Billy Liar

Hi Aki,

Today I finished Billy Liar a movie I recorded, and watched about an hour friday, 20 minutes yesterday, the end today.

This was a play. Then it was a movie. Then it was a TV show. The writers really hit the jackpot with this one. John Schlesinger directed.

The story is set in a small town in northern england, early 60s. Billy (Albert Finney in the play version, then Tom Courtenay took over the role in the play, then Courtenay played in the movie) is a young man with big dreams. We open with a radio show just going on-air at 6 am. The host begins what he usually does: read letters and dedications that listeners have sent in.

As we continue to hear the radio show and the many dedications, we see exterior shots of houses, apartment buildings, all over town, as happy housewives react when their letters are read. These are all extreme long shots (the film was shot Panavision, black and white) from the street; the women are far away. Finally we end on a closer shot of a woman (Mona Washbourne playing Billy’s mom) behind a window. We go inside with her. she’s wondering when the radio show will ever get around to reading her letter and playing her record. The Mum, Dad, and Mum’s Mum are all around the breakfast table getting ready for the day. They occasionally shout upstairs to son Billy to come down and have breakfast or he’ll be late for work.

Billy, meanwhile, lies in bed, daydreaming of Ambrosia, the country he imagines. Ambrosia has just won the Great War, for peace and freedom and independence. We see Billy as the general who won the war, as the wounded leader of a wounded squadron, as one of the women recruits … all marching in parade before the general-king of Ambrosia (also, of course, Billy).

Billy at last goes down stairs, half an hour late. He gets in a fight with his Dad and Mum, his Dad especially attacks him constantly and in one flight of fancy Billy turns, now in uniform, and guns them all down with submachine gun (a recurring motif Billy imagines whenever somebody is giving him too much grief).

Another point of contention is the wardrobe in Billy’s room. His Mum wants to clean it, she wants him to unlock it, and why does he want to keep it locked for, anyway? When Billy goes up to get ready for work, he unlocks it, and we find out why: inside it are 200 or so calendars from his workplace, a funeral home. Billy was supposed to mail them out. Instead he spent the postage money himself, and now is stuck with all these calendars and no idea what to do with them other than hide them in his wardrobe!

Billy goes on to work (late, and yelled at for it) and along the way he indulges in some more fantasies. He imagines being caught for pilfering the postage money; thrown in prison, he dashes off an exposé on prison life that turns into a major best-seller before Billy even gets out of prison; the Warden thanks him, and Billy leaves the prison to universal fame and acclaim.

Being a writer seems to be the core real-world ambition Billy enjoys: he has a novel he keeps intending to begin, and he has sent sample scripts to a radio comedian who happens to be in town to open a supermarket; Billy is sure the comedian will hire him and take him to London. But the comedian doesn’t even remember Billy’s scripts and just gives him the brush-off when Billy finally does get to see him.

Real-world problems are mounting for Billy: he has gotten himself engaged, twice, to two very different girls: Barbara, the shy, repressed girl who really loves him but won’t even kiss him before they are married, and Rita, the brassy waitress who’s been shagging Billy. Billy gave Rita an engagement ring, only he got it back from her ‘to give to a jeweler for alteration’ and gave it to Barbara. Now Rita wants the ring back, and Billy is trying to get Barbara to give up the ring ‘for alterations’ to get it back to Rita. Only Barbara won’t give it up. To make matters worse, he has invited both girls to his home for tea on the same day. And, of course, he has told them both a pack of lies about his home life. And on top of this, an old flame, Liz (Julie Christie in her first big role on film) has come back to town.

Billy is telling everybody that the comedian will hire him and he’ll be going to London. This is his escape. He tries to quit his job at the funeral home only to have his obnoxious boss Mr Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter) let Billy know they are on to him and the calendar/postage gag, and he can’t quit until he’s worked off all the money he owes.

Billy goes in and out of fantasy. Walking by a stadium where a football (soccer) match is in progress, he dreams he is the Prime Minister of Ambrosia promising a new and better future for all (in best Winston Churchill imitation) to the mad cheers of the populace. But his real life is getting worse and worse. The two women are pressuring him for the ring, to see his parents. The comedian doesn’t know him and has no job for him. And when Billy shouts at his Grandmum, she has a bit of an attack, making his Dad even harsher on Billy.

That night the whole town congregates at the dance hall. Billy tries to avoid Rita and Barbara (he has dates with both, of course) but they meet up and the whole business of two fiancées and one ring comes out; the women fall into a catfight. The band though is playing a song Billy and a mate wrote, which is good – until the MC gives Billy credit and announces Billy will be going to London to write the radio show; more humiliation is bound to follow when this is revealed as a lie, and indeed, several of Billy’s pals are razzing him when the dance hall applauds him, calling out, ‘Billy Liar! Billy Liar!’

Billy escapes the dance hall for a walk with Liz. They catch up on old times. Billy is amazed that Liz has left the small town so many times, but she says it’s easy, you just get a ticket and get on the train. Liz seems to really understand Billy, she knows all his faults and fibs and likes him anyway. They share a penchant for day-dreaming, and Billy reveals to Liz, the first person ever, his fantasies of Ambrosia. Liz wants to make love to Billy in the park, he proposes, really seems to mean it, and they lie down in the grass. Only Billy’s mates have followed them, and mock him. The secret of ‘Ambrosia’ is now out, and it’s a sure thing that by Monday night the whole town will know all about it.

Billy is furious but Liz tells him it doesn’t matter, those guys, the whole town, aren’t worth it. She tells him they can go to London tonight on the midnight train; that she’ll be on it, and she gets him to agree to meet her at the station.

Billy goes home, once more full of hope. At home though, unpleasantness awaits: his Dad tells him that Grandmum is in the hospital and Mum is there waiting for Billy. And they know all about the calendars and postage, and they’ve broken into the wardrobe and found Mum’s letter to the radio show dedication, which Billy never sent either. Billy tries to stand up for himself and stick to his promise to Liz, and he packs and leaves to go to the infirmary.

There he sits with his Mum. She is no less determined to keep Billy at home, though she uses gentler tactics. Grandmum dies, and Mum grieves, and Billy departs for the station.

He walks to the station, dreaming of his regiment’s military burial of his Grandmum in Ambrosia and humming a military tune. But the camera pulls away and reveals Billy walking down a dark city street, engulfed in shadow, his tune more like whistling in the dark. We know Billy is not going to London, even though he thinks he is, and is making every move to go.

