useless Mark 42 armor behind him and requiring the help of a cute kid named Harley.

Cute kid = kiss of death. Right? Nope, not here. Not with Shane Black on duty. It’s a testament to Black’s skill with comedy that comes from the characterizations instead of the sitcom one-liner mentality that the scenes between RDJ and child actor Ty Simpkins are among the film’s best. Tony Stark never goes sentimental with the kid, and even hurls out some (hilarious) insults to him that also work as insults to himself. The best snub deals with father abandonment issues and sounds like its flipping off the most boring hour of Iron Man 2. That all of these scenes take place against a blue-collar Christmas background is just another Shane Black touch, as is the humorous flashback narration from Stark, which starts with him fumbling his first line with his ego barging into his way.

The scene with the strongest Shane Black stamp is Stark getting into an argument with some AIM goons who have him strapped up to a bed frame. It’s a great exchange that feels like two misfits from a 1990s action film (The Last Boy Scout immediately comes to mind) flexing tough with the current style of cinema hero. Shane Black has always had a flair for fleshing out what should be minor thug characters. On a related note, two of the lower-rung villains, Stephanie Szostak as Ellen Brandt and James Badge Dale as Eric “Coldblood” Savin, make great impressions given the small space they have literally to burn up the screen.

Robert Downey Jr. didn’t get to show much chemistry with Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2, where Cheadle felt more like a placeholder after Terrence Howard departed the role. But now Cheadle gets to step fully into the part of James Rhodes without any baggage, and he and Stark feel like a classic buddy-combo during the massive finale. Rhodes now wears a Captain Americanized version of the War Machine suit re-christened “Iron Patriot.” (In the standard Marvel U, the Iron Patriot is an identity taken on by, I kid you not, Norman “Green Goblin” Osborne.)

Breaking away from the previous two films that pit Iron Man against other blokes in metal suits, the hero this time faces fiery exploding people, the results of Aldrich Killian’s Extremis experiments that were supposed to update the human brain, but instead turned folks into human bombs. Back in 1999, during a drunken New Year’s party, Tony Stark rejected a young Killian’s proposal to join his organization AIM, Advanced Idea Mechanics. It seems that years later a frustrated Killian sold out his explosive accident to the highest bidder: “The Mandarin,” an Usamah bin-Laden clone with an Asian-fetish who loves making video collages to threaten the U.S. president and who speaks like he’s auditioning for the part of Macbeth.

But this is a world where everything has gotten flipped around, and where Ben Kingsley gets to bite into a role much juicer than anybody expected from, well, what looks like an Usamah bin-Laden clone. The movie isn’t content with simply plastering down a criminal mastermind from the old Stan Lee playbook of the ‘60s, and Kingsley nails the fresh material given to him. I love every aspect of Sir Ben’s performance, and the knighted Oscar-winning actor must have loved each moment he got to launch into character.

In the rest of the acting department, I’d like to give a brief shout out to two actors who probably won’t receive much attention in the swirl of everything else around Iron Man 3. Jon Faverau does a great turn as Happy Hogan, Tony Stark’s former bodyguard and chauffeur, who now views himself a security guru. Freed from the responsibilities of the director’s chair, Favreau seems relaxed and having a great time; much like Paltrow as Pepper Potts, he pierces to the heart of Stark’s conflicts without pushing too hard. And then there’s Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen, an employee of Killian’s and Stark’s one-night stand from New Year’s Day 1999. I’ve loved Hall as an actress since she appeared in The Prestige and outdid Scarlet Johansson, and I wanted even more from her here. I can’t have enough Rebecca Hall in any movie, and she needs a breakout starring role. Should we ever get a Tarzan film again, she should play Jane. You hear me, Hollywood? Yes, even over Jessica Chastain.

The Iron Man series has never excelled in the arena of action: the first film delivered about the right amount and then slowed down for an adequate finale; and the second film only had a good opening fight and then simply gave up, collapsing into a huge CGI mess at the end. Iron Man Three is an uptick, although the climax is a wash of colorful things blowing up at night around an oil platform, a background we’ve seen for plenty of action scenes going back to Diamonds Are Forever. It isn’t a disaster of a finale, however, because of how RDJ, Cheadle, and Paltrow work together, and the crazy investment Guy Pearce puts into his dramatics. It also gives future Blu-ray owners something to pause on as they try to identify the uses of Tony Stark’s wardrobe of battle suits. (“So, is that the anti-Thor armor?”)

The best action beat gives Iron Man his “Superman” moment, where heroism is not about slugging super-powered bad guys, but pulling off the rescue of innocents against ridiculous odds. You’ve seen hints of it in the trailers: an attack on Air Force One sends passengers hurtling into the air, and a faulty Mark 42 armor has to try to rescue them all. This is, bar none, the best “hero” moment for Iron Man in his three individual films. It boosts the movie with the energy of hope that otherwise might get lost in a tale about international terrorism and genetically engineered suicide bombers.

Tony Stark spends a great deal of time out of the suit in Iron Man 3, with the remote-control armors taking care of many major scenes. But the movie counters what might have been a dull move by keeping Stark in constant danger and needing to rely on out-of-suit heroics. When Tony Stark has to storm a compound outfitted only with what he could cobble together from Home Depot, he suddenly turns into a James Bond/Q combination and it’s a blast. Kicking butt in an invincible armor suit is one thing; taking down terrorists with a Supersoaker from Walmart is something else.

If there’s one fanboy complaint I can make, it’s this: why aren’t the employees of AIM wearing those fantastic Jack Kirby “beekeeper” outfits they always wore in the comics? And, if AIM is now out of the bag in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that means it’s… MODOK time!

Marvel Phase 2 has blasted off, and Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, cannot arrive fast enough.

Presentation Note: I watched the film in classic 2D, the hip new way to see movies. Post-conversion 3D is a plot devised by the Red Skull.

Seriously, where are these guys?

Star Wars: Death Troopers

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:22:00 +0000

Star Wars: Death Troopers (2009)
By Joe Schreiber

By 2012, the Star Wars franchise was a dead body. It lay in the open, festering, attracting attention, but for most fans it was… dead. Then the Walt Disney wizards appeared and cast a Level 5 resurrection spell along with a multi-billion-dollar buyout spell, and presto! Star Wars turned into the walking dead. We shall see how that works out long term; perhaps zombie Star Wars will develop like Bub the Zombie in George Romero’s Day of Dead, getting smarter and learning to salute.

The recent resurrection of Star Wars makes Death Troopers, a 2009 mash-up of Star Wars and zombie-mania, seem prophetic.

Death Troopers must have been a no-brainer pitch: use a hot genre to fashion a fresh approach to the standard business of the Expanded Universe Star Wars novels, which seem locked in a cycle of destroying the various children of Han and Leia Solo. That’s what I’ve heard, at least. My time scant spent with the Expanded Universe novels usually revolves around the world of the prequels and the classic series. Death Troopers falls into this category: it takes place approximately one year before the events of the first movie, a.k.a. Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope in the burdensome taxonomy of Lucasfilm. Death Troopers has plentiful gore and medical gruesomeness mixed in with fragments of the Star Wars universe and supporting roles for Han Solo and Chewbacca as the characters you know will survive whatever undead onslaught they face. Gorehounds and zombie fanatics with a taste for Star Wars won’t have much to complain about, but groups with marginal interest in either camp should resist the gimmick appeal.

Since the Star Wars universe has always had elements of fantasy to it (the Force in particular), resurrecting the dead wasn’t too hard a trick for author Joe Schreiber. He uses the “zombie virus” tactic, although scientifically the reason the dead bodies come back after the ravages of the disease receives only passing explanation. The illness causes horrible deaths, the bodies return to life a few hours later hungry for living flesh, spreading the infection with their bites, and eventually they develop enough intelligence to work together and pilot vessels (although not very skillfully). It’s the standard zombie playbook, plus poor X-Wing piloting.

The main setting is Purge, an Imperial prison barge and a rare view into the vilest side of the Galactic Empire’s tyranny. When Purge malfunctions, the captain arranges to dock with a Star Destroyer that for some reason is drifting aimlessly without life signs. Oh well, what could possibly go wrong? Send in a team to scavenge some parts from the floating hulk, and then get out.

The zombie mayhem doesn’t begin until past the first third. Until then, the plot is an outbreak story with squishy and gross details as a contagion aboard the Star Destroyer wipes out Purge’s crew and prisoners while chief medical officer Zahara Cody, who steps up as the main character, tries to get control of the situation. Zahara has her own demons to battle, of course (how else would you end up in the assignment of doctoring on an Imperial prison barge?) but has the company of “Waste,” a 2-1B medical droid. If you’ve seen The Empire Strikes Back, and you have, you’ll know this robot type: it’s the droid that tended to Luke after the Wampa attack. Waste provides the best character moments in the novel.

The other main characters are two prisoners, brothers Trig and Kale Longo; and Jareth Sartoris, the captain of the guard aboard Purge. Sartoris fills the role a hero-villain, a nasty character we root for to survive long enough so he’ll meet an appropriate death. The Longo brothers are coming from a recent tragedy as well, their father’s death aboard the ship.

Once the dead bodies start moving and munching, and Zahara finds Han Solo and Chewbacca in solitary, the novel shifts into chase-and-chomp territory, with a touch a mystery around the discovery of the origin of the virus and hints at what it might ultimately be for.

Schreiber is a horror author, so it won’t shock readers that where Death Troopers cooks is during baroque sequences of the grotesque and gory. If zombie horror in space is all that you care about, then that’s what you’ll receive. Schreiber has a knack for hatching up horror-filled tension set pieces, most notably a tactilely nasty scene of Trig Longo climbing over a mountain of dead flesh to escape from a relentless zombie stormtrooper. There’s also a hideous encounter with cannibals—living human cannibals, not zombies—that I’m thankful Schreiber did not carry too far. Both zombies and humans meet some grisly dispatches, and no opportunity for medical-based stickiness gets passed up. You think Wookie zombies shredding through fools might be cool? Well, you get that. And if you want a few horror-fan bonuses, Schreiber tosses in some gag names, like Quatermass and Phibes, for minor characters. (Both are far too obvious for my tastes.)

Schreiber’s feel for the Star Wars universe? Eh, it’s there. A bit. Han Solo and Chewbacca are really on autopilot, although they aren’t horribly written. Han seems more like his Return of the Jedi incarnation than the more callous survivor figure you’d expect before his encounter with the Rebellion. I can’t imagine the Han Solo of Death Troopers shouting, “Watch your mouth kid, or you’ll find yourself floating home!” I could have done without Han and Chewbacca entirely; they are hooks for Star Wars fans, and because we know they can’t die the sections with them don’t have much suspense.

Although published three years before the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm, Death Troopers feels like a pitch for one of the interstitial movies the Mouse House plans to make between the main saga movies like Episode VII. Limited to action aboard two ships and breaking away from space adventure, the book makes a fine template for a $40 million-or-so production. Of course, it won’t happen; not only does Disney have no interest in using the Expanded Universe novels as sources for their new movies, but there’s no way of getting an R-rated Star Wars film ever, especially a “hard” R with cargo bays full of grue. And that’s before even considering how the script would need to get around having a young Han Solo in the movie.

That’s unfortunate, because Death Troopers may not be a great novel, but it feels like it could be a fun cinematic departure on Star Wars. Reading about white-clad Imperial stormtroopers lurching around the corridors of a Star Destroyer as flesh-consuming zombies is nowhere near as fun as seeing it would be.

Failing the movie pitch, Death Troopers could translate smoothly to a survival horror video game. No need to worry about Han Solo casting in that case, and the confined spaces and levels inside a Star Destroyer almost write the code themselves.

Schreiber wrote a further Star Wars zombie story, Star Wars: Red Harvest, set during the Sith Era. Apparently nobody at Lucasfilm realized that Dashiell Hammett has a lock on the title Red Harvest. But I don’t plan to go near this spiritual follow-up to Death Troopers. This is about as much zombie fiction as I want to read for the next few years. Can’t we have more werewolves, Frankenstein monsters? I feel I’ve been making this plea for over a thousand generations

“The Hanging Gardener” to Appear in Plasma Frequency

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0000

More good publishing news rolls in… this one with a slice of Nebuchadnezzar.

I received word today that my short dark fantasy story “The Hanging Gardener” will appear in an upcoming issue of Plasma Frequency Magazine, which publishes in both print and eBook formats and is now going on its second year of publication.

“The Hanging Garnder” is an H. P. Lovecraft-influenced tale, or perhaps I should say it is a “Mythos-influenced” horror tale, since it draws on other members of the Lovecraft circle. I always planned to write a Mythos story from the time I started reading HPL in college, but I wasn’t interested in simply imitating Lovecraft. When I latched onto the idea of setting a story in the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I realized I had finally found the slant necessary to make a story that fit my own writing style and historical interests. I wrote the first draft of it during NaNoWriMo, part of a flurry of multiple stories, but it was my personal favorite work to have come out of that November writing marathon.

No definite date is set for the issue yet. I’ll keep everyone up to date when I know more.

Thank you to editor Richard Flores IV for accepting the story.

“The Sorrowless Thief” Reviewed at Tangent Online

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:30:00 +0000

John Sulyok at Tangent Online has given a positive review of my recently published Ahn-Tarqa story, “The Sorrowless Thief” (read the story for free here).

From the conclusion of the review:

Ryan Harvey’s “The Sorrowless Thief” exists as part of a larger science-fantasy series. The world of Dyzan includes few guns and many (magically) tamed dinosaur beasts situated in the usual tropes of fantasy. These surrounding details thicken the setting and the plot, adding a lot of intrigue to the events herein. It feels like a good entry-point if the series continues.

Good news there, John: it already has continued! You can read “An Acolyte of Black Spires” in Writers of the Future Vol. XXVII, and get the novelette “Farewell to Tyrn” as an ebook right now. Dive in, folks… let’s get some publishers chomping at the dinosaur bit to hold of the novel Turn over the Moon.

Thanks to John O’Neill for posting about Tangent’s taking notice.

A Man Is as Big as What Makes Him Mad: Bad Day at Black Rock

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:33:00 +0000

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Directed by John Sturges. Starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Russell Collins, Walter Sande.

Our wide image starts with a split between the modern world and the Old West: Fabulous vistas of a Southwestern desert sprawled over the screen in CinemaScope and Technicolor glory. Running through the brush and sand is an icon of the frontier: the railroad. But no black iron locomotive belching a smoke banner rides these rails. It’s a high-speed silver-and-orange streamliner offering every comfort to its riders blazing through this wasteland to get from one glistening city to the other.

Yet this train of the New Twentieth stops at Black Rock, Arizona, a town rusted in place in the Old Nineteenth. The streamliner hasn’t stopped at Black Rock in four years, and the town looks like it hasn’t touched the rest of the nation for far longer than that. Black Rock may have telephones, electric power, and cars, but it’s as rough as any frontier town from the 1880s and about as far distant from what civilization calls law and order. The single hotel advertises “Steam Heat” on the glass of the lobby window, but none of the buildings look like they’ve gotten refurbished since the invention of barbed wire. Even the sheriff’s office is a one-room hovel made of stone with a single jail cell of iron bars.

A lone figure steps off the streamliner, but he isn’t wearing a Stetson and boots. No gun belt hangs around his hips. He has on a plain black suit and tie, and his hat is a city-slicker fedora. Only the color of the fabric indicates that this fellow, played by Spencer Tracy, might be a classic avenging Western hero. Otherwise, he could be any twentieth-century businessman who got off at the wrong stop.

However, this Man in Black has come to the right place, and soon it’s going to be a bad day at Black Rock for those who still believe the lawlessness of the Old West will let them get away with murder, and that the racist values of the frontier still have a place in the contemporary world.

But it’s going to be a great day at Black Rock for the viewers.

Bad Day at Black Rock is my favorite entry in the Western subgenre called the “contemporary Western” or “modern Western.” These are films with Western settings and themes, similar styles of action and characters, but which take place post-World War I (or post-Mexican Revolution, a conflict at the center of the “Zapata Western” subgenre). The tension between traditional Western ideas and situations within the technological era makes these movies some of the more fascinating dips into the American West ever put on celluloid—and the time period does not negate them as Westerns. According to film historian Dana Polan on the commentary for the DVD of Bad Day at Black Rock, these films ask what happens to the mythologies of the Western as it enters the modern age.

