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Contraband (1940)
Apprentice of Suspense
The second collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as his writer before becoming his co-director, Contraband is another English effort at replicating Hitchcockian suspense after the master of suspense left for America. It's got an everyman walking into a nest of spies and finding his way out, all while a little romance gets to play out at the same time. It's also extremely timely, its American title (Blackout) making it more obvious than its British title, and it ends up being a fair amount of fun. It's not great, its plot mechanics to get everyone in place never quite making the most sense or holding together as well as it should, but once it gets moving, it has an infectious energy that very much works in its favor.
Captain Anderson (Conrad Veidt) commands the Danish freighter the Helvig, passing by England on its way home from New York laden with cargo, Red Cross supplies, and a handful of passengers. Chief among those is the American Mrs. Sorenson (Valerie Hobson) who marks herself antagonistically against Anderson by refusing to wear the life vest that he orders all passengers to wear. Stopped by British naval authorities for inspection for contraband in the early days of WWII, they're anchored off the British coast for the night, Anderson given a pair of passes to go on shore for dinner. Those get stolen at the same time that Mrs. Sorenson and the other American passenger, Mr. Pigeon (Esmond Knight), go missing from the vessel. Anderson, responsible for everything and everyone on his vessel, goes out in search of them, sneaking past the patrols to quick get on their trail.
So, the setup is mostly fine. It wasn't the most engaging thing, but there was a nice bit of tension around the British officers coming on board and sorting through details. The characters are decently well drawn, with a special note going to Anderson's first officer Axel Skold (Hay Petrie) who has a brother in London, Erik (also played by Petrie) who runs a nice Danish restaurant. He's just kind of fun to watch.
Where things get interesting is when Anderson catches up with Mrs. Sorenson, stays on her tail, and keeps her within his grasp. The plot kind of gets forgotten for a few minutes as they wait through one train back to port for the next, slowly getting acquainted and falling in love a bit. There's also a sequence at Erik's restaurant that feels like it's going to be just a random side adventure where Anderson uses his relationship with Erik's brother to get a free meal while he and Mrs. Sorenson bond, but does end up coming back later, especially with a tie to a song in Anderson's pocket watch (a Danish anthem).
The thing is that Mrs. Sorenson is sort of a spy, going to London to drop off some information that could have been done with a dead drop. That she has to go into London and hand it off to someone feels like someone who doesn't really understand how spycraft works wrote it out (which Pressburger probably didn't, but it's a decent enough excuse for the action that follows). She ends up falling into a German trap led by Van Dyne (Raymond Lovell), and Anderson has to escape, find some help, and rescue Mrs. Sorenson. Why doesn't he just take her with him? Because the bad guys will know something's wrong? His objective is to escape, not take down the spy ring. Anyway, that ends up being his implied objective so that an extended fight with a bunch of Danes, joined in by some rowdy and slightly inebriated Brits, can get into a fistfight in a club with some German spies. I'm not complaining too much.
I do think that the film missed out on a real opportunity with its concept, though. The film is set mainly during a blackout in London. Why? Well, because a war is on and Germany is in the middle of its blitz campaign of England. What doesn't happen in this film? Any kind of blitz. It's just nighttime. This does give us this nice moment where Anderson is able to use his navigating skills using the stars to retrace his steps, but you could still do that with some very basic sound and lighting effects to add the extra bit of tension and suspense around a bombing raid of London that feels far away, gets closer at random intervals, and creates this need to keep lights off more than just it's the right thing to do at the time.
So, it's pretty good. Its final act works wonderfully well even if the plotting to get us there doesn't make the most amount of sense. It may miss an opportunity, but that's not really a critique of the film as it is but more of me wish casting for a film they never made. There's also this nice little sequence in the middle that enters into the realm of phantasmagoria when Anderson gets knocked out that seems to presage the nightmarish visions of something later in Powell and Pressburger's filmography like The Red Shoes.
It's fun, is what I'm saying. It's a product of its time, but it can extend beyond that. If someone were to take up the mantle of master of suspense in England from Hitchcock after he left for America, Powell was not a bad way to go. He wouldn't keep making movies like this for very long, but he was pretty good at it while he did it.
The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Fun, childish nonsense
The film Michael Powell was in the middle of making (though, reportedly as the second director Korda had hired for the production) when WWII broke out, requiring Alexander Korda to move production from England to Hollywood. This left Powell behind to make the bit of propaganda, The Lion Has Wings, while Korda hired Tim Whelan to take over production (though, reportedly there are five directors who worked on the film, though only three are credited). This manic approach to scheduling ends up coming together to create a delightful bit of nonsensical fantasy, freely adapting Arabian Nights while feeling like it was cut down from a much larger cut. This is not great cinema, but it's fun cinema. I can't fault it for that.
A blind beggar and the former King of Bagdad, Ahmad (John Justin) tells of how he came to be blinded by the evil Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), his vizier, and the innocent thief Abu (Sabu) came to be turned into a dog. Eager to get to know his people, Ahmad had gone down to listen to them in disguise, but Jaffar had used the opportunity to seize power upon his absence, arresting Ahmad, labeling him as a madman, and throwing him in prison for execution. It was there he met Abu, in prison for stealing (though, good stealing since he gave the stolen fish to some starving men), and the two escape together. Now, my first sense that there were scenes missing happened here. Abu shows that he's pickpocketed the keys to the cell, and then there's a hard cut to the two of them outside the city, getting onto a small boat, and readying to head towards the city of Basra. Where's the escape? Was it filmed? Was it just skipped over because of the chaotic production? I have no idea. It doesn't break the film. It's not like we don't know how it happened. We have just enough information to fill in the gaps ourselves, but a tense 2-3 minute scene where they two have to sneak past guards feels like such a natural fit that its absence feels prominent.
Anyway, they make it to Basra where, coincidentally, Jaffar also goes. He has designs on the princess (June Duprez), to make her his wife. For power? For love? To expand his empire? I dunno, but he wants her. Good enough. Of course, Ahmad sees her (the whole ruling about how no man is allowed to even look at her falls apart the second it comes up) and falls in love. He sneaks in (how? I dunno) and the two instantly fall in love. However, Jaffar comes across Ahmad and Abu and does his magic to turn Ahmad blind and Abu into a dog.
For all my complaints about what feels like missing footage, the film is decently well plotted out. How does Ahmad come in contact with the princess again? Well, there's a small bit of coincidence (Jaffar encounters him on the road, blind and begging), but Jaffar actively brings him to her because he knows she'll only wake from a perpetual slumber if he arrives. So, Jaffar has to keep Ahmad alive after a certain point, but he also has to bring him to her. And then, plotting can also kind of fall apart. Upon the lifting of the curse on both men, Ahmad and Abu get separated, and Abu ends up on a random beach where he picks up a random bottle that randomly has a djinn (Rex Ingram) whose been trapped for two-thousand years inside. It kind of feels like a late idea in production that wasn't actually written into the script beforehand. Considering the level of craft, though, that went into the miniatures, the special effects, and the entire sequences, it feels like there had to have been some planning. However, one thing I know is that much of Sabu's footage originally shot in England was ditched because he grew so much in the months it took to move to America. Those months could have provided Korda with the time to create these large setpieces around Sabu from scratch. I dunno.
Essentially, Aladdin took the meat of this story, slimmed it down in some sections and generally just made it make more sense (and stole heavily from Dick Williams and The Thief and the Cobbler, but that's another story).
So, it's nonsensical, but it's fun. There's an embrace of special effects and spectacle, especially when Jaffar gives the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson) a flying, mechanical horse, that is designed to thrill the child in all of us. And that's where the joys lie, in these frequent flights of fancy, strung together by a plot that mostly fits together, hinging on low-rent Errol Flynn to hold up as much as he can. Well, at least Sabu is there.
So, it's fun. It's thin and nonsensical, but it's fun. It's colorful, has a light tone, and looks good (though those early blue screen effects are rough). Just the sort of thing the world needs as it descends into a war.
The Lion Has Wings (1939)
Drama + Propaganda
Michael Powell was in the middle of production of The Thief of Bagdad when war broke out between England and Germany upon Hitler's invasion of Poland. Falling back on an agreement with the government, producer Alexander Korda gave whatever resources he could to the British government to help the war effort and moved the production to Hollywood. That left Powell in England to make this, The Lion Has Wings, a propaganda piece of which he made, maybe, 15% of the final product. The rest is made up of footage shot by Brian Hurst, Adrian Brunel, and Korda himself mixed with a large dose of footage acquired from the British government and newsreels. The final product is a quick and dirty little bit of "pick me up" for the masses in the earliest days of the war. It would be interesting to match this up with John Boorman's Hope and Glory as well as William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver to get overlapping looks at the start of the global conflict from the British homefront perspective.
Anyway, the first half hour is essentially one long newsreel, describing the differences in culture between Britain (peace-loving, congenial, almost classless, and free-wheeling) and that of Germany (autocratic, stiff, warlike), leading up to Hitler's provocations across the European continent that led to the Polish invasion, and finally a look at British Spitfire and bomber production. Occasionally, we get glimpses of Wing Commander Richardson (Ralph Richardson) and his wife (Merle Oberon) as he goes off to help at central air command and prepare for the first of Germany's air raids against the British mainland.
The footage shot by each director is reportedly this: Hurst directed everything with Richardson, Powell directed everything in planes, and Brunel shot the crisis section (though, I'm not entirely sure what that is). There's footage from Triumph of the Will as well as a segment from the film Fire Over England showing Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson) giving speeches in her armor in the face of the Spanish Armada, drawing a parallel between the British responses then and contemporaneously. It seems a bit hoary, but I think it kind of works.
And that's largely my response to it all: it's a bit hoary, but it kind of works. It's unabashedly propaganda to the point where the only way to make it moreso would be to have the narrator (E. V. H. Emmett) outright call it so. However, it's actually got something like a dramatic structure. The scenes are mostly decently well done. The stuff with Richardson ranges from obvious (everything with his wife) to borderline ridiculous (the entire section dealing with the three German bombing runs, including a command center that makes no sense). However, it's Powell's stuff in the planes that works the best. They're about professional men doing a professional job in a dangerous environment (it's almost Hawksian), but there's no time for bits of personal story from any of them. It's just down and dirty men on a mission stuff.
And, because this is propaganda, the British win everything. I mean, everything. The British bombing run Kiel Canal goes off flawlessly, sinking a bunch of battleships without losing a single plane. The counterattack from Germany gets brushed away with the well-trained British pilots easily taking out the bombers, leaving no one on the ground to be hurt. In fact, the final scene is between Richardson and Oberon where Oberon, in nurse's dress, talks about how she has so little to do in her official capacity, a reality that would starkly change with the beginning of the German Blitz. It reminds me of how Hawks' own Air Force had to end with a great victory even if the story didn't call for it.
So, it's propaganda, but it's decent propaganda. The look at wartime production is interesting. The "story" beats are fine and function decently enough. The overview of how Britain is preparing defenses including explanations for barrage balloons is interesting and informative (the people of the nation should know why large inflatable blimps are hanging by steel cables from their major cities, for sure). I've seen far worse propaganda, but it's also obvious that the needs of propaganda and the needs for drama are pretty much completely diametrically opposed. They clash. It's possible to lessen the clash, but the clash will be there, nonetheless.
The Spy in Black (1939)
Across borders
Mostly notable as the first time that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger worked together, this time with Pressburger only as writer, not as codirector, The Spy in Black exists in this interesting pocket of film history. Made in 1938, less than a year before war broke out between Britain and Germany, a British film came out centered around a German U-boat captain in WWI that made him a rounded, almost sympathetic character, even as he plots to sink dozens of British warships. It's a mostly successful film that's really got dueling narrative directions, but we'll get to that.
U-boat captain Hardt (Conrad Veidt) is ordered on a secret mission to the Orkney Islands where he will meet a female German spy for a mission he won't know until he meets her. Meanwhile, we watch as a young English schoolteacher, Anne (June Duprez), engaged to the traveling Reverend Harris (Cyril Raymond) leaves for the Orkney Islands before she's drugged and replaced by German spies. On the island arrives Ms. Tiel (Valerie Hobson), having taking on the identity of Anne, and eschewing all efforts to get her to stay in the small and populated town center in favor of living in the remote schoolhouse.
The early parts of the film demonstrate the conflict within the heart of the film itself. Hardt's scenes are about how the war stripped humanity of many of its joys, in particular around food. He shows up to a hotel in a German port city, expects at least butter, gets nothing but carrots, and has to go right back out to perform his new mission. On the other hand, Tiel's scenes are about the mechanics of spycraft, somewhere between careful attention to the minutiae of the reality and an overly attentive to detail series of scenes that don't quite add the kind of tension one expects. It's not that Tiel's scenes are bad, just that they don't quite have the kind of suspenseful tension around them that they probably should. Part of this might be information kept from the audience until late in the film.
Anyway, Hardt meets with Tiel who tells him the plan. There is a disgraced English commander, now Lieutenant Ashington (Sebastian Shaw), who is angry with the Admiralty for removing his command that he's willing to give the German navy intelligence on a convoy leaving the Orkneys in order to sink it in exchange for payment. This is where a certain love triangle develops that makes the film feel like it's going to go in a particular direction, something rather mundane but potentially workable: two men falling in love with the same woman. It's here were Ford's later They Were Expendable comes to mind, about the impermanence of war and the fleeting nature of relationships made under its shadow, potentially walking towards some kind of tragic end.
But the film has something else in mind, a complete overturning of everything leading into the final act that deepens everything. It takes the idea of the impermanence of relationships under war and expands on it to include feelings of betrayal, dereliction of duty, and failure. It's a presentation of how human connection is both possible and impossible across national borders in wartime. It's a touch of Joyeaux Noel and The Dawn Patrol where there will always be other bonds that connect people crisscross national concerns but also conflict with them at the same time. It's where the efforts at actually building Hardt and Tiel as characters through the earlier parts of the film pays off.
As Hardt stands alone on that trawler's perch, having been defeated so thoroughly that he can't even move from a sinking vessel, it has this touch of tragedy, even though he's a German character, a spy working to sink British vessels, in a British film. It's not that Powell and Pressburger hated England. It seems obvious enough at this point that Powell loved his country deeply. However, he and Pressburger also seem to be humanists at heart, perhaps even utopians, who wished for human connection even in trying times of world-upheaval, a fact that helps their films have a long shelf life long after the direct conflicts are over. However, the films don't seem to be utopian themselves. They recognize that the world is big and violent without promises that all violence will end if we could just learn to get along. Instead, it strikes this balance where the focus is on individuals looking for ways through messy times, their conflicts of interest, and their basic desires.
The shadow of war was looming over Europe at the time, so making this on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland feels like a statement that even though countries may go to war, the people can still find common ground, and when they can't it's a tragedy of the individuals.
That's some waxing poetic about a movie I think is pretty good, but the final twenty minutes made it for me. Up until then, it was fine, a perfectly acceptable, if a bit overly complicated, spy adventure. And then it gained this extra dimension, deepening Hardt in a wonderful new direction, and giving us a tragic ending that surprised me. Helped in no small part by a strong cast, especially Veidt, The Spy in Black is overall a solid spy adventure that ends so much better than it begins.
The Edge of the World (1937)
Powell's first masterpiece
Michael Powell's quota quickie period was over, and he cobbled together the money for a real feature film from American producer Joe Rock to make a movie based on an idea he had about dying communities on small islands off the Scottish coast. Writing the script himself, he took his crew out to the remote island of Foula, which he renamed Hirta for the film, and he took in the rugged beauty of the island north of the Scottish coast. What he captured was beautiful, but he also framed it all with this wonderful story of a population that was on the edge of understanding that it was dying, that its way of life was going away with the advance of modernity. Melancholic, proud, and beautiful, The Edge of the World is Powell striking out on his own and proving that his apprenticeship period on the quota quickies was time well spent.
Told as a flashback ten years after the main events of the film, the final couple of years of life on Hirta is recounted by Andrew (Niall MacGinnis), centered around his friendship with Robbie (Eric Berry), his romance with Robbie's twin sister Ruth (Belle Chrystall), and the antagonistic relationship that develops with their father, Peter (John Laurie). Robbie has just come back from some time on a fishing trawler off the island, pulling in more money in one season that he could years of working for their Laird sheering sheep and fishing on the island. He sees how the world has moved on from the peasant, aboriginal life that they lead and sees that Hirta cannot survive. They have to leave. Andrew disagrees, and they decide to have a competition to decide what to do. It's more of a playful demonstration of youthfulness than a serious effort to make a decision for the island, but the two friends free climb a cliff along the island's edge which leads to Robbie falling to his death.
This isn't a plot heavy film, so it doesn't lead to major plot changes. It's a character piece, the center really being Peter as he deals with the death of his son, his daughter continuing to want to leave him for Andrew, and the steady decline of life on the island that he cannot deny. He even remarks upon how the fishing trawlers from the mainland come further out to take what the islanders can fish, requiring them using even more coal to go even further out. It's a conflict of visions with Robbie's death awakening some and deadening others to the situation, driving people away and weakening the island even further.
Through all of this, Powell uses the absolute most of the beautiful scenery of the cold, remote island. If this didn't inspire David Lean on Ryan's Daughter, I'd be extremely surprised. He has these wonderful shots of people standing on the cliffs that dominate, demonstrating how large the island is to all of these people, how they transient considering the island's life that lasted long before they came (the opening text refers to when the Romans discovered it) and long after (the framing device of Andrew returning to an empty island). It's beautiful imagery, and it's almost constant, so much of the film happening outside. That makes me note the sound design as well. We're well past the point when sound was awkwardly built out of a single, unmixed track. Here, we get overlapping sounds like music, sound effects, and dialogue all at once, and it's all happening outside where it's obvious there's constant wind. The dialogue still comes through clearly, and it's really a strong technical achievement.
The ending of the film is the dramatic justification for abandoning the island with one character having exiled himself only finding need to come back when he receives word through unconventional means, racing back to save someone's life. It's a situation that would have been much easier to manage if the island had modern conveniences, but the modest economy of the place can't justify anything more than it already has.
So, the path is inevitable, and Powell makes no mystery of that, starting with the flash-forward where the island is already depopulated. There's this marvelous sense of melancholy from the moment Andrew's face crossfades into images of the town getting ready for Sunday services ten years prior. The rugged, hard life on the island has produced a wonderful people, but they cannot stay there. Watching the dramatics of a personal tragedy define this is just wonderful writing on Powell's part, splitting the community through the microcosm of one father grieving for his son and a potential son-in-law becoming the driving force to pull everyone away.
Finally, Powell is reaching what could be his full potential as a filmmaker. Given time and money he never had cranking out five short movies a year, he's able to personally craft a tale of wonderful depth and feeling. It's about as long as most of his quota quickies, but it is so much more. It's his first great film.
The Man Behind the Mask (1936)
All of a sudden, Flash Gordon influences.
Michael Powell's final quota quickie now only exists in an abbreviated, recut form made after WWII, cutting out twenty minutes of its final runtime to get it under an hour. I feel like those missing twenty minutes would have made this a fair bit better, but the end result is interesting nonetheless. I mean, it's not good. It's a weird combination of Hitchcock's British period and, of all things, Flash Gordon, but some of what makes it less than good is an abbreviated feel to, especially, its early sections where pieces don't quite seem to fit together. I doubt the missing twenty minutes would make this a masterpiece of silly wrong man nonsense, but it would probably just make it better.
Nick (Hugh Williams) is an amateur aviator (something that never becomes important ever, so a waste) who is in love with June Slade (Jane Baxter), daughter to Lord Slade (Peter Gawthorne) who opposes their match. On the night of Lord Slade's party to celebrate his acquisition of a mysterious and ancient golden shield, New Years' Eve, Nick gets shot by an intruder with a familiar tattoo on his wrist who steals Nick's costume for the masquerade. This man steals into Lord Slade's party in Nick's costume, steals the shield, makes off with June, and Nick ends up the prime suspect.
So, the early parts of this, pretty much the whole setup, feel unnaturally truncated and staccato, especially the history that ties Nick with June's brother Jimmy (Ronald Ward). They were two parts of three to a secret brotherhood, the third being Allan Hayden (Reginald Tate), presumed dead, information pretty much hidden from the audience until his reveal at being alive. Honestly, this feels more like the fourth or fifth entry in a serial than a standalone mystery thriller.
So, the focus of the plot ends up trying to track down where June went, who she was taken by, and who he was working for all while the police are after Nick. It's unclear why either he doesn't have an alibi or why Doctor Harold (Donald Calthrop) believes him so readily, fixing him up after he gets back from that central party that he was attending. However, Nick uses him to divert the police while he goes to the shop where a tie he pulled off of his assailant was purchased, leading to the discovery of Hayden. This is compounded by the fact that Hayden is betraying his employer, The Master (Maurice Schwartz), whose lieutenant, Harrah (Gerald Fielding) is in pursuit as well.
Where the film actually works is in pieces of the whole mystery thing, like the chase and individual sequences of some suspense, like when Jimmy has to rescue Nick from Hayden in the tie shop. There are also a good number of sources of light comedy to help even the tone out, especially from Dr. Harold's American assistant, Marian (Kitty Kelly). Also, the whole presentation of The Master, who feels like a copy of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, especially in his astronomy tower as he gazes up at the stars in between orders to have Nick killed and the shield returned. It feels so out of place in the rest of the film's setting of the English countryside, a small city street, and a country manor that it's just fascinating how the clean angles and exacting and mannered performances, especially from Schwartz, contrasts with everything else around it.
The movements of the plot get almost incomprehensible as people get kidnapped, Nick and June keep getting pursued even though they shouldn't (or maybe they should? The ownership of the shield gets unclear for a while). And it's all anchored by characters that we never got any real time to develop (the central reason I feel like the longer cut is probably better, should it ever be discovered), leaving the film's finale to focus on The Master because no one else is particularly interesting.
So, it's not a good film. It's far from his best, and it might be the worst surviving quota quickie Powell made, but it has some limited charms. The light comedy that gets sprinkled through is nice to have, and there are some decently built sequences. However, the whole just doesn't connect particularly well, the gaping holes of the cuts too obviously hampering what's left in the film. Eh, there are worse things out there, but I wouldn't exactly rush to discover this.
