Tag: Mig's Reviews

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Wes Craven
CAST: Sandra Peabody, Lucy Grantham, David Hess, Fred J. Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, Richard Towers, Martin Kove
MY RATING: 4/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 65%

PLOT: Two teenage girls heading to a rock concert for try to score marijuana in the city, where they are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of psychopathic convicts.

*Note: This review contains spoilers.


I am not quite sure where to start with this review.  On the one hand, The Last House on the Left resembles the lowest kind of shock-ploitation movie…and if that’s not a word, it should be.  Rock-bottom production values, bad edits, hammy acting, gratuitous nudity, incongruous music on the soundtrack, and some of the most repulsive violent acts I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching on a movie screen. (Or TV screen, whatever.)

On the other hand, the sickest scenes are followed by an extremely gratifying second act where the chief perpetrators in the first act get what’s coming to them in an orgy of carnage that makes Halloween look like The Little Princess.  So, we’ve got a situation where the traumatic scenes at the beginning are necessary if the over-the-top revenge killings at the end achieve the necessary catharsis.  The question becomes: are you, the viewer, willing to sit through the filmic equivalent of eating a bowl of spider eggs in order to get to the chocolate cheesecake for dessert?

The story is as bare bones as it gets, except for the twist ending (and if you’ve ever seen Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, none of this would have come as a surprise anyway).  Two teenage girls, Mari and Phyllis, head to the city for a rock concert where a band called “Bloodlust” will be performing.  Subtle.  They try to score some weed from a skeevy character in a doorway, and before you can say “cautionary tale”, they’re in the clutches of four psychopaths who proceed to kidnap them, take them to the woods outside of the city, and force the girls to…but I find myself reluctant to even type out what happens to the girls.  Maybe I should leave that stuff out, if for no other reason than to preserve the surprises for any reader who still feels adventurous enough to watch this movie cold, as I did.  Suffice it to say the violent acts that follow are as distasteful as they can get.  If you know anyone who gets turned on or excited by these scenes, delete them from your contacts.

What makes these scenes even more outrageous is the background score used for some of the scenes.  In one shot, the bound and gagged victims are being slowly carried out the window of the apartment where the psychos were being holed up.  The apartment is 2 stories up, so they have to be carried down the fire escape, a delicate process.  And in the background, the score provides us with music that, instead of making the scene harrowing, makes it sound instead like a comedy beat from a cheesy TV comedy.  This jarring musical device is used again when the villains are driving the car out to the woods, with the girls tied up in the trunk, and again during a rape scene, although the music is far less giddy than before…more like a blues tune.

I’m shaking my head even now, thinking about it.  What was Craven thinking?  In interviews on the Blu Ray, Craven talks about how he had been disillusioned by how Westerns and war movies had glamorized violence to the point that it looked “cool” when good guys killed bad guys.  So, he set out to make a movie that showed violence, real and true, and showed the real effects of that kind of violence, without cutting away, without fancy camera tricks, and without anyone feeling good about it afterward.  He wanted to show violence as an ugly act.

Well, he succeeded.  The violence in The Last House on the Left is ugly, depressing, and deplorable.  It’s been said that it’s impossible to make a truly anti-war film because war, by its nature, is exciting.  Well, this may be the first truly anti-violence film, despite the amount of gut-churning violence it contains.  There is nothing exciting about any of it, not even at the end (which I’m getting to, I promise).

But I have to ask myself: while the goal is worthy, was this really the way to go about it?  At one point, the psychos’ leader, Krug, tells one of the girls, Phyllis, to pee her pants, or he’ll cut her friend, Mari.  Phyllis complies, in one of the most downright miserable scenes I’ve ever seen.  They’re forced to disrobe and make out with each other.  In another scene, one of the girls is stabbed so many times she’s disemboweled.

In another one of those Blu Ray interviews, David Hess, the actor who played Krug, nonchalantly mentions how, during a scene where he rapes Mari, the actress (Sandra Peabody) suddenly got this look in her eyes, like she had really gone somewhere else mentally, and he says, “At that point, I knew that if I’d really wanted to, I could have f****d her, and she wouldn’t have done anything.”  What???  So, yeah, the movie up to this point is ugly, unpleasant, repulsive, pick an adjective.  I found myself wondering how Craven found a career after this movie.

But then, a saving grace, plot-wise.  The killers’ car is dead, so they seek help/refuge from the people who live in a nearby house…and wouldn’t you know it, this is where Mari lived with her parents.  After some uneasy conversation, the parents offer them room and board for the night.  At some point, the mother discovers a clue that leads to the inescapable conclusion that these people have murdered her daughter.  She informs her husband, and in the dark of night, he carefully locks all the doors, removes the window handles, and lays out some rudimentary traps that look like nothing so much as the prototypes for Home Alone: whipped cream on the floor, hard-to-see wires in doorways to trip you up, even an ingenious way to electrocute someone that, if it doesn’t actually work in real life, it really should.

The bloodbath that follows is chaotic and messy, much like it might be in real life if an unassuming doctor tried to kill three people.  (Don’t worry, I didn’t lose count…the fourth psychopath has been seduced by Mari’s mother and led out to the neighboring woods where she gets her own revenge, Lorena Bobbitt style.)  To Craven’s credit, his credo for this film remains intact: while the violent acts inflicted on the bad guys do provide a catharsis, they are hardly glamorous or exciting.

(I haven’t even mentioned the two bumbling cops who provide an insanely inadequate level of comic relief…and of them is Martin Kove, who would later achieve fame as the sensei of Cobra Kai in The Karate Kid.)

So, the question remains: are you willing to sit through this series of depraved acts of (pretend) violence that have been designed to remind you that real violence is not cool?  See, I already knew that.  But then, I’m in my fifties.  The Last House on the Left seems geared towards younger mindsets than mine who, at the time (1972), had not yet seen The Silence of the Lambs or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a movie that covers this same ground with equal or even greater impact, but without spending quite so much time depicting the violence it’s eschewing.  Craven’s philosophy and motives are sound.  I am just not a fan of this movie’s method.

P.S.  The story of this film’s surprise success is no doubt well-known, as is the fact this was a fledgling director’s first film.  I assure you, I’m well aware of the backstory, but to delve into that particular rabbit hole would result in a 3,000-word essay, which I have neither the time nor the inclination to write.  I’ve decided to focus on the immediate effect this movie had on me personally.

AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM (2023)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: James Wan
CAST: Jason Momoa, Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, Randall Park, Temuera Morrison, Dolph Lundgren
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 35%

PLOT: When Black Manta seeks revenge on Aquaman for his father’s death, Aquaman forges an uneasy alliance with his imprisoned brother to defend Atlantis and his family.


“They say everybody’s good at something.  Me?  I talk to fish.  …Some people think that makes me a joke.  But I don’t care.”

Those lines, spoken in narration by Aquaman at the beginning of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, admirably sum up just about every comic book fan’s opinion of Aquaman and his dubious powers over the course of his existence.  The genius move on the part of the DC Extended Universe was casting Jason Momoa as the King of Atlantis.  As I wrote in my review of Aquaman (2018): “Hell, I wouldn’t laugh at a guy who looks like that.  ‘You talkin’ to fish?  Ping away, Muscles!’”

So, you’ve got the right guy for the role, no worries there.  The problem now is how to use him.  Based on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, it would seem they used up all the best ideas in the first movie.  I wouldn’t call Lost Kingdom a rehash of Aquaman, necessarily, but it doesn’t exactly stake out new territory.  (Well, except for when they visit the underwater version of the Star Wars cantina, complete with a live band, seedy characters, and a pirate overlord who looks like Jabba the Hutt with fins for hands.  That was new.  I mean, sort of.)

Putting it another way, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom does not transcend, or even seem to ATTEMPT to transcend, the boundaries of the comic-book-movie genre.  The filmmakers did add some witty banter between Arthur and his imprisoned brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), that was a nice source of comic relief.  Orm’s almost complete ignorance of life on the surface world leads to some funny scenes involving such basic concepts of what to eat and how to run.  But aside from that, a rundown of the plot seems redundant because you’ve heard and seen it all before.  “Bad guy from first movie shows up, more powerful than before, threatens life on Earth for personal vendetta against good guy.  Good guy learns to get along with semi-bad-guy brother to defeat good guy.”

With that in mind, though, knowing full well that the movie followed the comic-book-movie formula step-by-step…I must truthfully report that I had a good time.  I enjoyed it.  I could intellectualize endlessly about the bankruptcy of the story, the bloated visual effects, the overly-preachy finger-wagging to climate-change deniers (Black Manta’s plan is to raise global temperatures in order to release an army of mutant henchmen from their icy prison in Antarctica; he has a line where he says something like, “I’m only continuing what we’ve been doing for decades.”  Shaaaame on us).  But…again, I must admit, I had fun.

At some point, when it comes to comic book movies, I have to start asking myself: what more do I want from a comic book movie?  If I expected every single comic book film to be as good as Superman or The Dark Knight or The Batman or even the first Shazam!, I would be sorely disappointed.  It’s impossible to have that kind of track record, quality-wise.  To be sure, there have been disappointments (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Venom, Wonder Woman 1984, and many others).  But none of those films were even close to being as much fun as Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.  Others will no doubt disagree.  Understandable.

But I still had fun, and no amount of critical dismantling of the plot will change that.

SALTBURN (2023)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Emerald Fennell
CAST: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 71%

PLOT: A scholarship student at Oxford finds himself drawn into the world of a charming and aristocratic classmate, who invites him to his eccentric family’s sprawling estate for a summer never to be forgotten.


What is Saltburn?

I sit in front of my keyboard and try to figure out a way to write a review of Saltburn that doesn’t spoil its surprises in any way.  I ponder.  I rack my brain.  As of this writing (January 2024), the film has already been released theatrically and in the public eye for almost three weeks.  Any avid filmgoer who hasn’t seen it has heard rumblings about some kind of dark undertones and risqué material in writer-director Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her astounding debut film Promising Young Woman.  The trailers reveal nothing except a plot that seems almost too similar to another film released over a month ago, The Holdovers.

Having just watched it last night, I can say that Saltburn is a pure thriller, masquerading as a dark comedy about class warfare, heavily influenced by The Talented Mr. Ripley and, say, Howards End, but that’s just plotting.  With this movie, it’s all about style and delivery, both verbally and visually.

First, a plot summary.  Young Oliver Quick (nice Dickensian name), played by Barry Keoghan, is a scholarship freshman at Oxford University in the long-ago year of 2006.  Virtually friendless except for an antisocial math whiz, he notices the strikingly handsome Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, unknown to me), a very rich…what, junior?  Senior?  Probably a senior.  People of all genders are attracted to him like bees to honey.  Oliver is instantly attracted to him, but that doesn’t stop him from making out with one of Felix’s paramours given the opportunity.  He is nothing if not opportunistic.

After a meet-cute involving a flat bicycle tire, Felix gradually folds Oliver into his flock of hangers-on, much to the dismay of Felix’s cousin, Farleigh (who is brown-skinned…that will be important later), and to Oliver’s math friend, who cryptically tells Oliver, “He’ll get tired of you.”  One thing leads to another, and Felix winds up inviting Oliver to stay at his – there’s no other word for it – palatial manor house, Saltburn.  There, Oliver meets Felix’s aristocratic, idiosyncratic family: Felix’s mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike); his father, Sir James (Richard E. Grant); his sister, Venetia (newcomer Alison Oliver); a “friend of the family”, Pamela (Carey Mulligan); and the creepiest butler since that guy in the men’s room with Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Here at Saltburn, and at Oxford, Fennell proves to be a master at creating a certain kind of mood.  There is an air of…something in the offing.  You know how some animals supposedly know when an earthquake or a tornado is coming?  That’s what the movie feels like during its first half.  I kept expecting a gruesome murder to occur, or for Oliver to discover a literal skeleton in a forgotten closet, or an explosion, I dunno, something.  I don’t know how much of that is due to my expectations after Promising Young Woman and how much to the carefully modulated camerawork and editing, but either way, the mood was there, permeating the screen with a sense of foreboding.

Oliver revels in his proximity to Felix, and I remembered with some chagrin my own formative years as a geeky teenager.  Trust me, I recognize hero worship when I see it.  At Saltburn, they sleep in separate rooms with a common bathroom, but there’s no shower, just an old-fashioned bathtub in the middle of the room.  At one point, Oliver hears…noises…coming from the bathroom and takes a peek inside, where he sees Felix lying back in the filled bathtub and – well, I’m given to understand that in Catholic schools, it was called “interfering with yourself.”