The contemporary Western includes such diverse films as Brokeback Mountain, The Electric Cowboy, No Country for Old Men, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Comes a Horseman, Hearts of the West, and Sunset. Might as well toss the near-future science fiction of Westworld onto the pile: it has the Western figuratively taking revenge on modern-day joyriders who want to reduce it to their macho wish-fulfillment tool. (With last month’s release of the Blu-ray of Westworld, I’m overdue to write at noxious length about the numerous layers in that speciously simple film.)

The moment you try to define a subgenre, you run into problems. I favor the simplicity of the term “contemporary Western,” but it’s a bit misleading. Often these movies don’t take place in the same time period in which they were made. Comes a Horseman was released in 1978, but takes place in the 1940s; No Country for Old Men was released in 2007 but takes place in the early 1980s. This applies to Bad Day at Black Rock, although only by a few years: released in 1954, but set a few months after the end of World War II.

The movie was adapted from Howard Breslin’s short story “Bad Time at Honda,” which was first published in January 1947 in The American Magazine. In the director’s chair is John Sturges, who made a name for himself as one of the foremost directors of tough guy thrillers in the 1950s and ‘60s, including two ultra-classic Westerns: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and The Magnificent Seven. Sturges’s films could often get bloated in their running times, but Bad Day at Black Rock hits straight and fast. It’s one of Sturges’s finest films, packing in a remarkable amount of high-tension drama and social commentary in less than an hour and a half.

The one-armed man in his off-the-rack black suit (literally: Spencer Tracy raided the rack himself) who steps off the streamliner is veteran John J. Macreedy. He’s come to Black Rock to go to a place called Adobe Flat. The entire town is instantly on pins and needles around him. “[You] act like you’re sitting on a keg… diamond, gunpowder,” the newcomer observes. Macreedy expects to find a Japanese-American farmer named Komoko at Adobe Flat. Komoko’s son Joe saved Macreedy’s life in Italy during the war, and died doing it; Macreedy has come to give the boy’s medal of honor to his father. As Macreedy’s goal becomes clearer—and people start hearing the name “Komoko”—Black Rock gets even jumpier. The town Black Rock is sitting on a dark secret, and ranch-owner and informal town warlord Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) and his cronies Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector David (Lee Marvin) are prepped to kill to keep it secret.

Stop and think consider that: the villain’s support crew consists of Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Neither actor had their star-making breakout film when Bad Day at Black Rock was shot. Borgnine burst into fame with Marty released that same year, and Marvin’s career had a more gradual build until he won the Oscar for Cat Ballou in 1965 and followed it up with The Professionals and The Dirty Dozen. Both actors are operating in supporting roles here but have the full force of their personas and A-game backing them. Borgnine plays a tactless gorilla with fake brawn and no brain, and Marvin is smooth and arrogant as a character who always addresses Macreedy as “boy.”

When Reno Smith finds out that Macreedy has gone looking for Komoko at Adobe Flat, he offers Macreedy a weak sauce story that Komoko came to the town in 1941, but then got shipped to a relocation center after the war started. But the nervy town and the disassembling sheriff, Tim Horn (Dean Jagger), have put Macreedy on alert that Komoko went nowhere except a shallow grave covered with flowers on lonely Adobe Flat—and he didn’t go quietly. It seems that not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Reno Smith and a few of his boys got a bit “Patriotic drunk” and wandered up to Adobe Flat.…

MGM’s president Nicholas Schenck recognized Bad Day at Black Rock’s message against xenophobia and opposed production of the film because it was “subversive.” Producer Dore Schary already had a history of films dealing with racism, which were known as “problem pictures” or “message pictures” at the time. Schary executive-produced Crossfire, a 1947 noir thriller where Robert Ryan also played a bigoted killer, in this case an anti-Semite. (Although Ryan’s performance there makes the character seem more like a psychopath than a standard bigot. It isn’t that he specifically hates Jews. He just wants an excuse to kill somebody. He’s a straightforward racist in Bad Day at Black Rock.)

Schary still got the film made, despite Schenck’s objections. And Schenck was right: Bad Day at Black Rock is subversive—and still is. The movie’s approach to xenophobia and racism is disturbingly prescient, and unfortunately has not dated in 2013. When Macreedy confronts Reno Smith about what really happened to Komoko, sliding into the conversation to raise Smith’s hackles in the right way, we get frighteningly familiar-sounding dialogue.

SMITH: I believe a man is as big as what will make him mad….

MACREEDY: What makes you mad, Mr. Smith?... The Japanese make you mad, don’t they?

SMITH: Well, that’s different. After that sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Bataan—

MACREEDY: Komoko made you mad?

SMITH: It’s the same thing. “Loyal Japanese-Americans.” That’s a laugh. They’re all mad dogs. What about Corregidor, the Death March?

MACREEDY: What did Komoko have to do with Corregidor?

SMITH: He was a Jap, wasn’t he? Look, Mr. Macreedy. There’s a law in this county about shooting dogs. But when I see a mad dog, I don’t wait for him to bite me. I swear you’re beginning to make me mad.

MACREEDY: All strangers do.

Swap out Japanese-Americans and World War II atrocities with Arab-Americans and 9/11, and this is a conversation I still hear and which always makes my faith in humanity waver. The Reno Smiths of the world are still around, irrationally hating whole groups of people for the crimes of a few and unable to see the blood-red irony of their own bigoted violence.

Reno Smith is right about one thing: a man is as big as what makes him mad. Bigotry and blind hatred make Macreedy mad, and that ends up making him far bigger than Smith and his gang of racists—and they pay for underestimating him.

Spencer Tracy’s performance emphasizes how easy it is for narrow-minded thugs like Coley and Hector to believe he’s a wimp and a pushover. Macreedy appears stoic, going out of his way to avoid trouble. Hector assumes the man is a coward with no “iron in his gut.” How tough could a man with only one arm actually be? But Tracy also exudes an underlying inflexibility in the early scenes, putting the audience on alert that he will eventually make his move and come down hard on the bullies of Black Rock.

The first explosion occurs in a spectacularly memorable and oh-so-satisfying fight with Coley at the local hash house, where Macreedy facilely beats Borgnine’s orcish jerk into unconsciousness using only one hand and not even breaking into more of a sweat than he already had from the heat. Appropriately, Macreedy uses judo—a nice message from Japanese-Americans delivered through the edge of his hand. The tears of racists are delicious.

Anne Francis, one of the underrated actresses of the decade, appears as Liz Wirth, sister of Pete Wirth (John Ericson) who runs Black Rock’s hotel. Liz is a strong woman but doesn’t rock the boat because “I have to go on living in this town.” She can’t leave because she won’t abandon her brother, and he’s too weak to uproot himself. But Liz turns out to be a surprise character; she isn’t a romantic interest for Macreedy as viewers might expect. There’s a hefty age gap between Tracy and Francis, but then Hollywood’s never had a problem tossing older male stars on-screen girlfriends far below the “half your age plus seven” rule. But Anne Francis’s role is unlike what people might expect from the top-billed woman in the cast.

Actually, Francis is the only woman in the cast, the only woman we ever see in Black Rock, which makes the town seem even more desolate. Black Rock not only lacks women, it seems to lack families of any kind; the only people who are related are brother and sister Liz and Pete. The town otherwise consists of only a dozen older men, furthering the sense that the place is a withering spot with values that mean nothing. When Doc Velie (Walter Brennan) talks about revitalizing Black Rock at the finale, you have to wonder how he intends to achieve it. Macreedy’s attitude of, “Sure, you go ahead and try that,” seems entirely justified.

Doc Velie serves as the conscience of the town, the decent moral man who finds the strength to do what’s right when Macreedy arrives, and who tries to kick the others to the better sides of their nature. Brennan gives a great performance that makes Doc Velie convincingly principled and yet impotent at the same time. Unlike the sheriff and Pete Wirth, who have good intentions but are cowards, Doc Velie is a fellow who could take a stand if there were any space for him to stand.

At a streamlined eighty-two minutes, Bad Day at Black Rock is a bit fast at the very end, and the only negative I can lob at the film is that John Sturges cuts the finale too lean and brings events to a close so quickly that it feels an important moment of satisfaction got left behind in the editing, making Reno Smith leap abruptly to the end of his character arc. The confrontation between Macreedy and Smith ends rapidly and without the same catharsis as the beating the hero handed out to Coley earlier.

Bad Day at Black Rock was made two years into the life of the CinemaScope widescreen format. MGM licensed the special lenses from Twentieth Century Fox to make the movie, although Sturges simultaneously shot the movie “flat” because the studio wasn’t sure about how it would turn out. A ridiculous concern: Bad Day at Black Rock looks phenomenal on the huge CinemaScope 2.55:1 canvas. (The 2.55:1 aspect ratio was the standard at the time, changing to 2.35:1 with the later addition of a magnetic track.) Look at the stunning composition of this shot, part of a simple expository dialogue scene:

The CinemaScope format also explodes during an early action sequence when a car tries to drive a Jeep off the road. Unlike other vehicle pursuits filmed in the pre-Bullitt era, most of this scene was shot with the cars going at actual speed without under-cranking the camera. But what makes it work so well is the enormous canvas capturing the baroque desert surroundings of the two vehicles. The widescreen space helps bring home the power of the location filming (done at Lone Pine, CA). This is why the Western loved CinemaScope, and changed the way viewers looked at the genre. The development of widescreen processes helped drive the Western to a level of mainstream, A-budget popularity that signed the walking papers of the “B” Western by the 1960s and another John Sturges Western, The Magnificent Seven.

This film is part of my “Great Western Challenge” list of essential movie Westerns. Give Bad Day a Black Rock a watch and in only eighty-two minutes you can bump up your score by a point.

Romance & Revisions: The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:33:00 +0000

The Outlaw of Torn (1914)
By Edgar Rice Burroughs

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

“Not since Arthur of Silures kept his round table hath ridden forth upon English soil so true a knight as Norman of Torn.” –Joan de Tany

“I am very doubtful about the story. The plot is excellent, but I think you worked it out all together too hurriedly.” –Thomas Newell Metcalf, letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs, 19 December 1911

“I am not prone to be prejudiced in favor of my own stuff, in fact it all sounds like rot to me….” –Edgar Rice Burroughs, letter to Thomas Newell Metcalf, 14 March 2012

In Irwin Porges’s groundbreaking and Chartres Cathedral-sized biography Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Brigham Young University Press, 1975) only two of ERB’s books have solo chapters dedicated to them: Tarzan of the Apes, of course—and The Outlaw of Torn.

Unless you are a hardheaded Burroughs devotee, I’ll wager a ducat you have never crossed paths with the title The Outlaw of Torn. Considering that chronologically it is squashed between his two most famous books, A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, it makes sense that The Outlaw or Torn gets overlooked. That it belongs to the genre of Medieval Romance, a mite mustier than high Martian adventure or swinging times in the African rainforest, compounds the issue.

But this Middle Ages adventure deserves the primacy Porges awarded it. Burroughs’s second novel taught him hard truths about the business of writing and what he was capable of. ERB was one of the first writer-businessmen; the long labor getting his second book to work and sell schooled him in the reality of making a living as a popular adventure author.

The Outlaw of Torn also turned out, after all the toil put into it, a flat work manufactured to obviously as a copy of earlier romances. Burroughs thought highly of the book, and in 1927 wrote to his publisher: “I think it is the best thing I ever wrote, with the possible exception of Tarzan of the Apes, and next to it, I believe will rank The War Chief of the Apaches.” But instead of embracing further stories in this style, Burroughs turned and ran for the jungle with his next outing. A lesson learned, even if years later he could not admit it.

The concept for the book came from Thomas Newell Metcalf, the editor at Munsey’s Magazines who purchased A Princess of Mars (then going by its magazine title, “Under the Moons of Mars”) in 1911. Metcalf recognized a major talent emerging in this chap from Chicago, and suggested Burroughs try “a serial of the regular romantic type, something like, say ‘Ivanhoe’, or at least of the period when everybody wore armor and dashed about rescuing fair ladies.” The editor thought his new discovery might do well in this tried-and-true genre, even though Metcalf had just purchased an unclassifiable planetary adventure from him. Burroughs, thinking a second sale was guaranteed, leaped into creating His Own Private Ivanhoe.

A scant three weeks later (Burroughs’s answer to Metcalf’s letter was to send a complete manuscript to his desk), the editor rejected The Outlaw of Torn. This sent ERB into a spiral of revisions and attempts to satisfy Metcalf, all which came to nothing. He eventually sold the manuscript to A. L. Sessions at New Story magazine for $1,000.

The final published version of The Outlaw of Torn begins with the pseudo-ERB making his second appearance, presenting the story as a manuscript discovered in Europe. Burroughs added this framing device in later revisions, but it fits with the rest of his body of work. It also permits wiggle room with historical events, since the narrator excuses most of those pesky details from his account: “In the retelling of it I have left out most of the history.” That’s one way to chuck out research; Burroughs did write the first draft in a hurry.

It takes only a single chapter for Burroughs to cement his “History? Whatever!” approach when he has thirteenth-century fighters using foils in the art of “fencing,” confusing the Middle Ages with Early Modern Europe. Similar anachronisms appear in clothing and headgear throughout the book. There’s also a loose use of monetary units (“zecchins”?) and a general tone that feels nothing like medieval England, but more like a silent movie version of it.

Burroughs had more reason to ignore historical realism aside from just making the writing move quicker. He acknowledged that he romanticized his hero for the sake of readability: “If I had written in to Outlaw of Torn my real conception of the knights of the time of Henry III you [Metcalf] would have taken the Mss. with a pair of tongs and dropped it into the furnace. I made my hero everything that I thought the men of the time were not.”

The non-real year is 1243, during the middle of the long reign of King Henry III of England. The king, for reasons unexplained (“Never mind the quarrel, that’s history.”) accuses nobleman Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, of treason. De Montfort—an historical figure—retorts by calling the king a coward and storming off. Instead of banishing or executing de Montfort, like any bloodthirsty Plantagenet monarch would, King Henry takes out his frustrations on the fencing master, the Parisian Jules de Vac. De Vac swears he will have revenge for the insolence of this English swine king!

De Vac’s plan relies on using Henry’s young son Richard, a figure forgotten to history because Burroughs invented him. De Vac kidnaps the child prince, killing Richard’s minder and her suitor while doing so. De Vac and the boy vanish, and the prince’s whereabouts remain a mystery to King Henry and his court for twenty years.

Young Richard grows up in the Derby Hills, unaware of his true identity and name. De Vac trains him in the arts of the sword and hating Englishmen. At age fifteen, the youth encounters and kills three of Henry’s knights who almost discover the prince’s identity. (One of the knights is “Greystoke.” ERB makes a mental note.) De Vac now tells the young man that he is actually “Norman of Torn,” foe of all Englishmen. The newly named man dons armor, his visor always lowered at De Vac’s orders—and to avoid ending the story too soon—and rides forth to strike terror in the hearts of the English!

Since a Romantic hero requires chivalry, something De Vac can’t offer, the figure of the kind old priest Father Claude appears to furnish Norman of Torn with knightly attributes. Norman gathers a crew of highwaymen into a band to wage a bandit’s war against King Henry and all highborn English. A confusing time slip has the story jump ahead to describe Norman’s campaign and growing power in the battle between the King and his barons, and then two pages later hop back to the formation of the band. This feels like an amateur writer’s mistake, or Burroughs trying too hard to embroil the characters in wide-scale adventure before they actually do anything.

Norman of Torn soon has a thousand men under his command—a far-fetched leap—and in Robin Hood fashion he refuses to torment the serfs, targeting only the wealthy English. He rescues a woman on the road who turns out to be Simon de Montfort’s (fictional) daughter, Bertrade. Norman decides to keep his identity as the famous outlaw a secret from her, and calls himself Roger de Condé. He immediately falls in love with her, although he keeps the news from himself.

De Vac, whom the text almost exclusively and repetitively describes as “the grim, gray man” after the first few chapters, needs to stop his protégé’s slide toward romance and goodwill. He anonymously helps Bertrade’s frustrated suitor Peter of Colfax kidnap the girl from the road, and leaves behind clues blaming the attack on men from Torn. Bertrade shows herself resourceful in captivity and temporarily turns the tables on Colfax, but this is all a pointless plot cul-de-sac. Norman goes ahead with the rescue, of course.

In his Peter of Condé guise, Norman swears his love to Bertrade, and she to him, but this is an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, so of course the hero tells her they can’t be together “and-I-can’t-tell-you-why-so-just-deal-with-it.” But Simon de Montfort plans to betroth Bertrade to Prince Philip of France; the nobleman sends Bertrade over the water and out of Peter/Norman’s reach. A year passes, and Norman of Torn leans his forces to the side of the barons rebelling against King Henry, setting up his eventual change into the full hero who will reject the vengeful destiny that De Vac tried to chart for him.

