Wanna See Some Great Movies?

For the month of February, Turner Classic Movies puts together perhaps one of the best themed film marathons, in my personal opinion. From February 1st until March 3rd, they put on their 31 Days of Oscar Marathon, saluting some of the most award-winning films, actors, and directors to grace the silver screen.

Rather than dividing the films up into Oscar category, such as Best Director or Best Cinematographer, TCM has come up with a more creative approach. The films are divided into themed or genre segments. For example, the segemnt called "The Southwestern United States" features the films Tulsa, Oklahoma!, and Cimarron. Each day is divided up into "departments", like a college, and the various departments have name like "The Education Department", "The Law Department", and "The Philosophy Department" and each "department" is subdivided from there.

For example, "The Foriegn Language" Department features segments entitled "Introduction to Italian" and "Intermediate French", including foriegn movies like The Four Days of Naples and Mr. Hulot's Holiday whereas the "Dance Department" features segements like "Advanced Tap" and "Introduction to Choreography", featuring various musical and dance films like Royal Wedding and 42nd Street. I'm not sure if this schedule will be better than the old standby, but it may help group together movies that will attract viewers with common interests in all of them.

For more information about what to expect with this year's 31 Days of Oscar, you can read this article twitchfilm.com did with Robert Osborne, who will be emceeing the majority of the event. Monstersandcritics.com has more on the set up of the marathon along with a schedule that will be more easy to access than downloading the pdf schedule from the TCM website. For those of you interested, here is TCM's press release about the event.

So, crack open those schedules and cancel all your plans for the rest of the month because some great films are coming to a television near you!

Vincent Price Double Feature: Part Two

The second part of my Vincent Price Double Feature, is the second in the series of films Roger Corman and Vincent Price made in their series of films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. The Pit and the Pendelum was made in response to the widespread success of The Fall of the House of Usher and grossed even more than the previous film had. Those of you who are true Edgar Allen Poe fans will come to realize that this film version really has nothing in common with the original story, which can be read here. However, it truly is a remarkable film and a fitting sequel to House of Usher.

The story begins when Englishman Francis Barnard (John Kerr) comes to a castle in Spain, owned by his brother-in-law Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price). It was here that Francis's sister Elizabeth (scream queen Barbara Steele) died under mysterious circumstances and Francis blames Nicholas for his sister's death. In residence of the castle is currently Nicholas's sister Catherine (Luana Anders) who is worried for her brother's crazy behavior after the loss of his beloved wife. A frequent visitor is friend Doctor Leon (Anthony Carbone) who pronounced Elizabeth Medina dead. It is revealed that Nicholas and Catherine's father Sebastian Medina was in fact a torturer during the Spanish Inquisition and killed his own wife and brother for adultery against him. It seems that Elizabeth is still alive and her spirit is haunting the house. Those staying in it must find out what is causing Elizabeth's reappearance after her death. A few twists at the end provide for a wonderful climax.

Again, color is very prominent in this film and you can see the beginning of Sixties experimentation in film through the colorful flashback sequences in this film. A 40 mm wide angle lens was used to make the sets look larger than normal because they budget was too low to afford very elaborate sets. Another low budget trick was using 20 gallons of fake spiderwebs to create an eerie atmosphere throughout the castle set. The shots of the sea near which the castle is supposed to be located are actually shots of the Palos Verdes coast in the South Bay near Los Angeles. To make the movement of the pendulum even more horrifying, Corman took out every second shot to make it look as though the pendulum was moving twice as fast.

This film is even better than the previous one, though the two of them are obviously connected. Price is at the top of his game in the genre he does so well. Themes of alive entombment, torture, and madness abound in this film as well, but work in a completely different way as in the previous. Want a second opinion? Excellent source for this genre, the blog Horror Movie a Day has also reviewed this film and talked about it in depth, which you can read here. I really recommend that you watch not only this film but also the rest of Roger Corman's Poe films, which will surely give you a night of fright.

Poster Design: The Art of Horror

Before you go into a movie theatre, what is usually the first thing you see as you go in? The movie posters lining the walls, which are supposed to attract you inside, of course. In today's world, computers have made graphic design such an easy task, but before you could make art with a few clicks of a mouse, most of these posters were hand-drawn, completely created by the designers from scratch to make beautiful works of art. Since horror is the topic of the month, I'm going to focus on two horror artists in particular: Reynold Brown and Saul Bass.

Saul Bass is probably most famous for the designing of several Hitchcock movie posters including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He also worked on two drama posters for The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. Bass did some famous non-horror posters as well, such as the ones for Carmen Jones, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Seven Year Itch and The Big Country. Bass's career spanned forty years and in addition to posters, he also did film title sequences and company logos. Bass worked for such legendary directors as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Sorcsese and Preminger. His posters all have a unique style to them.

Another famous artist who did several horror posters is Reynold Brown. Brown's posters were wide range from different genres, ages, and success levels. Many of his beautifully done posters are b-movies, though the posters themselves are Grade A. His posters include ones done for Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Pit and the Pendulum, House on Haunted Hill, Tarantula, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and The Time Machine. Some of his famous non-horror posters include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Spartacus, Ben-Hur, King of Kinds, How the West Was Won, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Alamo.

In the past few decades, collecting vintage film memorabilia, especially these posters, has become an incredibly competitive commercial market. Many such

posters are extremely rare and it is common for people to screen printer illegal or unlicensed copies of them to sell. To date, the most expensive movie poster sold on record was the one made for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which sold to a collector for $690,000. Serious collectors are willing to drop some major cash in order to add to their collection, but that doesn't mean you can't see these beautiful works of art for yourself.