At the station he finds Rita, dragging around one of Billy’s mates who is drunk. There’s also a young soldier who is going off to serve, and supported by older women relatives. And out on the platform he finds Liz.

They board the train and wait. Only minutes before it will depart. And Billy is feeling anxious. He tries to get Liz to ask him to go back out to get something to eat – she has packed sandwiches. What about something to drink? She doesn’t want anything. Some milk? She doesn’t want any. But Billy goes out to get the milk anyway.

He stands at the vending machine. The train will depart any moment and Billy takes his time. He holds two cartons of milk in his hand, his back to the platform. He could still make it but he waits until he’s just too late, and only then turns and runs, runs when it’s too late, runs just to make a show of trying to go.

In the carriage window Liz looks out, shaking her head. She knows Billy too well, is sorry he couldn’t come but doesn’t seem to blame him too much. She didn’t really expect him to go. She has left his suitcase out on the platform for him.

Billy walks home, alone on the dark streets. But he walks a bit faster, parade march, and behind him march in step the paratroopers of Ambrosia. Billy marches up to his house and inside, and the camera pulls back down the street, as the national anthem of Ambrosia rises on the soundtrack. Billy’s window is the only one lit in the house, far away, at the end of the street, as the anthem ends and closes out the movie.

It’s an excellent picture. Schlesinger was a terrific filmmaker for about 10, 15 years. The beginning, with the radio program and shots of the streets, has a nice, naturalistic feel, but it was a bit flawed in that it’s just an effort to ‘break out’ of the play, which probably opens on Mrs Fisher dusting and cleaning and making breakfast while the radio plays the other dedications.

The biggest challenge for the picture is bringing us in and out of the daydreams. This is done usually with sound helping: either we begin to hear Ambrosia before picture takes us there, or we go on hearing Ambrosia after picture brings us back into ‘reality.’ I wonder how it might have felt if they had had the budget and tried The Wizard of Oz gambit, putting all the Ambrosia/daydream scenes in color?

One thing that had my head turning while watching was thinking how Albert Finney would have been as Billy. Tom Courtenay is a frail, slight man, and so I interpret his Billy as the recourse of a weakling; when he interacts with others, telling lies, it’s like somebody who has this one defensive mechanism to help him through life. But Finney is much heartier, stronger physically. He was playing Tom Jones at about this period, so I have a good picture of what he was like in a somewhat similar genre (comedy of a young man against the forces of the established order). Finney as Billy would have been more cheeky, more aggressive, more mocking. He would have been lying more out of strength than weakness, or else more out of a boyish, Peter Pan, not-yet-grown-up personality. Whilst Courtenay is lying and fantasizing because life is too heavy and hard for him, Finney might have been doing it because, well, it’s fun! And to hell with everybody else if they can’t take a joke! Finney would have been more ‘dangerous’ if you will as a suitor in the scenes with Rita and Barbara. More calculating.

I don’t know if I would have liked Finney’s Billy as well. I certainly wouldn’t have sympathized with him, or pitied him so much. But Finney is an amazing actor, and I expect he would have won me over if not with pity, then with sheer ebullience and sense of enjoyment.

The other thing that struck me is one scene. It’s the scene where Billy enters Mr Shadrack’s office to resign (because he’s so sure that he’ll get the radio scriptwriting job). Mr Shadrack isn’t there, so Billy imagines a conversation with him. Billy goes on and on, talking to the empty desk, and I was sure that the scene would take a turn for the worse when Mr Shadrack appeared in the doorway behind Billy. Sure enough it happened, but not the way I expected. The usual way to do this, the ‘elegant’ solution, is to have the camera move to follow Billy. Generally camera movement is invisible to the audience when it is ‘motivated’ by something that happens on the screen. Billy walks screen right, and the camera follows him. This is invisible to us because it gives us what we want to see; our brains are hard-wired to track such side-to-side movement. The camera moves just as our eyes would move if we were sitting where the camera is.

The natural, ‘elegant’ solution to revealing Mr Shadrack then is to get the camera over behind the desk, looking at Billy; Billy walks to one side or the other so the doorway behind him is gone out of frame; then Billy walks back, camera follows, and there is Mr Shadrack, appearing as if by magic.

Schlesinger doesn’t do it that way. He moves Billy around the desk, and pans the camera after him, right enough. For several shots the doorway is offscreen. He then moves Billy back around in front of the desk. Still the doorway is offscreen. All Schlesinger needs to do now is move Billy a little bit farther screen left.

Instead, Billy stays put, and the camera, from an unmoving spot, ‘decides on its own’ to pan left, and find Mr Shadrack.

Now why did Schlesinger do it this way? I thought it was a ‘mistake’ at first. But in general it’s never the best approach for a critic to assume the artist is ‘wrong’ but instead assume he is ‘right’ and find some sort of reason why Schlesinger would want to prefer to do it the way he did; and then see if that reason might be valid, a ‘better’ solution to the problem.

When a character commands the camera – when the camera must follow him, and nobody else in the scene – that character acquires power. He is dominating the shot. This is generally true, and so the opposite is often true as well: if the camera ignores a character and moves against him, then the character loses power. Here Billy is ‘cut down to size’ if you will, when the camera, ‘on its own’ decides to ignore him and look over there – over to the door. (I don’t think this movement is motivated by a sound from Shadrack – say a footstep or clearing of the throat – but I can’t say for sure.) Since Billy has been fantasizing of himself as a big man, an important man, someone superior to the imaginary Shadrack, when the camera moves against Billy, it deflates this image which the filmmakers hope Courtenay’s acting will have won us over (after all, the audience should be on Billy’s side at this point, and who among us hasn’t daydreamed about telling off our obnoxious and petty bosses?).

Schlesinger’s camera move might, therefore, be a deliberate effort to accelerate Billy’s loss of stature, to tear us back into ‘reality’ before Billy himself is ready for it, or aware of his boss’s presence.

I still don’t much like it though. Because the second half of this scene, in which Shadrack enters the office and proceeds to tell Billy off, rejecting Billy’s resignation in no uncertain terms, will cut Billy down quickly enough. What after all is the first thing that’s going to happen in this part of the scene? Mr Shadrack is going to walk into the office, go behind his desk, sit down, open the letter of resignation, read it. Shadrack thus can capture and command the camera with his moves, and acquire power; the camera follows him and lets Billy go in and out of frame, undermining Billy’s power in this part of the scene. This sort of solution is generally used and preferred and considered more ‘elegant’ because it is invisible and organic – organic in the sense that it is invisible and the camera is following the blocking of the actors.

