A New Film a Day in 2020 (6) – WOMAN IN HIDING (Michael Gordon, USA, 1950)

As part of a run through of Ida Lupino’s career, I came across this title, made at Universal in 1950 by the unfashionable Michael Gordon.

The convoluted plot is a breathtaker. Ida, as Deborah opens in a car careening far too fast along a country road until it crashes over a bridge into a river. Twenty seven minutes later it has been revealed just how all that happened and the sequence is replayed (spoiler alert) but this time we see that the brakes and doors have been tampered with. Deborah has married in a rush and the honeymoon night is ruined when her new husband’s old flame shows up with a gun.

Deborah makes her escape and goes searching for the old flame who, inconveniently, is out of town for a while. She takes on a new identity but the husband (stone-faced Stephen McNally) knows she’s not dead and wants to find her so that he can take over her family’s business. She is befriended by a smiling drifter (played by Ida’s then husband Howard Duff) but he’s interested in the reward money until….lashings of plot…

…and so on until a noir-filled ending in the much desired factory, the location where the husband has previously offed Deborah’s father via an ‘accident’. The black and white photography by William Daniels, especially in the climax, is, to put it mildly, sensational and Gordon even manages to get some semblance of suspense into the chase around the factory stairs. The villainess/thwarted lover is played by Peggy Dow, quite a beauty. 

A rip-snorting 92 minutes with Ida yet again demonstrating that she could do a woman in peril like no other. 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison unearths the South Korean blockbuster ASHFALL (Byung-seo Kim & Hae-jun Lee)

Cecil B. De Mille once explained that a good film should start with an earthquake and develop to a crescendo. Well now we've got another one of those. After Clint Eastwood's Hereafter and the Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock, include Byung-seo Kim and Hae-jun Lee’s Ashfall which is being pushed as an event film for South Korean cinema and is headed up by their big stars Byung-Hun Lee (I Saw the Devil, the new Magnificent Seven, P.S.A.) and Jung-woo Ha (The Handmaiden, 1987, Yellow Sea). Their unit are trying to do an effects super spectacle for a mere seventeen million U.S dollars. But that’s not the problem.

The opening holds promise with Ha’s team in their Hurt Locker gear digging out a rusted bomb.  But he is bored with all the procedures, takes off his face mask and bangs the thing with a spanner. They’ve never had one go off in the history of the unit and he’s only got a day to go before his retirement anyway. He’s going to take off with his pregnant wife Suzy Bae.

However, (the fictional) Baekdu Mountain volcano is about to blow and take three quarters of the peninsula with it. Scruffy professor Dong-seok Ma, who predicted it years back, has a plan. They have to send a unit into North Korea, steal the nukes they are surrendering there as part of the de-nuclearisation program and use them to blow up a copper mine next to the magma lakes. That will drain off the menace. So a secret nuclear explosion on the Chinese border without telling the Americans who are racing in with their weapons leveled. 

The plan’s guide is the imprisoned double agent Lee, located by a G.P.S. transmitter under his skin. He’s got issues of his own having been in the cage so long that his daughter by his junkie wife may not recognise him. To give them credit, none of the on-screen characters has much confidence in this. Well, it’s only a movie Ingrid.  

Never the less Ha and his (sadly under-characterised) lot suit up to fly the in the plane next to one full of elite troops who are going to do all the rough stuff. Of course Ha and Lee end up forming an uneasy partnership to complete the mission.

The explosions, earthquake and tidal wave are quite well realised and there are a few nice touches like using toppled statues of The Great Leader to locate their way through the chaos. Killer is that we keep on getting things that were better in other films – the quake fissure running along the buildings in Aftershock, the macho types dropping out to leave the tech guys to do the heroics in Executive Decision, the military only equipped with non-lethal ammunition in Southern Comfort, or the speeding escape vehicle showered with big bang debris in Chain Reaction just for starters. At least they don’t outrun the shockwave here.

We end up with an action effects piece undermined by familiar plot and visuals. Finally, it’s kind of boring – occasionally accomplished film making wrapped around a core of cliché. 

We’ve seen the leads do better.

