From the Queue: Diabolique (1954)

Diabolique is about two woman who, together, plot the murder of a terrible man. He is husband to one, mistress to the other, and such a pouty, abusive lout that his death is welcome to both women, whatever personal rivalries they may feel. All three work at the same boys boarding school. The wife is wealthy and owns the place, the husband runs it as a principal, and the mistress teaches. The troubled relationship between the three is known to all the teachers, staff, and students of the school, and these side characters walk around, shaking their heads at the drama that unfolds before them on a daily basis. The wife is an ex-nun with a heart condition, and she's opposed to both divorce and murder for religious reasons. But, after suffering at the husband's hands for so long, her anger inspires her to break the latter taboo. Yet, it is the mistress who, tired of the abuse, plots the murder and asks the wife for help. They drown the man in a bathtub, and soon after the wife begins to crack under the strain of her guilt. When things begin to get mysterious (the body disappears, the suit the man was killed in is sent to the cleaners), the poor woman's heart begins to deteriorate. The mistress, bound to the wife through their mutual crime, must watch over her, protect both of them from the other woman's conscience.

It isn't long before the two women are turning to familiar gender roles to get through the strain--the wife is frail and emotional, while the mistress is competent and taciturn. Watching this relationship develop in this way, to see these two form a fractured, diseased "marriage" consummated by murder is fascinating. Saying this movie is about lesbians is a stretch; these characters are in bed with one another due to a man's absence. Sexual desire has nothing to do with it. There is, nevertheless, a dollop of subtext in there that compels--particularly as the mistress is quite butch--and I couldn't help but wonder if this movie was the only way to discuss lesbianism in 1955, to speak of it in terms of aberration and violence. Then, thinking of how lesbianism is usually portrayed in today's films, I wondered if that's still the case.

As a suspense thriller, it's great fun. All of the murder and scheming is fine and well-done. The twisty plot seems obvious in the light of decades of soap operas and cop shows, but the characters and writing are always sharp. Information is doled out in just the right amounts and at the appropriate times. Just as the two women begin to need each other on a deeper level, we get deeper information about them and their histories. But really, this whole movie pretty much serves as a setup to deliver the final sequence in which the wife is terrified by the shadows and ghosts of her guilty conscience. She moves down the halls of the school as doors creak open by themselves and the lights go out mysteriously. Someone or something has typed the name of her victim on a typewriter, and the gloves of the murdered man lie nearby. Terrified, she flees to the bathroom and lying in the tub is a vision of terrifying simplicity. This is perfect funhouse filmmaking, chock full of spooky shadows and suggestive sounds timed perfectly to the viewer's increasing heart rate. It's especially neat, because the heroine is in such a vulnerable state that stress alone can kill her. Since she's the character with whom the viewer empathizes, and since the movie's wound the viewer up so well, you're doubly concerned for her... if her heart is racing like mine... she can't live much longer! Few movies of this period still retain their power to grab me, but this is killer stuff. It got me good.

The director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, was apparently called the French Hitchcock at some point (Hitchcock reportedly wanted to make this movie himself) , and the way he juggles suspense with grim, gallows humor in this film is certainly evidence of this. The film ends on a half-joke, half-scare when a child intimates that the film's business is not quite finished and is punished for his insolence. But, despite the deftness of crafty filmmaking and the cynical humor, Clouzot is less interested in maintaining the status quo than Hitch. The mistress character alone draws a sharp contrast between the two directors. She's got a very French kind of cool about her, constantly wearing sunglasses, smoking, and brazenly speaking her mind. Hitchcock may have dreamt of this woman, but if he had, he wouldn't have allowed such a fiery-willed lady to exist film without wanting to punish her for it (he does this to both Annie and Melanie in The Birds. Time to find a nice man and settle down, ladies!). In Diabolique, it's the aberrant that survives, the outcast who overcomes (though, of course they do not ultimately "win," their fate feels nothing like punishment). This is refreshing, even in the context of modern cinema. In fact, with its cinematic flair, and love of quirky women, Diabolique points the way directly to Pedro Almodovar more than it sides with Hitchcock, and I believe that's a victory for everyone.