ERB was still swimming in unfamiliar waters as a novelist, working on only his second book and still uncertain of his own style. Writing about a fantastic version of Mars freed him to craft what he liked, but The Outlaw of Torn carries the burden of a century of historical romances. The dialogue is thick with attempts at period flavor via Shakespearean flourishes (“Unhand me, sirrah!”) and overstretched speeches packed with “Ye Olde Ynglish” words that weigh as much as a mail shirt: “Silence, old hag…. Is it not enough that you leech me of the good marks of such a quantity that you may ever after wear mantles of villosa and feast on simnel bread and malmsey, that you must needs burden me still further with the affliction of thy vile tongue?” I think he made his point with “Silence, hag!”, but ERB was trying too hard to give what he expected readers wanted from an historical romance. He uses phrases and words like “you wot,” “sumpter beast,” and “nathless” with a heavy artificial hand.

Chapter XIII, approximately the two-third’s point, marks the first place in the novel where Burroughs feels comfortable with events: Norman of Torn tries to escape from imprisonment in the castle of the Earl of Buckingham, and finds Joan de Tany, a noblewoman who has already fallen hard for Norman in his Roger de Condé disguise. While dealing with their confused emotions—the first romantic triangle of ERB’s writing career—they find their way through caverns beneath the castle to freedom. The compressed location fits Burroughs’s natural style, and he suddenly dumps the artificial prose and becomes the sleeker action writer we love today. The dialogue remains the same stilted “Oh would that yea knew!” stuff, but it’s progress.

The tension between Norman (as Roger) and Joan works even though Norman’s thoughts keep trying to defeat it with his pure chivalry and undying love for unreachable Bertrade. We know Burroughs won’t break up the established true love between Norman and Bertrade, but the maiden voyage into this kind of romantic tangle is more interesting than the bland baronial revolution and the broader English canvas that Burroughs wants to rush through. He even brings the romance with Joan to a nasty conclusion right as it appears on the edge of getting the flippant dismissal that often occurs in other ERB books. The end of this romantic tangle is the biggest and best jolt in The Outlaw of Torn.

The story moves into its finale with Norman losing his hatred of all things English through his love for Bertrade; he sides with the baronial revolt against King Henry even after the king offers him a pardon because the outlaw inadvertently saved the life of Queen Eleanor. The writing starts to shed its archaic turns of phrase, although never completely, and the large Battle of Lewes in Chapter XVI is an action highlight. Burroughs follows it with a gruesome duel that has a vibrancy no earlier crossing of swords in the book has; it’s ERB getting his bearings at a late stage. However, the drama never recovers to the level of tension from the Joan de Tany episode. Even the baronial rebellion amounts to nothing, forgotten at the end in the wrap-up.

In a running theme, ERB struggles with getting his main villain to work. De Vac makes a nonsensical and boring main bad guy. That his name vanishes entirely to be replaced with “the grim, gray man” shows how colorless the character is. The repetition of the phrase eventually becomes flat-out hilarious. De Vac’s motivation and long-game can’t support the story, and his attempts to manipulate events to make sure that Norman of Torn fulfills the Frenchman’s plot to get revenge on King Henry for slapping him come across as pedestrian.

Thomas Newell Metcalf made a few boneheaded decisions in rejecting early Burroughs manuscripts, most damning the choice to bounce The Return of Tarzan. (What was he thinking?) But with Outlaw of Torn, the editor had good reason to feel let down, even if it was his idea in the first place to suggest this kind of book. Despite the twist with Joan of Tany and a well-crafted action conclusion, The Outlaw of Torn feels drearily artificial; it lacks the zest of the best of Burroughs’s work, and his own writing style is subsumed under the attempt to create a noble, overly-stylized romance.

One of Metcalf’s comments spikes home to a trouble Burroughs often had: “When you are not using any one of any number of your characters you sort of lay them away in a drawer, so to speak, and seem apparently to forget all about them.” De Vac suffers from this, even after Burroughs revised the story to make the character a more continuous presence. De Vac’s opposite, the pastoral Father Claude, also feels conspicuously absent for long stretches.

Burroughs worked at re-tooling the novel to Metcalf’s liking, trying two different endings, one happy and one downbeat. The editor still rejected the manuscript, although he made an offer to purchase the plot for a hundred dollars and have one of the magazine’s editors re-write it. Thankfully, Burroughs turned down the proposal: it was too little compensation considering the time he had put into the project, and he had confidence in his talent. He stayed defiant in his last letters to Metcalf regarding his medieval adventure: “I really think your readers would have liked that story…. I tried the Mss on some young people; extremely superior, hypercritical young people, and some of them sat up all night reading it.” When A. C. McClurg released the book in hardcover in 1927, the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out in a month; Burroughs must have felt he had finally won the war, although it took fifteen years of fighting.

The battle over Outlaw of Torn taught Burroughs two important lessons. The first was that, although rescuing damsels in distress was a swell plot device for him, it was better to do it in his own imaginative settings rather than mired in Sir Walter Scott-land. He was too eager to please at this early phase, and unaware of his strengths. Through the struggle getting the book published, he learned those strengths dwelt not in the historical novel.

Burroughs’s second lesson from The Outlaw of Torn was that it was not worth his time to continually revise a work to please a single editor. ERB was a great writer, but he was also a practical man—an “Efficiency Expert”—who didn’t want to expend effort for minimal pay-off. After the experience trying to get Metcalf to buy this one story, Burroughs never again trapped himself in revisions; he either sold the work to someone else or stuck it in the drawer.

Burroughs was an innovator, not an imitator (except of himself in his winding-down years); The Outlaw of Torn is an early stumble at imitation and its faults emphasize that Burroughs needed to forge his own methods outside of what was expected from contemporary genre literature. Trying to sound like what he thought was popular, and at the request of an editor, made him turn out a mostly lifeless work. As Porges sums up in the chapter of his ERB biography dedicated to The Outlaw of Torn:

From a businessman’s standpoint, as balanced the long hours of revision and research against the net return, Ed undoubtedly considered “The Outlaw of Torn” to be a poor investment. Still, he had gained the satisfaction of another sale and had demonstrated the power of sheer stubbornness. Above all, through his unhappy experience with medieval times, castles and knighthood, he had learned that the historical romance, with its emphasis on realistic atmosphere, was not the best outlet for his talents.

There was a happy ending to The Outlaw of Torn ordeal, aside from Burroughs eventually managing to sell it: the experience forged an even higher creative drive in the author. The next time he set down to write a story, he took the kernel of his medieval romance—a young English nobleman unaware of his identity who is brought up in a foreign environment—and retooled it to fit his wilder sense of adventure: Tarzan of the Apes.

Universal Horror Archive: Man Made Monster (1941)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:13:00 +0000

Man Made Monster (1941)
Directed by George Waggner. Starring Lionel Atwill, Lon Chaney Jr., Anne Nagel, Frank Albertson, Samuel S. Hinds.

Although a minor film taken on its own, Man Made Monster introduced two of the major stars of the 1940s Universal horror movie factory: actor Lon Chaney Jr. and director-writer-producer George Waggner. Chaney Jr. (born Creighton Chaney) became Universal’s primary monster performer for the rest of the decade, thanks to his success in the title role of The Wolf Man. George Waggner also rode the success of The Wolf Man as its director, and rose to be the studio’s go-to producer and director for the remainder of the classic horror cycle.

Man Made Monster started as an adaptation of a story by Harry J. Essex, “The Electric Man,” which Essex wrote as a film treatment. Universal planned it as a Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi vehicle in 1935 under the title The Man in the Cab, but the studio placed that project on hold. The similarities between the proposed film and The Invisible Ray in 1936 (both concern a glow-in-the-dark killer with an electrical death-touch) make it seem that the execs shelved one to make the other. In 1940, the new Universal management tossed $86,000—as low a budget as anything they were cranking out at the time—to director George Waggner to make another attempt at “The Electric Man.”

Waggner started his career as an actor in silent movies—he had a role in John Ford’s early Western classic The Iron Horse—then switched to writing screenplays in the 1930s. He already had a few directorial credits on “B” Westerns before Universal handed him his first horror assignment. Waggner rewrote the script under the pseudonym “Joseph West.”

I’m not sure what the studio expected from Waggner, although it was certainly far less than what they ended up getting. But their reason for casting Lon Chaney Jr. is transparent: name recognition. The son of the famous silent movie “Man of a Thousand Faces” came to attention as an actor in 1939 for his performance as slow-witted Lennie in the 1939 version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Universal recognized the marquee value of the Chaney name in a horror film and gave him his first role in the genre with a modest payment of $500 a week.

Man Made Monster feels like a 1950s science-fiction film made fifteen years early, with electricity substituted for nuclear power and a slick studio sheen. Even though produced on a pittance, the movie had access to Universal’s stock sets, wardrobe, character actors, and lush musical cues. Waggner’s investment as director also gave the film a personality that belies how inexpensively and rapidly it was shot. It provides sixty minutes of B-movie thrills with only a brief turn into courtroom drama territory to slow the pace down before the climax kicks in.

Chaney plays Dan McCormick, also known as “Dynamo Dan, The Electric Man,” a circus huckster who does gags with electrical power. But after Dan emerges as the sole survivor from a bus collision with an electrical tower, he attracts the attention of Dr. John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds), a leader in the made-up field of electro-biology. In a scene bizarrely similar to one years later in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, the doctor arrives in the hospital to tell Dan that he’s curious about why he not only survived the accident that killed everyone else in the bus, but came out of the wreckage without a mark on him.

Dr. Lawrence invites Dan to his mansion/laboratory where he can run tests on his resilience to electricity. Also living at the mansion are the doctor’s cute niece June (Anne Nagel) and another electro-biologist, Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill). Dr. Rigas has more pointed goals in this vague branch of biology than pure research: he wants to take the “less useful” members of society and turn them into a race of supermen whose only need is electricity. Dr. Lawrence doesn’t support his partner’s disturbingly fascist (especially in 1940) approach to their field. He even swaps a line from Bride of Frankenstein: “This theory isn’t science. It’s black magic.” But Dr. Lawrence still glibly lets this nutcase screw around with dynamos in the laboratory attached to his house. I suspect a blackmail deal going between the houseguest and his host, with Dr. Rigas playing the Herbert West part, but ultimately Dr. Lawrence is guilty of just being a gullible old guy. He’s fortunate that Dr. Rigas never tried any experiments on the adorable family dog, Corky, something I expected to happen the moment the pooch showed up.

Dr. Rigas starts testing his theories on Dan, gradually addicting him to electrical charges until Dan changes into a hollow shell of a man. For some reason, this also makes him obedient to Dr. Rigas’s will, although logically he would simply follow the orders of anyone. While Rigas works on creating his electrically powered slave—a “voltage vampire” according to the movie ads—a reporter investigating Dan’s mysterious case, Mark Adams (Frank Albertson), falls down on the job as he romances June. Mark keeps barging into the Lawrence household without an invitation, which shows how lax the doctor is at checking up on what’s going on under his roof.

After a half-hour of build-up, Dr. Rigas at last unleashes his man-made monster: “The worker of the future, controlled by a superior intelligence!” (Oh, so perhaps this is a Marxist critique as well?) However, Dan quickly ends up in jail for murder, and despite June and her reporter boyfriend feeling suspicious of Dr. Rigas’s hand in all this, Dan ends up sentenced to death… in the electric chair!

Ah, see? See what’s going to happen?

I don’t know if this was all part of Dr. Rigas’s long-term plan, but it does lead to a good action-filled finale with glowering menace from a purely mad Dr. Rigas, and Dan delivering a few satisfying electro-shock deaths. To add Gothic-movie flavor, the climax takes place on the foggy moors. We know this because of a shot of a sign identifying it as “The Moors.” Ah, the 1940s—when your location (and/or time period) didn’t need to make any sense.

Lon Chaney Jr. never had his famous father’s versatility, but he could play a slow-witted Midwestern chump as well as anybody in Hollywood at the time. “Dynamo Dan” is an ideal part for him: a dense, plain-folks guy who needs the word “immunity” explained to him. Chaney has a genuine and unforced charm in his early scenes, telling June that she looks “mighty purdy with those flowers,” and enjoying bonding time with the dog. His thick build and imposing stature give him physical presence as the electro-zombie of the second half of the film, even if the part doesn’t demand much acting aside from glowering and stumbling around. It seems strange Universal didn’t immediately cast Chaney as the replacement for Boris Karloff in the Frankenstein movies based on what he does here. They got around to it not long after the success of The Wolf Man, however, with Chaney getting into the famous makeup for The Ghost of Frankenstein.

Special effects supervisor John P. Fulton is as much the monster co-star as Chaney. The technical wizard who made The Invisible Man so astonishing pulls off minor miracles on almost no budget. The opening bus crash features model work that looks quite realistic, and the electrical effects on Chaney, which resemble the glowing optical tricks Fulton used on Karloff for The Invisible Ray, jump off the screen. We get to see plenty of this effect, which is surprising for a low-budget film. Usually a movie would go out of its way to find excuses to hide expensive superpowers, but long stretches of Man Made Monster go on with the glowing Dynamo Dan front and center.

Although Universal aimed to get a marketing jolt from the Chaney name, Lon Chaney Jr. is not the headliner. For top billing, Universal turned to Lionel Atwill, a dependable character actor familiar with mad-scientist roles. Atwill is one of the most underrated members of the Universal horror bullpen of actors. Considering that he took the role in Man Made Monster just to get a paycheck to fund his ambitions to enter film production, Atwill attacks his role with delicious zeal. Chaney may have gotten the boost up to horror stardom, but Atwill owns the film. His commitment to making Dr. Rigas insane but without seeming like a ham is commendable. “I’ll bet he spent his childhood sticking pins in butterflies,” one character remarks about Dr. Rigas, and damn if Atwill doesn’t project this to perfection. The camera is on Atwill’s side as well, giving him increasingly moody lighting effects as the film progresses toward his leering finale. In these last scenes Atwill gets to cut loose with the villainy, and even in these moments he still won’t go into full scenery-chewing mode; it’s a pleasant and appreciated amount of restraint.

Waggner brings considerable style to the film, particularly in the second half when the flat photography and staging turn more baroque. The squeamish Production Code forced the electric chair execution entirely off-camera, but the scenes in the jail leading up to it compensate with noir-ish lighting that lends gravity to the remainder of the running time. Waggner gets a few powerful emotional beats from small moments, particularly with the dog Corky, who first appears as a cute gimmick to make Chaney look charming and harmless, but the dog turns out to be the film’s emotional kicker. It’s the kind of old-fashioned audience manipulation that audiences don’t mind even when they’re aware of it.

Man Made Monster led to bigger and sometimes better things for Waggner and Chaney, although poor Atwill’s career was almost at its end. A sex scandal that broke during the production of this film crippled his goal of getting into film production. He died a few years later in 1946.

Waggner’s film-directing career declined with the horror movie at Universal, but he later became active in television, when for some reason he re-christened himself “george waGGner.” I have no idea why. Was he trying to imitate the Wolf Man’s growl? That’s the best explanation I can come up with. WaGGner’s most prominent television assignments are episodes of the 1960s Batman, and he even got to boss famous director Otto Preminger around on the set of the two episodes where Preminger played Mr. Freeze. That must have felt good.

The next film on the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive is appropriately Waggner’s next assignment: Horror Island, shot to fill out a double bill with Man Made Monster.

Benson’s Bond Begins: Zero Minus Ten

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:45:00 +0000

Zero Minus Ten (1977)
By Raymond Benson

Here is another Bond review I have dragged out of mothballs. I’ve never reviewed one of Benson’s novels—in fact, I’ve only read the first two and have stalled getting to work on my copy of High Time to Kill—but I found my thoughts on his inaugural outing…

After writing fourteen “continuation” James Bond novels, English writer John Gardner finally packed it in after COLD (U.S. title: Cold Fall) in 1996. Glidrose Ltd., the literary rights holder to James Bond, gave the task of writing new adventures of the master spy to Raymond Benson. The American Benson, a longtime Bond fan and author of the popular 1980s’ The James Bond Bedside Companion—an invaluable book for me in high school when there was little criticism of the movies and novels available—debuted with Zero Minus Ten, a thriller taking place around the historic handover of Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese government.

Benson’s work is immediately superior to the final few Gardner novels. Gardner had wearied of churning out a book a year about the character, and it shows in his last lackadaisical entries: Death Is Forever, SeaFire, and COLD are poor bordering on terrible. Benson rushed into the fray riding a wave of fannish exuberance that carries Zero Minus Ten along at a brisk pace toward a tense finale. Readers who are only seeking a fast-paced thriller won’t feel Benson wasted their time.

