It can be dangerous to take a filmmaker at his word. Or, if not dangerous, it can cause you to stop thinking. Preston Sturges’ explanation of his intent with The Palm Beach Story was that he wanted to explore/illustrate “the aristocracy of beauty,” or, as Claudette Colbert’s character puts it, “It’s amazing what a pretty girl can do without doing anything.”

With typical Sturges complexity, the plot of this film sets up three intertwined problems: (1) the marriage of Tom and Jerry is in trouble because (2) he can’t interest anyone in his crazy idea of an overhead airfield made of wire mesh and (3) he won’t let Jerry use her charm to help him.

Jerry resolves to divorce Tom so she can help him from outside the marriage, removing his right to be jealous. The film now follows her adventures, with Tom following her. The REAL problem of the film is the marriage, but all the lesser problems have to be solved so it can be rescued.

Jerry has to somehow get to Palm Beach with no money, obtain a divorce with no money, and meet and marry a millionaire who can finance Tom’s tennis-racket airport. While the intuitive solution to making this interesting dramatically – screenwriting 101 – would be to make the most of these obstacles, Sturges goes the advanced route, having solutions fall into her lap at every turn.

It may be standard practice — the erotic thrill that Italian cinematographers bring to their experiments with light. 

Yet the origin story of that light remains cloaked. Why should so many visual throwbacks, indeed an entire corpus of undead iconography, arrive willy-nilly to boggle the Mod eye? Amid Italy’s love affair with Fellini and its own sexy ebullience, an arch Gothic fountainhead rises up; and this otherwise sun-kissed, suggestive peninsula hungers for crooked headstones, images ripped from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari under German light. The question arises, in my own mind, if nowhere else: mightn’t Italian Gothic Horror have originated in guilt? 

Can we take a moment and compare the 2024 presidential election with the elections of the Gilded Age?

Not since the second administration of President Grover Cleveland, in 1892, has a candidate out for the stuff gained the opportunity to humblebrag nonconsecutive terms in the seat of Brother Jonathan. Old Cleveland was a chunky fellow, but right small potatoes when compared to the swelled head of the brandname monarch creeper, fairly elected in November, 2024. There’s no two ways about it: once the popular vote was in, and the convict clackbox was announced victorious, anyone in support of the Civil Rights Act was ready to absquatulate, while the dopes and note-shavers finally felt seen. Country jakes and bluebloods alike took a hard pass on goodwill for a taste of the fast boodle promised by the gasconading muttonhead. Liberals were out on their ear, and totally not heeled for another four years counting ties while the wheelhorse of the Grand Old Party lights up a D.C. dumpster fire the way red herrings torched Dolly and James Madison’s house in the War of 1812.

There was a new sort of hip underground subculture that arose in the mid-80s and hung around until the early ’90s. That was about par for a new subculture’s lifespan in those days. In a way it evolved out of punk rock—which was hacking its last at the time—but it was neither musical nor political, not in the normal sense anyway. It was broader, darker, and more intellectual, with books usurping DIY cassettes as the primary medium of communication. It’s hard to thumbnail, but it involved a celebration of industrial decay, serial killers,, the Jonestown massacre, sideshow freaks, William Burroughs, Satanism, dystopias, insane religious cults, the Challenger explosion, Manson, conspiracy theories, Ed Gein, B movies, extremes of human thought, behavior, art and sexuality, all things violent, transgressive, nihilistic and shocking. All of them, for the most part, appreciated from a safe distance. In a way it was related to the mid-19th century school of thought dubbed “Cultural Pessimism,” but instead of merely noting, predicting or tracking a civilization’s decline, this new lot was cheering it on, even looking for ways to speed things up. I was anyway.

One way to sum it up can be found in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1984 essay collection, “Driftworks”:

“Here is a course of action: harden, worsen, accelerate decadence. Adopt the perspective of active nihilism, exceed the mere recognition—be it depressive or admiring—of the destruction of all values. Become more and more incredulous. Push decadence further still and accept, for instance, to destroy the belief in truth under all its forms.”

