THE HYPNOTIC EYE

Alternately nasty and tedious 1960 b-flick that sells itself as a some kind of cautionary tale of the dangers of hypnosis. Women are disfiguring themselves and the police can’t figure out why, but the audience can by the third scene. With Allison Hayes slinking about, it is easy to guess what she has to do with the diabolical goings on. Directed by TV director George Blair; also with Jacques Bergerac, Marcia Henderson, Merry Anders and Joe Patridge.

VIVA KNIEVEL!

The motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel stars as himself in this piece of the 1970s cheese. Drug lord Leslie Nielsen wants to arrange for Evel to suffer a fatal accident during a jump in Mexico so he can smuggle drugs across the border in Evel’s funeral trailer.

Like many athletes and showmen, whatever charisma Knievel may have displayed in his television specials vanishes when called upon to act a character, even himself.

Knievel seems an awfully square daredevil, an establishment hero, in red white and blue, promoting an anti-drug message, to push back against the counterculture. A real manly man, Knievel butts heads with feminist photographer played by Lauren Hutton, but she’s converted after a ride on his crotch rocket.

From 1978, directed by veteran Gordon Douglas; featuring Gene Kelly, Red Buttons, Cameron Mitchell, Dabney Coleman, Marjoe Gortner and Frank Gifford as himself. Some of the action in the climax is better executed than one would expect in a movie like this.

GOKE, BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL

A spaceship buzzes an airplane causing it to crash on a barren rocky landscape. The survivors are offed by a space vampire. The title promises a wacked-out ride, but this Japanese science fiction horror movie from 1968 is mostly a boring rehash of misanthropic clichés about the savagery of humankind in extremis and the typical throat-sucking monster attacks. Some late 1960s era turmoil is horned into the proceedings including assassination, terrorism, Vietnam, and of course the bomb, imbuing the movie with an appropriately apocalyptic backdrop. Hajime Sato (TERROR BENEATH THE SEA) directs; the movie stars Teruo Yoshida, Tomomi Sato, Eizo Kitamuro, and Hideo Ko.

TENSION AT TABLE ROCK

A superb color RKO western from 1956.  Richard Egan plays a Robert Ford like gunslinger, vilified in folklore in song after shooting a fabled outlaw.  After a gunfight disposing of three stagecoach robbers that leaves a boy orphaned, he arrives at the title town and meets a sheriff played by Cameron Mitchell who is also haunted by his past.  My favorite scene: a line of bored cowboys, after months on the trail, forced to behave themselves in the town by the ramrod, line up outside along the storefronts and stomp their feet in unision at passerbys, including the sheriff - a percussive metaphor for the inescapable past, always stalking him.  Directed by Charles Marquis Warren.

A Matter of Faith - on BURN, WITCH, BURN

BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962) is a thriller about faith.  The first line of the film, spoken by its protagonist, a smug professor named Norman (Peter Wyngarde), writing on a chalk board: I do not believe.  He discovers his wife, Tansy (Janet Blair), has been using witchcraft to protect him from a dangerous rival at the college where he teaches.  Demanding she destroy the protective charms which are an affront to his core credo in rationality, his luck immediately takes a turn for the disastrous.

The film’s silly title – its original British title, NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, isn’t much better - belies a relatively subtle and intelligent horror film, a throwback to the suggestive frissons of the series of psychological horror films produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the forties.  The smart script is credited to Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, from a fine novel, CONJURE WIFE, by Fritz Leiber.  The director, Sidney Hayers, made CIRCUS OF HORRORS a couple years earlier, but the bulk of his career was in television.  There are sequences in BURN, WITCH, BURN which recall some of his better television work, particularly for the 1960s series THE AVENGERS, but better rendered, with a higher budget.  Suggestive, fearful shots of Norman from a pursuing camera are very reminiscent of Hayers’s work on THE AVENGERS episode, “The Hidden Tiger.”

BURN, WITCH, BURN lacks the visual elegance of the best of the Lewton films: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, CAT PEOPLE, THE SEVENTH VICTIM, ISLE OF THE DEAD, and THE LEOPARD MAN, or the late fifties film, NIGHT OF THE DEMON, directed by the best of the Lewton directors, Jacques Tourneur; and a climatic chase at the end involving an eagle, though effective wham-bam filmmaking, is discordant with the more subtle terror of the rest of the film.  In the film’s best scene and true climax, a supposed witch sets fire to a house of cards and asks the professor, “Do you think your house is burning down?”  The central conflict between rationality and the supernatural, between belief and skepticism, cannot be more eloquently or potently illustrated.  Unfortunately, even here, the suspense is undermined by a cut to the professor’s house; the audience should have been allowed to simmer alongside the hero in uncertainty.

Benign Buñuel - on SIMON OF THE DESERT

SIMON OF THE DESERT, Luis Buñuel’s last Mexican film and his funniest, is a compromised work without seeming like one.  Its mere 43 minutes running time, a result of the producer running out of money, explains the film’s abrupt finale, but Buñuel’s ultimate solution – jetting his hero centuries forward to a 1960s nightclub hell - is befitting the surrealistic touches that precede it.

The plot: Simón (Claudio Brook), an early Christian ascetic perched atop a pillar for six years must resist the temptations of the Devil in the guise of Silvia Pinal, who appears as a water bearer, a not-so-innocent anachronistic school girl, and as Christ, carrying a lamb, which she promptly drops and kicks when Simón denies her.

Buñuel depicts the often absurd proceedings with a serene detachment.  If the actors’ playing was more broadly comedic, several scenes could have passed for a Monty Python sketch.  The men and women who gather around Simón’s pillar aren’t too impressed with Simón, even after he performs a miracle: restoring a man’s chopped off hands.  It’s all pretty mundane to the onlookers.  After all, what else is a saint supposed to do if not perform miracles, as a baker bakes bread.

One scene, where a possessed monk quarrels with his fellow monks, is basically the Duck Season/Rabbit Season gag from the Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny cartoons, as the possessed monk manages to confuse his fellow monks as to what they should be damning and praising in their shouts.

As funny as SIMON IN THE DESERT often is, it is also one of Buñuel’s most benign films.  The old master can’t conceal his fondness for his Simón, in his solitude, nibbling on lettuce and blessing the insects who visit him on his perch in the sky.  The purity of Simón’s devotion is something Buñuel cannot scoff at; he just shakes his head, amused, smiling.

Cinephile bristle

Critic Glenn Kenny on new film HITCHCOCK, his own headline: "HITCH-CROCK!"  http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/hitchcock/

At the bottom of his review: "Elsewhere "Hitchcock" lobs random, cheap insults at directors Frank Tashlin and Anthony Mann..."

These insults were fairly inane throwaway lines, tin-eared Tinseltown insider talk of the 1950s; they do little except rile up cinephiles who actually know and love the work of the filmmakers being trashed.  It's a case of mediocrities tarnishing the reps of their artistic superiors.

I had a similar cinephile bristle watching an early episode of NBC's musical SMASH which largely put me off the show.  One of the would-be actresses trying out for the lead in a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe says she's watched every Monroe movie to which the guy with her remarks, voice dripping with incredulous disdain, “Even MONKEY BUSINESS and CLASH BY NIGHT?”

Yeah, even the films by auteurs Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang?  (And really, trashing CLASH BY NIGHT, which features some of Monroe's best actual acting?  Did anybody involved the show even bother to watch that film?)