For some people, Cinqo de Mayo means a nacho party platter, a cooler full of Corona, plastic sombreros and a pinata filled with stale butterscotch discs. For a few of us, though, Cinqo de Mayo means one thing and one thing only: Aztec mummies. The sad part of it is that it might actually make much more sense than the nachos.

After Tod Browning and his crew left the set at the end of the shooting day while working on 1931’s Dracula, they were replaced by director George Melford and a Mexican cast and crew. Using the same sets, the same cameras, and a translated version of the script, they worked all night to shoot the Spanish-language version of the film. Those who have seen both tend to agree that the Spanish version is the superior of the two. The cinematography is more vibrant and less stage-bound than the Browning version, the atmosphere is richer (possibly because they were shooting at night), and most important of all, the Mexican Dracula (Carlos Villar) smolders with a sexual energy and menace Bela Lugosi, great as he is, lacks.

On the inside, ladies and gentlemen. Pree-senting my anti-canonical list of the “greatest” movies (laughs backwards) ever made on this or any other planet… presented for your edicational edification in no particular order… with conflicting standards applied… I bring you miscellaneous genres and the occasional rare species… with no abiding respect paid to “seriousness,” renown and what have you… See ‘made-for-television’ tomfoolery. Witness the wonder of accidental Surrealism; the expanses of expanded cinema, shorts, features. With industrial films… animation… agitprop… home movies… Hollywood cheapies… medical adventures. Step right up and behold!


MATHEMATICS OF GOD, Val Del Omar

PAROLE GIRL, Cline

80 BLOCKS FROM TIFFANY’S, Weis

CYBERNETIC GRANDMOTHER, Trnka

WALKING FROM MUNICH TO BERLIN, Fischinger

SENSATION HUNTERS, Vidor

ANOTHER WORLDY, Thornton

WOMAN UNAFRAID, Cowen

THE POOR RICH, Sedgwick

BECAUSE WE CARE, Oscar Mayer

MIDNIGHT COURT, McDonald

POLLY TIX IN WASHINGTON, Lamont

REACHING FOR THE SUN, Wellman

THE COMET, Zeman

IMPATIENCE, Dekeukeleire

GETTING HIS GOAT, ?

TOPOLOGY, Eames

THE ROAD TO RENO, Wallace

TWO ALONE, Nugent

MOR VRAN, Epstein

WICKED WOMAN, Rouse

LIQUID CRYSTALS, Painleve

GLOBE, Jacobs

THE RED SPECTER, Chomon

DARK HAZARD, Green

DOWN TO THEIR LAST YACHT, Sloane

A FIRE, Golestan

TOWN BLOODY HALL, Hegedus, Pennebaker

CHAZ CHASE: The Unique Comedian, ?

MR. FREEDOM, Klein

THE LIGHTS THAT NEVER FAIL, Epstein

LONG KNIVES NIGHT, Dashuk

STOP AND GO, THE SAFETY TWINS, ?

