Monday, November 30, 2020

Our Alien World of Childhood: THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

Click on this image for a better jpeg.

Although she often asked for the reasons, my last girlfriend rarely understood why certain films left me in tears. Yet when we saw THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, she not only cried at the end, she gave way to wracking sobs that went on for several minutes. I could only hold her close until the storm had passed by.

For me, this film has always provoked a complex emotional response. Less a horror film than a troubled fantasy about fantasies, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE resembles Victor Erice's THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, in that it remembers just how strange a world is childhood. Most films forget, and either fall into the overly-stylized, melodramatic approach of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, or dilute the everyday strangeness with needlessly "magical" icing, as in PAN'S LABYRINTH. CURSE never falls into these traps.

What the film does, instead, is to maintain a tension between the typically fearful experience of a child, and the supernatural: "Is this *really* happening, or are these purely psychological fantasies?" It also maintains a tension between benevolence and malevolence: "If this *is* really happening, then is the ghost benign, or covertly sinister? Is this an act of compassion, or an attempt at vengeance by proxy?"

To its credit, the film never answers these questions, and maintains its delicate tension right to the ending, perhaps beyond. Consider, for example, the actions of the "ghost" during the climactic sequence: Does the ghost offer protection, or endangerment? Everything depends on the viewer's perspective; the film itself offers no confirmation either way.

How a viewer decides to interpret that sequence might depend on how the viewer feels about CAT PEOPLE, which must be seen before CURSE if the sequel is to make any sense at all. The first film haunts the second, colours almost every mood, and forces me to suspect that the results of this childhood "fantasy" might be darker than the ending implies.

After all, this child will grow up some day... but into what kind of person, amongst what sort of people?

Click on this image for a better jpeg.

The Tidiness of CAT PEOPLE

Click on this image for a better jpeg.

CAT PEOPLE has never worked for me; I would love to understand why.

Those who know the film will understand my confusion. On every scale of excellence, from script and performances to direction and photography, CAT PEOPLE can rival any horror film ever made. Its high reputation is more than justified. And yet, for me, something is wrong.

Click on this image for a better jpeg.

Perhaps the film is too tidy, too neat. It "dots every i, crosses every t," and leaves out the messy uncertainties that make later films by Lewton so fascinating.

There is nothing tidy about THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, in which even the ghost might not be a ghost at all; nothing neat about THE BODY SNATCHER, with its intensely bitter personal conflict that not even death can erase; nothing is dotted in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, which is a baffling family drama; nothing is crossed in THE SEVENTH VICTIM, which is... THE SEVENTH VICTIM.

These thematically complicated films are as excellent as CAT PEOPLE, but they reject an easy closure; instead, they nag at the mind long after the screen has faded. For all of its power and beauty, CAT PEOPLE ends with its ending.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Levels of Silent Running


Click on this image for a better jpeg.

SILENT RUNNING can be hard to assess. On one level, it fails completely, but on a different level, it works beautifully.

On the level of science fiction extrapolation, SILENT RUNNING makes no sense at all. Once you begin to look at its concepts and at certain aspects of its plot, the doubts arise, and question follows question. (I will ask a few at the end of this post, after a spoiler warning).

Beyond the level of extrapolation, however, as an illustration or parable of our inability to love the world on its own terms, or to recognize what we need in life before we toss it away, SILENT RUNNING hits hard. Along with Tarkovsky's adaptation of SOLARIS, it might be the most heart-breaking of all science fiction films.

Over the decades, much has been written about this; I have little to add, beyond noting that Bruce Dern's performance turns a character who is both crazy and untrustworthy into someone with emotional depth. As the film goes on, his character begins to show layers of remorse and humanity; isolated, losing his mind, he becomes more of a person, which makes his final decision all the more painful. I might not like this character, but I certainly feel for him, and his ending never fails to make me cry.

Sadness, regret, loss, and hope are aspects of life that I wish more science fiction films were able to confront. SILENT RUNNING has the courage to be beautifully tragic, and this makes it unforgettable.


Click on this image for a better jpeg.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

I expect science fiction to unroll with a certain logic: one idea should develop from another, and the implications of this development should make sense.

SILENT RUNNING, however, builds on a foundation of sliding sand. It fails to cohere, and so you might find yourself asking questions.