And it’s here I must stop with any kind of summarizing.  It’s here where Saltburn abandons its masquerade as a comedy of manners and becomes something else entirely.  It’s still comic, in my opinion, but it becomes less about manners and more about Machiavelli.  Oliver may present a meek façade, but he reveals the ability to do some very quick thinking indeed, especially in a moonlit scene involving Felix’s sister, Venetia, and during a karaoke party when Farleigh suggests a song for Oliver to sing that hits a little too close to home.

I admired how the movie turned my expectations on their head…twice.  There were a couple of times when, I must admit, my conspiratorial thinking led me to a couple of conclusions that turned out to be right in the end, which is something I don’t really like to do.  I don’t like to be that guy who goes to see The Sixth Sense and thinks, “You know, I don’t see how Bruce Willis could have survived that gunshot…”  I want to revel in the mystery, to live in the moment of the film and let its surprises work organically.  When a movie does its job well, I don’t even have to think about it.

What’s cool about THIS movie is that I managed to pick up on little “clues” about what was happening, or about to happen, but as the movie progressed, other things occurred (especially Felix’s little field trip with Oliver), and I found myself thinking, “Nah, never mind.”  And that is pretty ingenious, I think.  To lead the viewer down the garden path, make a left turn, get back to what looks like the main road so you think you know where it’s headed, then to pull a sudden U-turn into something else entirely?  That’s masterful misdirection.  I dunno, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.  Call me crazy.

I haven’t even really touched on what will no doubt be the most famous elements of this movie.  That would be the scenes involving the bathtub, the cycle of the moon, a surprise midnight visit, a freshly dug grave, and Oliver’s, er, choreographic inclinations.  With the exception of that last one, which occurs too late to mean anything to the plot except as a wonderful ribbon to tie it up with, these scenes were, yes, shocking, but not in a hostile way.  Or even a Hostel way, if you take my meaning.  They were not intended to disgust or horrify the audience.  Or perhaps they ARE meant to horrify, but not in the kind of way that a serious horror movie disgusts people, like The Thing or Hellraiser.  It’s very tongue-in-cheek.  I’d like to believe there was a certain kind of glee in Emerald Fennell’s face when she watched her actors performing those scenes, knowing the material might completely turn some people off to the film without hesitation.  I found them to be yet another example of misdirection.  The off-putting nature of those scenes sort of lulled me into thinking one thing was happening and that the movie would then follow that thread into a more predictable conclusion.  But it didn’t.

I know, I’m being maddeningly vague.  The movie is new enough that I don’t want to risk spoiling anything.  There are supposedly some moths that, once touched by human hands, can never fly again.  Or is that butterflies?  Either way, I don’t want to deprive this movie of flying high in the eyes of a first-time viewer.  It’s refreshing to see a movie that seems to be following all the mile markers towards one thing, when it was really leading you somewhere else.  Saltburn is a treasure.

FUNNY GIRL (1968)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: William Wyler
CAST: Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Kay Medford, Walter Pidgeon
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Barbra Streisand elevates this otherwise rote musical melodrama with her ultra-memorable star turn as real-life stage performer Fanny Brice.


There is nothing wrong with Funny Girl that couldn’t have been fixed by the film not taking itself so seriously.  With its widescreen compositions and scores of extras and lavish stage productions featuring flocks of Ziegfeld girls in the most extravagant costumes imaginable, this should have been a romp, even with the serious bits in between.  Instead, the movie sinks under the weight of its pretentiousness, short-changing the funniest bits and wallowing in pathos way more than is necessary.  Thank goodness Barbra Streisand is there, giving a debut performance for the ages that is part Groucho Marx, part Debbie Reynolds, but mostly just Barbra.  Come for the spectacle, stay for the songs.

The story begins with Fanny Brice (Streisand) walking backstage at a theater and delivering her immortal opening line to a mirror: “Hello, gorgeous.”  From there, the rest of the movie is a flashback to the rise and rise of Fanny Brice, a plain-ish vaudeville chorus girl who is discovered by a roguish playboy, Nick Arnstein, played by Omar Sharif, who looks like a man whose last name would be anything BUT Arnstein.  He cleverly gets her boss to raise her pay to $50 a week (about $800 in today’s dollars, so not bad), and in the process captures Fanny’s heart.  Shortly after that, she’s invited to join Florenz Ziegfeld’s legendary troupe of dancing girls, where she manages to tweak his authority in probably the funniest number in the movie, “His Love Makes Me Beautiful.”

It’s in this number where the first tonal tug-of-war takes place between Streisand’s playfulness and the movie’s urgency to look “important.”  There is an earlier number, “I’m the Greatest Star”, that really showcases Streisand, but the movie never gets that tone right for the rest of the movie.  In “His Love Makes Me Beautiful”, she has these wonderful glances and occasional throwaway lines, but most of them are lost in medium or long shots that emphasize the extravagant Ziegfeld costumes and the expensive-looking set dressing.  It’s like watching a play where the lights are shining everywhere except the stage.

Arnstein comes and goes, sometimes for weeks or months at a stretch, always making sure to see Fanny when he’s in town but repeatedly pointing out that he doesn’t want to be tied down by a relationship.  Their “courtship” lasts through “People”, a song most people know without knowing what it’s from, and a curious number where Arnstein invites her to dinner in a private room upholstered entirely in red velvet, and we know and Fanny knows what’s going to happen, and she has a funny argument between her lust and her manners in “You Are Woman, I Am Man.”  The song also contains a duet with Arnstein, and brother, if you haven’t seen Omar Sharif crooning, you haven’t lived.

Everything comes to a head at the finale of Act One when Fanny learns Arnstein is sailing to Europe and decides to join him instead of going to the Ziegfeld girls’ next port of call.  Here is where Streisand really pours it on, proving her virtuosity with the classic “Don’t Rain on My Parade”, belting out note after note and ending on the iconic shot of her standing on a tugboat as it passes the Statue of Liberty.  If anyone ever doubted she was the real thing before that moment and this movie, their doubts were certainly erased by intermission.