But despite all of Benson’s knowledge of the 007 of the printed page, he has none of the literary qualities to merit comparison to Ian Fleming—or even to John Gardner. Benson writes flat and straightforward prose; he can tell a story, but without much flair. The problem isn’t that Benson fails to copy the intoxicating journalistic style of Ian Fleming; that would be an impossible piece of artifice and would only aggravate fans. The problem is that Benson seems to lack a sense of his own style. His Bond is a lifeless manikin who exists as a tool for the story and a perceiver for the reader, and whose opinions are shallowly telegraphed from elsewhere.

Benson takes pains to imitate some of Fleming’s tropes, like placing Bond in a confrontation with the villain over a gambling table, and including lengthy travelogue sequences. Bond even starts the story in his familiar stomping grounds of Jamaica, where he has purchased a home that sounds suspiciously like Fleming’s estate of Goldeneye (the former owner, according to Bond, was a writer and journalist). Gardner conspicuously ignored Jamaica in his novels, but Benson tosses it right back into Bond’s world as if to declare his allegiance to the spirit of 007’s creator.

Hurling in the classic elements isn’t enough however, and the mahjong game between Bond and Guy Thackeray in Macau is emblematic of the trouble Benson faces when he tries to mirror Ian Fleming. The mahjong game is overwritten, suspenseless, and achieves nothing in the end because the sudden appearance of Triad killers negates any importance the game might have had. The sequence ostensibly exists so that Bond—and by extension, the reader—can get a sense of his adversary, but it achieves nothing of the kind and leaves Guy Thackeray more an enigma than he started. The writing drops into a rhythm of describing the wins and losses of each hand, which started to remind me of a mind-numbing history assignment from college that forced me to slog through pages and pages listing the levying of fines in a Medieval English village (“Mr. Tatterall walked his kine across Mrs. Amis’s land and is amerced five pence.”) Benson does not know exactly where to focus the reader’s attention in the game, and the lengthy explanation in an earlier chapter of the rules of mahjong doesn’t clarify matters. The scheme of Bond out-cheating a cheater is too similar to the classic bridge game in Moonraker, and Benson should never have opened himself up to such a direct comparison in which he would inevitably end up the loser.

The travelogues sections are turned out in rote fashion, without any interaction from Bond. This is a James Bond who has few feelings about anything. Where is the cynical and irritable Bond of Fleming, who has virile opinions on Camay soap, airline service, Japanese customs, tea and its effect on the British Empire, and beautiful female secretaries? If Benson wants to toss in references to the Fleming novels, why ignore so much of the genuine qualities of Fleming’s writing that make his work so powerful?

For example, Bond’s ruminations on the Asian art of feng shui is all info-dump, no attitude, and passes up a superb opportunity to inject a spark into the travelogue proceedings:

Bond knew that the concept of feng shui, the art and science of positioning man-made structures in harmony with the vital cosmic energy coursing through the earth, was taken seriously in the East. Sometimes entire buildings had to be adjusted slightly in accordance with instructions from professional feng shui masters. Fish tanks were in abundance in restaurants, and these improved the feng shui.

Fleming’s James Bond would note the feng shui, and then immediately scoff at it as “rubbish.” Remember Bond’s European disdain for the quirks of Japanese culture in You Only Live Twice? Even in this more politically correct culture, Bond remains a man of certain prejudices which that him an intriguing figure; Benson gives us precious little of that. The Fleming name-dropping aside (a sort of “greatest hits” of Bond’s most well-known character tags), the Bond of Zero Minus Ten is the EON Productions Bond of the day, the Pierce Brosnan version, not the one of the novels, and the book suffers because of it. Movie characters work best in movies, not on the page.

Some of the travelogue is gratuitous, particularly the Triad initiation scene. The play-by-play doesn’t serve any purpose except maybe to show that the author has done his research. (In speculative fiction-writing circles, this is known as “I’ve suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.”) In comparison, the sections in Australia have a freshness to them; it’s a place I always wanted Bond to visit. Unlike much of the descriptive dross afforded Bond’s time in Hong Kong and Southern China, here the information on the setting has a direct effect on the hero. Bond on a survival trek against the clock contains some of Benson’s better writing, and it’s a pleasant break from the Hong Kong setting.

The villain, Guy Thackeray, is a disappointment. Benson has stated that he visualized Jeremy Irons as Thackeray, and indeed it’s easy to see the famous English actor playing the part in one of his slummier, grab-the-paycheck-and-run moments (watch him in Dungeons & Dragons for an example). Bill Nighy might have more fun with the part, and would give Thackeray more of an idiosyncratic personality than he portrays on the page. Benson moves the character through the motions of a classic Fleming villain, but like so much of the novel, the motions simply aren’t enough. Even when he lays out his reasons for his diabolical scheme, Thackeray remains inscrutable and uninteresting. General Guangzhou, the red-herring villain who will fool nobody, works better than this incompetent drunk. At least Guangzhou gets to lay down vicious torture on Bond in one of the books better handled nods to Ian Fleming.

More successful is Bond’s Triad ally, Li Xu Nan. John Gardner’s stories tend to ignore the male friendships that Fleming’s Bond formed: men like Marc-Ange Draco, Kerim Bey, and Tiger Tanaka. Benson thankfully recognizes this, and serves up a sort of Eastern-tinged Marc-Ange Draco. The dialogue between the two men concerning their positions on different sides of the law is among the book’s most memorable. Consequently, the quick dispatch of Li in the assault on Thackeray’s yacht in the conclusion seems a shame. Bond’s other ally, the standard mid-plot victim, T. Y. Woo, comes across as too much of an Asian stereotype.

The Bond girl is one of the weakest elements of the book. Sunni Pei has little reason to be in the story aside from needing rescue and to give Bond a sidekick when he jets down to the Aussie Outback. Sunni’s martial arts skills seem like a bone tossed to her to keep her from turning into a generic trembling-Asian orchid in distress. The sex scenes have some kinkiness, which is a pleasing change from Gardner’s bland approach to erotic content, but they still come nowhere near the steaminess of Ian Fleming’s writing.

The ticking clock in the finale, especially when Bond finds himself on an unplanned walkabout in the Australian Outback, keeps the novel tense at the ending. Gardner frequently slacked off in his finales; Benson at least keeps the pressure on.

All the Fleming imitations and flourishes can’t cover up for the mechanical exercise of Zero Minus Ten. It works as an undemanding thriller, but the classic James Bond appears here only as a reflection in tin foil of the Ian Fleming original.

Universal Horror Archive: The Black Cat (1941)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:24:00 +0000

The Black Cat (1941)
Directed by Albert S. Rogell. Starring Basil Rathbone, Hugh Herbert, Broderick Crawford, Bela Lugosi, Gale Sondergaard, Anne Gwynne.

One of the great discoveries in my college library was the volume Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946 by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas. The 1990 book (new at the time) was one of the first to look at the entire canon of Universal’s horror and mystery pictures of the Golden Age and treat them as something more than the “kiddie TV entertainment” they were relegated to during the previous decades. I grew up watching these movies on weekend afternoons, but until Weaver et. al I knew little about the behind-the-scenes tales of their making.

I must have kept that book checked out of the college library for a straight year, constantly renewing it. It gave me a huge uptick in appreciation for classic horror, and instilled in me a hunger to dig up the more obscure movies the authors covered. And they covered everything: The Sherlock Holmes movies; the Inner Sanctum series; the supernatural comedy Ghost Catchers; films such as The Secret Key that might only count as horror because a star like Boris Karloff appeared in them; historical epics with gruesome content, like Tower of London; plus odd obscurities The Mad Ghoul, House of Horrors, and the film I’m writing about today, the 1941 mystery-comedy The Black Cat.

Universal Horrors vanished from my life after college, and the only copies I could locate to buy online were prohibitively pricey. Then a few months ago I found the book available for $3.99 in a revised version for Kindle. Re-reading the book caused another Universal Horror love explosion (so soon after the Blu-ray release of the classic films), and I scrounged up the DVD collection Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive, a package of five lesser-known chillers from the early 1940s era. As I once did with The Bela Lugosi Collection, I now plan to move through all five films and deliver reviews. Even though Man Made Monster is the earliest released film in the collection, Universal Home Video put The Black Cat first for some reason. I’ll obey their ordering and begin with that.

Universal already made a film called The Black Cat in 1934; it’s one of the greatest horror movies of its decade, but you can read my gushing praise of it in an older review. This new Black Cat also credits Edgar Allan Poe’s short story—“suggested by” in both cases—while having (almost) no plot connection to it at all. The 1934 film made use of many of Poe’s themes, which nobody would accuse the 1941 version of doing.

The inspiration for this new Black Cat was the success of 1939’s The Cat and the Canary, a Paramount smash hit with Bob Hope adding comedy to the “Old Dark House” mystery that was already hashed out by the end of the ‘30s. Universal certainly made their share of them, such as The Secret of the Blue Room and the wonderful James Whale picture with the archetypal title The Old Dark House. By the dawn of the ‘40s, the genre could no longer be played with a straight face. Universal assigned two comedy writers to revise the screenplay by Eric Taylor and Robert Neville based on Poe’s title to see if they could work out a spooky-funny cash grab. I’m being a touch cynical—but so was Universal. However, The Black Cat features an appealing cast with three horror icons from the studio (Lugosi, Rathbone, and Sondergaard) and a famous character actor and future Oscar-winner (Broderick Crawford), so it might be fun. I’m always up for a spooky mansion story.

Or I should say, I’m up for a good spooky mansion story. And The Black Cat ’41 is nothing of the kind. With two sets of writers to the project, one for the murder mystery and the other to bring the belly laughs, it results in a disjointed movie. The comic characters played by Crawford and Hughes rub the fur the wrong way on the inhabitants of a creepy mansion who are going through the motions of figuring out who killed an old lady with a huge inheritance. It’s as outright boring as it sounds.

Neither of two mismatched sections works well on its own merits. The actual murder-mystery plot is perfunctory: Mrs. Henrietta Winslow (Cecilia Loftus in her final role) hovers on the edge of death, bringing all those avaricious relatives to swarm around awaiting the moment. After estate dealer Gilbert Smith (Crawford) foils an attempt to poison Mrs. Winslow’s milk, the killer takes a more proactive approach and stabs Mrs. Winslow to death with a knitting needle and deposits her body in the crematorium. However, it turns out that Mrs. Winslow left a hidden stipulation in her will: the relatives will receive not a single penny of their inheritance until after the death of her maid Abigail Doone (Gale Sondergaard), caretaker of the many cats on the estate. What are the odds on Abigail’s survival? Mrs. Winslow must have really had it out for her poor maid.

It’s bizarre that solving this murder should fall to a fast-talking estate swindler like Gilbert Smith, but that’s what happens when you smash two styles together to make a cash-in. The reveal of the murderer is not a surprise, but that isn’t because audiences will manage to guess who it is. It’s because audiences won’t care who it is.

What disappoints the most about The Black Cat, as much as a quickie programmer could really disappoint, is how little it manages to get out of potentially fun performers like Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi. The huge heap of nothing that Rahtbone has to do here seems almost criminal misconduct from Universal’s casting department. Rathbone plays one of the various potential heirs and therefore potential suspects who wander around the mansion of the ex-Mrs. Henrietta Winslow, but he has nothing more fascinating to occupy his time than most of the down-ticket suspects. Bela Lugosi has a more lively part, the stereotypical spooky groundskeeper, modeled on his Ygor character from Son of Frankenstein. But he has little screen time and few opportunities to steal the show. I’m thankful to have Bela crawling around any Universal picture, and when he gets his few moments—like trying to corral a bunch of loose cats—he brightens up the dreary proceedings. But more Bela is better Bela, dammit, and Universal should have realized it.

Way down on the cast list is a still unknown Alan Ladd. After his breakout role in This Gun for Hire (1942), Universal re-released The Black Cat to grab some of his star power, adding the tag line to the posters, “Even Ladd Is Scared!” Ladd’s thankless part must have ticked off anyone who bought a ticket to this revival.

Gale Sondergaard fares best of the cast. Her part is the “Mrs. Danvers” character: the suspicious and hovering housekeeper. In an interview late in life, Sondergaard remarked that she thought the part was “beneath her.” But you wouldn’t know that from how much she invests in Mrs. Doone. This is the only key character who shows any true horror movie style. She’s acting in the better creepy house movie that we would rather be watching.

I always enjoy seeing Anne Gwynne pop up in Universal movies of the ‘40s, even just to play the upbeat smiling pretty girl like she does here and in The House of Frankenstein. She’s just so shiny-cute-sexy. If I were a young male at the time, I would have her pinups all over my wall—and she did quite a few of those.

Broderick Crawford gave some excellent performances in his life, winning an Oscar for playing Governor Stark in the 1949 version of All the King’s Men. But getting saddled with being both the young romantic hero and the comedy backbone (the picture’s ersatz Bob Hope) misses his actual talents. His delivery is snappy, and he manages to wring some laughs out of the better of the B-level gags he’s given, but it’s not enough. His comedy sidekick, the bumbling and clueless Mr. Penny (played by Hugh Herbert), poisons the pot. The running gag with Mr. Penny’s character is that he constantly damages furniture in order to pass it off as a legitimate antique. He goes about this tired business, drilling fake “worm holes” in valuable cabinets, while the rest of the movie rolls on around him; in a funnier film, this might work, but Herbert’s shtick is just one more piece of humor gumming up the works.

Technically, the winner in The Black Cat ’41 is photographer Stanley Cortez, who would shoot in the next decade one of the most remarkable-looking films of all time, The Night of the Hunter (1995). Orson Welles hired Cortez to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons based on seeing this movie (what was he doing watching this?) so we can thank The Black Cat for that collaboration. His camera provides the atmosphere the film needs, and he lavishes attention on Bela Lugosi that the part as written doesn’t deserve, but which Bela certainly does. Cortez makes magic out of the film’s best set, the crematorium dedicated exclusively to the remains of cats. Done in veined black marble with Art Deco doors and a cat goddess statue in obsidian, the crematorium begs to be in a finer feline horror film. Oh, Cat People came out this same year. Why aren’t you watching that instead?

Ironically, although The Black Cat ’41 has far less Edgar Allan Poe atmosphere than the ’34 version—actually, it has no Edgar Allan Poe atmosphere at all—it does have a plot connection to the short story. During the finale, the screech of a black cat leads to the discovery of a hidden body. I appreciate that one of the screenwriters, probably not the comedy scribes Robert Lees and Frederic I. Rinaldo, thought the movie should justify its title beyond simply having a black cat occasionally wander into the frame and lurk around the credits.

My final recommendation: you should see The Black Cat… the 1934 version. Leave this one bricked up behind the wall unless you must see everything featuring Bela Lugosi.

James Bond Book Review: Scorpius by John Gardner

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:20:00 +0000

Scorpius (1988)
By John Gardner

I finished reading all of John Garnder’s “continuation” James Bond novels last year with COLD (alias Cold Fall), a project I started in the mid-‘80s when I read Icebreaker. I don’t have any intention of going back and reading them again—at least not in the far foreseeable future—but I discovered a few ancient reviews I wrote for them back in the early 2000s and posted on a forum somewhere. Don’t remember where. Maybe it has gone into the dead case files. But I still have a few of them saved on the hard drive, and here is a revised version of my original thoughts on Scorpius. I recall when this book was published; I had read all the Gardners up to that point, but disliked Win, Lose or Die so much that I quit Gardner for almost fifteen years starting with Scorpius. The book is now back in print, along with all of Gardner’s and Benson’s 007 novels. My advice: read Fleming instead. If you have already read all of Fleming’s books, go read them again.

We now turn things over to me, ten years ago:

One year before the cinematic James Bond faced a villain who used a religious cult to front his activities in Licence to Kill, John Gardner sent the super-spy against Father Valentine, a.k.a. terrorist-funder Valdimir Scorpius, and his brainwashed followers in the Society of the Meek Ones. How meek are they? They’re so meek, they’ll detonate themselves next to British politicians! How better to disrupt an upcoming special election?

It’s an intriguingly pulpy idea for a Bond novel. But Scorpius, Gardner’s seventh outing as the official author of the James Bond novels, is not as much fun as the premise promises. (Or the promise premises.) It marks the beginning of the downturn in Gardner’s novels, as if the author was developing malaise with the series and was running short of enthusiasm. Scorpius falls between two of Gardner’s most derivative Bonds: No Deals, Mr. Bond, which borrows its finale direct from the classic Richard Condon short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” and Win, Lose or Die, cribbed from Top Gun and Die Hard.