How can the human species live without a biosphere? Why are the last ecosystems of Earth isolated in space? Why are they set far out in space, in the orbit of Saturn? Why, when they are self-sufficient, must they be destroyed? Why would a trained astronaut with advance warning of a dangerous impact at a definite date and time not prepare himself and his vessel to meet that impact? Why would a trained biologist not recognize that plants need certain conditions to survive?

Foundations of sand. The miracle of SILENT RUNNING is that, somehow, it can build on a slippery base; it can grow towards meaning and emotional power, and it can hurt.

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

E. R. Eddison and the Dangers of Being a Spectator


Click on this image for a better jpeg.

E. R. Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS remains one of the greatest of all fantasy books. Reading it for a third time, I find my reaction as it was before: I wish I could love it.

Eddison brings to his work a strong style, a keen eye for costumes and settings, and an ear for dramatic dialogue, all in the service of epic fantasy -- but I have never liked epic fantasy. The nightmares of Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore, yes; the eccentric, highly-personal fantasies of Mervyn Peake and E. T. A. Hoffmann, yes; the waking dreams of Bruno Schulz, Murray Gilchrist, and Marcel Brion, yes; but voyages and quests and battles have always left me cold.

What drew me to the book in the first place, and what has always drawn me back, is Eddison's respect for dramatists I love, John Webster in particular. Then again, I would rather spend my time with Webster, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ford, and all the other playwrights who influenced THE WORM. I would also rather spend my time with Thomas Browne, from whom Eddison steals blatantly in Chapter VII; there can be no excuse for this.


Eddison steals from Thomas Browne's PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA (Third Book), 1646-1672. Click on this image for a better jpeg.

Still, I have to praise Eddison for his writing style. He understands the power of a brief description:

"And as they stood in the court-yard in the torch-light there came forth on a balcony the Lady Prezmyra in her nightgown, disturbed by this ransacking. Ethereal as a cloud she seemed, pavilioned in the balmy night, as a cloud touched by the exhalations of the unrisen moon."

Elsewhere, I find the style undeniably vivid, yet static. He loves costumes, preferably on mannequins:

"Like a black eagle surveying earth from some high mountain the King passed by in his majesty. His byrny was of black chain mail, its collar, sleeves, and skirt edged with plates of dull gold set with hyacinths and black opals. His hose were black, cross-gartered with bands of sealskin trimmed with diamonds. On his left thumb was his great signet ring fashioned in gold in the semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail: the bezel of the ring the head of the worm, made of a peach-coloured ruby of the bigness of a sparrow’s egg. His cloak was woven of the skins of black cobras stitched together with gold wire, its lining of black silk sprinkled with dust of gold. The iron crown of Witchland weighed on his brow, the claws of the crab erect like horns ; and the sheen of its jewels was many-coloured like the rays of Sirius on a clear night of frost and wind at Yule-tide."

Certain descriptions bring to mind stage settings:

"And now were all gathered together in the great banquet hall that was built by Gorice XI., when he was first made King, in the south-east corner of the palace; and it far exceeded in greatness and magnificence the old hall where Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha were held in duress. Seven equal walls it had, of dark green jasper, specked with bloody spots. In the midst of one wall was the lofty doorway, and in the walls right and left of this and in those that inclosed the angle opposite the door were great windows placed high, giving light to the banquet hall. In each of the seven angles of the wall a caryatide, cut in the likeness of a three-headed giant from ponderous blocks of black serpentine, bowed beneath the mass of a monstrous crab hewn out of the same stone. The mighty claws of those seven crabs spreading upwards bare up the dome of the roof, that was smooth and covered all over with paintings of battles and hunting scenes and wrastling bouts in dark and smoky colours answerable to the gloomy grandeur of that chamber. On the walls beneath the windows gleamed weapons of war and of the chase, and on the two blind walls were nailed up all orderly the skulls and dead bones of those champions which had wrastled aforetime with King Gorice XI or ever he appointed in an evil hour to wrastle with Goldry Bluszco. Across the innermost angle facing the door was a long table and a carven bench behind it, and from the two ends of that table, set square with it, two other tables yet longer and benches by them on the sides next the wall stretched to within a short space of the door. Midmost of the table to the right of the door was a high seat of old cypress wood, great and fair, with cushions of black velvet broidered with gold, and facing it at the opposite table another high seat, smaller, and the cushions of it sewn with silver. In the space betwixt the tables five iron braziers, massive and footed with claws like an eagle’s, stood in a row, and behind the benches on either side were nine great stands for flamboys to light the hall by night, and seven behind the cross bench, set at equal distances and even with the walls. The floor was paved with steatite, white and creamy, with veins of rich brown and black and purple and splashes of scarlet. The tables resting on great trestles were massy slabs of a dusky polished stone, powdered with sparks of gold as small as atoms."

