The Screengrab : dino de laurentiis

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part Three: Live Blogging TCM's Easter Sunday Line-Up: "Barabbas", "Easter Parade", "King of Kings"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:10:00 GMT

4:30 PM: Barabbas, a 1961 epic based on a novel by Pär Lagerkvist, stars Anthony Quinn as a footnote historical character, the "rebel and robber" who the rabble selected, out of the same pool that included Jesus, to be spared execution and set free. The movie, directed by Richard Fleischer, starts right out of the gate with the scene of Barabbas being pulled out of holding cell and turned loose, and the minor-character's-eye view on important historical (Biblical) events has me thinking of Monty Python's Life of Brian even before Quinn backed into the crucifix being prepared for Jesus and the Foley guy, having a little fun, provided the sound effect to go with Quinn hitting his head with what sounded like someone smacking a hollow coconut. This was an international production, shot in Rome and produced by Dino De Laurentiis for Columbia Pictures, with a cast that includes Silvana Mangano (as Barabbas's old flame, who has fallen under Jesus's sway while her boyfriend had been in the jug, and who talks about her new crush as if she prayed to a picture of him that she tore out of Tiger Beat), Arthur Kennedy as Pilate, Katy Jurado, Harry Andrews, Vittorio Gassman, Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Palance as, shockingly, a bad guy. It features some weird, faintly arty effects--such as the synthesizer-like sounds that accompany the sight of a whip lashing Jesus's back--that might have just been in the air of Rome during the time of Fellini's greatest popular successes, and it's very badly dubbed, with a lot of awkward chatter when there are more than three people on the screen: "Hey, look, it's Barabbas!" "Look, everybody, Barabbas is out!" "What's it like to be free, Barabbas?" If Quinn seems to be about as right in the lead role as anybody could be, that may be because, after so many international-cast jobs, he had developed the weird ability to sound dubbed while speaking in what was clearly his own voice, if only because nobody else could deliver a bad line like "You're afraid to look at me because I'm alive!" in quite the same way, as if he regretted that he couldn't have it tattooed on his forehead. When this lowlife staggers into the local watering hole and all the other lowlifes start jabbering in other people's voice, Barabbas has the special feel of a spaghetti Western religious epic.

Eventually, Sylvano Mangana is stoned to death, after which the movie gets a whole lot uglier-looking, and the powers that be, incarnated by Pilate, come to a fresh realization that having given a promise to never execute Anthony Quinn can really leave you up a creek without a paddle, since he's never going to behave and you can't always count on him to fall in a hole or drink himself to death. After following Quinn through numerous adventures that serve to broaden and humanize his rotten bastard's viewpoint, the movie is so desperate to end somehow that it settles for having the Romans forget all about their vow and crucify his shivering ass anyway, though by the time of the concluding shot, he's so ripe for martyrdom that it's a wonder they don't have to restrain him from scampering up the nearest ladder and trying to beat the nails in himself. So it turns out that the answer to the trivia question, "Whatever happened to the guy who was freed in place of Jesus?" is, "If you mean when he was being played by Anthony Quinn, the same thing that would have happened to him anyway." Barabbas runs two hours and twenty-four minutes, which is about the standard length of time it takes for a Biblical epic to make its way back top square one.