(4 May 2009)

Premonition

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Premonition a sort of hybrid genre of family drama, tearjerker, and supernatural thriller. Oh yeah, a puzzle picture too.

The Story has Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) a very-happy wife of a very-happy husband with two cute adorable little girls. Well, maybe things aren’t so happy because one day Linda wakes up to hear a phone message from her husband who’s off on a business trip. Then at the door there’s a cop telling her that her husband is dead in a car accident.

Linda has to go through the whole day, not believing, barely able to cope with the news. Good thing her mother is there to help with the kids. Linda finally goes to sleep … and wakes up next to her husband. She passes a whole day in which her husband is alive … next day he is dead … next day he’s alive … next day he’s dead…

The tale is one of her recurring premonitions of the future all of which are true and not true, so it’s kind of impossible to pull everything out of it. The DVD has a commentary track with the director and Bullock which undoubtedly explains it all, and if you watch a second time I bet you get a lot more out of it, puzzle-wise. In the end (after the midpoint, when Linda figures out what has been happening) she makes a calendar and tries to work out what happened or will happen on what days.

Something similar would have helped us too in the audience. Why didn’t they give us one? I think there are two reasons:

1. They want us to share her dislocation and confusion and her sense of horror. There’s a way to pitch this script as a horror movie, and it was undoubtedly pitched that way at least once. Maybe it would have been more successful as straight horror.
2. More interesting though: if they had given us titles, like ‘Monday’ ‘Thursday’ ‘Tuesday’ ‘Saturday’ ‘previous Sunday’ it would have seemed as though Linda was really going through time, which isn’t what is happening, even though it seems like it.

In fact, what we have is a flashback/flashforward structure in this picture, only the heroine goes through it in movie-time just like we do. She is half in the audience herself in a weird way. She only knows and experiences each day based on her knowledge of the previous day and the day before that, in this jump-ahead, jump-back pattern.

They change her outfit every time she wakes up, which helps, and there’s a lot of Hitchcock-style glance-object cutting, along with a bunch of hyper-realistic moviemaking. Which kind of bugged me, it was too much.

At first Linda is increasingly upset and confused at what’s going on. She meets people who know her but they are strangers to her, because she met them in the past – their past, not hers, because she has skipped that day (in her dreams or premonitions which seem to come at night and begin with her waking and then living through an entire day). So there is a double dislocation which comes from this: not only does Linda not know what happened on the intervening days, but the premonition is false when it comes to her, and true when it comes to everybody else. What I mean is that in her premonitions she sees what other people will do, what will happen to them, but she is reacting as she would from the past and not as she will react when she actually lives through that day. So on Saturday, the day of the funeral, Linda in her premonition doesn’t believe her husband is dead, causes a scene – several – and ends up being committed by a psychiatrist – all because she is foreseeing this Saturday from Tuesday, or Monday, or Sunday night before, before her husband’s death, before she figures out these are premonitions. But then when Saturday does come, will she think he’s still alive, after she turns out to have been on the scene and witnessed his death on Wednesday?

And yet the final scene is some months after her husband’s death. And her daughter still has scars, from running through a glass door, which she does in part because Linda is screaming to her in a distraught state, because at this point Linda is in a premonition or suffering the dislocation of having been seeing future.

I think this sort of puzzle makes the movie hard to grasp emotionally. There is a double set of emotional reactions we have. First there are the feelings of strangeness and fear and alienation we share as we follow Linda through the fractured time, knowing only a little more than she does, what is going on. Then there are the feelings of what she is going through: learning her husband might be, is, is considering, sleeping with the hot blonde at work, feeling that he really is more of a roommate than a lover, and finally coming to terms with this and loving him anyway, trying to save him from the accident she knows is coming.

Of course, part of the reason the picture fails to satisfy is that she can’t forestall the future she has seen. Her daughter does get cut running through the glass doors, which seems to set up a possibility in reverse way, that Linda might save her husband. (Yeah, that sounds irrational, but I’m thinking not in real terms but in movie-goer terms: because she couldn’t stop her daughter’s accident, she will be motivated to try very hard to stop her husband’s accident; because she fails to prevent one, we are being forewarned that the husband’s accident is not forestallable, which would make for a very happy twist if she could forestall her husband’s accident – see?)

There is a priest who talks like a scientist and when Linda tells him of these crazy dreams, actually can pull out right away a book where he has marked all the pages of historical incidents where people had visions of the future that came true.

I sense a lot of different cooks messing with this stew. There are several production houses involved, and two studios, Tristar and MGM (MGM outside the Bond franchise is an almost sure sign that a movie is going to have problems these days), and even though there is only the one screenwriter credited, I wonder mightily if this script hasn’t gone through a few incarnations, one of which was the straight Lions Gate or Dimension Films horror movie, then Sandra Bullock got involved, she’s not doing a cheap horror movie, now the premise can be re-envisioned and look at the wider implications of knowing the future; as Linda asks after finding out her husband was getting interested in the blonde, ‘If I let Jim die, is it the same as killing him?’

Then there is a big strained reach after this bit of added meaning: when the priest explains his way of thinking on all this, he tells her that faith is not religion or God or Catholicism, but instead just having something outside yourself you’re willing to fight for. Linda answers, ‘I don’t know what to fight for.’

Oh yeah, here’s the climax: she knows that her husband died at mile marker 220 on the highway. She drives after him on the fateful Wednesday morning, talking to him on cell phone. He’s about to tell her about the blonde, she says she already knows all about her; he says he didn’t want that any more, he now wants to make a fresh start with her (and the picture commits the fatal flaw of telling us that he hasn’t gone through with boning the blonde yet; a rather stupid way of trying to redeem him a little). This makes Linda smile. She gets him to pull over off the highway, he does, then she notices that it’s mile marker 220. She tells him to turn around, he does, then he almost collides with a car coming the other way. His car is sitting in the middle of the highway. He tries to start it, the engine is flooded. Along comes an oil tanker truck (just so we can get a big spectacular explosion, which is more hyper-realism and a cheap, though very expensive, way to end things) and totally destroys him. Right in front of her eyes.

The final scene has her waking one last time. Her daughters come in, and we learn it’s moving day. Even as we opened the picture seeing how the husband surprised Linda with this house, buying it without telling her, we close on her moving out. The cut daughter’s face is healing well, it looks like there will be no scars. And when Linda rises to go out to meet the movers, we see she is pregnant in a shot that seems added on, it’s so poorly designed – as though a few cooks got messing with the stew even in postproduction, and wanted to give her something good to come out of all this, too.