Even his most vividly-conveyed people often seem like portraits:

"Gorice the King stood up and went to the south window. The casement bolts were rusted : he forced them and they flew back with a shriek and a clatter and a thin shower of dust and grit. He opened the window and looked out. The heavy night grew to her depth of quiet. There were lights far out in the marshes, the lights of Lord Juss’s camp-fires of his armies gathered against CarcĂ«. Scarcely without a chill might a man have looked upon that King standing by the window; for there was in the tall lean frame of him an iron aspect as of no natural flesh and blood but some harder colder element; and his countenance, like the picture of some dark divinity graven ages ago by men long dead, bore the imprint of those old qualities of unrelenting power, scorn, violence, and oppression, ancient as night herself yet untouched by age, young as each night when it shuts down and old and elemental as the primaeval dark."

What I miss, here, is the technique of description-in-motion used consistently and well by Clark Ashton Smith:

"So, all that night, and throughout the day that followed, Gaspard du Nord, with the dried slime of the oubliette on his briar-shredded raiment, plunged like a madman through the towering woods that were haunted by robbers and werewolves. The westward-falling moon flickered in his eyes betwixt the gnarled, somber boles as he ran; and the dawn overtook him with the pale shafts of its searching arrows. The moon poured over him its white sultriness, like furnace-heated metal sublimed into light; and the clotted filth that clung to his tatters was again turned into slime by his own sweat. But still he pursued his nightmare-harried way, while a vague, seemingly hopeless plan took form in his mind." [The Colossus of Ylourgne]

"The doors on either side of the hall, with cunningly mated valves of ebony and ivory, were all closed. At the far end, Tiglari saw a rift of flaming light in a somber double arras. Parting the arras very softly, he peered into a huge, brightly illumined chamber that seemed at first sight to be the harem of Maal Dweb, peopled with all the girls that the enchanter had summoned to his mountain dwelling over a course of decades. In fact, it seemed that there were many hundreds, leaning or recumbent on ornate couches, or standing in attitudes of languor or terror. Tiglari discerned in the throng the women of Ommu-Zain, whose flesh is whiter than desert salt; the slim girls of Uthmai, who are moulded from breathing, palpitating jet; the queenly amber girls of equatorial Xala; and the small women of Ilap, who have the tones of newly greening bronze. But among them all, he could not find the lilied beauty of Athlé." [The Maze of the Enchanter]

"Crossing the threshold, he was engulfed instantly by a dead and clammy darkness, touched with the faint fetor of corruption, and a smell as of charred bone and flesh. He thought that he was in a huge corridor, and feeling his way forward along the right-hand wall, he soon came to a sudden turn, and saw a bluish glimmering far ahead, as if in some central adytum where the hall ended. Massy columns were silhouetted against the glimmering; and across it, as he drew nearer, several dark and muffled figures passed, presenting the profiles of enormous skulls. Two of them were sharing the burden of a human body which they carried in their arms. To Phariom, pausing in the shadowy hall, it appeared that the vague taint of putrescence upon the air grew stronger for a few instants after the figures had come and gone." [The Charnel God]

In a story by Smith, visual descriptions are never paintings, as they are in Eddison, but moving images that propel the story. His details are discovered, uncovered, revealed. This method is driven by a need for economy (books have space and time for stillness, while stories demand compression), but I suspect, as well, that the pressure of imagination took different forms in these two writers. Eddison stood at arm's length and watched his events, a spectator, while Smith prowled through his dreams, a participant.

Being a spectator can bring another limitation. For all of the dramatic influence on his book, Eddison's detachment can hinder the drama. This rarely gets in the way of his villains from Witchland, who remain from start to finish a vivid crowd, but it does make his heroes of Demonland one-dimensional. This limitation shows up especially in the final chapters, where Eddison reveals himself at his best and worst.