A New Film a Day in 2020 (5) – THE TRAITOR/IL TRADITORE (Marco Bellochio, Italy, 2019)

The director of Fists in the Pocket,  China is Near, Vincere, The Eyes the Mouth,  Sleeping Beauty  and a half dozen more has come to this. 

The Traitor  is a two and a half hour trek through the life of Tommaso Buscetta, a man who, under pressure, gave up his Mafia associates and put a heap of them in jail. Bellocchio meticulously takes us through the process of Buscetta’s fear of exposure, his self-exile to Brazil, his exposure, the threats made to force his hand to give up his Mafia associates and the seemingly endless judicial process whereby he put criminal associated after criminal associate into jail. 

The Mafia, thanks to the drug trade, survives though that doesn’t seem to be Bellocchio’s point.

Interesting that Bellocchio should tread in the steps of Francesco Rosi and many other film-makers in exposing the criminal enterprise that is twisted and insinuated into every element of Italian politics and society. Mafias, however, exist in every country, driven and sustained by the criminalisation of the drug trade, pornography, sex trafficking and just about anything else that is illegal but desired by many. But maybe only in Italy, possibly Russia, have the criminal oligarchs taken over the mainstream of society, buying politicians and other pillars of society to make themselves and their criminal behaviour totally exempt from any oversight, sanction or punishment.

Bellocchio’s movie just tells us of one episode even if it does attach to itself the story of the evil Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti who for decades served Italy’s Christian Democrats, the Papacy and the Mafia so well. Rosi did it in a more interesting way twice. First with the untold story of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano in the film of that name, second in his adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia’s “Cadaveri Eccelenti” filmed as Exquisite Corpses.  Matteo Garrone also did it with far more energy and excitement in Gomorrah. It makes you wonder why the director of those remarkable films cited in the first paragraph wanted to go down such a well-trodden path and make this movie.

A New Film a Day in 2020 (4) – SWORDSMAN OF DOUBLE FLAG TOWN (He Ping, China, 1990)

Blu-ray box from Diskino

Back in the 80s the esteemed Wu Tian-ming, a director of some repute, was made head of the Xian Film Studios. The dark years of the Cultural Revolution had ended and graduates from the reopened Beijing Film Academy were on the lookout for work. Wu set out to make some high quality films and to do so gave jobs to a bunch of those first graduates. Among them were Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Zhang Yimou. Another whom Wu employed was the young but established director He Ping.

A little after Chen, Tian and Zhang made their first films, He Ping made Swordsman of Double Flag town a movie designed quite consciously to draw upon the traditions of the American and Italian westerns of both antiquity and recent times. I suspect He Ping may have also seen and admired Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai  and maybe Yojimbo  but that’s not a matter dealt with in the extras on a splendid disc of He Ping’s Swordsman of Double Flag Town (1990) produced at Xian Film Studios, a big hit in China and a hit abroad in the Chinatowns. 

Now the wonderful Diskino company, an independent DVD and Blu-ray publisher operating in China, and managed by serious enthusiasts, has released Swordsman of Double Flag Town,  the fifth film in its World Cinema Library collection devoted to restoring and re-releasing the major works of the Xian Film Studio from back in Wu Tian-ming’s day. It follows Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou), The Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang), The Black Cannon Incident (Huang Jianxin) and King of the Children (Chen Kaige). Believe me, even if you saw those four films back in the day when they were released here on 35mm and VHS by Ronin Films (the 35mm prints are still held by the NFSA) you never saw anything like the images now on display in the new Blu-ray editions released over the last couple of years. 

Swordsman of Double Flag Town  came a little after those films in its production and Ronin didn’t pick it up for distribution. It had screenings at the Sydney Film Festival in 1992 and probably in local Chinatown cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne. (Thanks Tina Kaufman and Barrie Pattison for this info.) 

He Ping (and Wu) wanted to transform the conventions of the western and create a film, as Tony Rayns says on one of the extras, “rooted in the local reality, topography, customs and people”. The western would be re-invented and in the process break new ground for both Xian Studios and the Chinese film industry. Wu had a sharp eye for the leading edge.