(28 April 2009)

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising which is adapted from Susan Cooper’s YA novel The Dark is Rising. Cooper’s book is one of a series of 5 novels she published back in the 1960s and 70s. The adaptation is Fox Studio’s entry in the ‘Harry Potter Blockbuster Series Imitation’ sweepstakes but, like New Line’s The Golden Compass, is probably destined to be a one-shot money loser.

The story has the Stanton family in England from their native California. Will is the youngest of a big brood of 6 brothers and one sister. His brothers pick on him, and when he gets home from school for Christmas term break, he finds that his second-oldest brother has come back from college and has taken over his room. Well he’s not going to move in with the twins who are always picking on him, so he puts a futon up in the attic of the old house.

Strange things are happening in town, though, and Will is starting to see some strange things – usually swirling shapes in patterns. And there is a man all dressed in black who rides around town on a white horse, and stops Will on the road and demands that he hand over ‘the Signs.’ But Will doesn’t know what these are.

The answer is soon to come as the people of the Manor house take Will into an ancient church and tell him they are the Old Ones, who have been fighting on behalf of the Light against the Dark in an age-old struggle. Will they claim is an Old One himself, in fact the all-important Seeker – the one who can read The Book and know the Signs. Six Signs there are, hidden over the ages from the Rider who is the incarnation or representative of the Dark. The Rider’s powers are growing, for it is the time of the age once more when the Dark will rise and threaten to overwhelm the world, unless the Old Ones can assemble all Six Signs and use their power to counter the Rider. The Signs are made of different elements like glass, wood, iron; but the sixth Sign is in a human soul, and can never be found. On top of all this, Will can go through time to find the Signs where they were hidden. And there are only 5 days before the Rider’s powers will be at their peak, and if the Signs are not found before then, the world will be done for.

Well Will doesn’t believe this, but the Rider comes again, and the representatives and allies of the Rider, and there are thousands of black crows over the town, and the Old Ones walk Will from winter into spring, so what’s so hard to believe? One by one Will finds the signs; he sees the swirling fractal pattern glowing, and walks through time into the past, and retrieves the Signs.

But even members of Will’s family, and even the girl he’s got the hots for, can be tempted by the Rider into betraying Will. And though Will gets the five elemental Signs, how on earth will he find the Sign that cannot be found?

Of course there is a happy ending and young Will Stanton, the Seeker, uses his growing super powers to defeat the Rider and save the town and the world from snow and ice and dark. But it isn’t the end. The age is still one of conflicts, and there will be more battles ahead for … the Seeker!!!

The movie makes several crucial changes from the novel. It’s a while since I read Cooper’s books, so I only know a bit of the changes they made. The basic one, that sums up all the others, is that Cooper told of a family of Londoners who were on vacation in a small town in England, a quaint old place where they had some relatives. But Hollywood is sure that American kids can’t sympathize with British kids, Harry Potter notwithstanding, so Fox has to have a California Stanton pack.

And in the book Will didn’t have the super powers – or not so much anyway – and he was humble. But Americans today aren’t humble, if we ever were, and Hollywood wants to pander to our self-deceptions, and feed our egos. So Will is American, he is the Destined One, the Chosen One, and a Superboy all in one.

The books have their faults. It’s quite difficult to show a world of fantasy coexisting with our modern world; in fact I don’t think anybody succeeded in doing so before Joanne Rowling. In addition, The Dark is Rising is hard to film because it’s a puzzle tale: six signs have been hidden about the town, and all six must be found. That makes for six sequences of clues and discovery, on top of which there must be a couple of opening sequences to show Will in his status quo ante and learning who and what he is, and then coming to terms with it, and a climactic battle scene. It makes for a movie with about 10 sequences, all of them involving flashy special effects, and a huge budget with a long running time.

Fox chose instead to short-change the puzzle sequences, making them very short, which makes the puzzles seem easy, and not true puzzle at all: Will is just going along, suddenly sees the swirling fractal pattern, and boom! – he’s in the past and sees a Sign, grabs it with a bit of a struggle, and boom! – he’s back in the present.

But each of the sequences, almost all the scenes in fact, are packed with typical Hollywood digital effects. And the director tries to shoot everything to make it look ‘magical’ so it’s all pretty crazy to look at. This movie almost qualifies in the ‘looks great, stupid script’ line of films I started keeping track of when I first noticed that The Avengers looked cool and awesome with the sound turned off. (Tomb Raider is another in that line.) But The Seeker: the Dark is Rising doesn’t look good enough to quite qualify, and the cutting is so crazy (probably to bring it in with a short running time; there are something like 3 credited editors) that I couldn’t really enjoy the production design and effects anyway.

In the end the most damning thing I can say of this movie is how bland and generic Fox has made it. If they wanted just to imitate Harry Potter, why not come up with their own script property – surely 50-year-old minor British books aren’t famous enough to warrant this treatment, and the rights to the book must be less than the shoot’s craft services budget – paltry in comparison to the hundred, two hundred million dollars or so it cost Fox to develop, shoot, post and launch it (and it only grossed 8 million in North America, and 22 million abroad, for a really dreadful 31 million dollars total – somebody for sure got fired for this one).

Nobody in power understood that the charm in Cooper’s book lay in the specificity of the time and place, and the humble and unassuming nature of the tale, meant to be read over a school break to while away boredom of being shut in while the bad weather raged outside.

Just a waste, in fact.

(16 April 2009)

The Magic Voyage of Sinbad + The Day the Earth Froze

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Magic Voyage of Sinbad + The Day the Earth Froze

These two movies came on one disk, one movie per side. Both are foreign films licensed in the very-early 1960s by micro-studio American International Pictures, where Roger Corman held sway producing mostly genre and terror pictures for drive-in theaters, with a special eye on the teen and college viewers (who would mostly mock the movies or make out in their cars while the films screened).

These two movies were imported by AIP then recut, dubbed, and released under false pretenses. The movies were then cut again and (maybe) reformatted for release to local television stations in North America. Finally RetroMedia got the rights to digitize and put them on DVD.

In the process of refashioning the films for TV, AIP had to reach a very narrow running time to fit a 90-minute slot (plus commercials). The total running time for the film would then end up about 80 minutes. So some early Corman pictures with 65-minute running times had to get some additional scenes shot later on, when the TV licensing deal came through; and longer pictures needed to be shortened. I suspect both these films were shortened, and that it’s the TV versions that RetroMedia digitized.