Alas, all good things come to an end, and Act Two falls into a predictable series of economic rises and falls as Arnstein’s volatile income stream finally goes south permanently, while Fanny’s career continues arcing upwards without looking back.  It’s here where the pretentious sensibilities of the filmmakers finally take over for good.  In a second number that could have been downright hilarious, “The Swan”, the movie once again keeps its distance from Streisand’s (appropriate) mugging, asides, and pratfalls…although, being a ballet, it is interesting to see her doing all the dancing herself.

I found myself committing a critical sin by comparing this movie to another widescreen, elaborate movie musical from around the same era, My Fair Lady.  Here’s a movie shot on a grand scale with huge sets, lavish costumes, and big musical numbers, but instead of feeling ponderous, there is a lightness to it.  It zings along, even during the long stretches between songs, thanks to its crackling pace, and gives us just enough pathos to appreciate why we need glee and glamour.

Everything that’s wrong with Funny Girl could have been fixed by just lightening the mood, man.  You’ve got a star-making performance by an experienced theatre actress (Streisand is actually reprising the role she played on Broadway), you’ve got one of the most legendary directors of the time at the helm, William Wyler (Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday), and you’ve got some above-average songs that people can still hum over fifty years later.  Why cloak everything in this gloomy overcoat of affectation and heavy-handed emotional beats that we can see coming a mile away?

When all is said and done, Funny Girl is by no means a bad film.  Streisand is too good at what she does to let this movie fall by the wayside without recognition.  But without her, it’s easy to imagine this movie sinking into near-obscurity, yet another maudlin melodrama that crams 100 minutes of story into a 2-hour-and-35-minute film.  So, rather than mourn what could have been, let’s instead give thanks for what we’ve got: one of the last of the old-fashioned Hollywood musicals with a 24-karat-gold star at its center and a handful of memorable songs.  I suppose it could have been worse.  [insert shrug emoji here]

COME DRINK WITH ME (Hong Kong, 1966)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: King Hu
CAST: Pei-Pei Cheng, Hua Yueh, Chih-Ching Yang
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100%

PLOT: A highly skilled martial artist (Pei-Pei Cheng) is dispatched to rescue her own brother from kidnappers.


King Hu’s Come Drink with Me feels like a multiverse version of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and no wonder: Lee, like so many of his countrymen, is a huge fan of the wuxia genre of films that have been around since the 1930s.  Come Drink with Me created the template that was faithfully followed by many other films in the succeeding years, and while I cannot claim to have seen them all, it is plainly visible that this film was their prototype, much like Halloween laid the groundwork for countless other slasher films.

Right from the opening scene, the focus is clearly on action above all else.  We watch a caravan taking prisoners to jail, in the traditionally accepted timeframe of what looks like medieval China.  The caravan is stopped by a lone figure who announces himself as the leader of the bandits known as The Five Tigers.  The gang’s name alone evokes scores of kung-fu films aired on Saturday afternoons on Channel 44. A furious battle ensues in which the prisoners are freed, and a government official is kidnapped by the bandits and ransomed in exchange for the release of another one of their comrades.  Rather than pay the ransom, the government sends a lone warrior, Golden Swallow (Pei-Pei Cheng), to rescue the captured man. (If Golden Swallow looks familiar, that’s because she played the villainous Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, further enhancing the idea that we’re in some kind of wuxia multiverse.)

That’s all in literally the movie’s first five-to-ten minutes.  Everything that happens afterwards is one action sequence after another, with only two breaks for a breather.  There is a bar brawl that looks curiously similar to the one featured in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, complete with some impossible acrobatics from the heroine as she leaps from a wall to the upturned legs of a table to the other side of the room.  Granted, it’s not as technically sophisticated as the newer film, but the influence is undeniable.

There is a chase across the rooftops at night, another element clearly appropriated by Crouching Tiger.  Golden Swallow fights off wave after wave of enemy thugs, most of them wielding swords, but some of them hurling wicked needles and darts, one of which finds its mark and lands Golden Swallow in the care of a man, Fan Ta-p’I, who she thought was a drunkard, but who turns out to be a skilled martial artist himself.  These two will eventually cooperate to accomplish their mission, along with a second mission that reveals itself organically.

I must say I wasn’t altogether thrilled with this secondary plot element because it takes the spotlight from Golden Swallow, who dominates three-quarters of the movie.  However, I immediately let it slide when it provided the opportunity to showcase one of Fan’s hidden skills: the ability to manipulate and focus the air so it flows from his hand and can part the cascading stream of a nearby waterfall.  That’s right out of comic books, man.  Or “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”  Take your pick.

To say Come Drink with Me is inferior because it is not as technically sophisticated as modern martial arts films is to overlook its relevance.  Yes, there are a lot of quick cuts used to hide some otherwise impossible-to-perform maneuvers.  Yes, a lot of the dialogue (what little of it there is) is either hammy or overly expository, or both.  Yes, the fight choreography, on close inspection, is not as polished as we’ve come to expect after seeing The Matrix or House of Flying Daggers.

But as an artifact of where today’s martial arts films began, Come Drink with Me is incredibly valuable and still entertaining, even in its relative crudeness.  I loved being able to draw straight lines from specific scenes in this movie to Crouching Tiger, or even all the way to the John Wick franchise.  The last John Wick film featured a scene where Wick fights off an almost literal army of henchmen on a long staircase.  I laughed at the audacity and absurdity of the situation…but I rolled with it, because that’s just what John Wick does: he fights, and he endures.  Why?  Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be named John Wick.  Same thing applies to Jason Bourne and James Bond.

And the same thing with Come Drink with Me.  The obviously overmatched Golden Swallow picks off the hordes of attackers one by one because they’re foolish enough to only attack her one or two at a time.  Why?  Because the story demands it.  It’s tradition, even when it looks goofy and unrealistic.  It took me some time to grasp that core concept, but when I did, my enjoyment of these older swordplay films deepened considerably.

THE PAWNBROKER (1964)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet
CAST: Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 86%

PLOT: A Jewish pawnbroker, victim of Nazi persecution, loses all faith in his fellow man until he realizes too late the tragedy of his actions.


One of my favorite books about movies is Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, in which the legendary director explains in detail the moviemaking process from script selection through the preview screening and ancillary rights distribution.  He uses, of course, the movies from his own career as examples, from 12 Angry Men through Guilty as Sin (the book was first published in 1995).  One of the films he brings up many times is one I had not heard of when I picked up the book for the first time: The Pawnbroker, from 1964, starring Rod Steiger.  After reading the book many times, I found myself obsessed with finding and watching this, to me, unknown film.