It wasn’t a “movement” or “scene” so much as it was a shared attitude, a way of looking at a world in delirious collapse. It was reflected and documented by indie publishers like RE/Search, Amok, Loompanics and Feral House, magazines like ANSWER Me!, Search & Destroy and Seconds, and films like “Mondo New York,” a documentary about the city’s various late ’80s underground scenes, from performance art to S&M. Little storefronts even began popping up that catered directly to the Weltanschauung, selling the above-mentioned books and magazines, creepy knick-knacks, records, sideshow and serial killer memorabilia and the like.

It never had a collective name, but Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey came as close as anyone with the title of his 1987 anthology of essays and interviews, “Apocalypse Culture.” The whole mindset definitely had that Fin de siècle vibe about it, but with more wicked glee.

Dick Powell is an amazing figure. His career spans several stages which are not only distinct but unreconcilable: from gibbous crooner in pre-code musical comedies, first foist before a disbelieving public in the scabrous Blessed Event (1932), the whole pitch of which seems to be to make us hate him and want him punched, progressing through a series of Busby and sub-Busby musical fare, smirking and twinkling being generally mellifluous; he then “matured,” like cheese, into an uninspiring male lead of no particular qualities, perfectly servicable as the chump hero in Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940); then comes an unlikelier reinvention, as tough guy, stippling on the stubble to play a world-weary Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (1944), a piece of casting which makes no sense but somehow passes muster; and finally, there’s Powell the auteur, his most preposterous role yet, bringing us tough-guy stuff like the nuclear thriller Split Second and a couple of war pics, plus a musical remake of It Happened One Night which we all just pretend never happened, and the legendary John Wayne as Genghis Khan atrocity The Conquerer, which literally killed everyone involved.  

Helen Walker was a sad case, her offscreen life a discordant contrast to the amount of fun she produced in her Hollywood roles. Her career was short, and so was her life.

In brief: New Year’s Eve, 1946. Walker was driving a car borrowed from director Bruce “Lucky” Humberstone (I Wake Up Screaming) and stopped to pick up three hitch-hiking soldiers. The two who survived the ensuing accident, in which the car hit a divider and overturned, testified that Walker was drunk. Everyone was badly injured and Walker was kicked off the film she’d been shooting. Amazingly, her career wasn’t totally over, but the work that followed was intermittent and Walker’s health declined and she died aged forty-eight, having not made a film for thirteen years.

It should have been different. In 1942, Walker is bright and breezy in Lucky Jordan, opposite Alan Ladd in one of his roguish early roles before he succumbed to respectability. Her role mainly requires her to look good and be outraged at her co-star’s crooked ways. She’s damn good, and it’s impossible to square the sharp and sassy dame onscreen with the tragic and disorderly life.

Most of Walker’s early roles were lightweight, showcasing her gift for comedy. Murder, He Says stars Fred MacMurray and is directed by former Laurel & Hardy man George Marshall, whose handling of farce is strikingly pacey and cinematic here. MacMurray was liked by his leading ladies for not hogging the limelight – he saw himself more as a horn player who got lucky than an actual actor, though he was in fact very talented in that department (Jean-Pierre Melville credited him with inventing underplaying in Double Indemnity: “Even Humphrey Bogart was not underplaying before then.”) Walker is similarly low-key, and they compliment one another nicely.

Cluny Brown is one of the jewels in Walker’s crown: the last film completed by genius of comedy Ernst Lubitsch, it hasn’t acquired the reputation of his other later works, such as Heaven Can Wait or To Be Or Not To Be. Maybe that’s because it’s not for everybody. It’s quite a strange film, oddly structured: the opening scenes concern a man called Hilary Aimes and a party he’s to throw, then we get sidetracked into the subject of plumbing and Aimes never appears again. Jennifer Jones plays an unlikely young Englishwoman who doesn’t fit in (with that accent it’s hardly surprising), then the plot decamps to a Wodehousian country house, the leading man is Charles Boyer, cast as some kind of great political thinker who never discusses, or apparently thinks about, politics.

