"PHANTOM" HAUNTS IMAGINATION

          In a Paris opera house built over Medieval torture chambers and dungeons a mysterious figure with "eyes like holes in a grinning skull" necessitates the theater's sale.
          Meanwhile, there's a prima donna whom the mysterious figure dislikes, and would have replaced with his own choice for the upcoming performance of Faust, a protégé who has never seen him named Christine.
          "From hidden places beyond the walls, a melodious voice, like the voice of an angel" instructs Christine--a Svengali-like figure before Svengali was filmed. This mysterious maestro interests Christine, and she promises him--or rather his voice through the walls--that when he finally appears, she will be waiting...
          However, what she does not realize is that the opera ghost with a face like a grinning skull and the hidden singing coach are in fact one and the same--the Phantom. What no one realizes until perhaps too late: the Phantom is a convict named Erik, a master of the black arts who has returned from the infamous penal colony across the Atlantic known as Devil's Island. And the only reasonable explanation for the Phantom's skeletal face ("His nose--there is no nose!") is that he contracted leprosy during his imprisonment.
          Directed by Rupert Julian and starring the Man of a Thousand Faces, Lon Chaney, The Phantom of the Opera (1925) is the story of an egregious criminal justice system, superficiality run rampant, and a whopping case of ingratitude.
          How else can one see it? Erik helps Christine with her career. She accepts his help, and assures her affection, until she sees his face, at which point she treats him like he's a monster. And the only way she sees his face is by tearing off his mask, from behind, even after he clearly warned her not to.
          Then there's Raoul, some little bit of nothing who has no musical taste, no fire in the belly, and wants to take Christine away from the opera career she loves. Entirely because of Erik she lands the job of her dreams. But when she sees that his face isn't lovely enough for her, suddenly she sings a different tune.
          No other version of Gaston Leroux's novel compares. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical starring Gerard Butler, despite the great music, particularly fails by turning the Phantom into a pretty boy instead of a proper leper with a gondola-load of style and dash. Butler is to the Phantom what Twilight is to vampires. That's the real horror.
          The 1943 version with Claude Rains is decent, but not comparable with the Chaney original; the 1989 offering starring Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund (in spite of a poor start) provides a distant second-best.
          The atmospheric silent masterpiece freely available on YouTube.


THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Starring Lon Chaney,
Mary Philbin,
Norman Kerry,
Arthur Edmund Carewe,
Gibson Gowland
Directed by Rupert Julian
Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux
Runtime 93 minutes


Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE

"KONG" SCALES MOVIE HEIGHTS

          The one, the only, the great original.
          An enthusiastic movie director happens on a map, and with a roll of the dice risks lives taking a steamship around the world hoping to bring back something huge, something the so-called civilized world never imagined even existed.
          And to ensure that the swell picture which the director sweats blood to make brings back big money at the box-office, he's determined to find a pretty girl to star as the film's love-interest.
          King Kong (1933) is unquestionably the greatest film to feature a director trolling around a women's shelter. It's also regarded as the greatest horror film, but that genre classification lacks accuracy. More of a fantasy adventure, really. Either way, King Kong is the most technically advanced movie of Hollywood's Golden Age.
          Featuring Fay Wray as the beautiful and brave Ann Darrow, Robert Armstrong as the director, Carl Denham, and Bruce Cabot as the big lug, Driscoll. And most of all, starring...KONG, The Eighth Wonder of the World!
          For many years, a Hollywood hoax has circulated that King Kong was merely a toy figure, positioned and photographed countless times in the laborious stop-motion animation process. This is of course pure hogwash. Kong has to have been real, he just has to.
          The lead animator, Willis O'Brien, had directed his own short film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, back in 1915, so he already had about 17 years of experience using stop-motion to film fights between dinosaurs and big apes.
          The person most responsible for bringing the monarch of Skull Island to life was Merian C. Cooper, a decorated war hero who spent 9 months in a Soviet POW camp. Cooper and Edgar Wallace came up with the idea for the story; Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack produced and directed the RKO colossal smash hit. (Both Cooper and Schoedsack appear in an airplane which shoots at Kong atop the Empire State Building.) Interestingly, according to IMDb, Cooper died in 1973 only one day after the passing of actor Armstrong, who worked in many a Cooper-produced picture.
          What exactly is Kong? He's not a gorilla. Indeed, Skull Island is nowhere near Africa, but rather somewhere west of Sumatra. That said, try explaining this to the people of the island. Yes, King Kong has racist overtones with which one must kindly cope in order to appreciate the film's escapist Depression-era appeal.
          Since its release, many attempts have been made to ape the runaway success of King Kong, including Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young, a 1970s re-make with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lang, the 2005 re-make directed by Peter Jackson, and Kong: Skull Island (2017). But not one of these releases can compare with the real thing. Most don't have the classic look, and all the computer animation in the world can never bring back that original charm.
          Eminently available online.