The Phantom Light (1935)
Soundscape
Michael Powell has completely grown past the early, awkward stages of the sound era and can now use sound to create interesting soundscapes in service to atmosphere. This is easily his most atmospheric film to date which is unfortunately tied to a script that just doesn't quite work. There are too many outside views of the remote community centered around the coastal lighthouse and not enough from the inside, making it a mystery to such a level that it's hard to grasp what the mystery is even about. Still, that atmosphere really does help things.
Sam Higgins (Gordon Harker) arrives at Tan-Y-Bwlch in Wales to take up his position as chief lighthouse keeper after the mysterious death of its previous occupant of the role, Jack Davis. Really, he just disappeared. At the train station, he meets Binnie (Alice Bright) from out of town who's waiting for a car into town. In town, he also meets a man who lets himself be known as a journalist, Jim (Ian Hunter), who tries to bribe his way onto the lighthouse island, a bribe that Sam easily swats away. He's a twenty-five year man, you see. At the lighthouse, he meets his main helper, Claff Owen (Herbert Lomas), a local with many eerie tales of the eponymous light that shines out some nights and leads ships to their death on the rocks.
So, my problem with this is ultimately that Sam isn't there to investigate anything but Binnie and Jim are, but under false pretenses. Sam is mostly just trying to get through his first night, and he's never flustered. He's too experienced for anything else. The one fact that should fluster him, the presence of a half-mad former helper, Tom (Reginald Tate), that Sam ends up tying up to control. Sam isn't interested in the mystery. Instead, Binnie and Tom end up on the island when Tom takes a boat and demands help in the night, a boat on which Binnie had stowed-away. They both have secret interests for investigating the circumstance of Jack Davis' disappearance, but they keep them from each other, from Sam, and from the audience until pretty much the film's ending.
So, we have our main character who's essentially just managing the mess, two supporting characters who are searching for truth but we don't understand any of it, and Claff in the middle talking about the phantom light while Tom tries to escape from his bonds. It's a weird muddle where I was unsure of what was even going on, the whole thing really only held up by that atmosphere. That atmosphere is helped by this constant whirl of wind, the crashing of waves, and the wonderfully naturalistic photography that Powell uses to help set the scene, especially as Sam is approaching the lighthouse. The set on which most of the film takes place is claustrophobic but brightly lit so that we can see everything (it could have used a bit more moodiness in the lighting inside).
And then everything gets revealed. It's a money scheme that's never quite clear but involves the wrecking of ships, a naval officers brother, and the death of Jack. Even how far the conspiracy goes ends up unclear, but the action itself around the resolution is clear enough to function.
If I were given this script, I'd rewrite at least one of those three outsider roles to be from the village, most likely Binnie. Her secret identity ends up not really mattering in the long run, and the lack of any real connection to the village makes everything about it extremely opaque for far too long. Instead, make Binnie Jack's brother or daughter, or something. She knows everyone, but she can't get onto the island for whatever reason. She ends up being able to provide Sam with background and even a reason for him to be invested (he falls for her, maybe). Then we can touch on, perhaps, a conspiracy in the town that she has some sense of but no real specific knowledge of, and someone like Claff or even Tom or Jim could help fill out the details.
So, the mystery is far too opaque for far too long, but the atmosphere really does help, especially since the focus is a bit more sensational in the experience rather than about the details of the mystery. It really would have helped the film overall to have greater clarity around its central narrative. So, it's a mix, not quite successful, but pretty consistently interesting.
Crown v. Stevens (1936)
Solid thriller
Looking at that title, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a courtroom drama. However, much to my pleasant surprise, there isn't a single shot of a single courtroom in the whole thing. The title is something I would change (an observation I don't often make), but underneath it is another Hitchcockian adventure in the underbelly of interwar England where the wrong man gets caught in between a murder and his own safety.
Chris Jensen (Patric Knowles) works at an interior designer as an office boy. He's fallen in love with a girl, Mamie (Mabel Poulton) whom he gives a diamond ring he hasn't yet paid for, feeling like a promotion is just around the corner from his boss, Mr. Stevens (Frederick Piper). However, she takes the ring, runs off with another man, leaving Chris with the bill for the ring he doesn't even have anymore, a bill due to the nefarious Maurice (Morris Harvey). However, when Chris goes to negotiate the payments, something he can't being to pay back because Mr. Stevens denied him the promotion, he finds Maurice dead, shot by a mysterious woman who ends up being Mrs. Stevens (Beatrix Thomas). Borrowing money because her husband won't let her spend the way she wants.
So, there's a murder. Chris knows who it is, but he can't give her up because Mr. Stevens could fire him for embroiling himself as well as Mr. Stevens in scandal, besides Maurice will be missed by no one. He tries to forget what's going on, striking up a romance with the designer Molly (Glennis Lorimer), and keep his head down. Meanwhile, the police are on the case, looking for clues.
What's interesting about this is how we know exactly who the killer is from the beginning, and it's all about this dance around wanting Chris to turn her in, understanding his precarious situation, and watching as Mrs. Stevens steadily self-destructs. Freed from her illicit debts but not freed from her penny-pinching husband, she's egged on by her friend Ella (Googie Withers), putting her in direct conflict with her husband, all while Chris' conscience weighs more heavily on him and the police get closer through investigation of the gun used to kill Maurice.
The plotting is mostly very tight around the movements of the police closer to Mrs. Stevens. I say mostly tight because it relies on her taking the gun she used, throwing it off a bridge, and it immediately falling into a passing boat, the occupants of which take the gun to the police. Coincidence isn't something I'm totally against in drama. It's perfectly acceptable in setting things up, but this is kind of the middle ground where it's about making the drama more difficult (fine). However, it feels so convenient that it's kind of unbelievable. It's not the film's greatest moment, but it's over and done with quickly.
The final couple of reels, though, where Mrs. Stevens feels the most cornered with Mr. Stevens asking too many questions about the gun she can no longer account for and his continued pressure for her to stop spending money and living flagrantly out of order with his moral code (she parties with Ella), is where we get this specific level of detail around her efforts that ends up feeling most Hitchcockian. The devil is in the details, and we watch as Mrs. Stevens improvises a murder, starting with sleeping pills and needing to evolve as he insists on going to the police station, not quite hobbled by the pills she secretly fed him, and needing to involve a car, a closed garage door, and time.
So, we get our ticking clock as Chris and Molly (now in on the situation) stop by to investigate while the Stevens maid, Mamie (Mabel Poulton), who quit to preserve her character when Mrs. Stevens accused her of stealing the missing pistol and ran to the police. So, Mrs. Stevens' efforts feel like she flailing, but not completely without some method to it. She could almost have gotten away with it, sneaking by suspicions if only things had worked out a slightly different way.
And that last twenty minutes really makes the film. Everything before that had been perfectly fine. I had few complaints, mostly about the coincidence of the gun drop as well as the fact that Mamie never comes back into the film, making the opening feel like something of a waste. However, it's actually pretty solid stuff overall, and the ending is kind of great.
Her Last Affaire (1935)
Hitchcockian Entertainment
Michael Powell's quota quickie period is a mixed bag overall with a lot riding on quickly written scripts as he made about five films a year. All feature length, these were testaments to work ethic more than anything else, and what's interesting to watch across the first few years of Powell's career is how increasingly sophisticated the physical productions are getting with time. The Phantom Light had some very nice sound design choices, and here, in Her Last Affaire, Powell shows an increasing command of the visual aspect, especially in terms of set design. It also helps that the script is actually pretty decent, a mystery that gets wrapped up in a dangerous situation, hanging on by a solid, likeable lead we can root for.
Alan Herriot (Hugh Williams) is secretary to Sir Julian (Francis L. Sullivan). Son of a traitor who died in prison, Alan has fallen in love with Sir Julian's daughter Judy (Sophie Stewart) while Sir Julian's wife, Lady Avril (Viola Keats) is being told by her doctor to lessen the excitement in her life for the good of her heart. Alan gets sent to Paris to do some business for Sir Julian in the runup to Sir Julian's efforts to become a cabinet minister, but Alan ends up at a small inn in the countryside with Lady Avril, giving fake names to Robb (John Laurie) who owns the place while the maid, Effie (Googie Withers), gives Alan the kind of lustful attention he probably doesn't want but is ultimately harmless. He's there with ulterior motives besides the affair that Lady Avril thinks she's there for. He wants a confession from her about what happened to his father in written form, and he won't leave without it.
What makes this work better than The Phantom Light's plot is that the characters have motivation to actually being involved with what happens. Alan is a young man looking to make something of himself. He wants to advance his career and marry the daughter of a lord, but Sir Julian won't allow it because of the potential scandal. So, he's out there trying to clear his father's name, willing to do almost anything to get that information from a willingly unfaithful woman while also being faithful himself to the woman he loves, even if he has to put on a face and play unfaithfulness to a point.
Things go wrong when Lady Avril falls dead with a chemist's bottle in her hand, a bottle that the pair had picked up on their way there but had been made incorrectly leading to a radio report about it. Convinced that she drank from the bottle, which he can't pry from her hands, Alan panics, flees, takes a boat to France, and gets to his hotel in time for any phone calls due to come.
What follows is Alan navigating the investigation, pushed heavily by Robb and alternatively subdued and then elevated by Sir Julian. He thinks he may have had a real hand in the murder (by picking up the chemist's vial from the shop) in addition to having set himself in a situation where it really does look like he was trying to have an affair with his girl's mother and boss's wife. He also lost the letter that Avril wrote, picked up by Effie right after he left, so his only proof of his ulterior motive has been lost to him. It's a balance that he has to strike, and he can only manage so well, creating this wonderful sense of tension that flows through the whole thing.
The actual resolution is fairly staccato and abrupt, but most of the endings of these quota quickies have been staccato and abrupt. I would have liked a few more minutes, not much, maybe three or so, to get a better sense of where things are going to go. As it stands, I honestly don't know if it's a bittersweet ending or a happy one. I'd be surprised if Powell and team hadn't had a specific feeling in mind and just kind of missed how the ending they settled with left a lingering question that was key to understanding where things would go from there. It's a smallish complaint, but it was still kind of jarring as a place to stop the movie.
Still, the movie looks really good, especially in the inn. There's a set of stairs in the back of the sitting room on the first floor that gets some good use. It's full of strong angles and shadows that almost makes it feel more at home in German Expressionism than a Michael Powell film, showing that he was pushing set design in interesting directions even on tight budgets and short timelines.
So, it's a pretty effective little movie. It's got tension and a story that's almost Hitchcockian. It looks good, is acted well, and moves along with a nice clip before ending a little too quickly. Still, definitely one of the best of the quota quickies from Powell that survive.
The Night of the Party (1934)
Releasing the tension
Obviously inspired by Agatha Christie and her stories of Poirot, Michael Powell's The Night of the Party takes what should have been a tightly focused murder mystery and just lets out all of the tension by actually trying to follow real police procedures. What should have been a pressure cooker of tension as everyone is trapped in an enclosed location with a murderer ends up just feeling wane as police pursue one lead and then another over the course of days and weeks afterwards. It just ends up feeling like a waste of a solid setup and concept.
Lord Studholme (Malcolm Keen) is having a party for the visiting Princess Amelia (Muriel Aked). To this party he invites a cast of characters from his daughter Peggy (Jane Baxter) to her friend Joan (Viola Keats), daughter of the police inspector Sir John (Leslie Banks), the writer Chiddiatt (Ernest Thesiger) whose work Lord Studholme's papers have regularly trashed, and Studholme's secretary, Guy (Ian Hunter) who is having a secret love affair with plans to marry Peggy. There are a handful more, but that's the real focus, everyone who could possibly have a motive for killing Lord Studholme. Though, there's extra business about John in that Lord Studholme wants to start an affair with her, but she doesn't want it while he forced her previous lover, Howard Vernon (Cecil Ramage), to sell him the love letters she had sent him.
The movie takes its time to establish everyone, a good half-hour (out of a film that's only an hour long), and it's probably the film's greatest strength. People feel individualized and specific. People get real motives for what they could do to Lord Studholme.
The plot turns at the party when the princess, deciding that she's bored and won't be told no, dictates that they should all play a game called Murder where, drawing cards out of a hat, one person is declared the murderer, a second the investigator, the lights should go off for ten minutes, and they should play act the murder and then the investigation. Chiddiatt jumps at the suggestion, getting behind it especially when he discovers that the princess has a gun with blanks in it, and everyone gets involved, Sir John's arrival negating the need to randomly choose someone to investigate. Of course, Lord Studholme gets murdered, and we have our suspects.
If Christie would have written this, it'd have happened in a remote country house, not an inner city, posh apartment. No one would have been able to leave as Sir John, or Poirot, would have kept everyone there to dig into their pasts and dramatically draw out the truth of who killed him for nefarious means. Well, that's not how Powell and his writers, Roland Pertwee and John Hastings Turner, decide to play things. Sir John gets immediately sidelined when he calls his fellow police officers at Scotland Yard to take over. They let everyone go, and the investigation becomes a series of interviews about information we already know, eventually zeroing in on one of suspects because his knowledge of certain aspects makes him the most obvious suspect.
And then we get to the courtroom scenes. I rolled my eyes instantly because courtroom scenes tacked on to the end of movies rarely work that well. They vacillate between boring and unbelievable, and at least this has the good sense to go into fully unbelievable and, one might even call it, exploitative. It's kind of amusing.
So, the actual murder mystery feels bungled, but the character work leading up to it is interesting in and of itself. It feeds into an abbreviated courtroom bit, but it ends with a kind of ridiculous bang, a ridiculous bang that I was pretty okay with, even if it was a small moment that did little to elevate what had come before. This isn't exactly some great failure, the character work is too decently well done for that, but it is something of a wet squib when it actually gets to the murder mystery part. In terms of this quota quickie period, it's very much on the low end, but that it's still sort of okay is a testament to Powell's abilities behind the camera, I think.
The Love Test (1935)
A nice little comedy
Possibly the least ambitious of these quota quickies Michael Powell had made since The Fire Raisers, The Love Test has the great advantage of being a light romantic comedy. It has a small enough cast of characters so that our focus isn't diverted too much from our main characters (like what happened in Lazybones), and it has that big heart that Powell was showing so frequently. It's a frothy bit of nothing, but it's an endearing and frothy bit of nothing.
Touching on the obvious fascination Powell had with increasing technological advancements, the film centers around a commercial chemist lab that's focused on trying to come up with something to make celluloid non-flammable. For those who've seen Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (including its quick clip from Hitchcock's Sabotage), you know that nitrate film was highly flammable and a huge problem for the film world for decades. Fox lost almost its entire silent library in a film vault fire (including most of the early work of John Ford and almost all the work of Theda Bera). This has the good sense to not delve too deeply into what the solution to this flammable celluloid could be (it seems to be some kind of coating instead of just a brand new method of making the stuff), but at least it doesn't feel as ridiculous as swimming pools at petrol stations like in Something Always Happens.
Anyway, this chemist lab is headed by Mr. Smith (Gilbert Davis) who has decided to leave in the middle of this critical time to look after his health (manifested by hiccup fits). His second in command, Thompson (David Hutcheson), thinks that he'll be a natural fit for taking on the roll, but when the office secretary, Minnie (Googie Withers), overhears the company president (Morris Harvey), it's obvious that the post will be given to Mary Lee (Judy Gunn). Overcome with emotion at potentially being passed over for a mousy woman, Thompson comes up with a plan for Mary Lee to lose her advantage by getting her to fall in love with John (Louis Hayward), another chemist in the lab. John reluctantly goes along with it (presumably because he already likes Mary Lee).
The bulk of the film is this nascent romance between the two with Mary Lee starting as an ice queen who talks about how the ideal social arrangement is the beehive with one queen and many workers (she sees herself as a worker, not a queen) and John starting as an uninitiated boob in the world of romance. The two slowly open up to each other as Mary Lee begins to like the sense of affection. It's nice.
And then the most interesting contrast happens in the film. Mary Lee decides to buy herself a dress for a dinner with John, so her neighbor, Kathleen (Eve Turner), decides to help her by providing her with everything else. At the same time, Thompson and Minnie come over to John's house to help him become Mary Lee's Casanova by teaching him how to kiss girls. So, Mary Lee strains to become pretty, and John makes out with another girl. In today's parlance, that would be considered problematic. I found it amusing, if unintentionally so.
There are complications that push Thompson to accelerate his plans which involve driving a wedge between John and Mary Lee. It's not a deep conflict, mostly relying on a couple of lies that someone immediately believes without question. However, it does provide this nice backdrop to a comic ending where John is locked up, Thompson has stolen his work, and Mary Lee has to figure out the situation on her own.
It's not deep or challenging, but it's a nice ending where good triumphs over irritatingly underhanded through the use of honesty and earnestness.
On these short features that Powell was banging out several times a year, it's obvious that his command of the physical production had solidified, his ability to coax performances out of actors was strong, and the strength and weaknesses rose and fell with the quality of the script. Here, with a modestly ambitious, tightly focused script, he's able to craft an amusing romantic comedy that still entertains 90 years later. It's nice.
Lazybones (1935)
Disconnect
There's a thematic throughline developing through Powell's quote quickies of shiftless men gaining purpose through a woman and becoming valuable members of society through the strength of their ideas. Here, it's really truncated, though. The 60-minute runtime doesn't allow for a lot of room in the storytelling, and Powell dedicates too much time to a supporting cast that don't do much more than take up room. They'd be fine window-dressing, perhaps one could call it world-building, in a 90 minute film with more time to breathe, but the 60-minute runtime requires a more ruthlessly efficient and single-minded approach to the storytelling.
The titular lazybones is Sir Reginald Ford (Ian Hunter), a lay-about lord, leader of the family made up of his siblings, with no ambitions, an inability to get out of bed in the morning due to ennui, and the potential to ask the young American Kitty (Claire Luce) to marry him. It's the seemingly common story of a nearly bankrupt older name and the newer money coming together for, potentially, a marriage of convenience and trade (the title for the cash). Kitty has a former beau from America, Mike (Bernard Nedell), who has come to England on the business of corporate espionage, set to steal government documents from Hildebrand (Michael Shepley), Reginald's brother-in-law. He uses it as an opportunity to try and repair the break with Kitty, and we have our love-triangle.
The problem is all the time spent on the family, including Reginald's two other siblings, Hugh (Denys Blakelock) and Marjory (Mary Gaskell), and a few policemen looking for Mike. They're a source of comic business, which entertains for sure, but it sacrifices our ability to understand that there's actually a possibility that Kitty might go back to Mike. It's either a lack of time to develop things or that she's never going to go to him anyway which undermines the whole effort at dramatic stakes in the film.
The other side of things that never quite feels as robust as it needs to be is the subplot about Kitty's money. She's apparently lost it all (though we never get a reason, just a line about bad investments which is good enough), leaving her with only the pub she bought near the Ford house as her only possession. She tells Reginald about it directly. He believes her. His siblings tell him that it's only a ruse to test his loyalty to her. They get married. She finds out that his family told him it was a ruse, and she instantly tries to break it off with him because he stammers a bit. It's sitcom-level writing that doesn't make the most sense. Perhaps if Powell had sold the idea that he really did believe that it was a ruse, but there's no time for that when light comic business with side characters is necessary.
The actual plot of the film that dominates the final half is the stealing of the government documents by Mike, his hiding it with Kitty, and then Kitty disappearing because she's mad at Reginald. This coincides with Reginald's self-actualization and need for work, so he makes the house a cash cow in an interesting and fun little way.
And that's kind of the thrust of the film: a plot that never really connects with characters that never quite gel, but there are amusing comic bits throughout. There's a tug of war between Mike and the chief inspector on his tail, Kemp (Bobbie Comber), including the dropping of flower vases near the policeman. Even Kitty's nanny/friend, Bridget (Sara Allgood) gets a few moments along those lines. There's the pair of drinkers who show up to the pub right at opening time to down a pair of beer and leave. There's the whole ending where Reginald puts a twist on the whole working and class thing that's honestly quite fun.
It's just that little actually connects narratively. It's obvious that Powell was working very quickly, but this script by Gerard Fairlie based on a play by Ernest Denny needed more of what it already had to bridge the narrative points more effectively. The story is lacking, but the moments are nice.
Something Always Happens (1934)
Visions of the Future from the Past
Michael Powell returns to comedy with a combination of his visionary main character with the lighter tone of something like Hotel Splendide, and he does it to results that don't quite come together. It's amusing pretty consistently, but Something Always Happens has plot elements that make no sense, a heavy reliance on coincidence, and a child character who doesn't really add much of anything. The movie is never dull or outright bad, but the screenplay really needed another pass to get everything to work together like it should.
Peter Middleton (Ian Hunter) is a hustler salesman who loses his last twenty-five pounds in a game of cards and cheerfully goes out to make another small fortune to burn through. He meets Billy (John Singer), an urchin on the streets who we get introduced to at the same time as Peter in intercutting moments that draws parallels between them. It's an effective opening that brings them together and joins them at the hip, and then...the kid doesn't really matter that much anymore. He largely gets left at the boarding house Peter gets them into, run by the softy Mrs. Badger (Muriel George) who keeps letting them stay and eat despite Peter's inability to pay.
Peter gets word on a car wanted by a foreign millionaire and finds one on the street, which happens to be owned by Cynthia Hatch (Nancy O'Neil). In a bit of masquerade (I'm still seeing Lubitsch everywhere when it comes to 30s comedies, so this feels like a Lubitsch influence), he pretends to own the car, she pretends to be a working girl, and they have dinner on him, without a penny, in an expensive restaurant. It's here where she gives him the idea to approach Ben Hatch (Peter Gawthorne), her father, a fact he doesn't know, with an idea for his petrol stations.
It's all kinds of busy to get Peter to the point where he ends up working for Hatch's rival, but at least its comic in nature, providing light entertainment as it lugubriously moves along with its plot, eventually getting us to the point where Peter is on the rise (Mrs. Badger unfortunately but understandably just disappears from the film), attacking Hatch's revenues head-on, while Cynthia works incognito as his secretary.
One of the amusing things about movies like this, movies where someone has a great, new idea, is that the ideas themselves almost always come off as kind of ridiculous (think of the suspended tarmac in The Palm Beach Story), and Peter's idea here feels so innocently naïve. The idea is to make petrol stations small resorts, complete with swimming pools, where people will decide to stop for long stretches to enjoy themselves while on a drive. You know, instead of the quick service place that we all know and...tolerate on the road 90 years later. It's not really a critique of the film, just an observation that visionaries in films tend to look mostly kind of silly years after when their ideas have become obviously wrong-headed.
Anyway, it works, Peter ends up on top. There's a battle for some new sites along a proposed bypass, Hatch does something that makes literally no sense that gives Peter complete control victory over everything, a step too far in plotting to give Peter the kind of ending that probably isn't that necessary. There's the victory of business, and then there's the victory of the heart. Powell chooses to highlight the victory of business while leaving the victory of the heart as something of a coda. This isn't exactly Rocky.
So, it's fine. The kid feels extraneous, though he does help give the opening a nice feel. It's mostly that he's just wasted, not used in Peter's grand scheme. The romance is probably the best part of it, using masquerade to bring them together, each person pretending to be someone else, and the romance developing rather naturally. The business side is alternatively silly, earnestly presented, just goes too far in giving Peter total victory. There's amusing action in the restaurant, especially around how Peter gets out of paying bills, but it feels like it's missing one more repetition to give it that special Lubitsch Touch.
For a quota quickie, this time produced by Warner Bros.' international division, it's a light entertainment that gets a few smiles as it goes. It's never going down as a forgotten Powell gem, but it was fine while it was on.
Red Ensign (1934)
Powell does Capra
If Michael Powell wasn't inspired by Frank Capra and American Madness, I would be quite surprised. Coming out two years after Capra's early masterpiece, Red Ensign shares similar beats, outlooks on the rich in depression times, and just a general approach to material about depression era conditions. It would be quite the coincidence if Powell had never seen Capra's film. That being said, this is lesser than Capra's work, but it's still a worthwhile experience on its own. Still part of his quota quickie period, it could have used longer in scripting and a slightly lengthened running time to flesh out some things (in particular its final act), but from a physical production standpoint, it's obvious that Powell was just getting more sophisticated with every passing picture.
Powell scholars refer to this as the first real Powell movie, in particular when dealing with the central character of David Barr (Leslie Banks), the visionary shipbuilder who decides to take a great personal risk with his company in a time of depression. Reportedly, Barr's efforts to push shipbuilding in Britain mirror Powell's own perceived efforts to push the British film industry at the same time, identifying with the main character on a level he hadn't felt for any other character he'd directed since he'd started. The irony, though, is that there are also parallels to how Barr is willing to do things that come close to how Banks' character in The Fire Raisers worked. But, that's another topic entirely.
Anyway, England is in Depression with the rest of the world, and the merchant marine is degrading with the times as foreign subsidized ships are dominating the seas, manifested by Manning (Alfred Drayton), a British national who uses foreign crews on foreign built ships to make his money. Barr's ambitious plan to build 20 ships of his new design is met with resistance by his board of directors, mostly Lord Dean (Frank Vosper), Barr's efforts only saved by some sweet words to June (Carol Goodner) who owns most of the shares. The bulk of the story is really focused on these corporate level efforts to fund the project which are kept at a high enough level to never get bogged down in the details, interesting in their own right, but never quite the stuff of high drama.
Where the comparisons to American Madness become the most clear and perhaps inescapable is when Barr does run out of money, having chosen to fund it himself, and the workers aren't getting paid for their week of worth. He gets up and gives a speech about what he's trying to do, about how the effort will revitalize all of British shipping, and he's sacrificing while he needs them to as well. It's extremely reminiscent of Walter Huston's speech to the crowd at the bank.
The central dramatic point happens right after this as Barr struggles to come up with the eight-thousand-pounds he needs in order to finish the project, getting permission from June for something that they also need permission from Lord Dean, all while Manning rests in the wings, ready to snatch up the design exclusively to save Barr from financial destitution. It's got some tenseness, but the film isn't outright a thriller, which is an advantage that this has over The Fire Raisers. It's a drama with character conflict instead of trying to build a setpiece of thrills. It's more modest in ambition cinematically than The Fire Raisers, it doesn't have the epic feeling of escalation that American Madness does, but within its bounds, it works decently well.
The finale, though, is this rushed bit of dramatics, heavily using montage to get us through a quick trial and turnaround of public opinion. There's business around some sabotage that never gets the right kind of attention it needs. Really, if Powell had the time that even Capra got at skid-row Columbia, instead of the rushed production schedules of these quota quickies, I think he had it in him to elevate what he was doing into something much better. As it is, though, this is a solid entertainment, a view of a visionary fighting the world to make his vision a reality (the sort of thing that Powell's contemporary Lean used, often to very opposite purpose). It's good stuff, a look at a slice of Britain in a specific moment, anchored by a strong character at the center of it all, and filmed handsomely by Powell. It's also emblematic of why I go to the very beginning of these filmmakers' careers: there are gems to be found.
The Fire Raisers (1934)
The term you're looking for is: Arsonist
What, pray tell, is a fire raiser? It's an arsonist, but...fire raiser is such a mealy-mouthed term. It feels too polite. Maybe it had greater purchase culturally in Britain in the 1930s, but 90 years later, it's an odd choice. Hard to fault Michael Powell for not having that foresight, but, seriously, arsonist is such a better term. It just sounds meaner. Anyway, this is the closest I'd say that Powell has come to failure in the opening four surviving films of his quota quickie period. A thriller without much in the way of thrills, helped none at all by being overstuffed and too broadly told, and reminding me of how John Huston had such trouble with straight thrillers throughout his tired period.
Sifting through everything post hoc, the film is about Jim Bronson (Leslie Banks), an independence insurance investigator who blackmails people who have done bad things to get those insurance payouts, getting himself a cut. The film starts with him running to a warehouse fire where he climbs up the back, recovers the financial books, and then presents them after the fact to the owner with thinly veiled threats that he'll reveal the true state of the business before the fire. It was only worth ten thousand pounds, not the insured thirty thousand. And he's set to start business.
That feels straightforward, except we have this bevy of a supporting cast. There's Bates (Harry Caine), who gets him the information about the fire early. There's his secretary Helen (Carol Goodner). There's this...guy (seriously, I don't really know who he's supposed to be, though, he becomes important later in the film, maybe he's another insurance assessor) Twist (Lawrence Anderson). At the same time, Jim has to negotiate with the insurance companies, mainly represented by Brent (Frank Cellier), who don't trust him, think he's a crook, and think he may have something to do with any claim he helps manage. Brent also has a daughter, Arden (Anne Grey) whom Jim falls in love with while he's racing his horses with his newfound wealth. Yeah, there's a lot, and when most of the men kind of look similarly, it can be hard to figure out who is who for stretches.
The dramatic turn is when Jim decides to take on the underhanded and illegal proposal from Stedding (Francis L. Sullivan), the head of a financial firm who's also a crook and who does raise fires to take advantage of the financial payoffs from the insurance companies. Brent uses Twist to get closer to what's going on. Bates becomes a stool-pigeon. Twist wants to protect Helen because he's sweet on her.
Why do I think this is all kind of dead as a thriller? I wouldn't call the film a complete bomb. The characters, once we get to know who's who, are fine. There are some nice moments here and there. But, the thrills are just absent, and I think it's a combination of the primitive sound mixing (getting more complex with every film, but still pretty archaic), Jim's culpability in everything, making him less of a heroic figure in any light, and the general opaqueness around Twist, who becomes the main point of tension as the central figure under duress.
Essentially, Brent knows that there is a fire raiser gang doing everything, and through Twist he has enough circumstantial and witness-based evidence gathered inappropriately to know who's behind it all. However, to be good enough for the police, he wants to catch the gang in the act (without ever calling the police because obviously, I guess). This is something that Stedding figures out, and suddenly Twist, this guy we've had trouble figuring out why he's in the movie at all, is in trouble, Jim is having a crisis of conscience because the effort before this effort led to the deaths of dozens of people, and the women are all in the background being stiff-upper-lipped about it all while trying to support the guy who's kind of responsible for it all anyway.
It's a very odd mix that doesn't really work, undermining the whole third act as it steams forward into the mechanics of thrillers.
Thrillers are hard and work very specifically, is what I've figured out.
For a quota quickie, this would entertain the masses in between larger features as they spent their Saturday in the theater, escaping the heat. As an actual entertainment to keep one going for about 70 minutes, it doesn't really work. It's handsome, has some good performances, and some delightful miniature work (that is never convincing, but I love miniatures). I mean, it's not good. It fails at being a thriller, its attention more towards creating a complicated character who gets lost in his own film, but it's not bad.
His Lordship (1932)
Powell does Lubitsch
Michael Powell changes production companies and makes his first surviving musical, a fun and amusing, almost delightful, comedy of manners that uses the ideas of class as jumping grounds for light comedy and no more. Satirical in intent but musical in execution, His Lordship feels like a Lubitsch homage, especially Love Parade, his first musical, and Powell pulls it off quite well.
Bert Gibbs (Jerry Verno) is a plumber by trade by holds possession of a peerage making him the Right Honorable Lord Thornheath. It was a title granted to his father for decades of loyal service, an honor that killed him because it was a betrayal of his working class roots. It's also a title that Bert shuns because he's walking out with a girl, Lenina (Polly Ward), who's dedicated to the socialist cause, our opening scene watching as Bert agrees to join the Legion of Liberty headed by two conmen, Comrade Curzon (Michael Hogan) and Comrade Howard (V. C. Clinton-Baddeley), but it's really only for the girl. He's presented with a path to wealth when the movie star Ilya (Jante McGrew) tracks him down through her ex-husband and publicist, Washington Roosevelt Lincoln (Ben Welden), looking for any lord to marry for some publicity.
So, this is essentially a pro-English, pro-working class musical comedy where Bert navigates the Russian conmen (who have a number singing to each other about how corrupt they are) and the American movie star to keep his innocence and honor. It's all presented through this lightly comic tone done to a fair bit of perfectly acceptable musical numbers with Verno at the center of most of it.
For a film that's so short (just over an hour) and so much going on, it's actually somewhat impressive that we never really feel like anything is getting a major short shrift. It helps that it's a comedy so our two Russian comrades who insist that they're not foreign but born in England despite their outrageous accents not feeling like much more than caricatures can work as long as they entertain. And that's really what they are: caricatures of a critique against communist revolutionaries in England at the time, begging for and obsessed with money while advocating for a classless society without it while outright admitting to themselves that they just make everything up. It works in the context of pitting Bert in the middle of the socialists and the capitalists to reach for the basic humanity of his situation (in song).
The other side of the coin, Ilya, is where the film spends most of the second half as Bert agrees to the situation after Lenina chucks him because she finds out about his hidden peerage, and he gets his whirlwind romance with the movie star. It's all done as one musical number sung by Lincoln, set in one room as a pliant set of reporters and photographers document the changes in clothes and backdrops, documenting their torrid romance that's playing out farcically before them including a fight in a nightclub with another suitor for Ilya and even a hunting trip to the Scottish highlands. Comedies are often built of moments, and the moments here are really quite fun.
And, of course, Bert maintains his good, common sense, down to earth yeomanry by backing out, winning Lenina back, and still getting paid for his trouble anyway. It's not a challenging work. It doesn't have anything much to say about the class situation that it throws out main character into, preferring to set up the irony of his situation (his peerage and his discomfort with it) and then just use the rest for light satirical jabs at just about everyone. And the package delivers quite nicely.