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins, the reboot of the Batman franchise that precedes The Dark Knight, was a novel take on the whole Batman mythos. It spent most of its running time justifying the wackiness of a dude putting on a costume and fighting crime in real-world terms. It was also the first Batman movie that (finally) correctly identified that Batman does, in fact, have a super power, after all--he's rich. Playing with themes of noblesse oblige and grounding the action in the landscape of an urban crime drama, it found a new, welcome spin on the character and justified its re-telling of the Batman origin story. It also barreled past a perfect ending about an hour or so into the film and went on and on through some ho-hum plot about supervillains poisoning the water supply or something. Now, on the heels of that film's success and amidst a huge cultural footprint comes The Dark Knight, a film even more overstuffed and overplotted than its predecessor. It goes even further in the attempt to remove Batman from the arch, exaggerated comic book universe and place him in the middle of a modern American city, and also outwears its welcome by going on far longer than its plot deserves. The film is two and a half hours of superbly produced scenes of dour, sweaty machismo, but features little-to-no dramatic tension for most of this time. It's weird, because the script has the air of a well-structured and nuanced procedural with motifs and themes that bounce off of one another, reflecting the ultimate larger purpose of the film, and the chief villain is a wondrous, relevant rendition of modern day anxieties. But the film is, ultimately, a dreary experience puffed up with unearned self-importance, and, while there's a lot of chaotic movement and things blow up real good, it's monotonous. Everything is always happening at the same level; each scene and each gesture is as grand as the last one. As a result, The Dark Knight congeals into a puddle of pretty goodness, its ambitions encased in the ceaseless drone of the execution.

That said, it's still often a mesmerizing film. When it's working and everything is clicking (which is about half of the time), it's a magnificent crime drama about a desperate, rotting city. A large part of this success is due to Heath Ledger's Joker. The late actor's performance is crazy-good or good-crazy; like Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, his performance elevates the entire film. As written, this Joker is an anarchic terrorist, a self-described agent of chaos (...calling Maxwell Smart...). He may have a purpose, but whatever it is, his methods eclipse his politics and render them irrelevant. It's a perfect villain for the times, an exaggerated version of America's terrorist bogeymen whose methods and beliefs can seem so utterly foreign and impenetrable. Ledger's clearly having a good time with this; he employs a bunch of crazy tics and grimaces, and intones most of his lines with a chilling deadpan. A less capable actor would have gone too crazy, but Ledger imbues the craziness of the character with a palpable sense of masochism and self-loathing. It's soon clear that Batman's use of force and technology is no match for the sheer psychological guile that this villain possesses. All of this informs the best scene in the film (and Ledger's in most of the movie's best scenes), an interrogation scene where Batman is free to pummel and torture the Joker, but finds himself powerless nonetheless. It's the first and only time in any Batman film that the villain and the hero seem completely equal, flip sides of the same coin, and the only moment in this film that truly embraces the scarred, freakshow nature of its characters.

What a shame, then, that Ledger's buried amidst the movie's rambling, listless plot. The movie has a lot going on, enough to fill a few episodes of a weekly TV series, but it doesn't find any traction until around the halfway mark, when things begin to get a bit personal for the characters. As mentioned, it's all very smartly written with its themes of scarring and despair and loss and so-forth. And I liked the way it cared enough about characters on the periphery to give them their own mini-stories within the main plot, but a lot of the film's subplots don't work and just wind up as padding to the runtime. Early in the film, Batman goes to Hong Kong to capture a money launderer, but the whole thing just rings of a pretty diversion, an excuse to shoot some cool exteriors and throw in some exposition about a pivotal piece of technology. And, for all of the work the screenwriters did to foreshadow the eventual corruption of Aaron Eckhart's District Attorney, Harvey Dent, his transformation is rushed and sloppy. This is doubly disappointing because Eckhart is also crazy-good in his role, but he's hampered in his most interesting moments by a makeup job that looks like it belongs in the Halloween display at Spencer's gifts. There are buried hints of greatness in the script, but the movie spreads itself too thin and the plot becomes so convoluted that it distorts anything resembling a coherent or intelligible or relatable story.