According to the RetroMedia liner notes, at least Sinbad was overseen by the young Francis Ford Coppola. RetroMedia included shots of the lobby cards and posters for both films, and I notice that both were advertised as ‘In Vistascope!’ which implies a widescreen format; I’m not sure if the films were shot widescreen or if AIP was just misleading its audience again.

Sinbad is a Russian film, and it was a big budget epic. I’m not sure if it was originally meant to depict Sinbad or some folk hero of Russia, or a new imagined character – in any event the guy does take a voyage and visits some strange lands. There was a big budget on this film, lots of effects, costumes, props.

The story has ‘Sinbad’ returning home to his fabulous city, only to find that the people are in misery. The rich have taken over and, like the rich everywhere, they have only gotten richer – this time at the workers’ expense (this was produced in Soviet Russia, after all). Sinbad wants to give his fellow citizens hope by bringing them the bird of happiness (it turns out to be blue, with a tip of the hat, I suppose to Maurice Maeterlinck). To do that he must win the help and friendship of one of the sea-king’s daughters. She digs him, so she helps.

Sinbad sets out on magic ships with all the volunteers he can muster. They visit some land that seems like modern day Pakistan, anyway it has temples rather like Babylon and the kings look like they are from the subcontinent, ride elephants and play chess. Sinbad and his crew are captured, and he must beat the king at chess – by using magic pieces. He then manages to put all the city inhabitants to sleep so he and his men can walk out unharmed.

Then he goes past Egypt, and decides to turn back – there is a sweet girl back in his home city and Sinbad misses her too much to carry on any longer without her. Then the fleet encounters a fierce storm, and Sinbad himself falls overboard to the bottom of the sea, where the sea-king decides whether to let him live or not. Sinbad hooks up again with the daughter who favors him and escapes, with the blue bird of happiness. He makes it back home and all is well.

I confess I didn’t hear a single sound from the film after the first couple of scenes, but set the dvd player on fast forward and watched it soundless on the fly, just to get a good flavor of the images. The color is washed out, and a bit strange, but I can’t say if that is on the original process used in Russia at the time, or if it comes from the prints used to make the TV versions, or from RetroMedia, but RetroMedia does preface their version with an apology for the uneven quality of the video and audio elements, which they had to pick up from different sources of varying quality.

The Day the Earth Froze is a Finnish film, recounting the core legend of the Kalevala – the forging and loss of the magical mill the Sampo, which could grind out anything you wished for, and the loss and recovery of the Sun to the land of Kalevala.

AIP really didn’t know what to do with this one. Sinbad was a popular name thanks to some work by a chap name of Ray Harryhausen, but nobody in the American market knew Elias Lonnrot from Hans Christian Andersen. Rather than package the movie as a children’s matinee picture, AIP decided to focus on the climax, which involves the dark, frozen wasteland that the land of Kalevala becomes after the wicked witch captures and hides the sun in a cave. Somebody liked the Fox picture from a decade before, so they got the title The Day the Earth Froze and advertised it as ‘a chilling tale of terror!’

The budget, effects, and general technical expertise in Finland was not up to Russian standards, and it shows here – although again, it’s anybody’s guess what the original picture looked like, except we can be sure that it looked better than what I saw.

The story involves Anaki (fair warning, I’m not sure I’m spelling the names right), a beautiful maiden, sister to the mighty, immortal smith Ilmarinen. There is a legend that when Anaki falls in love it will come time to forge the Sampo, and for some reason this is feared, so Ilmarinen warns his sister, and she stays apart from all men. All the men agree not to woo her, except one – Leminkainen, a woodsman who lives and works so deep in the forest he has never heard of her. He works so hard his father at last tells him to go back home to rest. Leminkainen steps onto a log and with but a long pole-oar rides it down the river, in the most interesting sequence of the movie – the actor (or his stunt double) actually seems to be standing on a log (maybe on notches cut on the log) and riding it through some rapids, without falling, balancing himself only by leaning on the pole-oar.

Down the river he happens to find Anaki on the river bank. The two young people instantly fall in love, and she takes him to her brother. Ilmarinen agrees to the wedding, and then a group of elders comes to ask the smith, isn’t it time for him to forge the Sampo? But Ilmarinen protests that he has no fire hot enough to do it, that it can only be done using the fire from the sky.

We leave the people of Kalevala and go far north, to the lair of the wicked witch Louki. She has captured and chained not only the fire from the sky but all the elements of nature – winds, mist, snow. Ceaselessly she urges her slaves to forge the Sampo, for which her greedy heart lusts, but none of them can manage it, wizards though they be. ‘Only the mighty smith Ilmarinen could forge the Sampo,’ they tell her.

So the wizards conjure up an image of Ilmarinen as he stands giving Anaki and Leminkainen his bleesing. Straight away the witch knows that if she kidnaps Anaki she will be able to force Ilmarinen to forge the Sampo for her. She sends her cloak to fly away and get Anaki, a sequence done with imagination and good effects. The cloak flies with the winds, and finds Anaki stepping into a small boat. The cloak leaps onto the mast, fills with wind, and carries the helpless maiden across the seas to Louki’s land.

Ilmarinen learns of this and determines to go rescue his sister. Leminkainen will go too. They sail to Louki’s land where they confront her army of wizards. The witch agrees to give them Anaki if each will perform one service to her. First, that Leminkainen will plow and plant a field of serpents. This is impossible, as no draft beast can live after the serpents bite it. But Ilmarinen forges a horse out of metal and this draws the plow, and the task is done. Now it is Ilmarinen’s turn, but the witch tells him it’s no good even to ask after his sister now, for his boat is wrecked (by her wizards, though she claims it was a whale that did it).

She then demands that Ilmarinen forge the Sampo for her. He protests, and tells her anything but the Sampo, but the witch wants the Sampo and nothing else. So Ilmarinen, aided by the wizards, uses the captured fire from the sky and forges the magical mill, here represented as looking rather like a pipe-organ.

(A note here that the original tale uses only words, of course, so the word ‘Sampo’ and the other word ‘mill’ can stand for anything you might picture. In illustrated versions of the Kalevala I’ve seen the Sampo depicted as a small tabletop salt mill; evidently that was insufficiently grand for the movie, a feeling I can endorse. Actually when you want to film something magical like this, I feel that you should either go big or very small: either a big pipe-organ like they did here, or something that looks small and quite ordinary, like a table salt mill. The only other way that works is not to show the thing at all – not really an option in this case. The kids will want to see the Sampo!)