Walker plays the Honorable Betty Cream, subsidiary romantic interest to subsidiary lead Peter Lawford. We’re told that she “doesn’t go everywhere,” and she “sits a horse well,” (“Damn it,” adds Lawford) and this phrase then spreads like a disease through the cast, being applied to one character or another at random intervals, becoming obscurely hilarious through sheer nonsense overkill.

I’m not sure how well Betty sits a horse – Walker was too tiny to convince in the saddle – but the line is spoken after her only horseback appearance so it retroactively brainwashes us into believing it. And the rest of her performance is divine, catty, bitchy, superior, and so correct in her superiority that you don’t hate her for it. She’s the only one who can disarm the charming and unpredictable Charles Boyer. And then she gets a talking to from Lawford’s mum and turns into a little girl. Walker, with her moon face and big doll eyes always had that aspect about her, so the transformation seems logical.

In her first lead film role in the John Wayne western Hondo (1953), Geraldine Page takes the space around her physically in a very definite way, but her squinting face and high, persnickety, slightly whiny voice don’t quite have the same authority as her body does yet. She was 29 years old here and already known as a promising theater actress, and she gets a special “introducing” credit for Hondo, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar even though she is Wayne’s unconventional leading lady.

“I am fully aware that I am a homely woman,” Page tells Wayne in Hondo, almost boastfully, or at least in a way that seems proud of her own self-awareness. Hers was not a face or even sometimes a sensibility made for the camera, but as a middle-aged and then older woman she made the movies respect her talent. At the Actors Studio in the 1950s, she worked and worked on her thin voice until it became a notably flexible instrument that she could use for practically any effect she wanted.

In a somewhat sparing feature film career, Page would rack up eight Oscar nominations in all, four in the supporting category and four for lead actress, and at least three of her supporting nominations don’t make too much sense. There isn’t much for her to do in Hondo, and she has even less to work with during her jokey short appearances in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), where she is a cartoon smother mother in an oversized black wig, and Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), where she is a society matron in an oversized blonde wig that gets pulled off by Carol Burnett during a low comedy catfight. (Page does have one genuinely funny moment in Pete ‘n’ Tillie where an official asks her age and she gets stuck behind the sounds “For” and “Fi” until she finally collapses, the sort of comic routine that lands precisely because of how overdone it is.)

Clara Bow was born in abject poverty in Brooklyn in 1905, and she was not expected to live. She became a tough street fighter because she had to in order to survive, and as a girl she watched her best male friend burn up in a fire. Her mentally unbalanced mother tried to kill her with a butcher knife when Bow expressed a desire to act in films, and her shiftless father sexually abused her. Getting into the movies was an escape from her milieu and a reaching towards the love that she did not get from her family. What Bow wanted, like so many other movie stars who came after her, was mass love, and her desire for this was as enormous as her unlikely and cheering vitality. In the face of infernal circumstances, Bow held tight to a dream of what her life could be, and the fun she might have in spite of everything.

When I was in my early teens, I went to some Halloween event dressed as Lazarus, or at least the way I’d always pictured him: Full Arabic robes, desiccated, rotting flesh, and a blood-smeared mouth. Nobody seemed to get the joke, which I found hard to believe. Even as a kid in Sunday School it seemed pretty clear to me Lazarus was a zombie. According to the Bible story, he’d been dead long enough for his corpse to begin putrefying. Then Jesus came along, raised him from the dead, and unleashed him across the countryside. You never hear much about what happened to Lazarus after that, but I imagine he left a trail of carnage wherever he went.

But Lazarus was small potatoes compared with the impact the Zombie Jesus had on the world.

The big allegorical message of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend is pretty obvious. Overwrought, even. And it bonks audiences over the head even harder in the two most faithful film adaptations: 1964’s The Last Man on Earth and 1971’s Omega Man.