Early sound is the era I find the most interesting, so I should note the increasingly complex sound design that Powell is embracing. Musicals are hard, especially with primitive sound technology, because sound is at the center of it all, needs to balance instrumentation with vocals, and tends towards a fair amount of editing, especially if you include dance, which Powell does here. Not everything feels closely modern or refined, but there's a lot of complicated moves, including cuts within dialogue, keeping soundtracks from one shot over another, and letting the music take over the soundtrack completely that don't feel like revolutionary moves from the advances he had made on Hotel Splendide, but they do feel like next steps, making the mixes more complicated and delicately assembled. It's a technical step up that can't be ignored.
So, the movie is fun. It's disposable and amusing, a bit derivative of Lubitsch (Bert and Lenina's number near the beginning feels a whole lot like "Let's Be Common" from Love Parade), but that's not something to just discard. That sort of entertainment can still entertain nearly 100 years later, and I think it does.
Hotel Splendide (1932)
A small treasure
An advantage of a really short film is that if your final ten minutes are really fun then they end up representing a much larger percentage of the overall experience than in a normal feature length film. This allows those final ten minutes to elevate the viewing more fully, providing a capper with greater effect. Well, that's what happens with Hotel Splendide, Michael Powell's second surviving feature where the first 40 minutes are a slightly amusing look at a combination of comedy of errors and criminal investigation which bleed into a final ten minutes that takes everything that came before and resolves it with a light and confident touch.
Jerry Mason (Jerry Verno) is a clerk in an office who dreams of bigger things, manifested by his reading a book about how to be more confident while sneaking into his superior's office to playact to himself with a mirror, dominating his own image, an embarrassing situation that gets found out. At the same time, Gentleman Charlie (Edgar Norfolk) has just been released from prison after five years without ever giving up where he hid some expensive pearls which he buried on the Western coast of England in a spot that his compatriot tells him is now occupied by the titular Hotel Splendide. Coincidentally enough, Jerry receives notice that his uncle has died, leaving him the Hotel in his testament. So, we're off for our two characters to arrive at the same place at nearly the same time with different purposes.
None of this is as awkwardly presented as the early sound effort Rynox. There are still heavy signs of the primitive nature of the sound equipment (there's only one sequence with music, for instance, since multi-track mixing was still not within the small Film Engineering company's grasp), but Powell's stretching his limits as much as he can. Soundscapes tend to be a bit more even, especially since he allows cuts in the middle of dialogue from one shot to a reverse with the sound of the first shot continuing, and he even uses ADR to work through what must have been troubling sound issues on set (lips don't quite match in a few scenes while there's a certain hollow sound to things, like the actors are in a booth not on set). It's all done to make the sound better, though, meaning that Powell was not happy to just accept the limited tools he had at his disposal as they were.
Anyway, the comedy of errors comes up as Jerry shows up to the hotel with dreams of a glorious seaside retreat deserving of its name, only to find a house with a few rooms run by the sweet Joyce (Vera Sherborne) and populated by a handful of stolid, older people. Jerry has large ideas about how to bring in new guests, digging up the garden to put up a flag, accidentally finding the tin with the jewels, and casting them aside, before Charlie shows up ready to dig for his own part. There's business about showing two couples the same set of rooms that's fun to play out. There's business around the dinners, Jerry's sense of pomposity regarding his position, and the maid's exasperation of everything. It's lightly amusing.
And then we start getting reveals about an old woman, a secret investigation, what's in the box, double crosses, and it's all captured in the last ten minutes or so. I wouldn't go so far as to call this section madcap, but it's as close as Powell was probably ever going to get. And it's really quite fun, especially when a cat is discovered, almost the whole hotel's population has gathered around it, and they tiptoe behind it in line as "Funeral March of the Marionettes" takes over the soundtrack.
Is it a great comedy of the era? No, but it is fun in that genteel British sort of way. It's a light comedy, something made for cheap and fast because it was a quota quickie, and that actually makes it somewhat more impressive. I saw how Powell strained under similar circumstances with Rynox, a film that was amusing enough but never quite came together. This feels much more accomplished and well assembled, like Powell was suddenly much more comfortable with the process. The locations and sets feel more natural. The film feels less confined, even if it does only really exist on 3 sets (perhaps more, depending on how you count the Hotel Splendide rooms), and everyone feels like they have an appropriate amount of space to operate within the film's limited running time.
Really, for a 52-minute film, that actually feels like something of an accomplishment on its own.
So, it's a small treasure of a discovery from Powell's earliest days. It was fun.
Rynox (1931)
Awkward, but decent
Michael Powell's first surviving film is his third with sole credit, the first two, Two Crowded Hours and My Friend the King being considered lost. Rynox was part of series of films that Powell made that were called quota quickies, short 4-5 reel films with minimal budgets (reportedly for this it was only about five thousand pounds), and very abbreviated shooting schedules. These were the kinds of film that Capra thought he was making: akin to newspapers to be watched once and discarded. I'm glad that some exist at least.
Rynox was made at one of the most awkward points in history: the first couple of years of the sound era. It's obvious that the production company he was working for, Film Engineering, wasn't a dominant force in the English film scene at the time, so that this film's soundscape feels like it was plucked right from the earliest of Hollywood sound films 2 years prior is not much of a surprise. Reverse shots have completely different ambient levels of noise not quite at the same level of John Ford's football game in Salute, but it's close. And the lack of musical score takes moments that could be just standard and quiet into awkwardly stilted. It's just part of that growing period of early sound that every filmmaker had to figure out (except, well, Lubitsch), and Powell is the first filmmaker I've discovered who started right at that beginning.
Anyway, the story is about the titular company Rynox owned by F. X. Benedik (Stewart Rome). The company has serious debt problems, and Benedik is being pestered by a strange bum named Boswell Marsh. He assures his business partner that all will be well soon, making brief mention of some materials, a rubber substitute, that will work out for them (I'm not entirely sure what Rynox does). His son, Tony (John Longden), is engaged to his business partner's daughter, Peter (Dorothy Boyd).
Really, there's not a whole lot of story here because the film is only 46 minutes long. The opening is stilted exposition with people talking in F. X.'s office, and it's a small slog. There are introductions of our minor characters, one of whom never seems to go anywhere, their treasurer Samuel (Charles Paton) who is talked about becoming a partner but which doesn't affect anything, and it highlights how the film is just too short for its own good. The treasurer is just a bit of a dead zone, but the real problem is Tony.
Tony is barely introduced, mostly just as F. X.'s son and Peter's fiancé while Peter (that name is throwing me, because it's definitely a girl) ends up the main focus of their introductory scene. However, Tony becomes the focus in the final sequence, including getting into a fight with Captain James (Edmund Willard), who has a secret that he's threatening to make public if he doesn't get paid off. It leads to a fight that ends up unnecessary, consciously so, with Tony talking about how James couldn't understand why he got into the fight. And I don't understand why he got into the fight.
Listen, I don't think this 45-minute film needs to be two-and-a-half hours long, but a solid 20-30 minutes to get it to a real feature length could have focused on people like Tony to bulk that up so that his decision makes sense in that ironically character-based sort of way.
That being said, the second half of the film is a mysterious reveal that is actually quite fun. It's easy to see why the critical reception at the time would have been positive, because the whole thing ends up being recast in a fun (if actually kind of pretty dark) sort of way. It's almost Hitchcockian in its mechanics. It was one of three different possibilities I had in my head (not the one I focused on most, though, to my eternal shame), but it worked.
So, its awkwardness of early sound and its abbreviated runtime hinder it a good bit, but the actual story with its little twists works decently well. It has some very nice compositions like when Peter goes to a gun store to buy Tony a wedding gift, Powell frames her nicely with a gun rack in the foreground and the storekeeper framed just as nicely in a tighter visual spot. It's a mix, but it's very far from the worst start.
Halloween Ends (2022)
Deeply misunderstood
Well, I really don't get the consensus. Halloween Ends is easily the best sequel since the original film, the one that does the most to actually expand on the original ideas, the one with the best handle on the kind of horror that Carpenter originally strived for, and the one with the best overall approach to its character-based storytelling. Sure, Michael Myers doesn't appear until something like halfway through the film, but we got much more interesting stuff instead. Do we really need another retread of Michael stabbing dumb teenagers, or can we get a portrait of evil transferring over to a new vessel, the shape transforming into something new?
One year after the events of the two previous entries in David Gordon Green's Halloween films, Michael Myers has disappeared without a trace, and Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) accidentally kills the child he's babysitting on Halloween night. Several years later, the specter of Myers still lingers over Haddonfield like a sickness, never lifting, especially around the eponymous holiday. Corey has been released from police custody, though he can't shake the guilt or shame the town feels towards him as he works at a mechanic's yard with his father. He's accepted that he's a loner.
Meanwhile, Allyson (Andi Matichak) has moved in with her grandmother Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) after the death of her mother at the hands of Myers at the end of the previous film. Allyson works in a doctor's office, also comes off as a loner while her grandmother tries to push her out the door to live a life. When Laurie encounters Corey at a gas station, being bullied by four high school kids, she orchestrates the meeting between her granddaughter and this seemingly nice boy.
And that's really the heart of this film: a romance between a broken young man and the girl who sees a kindred spirit in him with a question in the middle of it. Where does the evil come from? Is it something that was always in Corey that just came out, or was it from an external force, like the sickness infecting Haddonfield? Considering the plot progression, I'd say that the film leans more towards one than the other, but it never has that moment where someone just explains the "proper" interpretation. People, especially Laurie, do talk about it explicitly, but they just don't answer the question, leaving it up to the audience.
The dramatics involve the pressures put on Corey and, to a lesser extent, Allyson as the four days before Halloween progress, with heightened moments that keep pushing them both forwards towards a point where they want to burn it all down (Corey saying that he'll bring the match is probably the best moment in the film, and it's a whispered line). And it corresponds with the discovery, about halfway through the film, of Corey discovering Michael living as a scavenger in a sewer beneath a bridge.
The relationship between Corey and Michael, mostly wordless since Michael can't talk and Corey can't really explain what's going on with him, is the portrait of evil passing the torch, changing form. They become symbiotic as Corey's descent into evil makes Michael stronger, while Michael's willingness to just commit evil for no reason feeds Corey's nihilism. By the point that Corey is putting on his own mask to commit his own violence, the performance by Campbell gains this wonderfully subtle quality of menace that gets highlighted in a few moments, really selling the journey.
The finale is absolutely great as Corey fully embraces the legacy that he's stepping into...until it's not, the film quickly changes direction so the marketing team could focus on a roughly five-minute sequence between Michael and Laurie. I won't go so far as to say that this doesn't work at all. It's fine in a schlocky kind of way, but it just simply does not fit the film that came before it. If there was one person that Michael should have faced off (assuming a face off was necessary, which it wasn't) it would have been Corey, the younger man getting stronger and accepting the evil that's leaching out of the older man. But, franchise movie in a series that'd hit a rough spot with the previous film, negating any desire from any executive to take risks.
It's amazing that Jason Blum allowed David Gordon Green and Danny McBride to go as afar field as they did for so long because 90% of this film is great. Just outright great. The kind of thing you expect from hiring the guy who made George Washington or Undertow or Joe to make a Halloween film and given the support he needed. I really wonder if there's an alternate ending out there, that the ending we got was the result of reshoots.