Ilmarinen proves it is indeed the magic mill by commanding it to put forth gold, flour, and salt, all at once. The three streams come out, and the witch gives back Anaki. The lovers and smith depart in a bronze boat the smith has forged to replace the wooden boat they came in. But on the way back Leminkainen swears he will steal the Sampo and bring it to the land of Kalevala. He leaps overboard and swims to the land of Louki and steals the Sampo. But Louki sends a storm after him, and he is lost … his mother mourns for him and asks a birch tree, a mountain, and other elements what became of her son, but none can tell her. At last she finds him washed up on the beach. She’s delighted to find him alive, but Leminkainen is heartsore: the Sampo, magical mill, was destroyed. All he could salvage was its lid. The Sampo is lost forever.

Meanwhile the witch is gnashing her teeth. She’s even more enraged when she sees from afar Leminkainen and Anaki getting married. She flies with her magical cloak to the land of Kalevala and steals the Sun out of their sky. From now on it’s dark in the land. And then the witch sends cold north winds and storms, and the land freezes over. Leminkainen is really sad because he can’t even see his wife’s eyes in the dark, and can’t remember what color they were.

In desperation Leminkainen and Ilmarinen and all the warriors prepare to go attack Louki and get the Sun back. Their old wizard gives them advice. He flings the lid of the Sampo into the sky where it blazes with the Northern Lights, showing the way to Louki’s land. The smith makes musical instruments for them all instead of spears and swords, and they walk over the frozen sea, dragging their boats behind them. In Louki’s land they play the instruments and put all her wizard-warriors to sleep. Then Leminkainen chases the witch to the cave where she hid the Sun. She turns to stone to guard the entrance, but Leminkainen with one blow of the sword Ilmarinen long ago forged, shatters her and the stone door to bits, and the Sun flies up into the sky. The sea thaws, the people sail back home, and all is well again.

But the magical mill, the Sampo, can never be forged again.

The movie is pitched for ‘the young’ as a sort of fairytale. Thus the acting is broad and simple, and the only role that has any sort of play or development is the old witch Louki, giving the actress a lot of fun being wicked and evil and treacherous.

The print was muddy and dark in the darker scenes which include the scenes at Louki’s cavernous lair, scenes in the forest even by day, and all the scenes when the Sun is held captive. Here I expect the print and video are to blame, and I’m sure the original print as screen in Finland looked a lot better. The camera moves very little, though there is one great crane shot that begins with a look over the forested countryside, and follows the foresters walking along a path on the ridge, and finally settles on Leminkainen – it’s his introduction, and he gets probably the best introduction in cinematic terms. Soon after this we follow him down the river on the log, another impressive bit that helps us understand that here is a hero. Ilmarinen on the other hand is not treated so well, and Anaki is just presented on a soundstage forest luring birds to her hand. But I will bet that there was more in the way of introductions in the original; remember that this is the AIP version as cut down, most likely, to produce this 80-minute TV version. The great old Kalevala wizard, son of the Virgin, mightiest singer in the world, whose name I can’t remember, is really trimmed here.

(21 March 2009)

Highlander: Endgame

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched Highlander: Endgame. I have a fondness for the original Highlander – at least for the concept and a couple set-pieces, the rest of the movie was pretty bad. This entry to the series, which teams up the original Christopher Lambert with the actor who played Highlander in the TV series, is a mess.

Six, yes, six editors are given screen credit.

Every single one of the Highlander films I’ve watched has had a separate set of rules. I never saw the TV series, but some of the new rules here probably come from the series. All the same, the very first movie ended it all: Connor Macleod was the one, final, winner in the Game. In the second movie, it took place after Connor was the last one, and trying to save Earth from the break in the ozone layer, and it was revealed he and all the other immortals like him were aliens. They later recanted on this and tried to forget that movie was ever made.

Here Connor dies, actually is killed at his own request by his protégé, the TV-series star, so their combined strength can overcome the chief bad guy. But there are so many immortals running around, it made me wonder, ‘Who’s NOT immortal here?’

The action scenes are not impressive, unfortunately. The guy from the TV series is good looking and well trained, but his stuntwork is weak. Christopher Lambert still can bring some empathy and sadness to his role as an immortal who still grieves the death of his first wife several centuries ago.

(26 January 2009)

10,000 BC

Hi Aki,

So I watched 10,000 BC and liked it a lot more than I expected to. In fact, I did actually like it!

Omar Shariff does the narration. I have always liked him and he’s been in a few movies I love, so it’s just so nice to hear his voice. There are moments when his age shows in the voice, which is too bad, but other moments when his pleasure in just telling the story is powerful.

The cast is mostly unknown to me. This is good. Distracting to see Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy, but here there was no ‘that’s a movie star in a loin cloth!’ objection.

Another good thing about the cast is that there were so many different ethnicities (no Asians, alas, even though it takes place in Asia, I guess – but central Asia from Siberia down to say Iraq or Egypt). This gave it an exotic look that helped to transport me into its foreign world.

There were lots of surprises in the movie. The central story is a quest: raiders take slaves from a small tribe far in the snowy north, including a girl beloved by the hero. So he and a couple friends go to rescue her. Every 15 minutes the landscape changes completely from snowy mountains to jungle, to savannah, to desert, to arid plain. And each new tribe/culture the rescuers meet is a different kind and level of civilization, mostly getting more and more sophistication until they run into the descendents of Atlantis – or are they aliens landed on earth?

This means it’s not easy to get bored. If you don’t like one setting, hold on – it will change.

Of course a movie like this is impossible without massive budgets and digital effects, and the digital stuff looked very good at least on a television.

There was not much to recommend the acting. A Roland Emmerich movie is not written to give the actors much emotions to emote, it’s mostly action. Only the narrator got to really go to town, and one old lady from the siberian tribes, their wise woman, who accompanied the rescuers through visions, helping when she could in a semi-mystical way.

The ending is cheesy of course, because it’s Roland Emmerich! And it’s for kids! And there are multiple problems if you try to think, and consider it as actually representing any past epoch on earth. The Siberians hunt wooly mammoths and yet believe it’s impossible to leave their valley – but the mammoths come and go? Men ride horses thousands of years before horses were bred big enough to support a man. Men from the far north are wandering across deep desert in equatorial regions without even getting sunburned. And so on.

But this is a kids’ movie, and you have to just put aside your brain when you go in the theater and let it take you wherever it wants to go, and enjoy it for what it is.

In North America the movie was ill-served by the ad campaign, which just went for cheap thrills without communicating the unfolding sense of wonder the film gives. They showed some of the different cultures in a way that just looked like a stew of random elements thrown together in the commercial; but in the movie, Emmerich takes us carefully from one place to a slightly-different place, to one even more different, so it seems more organic.

