Movie review - Corman #25 – “The Last Woman on Earth” (1961) **

Robert Towne not only wrote the script for this film, but has one of the three main roles (he’s clean shaven). He plays the lawyer of a shonky businessman with a beautiful wife: the three of them go diving in Puerto Rico one day and when they come up it seems everyone has been wiped out.

While Towne’s script isn’t quite Chinatown it’s still a pretty decent effort, full of conflict and interesting characters – for instance, the businessman is established as a bit of a scum bag but once they’re the last people on earth he’s the only one who has ant ideas about what to do.

Towne’s acting is more of a drawback – it’s not so much he’d bad just a bit too laid back for a role which could have done with more energy, or sexiness. (The sexiest thing about the film is the credits, slow panning over a naked shape of a woman). And while the three characterisations in this are strong there isn’t much of a story. One would think Corman would really get into the visuals of showing people-running-down-empty-streets but that only happens towards the end. And he doesn’t get into any end-of-the-world fantasy sequences eg ransacking shopping centres.

This film a bit more adult and sexy than Corman’s films to that date eg there’s no doubt Towne and Jones-Moreland have sex. Maybe this is why Corman was distracted from tackling other end of world issues eg there’s no mutants or other survivor – something which would have given the film a better third act than adultery. I also the film would have been sexier if Corman had cast his original choice in the female role, Alison Hayes, but he ended up seeing Jones-Moreland in a play and going with her instead.

This was issued on DVD with special features as part of the “Roger Corman Puerto Rico trilogy”. Until I saw the DVD I had no idea the film was shot in colour! (To be honest, colour doesn’t add super much to the film – there’s a lot of brown eg brown walls, brown shorts and the location isn’t really exploited; and besides black and white kind of suits apocalyptic tales anyway.)

There’s an entertaining commentary with Fred Olen Ray, some other dude and two of the actors (Olen Ray says Robert Towne was invited and the door was left open for him to turn up right until the last minute but he doesn’t show).

The actors continually refer to Corman’s cheapness, not really in an affectionate way - Jones-Moreland bitches about the lack of hairdressing, costume, stuntman, etc (one story – she was having trouble in the water and asked for rope and they threw the whole rope in.); although later on both say they admire him and pay tribute to his energy. The commentators poke some affectionate fun at the 60-ness of it all – dressing for dinner, drinking martinis, etc even after the apocalypse.

TV series review – “Sunset on Studio 60” ***

Entertaining and frustrating but I think this series was doomed from the outset. There’s no reason you couldn’t set a TV series behind the scenes of a comedy show (many TV series use TV as a background eg Frontline, Murphy Brown, Mary Tyler Moore) but Aaron Sorkin made the mistake of writing a show which was about putting on a comedy series, rather than characters who happen to work there. Why does this matter? Because the stakes are so low.

Who cares if a comedy show goes on or not? Comedy shows are great, sure, but they don’t really matter – who cares if Ricky and Ron take over, or the jokes are stale, or the ratings are wonky, or they use a joke which turns out to be stolen, etc? It just doesn’t matter – at least, not enough to match up with the weight they are given here.

Sorkin falls back on Christians-getting-angry plots which were great on West Wing, but this is a TV show – if it gets axed, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, to be honest, for the characters either – Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford are already fabulously successful and well paid, ditto Amanda Peet and the cast members. (It’s different, say, with Entourage, where we know if Vinnie Chase picks one wrong movie his whole career goes crashing down).

And this is heartbreaking because everything else in this series is pretty much spot on – the writing is divine, the dialogue snaps and crackles, the emotion is strong, the acting good (I felt Perry and Whitford were too old at first but they grew on me, Peet was a revelation, and there is sterling support work from the two leading male comedians and the chubby secretary; the exception is Sarah Paulson who is beautiful and likeable but not convincing as a great comic).

It’s just got this central issue which isn’t resolved. I think this would have worked a treat as a film – a romantic comedy between a feisty writer and a Christian star with a TV show background, that’s gold. Or as a TV series about something with weight - a current affairs show or a news program. But you keep going “aargh!”. Like when a comic’s brother is abducted in Afghanistan – that would be a horrible thing to happen, but who cares how it affects a TV comedy show?