Unlike a participant, a spectator can look away; Eddison falls into this trap at precisely the wrong moment. When characters succeed against impossible odds, I want to know how they did it, but when Eddison pits his heroes against Laxus and a sea-fleet that outnumbers them drastically, in a fight they cannot win, all he can offer is this:

"O I’ll tell thee the tale to-morrow, madam. I’m surfeited with it to-night. The sum is, Laxus drownded and all that were with him, and Juss with his whole great armament northward bound for Witchland."

Unforgivable!

The best, however, is a climactic chapter that shows the dread of the Witchlanders in the certainty of their defeat, and their confusion when the deed is done.

Unlike our heroes, the Demons, the Witches actually care about the loss of their kingdom, and when the spells of Gorice XII fail to protect them (in an eerie scene of livid light and thunder, a sorcerous Chernobyl), their shock and anger is dramatized with a conviction that I could not find elsewhere in the book.

Mourning for her husband, Corund (a soldier whose decency and sense of honour have impressed even his enemies), Queen Prezmyra becomes a tragic figure: someone on the wrong side, full of scorn for the victors, yet loyal to her loved ones and dignified in her bitterness. Shown to be an actual human being, she makes the heroes look shallow and ridiculous in comparison:

"It was ever the wont of you of Demonland to eat the egg and give away the shell in alms."

I can be critical of many scenes and aspects of this book, but I have to give Eddison credit for a superb climactic chapter.

For all that I respect this book, and for all that I recommend it, I prefer to be "inside" a story. Readers who come to THE WORM OUROBOROS with a different set of aesthetic principles might fall in love with it -- many have -- but I love other stories, and they live elsewhere.

It Came From Outer Space


Click on this image for a better jpeg.

A favourite of mine since adolescence, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE not only holds up well, but gets better with each viewing. Like THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, it creates and justifies a set of images and methods that would be copied by other films to the point of cliche.

Everything is here: a small town, an eerie desert setting, the sudden appearance of an alien ship and chameleonic beings, the paranoia that comes with incomprehension. All of this would be seen again later in countless films, but IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE feels new. Like a fresh-water spring, it remains clear and unpolluted by later developments.

It also stands out as one of the few science fiction films of this period to reveal the aliens as non-humanoid, monstrous, yet beings that can be understood and respected. In that sense, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE could almost be a refutation of THE THING. It even recalls the final message of that film ("Watch the skies!"), but with a difference in both tone and implication:

"There'll be other nights, other stars for us to watch. They'll be back."

That sense of hope might feel uneasy, perhaps even fragile, but in the end, it remains hope.

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Conceptual Simplicity: QUATERMASS 2


Click on this image for a better jpeg.

Of the Hammer films adapted from Nigel Kneale's television plays, QUATERMASS 2 works the best because it was based on the simplest concept.

The teleplays written before and after used the extended range of a mini-series to explore the implications of complex ideas. Hammer ignored these ideas in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, and degraded Kneale's unusual alien threat into a standard movie monster; the studio remained a bit more faithful to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, but abridged severely the exploration of its concepts, and in doing this, took away the pleasures of escalating discovery that had made the original so compelling.

QUATERMASS 2, on the other hand, was less about the exploration of ideas than about the suspense of an alien invasion that spreads in technocratic governmental secrecy: a threat less important in its nature than in the question of what Quatermass can do to stop it. The simplicity of this concept allowed Hammer to condense the plot of the teleplay without sacrificing nuance, and the result is a film that moves rapidly without seeming to have lost its reasons for moving at all.

The film also benefits from strong direction by Val Guest, who stages events on several planes at once, in foreground, background, and often in middleground. This hive-like activity builds a sense of encroaching, claustrophobic danger even in wide-open spaces.

Other benefits are the score, the photography, editing, and cast: those familiar Hammer faces. In this crowd, only Brian Donlevy seems to be in the wrong film. His performance is competent, sometimes even good, but he is never convincing as a man of intellect and scientific perception; he never feels like the true Quatermass.

This one disappointment never takes away the pleasures of the adaptation as a whole. Hammer's reductions of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and of PIT have never worked for me, but QUATERMASS 2 is a film I recommend.