Quest For Fire is an obvious inspiration, and this movie just can’t compare to that one – quest is a masterpiece compared to this. Quest was also a serious effort to depict what it might have been like before agriculture, at the end of the last ice age. This one is trashy fun, and for what it is, it’s very good.

(written around 8 March 2009)

Kings of the Sun

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Kings of the Sun a 1963 epic starring Yul Brynner and George Chakiris.

The story is set about 1500 years ago or so. The Mayans of the Yucatan are overrun by rival kingdoms from western Central America who have mastered metal smelting. The Mayans have only wood and stone weapons and are slaughtered. The king and his last surviving priests and warriors realize that their human sacrifices to the gods have not worked, the gods are angry, and they decide to flee.

They go to the coast, to a fishing village. There the village chief refuses to allow his fishermen to sail the warriors away unless the king agrees to marry the chief’s daughter. Angry, proud, King Balam agrees that if they reach the mythical shores to the north across the great sea, he will marry Ixchell the chief’s daughter.

They are about to take sail, but the priest says they should make a sacrifice first. King Balam resists, confessing that he never liked sacrifice. But before it can go farther, the enemy king arrives, and they must flee to the waves. The enemy king, Una Kell, swears he too will build boats and follow them and kill Balam.

Now Balam and his people and the villagers are long at sea, and there is no wind, and many want to turn back. They say Una Kell only wants Balam, and why not give him to them? Others call for a human sacrifice, and say the voyage was doomed because there was no sacrifice. But even then the chief’s daughter Ixchell sees birds, and they find land.

They have come from Chichenitza on the Yucatan, and the movie gives us a map of where they might have gone, but do not say whether it is Florida, Louisiana, Texas – it is somewhere along the gulf coast though.

In the new land, again the priest wants to make sacrifice. Balam announces that he will marry Ixchell and commands the priests to prepare all the necessary rituals.

Meantime they are building a new village, huts, buildings, and a pyramid on which to make the sacrifices. It does not rain, but the king says they should channel a nearby stream and irrigate their crops, and he takes the workers off the pyramid to build a dam and irrigation channels.

Meantime, there is a tribe of Plains Indians who are living nearby. They find one of the lost ships of the Mayans, that washed up on the shore. The chief, Black Eagle, and one of his warriors, go to search for the invaders. Black Eagle intends to capture one of the invaders and bring him back so they can learn who these people are, then drive them away.

Black Eagle finds the new village of the Mayans. He spies on King Balam, and somehow they all speak the same language, so he knows Balam is king. A good captive to take back. Black Eagle leaps from a tree and attacks, and he and Balam fight, sword against tomahawk. Black Eagle is about to win, when the Mayan warriors arrive and take him captive.

The priest is overjoyed. What better sacrifice than a man who is from this new land? The gods here will be happy with his blood. But Black Eagle has been wounded by the soldiers, and so he must be nursed back to health before he is sacrificed.

Black Eagle resists all help, until beautiful Ixchell comes to heal him. Over the days of his recuperation, Black Eagle falls in love with Ixchell, and she responds. She has not yet wed the king, and Balam is proud, and so is Ixchell, and the fact that Balam was forced to swear to marry her is a wall between them. she’s waiting for him to say he really does want her as a woman, and he’s waiting for her to say she likes him as a man.

But Black Eagle is not afraid to say he wants Ixchell, and this touches her.

When Black Eagle is healed, he is given robes of ceremony and told his honor is to be given to the gods with the prayers of the Mayans. Meanwhile he is like a god himself, and he may have any maiden he wants. He says ‘I want Ixchell!’

The king must tell Ixchell that Black Eagle chose her. She says she knows. But Balam wanted Ixchell to say, ‘I wish he had picked someone else’ and Ixchell wanted Balam to say ‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’ Neither does, so again they are apart.

Ixchell goes to Black Eagle, but Black Eagle only says that he asked for her to tell her how much he hates her and all her people, and sends her away.

The day of the sacrifice, Black Eagle refuses to lie down on the sacrificial stone willingly. They may kill him, but he will fight them. In answer, Balam says that he will not sacrifice Black Eagle, and asks him to go to his tribe and seek peace between their peoples. Black Eagle sets out. And the priest, sure in his heart the gods need blood, sacrifices himself.

Black Eagle talks his people into agreeing to live in peace with the Mayan and learn from each other. But Balam and Black Eagle get into a fight over Ixchell, and Black Eagle decides to lead his people away. They usually wander, and he’s sick of these Mayans. Ixchell’s heart belongs to Balam, he sees, so there’s no point in staying. He goes with his tribe.

But now Una Kell and his warriors arrive in their ships, and attack the Mayans. Black Eagle and his people hear the war horns and he decides he must go back and fight at the Mayans’ side.

The Mayans are overwhelmed by the superior metal swords, and make a last stand on top of the pyramid. Then Black Eagle and his warriors arrive. The battle turns, and Una Kell’s men are killed. On top of the pyramid Balam kills Una Kell himself. But Black Eagle is wounded fatally in the fight, and carried on top of the pyramid.

Under the guidance of Black Eagle, King Balam tells his people they can go back home now, but he will stay in this new land. But he will never take up sacrifice again. True sacrifice lies in what people give up in their daily struggle, there’s no need for blood.

Black Eagle tells Balam they have both learned from each other, and that Ixchell belongs to him. Then he dies.

The people stay with Balam, and he and Ixchell will be happy together.

The end.

The print they made the dvd from was in excellent shape, beautiful colors. A big budget with hundreds of extras, big battle scenes.

About the most interesting thing artistically were the scenes in the hut where Black Eagle was recovering. These were shot in a very noir way, with angular black shadows cutting everywhere, dense pools of black and highlights on parts of the actors while other parts were in shadow. These effects are not easy to achieve in color stock, the dp did a good job on these soundstage sets.

Yul Brynner worked out and got in fine shape for the role, and they dyed his body dark; he doesn’t quite look Indian, but pretty good. And he knew how to strut and carry himself like a king.

George Chakiris is rather weak as Balam, but he’s as strong as George Chakiris ever got.

The girl who played Ixchell sounded english in some scenes, I’m not familiar with her.

The director is J Lee Thompson, and this was part of his high water mark as a director. He directed the original Cape Fear among others. This is a sort of a film that is less directed than generaled, with all the extras, the huge sets, the sweeping panavision shots. it’s put together well, but the point of the movie is a liberal one of secular humanism, that religion is less important than the way we live our daily lives. And the plains Indian is not really the one to deliver this message.