Anyway, despite the completely unnatural way that the ending fits, it only does a little to get me away from appreciation of the film as a whole. Corey's journey is specifically drawn and really quite compelling. The performances are all very good. Green gets some wonderful moments of tension that he drags out as much as they will allow. Even the kills are good in that sort of way that people want from a slasher, they just have to get through a well-done character piece first. I know, how boring.
Halloween Kills (2021)
A mess, but I like it
I've seen this once before, a couple of years ago, right after its release. I was somewhat mixed on the film, but I just did not understand the vitriol some were throwing at it. Yeah, the repetitions of "Evil Dies Tonight" got old and there was some obviously, hit you over the head moralizing, but I didn't hate it. It was obvious that David Gordon Green was trying to do something about trauma infecting a community, and I appreciated that. Upon this revisit, though, I'm even more on board with it. I think this film has been deeply misunderstood. I don't think it's a masterpiece. It's got weird moments and a subplot that just feels like more of a distraction than a contribution, but I think the central ideas work quite well.
Immediately following the events of the previous film, we pick up with Cameron (Dylan Arnold) finding sheriff's deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) on the ground, barely alive after he had been stabbed in the neck. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) speed towards the hospital. Meanwhile, Michael Myers escapes from his hellfire to kill a dozen first responders and start his march back to somewhere. Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) leads a toast to the dead from 40 years ago in a bar (definitely bringing the mood down), and this is where the film introduces its central idea.
The idea is that trauma grows if you let it. There's a lot going on in this film, but what it ultimately comes down to is that the trauma that these people let fester ends up strengthening Michael Myers. Why? Because Michael Myers is not a man. Michael Myers is fear personified. The more attention he gets, the more powerful he grows. Now, that is something interesting, a twist on the whole Myers mythos that no sequel has touched on. What they have touched on is a series of theories about why Myers kills, and the film makes its dismissal of all of that rather explicit, especially with Laurie insisting it's all about her while convalescing next to Frank who tells her that it's not about her at all.
So, if it's not about Laurie, who is it about? Well, Laurie isn't the only Michael Myers victim. That's the point of bringing up as many of the characters from the first film as possible. Tommy, Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), Lindsey (Kyle Richards), and Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) all had encounters with the boogeyman, and they carry those scars. And then Tommy spreads it. He forces it upon the rest of the town, a situation made all the worse by the actual reappearance of Michael Myers, driving everyone into a frenzy.
And so, we get people getting in cars, arming up, and looking to take out Michael because the law has failed. Is this a celebration of mob justice? Not that I'd mind it entirely, but it's not. Is it an admonition against mob justice? Yes, but within the context of the actual system of legal force having already failed. The evil isn't normal. It's manifest of fear. What's the solution? What can kill Michael Myers? The scary answer? Nothing. Nothing can kill him. Myers is a natural force.
How does that manifest dramatically? Well, mostly with Michael cutting his way through people in tensely built sequences. Green has this desire to make the victims in these movies individuals with memorable moments, so when he introduces an older couple who are going to get murdered in a couple of minutes, he gives them a minute to play with a drone and talk about how Cheese-Its go great with a nice wine. The moment ends up sticking out because it's this weirdly comic moment where we introduce two characters right before they get fluorescent tubes shoved into their throats, so I end up of two minds about stuff like this. I like that Green is providing the care for characters to feel unique and, to some degree, real or, at least, not just meat for a knife. However, they really do stick out.
The real center of that kind of thing is Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald), a couple who live in the old Myers house. Myers never gets a motive beyond, "kill and return home" (which I am very fine with, it doesn't explain anything). And so, it's a pathway there while the town kind of flails about trying to figure things out. The two are, of course, distinctive from the rest, given time to establish themselves as characters, and they're also destined for death. I appreciate these characters more than the old couple because they are in the film for longer, but they never connect with anyone else beyond some kids briefly. It feels like they should be more tragic than comic.
The one subplot that really just doesn't work is the other escaped mental patient. I get it. I think it works thematically (the people's rage builds and builds until it will lash out at whatever), but it's placed at a weird spot in the film (essentially at the start of the third act which then moves on to smaller scale action), no one really seems to learn anything from it. Not that I demand arcs in this stuff, but the central characters involved in the riot just move on to do some more violence minutes later. It's also a lot of business in an overstuffed movie, and it seems to be more of a side-point than feeding the central one about fear, though they're obviously related.
So, the film definitely has ideas. I think they're fairly well presented, but overstuffing everything didn't help matters. Where's the story though? It's actually a story of chaos, of not knowing where to go or what to do to stay safe. It's about a community reacting to tragedy in a variety of ways, and not being able to actually win. That gets dispersed across a lot of characters (Laurie convalescing in the hospital, Frank holding onto his guilt from 40 years earlier, Tommy trying to be protective in a way that he hadn't been able to as a child, Allyson acting like she's going to end this family curse), and that introduces a lot of little subplots (Cameron starts the film on the outs with Allyson, but it just gets forgotten rather than addressed).
So, it's something of a mess, but I find this throughline in the film that I latch onto pretty hard. It's an intelligent way to address the idea of Michael Myers, expand it while keeping it within the bounds of what Green and co had reclaimed in their remake, while Green fills it with...unique characters. Not everything works, and the whole "Evil dies tonight," stuff ends up a distraction and far less of an asset (justifying the memefication of the film a bit). However, Green was approaching these films not as just slashers but as explorations of fear. I think it actually ends up working, even if the final package is a bit jankier than it should be.
Halloween II (2009)
Funny games
Rob Zombie hated working with the Weinsteins on his first Halloween film, so...he came back and made a second one with them. His reasons don't make sense. However, he did, and he proved once and for all that he doesn't understand...the slasher genre in the least. Or Halloween. Or, potentially, horror at all. This is, at best, a hodgepodge of misery, something so unpleasant to look at that it makes one wonder how anyone considered it a good fit with the unintentionally goofy nonsense that had come to define the franchise. Sure, they were moving in a new direction, but miserable was never going to sell that many tickets.
The night after the events of Halloween, after Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) shot her brother Michael (Tyler Mane) in the head, Michael escapes from the ambulance taking him to the hospital and then terrorizes Laurie until...she wakes up because it was a dream. Well, that took 25 minutes. Groan.
So, it's been a year, and Laurie has been pretty much ruined by that night. She's turned goth, and everything, working at a record store and living with Annie (Danielle Harris) and her father Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) in a remote farmhouse outside of Haddonfield. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Malcom McDowell) has become a completely different person, a huckster almost gleefully taking advantage of the situation he lived through in the first film to sell his second book about Michael Myers. At the same time, Michael is still alive, living as a hobo within walking distance of Haddonfield, killing people who confront him (apparently it doesn't happen often) and having visions of his mother (Sherri Moon Zombie) and his younger self (Chase Wright Vanek) who talk about bringing the family back together, meaning the acquiring of Laurie, born Angel Myers.
So, repeating the broadstrokes of Halloween H20, we get this view of Laurie with PTSD after her victimization and trauma. Where this film probably works best is here. It's here where Zombie brings in surrealism through visions that Laurie has of her real mother and younger version of her brother, creating this link between her and the psychotic family that she's unwittingly part of. It's more of the beginning of an idea, something that Zombie sort of tries to follow through on by the end, but it's in the middle of such muck and distraction that it ends up not really working very well.
The distractions really center around Loomis. He has absolutely no place in this film at all. He's out of alignment with his previous portrayal in the preceding film. He's something like a punchline. He goes through a redemption arc which feels deeply underdeveloped and would have been a distraction from Laurie's story anyway.
And then you get to the violence. The point of violence in slashers is that it's quick and shocking, providing a sense of fun to watching teenagers get cut up by a monster. It's not the best form of entertainment, but I get it. It rarely works because the people making these movies don't have much of an idea of what to do in between the kills, but the kills end up being the main focus because they are generally the only fun parts. Here, Zombie makes the kills miserable. There's a kill where a girl gets murdered on the floor of a bathroom, her naked body on display, the room and her body covered in blood, and Zombie just lingers on it. It's painful to watch. If there's one movie this reminds me of it's Michael Haneke's Funny Games, and it makes me wonder if that was the point. Does Zombie actually hate these kinds of movies and wanted to turn the lens on the audience? Honestly, it's the explanation that makes the most sense to me.
So, the story plays out as Michael gets closer, zeroes in on Laurie, there are murders, connections as Laurie loses her grip on reality, and Loomis shows up to try and redeem himself to people he hasn't seen at all in the film up to this point (though, his book is what sent Laurie over the edge about halfway through, so it's not completely out of nowhere). All of it is ugly and hard to look at. It's unpleasant, undoing any of the potentially interesting things we could have been getting from the material that Zombie started presenting.
Really, this film is just miserable. There's not much more to be said about it.
Halloween (2007)
Unnecessary but mostly competent
With the death of Moustapha Akkad at the hands of terrorists in Jordan, Dimension was able to give more control to the Weinsteins who brought in Rob Zombie to direct a remake. Makes sense, I guess. Having made a couple of well-received horror films that were nothing like the Halloween franchise, but having an obvious affinity for the material and film in general, Zombie wasn't the worst choice. He's at least trying to make an interesting series of decisions, even if I think the core of it is somewhat wrong-headed.
The thing about Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) that no one who makes these movies wants to admit is that he's not actually a character. He's a symbol of evil and fear, and there's nothing else to him. And yet, people (including John Carpenter, admittedly drunk while writing II) kept trying to give him motivation. It was always terribly done and kind of poorly thought out, making the dilution of this symbol all the worse. Well, Zombie heads straight into that by spending the first thirty minutes of his remake in Myers' childhood (Daeg Faerch). You see, he came from the worst white trash you can imagine. His mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) was a stripper. His dad is gone, replaced by mom's boyfriend Ronnie (William Forsythe), who doesn't work and screams at her and her infant child all day. Michael's older sister Judith (Hanna Hall) dumps him on Halloween night to have sex with her boyfriend instead. He's also bullied at school, a situation he himself fixes by beating the bully to death with a stick in the woods. It all culminates in Michael killing Ronnie, Judith's boyfriend, and Judith herself that Halloween night, preserving his little sister for when his mother comes home to find the situation.
Demythologization is a drag, man. That being said, Zombie isn't really trying to find an excuse for Michael or even to establish much sympathy. Before we really see much of this, we get the implication that he kills his own pets for no reason along with pictures he's taken of dead cats. He's a psychopath from the beginning which...calls into question the entire portrait of his childhood we just saw. Is it necessary? Or is it just a way for Zombie to find a role for his wife in a movie again?
Anyway, Michael gets locked up in a sanitarium under the watchful eye of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) who tries to help in the first year until Michael randomly stabs a nurse with a fork. He gives up, we skip ahead fifteen years, and we get our remake.
Suddenly, we're focusing on Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) going through the same motions as she had in the original except with a thin Zombie-skin over everything (she wears a sweater with skulls, something original Laurie would never have done). Her friends Annie (Danielle Harris) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) have boyfriends, problems with boys, and appointments to babysit. Michael escapes from the sanitarium, heading straight towards Haddonfield to find Laurie because Zombie has included the sister subplot from the beginning here.
And that's where we have Myer's motivation. Myers shouldn't have motivation. The scary thing about him in the first one was the unexplained nature of his stalking and violence. He was just there doing evil things for no reason, not because he wanted to remake his family with his long-lost sister whom he knew was Laurie...somehow (deleted scene, I assume).