The story riffs on so many conventions as to be dizzying. The bandits terrorise a small village, one built in otherwise desert of Shanxi. It substituted swordplay for gunplay and above all its design - urban brown from sky to land, to costumes of fur and dark interiors, would be even more unique than Zhang’s red dominated colour design in Red Sorghum. In fact, in a brilliant stroke, beyond some navy blue clothing worn by the village extras, the only standout colour belongs to that of the would-be bride Haomei. She always wears a soft red jacket which causes the eye to go straight to her wherever she is placed in the scene.

Its story of a naïve boy come to claim his bride and on the way through displaying remarkable agility, natural grace and sharp self-taught sword fighting skills, follows a number of arcs that keep you guessing. In an interview/visual essay that accompanies the superb Blu-ray, Tony Rayns notes the connections with Leone and with High Noon, another film where eventually the hero has to go up against the villain alone.

At a time when DVD and Blu-ray are in retreat and streaming services offer a barebones experience (no extras like audio commentaries, making ofs, filmographies) the work of Diskino and its World Cinema Library is to be applauded. 

Two things.

Maybe we can hope at the very least that someone on the jury at the Bologna DVD awards takes notice of the work Diskino is doing. 

Regrettably it seems Diskino has no theatrical or international distribution rights and thus cant supply DCPs or even Blu-rays for festival events like Cinema Reborn. Thus the opportunity to see, for instance, beautifully restored copies and such additions as the alternate Tibetan-language soundtrack, which is included on The Horse Thief  Blu-ray, but doesn’t exist on any screenable 35mm print, is available only on home video. 

The Current Cinema - Kevin Anderson enthuses over MRS LOWRY & SON ( Adrian Noble , UK, 2019)

Firstly, the title of this film is interesting as it significantly places the mother before the renowned British artist L.S.Lowry, but also uses an ampersand instead of ‘and,’ as if we were about to see a film about a window-cleaning company, instead of a close examination of a dominating mother and her under-confident son locked in a troubled, codependent relationship. Written by Martyn Hesford and directed by Adrian Noble, who most recently directed the ensemble piece The Importance of Being Earnest  (2015). After setting up his invalid mother in her bed each morning Lowry pounds the gritty streets of Pendlebury in Lancashire, collecting rents from unwilling tenants, before returning home to cook his and his mother’s dinner which they then eat in her bedroom. The meal finished, Lowry retires to his attic studio where he paints into the small hours, before repeating it all the next day.

But despite the verbal abuse Lowry receives from his overbearing mother Lowry is a committed artist, who not only knows what he is looking at, but importantly finds beauty and meaning in these rough streets. Likewise he is moved by the seemingly odd characters he finds around him, such as a bearded woman on a bus, or a coal miner taking a bath outdoors under the watchful eye of his wife, until he is clean enough to venture indoors for dinner. 

This apparently simple man has found his subject among these ‘ugly’ factory chimneys and these rough people and his sense of purpose is stated quite simply as ‘I’m a painter; nothing more, nothing less.’ 

While we see a montage of Lowry at work in his studio near the end of the film, the artist competent and in control of his subject matter and medium, personally I would have liked to see more of what happened in the attic where Lowry escapes to each night to create his ‘unloved’ paintings, if only to leaven the often uncomfortable and sometimes overlong scenes between mother and son. Unlike his role as the corpulent Mr Turner (2014) Spall has shrunk himself to a whippet of a man in this film and it makes him appear all the more vulnerable under the unforgiving gaze of his formidable mother, played beautifully by Vanessa Redgrave. 

Spall manages to convey a repressed and awkward personality via small awkward gestures, vividly conveying a deep sense of pain and frustration. When a letter arrives from an appreciative London art dealer Lowry is physically unable to show it to his mother and wraps it in brown paper before hiding it in the larder. When his mother does eventually see the letter she rips it to shreds, fearful of its potential to upset the delicate equilibrium of their lives. Shattered,Lowry rushes up to his attic and violently destroys his work. Building a bonfire from the remains, he is then unable to make a fire of his canvases should it impact on the neighbour’s laundry.

On Blu-ray - David Hare draws attention to COBRA WOMAN (Robert Siodmak, USA, 1944)

Surely an ideal fantasy movie family, Ramu (Jon Hall), Kado (the divine Sabu) and Koko the chimpanzee (above). Here is the fourth and best of the Universal Jon Hall-Maria Montez adventure pictures. Cobra Woman from Titanic Noir Mensch, Robert Siodmak, has a delicately nuanced anti-fascist screenplay by Richard Brooks and is photographed in hallucinatory three strip Technicolor by Howard Greene and George Robinson. 

Second screen (above) delivers the cause of all this trouble, evil twin Naja (la Montez) about to launch into the cinema's greatest choreographed camp, the Dance to King Cobra to appease the Fire Mountain. Montez' movements are appropriately filmed in wide shots to allow the camera to capture every unplanned swing, tilt, lurch and gyration as Montez fingers Virgin after Virgin for human sacrifice to the Fire God (" Fires-of-the-faith-Fire-Mountain-grows-more-angry" read as a single word monotone line by Maria before the dance.) 

To compensate for so much ham and prime campery, Siodmak relies on the oldest trouper in the picture, Koko the Chimp (above), to occasionally give us highly skilled and performed diversions, in the screen below transfixing a hunky guard (no shortage of prime beef in this picture) with his needle and thread routine. The sequence is something Buñuel would have killed to do. (And may well have copied for the shot of Arturo de Cordova doing his needlework in the 1952 El.)

The picture is irresistible and comes from Universal, a studio who manifestly pioneered the translation of silent era Weimar expressionism into their 30s and 40s horror unit with staggering skill and beauty. It seems fitting that perhaps one of the greatest German expats to Hollywood, and one of the three greatest masters of Noir, with Lang and Ulmer, Siodmak should here make his Technicolor debut in an action fantasy picture with a movie so resonant of other genres and new directions without which the American cinema would never have later realized the likes of fifties gay infused avant-garde with Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger. 

As I’ve said before about Universal horror, anyone who can't connect with the Universal fantasy genre and the reservoirs of talent and genius that went into it simply doesn't understand American cinema itself.

Cobra Woman is a certified masterpiece, not only as exotica camp, but for hidden intentions, the guiltiest of pleasures, and the exercise of sheer delirium of a genre nobody can resist.

Kino Lorber have just released the title on Blu-ray from what looks like the same source as an older German BD from Alive Media. But with double the file size and twice the bitrate to deliver more grain, depth and detail to one of the greatest Technicolor movies of the three strip era.

Robert Siodmak

A New Film a Day in 2020 (3) - Dragged Across Concrete (S Craig Zahler, USA, 2019)

S Craig Zahler has made three films. Only the most determined have been able to track them down. I think all went straight to DVD at least in this neck of the woods. The latest, Dragged Across Concrete,had posters up for screening at the Randwick Ritz then it seems plans changed and suddenly they and the film were gone from the local. Whether it did in fact do any theatrical business is not known. No matter, it’s out on DVD as are Bone Tomhawk (2015) and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

If you are starting at this end of Zahler’s career with his biggest movie to date Dragged Across Concrete, once viewed it calls out to uncover the others quick smart. The latest film runs for 151 minutes, including eight minutes of credits and is as bleakly Hawksian as a modern movie can get. Scenes just eat up time – scenes sitting in cars on a stakeout, a bollocking from the Chief Lieutenant of the local police force who has to break the news that their latest arrest was filmed by someone on their phone and its going on the news that night.

Their policing methods of the two buddies, Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) a thirty year veteran of street work and his latest partner Luracetti (Vince Vaughn) are less than exemplary but they have put away enough to fill ‘two, maybe three, wings of the local prison”. The city is called Bulwark. You wonder if the Film Commission of British Columbia, where the film was shot, insisted that there be no reference to Vancouver or anywhere else. The bleak urban locale where cops are so poorly paid they have to live in the ghettos alongside the criminal life is very well represented.

The action unfolds so languidly that you get a lot of time to speculate on who will be last-man standing and you get a lot of dialogue (written by Zahler) which uses words not normally used by police or criminals. It suggests everyone has at least a college education. You also get a bunch of songs which Zahler co-wrote, heard on radios, in a manner that might make George Pelecanos envious. The movie zips past in a series of static medium shots, even in the shootouts where the only spice is some rapid editing, most notably in the robbery sequence and the final shootout. Then it’s back to quiet resolution.