I have found several websites that have excellent online galleries and stores for you to buy posters (both actual and replicas), if any of you are interested. Cinemacom.com has a wonderful collection of beautiful posters that you can view for free in their online galleries.

Cinemasterpieces.com buys, sells, and auctions posters, but you can look at them online for free. The site Hammerhorrorposters.com has several horror posters for you to view, histories of the posters, and is a great resource if you want to know more about the posters or collecting them. Movie posters even have their own awards, the Key Art Awards sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter on the internet is the Internet Movie Poster Awards (IMP Awards) and here you can view several award nominated and revered poster artists.

"There are spirits everywhere..."

Perhaps the first horror film ever made, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari or as it was originally titled in German Das Gabinet des Dr. Caligari, came to the screen in 1920 as a German Expressionist film directed by Robert Weine. Thanks again to public domain, you can watch a wonderful version of the film here.

The film is one any film student should watch and I also recommend it for those of you out there who are artists. The techniques used in the film are a little trippy and surreal at times. Expressionism, which was very prominent in Germany, was about distorting reality to create emotional turmoil. Other expressionist works include artist such as El Greco and Edvard Munch's famous and oft-stolen painting "The Scream", two of the German films I blogged about earlier The Golem as well as Nosferatu, the music of George Gershwin and Igor Stravinsky, as well as the literary works of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, and Eugene O'Neill. Though you don't have to be a student of art or film to enjoy this movie, there are definite aspects of the movie art and film lovers would see before the rest of us.

The plot is somewhat elusive since the film is Expressionist, and all. The main character Francis (Friedrich Feher) tells a story about his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowki) and Francis’s fiancée Jane (Lil Dagover). Alan and Francis go to a fair where they meet the strange Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) who shows his future-predicting sleepwalker Cesare (Conrad Veidt) to them. Cesare tells Alan he has until dawn to live and it comes to pass that Alan is murdered the next day. Cesare is the prime suspect and abducts Jane. Turns out, Dr. Caligari has been using Cesare to help him commit murders while sleepwalking for a period of time. Cesare runs away from those pursuing him, dying of exhaustion. After Cesare has died, they find Dr. Caligari has fled. Francis finds Caligari at a mental asylum. The ending at the asylum provides you with several twists and turns, making you wonder if anything in the film actually happened at all. The film may make you think or may leave you scracthing your head, trying to figure out what it was you just watched. Either outcome, I still think you should watch it.

The technical and artistic effects used in this movie are strange and wonderful, hence their appeal to the art and film lovers out there. The current time is done in strange blueberry hues whereas the flashback is done in dingy brown ones. This is one of the first films to do a “frame story” or flashback premise. The makeup is artistic and creates an image that is sort of a cross between a mime, a goth, Edward Scissorhands, and the guys from KISS. The scenery is extremely artistic and surreal. Most of the sets were made from paper and shadows were painted on the walls. The effects of the film are often citing as influencing film noir. The entire film has a dreamlike, surreal quality to it, which meshes perfectly with the macabre and unforeseen ending twists.

An artical done on the plot and further exploration of the film can be found here, written by the film and movie buffs at Plume-Noir.com. The Plume-Noir article details how this film influenced future German Expressionist film as well as its impact on German films in the 1930s and those made when Hitler came to power. Also, the Moving Picture Blog has done a great study on the film as well, which you can read here. Joe Leydon of this blog probably did a better job of describing the film than I did, so I would highly recommend you checking this out if you want to know more about the film.

The Strange and Supernatural Adventure of Allan Gray

For those of you who like art film, you might want to check out what might be one of the earliest art-horror films ever made. Vampyr was made in 1930, though released in 1932, and is one of the first handful of films made after the invention of sound. Of course, this movie does not rely on the new technology of sound to make its point. With little dialogue — and some may say plot — Vampyr relies on lighting and shadow techniques to create drama. The film appears a little grainy at times, but don't be alarmed. That's all part of the lighting effects. In fact, the lighting of this film has been continually praised since its making. For those of you who want to watch it, the film is public domain and can be found here.

The film is French-German but is made by Danish director Carol Theodor Dreyer, whom takes credit for the magnificent lighting effects. The film is meant to have a dreamlike, surreal quality to it and focuses more on imagery than anything else. The film itself was popular enough that it was translated into French, German, and English. Unfortunately, prints of the English version are all but lost and so we have to do with self-made title cards and subtitles with the film in the original German. Most of the actors were amateurs (think student art film people), but nonetheless, it is a good film. I really hope none of this information detracts from you wanting to watch it because it truly is a good film.

Vampyr is based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, which predates Bram Stoker's Dracula. For those of you interested, Carmilla can be read here on the vast online library that is Project Gutenberg. The story is relatively the same, and parallels most vampire stories of the era. The story follows young Allan Gray as he comes to a castle to study demonology and vampires. A dreamer himself, Gray had some problems distinguishing between what is real and what is surreal. He is given a copy of a book called The History of Vampires, which arouses his suspicions about the strange things happening in the area. Then, the beautiful daughter of the lord who's castle Gray is staying in comes down with a mysterious illness. At first, it is believed to be only anemia, but Gray feels there is something more sinister at work and tries to uncover the mystery of the dark forces haunting the area. As things get more intense, Gray discovers his quest to find the truth could cost him his soul.

So, this film is a great art film for those of you into that and does have vampire elements for those of you who are into that. It is also great for anyone who is a fan of lighting effects and early sound films. Of course, I don't want to limit this film to anyone in one of those categories. I really think everyone should watch Vampyr as a means of broadening your film horizons.