For a long time, it remained a kind of missing link in Lumet’s filmography.  It wasn’t available on home video, and it wasn’t streaming anywhere.  In 2008, it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, and the New York Times calls it one of the 1,000 best films ever made.  Lumet is one of my favorite directors.  I was desperate to see this movie.

Some time ago, I finally found a (relatively) cheap copy on Blu Ray, and I sat down and pushed PLAY with anticipation.  I mention all of this because I believe I inadvertently made myself a victim of my expectations.  The film that unfolded was not quite as hard-hitting as I had hoped, even though the story is deep and dark.  Perhaps I am too jaded as a modern filmgoer, with so many other Holocaust-related films under my belt, to fully appreciate this intensely acted character study of a man in crisis.  I can see myself changing my opinion of this movie at some point in the future, maybe when I’m a little older.  For now, in my opinion, The Pawnbroker is a well-crafted film, thoughtfully written, but a little too heavy-handed for its own good.

Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) is the aging Jewish owner of a pawn shop in New York City…I’m not familiar with the specific neighborhood, but I wanna say somewhere in the Bronx, or maybe Queens.  He and his Puerto Rican employee, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sánchez), run the shop with maximum efficiency and minimal customer interaction.  (Hey, look at that, a guy named Jesus with a Jewish boss, I only just now got that…)  Sol is not interested in the backstories of these desperate folks who bring in radios and candlesticks and school trophies in exchange for a couple of bucks each.  “Here’s your money, get out.”  Jesus, on the other hand, is a bundle of energy who sincerely wants to learn the trade and earn some money so he can get out of the 2-room apartment he shares with his mother.  Sol tolerates Jesus the same way a parent tolerates a hyperactive child.

Lumet and his production designer, Richard Sylbert, are very careful to show Sol’s store as nothing but a series of cages and bars.  We learn the reason for this as we see a series of flashbacks from Sol’s past: he was a Holocaust survivor.  (There’s a brilliant scene where Jesus asks Sol what those numbers on his arm are.  “Is that a secret society or something?  What do I do to join?”  Sol’s one-line answer is one of the best things in the script, followed later in the film by a monologue about clinging to a “bearded legend” that showcases Steiger’s talent to the nth degree, but feels a tad over-dramatic.)

Sol’s tragic past is the fuel that runs the engine of the film because it’s made him the man he is today: someone who doesn’t believe in anything anymore, not God, science, art, anything at all…except for one thing: money.  “Next to the speed of light, which Einstein says is the only absolute in the universe, second only to that, I rank money!”  While this sentiment seems as if it would feed into a racist stereotype, Sol never overtly occupies that space.  He is just a man who has seen too much and wants nothing except to get by.

There are suggestions that he is experiencing survivor’s guilt.  In his shop is a tear-a-day calendar showing September 29th.  When Jesus wants to rip it for the next day, Sol stops him.  Later, someone asks him if it’s an anniversary of something.  He says it is: “The day I didn’t die.”  That was the day he was powerless to stop a tragedy, and he should have died, but didn’t.  But he doesn’t frame it as a dramatic act.  I found that a marvelously layered response.  (There is another “suggestion” of his guilt in a monologue by a much older man, but that’s another one of the movie’s heavy-handed moments, so the less said about that, the better.)

There is also a suggestion that Sol is accepting payoffs from a local slum lord to launder money through his pawn shop.  A man comes by, says he needs money to repaint the building, Sol writes the man a check for $5,000, and the man gives him $5,000 in cash.  Why does Sol willingly acquiesce to this process of aiding and abetting a criminal?  I think it’s because he has learned to survive no matter the cost.  In one of his increasingly disturbing flashbacks to his days in the Nazi concentration camp, we watch as a man frantically attempts to scale a fence.  There’s no real hope of escape, but he tries anyway.  The guards don’t shoot him, but watch almost in bemusement.  One of them finally calls for another guard with a German shepherd.  And just yards away, Sol and other prisoners watch helplessly as the man is torn apart.  (Presumably, anyway.)

I haven’t even mentioned the social worker who comes by one day to solicit donations for a youth center, the local thugs (former friends of Jesus) who reek of foreshadowing, the slum lord himself (Brock Peters, playing totally against type as an amoral crook), or Jesus’s hooker girlfriend who knows how desperate Jesus is to get some money of his own and boldly offers her body to Sol in exchange for some cash.  Her act of desperation (featuring the first waist-up female nudity in a post-Code Hollywood film) only triggers more flashbacks for poor Sol. [HA! Jesus has a girlfriend who’s a prostitute…I only just got that one, too…]

By the end of the movie, events conspire that trigger even more feelings of guilt for Sol so that the film ends with him wandering out of his store and into the inner-city jungle with his hands bloody and his head bowed.  Has he realized the error of his ways, of his tendency to reject any kind of human connection?  Certainly his last act seems to demonstrate his remorse, but…has he really changed?  It’s said that, to figure out what a movie is about, look at how the main character changes from beginning to end.  Maybe I’m naïve, maybe I’ve been lucky enough in my life not to have experienced anything remotely resembling the tragedy of Sol’s life, but I felt nothing except mild shock at the end of The Pawnbroker, not because of any realizations about Sol’s character, but because of the events of the plot.  I don’t think that means the same thing as character development.  So, ultimately, I couldn’t really say what this movie is about beyond the ability of a fine director and a courageous actor to show the details of a man wounded so grievously in his past that he can barely tolerate mankind in the present.  Yes, we see the error of his ways…but does he?  You tell me.

ONIBABA (Japan, 1964)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Kaneto Shindô
CAST: Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Satô
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90%

PLOT: In feudal Japan, two women kill samurai and sell their belongings for a living. While one of them is having an affair with their neighbor, the other woman meets a mysterious samurai wearing a bizarre mask.


Squint your eyes, and long stretches of Onibaba look as if they were adapted from comic books.  I’m not talking about the eye-popping colors of Kirby, though.  More like the moody noir of Miller or McFarlane…especially Miller.  Extreme closeups, off-centered faces (to make room for word balloons, of course), sneering lips and bared teeth, gratuitous female nudity, shocking violence, the possibility of supernatural elements getting involved in the story – we’ve got all the makings of a new chapter for the Sin City saga.