NB much has been written about how unfunny the comedy segments are. I would agree they are mostly unfunny, in some cases very unfunny – but its hard to be funny. As someone in one of William Froug’s books once pointed out, its easy to write to make people smile, very hard to make them laugh out loud – and Sorkin is more a smile writer than a hard gag writer. This isn’t the main problem with the show, though. What is bewildering is why they offer up so many of the sketches. We don’t have to see any of them (in Entourage we only get glimpses of Vinnie Chase’s acting abilities and movies – and to be honest, even the amount we do see is too much) but as the episodes go on, we get more and more. It’s like, stop it, Sorkin – no one can do everything.

Movie review – Corman # 3 - “Swamp Women” (1955) **

Corman’s early movies often featured tough women in the lead – he admitted this wasn’t so much because he was a feminist but because it was something a bit different. This low budget effort has a plot surprisingly close to the sort of thing New World would do in the 70s: a female cop goes undercover in prison and busts out with a bunch of Bad Girls so she can find some diamonds. Good trashy fun, with the girls in tight tops and skimpy shorts running around the Louisiana bayous; there are crocodiles and lots of scenes where the woman smack each other around; there’s also a scene where one of the girls feels up a man (Mike Connors) they kidnap on the way. The low budget jars at times (look at the shonky set of the police officer) but the large amount of location filming (swamps, mardi gras) means this isn’t as big a problem as it would normally be: an early example of Corman’s thriftiness. Another one is how he got movement in the credit sequence: he had names on a picture, but would move the camera around. The presence of Marie Windsor, Beverly Garland and Connors in the cast give this actual star power.

Movie review – “Pallindromes” (2007) ***1/2

Todd Solodz in freaky mode again, with another affectionate, loving look at the, er, slightly less conventional area of society. This is the tale of a young girl who wants to get pregnant and gets hooked up with abortionists. Very well made with some excellent acting – loved the “freedom toast” and the Jesus songs, the abortionist shooting sequence literally makes you gasp.

Movie review – “The Gorilla” (1939) **

The Ritz brothers were a popular comedy team who made a number of films in the 1930s; they are not well remembered today, with no real accepted classics on their resume, despite being favourites of Pauline Kael (she would invoke their name when showing off how non-elitist her taste in movies could be). Their vehicle here is the sort of thing Abbott and Costello would shortly be doing – to wit, detectives investigating mysterious shenanigans in a haunted house. Like A and C there is a strong support cast including Lionel Atwill (everyone’s favourite 30s perv), Patsy Kelly (everyone’s favourite 30s wise-cracking lesbian) and Bela Lugosi (everyone’s favourite 30s red herring butler), plus a pair of juveniles. There is a lot of running around (including antics involving gorillas, pretend and real) and Alan Dwan’s direction is as professional as always, but I prefer A and C films – mainly because with them there’s a contrast in characters so you have a bit of conflict, whereas the Ritzes all look alike. Lugosi enters into the spirit of things with aplomb and bounces off the boys well.

Movie review – “Impact” (1949) **1/2

Arthur Lubin isn’t a director much heralded by auteurists but he produced a consistently entertaining body of work over the years. He’s best known for his comedies but this enjoyable film noir showed he was a dab hand at other genres. It’s not one of the really black noirs along the lines of something like Detour and it lacks a name noir cast (it has Brian Donlevy, Helen Walker and Charles Coburn – oh, and a cameo from Sheilah Graham). 

But it’s not bad – Donlevy is a businessman devoted to his wife who is having an affair and her boyfriend tries to kill him. The attempted murder sequence is particularly strong and Dovley gives a good performance, particularly when he realises his wife is a rat. 

The main problem is overlength: it goes on for a bit too long – 111 minutes. Oh, and Anna May Wong is in it – playing a maid but a decent sized role and she looks pretty good.

Movie review – “White Zombie” (1932) ***1/2

Famous early zombie film holds up well today despite inevitable creakiness. It wasn’t made by one of the studios which is partly why, I think, it has such devoted cultists. It helps that Lugosi’s in it, too, of course - I think part of the appeal is “well, anyone can like Frankenstein and Karloff, but Lugosi and White Zombie... that’s special.”

But that’s not enough on its own – this is a well made movie (making it mysterious why the Halperin brothers never went on to a more substantial career afterwards) with a very strong story, based partly one imagines on the Faust legend: a Caribbean businessman who covets a beautiful woman does a deal with devil-ish Bela Lugosi where Lugosi turns her into a zombie.

Despite the low budget Lugosi’s cliff top lair is impressive – there is some strong emotional stuff with the woman (a sexy one) going zombie and guys going crazy over her, and a climax with zombies going on the rampage and people falling off cliffs.