7:00 PM: Easter Parade (1947): This MGM musical, with an Irving Berlin score, stars Fred Astaire as Pontius Pilate and Judy Garland as Mary Magdalene. When Fred spots Judy in the audience at the Sermon on the Mount, he falls for her on sight, but he can't make time with her because she's hung up on Jesus (Peter Lawford). So he works out a deal with Judas Iscariot (Mickey Rooney), an old Glee Club pal who's now a member of Jesus's entourage, to have him set up and arrested, so that Fred will have an excuse to talk to Judy and can impress her by arranging to have Jesus be the accused man who is traditionally awarded a pardon on the big holiday. But then, when the accused men are presented to the public, a thief named Barabbas (Gene Kelly), who's been taking lessons from Salome (Rita Hayworth) on the sly, unexpectedly cuts loose with a terrific dance solo, which creates a groundswell of support for his release, and unless Fred can think of something fast...Okay, I'm kidding. I don't mean to suggest a lack of gratitude for any break in the steady diet of sackcloth and ashes shit either, but this movie does fit kind of strangely into this overall tapestry. It's also not my favorite movie musical; I think it's supposed to be the biggest hit of Astaire's career, but I think that Sabrina actually did better at the box office than The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, too. It does have its high point. Watch it here while I go check to see what's going on at The Amazing Race.

9:00 PM: Nicholas Ray's 1961 version of King of KIngs, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus--the first movie I've seen these past couple of days in which J.C. actually has a prominent on-screen role. The first half hour or so is all about setting the stage for his arrival by establishing the cultural and political context surrounding him, and so far as the characters I've been watching all day are concerned, it's like old-school week. Hurd Hatfield shows up as Pontius Pilate, pissed off that his wife's connections couldn't get him a better position than governor of a podunk town like Jerusalem; Frank Thring, who played Pilate in Ben-Hur, is Herod, drooling over his stepdaughter Salome and wishing that John the Baptist, played by Robert Ryan in a Grizzly Adams beard and hairpiece, would put a sock in it; and Barabbas, played Harry Guardino, is running around with his sidekick Judas, playing by Rip motherfuckin' Torn my pretties, trying to stir up revolution. Not the apolitical sneak thief that Anthony Quinn seemed to think he was playing, this Barabbas is conceived as the Malcolm X to Jesus's MLK, Jr. When he first learns of the Messiah's arrival, he hopes to plug into his charismatic teachings and join forces to fight the Romans, but instead, he's disillusioned by the touchy-feeliness of the Sermon of the Mount, after which he urges Judas to sell the hippie bastard out. On top of that, he can't get Orson Welles, who supplies the voice-over narration, to agree with the rest of the movie about how to pronounce his damn name; Welles gives the middle "a" a different tilt than the on-screen cast.

It's a strange thing just to see a Hollywood Biblical epic directed by a cult wild man like Ray. Maybe because of who made it, I know that some people think it must be something very different from the run of Christ story spectaculars; I remember seeing Martin Scorsese grooving out to its wide screen images in a British TV documentary made around the time of The Last Temptation of Christ. But despite the political thread running through it, which can be used as a metaphorical stand-in for anything you want, it mostly just looks like a standard run-through of all the scenes you expect to see in one of these movies, and at two hours and forty-eight minutes, I do mean all of them. Most of the actors, including Robert Ryan, seem at a loss at to what style they should be playing their roles in, with Hunter's performance in particular a sterling example of why taking on the role of Jesus used to be regarded as a career killer in Hollywood. (It may still be considered a career killer, but when's the last time you got to see somebody do it? And when's the last time you saw James Caviezel?) Hunter walks through the movie delivering his minds in a medicated stupor of a voice and manages to be amazingly uninteresting, especially since, between his intense, burning eyes and his inappropriately mean-looking smile, there are times when he actually out-crazy-faces Rip Torn.

12:00 AM: The day wraps up with with Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 silent King of Kings. This is kind of a nice way to bring things full circle. It's no more innocent, and at times at least as puke worthy, as any of the movies from the 1950s, but it's from such a distant point in the history of modern pop culture that parts of it have an authentic strangeness. There are a couple of lovely-looking sequences done in an early, two-step Technicolor process. One of them is, of course, the resurrection; the other is a morning-after scene that's a handy reminder that, once upon a time, DeMille did know how to stage an orgy, or the remains of one. (A bunch of ugly-looking, over-made-up guys are sitting around acting zonked while Mary Magdalene makes out with a leopard. "Mary," says the fatso on the guy's team, "would you kiss a beast and not kiss me?" This nameless wretch this achieves screen immortality as the inventer of leaving yourself wide open for whatever the woman says next. Compared to Ray's movie, it's pretty straight forward both in terms of its narrative and whatever you want to see there in terms of political subtext: Judas here is a looking-out-for-number-one kind of guy who has misread Jesus as a grafter on the rise and has hopped on for what he expects will be a ride on the gravy train. He starts to realize that he's misplayed his hand when he notices that Jesus only wants to waste his miraculous healing powers on the poor, occasioning a few title cards that make him look like a Republican senator inveighing against socialized medicine on C-SPAN at two in the morning. The title cards help. This material definitely plays better when you can't hear what the actors are supposed to be saying.

Unwatchable #55: “APE”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

A*P*E (also known as Hideous Mutant, Super Kong and, um, Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla) was released in 1976, the same year as the Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. The conspiracy theorist inside me would like to think that De Laurentiis secretly financed A*P*E so that his incredibly fake-looking Kong wouldn’t look so bad by comparison. In reality, A*P*E is a South Korean-American co-production with no apparent connection to the De Laurentiis empire. But I’m allowed to have my suspicions.

The first five minutes of A*P*E set a standard for gut-busting awfulness that few movies could sustain – and indeed, the remainder of the movie is a routinely terrible Kong ripoff. But oh, those first five minutes! It begins with a title card thanking the United States Army for its cooperation in the making of this motion picture. Wha? The United States Army cooperated with this? For what possible reason? Did anyone in charge read a script? You figure there has to be one guy in the Army who has the task of reading all the scripts submitted by producers looking to borrow some tanks and helicopters. (And by the way, how did this guy get that job? Is his brother fighting on the front lines while he sits at a desk reading Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla? Must make for a fun time at Thanksgiving.) Maybe this guy just wanted to assure us all that the Army would be on the case if we’re ever attacked by a giant ape. Or maybe there was some misunderstanding with the Korean producers over the use of the word “Kong.” Something was lost in translation, I’m almost certain.

Anyway, A*P*E skips all the usual tedious nonsense about assembling a crew, chartering a freighter to the island, dealing with the natives and capturing the giant ape. You know, all the stuff that took up about seven hours worth of the Peter Jackson King Kong remake. As the movie begins, we’re already aboard the ship with the drugged 36-foot-ape locked down in the hold. But not for long! The ape awakes, crashes through the deck, and – for reasons I could not discern from the mise-en-scene presented by director Paul Leder (I Dismember Mama) – the entire boat explodes. Apparently the freighter has been cruising along in about fifteen feet of water, because the ape now stands, waist-deep in the ocean, and dances with a rubber shark. (Here is a clip of his escape, which sadly, cuts out right before the shark-dancing.)

Eventually ape defeats shark and reaches land. Specifically, he makes it to Korea, where American movie star Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) is making her latest picture. (From the clips we see, she appears to be starring in the story of a woman in constant danger of being raped.) Ape and actress are destined for a rendezvous, but unlike Kong, this big gorilla does not appear to be a misunderstood gentle soul. Actually, he’s kind of a dick. He rampages around willy-nilly, knocking over schools and hospitals and whatnot. He defies physics by being 36 feet tall and yet towering over four-story buildings. When the inevitable helicopter attack arrives in the final reel, the ape deploys a rude gesture the original Kong could never have gotten away with.

When the beast meets his violent demise, his carpet-remnant fur rippling in the breeze, Marilyn’s weenie boyfriend gets the last word. “He was just too big for a small world like ours.” Poignance, thy name is A*P*E.