But Onibaba misses its chance for true greatness by the disappointing nature of its ending, which I cannot, in good faith, describe in detail here.  The last time I felt this cheated by the ending of a film was when I watched the original Night of Living Dead for the first time.  When the credits for that movie rolled, I wanted to throw popcorn at the TV.  Since I didn’t have popcorn, I cursed out my friends instead.  C’est la vie.

The story of Onibaba begins as we see two women – one older, one younger – living in poverty in medieval Japan.  Some later exposition informs us of an ongoing war far away between two warlords.  Weary soldiers from both sides wander into the tall grassy fields where the women live, and the women promptly kill them, take their clothes and belongings, and sell them to local merchant for bags of millet.  (We never learn the women’s names, by the way.  They are identified only by how they relate to Kichi, a man we never see: one is Kichi’s mother, the other is Kichi’s wife.)  The bodies of the men they kill are disposed of in a large, ominous pit hidden by the tall grass.

I should mention yet another stylistic and visual flourish.  The two women live in a grass hut constructed in a vast field of tall grass at least six, possibly seven feet tall.  There is poetry in many shots when the wind rises and pushes the grass.  In one neat overhead shot, the only way we can see a man pushing his way through the grass is by tracking the hole he makes as he walks.  It’s an indescribably lyrical moment in an otherwise mundane scene.

ANYWAY.  A neighbor arrives, Hachi, with sad news for the two women: Kichi has been killed.  When he asks how the women got by during his absence, they are cagey.  It’s here where we get the first of many masterful sequences where faces and eyes are used to convey emotion more vividly than any prose could.  When Hachi propositions the young woman, now a freshly-minted widow, she sneers.  But as days go by, Hachi wears her down, and they begin an affair, much to the mother-in-law’s disapproval.

Night after night, the young widow wanders off to Hachi’s shack, while the mother-in-law sneaks off and follows her, disapproving but never interrupting their liaisons.  All she offers as a rebuke are stern words and resentful glares.  This cycle repeats itself several times, and despite the visually unique methods of showing us these middle passages, I found myself wondering where this was going.  No doubt people more knowledgeable than I can make conjectures about how this might be a representation of Japanese culture at the time: the old severely disapproving of the young, but powerless to stop the march of progress.  It’s not a far-fetched theory, but if so, it’s an obvious one.  So, what’s the point?

Hope arrives (story-wise) in the form of a tall samurai warrior the mother-in-law encounters in the tall grass one night.  He wears a fearsome demon mask and demands the old woman show him the way to the nearest town.  She asks him to remove the mask.  He refuses, but he assures her that he is very handsome underneath.  Right.

At this point, I was on the edge of my seat.  At last, here we go, some real horror-story stuff.  The mask looks awesomely horrifying, not like the kind of demons we tend to think of, but a weird, bug-eyed, fanged face that still looks vaguely human, which only makes it that much creepier.  When the old woman finally gets her hands on the mask (I won’t say how), she formulates a plan.  The next night, when the younger woman sneaks off to another rendezvous with Hachi, she is confronted by a tall figure with long black hair with the face of a demon…gliding through the grass is if it were floating over the ground.  Floating?  People can’t float.  …what exactly is going on here?

At this point, I was primed for a Twilight Zone kind of twist, revealing the true nature of the samurai warrior, the mask, and the old woman.  (Onibaba translates to “demon woman”, according to the main titles of the movie.)  But what?  I was pleasantly surprised by my eagerness to see what would happen next, even if it were mildly predictable.  The movie had shown great visual flair, so even if the ending was a cliché story-wise, it would look really cool.

But…alas.  The film’s ending teases us with several minutes of truly disturbing stuff psychologically, and then throws it away in a moment of ambiguity, the kind of open-endedness that may inspire discussions on the movie blogs, but which is terribly unsatisfying when it doesn’t work.  And here, unfortunately, it doesn’t work.  It leaves us with more questions than answers, and when “The End” appears, it almost feels like the director and/or screenwriter said, “That’s it, I’m out of story.”

The liner notes of the Criterion Blu Ray for Onibaba inform me that it’s based on an ancient samurai legend, so I guess I can’t totally blame the director/screenwriters.  But I just wish there had been something meatier waiting at the end of what had been a visual treat.  If it had provided a nudge into something deeper or more visceral, I’d have been ready to put Onibaba near the top of my favorite Japanese films.  Visually, it’s stunning with a surprisingly modern feel.  But, oy, that ending.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Aldrich
CAST: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono, Maidie Norman
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 92% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A delusional former child star torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion.


I have heard of this movie by reputation almost my entire life, and only now, near the end of my 52nd year on Earth, have I finally sat down to watch What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a movie that has been called a camp classic, a horror film in the guignol tradition, and a showcase for two of the greatest bitches in the history of cinema.  And let me tell you, it was worth the wait.  Bette Davis’s performance as Baby Jane Hudson is the stuff of legend: evil, despicable, vile, and impossible to look away from.  She doesn’t just chew the scenery, she purees it.

And yes, before faithful readers get up in my grill, this is one of the slowly growing list of films where the main character is an absolute douchebag, and I not only tolerate it, I celebrate it.  It’s impossible not to.  Like Christian Bale or Jack Torrance, Davis hypnotizes viewers by so perfectly embodying the character that it becomes impossible to imagine anyone else playing it.  It’s been said that at one point, Joan Crawford was going to play Baby Jane, but as talented as Ms. Crawford was, I can’t imagine her improving on Davis’s fearless performance.  This is the very definition of “commit to the bit.”

If you’re like me before I watched the movie, you know the bare bones of the story.  Back in the heyday of vaudeville, Baby Jane Hudson with her golden curls was the darling of the stage, entrancing audiences with her heartbreaking rendition “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.”  Her slightly older sister, Blanche, was ignored by her talented sister and, tragically, her father.  But karma is a bitch, and in the early-to-mid-1930s, Blanche becomes a Hollywood superstar, while Baby Jane toils in obscurity, clearly an inferior talent to her celebrated older sister.

One night, there is a terrible “accident” in front of their house (an old Hollywood mansion that once belonged to Valentino), and Blanche is paralyzed from the waist down.  For the next thirty years, Blanche is confined to a wheelchair on the second floor of their mansion, while the delusional Jane, who in her late sixties still wears her Baby Jane makeup and curls, dutifully brings up Blanche’s meals and verbally abuses her.  Their part-time maid, Elvira (Maidie Norman, unknown to me, but quite good in a pivotal role), discovers a trove of Blanche’s fan mail…opened and discarded by Jane.

How to describe these scenes of emotional and verbal abuse?  The words that come out of Jane’s mouth are as harsh as you can get in a movie from 1962.  (In one scene, watch her mouth carefully, and you can see her call Blanche a “bitch” just as a buzzer drowns out her voice.)  But because Blanche, with the patience of a saint, puts up with it, we the audience are forced to accept it.  I mean, I wanted to punch Jane in the face about 30 minutes into this two-plus-hour movie, but I had to tough it out because Blanche is toughing it out.  At that point, I just wanted to see what kind of karmic fate awaited this intolerable harridan.  I wanted her to get trampled by horses while being drawn and quartered by four tractors.

But this is just summary.  I’m not doing the movie justice.  For a 61-year-old movie, it felt just as tense and thrilling as anything I’ve seen in theaters this or any year.  The term “camp” I absolutely disagree with when applied to this movie.  Camp occurs when someone genuinely believes they’re making a great film, and the result is so laughably bad it’s good.  Ed Wood is camp.  Reefer Madness is camp.  Troll 2 is camp.  But NOT What Ever Happened…  Director Robert Aldrich knew what a casting coup he got with Davis and Crawford in the leads, two actresses whose well-known feuds were constantly reported.  All he had to do was turn them loose on the script and keep the cameras rolling.  Rather than getting a movie that got overcooked by hammy histrionics, Aldrich got a top-notch thriller that keeps audiences off-kilter right up to the last five minutes.  That’s not an exaggeration.  As such, this cannot qualify as “camp” because the result was not a bad movie, but a brilliant one.

The different ways in which the screws get turned in such a claustrophobic thriller are ingenious.  Blanche has a pet parakeet that flies away while Jane is cleaning the cage…so she says.  Jane serves dinner to Blanche one day, always with a covered dish, and just as she walks out, she casually mentions there are rats in the basement.  Blanche and we look with horror at the covered dish waiting on her table.  Blanche tries to send a distress signal to their next-door neighbor; the way THAT scene plays out would have warmed the cockles of Hitchcock’s heart.  Blanche discovers that Jane has been practicing forging Blanche’s signature…UH oh.  One day the maid, Elvira, sees too much, and I found myself yelling at the screen when it becomes apparent her life is in danger.

The whole movie works on you like that.  I did a lot of yelling at the screen, just like your stereotypical rude audience member.  At one point, Jane has lied and lied and dug a hole so deep she can’t find a way out, and she pleads to Blanche, “Help me, Blanche, I don’t know what to do!”  The things I yelled at the screen at that point, I will not repeat here, but they involved words that rhymed with “witch”, “ducking”, and “blunt.”  That’s how well the movie got under my skin, in a good way, I should hasten to add.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is one of the finest thrillers I’ve ever seen.  I hesitate to call it a horror film because, in a way, I guess it transcends the horror genre.  It includes some occasional horrific imagery, but the movie is too complex, too rooted in real-world physics and situations for me to see it as a horror film.  It’s a domestic thriller that flirts with self-indulgence, but the performances are so good, we forgive it when, for example, Jane performs her old Baby Jane number, her voice croaking on the high notes like a frog on helium.  In any other movie, I can imagine people would shake their heads and mutter, “Oh, brother…”  In this movie, we still shake our heads, but in awe of an utterly unafraid actor.

As for why I give it a “9” instead of a “10”…ask me after watching it yourself and I’ll tell you.

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964)

by Miguel E. Rodrigugez

DIRECTOR: John Frankenheimer
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Martin Balsam
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91%

PLOT: United States military leaders plot to overthrow the President because he supports a nuclear disarmament treaty, and they fear a Soviet sneak attack.


Barely two years after The Manchurian Candidate shocked audiences, director John Frankenheimer delivered the goods again with a political conspiracy thriller that is the equal of Candidate in almost every way.  Were it not for some overcooked sermonizing during a transitional scene, I would almost call Seven Days in May a perfect example of the genre.  I’m frankly a little surprised it’s not mentioned more often in the same breath with other similar thrillers like Fail Safe, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor.

The action starts on a Monday and, predictably, spools out over the next seven days.  We learn that the current American President, Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, this being the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s.  His actions have brought his approval ratings to a record-setting low, and demonstrators outside the White House express their desire to see someone else in the Oval Office: General James Scott (Burt Lancaster), a hawkish individual who sees no evidence the Russians will ever honor such a treaty.  General Scott’s aide is Colonel “Jiggs” Casey (Kirk Douglas), a soldier who disagrees with Scott’s views privately, but who knows his duties and performs them admirably.

Over the next couple of days, Casey picks up scraps of conversations from senators and other generals critical of the President.  There is talk of the President attending an “alert”, or an exercise in which armed forces are scrambled in a drill; uncharacteristically, he’s attending alone – no press.  A friend of Casey’s mentions something called “ECOMCON”, a secret Army base in El Paso, and a mysterious “Site Y.”  A Pentagon messenger relays a teletype message from General Scott to other members of the Joint Chiefs about who’s placing bets in the Preakness pool…then gets transferred to Pearl Harbor.  Casey wonders why questions about a horse race would be broadcast over Top Secret channels…

Watching Casey piece the clues together is one of the pleasures of this movie.  It never talks down to the audience, depending on them to follow Casey’s line of reasoning while he draws his own conclusions.  Once he brings his suspicions to the President, and the President elects not to attend the alert, things start happening very fast.  It’s here where the height of suspense occurs, as three men are sent in different directions to accomplish three separate fact-finding missions.  As each man got closer to achieving their goal, there was a feeling in the air, a vibe, a tone that felt like disaster was just around the corner, knocking on the next-door window.  A man drives his car into the desert in search of the secret base in El Paso, and I half-expected the sands to just open up and swallow him whole.

Frankenheimer always was an expert at that kind of suspense generation.  Second only to Hitchcock among his contemporaries, he was a genius at creating tense situations with a minimum of flash, depending on strength of story and screenplay, and his actors, to generate a nervous tension in his viewers.  Those powers are on full display here.