Gardner at least gives Bond a more creative workout here with the religious cult with Jonestown-like pretensions and murderous ambitions beneath its “peace, love, and drug-free life” mottos. The plot, however, often wanders around in the first two thirds, promising to pick up the pace at any moment, but never getting there. No Deals, Mr. Bond at least moved fast and kept the story rolling. Scorpius has enough intrigue about the unfolding events to keep readers turning pages in anticipation of the big twists, but not until Bond gets to Scorpius’s Ten Pines Plantation in Chapter 16 does the novel finally advance to the next level. And the only big twist arrives in the final chapter, and by that point most readers will have figured it out—especially those familiar with the way Gardner usually crafts his plots.

The story remains in England for the early chapters. In itself, England isn’t a bad setting for a Bond story. Fleming managed to make a thrilling novel out of Moonraker, which never got farther away from London than the coast of Kent. Bond novels don’t necessarily need the visual exoticism of the movies to sustain interest as long as the story and atmosphere are right. A nuclear missile plant in Southeast England is still a nuclear missile plant. But Scorpius’s action in England consists entirely of Bond dashing from site to site so he can engage in long briefings with M, find the remains of Scorpius’s handiwork, and occasionally get involved in a bloody firefight.

When the action finally switches to another spot in the world, it moves to the uninteresting coast of South Carolina. At least the swamps around the resort have water moccasins, and Gardner promises a tense scene of Bond having to make his escape from Ten Pines Plantation, but the thrills that result are minor. As a climax, it’s a disappointment. The novel does have a surprising trick up its sleeve for the principal girl of the story, IRS agent Harriet Horner, and it’s not of the usual Gardner “identity switch” predictability. (For those of you who enjoy these gags, don’t fret: there are still a few awaiting you.)

And where, in all this, is our titular villain character? He’s mentioned plenty of times, but he’s a no-show until Bond jets to South Carolina (and gets to watch Sean Connery in The Untouchables on the in-flight movie—an overly forced in-joke). When Scorpius does have his obligatory dinner conversation with Bond, he turns out to be an unfocused villain who can’t explain exactly what he hopes to achieve with his schemes. The false wedding he forces on Bond and his gal-pal Harriet Horner is an especially loopy move that has no effect on the plot. Scorpius’s supposedly hypnotic power over people (but not, of course, over a strong-willed man like Bond) a la Charles Manson also isn’t convincing for a character who makes so few appearances.

The most effective character is Bond’s ally, Pearly Pearlham. Gardner’s novels often lack the important male friendships that Ian Fleming made such an integral part of his books, but Pearlham is a step in the right direction. His reasons for aiding Bond against Scorpius make him an unusual and suspicious partner. Bond’s constant doubts about Pearly’s and Harriet’s allegiances, however, gets wearisome. It feels as if the author, aware of the flagging suspense in the middle of the book, tossed in these passages to artificially heighten the tension.

The violence rises to a more graphic level than in Gardner’s previous Bonds, almost as if anticipating the gorier dispatches in Licence to Kill. The carnage left behind in the Puttenham clinic is especially ripe, even if the writing doesn’t make it clear what exactly happened. Bond also gives the villain a nasty, visceral send-off. If only Valdimir Scorpius and his namesake book were worthy of such a grand exit.

Worse books would follow, but Scorpius marks the end of John Gardner’s honeymoon in Bond-land.

The Last Time We Saw Tarzan: Tarzan and the Lost City

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:57:00 +0000

Tarzan and the Lost City (1998)
Directed by Carl Schenkel. Starring Casper Van Dien, Jane March, Steven Waddington.

We haven’t gotten a live-action theatrical Tarzan movie since 1998. As of a few days ago, hopes for one in the near future died when Warner Bros. halted development on a David Yates-directed project that sounded like it had promise. We will see the Lord of the Jungle back on the big screen eventually, but right now if we want to fall back on the last time it happened, we have to go to this: Tarzan and the Lost City, a mid-budget release that vanished quickly from theaters in April 1998 with a meager take and left little evidence of its existence behind. I was already an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan and well read in Tarzan’s adventures, and even I skipped out seeing this theatrically in 1998.

Did the film deserve better? As much as I’d love to answer “yes” and tell you it’s a minor-classic awaiting a cult following, Tarzan and the Lost City is a dull and cheap-looking affair. It stays true to Burroughs’s spirit most of the time, but when it makes a crazy swing into the supernatural to adhere closer to the Indiana Jones formula, it loses even the goodwill it gets from trying. It was pretty thin goodwill to begin with.

The set-up is a decent one, similar to the “crime story in the jungle” plots that Sy Weintraub used in his “New Look Tarzan” films of the 1960s, like Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure. In 1913, a group of vicious European treasure hunters and mercenaries (whom the opening text crawl calls “bounty hunters” despite doing nothing resembling bounty hunting) raid African villages and tombs to find relics that will point the way to the hidden city of Opar, the “First Civilization.” Tarzan (Casper Van Dien), who has retired to England to take up his peerage as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, and marry the lovely Jane Porter (Jane March), comes back to his birth land to stop the oppression of the natives at the cruel hands of the mercenary leader, Nigel Ravens (Steven Waddington, best known for his role in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans). Jane, for reasons unclear, follows her betrothed to Africa and ends up a captive among Ravens’ men, putting Tarzan in the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs situation of chasing down the villains who kidnapped his love.

On the surface, there is a lot of genuine ERB to go around here. Articulate Tarzan? Check. Vanished civilization in the wilds? Check. Sleazy European villain who nabs Jane? Check. Early twentieth-century setting? Check. Tarzan communicating with animals? Check. Cross-dressing chimpanzee comic relief? Well… that seems more in line with a Johnny Weissmuller film, but what they hey: Check.

But Tarzan and the Lost City looks more like a TV movie or a straight to video flick than a Burroughs epic. A low budget is not necessarily an impediment to a Tarzan movie; Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure and Tarzan the Magnificent were executed on skimpy budgets, but excelled at giving a hard edge to the Ape Man’s adventures that let audiences feel the danger, and also featured strong characterizations with casts to back them up. But director Carl Schenkel, who doesn’t have much notable on his resume except the Denzel Washington movie The Mighty Quinn, handles his Tarzan film with such breezy carelessness that it feels inconsequential and tailor-made for commercial breaks. Even though it was shot on location in South Africa, it appears like most of it was done in a studio arboretum.

Lead actor Casper Van Dien fits the TV mold: his Tarzan feels like he wandered in from a daytime soap opera like One Life to Live, where Van Dien once had a recurring role. In the late 1990s Van Dien still had potential to become a star from his leading role in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. But he was cast in that movie explicitly because of his wooden TV-movie/Beverly Hills 90210 blandness, part of Verhoeven’s bizarre and at the time misunderstood subversion of Heinlein’s novel. Plunk Casper Van Dien down in a serious adventure movie and his limitations appear like red wine spilled on white carpet. He’s still getting work and I’m happy for the guy, but he never had big-screen leading man potential.

From the perspective of ERB fandom, which most viewers won’t share but which I will go into anyway because that’s why I watched this at all, the movie is deeply confused. The opening text crawl establishes the backstory from the novel Tarzan of the Apes. But Jane is presented as from Suffolk (“My roots will always be in England.”) instead of Baltimore, something the Disney animated movie the next year also did, and it seems she has never gone to Africa before. This isn’t explicit, but her reactions to the continent and her obliviousness to Tarzan’s cabin where his parents lived and where he taught himself to read certainly make it seem that she and John Clayton met after he came back from Africa. Jane and Tarzan act like a couple who have just met, despite their engagement in England, which further muddles exactly where in the Tarzan legacy this is supposed to take place. Of course, I can blame the distance between the two as just poor chemistry between Casper Van Dien and Jane March.

For viewers without the ERB background, the relationship between Jane and Tarzan will still seem a touch bewildering. When Tarzan tells his fiancée that he must return to Africa and she threatens to cancel the wedding if he does, the script takes it for granted that people already have an attachment to these specific versions of the characters and their deep love. It feels like a sequel to a movie made two years ago that nobody saw. Yet when the two meet up again in Africa, the film plays it like a new romance where they get to meet-cute and learn about each other. Huh? It would have worked better to throw out the opening in England and refashion the script as a new telling of how Tarzan and Jane Porter met. The Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) took that approach, and it worked.

Jane March, a former fashion model who also flirted with stardom in the 1990s after her appearance in The Lover, is one of the better Janes to appear on screen, which makes the fizzle between her and Van Dien frustrating. March is civilized, poised, and beautiful, and looks exactly the way I think Jane Porter should. She can get tough and handle a gun, but never barges into the cliché of the modern action heroine. March would have made a wonderful Jane in a better movie. One of the mercenaries agrees when he exclaims, “What a woman!”

The blatant fantasy elements are where the shaky movie totally collapses. Burroughs often put science-fiction spice into his Tarzan novels: miniature “ant men,” a race of humanoids with monkey tails, talking apes that wear jewelry, a trip to the Earth’s core, and prehistoric beasts. Movie adaptations usually ignore these. But outright magic has no place in a Tarzan story, and when Tarzan and the Lost City starts to layer it on thick the movie goes from bad to outright embarrassing. There is a slight hint of the supernatural at the opening, when Tarzan hears the “call” of Numa the Lion after Ravens’ men torch a village. But when the village shaman Mugambi turns himself into a swarm of bees, the lurch toward the impossible is too much to take. At the city of Opar, where Mugambi transforms into a goofy CGI giant cobra, a troop of magical warriors spring up from bones, and the villain suffers a supernatural comeuppance from the very object for which he lusted, it becomes clear the filmmakers only used Tarzan as a conduit to create an Indiana Jones imitation. The bad CGI of the late ‘90s was a spectacularly horrid species—watch Mortal Kombat: Annihilation for minute-by-minute examples if you dare—and the execrable quality of the VFX here adds to the insult of it turning up in the first place. The movie wasn’t exactly in “Cruise Elroy” mode before the finale, but I could think of few worse ways of wrapping up a Tarzan movie.

The Indiana Jones comparison works forward in time as well: the climax in Opar has striking similarities, in plot and visuals, to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This is a rare case where Crystal Skull comes up better in a comparison. I won’t accuse Lucas and Spielberg of copying Tarzan and the Lost City, since I’m sure they never saw it. (In fact, I think Lucas stopped watching other movies sometime around 1984.)

The movie gets marginally better in the scenes centered on its villains. Except for Nigel Ravens, none of the mercenaries have much character on the page, but the ensemble of actors gives them tics that make them memorable and far more enjoyable to watch than Van Dien’s Tarzan. Waddington plays well in the colonial marauder role that meshes with Burroughs’s style of villain. Waddington’s best baddie moment is when he purposely mistranslates something a native guide says to try to trick one of his racist men into shooting the poor guy. That’s a nice “hateable” moment, and the right kind of pettiness for this type of villain.

A few of the action scenes verge on getting interesting. The mercenaries pursuing Jane right up to the edge of a gigantic chasm is one of the brief moments where the location shooting shines through. Tarzan gets to pull one supremely badass move, when he intercepts a snake strike aimed at Jane. But the follow-through on this is awful: instead of Tarzan finding an ingenious jungle-craft way of stopping the venom in his veins, he slumps over unconscious until the village shaman to would have had to write a real way out this!

If it’s a consolation—and most likely it isn’t—Tarzan and the Lost City is a superior jungle adventure than Congo three years before.

That Company That Time Will Never Forget: A Visit to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Incorporated

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:21:00 +0000

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

In the waning days of March 2013, I made a trip I should’ve taken years before. I’ve lived in Los Angeles since I was four, became a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs in my teens, but never thought about taking the jaunt on the I-405 into the Valley to visit the office of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. I knew the office was there; that part of the Valley didn’t get the name “Tarzana” by accident. But it wasn’t until after working for three years writing numerous articles about Burroughs’s books and movies based on them that I realized the opportunity in plain sight—actually, over the hill. I looked up the company’s website, found a phone number, and gave the office a call, wondering what might come of it. A pleasant-sounding woman answered the phone, and after I provided her only a sentence of explanation (ERB fan, live in L.A., would like to write something about him for an online magazine) she cheerfully told me to call the president of the company, James J. Sullos Jr., and gave me his cell phone number. Another call later—and a half-hour of quality fan talk with Mr. Sullos–I had an appointment to come out to the offices and have lunch with him and Cathy Wilbanks, the company archivist and executive assistant.

What follows is a brief record of that delayed visit. I would love to present myself to you as ERB often did, a fictional version of Ryan Harvey who discovered this account in a bottle that washed ashore from Caspak, or communicated via Gridley Wave from Helium on Mars. But no, it was just me, a humble fan who took some notes and stared in awe at… well, I’ll get to that.

Fifty-three years have passed since the death of the man who created Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and the inverse world of Pellucidar. The brain that launched millions of dreams in readers all over the world stopped abruptly on the morning of 19 March 1950, as Burroughs was sitting in bed, looking over the Sunday comics section. All Burroughs fans like to think he was reading the Tarzan strip at the time.

“Fifty-two years ago an Army doctor gave me six months to live, and I’ll bet the goddamn old drunk has been dead for twenty years,” Burroughs wrote in a letter to a military buddy in 1948. But could the grand old progenitor of pulp literature have foreseen that even more time than that would pass after his death and the company he started to oversee his creations would still be going—and in the same building where he started it?

The front of the building and the Memorial Tree

Burroughs was one of the first authors to incorporate himself. On 26 March 1923—exactly ninety years and one day before I made my visit—he formed Edgar Rice Burroughs, Incorporated. Although Burroughs had a history of failed business ventures before he discovered his talent as a dreamer on paper, he still took a businessman’s approach to his new career. This is an unexpected combination: we tend to think pure creativity should be divorced from the mundane concerns of handling lucre, but ERB was a man who could do both without one staining the other. If it were only money that Burroughs cared about, ERB Inc. wouldn’t still be sitting where it is today, and I doubt I would have much to write about the man or his work.

ERB Inc. is unusual in the fiction writing landscape. Most late, great authors leave behind a birthplace or some other old residence for fans to remember them, while the handling of their work passes to a separate company, agency, or family member. But Burroughs left behind his own business that continues in the same spot it always has, creating a rare continuity of past and present. The corporation still belongs to his descendants, and in a world where “corporation” has come to stand for soullessness and avarice, ERB Inc. is an amicable and joyful island that celebrates the imagination and skill of its founder. The staff still must to deal with displeasures of the business world, such as copyright infringement (Tarzan attracts plenty of this), but the atmosphere here is one that no writer could deny bursts with the electricity of creativity.

Burroughs established the company office in 1927 on one of the lots he owned in what was then Reseda. A visitor might imagine the charming house started life as a private home and then was converted to commercial use, but from its inception this place has always held ERB Inc. In the year the company moved to its permanent location, Ventura Blvd. was still an unpaved road with gravel shoulders, and Burroughs could ride a horse to work from his nearby Tarzana Ranch. Now the office is a half-hour drive up the snarled 405 freeway, where traffic construction is a daily exercise. But if the current environment is nothing Burroughs would recognize, his company remains much as he left it.

Archivist Cathy Wilbanks shows off the artwork of Zdnek Burian

Looking at the office from across the busy six-lane swath of Ventura Blvd., it looks like the Residential Home That Time Forgot. The one-story Spanish-style building hides behind a vine-covered wall and a lush garden with a large mulberry tree at the center. To one side sits an auto-repair shop and a lounge with an orange traffic horse sign beckoning people to kick the habit with electronic cigarettes. On the other side lies a strip of businesses including two alternative medicine practices, a personal training center, and the Valley’s most common and ephemeral of commercial endeavors, the nail salon. On the other side of the street, in Tarzana Square, is the first Blockbuster Video I had seen in a year. It is likely the next business to go extinct while ERB, Inc. continues.

Few people who enter the strip mall parking lot of Tarzana Square will know that this section of the San Fernando Valley was named after Tarzan, or that across the street is the office of Tarzan’s creator, where a staff of five handles the many off-shoots of the fiction empire he built (such as the revamped company website). Maybe they know that the hair salon where Britney Spears whacked off her locks in a moment of cultural irrelevance is on this block. One local business knows its roots: a pleasant restaurant called the Greystoke Grill, where a rug with Christopher Lambert in his Ape Man pose welcomes you as you step inside. Not the Tarzan actor I would have picked, but maybe it was the easiest color image to find.