Previously on Unwatchable:
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz
58. Ed
59. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!
60. Carry On Columbus

When Good Directors Go Bad: Waterloo (1970, Sergei Bondarchuk)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the great cinematic epics, none is bigger than Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace. Simply put, everything about the film is massive- its budget (upwards of $100 million in 1960s dollars), its production schedule (nearly five years), its cast (tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were used as extras in the battle sequences), even its running time of nearly eight hours. Yet War and Peace would merely be a footnote in movie history if its largesse was its only notable quality. Reviews of the day praised it not only for its epic scope and impeccable production values but also for its emotional sensitivity and human drama. Even today, War and Peace remains a masterpiece of its kind, and the rare adaptation of a great novel that does justice to its classic source material. For this not insignificant miracle, credit should be given not only to the Soviet film industry but also to Bondarchuk's sure-footed direction.

After the international acclaim for War and Peace, Bondarchuk decided to make a film about The Battle of Waterloo. For most filmmakers, this would have seemed a hugely ambitious project, but compared to War and Peace, a seemingly modest one for Bondarchuk. In order to bring the project to the screen, Bondarchuk received financial backing from Italian super-producer Dino De Laurentiis, and together they enlisted several well-known actors, led by Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. In addition, the film's $25 million budget afforded Bondarchuk the chance to re-create the battle on the same scale as the wartime sequences in War and Peace. But despite these factors, Waterloo was a disappointment both with critics and with audiences, garnering mostly middling reviews and making back less than one-fifth of its original budget, and sending its once-hot director back to the USSR for the rest of his career.

After Waterloo flopped big-time at the box office, De Laurentiis chalked its failure up to the lack of big-money stars in the cast. But while it's tempting to wonder what sort of Napoleon could be played by De Laurentiis' first choice Richard Burton, I'd say that Steiger did just fine with the role. This is especially true in the character's more grandiose moments- Steiger was always a magnificent ham, and Napoleon gave him a chance to cut loose in some entertaining ways that livened up the film. And for his part, Plummer did a capable job as the arrogant upper-class general Wellington.

Likewise, I'd say the battle sequences are as spectacular as advertised. As in War and Peace, the sight of thousands upon thousands of actual humans on the battlefield is still impressive, and still impossible to duplicate with CGI. In order for the sheer magnitude to achieve its intended effect, Bondarchuk films most of the battle in long shots, the better to comprehend the narrative of the battle itself. I also liked Bondarchuk's use of "God's eye" shots at several times in the battle, especially when the English Army forms itself into tight squares to fight off the advancing French cavalry. Had Bondarchuk tried to make a tactics-heavy recreation of the battle a la Cy Endfield's Zulu, Waterloo might have been a classic.

As it stands, the film is a missed opportunity, primarily because he and screenwriter H.A.L. Craig simply can't find a way to successfully integrate his principal characters into the battle. One of the triumphs of War and Peace was that Bondarchuk made us care about the people who were fighting the battle. But rather than exploring the lives of some of the soldiers in any kind of depth, Bondarchuk concentrates his narrative on Wellington and Napoleon and the differences in their approaches to war. This contrast is fairly interesting early on, but once the battle begins the tactic stops working. After all, it's hard to care about two men who essentially stand back and watch as thousands of men march to their deaths.

Today, any notoriety Waterloo may have comes mostly from the rumor that its disappointing box office performance led to production being shut down on Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon. But whether or not this is the case, the bile this idea summons up in some cinephiles is somewhat unfair. After all, hugely expensive epics were on their way out, and besides, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead, so it's not like his career took much of a hit. Taken on its own terms, Waterloo ultimately doesn't work, but there are dazzling sequences that demonstrate what a gifted filmmaker Bondarchuk was, and it's a shame that more of his work isn't available in the U.S. I guess seeing him “go bad” on such a grand scale has made me want to see him make good again.

The Screengrab : dino de laurentiis

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part Three: Live Blogging TCM's Easter Sunday Line-Up: "Barabbas", "Easter Parade", "King of Kings"

Unwatchable #55: “A*P*E”

When Good Directors Go Bad: Waterloo (1970, Sergei Bondarchuk)

Unwatchable #55: “APE”