GRAND SLAM, Dieterle

CENTRAL PARK, Adolfi

BOARD AND CARE, Ellis

MALAKAPALAKADOO, SKIP 2, Deleman

THE MOTORIST, Paul

A SCARY TIME, Clarke

ALLURES, Belson

THE FOURTH DIMENSION, Painleve

FINIS TERRAE, Epstein

LOCAL HUBBLE, Jacobs

THE LIFE OF A DOG, Harden

HELL DRIVERS, Endfield

THE HOT HEIRESS, Badger

HYAS AND STENORHYNCHUS, Painleve

TIMES SQUARE, Moyle

PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER, Collins

L'ARGENT, L'Herbier

THE HOUSE IS BLACK, Farrokhzad

FUEGO EN CASTILLA, Val Del Omar

BLIND CHILD 2, van der Keuken

DRUGS ARE LIKE THAT, Moser et al

ARE THESE OUR CHILDREN, Ruggles

CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS, Young

A CALL FOR HELP FROM SING SING, Metrotone newsreel

DREAMSCAPE, Ruben

THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, Dixon

NIGHT BEAT (now on Youtube!!!!!), Seitz

ONE MORE SPRING, King

BAD RONALD, Kulik

THE AMBULANCE, Cohen

FIVE MINUTES OF PURE CINEMA, Chomette

AGGIE APPLEBY, MAKER OF MEN, Sandrich

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT, Nemec

TRUTH AND ILLUSION, Vidor

TAKE A CHANCE, Brice, Schwab

THE SAVAGE EYE, Maddow et al

BLACK TUESDAY, Fregonese

JUST IMAGINE, Butler

PHYSICAL THERAPY MANAGEMENT OF A BILATERAL AMPUTEE, US Government training film

ISN’T IT SHOCKING?, Badham

BRUTALITY IN STONE, Kluge

CRYSTAL PALACE: CHANDELIERS FOR THE PEOPLE, Jacobs

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, Brown

IN PLACE OF CAPITAL, Formwalt

TELEZONIA, AT&T

LOVE LIFE OF THE OCTOPUS, Painleve

COLLEGE COACH, Wellman

DEATH MAY BE YOUR SANTA CLAUS, Dymon Jr.

FIVE ON THE BLACK HAND SIDE, Williams

In 1948, while living in New York and struggling to support his sister and invalid mother through sales of his homemade jewelry, then-23 year-old Wally Cox ventured onto the stage of the Village Vanguard for the first time to try his hand at stand-up.

Maxwell Bodenheim is no longer the cat’s pajamas.  If he was once something of a cult figure in Chicago and, later, New York City’s Greenwich Village, he is no longer of much interest to any reader – except perhaps to some stray dissertation student or to some crime reporter dredging up the gruesome details surrounding his violent death.  So much for the vicissitudes of poetic fame.

Back in 1931, however, when Bodenheim was coming into his own as a literary maverick, New York publisher Horace Liveright issued his novel – Naked on Roller Skates. The title is a grabber, but the book itself would be anathema to feminists since it features a heroine who wishes to be beaten and degraded:

Also known as stupid glasses.  Not smart like sunglasses or the billions of aids to clear sight that we prop on our noses every day.  Funny glasses only discriminate and separate two images thrown onto the same surface one to each eye so they can be related (by we who are gifted with two working eyes that can work together) in order to see depth.  So that a flat surface reflecting light and hard put to claim any dimension at all for itself can almost magically afford us a moving picture of things in deep space.  You think DaVinci would not have appreciated finding a pair of such specs in his mail?  Isn’t it our loss that Eisenstein and Welles never got to work in illusionary 3D as much as we see how they  press the limits of the 2D screen?  They may have preferred having that limit to press on, yes, and they might have discovered who-knows-what possibility beyond.  I only wish I could see what genius would do in unlimited space and for that, at present, I would leap to put on a pair of stereo specs. 

“Did you ever hear a dream talking?”  (line from an old song)

What was lost and what gained, crossing the great techno-divide between movie pantomime sometimes as stylized as ballet, and an initially stagey yackety yak? Film had been visual, fluid and rhythmic, with live music helping to transport audiences into The Bigger Than Life Beyond. The big deadweight soundproof box, containing both camera and asphyxiating operator, then fell on this dancing medium… flooring it. What would survive? What replace? And what become of the beloved genii of body language, the clowns, drooping tragediennes, aging sweethearts? And – even more crucially – of highly developed camerawork and editing. The Depression was on, Prohibition a corruptive disaster, and the movie temples needed to quickly distract their idolator congregations from seeking economic/political solutions to their predicaments. Raunchy was still possible; the “Code” had yet to institute twin beds throughout moviedom; Mae West became box office queen, and everyone bandied her lines. Distinctive talkers were in: Cagney, Robinson, Boop, Popeye. Tapdancers were in! The Marx Brothers stormed in with their deliciously clutzy first feature, The Cocoanuts. Black shoestringer Oscar Micheaux ingeniously stuck sound onto his unintentionally surreal Ten Minutes To Live. Talk, yes, but how? (I address those in particular who are interested in WORDS.) The movies weren’t life, or stage-theater, or novel. (The Frankenstein monster, opening his mouth to speak, says, “Smoke… good. Friend… good.”) The Muse of Cinema, caught between styles, exerts a special charm, with so much actuality showing through. Less avant-garde than off-guard, the movies were never more “dated” (transparent, that is, to the time and circumstance of their making), more vulnerable or touching.

by Ken Jacobs 

A natural-born mimic, ham, tease, hard worker, stoic follower and out-of-reach babe, Ginger Rogers has proven one of the most difficult to define of all the 1930s Hollywood stars. At her best she was a synonym for fun and high spirits while also conveying a dignified and skeptical kind of resistance to other people, and these contradictory impulses made her one of the most special and ambiguous performers of her time. Rogers excelled in her first seven musicals with Fred Astaire and in several of her comedy vehicles and even in some of the programmers she churned out in the early 1930s. She was beloved, and rightly so.

