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The Flying Monster from Mount Aso

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British Release Poster for Rodan (1956)

Don’t be misled by the above film poster: The “Cert X” refers to the British rating at the time as unsuitable for children. When I saw Rodan in 1957, I was scared out of my pants, particularly by all the claustrophobic monster scenes in the coal mine. And now, sixty-eight years later, I saw it again the other night. Both as a twelve-year-old child and as an old codger, I enjoyed the film immensely. It really did have a cast of thousands, and it showed models of several Japanese cities being demolished by the two Rodan monsters.

Mount Aso on the island of Kyushu—the birthplace of Rodan—is Japan’s most active volcano, and among the largest in the world. It has erupted as recently as 2021.

The Crater of Mount Aso, Where Rodan Was Born

Unlike Godzilla, Rodan did not use many of the big Toho Film Studio stars, and certainly none that I recognized. And it did not feature any annoying child stars who made goo-goo eyes at the monsters.

It is always interesting to re-see movies that impressed one as a child. It’s a way of taking a measure of oneself after decades of growth. I do the same thing with books. Sometimes, as a child, I am impressed for all the wrong reasons. For instance, as a college student, my favorite book was Gilbert Highet’s The Art of Teaching. I desperately wanted to become a college professor. Now, after Gen X, Gen Z, and Gen Whatever, I have no desire to light a fire under kids whose sacred scripture is Tik Tok.

My Video Collection

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When I bought my first video cassette recorder (VCR) in the 1980s, I thought I had it made. I had a great cable television setup near a neighborhood where many film industry moguls lived, and I could record films that were being broadcast on the many channels to which I had access. Eventually, I had a library of several hundred films that any film fanatic would be proud to own.

But then, little by little, they started to go bad. The VCR units had a hard time rewinding. And, of course, you couldn’t view a film until you rewound the reel. The tapes got stretched and started to go blooey. And rewinding became more and more of a chore.

When the DVD players first came out, I thought that was the way to go. I mean the laser didn’t even make contact with the surface of the DVD the way a VCR did with a videotape cassette.

One of my friends even suggested I convert all my videocassettes to DVD. I quickly pointed out that it would take years to accomplish this feat, during which my cassettes would continue to deteriorate.

Then I found out about a thing called “laser rot.” Even DVDs were not immune. After all, there was this metallic coating on a thin plastic disk. And plastic, as we know, won’t last forever.

In the age of streaming, people don’t keep the films they see: They just play them while downloading them. After viewing the film, it is gonzo!

In Love with the Twonky

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Tony Randall as the Medusa in 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964)

Oh, God, what is he on about now? Twonky? What is twonky?

You well know that there are films that you love but to which you cannot ascribe a high level of artistic excellence. I refer to them as twonky films. For me, a perfect example is George Pal’s 7 Faces of Dr Lao, produced at MGM. In it, Tony Randall actually plays eight roles: the inscrutable Dr Lao (pronounced LOH) himself, the magician Merlin, the god Pan, the Talking Serpent, Medusa, Apollonius of Tyana, the Abominable Snowman, and (uncredited) himself as a seated member of the audience.

In the last seven years, I have seen 7 Faces of Dr Lao four times and I’m still not tired of it. I will continue to see it and enjoy it whenever I can. I even read the book it was based on: Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao. (As a matter of fact, I think I’ll probably re-read the book pretty soon.)

Now where does this term twonky come from? In 1953, Arch Oboler directed a science fiction film entitled The Twonky starring Hans Conried. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), the plot concerns a “Tweedy college professor [who] discovers his new TV set is animate, apparently possessed by something from the future, and militantly intent on regulating his daily life.”

I have not seen the film but it sounds pretty twonky to me.

There are many other films (and, dare I say it, books) that I would consider to be twonky. I’m thinking of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, Showgirls, Popeye cartoons, and virtually the entire filmography of Roger Corman and William Castle.

Interestingly, there is a generation gap between the bad films I like and the bad films a Gen Z’er would like. That’s understandable because young people were raised to love a different kind of bad film. Even my younger brother (by six years) grew up loving Clutch Cargo and Huckleberry Hound cartoons, which I considered too unsophisticated for my tastes.

Heyday Is Over

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The Unmarvelous Marvel Universe

When I first came to Los Angeles at the tail end of 1966, it was the beginning of a Golden Era for people like me who loved the cinema and saw it as an art form that would prevail well into the next century.