The most troubling aspect of the film is its use of Batman himself. For one thing, someone chose to give this hero an unintentionally hilarious vocal effect, like someone accidentally pressed a reverb button on the sound board when mixing in his dialogue. His unnaturally deep and echoy vocal presence is just silly. He sounds like an incompetent lead singer of a Goth band who covers up the inadequacies of his voice with audio effects. This would be easily overlooked but for the fact that Batman is quite chatty in the film--he seems ready to invite characters over for tea at times. Anyway, Christian Bale isn't exactly the most commanding of presences here, and his life as Bruce Wayne is all but ignored in favor of the corruption of Eckhart and the Joker's preening. Batman is forced to make several choices throughout the film, choices with dire consequences for his character, but it makes no difference, no impact because it's not clear who Batman is anymore. Frankly, the character seems to be about as confused and random in his own morality as the Joker. He sees killing as the ultimate taboo, the one thing he won't do, but when he's perfectly content to smack people around, violate civil rights, and wantonly destroy property with barely a second thought, it just comes off as an arbitrary rule. The movie tries to exploit this by having the Joker force Batman to confront the futility of ideals in the rotting, festering world of Gotham City, but, while the confrontation is fun, the filmmakers do very little with it. They basically turn Batman into a square, like Kevin Costner's boy scout Elliot Ness from The Untouchables, lamenting his impotence under the threat of the sexier bad boy. But, really, the character is just ignored. You could quite easily remove Batman from this movie completely and have a much tighter and probably better film about a valiant District Attorney facing the perilous evil in himself while trying to stop a sadistic madman. This is bad news for a film that ends with Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon monologuing about Batman's mythic importance to Gotham City.

But, look, all of this complaining about the shortcomings of The Dark Knight is really a bit of scolding. The movie isn't bad, really, just disappointing. I find myself wanting to wag my finger at it to set it on the right path. There's quite a bit of good, grim fun in the film, and while the overbearing sameness of the execution is wearying, the film is nevertheless commanding. If you're willing to ignore the awfulness of the film's climactic showdown which features Batman utilizing a really stupid-looking (and, after a time, unnecessary) SONAR technology to fight the Joker and a drama on two cruise ships that plays out like the worst disaster movie from the 70s ever made, the film moves from scene to scene with an appealing confidence, indifferent to the muddled script. It's easy to get swept away by its briskness. The cinematography and the use of Chicago locations are grand; Gotham is not a cartoon here, but a stand-in for all modern urbanity. It renders the despair and hopelessness that marks city life rather beautifully, though it, of course, ignores any positive aspects of living there... you know, things like a symphony or good bookstores. It's frustrating because, with all of its strengths, the film has assembled many of the right ingredients, but just drops them into a pile onscreen. Despite the magnificent, handsome production and Heath Ledger's classic performance, the movie only works in fits and starts. Besides, there's a limit, I think, to how much real-world verisimilitude you can employ in a film about Batman before the arch, crazed nature of its main character starts to feel out of place, and the movie pushes right past it to the point that the whole thing unravels, becoming nearly as absurd and cheesy as the 60s TV series.

Would be a good double feature with: Thief

Day 68: Dark Habits

I'd like to start this one by quoting the Netflix summary of the film.  According to the summary "this film [is] about Yolanda, a singer who sells heroin on the side and goes on the lam when a deal goes awry. Now, thugs are after her, and her only sanctuary is a convent where Mother Superior is a junkie, a lesbian and also a fan of Yolanda's. Plus, another nun does LSD, a priest smokes hash, and everything is unexpected."