When I walked up to front door of ERB Inc., passing under a low porch where I could imagine Burroughs on a deck chair sipping a cool drink and discussing the latest MGM Tarzan offering with his secretary and business manager, Ralph Rothmund, I was struck with conflicting emotions: was I passing into the sanctuary of a great artist, or approaching a private home? Also in the back of my mind: Burroughs’s ashes are buried beneath the mulberry tree in the center of the lush front yard (although at the time of his death, there was a walnut tree there instead).

Early ERB editions in Jim Sullos’s office

Stepping inside the office will give any pulp lover a moment of sensory overload that not even the biggest convention hall could beat. Original paintings from dust jackets, book interiors, magazine covers, comic strips, comic books, and movie posters hang on any available space. Where there are no illustrations, there are bookshelves packed with the spines of Burroughs’s gargantuan output, reproduced in hundreds of versions from across the globe. On the desks stand statues and other pieces of three-dimensional artwork celebrating the Lord of the Jungle and the denizens of Barsoom. A towering Thark armed for battle against the Warhoons guards the desk of the archivist in the center room. And that desk: it’s an original, one that Burroughs himself worked on.

During the hours I was in the office, I never quite adapted to the amount of information coming from every inch of wall or table space. (Me: “Look! There’s the dictionary stand from ERB’s Pocatello, Idaho store [a stationery store he ran in 1898]!” Jim Sullos: “Yes, and the dictionary on it is opened to the entry on ‘Tarzan.’”)

The office could double as an art gallery; nowhere else have I come across so many originals from the great illustrators of fantasy. ERB’s work inspired some of the finest artwork in the history of genre literature, something any fan knows just from glancing at paperback covers. But it never hit me so powerfully as in these rooms, where numerous originals decorate every space not filled with the writing that inspired them. The first edition cover paintings for The Moon Maid and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar hang beside each other behind Jim Sullos’s desk. The Frank Frazetta originals include the covers for Lost on Venus and the astonishing Out of Time’s Abyss (also used for Land of Terror), which were given to ERB Inc. by Donald Wollheim of Ace Books. (Me: “Hey, is that the original J. Allen St. John painting for the cover of The Moon Maid?” Jim Sullos: “Yes, it is.” Me: “Huh.” I don’t know what else I could have said about that.)

Original J. Allen St. John artwork

The entrance room has illustrations from Czech artist Zdenek Burian. Burian is not as well-known an ERB artist as Frazetta, St. John, or Whelan, but he did remarkable work. (See this page for the examples hanging on the walls of the front office.) The logo for ERB Inc., a Roy Krenkel painting of Tarzan astride the golden lion Jad-bal-ja, also hangs in the front room. Danton Burroughs, ERB’s grandson and former president of the company, wrote that Krenkel was a “key factor in the 1960s revival of my grandfather’s writings,” and it is appropriate to have this image headline the company ERB founded.

Perhaps the final kicker in the artwork department: an original N. C. Wyeth painting used for The Return of Tarzan when it first appeared in Blue Book.

Of course, books are everywhere. The front room has the familiar paperbacks from my generation of Tarzan readers, and Cathy Wilbanks and I agreed that the Ballantine 1970s editions of the Tarzan novels, the ones with the black spines and borders, many with spectacular Neal Adams illustrations, are our personal favorites. I locate the edition of The Land That Time Forgot that was the first Burroughs book I bought with my own money. Later, I found the paperback edition of Tarzan of the Apes that sealed the deal for me as a Burroughs Bibliophile.

Jim Sullos’s office, the largest of the rooms, contains the oldest books, many of them first editions from when ERB Inc. was also a publisher. I have seen and held many elder editions of Mr. Burroughs’s books, but rarely do they have what these have: the dust jackets. Cathy described the difficulty in getting early hardback editions with the dust jackets. “Back then, people just thought of them as wrapping paper and tossed them out right after they bought the book. They had no idea the dust jacket could one day triple the value of the book.” This makes me feel stronger about the 1924 copy of The Gods of Mars that I own, which has a dust jacket in horrible condition… but it does have the dust jacket!

Dictionary stand from ERB’s 1898 stationery store

Seated at a table in Mr. Sullos’s office, talking to him and Cathy, felt like chatting with Edgar Rice Burroughs enthusiasts. There was no sense of awkwardness that I was merely a fan swinging past a corporate office. Burroughs is a living presence in that room, and not just because the walls are lined with editions of every book he wrote, or that hanging on the walls are original J. Allen St. John and Frank Frazetta paintings. It simply feels that the people who work here expect Ed to walk through the back door, straw Panama hat on his head and dust from the horse ride on his boots, and genially ask how they’re all doing. Although the employees today never knew Edgar Rice Burroughs when he was alive, they would no doubt find it easy to talk to him as if they were lifetime friends. I’m sure Ed would be pleased to discover his old writing desk still waiting for him.

Burroughs’s descendants still own the company, and even though no family member was in the office the day I was visiting, the sensation of family is powerful. But there is also a touch of tragedy. Danton Burroughs, ERB’s grandson by his son Jack, served as president of the company for many years, but he died abruptly from heart failure in 2008 at age sixty-three—only a day after a fire at his home destroyed a large amount of family memorabilia. Danton’s death came at a time of major change in the company: that very day he was to be named Chairman of ERB Inc., with Jim Sullos moving into the role of president. “We expected at least ten more years with him,” Jim told me, also remarking that the stress of the fire probably contributed to Danton’s death: he was collector and deeply attached to his grandfather’s legacy. Cathy added that even five years later, they miss him every day.

As we talked, the conversation turned to Burroughs’s appeal that continues to stretch across the generations. Jim pointed out that there is so much happening in his books (he picked Son of Tarzan as a good example—that is a busy book), so many ideas, that readers can’t help but tumble into this creative tsunami. But where did these ideas come from? How did this man, who showed no inclination toward creativity before penning A Princess of Mars, become, in the words of Ray Bradbury displayed on the company website, “The most important author of the twentieth century”?

Nobody, not even Burroughs if he walked into the room to join us like I expected, could answer that. But I explained to Jim and Cathy what personally draws me to Burroughs today: His writing always gives readers something to think about beyond the basic plot and action. This is why I find ERB such a fascinating author to write about; my mind starts clicking furiously as his action-packed plots roar along. You rarely find this quality in thrillers of any stripe today, which are as disposable as candy wrappers after you’ve eaten your sugary treat. Or, dust jackets to folks in the 1920s.

I learned new information from talking to Jim and Cathy, such as that it was Emma, Burroughs’s first wife, who forced him to bring Jane Porter back to life after Burroughs killed her off in Tarzan the Untamed. (The author found a way around that later: he simply ignored Jane for a whole stretch of books.) There are also various movie projects kicking around: a complete screenplay adaptation of The Outlaw of Torn has toured Hollywood. Unfortunately, the word right now is that the Ridley Scott Robin Hood has soured the studios on medieval adventure. I also discovered that the new Tarzan books series from Andy Briggs has finally found a U.S. publisher a few years after the first U.K. publication. Fantastic: I’ve purchased them all now and you can expect to hear more about them soon.

Tarzana Ranch as it looked when Burroughs first lived there

The talk eventually turned, of course, to the recent John Carter movie. Disney has a few years left to decide whether to renew the rights or let them revert back to the family. Jim asked me straight if I thought The Gods of Mars will happen, and I wished I could have answered with greater hope. After reading John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood, the recent book detailing how Disney fumbled the film, it is difficult to stay optimistic about future Mars movies. But there is some positive news about the reception of John Carter. Cathy told me that her thirteen-year-old daughter loved John Carter when she saw it in a packed theater with fans for a special December screening. Yes, these are the young people who need to get Burroughs into their blood!

There was more to see outside the office. After lunch, Jim gave me a short tour of the land ERB once owned and the Tarzana Ranch, the home Burroughs bought in 1919. It was originally built by Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and a key figure in the Owens Valley Water Scandal. When Burroughs purchased the 4,500-square-foot house, he also bought 550 acres around it, the lots that would become Tarzana, CA when an independent post office opened there 1930. To the west of the ranch house hill sits the El Caballero Country Club, another Burroughs-founded business, although like most of the land here, it is no longer in the hands of the Burroughs family. We couldn’t approach close to either the house or the country club, but the view from Tarzana Blvd. up to the hilltop, surrounded with exotic trees imported from around the world, has not completely forgotten the time when this was a solitary paradise, and the paved parking lot behind ERB Inc. was a dirt space where Ed could tether his horse.

I could have stayed for days inside the office searching every corner and pulling out priceless pieces of the legacy of Mr. Burroughs; my few hours there felt like running through the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Marathon speed, seeing flashes of greatness. In fact, I may have excused myself sooner than I needed to, because how long until I become a nuisance who wanted to take down and look at every first edition on the shelves in Jim Sullos’s office? This was the closest I have ever felt to a favorite author, even ones whom I have met in person: the vast world of ERB in compressed form surrounded me, in the same rooms where he walked and worked.

I drove back home, and before doing anything else, I sat down on my couch and started re-reading Tarzan of the Apes. Great book.

New Story Available: “The Sorrowless Thief” at Black Gate

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:55:00 +0000

I know some folks have waited to get a new Ahn-Tarqa story—believe me, I want you to have them—and here is the next one: “The Sorrowless Thief” is free to read at Black Gate’s online fiction.

“The Sorrowless Thief” is actually the first Ahn-Tarqa story I completed, so this is where I originally discovered the Sorrow and the Shapers and the concept of the “Devil Claws.” I revised the story later to match it better with the evolving series, but the core has always remained the same.

This was also my first paying fiction sale, so it was quite the event. John O’Neill purchased it for Black Gate. The backlog at the magazine meant that many more sales and publications have come along since, including my first pro sale with “An Acolyte of Black Spires.” I am glad to at last have the original Ahn-Tarqa tale available, and I am still proud of five years after I completed it.

Here is the sample:

At the time I had lost interest even in the meager profession of begging. I gave up my alms bowl and crawled into a smoke pit in the most dismal part of Ahn-Tarqa’s most dismal city.

I do not know how many days I droned away on a cot in a sweltering common room filled with narcotic smoke before I heard that voice. Its tone spoke sharp and clear from a place outside drugged dreams. I propped myself onto an elbow so I could listen to it.

The voice belonged to a tall man perched over the dreamer in the cot behind mine. The speaker was pestering the dreamer with questions. “You’re a fool to bother,” I muttered.

My head swam from the smoke, but I could see the man turn to look at me. “I’ve heard that sometimes the best knowledge in the city comes from men in smoke pits.”

“Sometimes. But this near to the Month of the Moon we’re all close to dead. You’re better off pestering the sots drowning themselves in a tavern.”

“Taverns are filled with other thieves,” he answered. “I don’t want to make competition. Not with the haul I plan to make.”

Read the whole story here.

Then get more Ahn-Tarqa with “Farewell to Tyrn”

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 1: The Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:22:00 +0000

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)
Directed by Robert Day. Starring Mike Henry, David Opatoshu, Nancy Kovack, Don Megowan.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold wastes no time telling viewers of the mid-1960s that this was not going to be their grandfather’s Tarzan. Or their father’s either. With swinging ‘60s big band jazz backed with bongos playing over a Warholian montage of pop art colors projecting scenes from the movie, it’s impossible not to think JAMES BOND! JAMES BOND! from the moment the opening titles start.

No doubt that was producer Sy Weintraub’s intention with this 1966 outing for Tarzan, the first of a trio starring Mike Henry. The credits sequence is a dead-on imitation of the style of Maurice Binder for Dr. No. After the director’s credit fades, the film hops into a Goldfinger-inspired sweep over a tropical resort city, concluding on a helicopter taking off from a luxury yacht in the harbor. Then, in another scene swiped from Dr. No, assassins shoot a limo driver outside the airport, and an imposter chauffeur awaits the arrival of our handsome hero in his impeccable suit and tie. Cue city montage with more swinging’ Latin big band rhythms! Smash into an action scene where a sunglass-wearing sniper tries to pick off our sharply dressed hero in an empty bullring. The crafty Ape Man turns the tables on the gunman and kills him by dropping a giant Coke Bottle advertising prop onto him. Ah, good times.

Sy Weintraub shows with this opening that he has taken the “New Look” Tarzan he introduced in 1959 in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure one step further to imitate the stratospheric popularity of spy cinema of the decade. Tarzan not only speaks in complete sentences, but he is comfortable donning civilizations’ trappings to travel the world to bring savage ape justice to turtleneck-wearing supervillains who adore exploding watches.

The temptation to go this direction must have been hard to resist: by the start of 1966, Bond-mania was approaching its delirious apex; Thunderball came out in December 1965 and was on its way to becoming one of the highest-grossing movies in history. Bandwagon films are often poor quality imitations, but Sy Weintraub already had a famous character available who could cut a dashing a dangerous figure to put at the center of his attempt to grab some Bond cash. It turned out well, better than you might initially think a “Tarzan goes ’60 spy” film would. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, currently available as a manufacture-on-demand DVD from Warner Archive, lacks the excellent script, performances, and drama of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, but it delivers in the breezy fun department.

Giving Tarzan a 007 makeover is not the betrayal of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s character that it may sound like on the surface. It’s surprising how well the tastes in 1960s adventure merged with an accurate version of the literary Tarzan of the ‘teens and ‘20s. Tarzan was familiar with civilization at the end of the novel Tarzan of the Apes, and was having globetrotting adventures in the next book, The Return of Tarzan. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold does not force the Ape Man to remain in a suit and tie long past the opening scenes: when he sets out to track the missing child Ramel (Manuel Padilla Jr.), whom the villain Augustus Vinero (David Opatoshu) is using the locate the Valley of Tucumai and its corridors stuffed with golden loot, Tarzan sheds the trappings of the city in exchange for a knife, a rope, a loincloth, and some animal sidekicks. The James Bond vibe continues, but it rests with the bad guys and the groovy soundtrack (composed by Van Alexander) from then on.

Finding an excuse to get Tarzan (never referred to as John Clayton in the movie) to Mexico is a bit wobbly, but once the villains kidnap the boy Ramel and kill Tarzan’s friend Ruiz (Frank Brandstetter), the movie has a straight line to walk the rest of the way. To make Mexico a more comfortable setting for Tarzan, Ruiz’s ranch provides a few imported African animals that would otherwise have no business wandering around Central America: “Major,” a lion, and “Dinky,” a chimpanzee, both of whom make up Tarzan’s crack squadron. A local beast, the jaguar “Bianco” (“Xima” in the novelization) serves as Tarzan’s advanced scout, since the big cat knows Ramel’s scent. Tarzan and his animal entourage enter the jungle on the trail of the kidnapped boy, while Vinero moves a small army, complete with an M3 Stuart light tank and a Bell 47 helicopter, toward the hidden valley. Tarzan goes up against Vinero’s modern military machines and acquits himself in super Ape Man style. He even gets to command the tank in the showdown in Tucumai.

This is the first of the three Tarzan films shot back-to-back in 1965 with Mike Henry in the title role. Henry was a linebacker for the Steelers and the Rams before his movie career, which also included parts in The Green Berets, The Longest Yard, and Smokey and the Bandit. He’s nothing much to shout about in the acting department—far flatter and more wooden than Gordon Scott—but he’s one of the best physical matches for Tarzan in the character’s silver screen history: dark haired, handsome, with the lean physique that makes him appear capable of the acrobatic feats of the Lord of the Jungle. Henry bears a resemblance to Sean Connery, which probably contributed to him getting cast in the first place. In the city-based scenes during the opening, Henry is dressed in a tropical suit that’s an almost perfect match to Sean Connery’s wardrobe in Jamaica in Dr. No. Mike Henry never does anything memorable with his dialogue scenes, although he has decent chemistry with the amateurish performance of young Manuel Padilla; but this is the rare Tarzan actor who looks at home both in the rainforest and in well-tailored suits. Burroughs would have approved.

Augustus Vinero is an international villain in the Ian Fleming-mold: Finely coiffed with a trimmed beard, dressed in sharp blazers over turtlenecks, headquartered inside an Old World mansion, and accompanied by a muscular henchman (Don Megowan as “Mr. Train”). In his first appearance, Vinero executes an old standby from the supervillain playbook and kills one of his hired hands for insubordination with an elaborate gimmick: in this case, an exploding cigarette trick. (The huge blast also takes out all of Vinero’s swank study, but perhaps he was planning to remodel.) Vinero also likes sending exploding watches to people who displease him, and hangs a nitro-laced necklace off the neck of his mistress, Sophia Renault (Nancy Kovack). Actor David Opatoshu has the right suave look for Vinero, although never gets him near the level of menace of classic Bond villain.

The idea of having Nancy Kovack, one of the stars of Jason and the Argonauts, as the heroine in a Tarzan film is spectacular. Kovack plays Sophia Renault, Vinero’s mistress, a part she got cast in at the last moment when Sharon Tate was unavailable. Unfortunately, the film underuses Kovack and she does little aside from run into Tarzan in the jungle, where he detaches the nitroglycerin necklace from around her neck, and then accompany the Ape Man to Tucumai where she sits out the finale doing… I have no idea. She simply vanishes until the coda. There also seems to be a scene missing where she decides to abandon Vinero; the movie has her receiving the explosive necklace from him in one scene, and then a few minutes later she’s running free in the middle of the jungle, begging for help. (Once again, there’s no mention of Tarzan’s wife Jane Porter, but Tarzan and Sophia never get father than bonding over exploding jewelry anyway.)

The film’s momentum slows down once the story reaches the valley of the title. The residents of Tucumai are staunch pacifists, leading to overlong scenes of Tarzan telling them they have to resist Vinero and his forces when they arrives, followed by the leader of Tucumai, the elderly Manco, insisting that they have no need of such barbarous actions, etc. But in an odd wrap-up, the people of Tucumai learn the moral lesson that sometimes violence is a good thing! Manco even selects a sadistic, if perfectly ironic, way of dealing with the greedy Vinero when the criminal enters the treasure chamber of the great pyramid. Oh well, if these peaceful folks didn’t get on board the violence train for at least a few stops, the movie would have had no action for the ending.

(Manco is played by Francisco Riqueiro, but obviously dubbed by Paul “Ghost Host” Frees. Not that I have a problem with this; Paul Frees is welcome to dub anything he chooses.)

The most overt 007 reference in the film comes during an action sequence where Tarzan downs a helicopter using jerry-rigged bolo-grenades. After the explosion, Tarzan barks into Vinero’s radio: “One of your aircraft is missing.” Thanks, From Russia With Love! And I believe Bond said that after, uhm, downing a helicopter. However, there’s at least one sequence where it appears that Tarzan and the Valley of Gold was the victim of theft: the action set-piece where Tarzan hunts down Vinero’s men inside a natural cave, picking them off with stealth attacks, looks exactly like the Afghan cave fight from Rambo III.

Unfortunately, the helicopter attack shows the relative poverty of the film’s budget; the craft can’t explode on screen since that would require either blowing up a real helicopter or having to mock-up a model, so instead the craft comes to rest behind a bush and then explodes, inexpensively out of sight of the camera. Some of the other action scenes suffer from the low budget; Tarzan’s stand-off with Mr. Train in the climax is weakly choreographed and sometimes relies on jerky under-cranked footage.

Sy Weintraub’s “New Look” Tarzan movies depended on location shooting to add realism and flavor. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold was filmed entirely in Mexico, shooting around Mexico City, Acapulco, Chapultepec Castle (Vinero’s headquarters), and most impressively Teotihuacan. The movie concludes in a classic “Lost Civilization” that will seem to contemporary viewers as Indiana Jones territory. But it comes straight from Burroughs’s typewriter: Tarzan ran into lost cities over and over again. The Valley of Tucumai was photographed at Teotihuacan, the astonishing Mesoamerican ruins thirty miles outside of Mexico City. The expansive physical location helps to offset the narrow budget that crops up elsewhere.

The one place where Tarzan and the Valley of Gold excels over Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure is in the animal action. The chimpanzee “Dinky” and the lion “Major” (inspired by Jab-Bal-Ja from the novel Tarzan and the Golden Lion) are continual presences, interacting easily with the humans. The leopard Bianco appears extensively in the first third of the movie as well. Few Tarzan films have done such a fine job of showing the Ape Man’s ease with jungle creatures as this one, and the training of the beasts results in astonishingly fluid work with the actors. (Unfortunately, Mike Henry had a nasty encounter with the chimpanzee while filming his second movie, Tarzan and the Great River, causing a serious injury that later led him to sue the producers for unsafe working conditions. This resulted in Ron Ely getting cast for the subsequent television series.)

English Director Robert Day (who, as of this writing, is still with us at age ninety) already had experience with Tarzan: he directed Gordon Scott in his last film, Tarzan the Magnificent, and the second of the two films starring Jock Mahoney, Tarzan’s Three Challenges. He directs with a sure hand for the adventure material, although otherwise feels invisible; the animal trainers probably had as much a say on the film as he did. Robert Day did one more Tarzan film after this, Tarzan and the Great River.

The Warner Archive MOD DVD presents the film in its original 2.4:1 Panavision, enhanced for widescreen televisions, with a decent 1.0 mono soundtrack. The print of the film contains damage and some murky colors in a number of scenes, particularly those in Tucumai (although this may be a source issue) but is always watchable. There’s even a bonus feature, the first I’ve seen on a Warner Archive disc: the original trailer.

This is only Part 1 of my look at Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. The topic merits a second installment because of the novelization released to tie-in with the film. Most novelizations aren’t worth discussion, but this one was written by a fellow named Fritz Leiber. Anything with Leiber’s name is worth discussing.

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo (1977)

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:24:00 +0000

The White Buffalo (1977)
Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Starring Charles Bronson, Jack Warden, Will Sampson, Clint Walker, Slim Pickens, Stuart Whitman, Kim Novak.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Warner Archive has so far received all the attention in my recent veer into the world of the manufacture-on-demand DVD, a dazzling universe where the big studios serve the niche movie lovers with titles that would otherwise only surface in North America on bootlegs swiped off Japanese laserdiscs. (Yeah, you own a couple of those.) Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Bermuda Depths, and The Last Dinosaur all come from Warner Brothers’ MOD division. But two other studios have their own extensive MOD programs: MGM Limited Edition Collection and Universal Vault. It’s through MGM that we get the strange 1977 combo of Western and monster movie called The White Buffalo.

My first experience with The White Buffalo, aside from seeing ads on local television stations when it ran during “Charles Bronson Tough Guy Week”, was on an awful first-generation VHS tape I watched during college as part of an independent study of the 1970s Western. The movie was drab and a cruel disappointment considering how exciting the plot description sounded: “Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse team up to hunt down a giant, possibly supernatural, rampaging white buffalo.” How could such a crunchy high-concept result in such a bland film?

Blame “VHS goggles,” which turned the movie’s photography into mulch. The difference in The White Buffalo experience between VHS and DVD is substantial. Although the MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD is rough compared to today’s Blu-rays, it is about as good as the picture could look in standard definition without undergoing hefty restoration. The movie isn’t a lost classic, but it wins in the realm of atmosphere: eerie and bleak. The artifice of the limited budget, which puts most the nighttime and snowbound scenes against the Buffalo on obvious interior sets, contributes to the dream-like atmosphere. That may be an accident of filming, but it’s a positive creative accident. The White Buffalo never succeeds as an action thriller, but it remains a fascinating piece of odd Western cinema of the 1970s, a decade filled with plenty of oddness for the grand ol’ American genre. The current popularity of the Weird Western and steampunk subgenres gives the movie a freshness that moves it beyond being only a “Manifest Destiny” take on Jaws.

In fairness to screenwriter Richard Sale, his novel The White Buffalo was first published in 1975, the same year Jaws scared people out of the water, so the Spielberg film had no effect on his writing the book. Perhaps Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws reached him, but likely Sale drew from the same literary well as Benchley, Moby Dick. Obsessed men hunt a giant white creature… Moby Dick, there you go. (By the way, I read Sale’s novel a few years ago and found it extremely disappointing and remember little about it.)

But if Richard Sale wasn’t jonesing to Jaws, there can be no doubt that the reason producer Dino de Laurentiis selected Sale’s novel for a movie adaptation was because of its similarities with what was then the highest-grossing film in history. De Laurentiis dipped into the Jaws well a second time during the summer of ‘77 with the infamous Orca, a movie that is actually better than you’ve heard it is thanks to the presence of Richard Harris.

Its cinematic influences aside, The White Buffalo does manage to forge its own identity. Part of it is the presence of Charles Bronson, a genre unto himself. The rest comes from the weird tone and style, which makes it difficult to think that the film could have managed to strike a chord with any general audience when it was released. It’s unfortunate that pure mood and pure Bronson don’t add up to a film as good as its premise.

Bronson plays Wild Bill Hickok on the downslope of his career, his eyesight failing behind tinted glasses. It’s 1874, and Hickok is coming back from a failed stage career in New York with Buffalo Bill. Traveling under the name “Mr. James Otis” to avoid vengeance seekers (it doesn’t work—he gets in a shootout at the first town he stops in), Hickok is pursuing a nightmare vision of a white buffalo that torments him to the edge of madness. The film never offers an explanation for these visions; they only prod Hickok out into the wilderness to face his destiny or some other hero-building 12-step program. But I like Charles Bronson as a screen persona, so I can excuse this. Bronson looks nothing like the actual Wild Bill Hickok, who was thought something of a dandy because of his soft face and sartorial concerns over his looks. But Bronson is ideal for this Wild Bill, a beaten and sagging man coming near the end of his violent life. With the round tinted glasses long hair, Bronson has something of counterculture swing to his Wild Bill. Toss that onto the “1970s fun” pile.

Will Sampson, who also popped up in Orca a few months later, plays the other obsessed hunter of the white beast, Crazy Horse. The famous Oglala Lakota war leader must avenge the deaths his daughter at the buffalo’s horns. Like Hickok, he travels under a different name, “Worm,” although this is not his choosing. Crazy Horse lost his true name because of his open weeping for his daughter’s death, and the quest to regain his true name requires the death of the buffalo. Sampson, who is best known for his roles in One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest and The Outlaw Josey Wales, gives an adequate performance that relies more on his magnificent features and bearing than his skill at delivering dialogue. Sampson and Bronson feel stilted in most of their scenes together, and Bronson doesn’t sound believable speaking the faux-Zen wisdom lines that make up most of his dialogue in these encounters. The first two meetings between Crazy Horse and Hickok are unintentionally hilarious because they sign to each other while needlessly shouting out perfect English. However, in their final moments together both men at last find common acting ground for an effective, downbeat curtain closer.

Bronson works better across from Jack Warden as “One Eye” Charlie Zane, the third side of the triangle of hunters who are the only characters in the final third of the movie. Warden gets second billing, and even though the actor was born only one year before Bronson, he’s able to sell himself as an “old timer” on screen. Warden gives the most accomplished pure performance in the movie, although it doesn’t have thrill of Bronson’s simple presence.

Some established Western stars make their way through the story in small and supporting parts. Clint Walker has the meatiest role, cast against type as a villain who bolsters up the middle act when he goes after Hickok for killing his son in a forgettable bar shootout. John Carradine, with his delivery as quirky as any of his mad scientist roles, makes a memorable one-scene undertaker in what would otherwise be a bland bit of exposition. Stuart Whitman plays a foul-mouthed stagecoach passenger who mistakes Hickok for a greenhorn and then pays the price. The stagecoach driver is Slim Pickens playing Slim Pickens. Blink and you’ll miss Karate Kid’s Martin Kove serving drinks in the Frozen Dog Saloon.

The only important female character is Poker Jenny, a role that seems like it should have been played by Charles Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland. The two-scene part is not far removed from the character Jill Ireland played in The Mechanic (1972), the brief romantic encounter to sand off one of the many rough edges of a Bronson character. Novak appears long enough to show a softer side to Wild Bill and a peek into his past, but Bronson lacks the chemistry with Novak that he had with Ireland in similar parts. Novak works while she’s on screen, but by the time the credits roll you won’t even remember she was there.

English-born director J. Lee Thompson has a long filmography, which includes one of the best of the “Planet of the Apes” films, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and a bulky number of Bronson films. On The White Buffalo Thompson seems to have put most of his effort into the “monster” scenes, and left the standard Western beats to fend for themselves. The obstacles Hickok faces leading up to the confrontation with the buffalo are haphazard occurrences brought out of a Western 101 playbook, with two separate saloon shootouts, neither of them handled with much flair. Thompson doesn’t stick the landing at the finale either. The build to the showdown with the white buffalo is intense, but the important triumphant moment seems never to have gotten in front of the cameras. The fight between the three hunters and the giant buffalo just sort of… stops. The drama that happens afterwards between Hickok and Charlie Zane over what they should do about Crazy Horse is more pointed than the buffalo battle itself.

The White Buffalo misses some other opportunities, such as exploring Hickok’s dreams or exploiting his fading eyesight for real tension. The movie starts with narration from a train conductor, then completely abandons the idea.

The tagline on the posters, “You won’t believe your eyes!”, is accurate, but not in the way the publicity department intended. Enjoyment of The White Buffalo depends on how much viewers can get into the stage-bound style the budget forced on Thompson. The buffalo is predominantly photographed in close shots combined with quick cuts to disguise that it’s not highly mobile. The animal’s hindquarters never appear because the prop is mounted on a truck. When the buffalo rampages through a Sioux camp early in the movie, the claustrophobic soundstage (complete with fog-machine mist clinging to the ground) and jumpy editing turn the scene into a mess that calls attention to the budget. Fortunately, the buffalo fares better in other scenes, and in the final showdown the editing and the creature’s leaping movements have developed into what might be called “style.” The close-ups on its staring eye and steaming nostrils, and the slow camera movements over its albino coat during Wild Bill’s nightmares are the best use of the title monster.

Half the film’s atmosphere comes from the musical score by the legendary John Barry. It’s an unusual score for the composer, dwelling in a dark, low register netherworld far removed from his James Bond sound or the lyrical romanticism of Somewhere in Time, Out of Africa, and his major Western score, Dances with Wolves. While a handful of Barry’s scores to lesser-known films from this period like Raise the Titanic and The Black Hole (easily one of the top five scores in his catalog) have attained fame among fans, the music for The White Buffalo is a drag to listen to on its own. The low dronings punctuated by ethnic percussion offer little dynamism, and this makes up three-quarters of the score. But the music is ideal accompaniment for the film, bringing the horror aura to the action without hitting generic Western notes or copying the action music style of the era. The theme for the buffalo rumbles and threatens enough to cover many of the deficiencies of the actual creature.

The White Buffalo was released on 6 May 1977 in the U.S., and died fast at the box office despite Bronson’s robust post-Death Wish celebrity. The Western was struggling in the late ‘70s and viewers were already getting leery of movies looking to snatch some of that Jaws cash. Also not helping: the release two weeks later of Star Wars, which guaranteed the kids who might have kept The White Buffalo chugging along in theaters a bit longer had a much larger destroying monster on their minds—the Death Star. The White Buffalo has only maintained enough cult status from genre fans to get it that DVD-R release thirty years later.

In this time of unnecessary re-makes, The White Buffalo is a film that could justify getting a second turn in front of cameras. With the special effects available today, the albino buffalo could be a fantastic creation—provided the CGI people still keep it shadowy and weird and the director avoids the temptation to throw it on screen as often as possible. Almost everything about the movie could be improved today, except Bronson’s performance. Maybe stick Viggo Mortensen in the lead. I wonder if David Cronenberg would be interested in directing a horror-Western?

Presentation notes: The MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD advertises on the back cover that The White Buffalo is “full frame,” the code words for “Pan & Scan” 1.33:1. But have no fear, the movie’s original 1.85:1 aspect ratio is preserved and enhanced for widescreen televisions. There are no extras of any kind, not even a menu, and chapter stops are dispersed at five-minute increments. There’s plenty of moaning on Amazon customer reviews (yeah, that’s a shock) about the DVD-R not playing, but I tried my copy on two different “play-only” DVD players and my iMac and it worked on all three without a glitch.

On the One Year Anniversary of John Carter, Let’s Look Forward to a New Tarzan Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 05:34:00 +0000

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

[Update: Damn, appears this isn’t happening. Warner Bros. is pulling the plug.]

Speaking of Tarzan movies, did you know that a new live-action film is gearing up? Perhaps not, since it has been “bubbling under” in entertainment news and only in the last few months started to reach a boil people might notice, but yeah—it’s a thing. Thinking over the progress toward another adventure of the Lord of the Jungle—who is 101 years old this October—helps me cope with another anniversary, this one only a year old. It’s a bittersweet memory, but let me go over it a moment before returning to Tarzan.

Over the weekend, Disney released a new take on a fantasy franchise more than a century old: Oz, The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi’s prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (as well as its somewhat famous 1939 film adaptation). Although Oz boasts a huge price tag of $215 million, the opening weekend take of $80 million in the U.S. is strong sign of success.