In Stage Door (1937), Rogers gives one of the most distinctive, most suggestive, and most perfectly judged performances of the period, molding every one of her bone-dry, wisecracking line readings (and what lines she has in that movie!) into something pleasurable, something unexpected, even something profound, delivering them all with her guarded, in-transit sort of face.

“I taste it right through every bone inside me.” This is a quintessential Sam Fuller line: there’s something off-kilter about it that might bug the literal-minded, but it’s a shot at conveying feelings so visceral and all-consuming that words can’t contain them, that language is warped by their intensity. The line is spoken by Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta) in Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959). A nisei, or second-generation Japanese-American, Joe is talking about his sense of nationality and race, his experience of being truly American and at the same time feeling sickeningly different. Fuller’s movies are filled with these tortured and transcendent moments when people try to communicate their deepest realities—like Kelly in The Naked Kiss (1964) telling a young woman what it’s like to be a prostitute: “You’ll be sleeping on the skin of a nightmare for the rest of your life.”

What saves Fuller’s language and his style from seeming risibly overheated is this constant sense that he wants more from words and images than they can give, more from the senses than they can provide. He wants to make us not just see but taste and smell and feel the experiences onscreen. In long continuous tracking shots we move with the characters and inhabit their space, but abrupt cross-cuts between different scenes slice through the flow, and sudden extreme close-ups seem like an attempt to force us under the actors’ skins. His style is the cinematic equivalent of the way, as Wim Wenders describes it in a documentary about Fuller, he would tell stories: jumping on the furniture and grabbing your arm and pacing and shouting.

I don’t recall how it came about that Paul Krassner got in touch with me when I was (briefly) overall editor of the Welcomat in Philadelphia. He may have called or it may have been through some intermediate relay. It was pre-email, in the early ‘90s, and he was not doing well, on the long downslide of what our generation had hoped would be a permanent change for the good.

It wasn’t. Notice that?

As founder, editor and wielder of The Realist in the '60s, Krassner was one of my heroes. He was doing what a satirist should do at all times and in all places: Sticking it to not just the Establishment but all that is Right, Reasonable and Held Sacrosanct, in an era when the mainstream press was rolling over and asking to have its tummy scratched. If you read the obits on Krassner this week, dead at 87, you can get all the skinny, so I’ll ignore most of that here.

In the roil of the post-'50s world, The Realist was delightfully scandalous, a mad scamper that didn’t give a flying fuck about what was expected, what was supposed to matter. If you believed any of what was printed there you were deranged. If you didn’t believe what it stood for, you were far more deranged. One issue included an “interview” with British mini-guru Alan Watts. I still don’t know if it was a celebration or a satire – Watts came off as a drunken unbalanced dipshit.

The most scandalous petard, in 1967, was “The Parts Left out of the Kennedy Book,” which described in loving detail vice-president and prexy-in-waiting LBJ fucking the wound in Kennedy’s throat on the flight back to Washington. A third of the readers laughed, a third were incensed. And a third believed it. It scandalized just about everybody, including supposed left supporters. You don’t say such things.

In 1993 I think it was, I sent Krassner a personal advance before we printed his story in the Welco; he was on his beam ends in Venice Beach, California (he paid me back immediately after getting the piddling Welco check). Why? I’d never done that for anyone else. Because, faded from view, he was still important, would always be important. Also – this is true – what he sent us was actually a chapter left out of his about-to-be published autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture.

A Welco writer from the early '80s, the superb visual-arts reviewer Tam Mossman, later worked at Running Press in Philly when they put out a paperback compendium of The Realist, including (of course) the Kennedy bit, plus Wally Wood’s sketch of all the major Walt Disney characters fucking the scum out of each other – my favorite is the 3 little pigs linked in a daisy chain of sodomy. (Woods came out of Will Eisner’s studio in the 1940s and penned the last weeks of “The Spirit” around 1951.) I had the joy of visiting Running Press on 22nd St. and thumbing through the paste-up layouts.