I've quoted this for two reasons.  The first is I find the description hilarious, like it's a description from a terrifying children's book.   The second is that, as ribald as it makes the movie sound, it's misleading.  Dark Habits is a quiet, sad film that takes the vices of its characters rather seriously, taking time to explore the truths behind these vices, as well as the consequences they bring.  On the surface, it may seem outrageous, - a nun does heroin! - but except for the religious component, it's not altogether shocking (or too remarkable, I'm afraid) underneath the gaudy, Catholic surface.

The film's got a nice pastiche of quirky characters that it treats with an admirable respect, but too often it wanders around in search of a point of view.  It ends powerfully, with a great jilted lover scene, and there are a few high-water marks like a climactic performance by its main character, Yolanda, but not unlike her character, the movie feels like it's hiding out in a convent, watching things happen, just biding its time until the heat's off.  Still, I loved the idea of a nun writing tawdry prose with an assumed name, and I was tickled at the notion of the convent's acid-taking Nun-cook having Jesus-based hallucinations while she prepares the food, and hey, I'm always game to watch a nun feed a rowdy tiger.  

The problem in the film lies in the way the Yolanda character is handled.  She makes a nice, convincing way of bringing us into this strange, cloistered world, but the movie never embraces her fully, stays away from examining her, and as a result, keeps us, the audience, at arm's length.  The film asks a question as to whether or not the world and its inhabitants have changed or are capable of changing, and comes down squarely in the middle with characters on either side.  There's nothing wrong with that, and this honesty about difficult questions is part of what makes the movie work as well as it does, but it fails to question the viewer as well as the characters, and that's, I think, what keeps it from taking off.

Day 40: Day for Night

Ferrand: Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.

A pleasing, well-told soap opera, Truffaut’s Day for Night follows the lives of the people involved in the making of a film.  It’s a solid endeavor -- every creative aspect of the movie is fabulous -- and it does effectively demonstrate the hardships involved in trying to create a fiction while the lives of actual people are swirling all around, threatening to derail everything.  And, while the lives of the characters are depicted in a pointed, observant, and watery-eyed honesty, the movie never quite reaches beyond the basics of its story to achieve an element of sublimity other than making movies is hard work.  Still, the rapid pace and solid character beats make it great fun to watch and the tone of the film is infectiously deadpan.  

The movie features a cast of characters whose lives are mostly empty except for the cinema.  With a couple of exceptions, they’re all immersed in the world of cinema and talk about little else (to the point that when the crew is recording background crowd noise by talking to one another, they have to be instructed to talk about something other than movies).  Those characters who have found something in their lives to care about besides film (usually a very bewildered spouse) work on the movie under constant threat that it will be snatched away by the intensity of the filmmaking process.  The movie’s effective at showing how the creative force behind making a movie is so single minded that it is destructive to everything except the film itself.  It also accurately depicts how seductive the worldview of fiction is, as the young lead actor of the film is bewildered when his relationship with his girlfriend doesn’t turn out the way it “should” (he’s constantly asking people the ridiculous question, “do you think women are magic?”).

So, it goes through its paces and hits its beats and the characters are all richly and realistically portrayed and, yeah, I nodded appreciatively throughout, having been in similar situations of love lost and gained backstage in the theatre and on film sets, and, truth be told, I laughed a lot and grinned a lot.  But in an age of DVD special features, offering behind the scenes accessibility to the point of overkill, the truth behind the lie of the movies is not really interesting in and of itself.  And, while, the story is interesting, I kept expecting it to come to some sort-of conclusion and instead it just kind of dissipates, like the fluff of dandelion seeds.  Pretty, but useless… except, of course, to the dandelion.

Day 22: Dressed to Kill

Voice of Bobbi: Don't make me be a bad girl again!