And, it's fine. The remake part is just kind of fine. It's that grungy 00's horror remake vibe shared with the Friday the 13th remake that I've never found appealing. Zombie films far too closely in normal situations, and horror sequences end up feeling cut to almost nonsense while the emphasis is on action rather than tension. He's best when he's making these small moments that ape Carpenter, like the few long shots down the roads of Haddonfield that see Michael in the background while the girls walk in the foreground.
So, it's an unnecessary remake that doesn't stand terribly well on its own. I mean...disconnected from everything that came before (not the worst thing in the world), Halloween is fine as a horror film. It's not terribly engaging or scary or even titillating. However, it's got an interesting, if completely unnecessary and kind of annoying, look at the childhood of a serial killer and the horror moments, while not my cup of tea, function well enough with loud noises and screams to keep things moving. It's ugly, mean, and not much fun, which isn't that far off from most slashers, but it's so much dirtier in the process. Maybe Zombie took the material too seriously.
Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
Borderline parody
Halloween fully becomes Friday the 13th, complete with idiotic, sex-craved teenagers doing stupid things while staying in a place they could easily escape from. Le sigh. It's not the worst this franchise has gotten, the dumb lore of The Curse of Michael Myers has to be the low point, but this isn't good. This is Moustapha Akkad discarding, again, the potential of tension in favor of tired slasher cliches, all while getting the director of II, Rick Rosenthal, to just embrace the direction fully without any sense of wit or fun.
In a pointless prologue, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is in a mental hospital that gets invaded by Michael Myers where he finally accomplishes his goal of murdering his sister. For all that this has to do with the rest of the film, it's way overlong, not to mention that it's marked by really stupid characters while Myers fully embraces being magical and able to appear anywhere at anytime again.
With that out of the way, we're introduced to our actual characters led by Sara (Bianca Kajlich), a college student at Haddonfield College who, with her two friends Jen (Katee Sackhoff) and Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), get selected to take part in Deathentertainment's exploration of Myers' house on live-Internet feed by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes). Sara also has an Internet friend, Myles (Ryan Merriman), whom she's never met, but he's fallen in love with her.
So, the setup is that we're going to get six teenagers into the house for more than half the film as they steadily get picked off by Michael while everyone figures out reasons to just stick around instead of leaving.
Despite the fact that the basic premise is kind of stupid, the execution is mostly just kind of boring, and the characters are generally thin and unlikeable, there are actually some interesting little pieces here and there. There's an all but explicit reference to Peeping Tom when Myers uses a tripod to kill someone. There's this balance between the kids finding easy answers to Michael's past and all of it being nonsense within the film and there being no answer. I mean...that's sort of interesting. It could have been the focus of the film.
Instead, we get teenagers, in effectively a haunted house, tearing off each other's clothes in a dank, dirty basement, while they know they're being filmed, and trying to bone. This is pure, dumb, Friday the 13th territory, and a serious departure from the re-embrace of tension based on character that Halloween H20 had sort of managed decently well enough.
Also, he whole thing about Myles getting everyone at a part obsessed with the show and then using some internet messaging to guide Sara through the house when things get dire is just silly. It's this late-90s skin to just using a phone that feels awkward and dumb as it plays out.
The kills are...fine, I guess. They don't inspire great visceral reactions like the detailed deaths in H20, but they're decent enough. They're just happening to people the film has made no effort to care about. They're really just meat for the knife. The lamest is probably the girl just getting put on a spike in an underground hallway. The best is probably the beheading. It's...fine. Doesn't have much impact, but it's sort of fun.
So, it's dumb. It tries to enter over-the-top territory in its finale with everything on fire and someone dead coming back to say a one-liner, but it's kind of a dumb one-liner and I hadn't care about anything since I first saw Laurie in that mental hospital. It's mostly just drudgery as we watch an unrealistic and kind of stupid series of events driven by stupid characters who should be doing anything that they're doing. However, there are a couple of interesting touches along the way. It's not a miserable as some of the others in this franchise, but it's not anywhere close to good.
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
Saving the kills for the end is a positive
Bringing in the talent who built the Friday the 13th franchise, Steve Miner, to direct the seventh installment of the Halloween franchise, a reboot of the franchise ignoring III through The Curse of Michael Myers, Moustapha Akkad found a way to make the best entry in the franchise since the beginning. I mean, it's not quite good, but it's practically there. It replicates the kind of tension that dominated the first film and hasn't been touched since, has some very solid kills, and even an emotional core. The uncredited rewrites by Kevin Williamson probably helped the film, but it could have used another real pass to tighten somethings up, give some meat on the film's bones, and find something for our cast to do in the final act.
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) faked her death shortly after the events of II and went into hiding, ending up as the head mistress of a tony boarding school in Summer Glen, California as Keri Tate. She has a son, John (Josh Hartnett), who is seventeen, her age when Michael Myers first showed up, who is grating against the tight bounds she imposes upon her. There's a big annual trip to Yosemite coming up that John wants to go on, but his friends Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd), Sarah (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), and his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams), all get themselves exempted from the trip so they can hang out together alone (with minimal supervision) for a few days over Halloween weekend. However, they're not destined to have a quiet time alone because Myers has reappeared, first killing Nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) in Haddonfield before finding Laurie's file which, apparently, contained information on where she was living.
What's interesting about this in contrast to the rest of the franchise since the first is that aside from the opening bit of terror, including a small part by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, there's no kill for pretty much for the first hour. The film is much more concerned with Laurie's dealing with PTSD twenty years after the event that shaped her life. It's not the deepest stuff, showing her being a high-functioning alcoholic as she tries to open up to her secret lover, the guidance counselor Will (Adam Arkin), while the teens do 90s teenager things as they set up for their secret night of food and sex, of which we end up seeing very little. These aren't great character moments, but they're solid enough to establish them as more than just meat for a slasher's knife. They feel a bit arch, but real enough.
And the advantage of actually giving us time with them as we can see the threat growing closer without anyone knowing about it is that they feel significantly less stupid when the killing starts. They have no reason for thinking that they're anything but safe even while we know that they're not. They're not having information withheld about someone who's been hacked to death a room over because the movie needs to happen. This also refocuses the tension around the kind of delivery that Carpenter (who was attached to direct this for a time before his sense of justice demanded he be paid $10 million for the job) had delivered in the first film. It's not about the strict thrills through, it's about building up the sense of suspense over an hour until the killing starts.
And while the killing isn't great in number, it's the most visceral killing in the franchise. The stabs hurt, the sound effects are gruesome, and there's one moment with a dumb waiter and a leg that just made me squirm.
So, the first hour or so was pretty okay with its character-focused efforts at building an actual story. The third act is where all the fireworks reside, and I ended up feeling something like a rollercoaster of emotion about it. The beginning of it was just outright great. This is where the meat hits the knife first and foremost, where the kills are gruesome and impactful, and where things feel like they're spinning out of control. And then...it just keeps going. The focus goes from the kids to Laurie, and the ending just kind of drags out as this cat and mouse chase develops between Laurie and Michael that often doesn't make the most sense, like the extended bit with Laurie under some folding tables that Michael (magically) gets on top of. It feels designed to extend the sequence as long as possible without addressing some real concerns about how...the whole thing is kind of stupid and Michael should just jump down and end it all.
I'm also of two minds regarding the finale to the finale where Laurie takes the knowledge that Michael always gets up again one last time and tries to do something about it. Knowingly leaning into that feels like a Williamson addition (it may not be, it's just a guess), but it goes on for too long, extending this coda of violence just too long, almost like the film wasn't long enough and they needed to get it over 80 minutes somehow.
So, if the film had better focus in its finale, I think I would have considered this good overall. Instead, the finale just kind of drags out beyond its effectiveness and becomes a drag. The opening hour was pretty decent, the start of the finale was great, and I was ready to really come away from this something of a fan. However, Miner and Akkad just didn't know when to quit, and we end up with still the second best entry in the franchise so far. I mean...it's a low bar, but it did clear it.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
No...just...no.
I often advocate for franchises stuck in a rut to go weird, and then when one actually does, I tend to reject it. Why? Well, I'm a bad person, but aside from that, the weirdness tends to be kind of terribly done. Think Jason Goes to Hell where all of the previous rules were tossed out in favor of disconnected weirdness that didn't make sense. Well, this is that for the Halloween franchise, a film so disconnected from how it had begun, so consumed with creating lore to explain what should never have been explained, and so unsure of how to fill all the bits of screentime in between lore with anything interesting that it just never works. I wonder if they'll reset everything after this.
I'm going to be honest, the opening ten minutes or so of this just outright confused me. I wasn't sure if things were jumping backwards and forwards in time. Having Michael continue to wear the Shatner mask is honestly not a help. It doesn't make sense. Anyway, Jamie (J. C. Brandy) has been captured by a cult who also captured Michael at the end of The Revenge of Michael Myers. Six years later, she gives birth to a baby and escapes with the help of a nurse. At the same time, Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan), a relative of Laurie's, lives in the Myers home (oh, lord) with her parents and son Danny (Devin Gardner). Across the street lives Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), who had been babysat by Laurie in the first film. He's obsessed with finding Michael again, and he watches the Myers house all the time. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has retired, but his old colleague Dr. Wynn (Mitch Ryan), stops by to offer him a job at the hospital he used to work at and where Michael had been kept. Also, Tommy finds Jamie's baby at a bus stop. Also, Haddonfield is trying to make is legal to celebrate Halloween again, an effort headed by Kara's friend Beth (Mariah O'Brien).
This is an overstuffed film.
And at its core, well, there's no core. What is supposed to be the point is this mystery around the Man in Black, a mysterious figure who first appeared in the fifth entry, and what he's doing with this cult focused on Jamie's baby and Michael Myers. The problem is that it's a mystery without much of an answer, no real sense of tension, and it all feels so disconnected from generally everything. What we get instead is Michael lumbering around (seriously...it made sense that he could get away with it in the first, even the second, entry, but anyone walking around with a Shatner mask in Haddonfield would be drawing attention) to kill people.
But, because we can't just have Michael killing people randomly, he needs purpose, so we get Loomis and Tommy explaining how Michael sees anyone who lives in his house as his family in need of killing. Which...whatever. It's an excuse, at least. And then the kills are kind of dull and unmemorable.
And it's all buoyed by details of the lore that are just kind of stupid, like Myers suddenly having a symbol that he burns into hay bails when he kills someone, something he's never done before. Is this...learned behavior over the past few years? I dunno. The movie doesn't know. The movie doesn't care.
So, it's all meant to build up to a big confrontation at the cult's center of operations with the surprise reveal of who The Man in Black is, a reveal that's honestly halfway decent not because of execution but because they did actually put in some effort for it to make sense. However, it's all lore-based nonsense that doesn't gel with much that came before and is kind of stupid. Tommy, at one point, says that the stars align on some Halloween nights to make a specific constellation, which isn't how stars work over a short period of time of a few years. Planets could do that, but not stars.
Anyway, this is a tired franchise reaching for anything to justify its continuation. Actors are committed, especially Pleasance in his final take as Loomis before his death, but it's all commitment to nonsense. The tension doesn't work. The kills aren't great. The stuff around them is nonsensical.
Take a break, Michael. You need a rest.