To the long-suffering near-masochists known as Zappa fans, the unmistakable work of Bruce Bickford is a familiar sight. Easily the best thing about Baby Snakes, his fascinating animated sequences mitigate against the longeurs of Roy Estrada and that doll. But Bickford has had a long career independently of Zappa’s patronage, and is perhaps the only outsider artist to work in the medium of animation. A personal appearance at London’s Horse Hospital in 2010 – along with a screening of the documentary portrait Monster Road and of his film Cas’l– still seemingly a work in progress at that time – offered a chance to find out more.

Monster Road, as well as being insightful, amusing, and sometimes tear-jerkingly sad, is a valuable resource for understanding this little known artist and his work. In one memorable scene, Bickford is heard on the telephone, telling a media company that he used to work with Frank Zappa in the 1970s. One imagines that they are puzzled as to who Zappa is, never mind Bickford himself. They say his work will be outsourced, much to Bickford’s bemusement. This brief segment contains two truths about Bickford: that he is somewhat out-of-step with modern ways to distribute and market one’s work, and that Zappa’s shadow still looms large over the animator, despite him having a worldview (and a technique to match) that is considerably more supple and imaginative than Zappa’s curmudgeonly burlesque. Bickford’s work bears more fruitful comparison with the work of David Lynch and Sergei Eisenstein, as I will show.

Bickford is the son of an engineer who worked for Boeing in Seattle. During the Cold War, the engineering plant was disguised using a life-size model village made of polystyrene and burlap. The documentary implies that this experience with a 1:1 scale reproduction of reality is what inspired at least some of Bickford’s surreal work – The diorama of “ye olde” London (complete with Globe theatre) that features in Cas’l being one example. Proportion, and the distortion thereof, plays a key role in shaping Bickford’s work.

He wasn’t as culturally attuned as Roger Corman. He wasn’t as obsessively prolific as Jess Franco. He wasn’t as personally flamboyant as Ed Wood. Still, writer/producer/director Del Tenney is a legend in the annals of low budget horror. That he’s a legend is in itself legendary, given that he’s remembered for only four films, all of which were made during a two year stretch in the early 1960s. I’m hard-pressed to think of another director with a filmography that brief who earned a legacy like Tenney’s. They weren’t great films, some weren’t even particularly good, but they had a spark to them, and they were undeniably memorable, sometimes for reasons that had nothing to do with the films themselves.

“My friends used to come up to me and ask, ‘How could you do all those terrible films?’’’ Tenney was fond of saying. “And I tell them, ‘I cry all the way to the bank,’”

He was born in Mason City, Iowa, but in the early ‘40s his family moved to Los Angeles. Tenney began studying theater in school, and by age 15 he was already working, both on stage and later as an extra in the likes of The Wild One and Stalag 17. His focus was on theater, though, so in the late ‘50s he moved to New York and found work in summer stock. A number of the young actors he worked with then, like Roy Scheider, Dick Van Patten, and Sylvia Miles, would later appear in Tenney’s films, many making their screen debuts with him.

By the early ‘60s Tenney and his wife, actress Margot Hartman Tenney, had also started directing productions of their own. After a conversation with a friend who was involved in (as it was described in polite company) “the exploitation film business,” Tenney took a job as assistant director on a couple of pictures, including the merely sleazy Satan in High Heels (a nasty little cheapie involving carnival strippers, junkies, robbery, sex, and murder) and nudie cuties like Orgy at Lil’s Place, (which concerned two girls who decide to get into the nude modeling racket). In later years, while Tenney spoke freely about the former, he rarely mentioned the latter. Still, his experience there inspired him to start making films of his own.

During an appearance on Firing Line in December of 1967, radical activist, community organizer and author Saul D. Alinsky told host William F. Buckley Jr., “Controversy is a matrix of everything creative that comes out of life.“ He further quipped, “All progress comes in response to a threat.”  The core of his argument that evening, however, was that the only way people can get power is when they take it for themselves. As undeniably intelligent as he  was, Mr. Buckley seemed to have a difficult time comprehending any of these notions. Or at least he pretended to have a difficult time for the sake of his audience.