The opening scenes are shot at real pyramids, uncovered and restored, somewhere in Mexico. I get the idea that somebody on vacation saw these pyramids and thought it would be a good starting point for an epic.

The other interesting thing is that the Mayans put up a stockade fence about their new village, so it’s a bit like a cavalry outpost against the indians, with a bit of the western flavor, which is strange indeed.

Elmer Bernstein did the music. This was all done for the Mirisch company, and I think Mirisch (beside Billy Wilder movies) had done Magnificent Seven – again with Yul Brynner. This may have been a try to recapture that magic.

I wish I had seen it on a huge screen. I’m sure it would be better so.

The film seems short at 108 minutes. I’m sure it was a financial flop – I’d never heard of it before – a longer original version might have been released, then when it failed a shorter version was made with television in mind. But I don’t see much in the story that is missing.

(written around 1 March 2009)

Topper Takes a Trip (Bonus: Days of Being Wild)

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Topper Takes a Trip and Days of Living Wild.

I thought Wild was very powerful, forceful, and had a flavor – you could tell the personality that made this film. Great portrait of the main guy. But, what was that scene at the end? Did that make sense to you? Tony Leung, who has not been in the film before, is getting ready to go out. he’s in an underground room we have never seen. He combs his hair, and he puts a big fistfull of bills in his pocket, and then a deck of cards, so we both think he must be a gambler, but still…what in the world????

Topper Takes a Trip. This movie was done for less money (and it shows) than the original Topper. I was mistaken about Topper, by the way, it’s not an MGM picture, but from Hal Roach studios. Hal Roach was an indie of those days. He made mostly Laurel and Hardy, and Little Rascals, comedy shorts. He also hit it big with 1,000,000 years B.C. Later in the 40s, a surprise caveman hit.

Anyway, they couldn’t get Cary Grant for this one, so they replace him with a wire terrier.

So that’s the big lesson of the movie, for all producers and moviemakers in the world:

Can’t get Tom Cruise? Hire a dog!

I just thought it was funny, that the producers thought they even needed the dog – why not just have one ghost? Why did they need two? I didn’t analyze the scenes carefully, but my guess is that they had a script hoping to get Cary Grant. But he wanted more money, or else he had other films to make. And in some sequences there was Cary-ghost in one location while Connie-ghost was in another location.

So, they thought about maybe giving her another ghost companion, and ended up instead of hiring another star…getting the dog!

(written around 17 February 2009)

Topper

Hi Aki,

I also saw Topper. Very funny, classic screwball comedy. Cary Grant and Constance Bennet play George and Marion Kerby, two fabulously wealthy young people who just play, play and play. Meanwhile Roland Young is Cosmo Topper, the wall street banker, who is middle aged and not happy about it, and his wife Clara (Billie Burke, the good witch from Wizard of Oz) is his wife, who wants them to be respectable and dictates what Cosmo eats, drinks, when he gets up in the morning and so on.

In a wild car trip, George and Marion crash and die, but they can’t go to heaven, they think, until they perform one good deed. They decide their good deed will be to loosen up Cosmo and show him how to have fun for a change.

So they can move things, and they can appear or disappear, and only Cosmo knows they are still around, and people think they are going crazy when they see cigarettes floating, or pens writing things on their own. Lots of zany dialogue and physical comedy. 1937 and from MGM when MGM meant great movies with lots of production money and beautiful sets and lighting. [Correction: made by Hal Roach Studios, not MGM.]

(written around 15 February 2009)

Angel-A

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched Luc Besson’s Angel-A. It was good, a sweet movie, maybe the Besson movie I liked the best somehow. Basically a two-character movie set in Paris. A punk, a loser, is in deep trouble. He owes several gangsters a lot of money and he can’t pay, so they will kill him tomorrow. He tries everything he can, it fails, so he decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge. But just as he’s about to jump, he sees a girl is about to do the same thing, a little farther down the bridge.

So these two losers, the short dark fellow and the tall, leggy super-model blonde, team up to try to solve his problems, so she can get her mind off her problems.

And they have various adventures around Paris.

It’s not quite new wave, and the adventures don’t really engage the real city the way they should,instead it’s more fabricated, a fantasy after the old Hollywood movie – Besson loves old Hollywood movies.

I was thinking more about angela, and I have to add: it’s too talky. I notice it more because I had to read subtitles and could barely see what was going on! There were only a couple of moments where they weren’t talking, and those moments were such a relief.

Also the characters are only half-characters. The girl is a sort of amnesiac: she is in fact an angel, and once was human, but has no memory of when she was alive; she only knows her 300 years as an angel being sent down to help various mortals.

The guy has bits and pieces of details, but he knows nobody in Paris outside of the criminals who hate him and want to kill him. He has no place to live here, either. So it’s kind of no-character character, where the actor Besson casts, his way of speaking, his face, make it seem as though he has a character, but really it’s only casting. (good casting too: the guy is the one-armed short guy who was the helper to the greengrocer in amelie, who was always picked on. The contrast between the really-tall, impossibly-long-legged blonde girl and the short dark guy makes for great comic casting.)

Even making the girl an angel is a cheat in good writing. Ok, this loser guy teams up with a beautiful blonde and they set about fixing up his life, and along the way they fall in love. Good premise. Only … why, WHY would the blonde want to help this guy? And HOW can she help him? Who is she, anyway?

There could be a lot of answers, but ‘She’s an angel, and has magic powers’ is just about the easiest way to not answer those questions.

Frank Daniel had a name for this kind of team up, I forget the name. But the premise is that two people who want to get away from each other, are instead bound together and must learn to co-operate. The Defiant Ones has for example Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as convicts. They escape the police, they hate each other – but, they are chained together, so they must stay together. that’s a simple way to bond them.

The advantage of this kind of teaming is that we never know when, if, they are going to split up. They keep talking about it, and the trick for the screenwriter is to juggle this, ‘I want to get away,’ and ‘We must work together!’ back and forth, up and down, throughout the second act. Usually at the end of act 2, or early in the third act, they do part company, giving them a chance to miss each other. (in this way it’s like a romantic story where the lovers split up at the end of act 2, and only get back together at the very end.)

When Besson has the blonde be an angel (Angela, or Angel-A) who is assigned the mission of helping this guy, he loses the chance to show us the pair about to split up at various points. We lose the juggling act.

(written around 14 February 2009)