KING KONG
Starring Fay Wray,
Robert Armstrong,
Bruce Cabot,
Noble Johnson,
Frank Reicher,
Steve Clemente
Directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Written by James Ashmore Creelman, Ruth Rose
From an idea conceived by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
Runtime 100 minutes

Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE

"FITZCARRALDO" UPLIFTING

          Current as ever.
          Klaus Kinski stars in Werner Herzog's masterpiece about a man obsessed with building an opera house in the Amazon jungle.
          Fitzcarraldo's dream is to get the greatest tenor in the world, Enrico Caruso himself, to sing at the opera's premiere, and in order to reach his financial goal to make this crazy dream come true, he's perfectly willing to hold a church hostage until he gets his way.
          Seems like a good idea at the time, the place being Iquitos, a frontier town in Peru with rent four times higher than in New York. It's called the richest city in the world, a place where horses drink champagne, and a guy feeds his fish hundred dollar bills. Formerly an ice-maker, Fitz shifts gears and decides to finance his opera house dream with a dangerous scheme to access a wealth of rubber, a scheme which has one crucial hitch: He'll have to drag a steamboat over a mountain.
          And in order to film this, that's exactly what the director did.
          Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a story about sheer determination. That, also ingenuity, teamwork, exploitation, obsession, and in a weird way, the filmmaker Herzog himself, whose vision of cinema encompasses picking up where German film left off prior to the impediment of fascism, and carrying on.
          Sharp chirps and shrill trills of exotic birds in creaking primordial trees accentuate fantastic Amazon photography rife with raging cataracts. Dangers traveling upriver into the ever-deepening jungle echo shades of Apocalypse Now. The jungle, with its deafening insect hum, is full of "lies, demons, and illusions." To the indigenous people, "everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams." To Fitz, opera is the expression of deepest feeling, and this may be sufficient reason to build an opera house anywhere, but he's also driven to do something that no one's ever done for that sake alone, as well.
          White-clad Kinski embodies the figure of colonial exploitation; Herzog's camera catches the towering temper always in his eyes. Off-camera, the indigenous Jivaros, who were deeply unimpressed with the German actor's abusive prima donna behavior, literally offered to kill Klaus Kinski for Werner Herzog. Like a parting gift.
          To learn more about the making of the film, and the stormy working relationship between the great director and his eccentric star, check out the documentaries Burden of Dreams and My Best Fiend.


FITZCARRALDO
Starring Klaus Kinski,
Claudia Cardinale,
Miguel Angel Fuentes,
Paul Hittscher,
Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez,
Peter Berling
Written and directed by Werner Herzog
Runtime 158 minutes
Rated PG


Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE


       
       

"STAGECOACH" ROLLICKING

          Soaring music, towering mesas, and wild Western wonders abound in John Ford's 1939 rouser, Stagecoach. Starring Claire Trevor as the shady lady with a heart of gold despised by the local wives, and introducing in his first A-list film starring role one Marion Morrison, aka John Wayne, as Ringo Kid.
          Ringo has just escaped from prison, and is on his way to Lordsburg seeking revenge on the man who killed his brother. Luckily for Ringo, the stagecoach also headed for Lordsburg happens by when Ringo's horse gives out. Unluckily for Ringo, the marshal is there riding shotgun.
          Shot in beautiful black and white, Stagecoach rolls along saturating the screen with indelible images from Ford's legendary cinematic eye. His rare facility with the medium accounts for the film being so well done. It's in the way he uses light and shadow, the way he fills his frame. Always interesting, never complicated.
          That also describes the story. Just a handful of passengers in a coach proving all the world's a stage. It's a story about a few people going from one place to another, yet with that simple premise, a legendary picture. Think Grand Hotel on wheels, as rustic as that one is fancy.
          Corny, too. "Give me coffee," says the drunk doctor (excellently played by Thomas Mitchell) when duty calls for him to sober up, "black coffee. Lots of it." As if that would do any good, to tack the jitters on top of being drunk.
          And the whole movie is like that. Old-time cornball about as real with the West as Buck Rogers is with space. Keeping this in mind, we know with John Ford we won't be seeing anything approaching an accurate depiction of Native Americans. One scene has a bank manager whining about how the Apaches "strike like rattlesnakes," and the next moment a whiskey peddler calls for Christian charity among the passengers, but not for the Apaches.
          That's the big disappointment. A moral dilemma, even. To watch an old John Ford Western is to bathe in a tainted tub, yet to consign him to perdition is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The best filmmakers cite his influence repeatedly. Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg.
          There's a solution: A film about Native Americans arriving on European shores in ever-increasing numbers. With all of the pertinent details inverted to make a serious point while entertaining in old school black and white. A movie made by Native Americans, starring Native Americans, with Native Americans playing Europeans, and Europeans having zero say, while providing the major conflict, and doing things poorly, and dropping like flies while the good guys kill them in corny ways. Huge potential here.
          Andy Devine co-stars as the amiable stagecoach driver with the cracked voice. Andy's the barometer. If Andy likes a feller, then that feller's a-ok. And if he don't, then the feller ain't. Co-starring also John Carradine as a superfluous riverboat gambler.
          Of the two women aboard, one is supposedly respectable. The bank manager, also, is supposedly respectable. Today we rarely see, if ever, such a character taken to task. "What's good for the banks is good for the country!" the bank manager nervously assures. Looking suspicious.
          Ah, the classic Western desert: Where the skulls of cows liven up the view like well-placed knickknacks in a drawing-room. A huge component of Ford's success is, of course, the Arizona-Utah region known as Monument Valley. The natural scenery itself steals the show. That great big Western feeling that comes from wide open spaces, the blank page of possibility rolling ever on.
          Carrying the capacity to win over viewers not necessarily fans of Westerns, Stagecoach exemplifies the Hollywood Golden Age classic which, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, helped shape perceptions of America within the county, and beyond, and still does.
          Available through Netflix and elsewhere online.


STAGECOACH
Starring Claire Trevor,
John Wayne,
Andy Devine,
Thomas Mitchell,
John Carradine,
Louise Platt,
Donald Meek,
Burton Churchill,
Tim Holt
Directed by John Ford
Written by Dudley Nichols
Based on a story by Ernest Haycox
Runtime 96 minutes


Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and 
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE