Category: Blogs on Film

Question 1: What famous movie includes the first film appearance of Jeff Goldblum (as a vicious thug), one of the first screen roles of Christopher Guest (as a police officer), and was long rumored — apparently incorrectly — to be the first screen appearance of Denzel Washington?

Question 2: I have recommended the film noir Too Late for Tears, in which appeared Arthur Kennedy. Today he may be best remembered for playing the Lowell Thomas-inspired character of Jackson Bentley in Lawrence of Arabia, but he for decades gave good performances in films and on stage without ever becoming a classic leading man. What distinction does this talented actor share with Claude Rains? Hint: It makes them both markedly different from Walter Brennan.

Question 3: Internet Movie Database has brief descriptions of various films. Here is the one for Casablanca.

Set in unoccupied Africa during the early days of World War II: An American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.

Sometimes, the films described are so strange sounding I can hardly believe they are real, and that is the seed from which this quiz grows. Below are five short film descriptions of the horror/sci-fi genre. Three of them are real descriptions from IMDB whereas the other two I made up. Try to guess which is which.

A) A lesbian college couple becomes stranded in the middle of nowhere with a pack of orphaned Nazi zombie breeders hellbent on their demise.

B) When an island off the coast of Ireland is invaded by bloodsucking aliens, the heroes discover that getting drunk is the only way to survive.

C) Two awkward Martian teenagers infiltrate the Texas Chili Cook Off and try to reunite their squabbling parents at the same time.

D) After making a pact with a witch to win a high school tennis tournament, the class nerd is terrorized by blood-sucking tennis balls that can only be defeated by a magical silver racket.

E) Aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop humanity from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb).

ANSWERS ANSWERS ANSWERS ANSWERS ANSWERS

Question 1: They were all in the 1970 Charles Bronson vehicle, Death Wish.

Question 2: Both Kennedy and Rains endured the frustration of being nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar four times and never winning. Brennan was also nominated four times, but took home the Academy Award three times.

Question 3:

A) REAL. The film is Blood Soaked.

B) REAL. The film is Grabbers.

C) FAKE.

D) FAKE.

E) REAL. It’s Ed Wood’s so bad it’s good classic Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Before the big romance scene, no one in the movies has to brush their teeth first to suppress halitosis. Before the big action scene, the hero never needs a pee break. And Henry Fonda, as the President, never passes gas.

The side-effect of the general exclusion of such realities of human biology from film is that when one of them appears, an experienced film goer knows it’s highly significant. One such example I have noticed a number of times is that if a movie character coughs for no apparent reason, they are going to die before the credits roll.

SPOILER ALERT

I was watching Finding Neverland a few years back. “Good movie” I thought as I watched, “but I wonder where the plot is going”.

And then Kate Winslet coughed.

The next hour unfolded entirely as expected. She died, Depp grieved.

Ditto the post-hack Julianne Moore in End of the Affair.

I am sure there are other instances of this phenomenon in the movies. It now awaits for some self-referential film buff director to really fool us by having a character cough for no good reason and then survive the movie in perfect health.

On the 40th anniversary of Kubrick’s famous adaptation of the Burgess novel, Tim Robey analyzed the movie’s impact. I am surprised to see a British writer missing the critically important point that Kubrick’s version is not based on what Burgess actually wrote and what most Britons actually read.

The UK version of the book has 21 chapters. In the final chapter, Alex realizes the emptiness of his life, renounces violence and gets married (sounds Dickensian, does it not?). But the American publisher refused to publish the book in that form, making the book end after Chapter 20 with Alex still violent and sociopathic.

Kubrick read the US version and made the film based on that. He apparently saw the UK version much later and said he didn’t like it, but we will never know what would have been the cinematic result if the American publisher hadn’t imposed such a change in the book over the author’s objections.

My preferred airline now has a channel of “classic films” which included the Bond outing From Russia with Love on my recent trip back home. And why not? It’s a very well made film and unlike the more silly and comic book-like Bond films that came along in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s fairly realistic and hence more engaging.

It also includes my second favorite fist fight in the movies, in which psychopath Donald Grant (played with convincing viciousness by Robert Shaw) and superagent James Bond (played by the inimitable Sean Connery) have it out on a train. The verbal build up is almost as good as the fisticuffs: It’s filled with class resentment, desperation and downright nastiness (“The first bullet won’t kill you, nor the second, not even the third…not until you crawl over here and you KISS MY FOOT”).

It helps a lot that Connery and Shaw were physically powerful men, and IIRC they didn’t like each other (I seem to remember that they almost got into a punch-up off camera). They attack each other with vigor, in an amazingly long scene shot in an eerie blueish light. And it’s not one of those pretty Marquess of Queensberry fights that Hollywood often serves up; there’s grappling and kicking and scrapping and brutal life or death struggle.

p.s. In case you are wondering why I describe it as my second favorite fistfight in film, it’s because cineastes have long recognized that unquestionably, the fight scene with the most energy, style, humanity and realism takes place in the wretched Mogumbo Bar on the Barbary Coast….

I watched Harry Brown a few years back, which the magnificent Sir Michael Caine personally lifts from forgettable to above-average. It does though feature a common movie trope, namely that a bullet can thrown a grown adult across a room (Presuming a powerful enough gun).

Mass and Speed are roughly interchangeble forces in comic books and in many films. If a superhero who weighs 200 pounds wants to stop a hurtling train or bus that weighs many tons, it’s entirely a matter of having his feet planted correctly and a good set of biceps.

In college I read in Soldier of Fortune magazine that if a bullet — which not only has small mass but penetrates upon impact — can throw a human being backwards 3 or 4 feet, then a regular feature of baseball games would be batters landing in the upper deck after being beaned by a pitcher.

My personal favorite guy-flying-improbably-backwards comes at the conclusion (at the 3:40 mark of this video of the gripping 1973 suspense film Day of the Jackal [SPOILER ALERT: this is the climax of the movie).

When we lost the irreplaceable Peter Falk in 2011, most of his obituaries focused on his role as Lieutenant Columbo, one of the best known characters in the world. I remember seeing Falk in a documentary filmed in the Andes, during which he walked through a market in a small village that probably didn’t have electricity, much less television. The natives clustered around him, pointing and saying “Columbo! Columbo!”.

What the commentaries about Columbo I have read miss, and what explains a large measure of its international appeal, is that Columbo is the ultimate show about working class resentment of and triumph over the rich and powerful. Ever notice how this Los Angeles homicide detective never had a case in which a gas station attendant beat his wife to death or two drug dealers had a fatal shootout? The villains are uniformly movie producers, physicians, best-selling writers, famous actors, monied gentry, vineyard owners, and globe-trotting business people. They are also usually good looking and well dressed, and look down on the rumpled, uncouth, Columbo, so clearly out of place in “their” world.

And of course we the audience know they are underestimating our hero, who despite outward appearances is morally and intellectually superior to them. They send him on wild goose chases and he doggedly checks each out (“Yes, sir, we did look into your theory of mobsters, we questioned 100 of them and none of them were involved”), because he is a dedicated working class guy who unlike the upper crust suspects, isn’t sloppy or arrogant enough to forget that one critical detail that undoes the whole endeavor. There are many conversations in the series that are suffused with class resentment. Columbo asks one villain “How much does a home like this cost?” and when he finds out says “Oh, sir, I could never afford that on a policeman’s salary”. And we love these exchanges, because we know that this working class hero is still conning his prey, and he’s going to bring that smug, rich S.O.B. down in the end.