Only, it didn’t. The great Hollywood directors sputtered out with films that were pale copies of their best work. There was John Ford’s 7 Women (1966) and Howard Hawks’s Rio Lobo (1970). On the plus side, there were the French cinéastes of the Nouvelle Vague, including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Agnes Varda. And, across the Pacific, the Japanese were making great films which I have never tired of watching.

It was in 1968 that Andrew Sarris published The American Cinema:Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. It was a revision and expansion of an issue of Film Culture that came out several years earlier which I had photocopied while I was at Dartmouth College and which I always kept at my side.

But other things were happening. Hollywood was sputtering out like a volcano in its final throes. The film distribution companies were run by yahoos who insisted that people of my frame of mind were out-of-touch elitists and what the filmgoing public really wanted was Thoroughly Modern Millie and the Marvel Universe.

In the course of several decades, there was a dribble of good films from Hollywood and abroad, but mostly an avalanche of mediocrity. At the same time, it was getting harder to see the films I loved. I recorded hundreds of films on VHS videotape—but then videotape died. I switched to DVD, but now I am beginning to encounter “laser rot.”

I have in my library a number of volumes that are over a hundred years old. Unless they are destroyed, they will be readable for at least another hundred years. Such is not the case with films. The media on which they are stored has to be changed every few years because of the rate of change in the digital world.

So I have concluded that it will be difficult to be a film lover. Yet I almost never see current Hollywood film products in theaters. Sometimes on HBO or Showtime, but never at a cinema.

Fortunately, my books are still quite readable; and I am diving into them voraciously.

Two Women Alone in the Wild

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Woman Wearing Demon Mask in Onibaba

Both films begin with the same situation. In Medieval Japan, there is civil war. Men are pressed into one of the competing armies, leaving behind a mother and wife in a hut. The situation is dangerous, what with deserters and roving bands of masterless samurai. And the same actress appears in both films, Nobuku Otawa, who also happened to be the director’s wife.

The two films are Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), both by the same director—Kaneto Shindo— and both produced by the Toho Studio. In the former film, the hut is located in a sea of tall reeds; in Kuroneko, in a bamboo forest.

In the 1960s, I believe that the best films produced anywhere in the world were made by a handful of Japanese film studios: Toho, Daiei, Schochiku, Nikkatsu, and Tohei. Although Hollywood pioneered wide-screen films, it was the Japanese who mastered the medium, whether in black and white or in color.

Nobuku Otawa in Shindo’s Kuroneko

Last night I stayed up late watching Onibaba and Kuroneko on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel.

Onibaba is the better of the two films. The tall grass becomes a character in the film, much like the sand dunes in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). When the daughter runs through the tall grass to tryst with her lover, the viewer feels that anything can happen. And it does: A demon appears in her path blocking the way.

Both films are available from the Criterion Collection.

The Alabama Hills

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Hundreds of Hollywood Films Were Shot in the Alabama Hills

If you take California 14 from Los Angeles through the Antelope Valley to the end, you will find yourself on U.S. 395 near China Lake and Ridgecrest. In another hour or so, you will pass the turn-off for Death Valley in Olancha and soon afterwards the little town of Lone Pine.

Just west of Lone Pine, along the road that takes you to the Whitney Portal, are the Alabama Hills, which if you have seen as many films as I have, may be surprisingly familiar to you. That is because literally hundreds of scenes in Hollywood films were shot there, Here is a short list:

  • Gladiator (2000)
  • Django Unchained (2012)
  • Tremors (1990)
  • The Great Race (1965)
  • Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
  • How the West Was Won (1962)
  • Gunga Din (1939)
  • Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
  • The Ox Bow Incident (1942)
  • High Sierra (1941)
  • Greed (1924)
  • Ride Lonesome (1959)
  • Three Godfathers (1948)
  • Samson and Delilah (1949)

If you should find yourself driving up that lonely Eastern Sierra highway, you might want to spend an hour or two taking the Alabama Hills loop road and seeing the sights. You can find out more if you should eat breakfast or lunch at the Alabama Hills Cafe in Lone Pine, probably the best eatery for a radius of a hundred miles.

Also highly recommended is the town’s Museum of Western Film History, which memorializes the Westerns shot in the Alabama Hills area.