After leaving the Welco, I dallied with a few folks who put together the Schuylkill Scallywag, a free quarterly mailed out to a minute number of subscribers. (The Schuylkill is a Philly river you don’t need to know about.) We ran an article from one of our contributors describing an extended morning ride with Alan Watts who shoveled down a crawful of scotch. Watts came off as… a drunken unbalanced dipshit.

When I wrote about The Realist in the Scallywag, someone (where have all the details gone?) handed me a box packed with ratty Realist volumettes from the '60s. What a gorgeous gift. Seven years ago I almost lost them in a fire in my wife’s potshop (“pot” as in “ceramics”). I dare not read them now for fear of their disintegration; they’ve turned a mortuary gray that I’ve never seen in any other publication.

Later, I came by a tape of one of Krassner’s standup routines. From the context, it was late 1995 or early 1996 – he mentions the deaths of Jerry Rubin, Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia and suggests the soon-to-be-end of Timothy Leary. The performance runs uninterrupted for an hour and a quarter.

The humor starts slow, gains steam as he talks about cattle-prodding a dwarf at a Coney Island ride, launches into an hilarious take on porn involving donkeys (have you ever…? well, don’t knock it) and ends with a plea for optimism delivered by another dwarf at a leftist talkfest. Funny, yes, but also instructive, intelligent, studied and caring. Think of merging Eddie Izzard with John Oliver.

Here’s a quote from the LA Times obit on Krassner: “If I had one thing to tell everybody, it would be: Do it now. Take up music, read a book, proposition a girl – but do it now. We know we are all sentenced to death. People cannot become prisoners of guilts or fears. They should cling to each moment and take what enjoyment they can from it.”

True in spirit. Does it still matter in such a wretched, disintegrating, malignant, blown-sideways, fucked-up, uncaring, blindered, weeping, disfigured, snarling, misaligned, gobsmacked, wailing-on-our-knees, bring-back-Jesus world?

Depends on your outlook, I guess.

by Derek Davis

While it must be admitted that no country on earth can top India when it comes to mass hysteria—I mean, the Indians really, really know how to panic over silly nonsense—the United States comes in a very close second. Despite sneering American press coverage of, say, the Monkey Man hysteria in north central India in the late Nineties, it seems we aren’t nearly so rational and sophisticated a population as we’d like to believe. Whether confined to small rural communities or spread nationwide, delightfully stupid instances of mass hysteria are sprinkled liberally throughout our history. Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast was small potatoes compared to some of the seriously dumb crap stalwart Americans have panicked about. From the Winsted Wild Man, to the Great Airship of 1897, to both Red Scares, to the child-raping Satanic cult hysteria of the Eighties, to the post-9/11 fear of, well, pretty much everything, to the Ninja Burglar who terrorized the residents of Staten Island for nearly a decade, Americans are just as primed and ready to start flapping their arms and trampling one another, as Rod Serling pointed out in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960), whenever the lights blink. Today, as fed by media both legitimate and less so, America as a whole seems to be one ugly, sloppy, rolling ball of mass hysterias. We are a gullible, susceptible people.

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.

Jerry has already had $700 thrust into her astonished hands by the Weenie King, a deus ex machina in the wizened flesh, but that money has been spent settling old bills. Now she has to make her own way, or so you might think.

It starts with the cab driver, played by Frank Faylen, the sinister asylum attendant from The Lost Weekend. He glances down, sees that Jerry has what Frank Capra considered the best body in Hollywood, and consents to drive her to Penn Station for no fare.

At the station, Jerry immediately meets a whole carload of rich millionaires, as you do. They take care of her train fare problem and supply her with a stateroom, but none of them seems particularly marriageable to say the least, so Sturges contrives a few misdemeanors to drive Jerry into the arms of John D. Hackensacker, one of the richest men in the world, who happens to be traveling by lower berth on the same sleeper train. He also has her lose her clothes, but rather than being a problem, this just cements the introduction and allows Hackensacker to act the role of heroic rescuer, which he might otherwise be judged ill-suited for.