It’s odd…Seven Days in May is a political thriller that doesn’t have any real action scenes or sequences.  A plane crash is referenced but never seen, as opposed to today’s films that would make room in the special FX budget to show audiences the crash.  At least in this film, it’s far more effective when it’s revealed but never seen.  That’s pretty gutsy.  There are no pumped-up chase scenes between a guy with crucial evidence and the shadow forces trying to keep it a secret.  It’s all handled very simply, which makes everything more plausible…and, as a further result, much more suspenseful.

I haven’t mentioned Ava Gardner’s character yet, Eleanor Holbrook, a former lover of General Scott’s.  How she figures in Casey’s plans to uncover evidence of Scott’s treason leads to a devastating scene involving old love letters and mistaken assumptions.  It’s some brilliantly incisive writing, and another example of how the movie achieves plausibility through simplicity.

Any further discussion would necessarily involve spoilers, so I’ll stop here.  Seven Days in May is a prime example of a good story told well, with hardly any bells or whistles.  It reminded me, for some reason, of some of those classic ‘80s thrillers where their only reason for existence was to turn up the tension without getting bogged down in subtext (Body Heat, No Way Out, Blow Out).  There is that one sermonizing speech, as I mentioned before, and I cringed a little when it happened, but it’s a minor quibble.  This is a superior thriller that deserves to be seen.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (France, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Georges Franju
CAST: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Edith Scob
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A surgeon goes to extreme lengths to give his daughter a new face, which was disfigured in an accident he caused.

[NOTE: This review contains mild spoilers.]


I have become a fan of many of the new breed of horror films released in the last ten years or so – Under the Skin, The Babadook, Get Out, Hereditary, Doctor Sleep, and Saint Maud, just to name a few.  Despite their cosmetic differences, these movies all accomplished the same thing: they got under my skin.  They were genuinely unsettling as their stories unfolded, and they can still creep me out to this day.

Imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, a French horror film released over sixty years ago, during a time when most mainstream American horror films (Hitchcock aside) were exercises in jump scares, cheesy special effects, and outrageous premises.  I was not prepared for how effectively this movie grabbed me from the outset and, except for a brief middle passage, did not let go.  When a movie from 1960 begins with a woman dumping a corpse into a river…a corpse with a clearly, hideously disfigured face…I don’t know about you, but I sat forward a little in my seat.  Where is THIS going?

When the body is discovered, the esteemed Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) solemnly identifies it as his daughter, Christianne.  There is a funeral, Christianne’s fiancé is distraught, and the police are satisfied.  When the good doctor returns home to his large, gothic estate in the country, he goes upstairs to a room where we find his actual daughter, still alive and so disfigured the camera dares not show her face.  The doctor’s assistant, Louise (Alida Valli, still exotic-looking 11 years after The Third Man), brings in a simple but disturbing mask for Christianne to wear.  “Get into the habit of wearing it,” says the doctor.

Who was the girl in the opening scene?  What happened to Christianne’s face?  And why does Louise start searching the nearby city for young unattached women with blond hair and pretty faces?  Why, indeed?

Eyes Without a Face may not have a particularly inscrutable or complicated story, but that doesn’t matter.  The movie unfolds like a modern-day Grimm’s fairy tale, poetic, with princesses locked in tall towers, an evil father figure, and unspeakable violence hinted at but never quite seen.  Except this time, in an unforgettably shocking scene, we witness one of the doctor’s operations.

In most films of this era, shockingly violent acts were tactfully carried out offscreen.  I am thinking, for some reason, of Lawrence of Arabia, where Lawrence must execute a man in order to keep the peace between two Arabian tribes.  Lawrence pulls his gun, we see the bound man try to escape, and we cut to Lawrence as he fires his gun, once, twice, several times.  It’s a shocking scene, but we never see the carnage of those bullets.  It’s left to our imagination.

In Eyes Without a Face, we watch as the doctor gently draws a grease pencil outline around his anesthetized victim’s pretty face.  (“I must try removing it in one large section, not in pieces as before.”  Yikes.)  Then Louise hands him a scalpel, and the camera stays on Louise’s face, and I expected it to stay there for several seconds as the horror of what the doctor was doing was left to our imaginations.  But no.  We cut back to the scalpel piercing the skin as he gingerly follows his outline around her face.  Some excess blood drips down, and Louise dutifully sponges it away.

This is already pretty strong stuff for 1960, at least when I compare it to other films I’ve seen from that era (again, Hitchcock aside).  But I was doubly shocked when the movie didn’t stop there.  The face must still be removed, but to do that we need clamps, more incisions (taking care around the eyes, of course), and we watch this process in several long takes which must have had some audience members fainting in disbelief.

When the doctor is finished, another body must be disposed of, Christianne has a new face, and all seems to be well.  (The doctor reminds his daughter: “Smile.  Smile.  …not too much.”)  What makes this movie great is that there is still so much more to the story, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.

This is the kind of gothic stuff that screams for a remake today, maybe by del Toro or Ari Aster.  Although perhaps they are already fans and have made the decision that the film is too perfect as it is.  I can’t blame that viewpoint.  Eyes Without a Face has just about everything a modern horror fan could desire.  Franju plays many of the film’s creepiest scenes with no score, creating a deeply unnerving mood like in The Blair Witch Project.  It doesn’t shy away from disturbing gore.  Christianne is not just a shrinking violet, but prone to heartbreaking philosophy.  (“My face frightens me.  My mask frightens me even more.”)  To say the resolution of the story is satisfying is an understatement; it takes “poetic justice” to a whole new level.  There is Hitchcockian – or, perhaps more accurately, Clouzot-esque – suspense when Christianne’s fiancé begins to suspect there is something fishy about Dr. Génessier’s clinic and tries to set up a sting operation with the help of local police.

And so much more.  Eyes Without a Face is, for me, one of those buried treasure movies that I normally do not seek out, but when they turn out to be more than worth my time, I can’t help but share it with others.  It holds its own with modern horror films, and then some.  The fact it was made in 1960 still boggles my mind, and that just makes it even more fascinating.

[P.S… According to IMDb, John Carpenter once suggested that the selection of the mask worn by Michael Myers was influenced by Christianne’s mask from this film. I believe it.]