This movie has the distinction of being the first one mentioned on this blog during which I fell asleep. It’s not entirely the movie’s fault, I was pretty tired, but I dosed for a moment during a protracted ten or fifteen minute denouement that was just excruciating to sit through. Before watching Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, I’d heard jokes made at De Palma’s expense about how he aped Hitchcock. Having never seen a movie where he does so, I never quite got the joke. I get it now. This is, essentially, a remake of Psycho with nothing new to add but explicit nudity and violence. You’ve got the same cross-dressing killer, the same “twist” where you learn a character you’ve been following the whole movie is said killer, the same slashing strings that mimic the killing you’re seeing, and the same Puritanical violent reaction to a fear of sexuality. Hell, the movie even carries over the worst part of Psycho, the stupid and nearly unforgivable psychologist scene at the end. This isn’t an unenjoyable movie to watch, the technical stuff is confident and artful, but it’s a waste of time.

For the record, I was only asleep for a few seconds. After the killer is disposed of and we get the unfortunate and questionable psychoanalytic analysis of why this guy was acting the way he was, there are a couple of unnecessary scenes in which characters chat about what they’ll do now that all of this is behind them. Then, as if whoring out the fun and scary ending to his version of Carrie, De Palma inflicts upon us a lengthy sequence in which Nancy Allen showers, hears a noise, and is attacked by the killer we thought was dead. Then she wakes up. I was asleep for a bit during the showering because at this point, there’s absolutely no reason to be watching the movie anymore. The story is over and the sequence adds nothing to the film but a cheap shock, one that any astute viewer should see coming from miles away.

Another ridiculous scene has Angie Dickinson, playing a sexually frustrated housewife, pursuing a man through an art museum. She’s interested in having a fling with him because her husband is bad in bed. There’s a great tracking shot through the museum and some Herrmannesque music plays. At first, it’s refreshing because this is a scene of conflicting emotions played silently. It’s clear that Dickinson wants to seduce this man, but isn’t sure it’s the right thing to do. But the scene continues, there are complications, and soon, Dickinson has given up on any hope of a fling but is still pursuing the man because he has a glove of hers that she wants back. As she follows him through the art museum, there’s a question of why she doesn’t just call out to the man so she can get the glove. The sequence has gone from kind-of cool to plain annoying because the craft of the movie (following Dickenson through the museum in a tracking shot that looks neat) begins to intrude on the characters. I guess she probably didn’t speak up because the music from the movie was playing too loudly and he wouldn’t have been able to hear her. I don’t really know, but it was infuriating to watch.


I’m not sure why this film exists. Psycho is a perfectly fine movie in its own right. It’s not like this movie is just borrowing elements from Psycho to tell its own story… that I can at least try to get behind. This is thematically the exact same story with a different plot as window dressing. I suppose one could argue that this movie puts Psycho into the modern age, changing the setting from a rural environment of isolation to an urban one and upping the sexual quotient to be more explicit. But if that’s true, then why is Nancy Allen’s prostitute character so old fashioned? She’s like a 15-year-old’s conception of a prostitute, a woman who’s sexually available but for whom the sex trade is as simple and consequence-free as sending a greeting card. What’s more, if you’re going to try and update Psycho, why align yourself with the simplistic and improbable psychological explanation from the original movie? Why give an explanation at all since it’s just going to read as simplistic and improbable? Am I being unfair in comparing this movie to Psycho rather than just judging it on its own merits? I don’t think so. The movie brazenly invites the comparison and fails to live up to its predecessor every step of the way. There are new layers to find in the story and different perspectives to examine, but all this does is give us the exact same perspective with only minor variations on the theme. Yawn.

Edit on 2/17/10: 4 and 1/2 years later, I find myself regretting the comments made about the pursuit through the museum. In all this time, I haven't stopped thinking of that sequence. I now think it's gorgeous filmmaking that should be applauded for its bravura. Hitchcock-inspired or no, it is exquisite. One of the benefits of doing all this in bloggy form is the ability to come back here now and say, quite publicly, that I think I was wrong.

Day 15: Dr Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine

Man on Motorcycle: Why me? Why me all the time?
Every now and then, The Simpsons will portray a parody of an entry into an older genre of film. Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine plays just like one of these parodies. Of the movies I’ve watched so far, it was the hardest to get through. It’s a frantic, horribly paced, unfunny comedy whose only saving grace comes, just barely, from Vincent Price’s gleeful performance as Dr. Goldfoot. The score is atrocious, playing constantly, Mickey Mousing every minute detail of the film. For all its sound and fury, it just winds up being noisy and, really, really not funny.

Was this kind of movie ever funny? It reminds me of the lesser entries in Leslie Nielsen’s oeuvre, titles like Spy Hard, or Wrongfully Accused. So very, very misguided and desperate to make you laugh, it resorts to pulling your pants down in public, pointing and laughing at your underwear, and then nudging you with its elbow, saying, “huh? Huh?” Frankie Avalon stars in the film as our protagonist and he’s like Jerry Lewis’s unfunny 3rd cousin. Clowning, mugging, and slapstick are the order of the day. There’s no wit to the wordplay and the script has a lot of, um, “fun” giving Vincent Price lines containing slang, the kind of joke you’d see Estelle Getty doing on The Golden Girls.

Poor Vincent Price. He’s clearly having fun playing against his persona as Dr. Goldfoot here. I thought that his having fun would be infectious for a while, but the movie fails him time and time again by giving Price the lamest line you can imagine and then cutting to Frankie Avalon smacking a door into his boss’s ass or falling down or mugging while a slide whistle plays in the background. Ugh. Goldfoot wants to take over the world, like any good super villain. The plan is to make sexy women robots trick men into marrying them, and, then, stealing all their money through power of attorney paperwork. Avalon works for some government investigation place that’s abbreviated SIC (leading to such classic exchanges as, “I’m a SIC man.” “I’ll say you are.” UGH) and gets wind of Goldfoot’s plot. Yeah.

To be fair: I did laugh once or twice in the movie. One scene has Price instructing his bikini-clad robots on the arts of seduction (this is funny in and of itself, in retrospect). One of the robots starts dancing and the music takes on a surf-music beat. Then, as if dancing is a virus for robots, the others start dancing too. Price blusters and screams, “STOP! STOP! STOP!” as they dance around him. If they had let this scene go on longer, I probably would have been on the floor. And there’s one joke that is inexplicably funny to me, just in the way it’s so completely nonsensical. Price, showing off his lair to some captives, walks to a door and says “I think you’ll like this.” He opens the door and a man is chained to a running a motorcycle. The man looks up to the camera and says, “Why me? Why me all the time?” I’m positive I’m missing a reference here because this makes no sense whatsoever. And that’s precisely why I was on the floor after this, um… joke?

The movie is shot, acted, and paced like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon. But part of the joy of those cartoons is their running times. Ninety minutes is far too long to sustain this breakneck pace and, anyway, there’s hardly enough story to go around. This movie would have been much better as a five to seven minute short and, preferably, directed by Chuck Jones. As it is, it plays like a stereotype of a bad sixties comedy, rife with sexism, pratfalls, and crossed-eye fainting. It’s certainly an interesting curio piece that is easier to laugh at than to laugh with.

Day 14: Dracula (1979)

Van Helsing: There is work… wild work to be done!

The story of Dracula, as Bram Stoker originally wrote it, was ultimately a story warning men that swarthy heathens from abroad will come to our homeland and pollute the purity of our blood lines by sleeping with our women. Additionally, these foreigners know things: secret, sexual things that we don’t, and so can seduce our women away right from under our clueless noses. Further, these vile creatures are so good at the act of seduction, our women will develop some kind of psychic bond with the thing and actually crave its company. What can we do against this threat but close ranks and make a circle around our women so they don’t succumb to the vile seductions of these beasts, the book asks? Indeed. I’ve seen quite a few filmed versions of the Dracula story, but this is the first one I’ve seen that actually seems to understand this subtextual essence and, what’s more, uses it to its advantage. In fact, up until the climax of the film, it plays counterpoint to these themes in the original material and, as a result, brings an air of freshness to this oft-told story.

Where this version of Dracula differs most from the countless other versions of the tale is in its main female character, Lucy. She’s pluckier than most women in Dracula movies and more enlightened. In our introduction to her, she’s reading a letter of acceptance to a law school. Her friend, Mina, makes a comment about her defiance of all the expectations men have for a lady. Yeah, this is your standard “spunky” and anachronistically-enlightened-woman character development stuff that we’ve all seen thousands of times (usually in the form of “why do I have to wear this corset???”... groan…). But as I watched the plot unfold and Lucy become enamored with Dracula, it occurred to me that Lucy’s enlightenment, however clunkily established, gave this character actual motivation to like Dracula. And this was, perhaps, the first time I’d actually seen that element of the story done right. No longer was Dracula just engaging in rape when he got the main guy’s girl, and she wasn’t so awed by his sexual prowess during the rape that she actually wanted to drink his blood. This is refreshing and smart.

(A little digression here: In Bram Stoker’s book, the main female character is named Mina. Mina has a friend named Lucy who is the first to succumb to Dracula’s bite. And, for some reason, this movie decides to focus on Lucy as its main female character. Whatever. No good movie has ever been made by being slavish to the book, right? But the movie gives Lucy a friend named Mina, and here she is the first to succumb to Dracula’s bite. Additionally, it is Lucy who is engaged to Jonathan Harker in this version. Basically, they just switched the names of the two original characters. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to make this change, but it confused me on more than one occasion due to my familiarity with the scores of other Dracula movies, as well as the book. I think it even confused the person who made the subtitles on the DVD, because, towards the end, as Lucy was struggling with Dracula and making whimpering noises, the subtitles read “Mina struggling”.)

Of course, this Lucy lusts for Dracula and leaps into his arms. She’s not interested in what her fiancée, Jonathan, wants for her. She’s smarter than he is and quite a bit more ambitious. She wants to be more than a wife, more than a mother, and, certainly more than a protected treasure. This is something that Jonathan is unable to cope with. It makes sense that the man who offers her, on the surface, the convention-defying pleasures she seeks (you think she’s getting oral sex from the doofus with the ratty mustache? I doubt it.) is the man who is so very rooted in old-school ideas that he physically remakes her to be the loving, devoted wife and mother he wants. This aspect of the movie was a lot of fun to watch, since it’s the first time this part of the story has ever made any sense to my late 20th century mentality.

But as progressive and smart as it is, the movie fails on its promise. When, at the end, Dracula is spiriting the partially vamped-out Lucy back to his homeland on a clipper ship, Jonathan and Van Helsing spring forth to rescue her, and there’s a Darwinian fight between the men and the vampire for reproductive rights. Lucy, now straddling the line between human and vampire, fights the two men, defending her new lover and her newfound status as wife and mother-to-be. Here, Jonathan slaps her, giving him the character moment of putting his woman in place (you do not sleep with Romanians while we are engaged, got that?!) and, the movie would tell us, the power to destroy Dracula. It’s a silly and disappointing choice, since Jonathan has been, mainly, a supporting character in the Lucy/Dracula narrative. The movie seems to be headed towards a conclusion where Lucy offs Dracula herself, but then reasserts the male protector image and all of that development of Lucy goes to waste. Ah well.

Anyway, subtext, shmubtext. The horrific stuff is nicely handled. There are a few genuinely creepy scenes (one in particular when Mina rises from the dead as a vampire). The effects in the movie aren’t exactly top-notch, but the actors take them seriously and, so, lend them an air of legitimacy. Frank Langella does a fine job as Dracula, playing the character like a soap opera star come to live amongst Midwesterners. He has an air of regal superiority that turns to a believable menace when he’s crossed, believable the same way you’d believe a member of royalty wouldn’t hesitate to kill some peasants in order to preserve their way of life. The mythology of the character is nicely tucked into the script too; there are glancing mentions of his past as a king, his unnaturally long life, and his species being on the brink of extinction. The movie doesn’t dwell on these things, so avoids the all-too-common poutiness of vampire tales of late. The score by John Williams is effectively tragic and romantic, though it’s far too overwrought at the beginning.