And, unfortunately, this is a reminder of what happened with the film Disney released exactly one year ago this same weekend: John Carter of Mars (the film’s on-screen title at the end, but called John Carter on promotional materials). The $250 million adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s hundred-year-old planetary fantasy A Princess of Mars opened to $30 million and immediate declarations of Epic Flop-dom.

John Carter of Mars was not the biggest flop in history—but the media hopped on that story and rode with it. In fact, they were on board the flop story more than year before the film came out. How John Carter of Mars got kneecapped through terrible marketing, social media misfires, false preconceptions, and the power shifts at Disney is a lengthy tale. I wrote a bit about the marketing bungles after the film came out, and readers who want a book-length version of this story should dip into John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood by Michael D. Sellers, one of many fans who fought to get grassroots support for the film moving.

But even if John Carter of Mars wasn’t the “Biggest Flop Ever!” it was a financial disappointment that stung ERB fans such as me because we thought it was a pretty darn good film to come out of our beloved book series. The people who got to the theaters to see it generally agreed with our positive opinion. Now that the film is on home video (the Blu-ray and DVD came out in August), more viewers have come to appreciate this live-action take on a groundbreaking novel. Perhaps the cult status will kick in, although so far I haven’t seen it.

I re-watched the film in its entirety this weekend, the first time I’ve done that since it was in theaters. I expected to find myself more critical of it with distance, but found I enjoyed the film even more now. Yes, I can see the faults—mostly structural issues and parts of Taylor Kitsch’s performance—and see them with greater clarity. But what works about the film only seems to get better when savored. Maybe that cult following is going to happen after all. As for whether this means we’ll see The Gods of Mars on screen… chances still not high on that.

But it still came as shock that after a big studio bungle with an Edgar Rice Burroughs property that Hollywood wanted to leap back into ERB’s worlds with a new Tarzan film. In November 2012, Warner Bros. announced that their long-discussed Tarzan project with producer Jerry Weintraub now had a director: David Yates, responsible for the last batch of Harry Potter films.

Attaching a director never guarantees a film is an absolute “go” project. (Oh, I mourn for At the Mountains of Madness!) But Yates is a powerful player in the industry with a couple big-budget franchise hits behind him—films that got praise from franchise fans as well—so the chances for Tarzan the Untitled getting the green light tripled when Warner Bros. signed him. Immediately, numerous young actors’ names were hurled around as choices to get in a loincloth and swing on vines. Warner Bros. was now officially enthusiastic after years of delay.

It wasn’t until last week, however, that a bit of news arrived that gave me the powerful sense that, yes, this was really going to happen. The rumor came from numerous sources: Jessica Chastain to play Jane. Chastain appeared in every movie made during the last two years, but right now she’s riding on acclaim for her role in Zero Dark Thirty, which for my money was the Best Actress performance of 2012. Chastain feels classy and right for the part, not simply a “model of the moment” plucked out of a bin for a film just going through the motions. If it turns out that Chastain is playing Jane Clayton-Porter, than I don’t think it will matter much who plays Tarzan.

Okay, of course it will matter… but it will be more likely the correct choice for the part if Chastain is the type of actress getting eyed for the female lead. The actor who has the biggest buzz around him right now to play Tarzan is Alexander Skarsgård. Skarsgård hasn’t had a breakout movie role yet, no doubt held back by producers who can’t type the character “å” on their keyboards, but has established himself on television with True Blood. The other actors that Yates announced for consideration include Henry Cavill, Charlie Hunnam, and Tom Hardy. Because of course Tom Hardy. But Skarsgård is the front-runner according to Variety, and he’s a solid choice: Tarzan needs to be lithe and tough, and Skarsgård can pull it off.

Oh, Samuel L. Jackson is in the mix here as well. It isn’t a Nick Fury crossover, although Marvel has published Tarzan comics before.

Another sign of Warner Bros. getting serious about Tarzan the Untitled: the film will be part of the company’s new deal with IMAX and get released in that format. Warners wants Tarzan to swing big. This isn’t going to be a $20 million quickie like 1998’s Tarzan and the Lost City.

Although it feels strange to have a new ERB film happen so close to the financial failure of John Carter, the timing for a return of Tarzan is near-perfect. The character is fresh for a re-introduction to the cinema-going world. Disney’s 1999 animated film was a hit, but it lives in that particular Disney setting set apart from other properties. That’s “Disney’s Tarzan,” and the public is ready for a new flesh-and-blood one.

So with a new Tarzan film looking about 85% likely at this point, at least according to the guys I know down at the track, what kind of film will we get? Apparently it will be Tarzan: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Thankfully, someone at Warner Bros. realized that audiences are sick of origin stories, and since we all know the deal with Tarzan, they are skipping the front material and hopping right into espionage adventure. The story from writers John August, Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, and Adam Cozad has Tarzan already living among civilization. He returns to his birthplace of Africa on an assignment from Queen Victoria to enter the Congo and investigate the vile doings of a warlord. The Ape Man teams up with Samuel L. Jackson, and hopefully the full-blooded ERB Tarzan—who kills jungle warmongers real good—gets into some savage simian fury. The storyline sounds like it borrows elements from two early ERB novels, The Return of Tarzan (Tarzan as world-traveling adventurer) and Tarzan the Untamed (a violent colonial war tale). It reads like a story Burroughs might have written in the ‘teens, and it means seeing a Tarzan adept at both city and wilderness life, no doubt kicking butt in both.

The proposed plot also has similarities to the “Tarzan 007” style of Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, the 1966 film starring Mike Henry that continued the “New Look” film Tarzan introduced in 1959 in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure. Now I’m definitely committed to bringing you a manufacture-on-demand DVD review of that, and not just because Fritz Leiber wrote the novelization.

But… will Cheetah the Chimp be in it? How much business will Warners lose from fan protests if Cheetah from the Weismuller films doesn’t show up?

Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure on DVD

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:50:00 +0000

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I’ve discovered a way to merge my recent posts about the manufacture-on-demand DVDs of The Bermuda Depths and The Last Dinosaur with my long-running Edgar Rice Burroughs posts. Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, the 1959 live-action film now available from Warner Archive, also gives me a reason to go back to talking about Tarzan for the first time since I reviewed Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion” back in ‘09.

Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in twelve movies from 1932 to 1948. But Weissmuller’s departure from the role didn’t bring halt to the series. It soldiered on, switching around studios and distributors (it had already flipped from MGM to RKO during Weissmuller’s tenure) for two more decades. Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, and Mike Henry all played the Lord of the Jungle for at least two films each, and then the movies segued into the television series starring Ron Ely, who would later play another famous pulp hero in George Pal’s unfortunate Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze in 1975.

Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure arrived in the middle of this second stage of the jungle adventures and marked a major shift in style. Producer Sol Lesser left the series, and his replacement Sy Weintraub decided to revamp Tarzan with a “New Look.” Actually, it was more of an “Old Look”: Weintraub took Tarzan back to his literary roots and made a movie more faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book series. Tarzan suddenly gained a full mastery of the English language, and the story acquired a more adult tone.

Because of Weissmuller’s continued domination of the Tarzan-on-film image to this day—even the mighty Disney machine cannot overcome him—it’s hard to imagine the latter-day movies in the series as being any good. But Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure is excellent; it’s the ERB-fan’s Tarzan film. Not that I don’t love Weissmuller’s first two movies, but this is actually something pretty damn special for any Burroughs Bibliophile. Even if it isn’t based on a specific novel, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure ranks with last year’s John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot as a movie that honestly captures the style and feel of ERB’s work. Had he been alive to see it, Burroughs would definitely have approved of the film. He might have objected to Tarzan’s non-monogamy, if it can really be called that, since Jane’s existence is questionable at this point in the movie series.

Also: a pre-007 Sean Connery as one of the villains. And it was actually shot in Africa!

The story is a bare bones chase plot similar to those ERB used in many of his novels: Tarzan is wronged; Tarzan pursuers wrongers; wrongers die viciously under the ape man’s feral wrath. The cuteness and comedy of earlier Tarzan movies is abandoned in the leaner approach, and Cheetah the Chimp makes only a token appearance at the beginning before Tarzan leaves him behind because there’s no room for comedy relief on this voyage. (Apparently, the trained chimps from the U.K. did not like the location shooting, but I can’t imagine a workable way to have Cheetah stick around no matter what.) The movie lacks the more outrageous elements of some of the original Tarzan books, such as lost civilizations and communicative apes, but in this stripped down form it comes close to the more down-to-earth installments of the series. The most noticeable change for casual viewers is Tarzan’s dialogue, which drops the “Me Tarzan” pidgin-speak for full English mastery.

The Lord of the Jungle is up against a crew of diamond thieves led by Slade (Anthony Quayle), an old enemy. A few years past, Tarzan turned Slade over to the authorities after the man let his partners in an elephant hunt die just so the single-minded villain could bag the pachyderm himself. The animosity runs both ways, since Slade isn’t too forgiving toward the Ape Man for turning him in. Slade’s team attacks a native village in the opening scene to steal the dynamite they need for their diamond expedition, and during the attack they kill a local doctor. The doctor was a friend of Tarzan’s, which brings the Ape Man into the story and onto the trail upriver of Slade and Co. Tarzan picks up an unexpected partner along the way: pilot Angie (Sara Shane), who crashes her plane while buzzing over Tarzan’s canoe, apparently to check out his abs.

As Tarzan tightens the pursuit, Slade’s men start to bicker and fall apart. Slade’s attention begins to turn from the quest for the diamonds and toward the murder of Tarzan over all else, eventually heading into a delirious one-on-one climax after the cast has gotten thinned out by back-stabbing, wild animals, arrows, and quicksand. (The quicksand scene is surprisingly horrific.)

Gordon Scott was on his fourth portrayal of Tarzan since taking the role in 1955. In his first three movies (Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle, Tarzan and the Lost Safari, Tarzan’s Fight for Life) he played the character in the standard monosyllabic style Weissmuller made famous. For this film and its follow-up, Tarzan the Magnificent, Scott became a Tarzan capable of speaking sentences with verbs and definite and indefinite articles. After Jock Mahoney and then Mike Henry took over the part, this “New Look”/“New Sound” Tarzan continued.

Scott makes a fine Tarzan, although transparently not an actor by original calling—but neither was Johnny Weissmuller. Scott lacks Weissmuller’s charisma, but he handles the expanded dialogue with B-movie leading man quality, and he has a grip on Burroughs’s character when he delivers lines like this: “[The lion] killed for food. Only man kills for its own sake…. Slade’s a man who has a—passion to kill…. I would have killed Slade a long time ago if not for man’s law. Now he’s broken that law.” Scott’s Tarzan is a rough customer, efficient and dangerous, with no scruples about killing evil-doers. Even his tussle with a clearly rubber alligator has a great primal fury to it.

Scott works well across from perky Sara Shane’s Angie, whose hair always has the right flip to it after days and nights in the jungle. And yes, Tarzan and Angie do it. Not on screen, of course; this was still the 1950s. This raises a question for viewers unfamiliar with the larger Tarzan corpus: What about Jane? Burroughs’s heroes never break their monogamous relationships. The script makes no mention of Jane, and she seems not to exist at all. In fact, only one of Gordon Scott’s Tarzan movies has Jane appear. Burroughs also dropped mention of Jane from many of the latter batch of his Tarzan novels, although he never gave Tarzan new lovers. Since I’ve always found Burroughs’s rigidity about his heroes’ fidelity dramatically limiting, this is a change to Tarzan mythos that doesn’t bother me.

The cast of villains is the hefty goods here. And it’s a hefty bunch: Anthony Quayle (Lawrence of Arabia), Niall McGinnis (the evil magician in The Night of the Demon; Zeus in Jason and the Argonauts), Al Mulock (who appeared—and got shot—in the opening scenes of both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West), and that Sean Connery fellow.

From the perspective of this film and 1959, casting Sean Connery to play a sophisticated British secret agent with a refined taste in Martinis seems like an absurd move. Seriously? You want this man, this grinning roughneck lout, to play James Bond? If I were an Ian Fleming reader back in 1962, I’d wonder if the Dr. No producers had cracked their heads on the bathtub edge when they said, “Yeah, let’s go with this guy.” It’s a testament to Connery’s acting chops that he turned out to be perfect for James Bond, managing to play suave and have the same dangerous edge that he shows here. It’s also praise that I found myself, from the perspective of 2013 and hardcore 007 fandom, rapidly forgetting about Connery’s most famous role and settling in to his performance as a character with a nasty sort of charm and not a hint of class. O’Bannion is an Irish mercenary who would have found a just cause to fight for, except “just causes don’t pay too good.”

Even among such company as McGinnis and Connery, Anthony Quayle shines as Slade, the prime villain. At first Slade looks like a standard one-dimensional baddie. But as the men in his company begin to crack apart, the layers start to rub off Slade. Quayle is very effective across from the scheming McGinnis, who plays the ex-Nazi diamond expert Kruger, and Scialla Gabel, who plays Slade’s mistress and the only person on the boat who has a conscience. She sees Slade eroding toward tragedy and tries to intervene, but of course the man is going to stay the course until it comes down to him and Tarzan. Quayle gives a fantastic slow burn show of the best type, steaming toward hysteria for the climax.

And the climax is a corker. When Tarzan and Slade at last tussle on a crumbling cliff, Slade trying to use metal noose to garrote his opponent, the fight gets downright nasty. No clean fisticuffs or acrobatic choreography on display here; this fight is gouging and scratching and feverish desperation, a perfect fulfillment of the promise of Slade’s character development. Tarzan’s final victory yell is damn well earned.

As advertised on its poster, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure was indeed shot on location in Africa. It makes a huge difference to see the actors, not simply stand-ins, walking among the Kenyan locations, sweating and toiling. The danger is tangible, and Tarzan’s natural connection to the jungle wilds is much more impressive when viewers can see his ease with an actual jungle. The location is especially vivid in the finale among jutting rocks over a river, a setting that looks more fantastic than anything that might be mocked-up in a studio. Stock shots still show up for most of the wild animal footage, however. Can’t have everything.

Director John Guillermin had a prolific career in movies, directing his first film in 1949 and retiring in 1988. He often worked as a journeyman for big name producers, such as Irwin Allen on The Towering Inferno and Dino de Laurentiis on the 1976 King Kong re-make. Guillermin was not a visionary, but Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure doesn’t require one; he handles the action and drama with a crisp and sure style. Along with the World War I drama The Blue Max (1966), Towering Inferno, and the charming Hercule Poirot mystery Death on the Nile (1978), this is Guillmerin’s best work. He did one more Tarzan film, the first of Jock Mahoney’s two outings, Tarzan in India (1962). And yes, it was filmed in India.

The usual caveats for a manufacture-on-demand DVD apply: no restoration, no remastering, no extras, generic main menu, chapter stops every ten minutes. The theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 is preserved, enhanced for 16x9 televisions, with the original mono mix. The picture quality is average; it’s about what I would expect if I saw the movie at a budget theater during its original run, with a print that’s seen some wear but remains watchable without serious distractions.

Warner Archive has released other of the later Tarzan films on MOD DVD. Now I want to check out the Mike Henry 1966 film Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, which has the distinction of getting a novelization by none other than Fritz Leiber.

The Oakdale Affair Is the 3000th Post at Black Gate

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan Harvey) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:17:00 +0000

Another blogging milestone… and this time I had no idea I was contributing.

When I placed my article on The Oakdale Affair up on the Black Gate website this morning, I had no idea that it was the 3,000th article to go on the website. Of course, I don’t have access to the full information about how many articles have appeared on the site (or maybe I do and I’ve never explored it) so I would never have known this if editor John O’Neill hadn’t posted about it later today. It came as stunning news, this realization of how large and influential Black Gate’s blog has grown. A few controversies have even grown out of it, but none thankfully because of anything I’ve written.

In January I got the glowing news from John O’Neill that my article on A Princess of Mars had received the highest hits of any post during a single month on the site. I don’t expect this record to hold for long, since traffic for Black Gate continues to grow at an astonishing rate, but it was a powerful feeling to know that my opinion on one of my favorite writers was reaching so many people across the world.

This marks four-and-half years of the Black Gate blog. I was one of the original seven weekly bloggers. The others were David Soyka, Judith Berman, E. E. Knight, James Enge, Scott Oden, and Bill Ward. I am now the last of the group who still posts regularly (I miss a week here and there, although I try to stay steady), which may simply be because the others got more successful and busy than me. I tend to stay in one place; I’ve been in the same apartment since 1998.

Thank you again to John O’Neill and Howard Andrew Jones for inviting me on the Black Gate longboat. May it sail until it reaches Valhalla!