Favorite Films: Morocco (1930)

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Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco

It was Marlene Dietrich’s first film in Hollywood, and Gary Cooper’s first co-starring role in a sound film. And the director was none other than Josef von Sternberg, in my opinion one of the greatest filmmakers in the industry. The two co-stars fell in love during the filming, but the relationship between Cooper and von Sternberg was adversarial to say the least.

Nonetheless, Morocco (1930) turned out to be a gem. In its one hour and thirty-two minutes, the unbridled passion between Cooper and Dietrich has few equals in the cinema. Cooper is Private Tom Brown in the French Foreign Legion, and Dietrich is Amy Jolly, a night club singer. Within the first five minutes of the film, the two are obviously entranced with each other.

Poor rich Adolphe Menjou as M. La Bessière tries to hook up with Dietrich, but it’s no go. In the end, the nightclub singer jettisons her high heels in the sand and follows the legionnaires to their next posting along with the camp followers.

Jean Gabin and the Kuleshov Effect

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Jeanne Moreau and Jean Gabin in Touchez pas au grisbi

Last week I saw a great film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley.” It was Jacques Becker’s 1954 film Touchez pas au grisbi starring Jean Gabin, one of the all-time great actors of the French Cinema. What made him great was the opposite of what makes most American film actors today look cheesy and fake.

It all relates to what is known in cinema as the Kuleshov Effect, an experiment made by Lev Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

Kuleshov edited a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine was alternated with various other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the bowl of soup, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief, or desire, respectively. The footage of Mosjoukine was actually the same shot each time. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience “raved about the acting … the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.”

Kuleshov’s Experiment

In today’s Hollywood, on the other hand, actors tend to overdo the mobility of their facial expressions. Add to that the fact that, when they act the part of a tough guy, they are bearded, scraggly, and tattooed.

Compare that to the acting of Jean Gabin in Touchez pas au grisbi. He always looks the same, dapper and somewhat atone-faced. This is equally true when he is romancing dance hall girls or pumping lead into a rival gangster who wants the gold bars (the grisbi, or loot) he stole in an earlier robbery. One of the reasons, I think, for the popularity of Clint Eastwood is that he acts tough without hamming it up.

Spinach, Hamburgers, and Olive Oyl

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Bluto and Popeye in Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor

Okay, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I love it. There’s a sixty-ish grizzled sailor, his beanpole girlfriend, a dark muscle-bound bear of a human, and occasionally this guy who has a voracious hunger for hamburgers (but no cash). The run of the Max and Dave Fleischer Popeye cartoons includes some 108 films from 1933 to 1942.

My favorites are the following three color two-reelers, which have classical Arabian Nights settings:

Of course, I also love all the black and white one-reelers. The usual plot comes down to a fight between Popeye and Bluto, usually over the hand of Olive Oyl, which Popeye wins after he opens a can of spinach and thrusts the contents down his throat. As for Olive, she is typically torn over Popeye and Bluto; but she has no trouble accepting the winner of the fight.

Here is one of my favorite black-and-white cartoons, “The Paneless Window Washer” (1937), which features Popeye and Bluto as duelling window-washers, with Olive the usual prize to the winner:

Betty Boop Meets Cab Calloway

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Cab Calloway and Cartoon Representations

As I hinted in yesterday’s post, I am not done with posting about the cartoons of Max and Dave Fleischer. Among my favorites were the Betty Boop cartoons with music (and dancing) supplied by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. In 1832 and 1933, Calloway worked with the Fleischers and three or four Betty Boop cartoons.

These included:

Minnie the Moocher (1932)

Snow-White (1933)

The Old Man of the Mountains (1933)

The reason I say there were three or four cartoons partnering Cab Calloway with Betty Boop was that there is a separately titled segment of Snow-White entitled St James Infirmary Blues.

None of these films could be regarded as suitable for children. (That also goes for Poor Cinderella, about which I posted yesterday, and in which Betty is in the street wearing nothing but bra and panties). In both Snow-White and St James Infirmary Blues, we see Betty in a glass coffin whose pallbearers are the seven dwarves, followed by the evil queen and Ko-Ko and Bimbo.

Even worse is The Old Man of the Mountain, whose villain is a bearded dirty old ogre who chases Betty Boop down the mountain with lascivious intent, at one point ripping off her dress.

On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) website, there is an interesting article entitled “When Cab Calloway Was Betty Boop’s Co-Star.”