Curiously, this movie feels to me the way I always imagined a Dracula movie would feel when I was a kid. Dracula seemed like a real threat, very powerful, and nearly unstoppable. His lady vampire creations were as pale white and shiny eyed as I’d always imagined they would be. Purists will probably hate this movie since it eschews so much of the book, but the cuts rid the movie of a lot of unnecessary dramatic dead-weight (see Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you want to see how economical this Dracula is versus that movie’s near-unwatchable bloat). I particularly liked the way it toyed with the gender roles and the way it moved deftly over familiar material to draw new ideas from an old, old well. It’s interesting that a cross is the symbol used to ward this menacing foreigner away, since the cross symbolizes (among other things) the unifying aspects of Western society. Unfortunately, the film concludes that it’s a good thing when an English lad scares Dracula away from “his” woman’s womb using this symbol. That it’s his choice to make and not hers.

Day 11: Danger: Diabolik

Song: You, only you, deep down… in my heart deep down, in my blood deep down, very deep deep down...

Danger: Diabolik is a winning, lurid movie. It’s exciting, funny, absurd, and so very of-its-time that its retro-charm destroyed my retro-charm meter (which looks curiously like a mood ring). Any movie that opens with its hero, an arch criminal, stealing ten million dollars from under the noses of the authorities and laughing at them — no, cackling at them in a full-throated MUAHAHAHAHA — is off to a good start as far as I’m concerned. If the movie then launches into a title sequence featuring random spinning colors while a song, written by Ennio Morricone, blares out, grabbing you by the ears to tell you, “listen, dammit, LISTEN OR I’LL JUST GET LOUDER...” I’m confident I’m going to like it. This is one very fun comic book movie.

Effectively combining the worlds of Batman and James Bond, the world of Danger: Diabolik is a colorful, archetype-filled landscape of cops and robbers, cool cats and squares. In this world, it is possible for one man to bring down the tax system of an entire nation by exploding a series of buildings with signs that say “TAX”. It’s the kind of world where mob kingpins own planes with trapdoors to dispose of their disobedient associates (and the air pressure problem is somehow fixed too). And in this world, it’s not unlikely to come across a round bed, rotating around a not-too-distant-futuristic hi-fi system.

This movie is ridiculous, to be sure, but there’s wit to it. One sequence has Diabolik trapped on top of a castle spire after stealing a necklace. The cops are in hot pursuit. He glances at a catapult. No way, I thought, he’s going to catapult off the roof! Sure enough, the cops break down the door in time to see Diabolik’s white-costumed body flung off the top of the building. The effect is fake-looking and laughable, but it fools the cops. They run down, unaware that a naked Diabolik is crouched behind the catapult, grinning, and, I assume, barely restraining another MUAHAHAHA. I had no reason to restrain my delighted laughter.

Yes, the pace lags occasionally. Yes, it’s the highest of high camp as Diabolik runs around in a black mask and suit, cackling at the authorities. Yes, the acting is bad and, yes, there are some real questionable plot and editing choices in the movie. But does it matter? When the pace lags, it’s because the movie is pausing to show off its mod stylishness, John Philip Law plays the titular character with infectious gusto, and if there are story problems, Morricone’s silly, in-your-face score covers up any ill-will you feel. Anyway, there’s a surprising sweetness to the relationship Diabolik has with Eva, his blonde bombshell partner-in-crime. The dialogue is also more clever than you’d expect, though the movie’s full of howlers (“I had the gold radioactivated”).

So, yeah, the movie’s not a triumph. It’s outrageously cheesy, but every time I thought I was laughing at the movie, it winked right at me, telling me I was laughing with it. When Diabolik flipped over the side of his car, it made me laugh, it thrilled me, and it reminded me of why the hell I watch movies anyway. Some things are just cool.