Sunday, October 20, 2013

Phantom Ship (1935)

Director: Denison Clift                                 Writer: Denison Clift
Film Score: Eric Ansell                               Cinematography: Eric Cross
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Shirley Grey, Arthur Margetson and Edmund Willard

I’ll say it right up front: I love Lugosi. And that can be problematic. There are bad Bela Lugosi movies, plenty of them, but there are also bad movies with Bela Lugosi in them, and for me there is a distinct difference. Unfortunately, this is one of the former. Unlike Return of the Vampire, where the rest of the film is fairly banal but Lugosi’s presence makes it worth watching, Phantom Ship is just bad, and even Lugosi can’t save it. A British version of the Mary Celeste story, the ship that was found adrift in the Atlantic in 1872 with no one onboard, the conceit here is that someone stowed away on the ship seeking revenge and killed off everyone. Unfortunately, this makes the film little more than a floating old dark house mystery, and a bad one at that.

Only the third film produced by the nascent Hammer Films in Britain, it would take a couple more decades before the company would find its sea legs and begin to make a major impact on the international film industry. This film tries, with the meager resources at hand, but just can’t overcome them. The British actors are, for the most part, fairly unremarkable and the crude acting styles tend to drag the whole production down. Oddly enough, one of the worst things about the film is actually the editing, an element that is usually invisible. But John Seabourne leaves too much film prior to reaction shots and it causes the reactions to feel as if they’re lagging. In terms of Lugosi, whose style could be somewhat stilted anyway, it has the effect of making the audience wonder if he is actually going to say anything at all.

Arthur Margetson is the ship’s captain. He is sailing for Italy with a cargo of raw alcohol and taking along his fiancée, Shirley Grey. The one complication is that he has stolen Grey away from another captain, Edmund Willard, who had been set on marrying her himself. When Margetson finds himself one hand short, he’s forced to ask for a sailor from Willard’s crew who sends his man off to Margetson with the implied instruction to make Margetson pay. Meanwhile Lugosi has just finished an arduous trip after being shanghaied and when he is offered a berth on the Marry Celeste he unexpectedly accepts. Unlike the old dark house mysteries, however, several sailors are killed openly, one while attempting to kill the captain and one while attempting to rape his fiancée.

Lugosi’s performance is just a bit too hammy and difficult to believe. After he kills the sailor who was attempting rape, he practically breaks down, seemingly horrified that he has “killed his fellow man.” And while Shirley Grey is very good, she has too little screen time. The Hammer film was released as The Mystery of the Mary Celeste in Britain, but in the United States the title was changed in addition to excising twenty minutes of the film, mostly onboard the ship. There are characters in the credits who don’t even appear in the American version. Unfortunately, the original British version doesn’t exist any more, so we’ll never know what was cut. While Phantom Ship is an interesting historical piece for Lugosi and Hammer completists, but not something that’s going to appeal to most viewers.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)

Director: John Sayles                              Writer: John Sayles
Music: Mason Daring                              Cinematography: Austin De Besche
Starring: Bruce MacDonald, Maggie Renzi, David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp

I had heard about this film for decades, beginning with Siskel and Ebert’s rant when The Big Chill came out and how much better this film was. It’s not. I can see the merits of the film, and understand why people like it, but ultimately it doesn’t hold up as a work of art for me. It’s like My Dinner with Andre, only with a dozen boring conversations instead of just one. This is the directorial debut of John Sayles, whose work I haven’t really been motivated to explore. Return of the Secaucus Seven is a small, independent film that has been lovingly restored but still shows its humble beginnings. I’ve written on many occasions that just because a film did something first, doesn’t mean that it is deserving of praise despite its flaws. It is still a flawed film, and Kasdan’s remake is still a better film.

The title of the film is not the setting, and the story takes place in New Hampshire. A group of college friends who were arrested in Secaucus while heading to a protest in Washington D.C. ten years earlier, are reuniting at the home of Bruce MacDonald and Maggie Renzi. Interestingly, none of the actual seven, apart from Adam LeFevre, became actors of any significance. The gas station attendant in town who went to high school with some of them is David Strathairn, who has had a slow but steady climb into stardom, and the straight-laced boyfriend of Jean Passanante is Gordon Clapp, best known for his work on NYPD Blue. Sayles himself plays another high school grad who got married and has three small children. Most of the first half of the film is spent establishing which of the group used to be sleeping with whom, for Clapp’s and the audience’s benefit. The rest is an awkward attempt at recreating banal sounding dialogue that feels incredibly forced.

For me, this is the biggest failure of the film. In attempting to be painfully realistic with his dialogue, Sayles has inadvertently done the opposite. There is a certain artistic quality that must be present in a screenplay that makes it worth watching. The kind of gossip and tedious details of life that might be interesting to those characters themselves, seems maddeningly pointless to outsiders. This is the strength of The Big Chill. First, Kasdan creates a far more compelling reason for the reunion: the death of one of their members. Secondly, the characters are differentiated into recognizably types: TV star, business owner, doctor, lawyer, writer, housewife, etc. In this there is something to anchor each character, and the death of the other focuses their conversations. In Sayles’ film it is all too random, too specific to the characters and, at the end of the day, too phony because of it.

Another issue is, of course, the acting. I understand that this is a small film, with relatively unknown actors. Fine, but all that serves to do is make the stilted dialogue that much worse. Technically, it’s not a poorly made film. Sayles clearly has some talent. A lot of the scenes, like the skinny-dipping, the basketball, and the bar scenes are well done, but the greatest frame in the world can’t make a bad picture any better. At the end of the day Return of the Secaucus Seven is what it is, a small film by a beginner who was learning his craft. To make it any more than that does not only a disservice to the film itself, but is an insult to the greater works to come. The film has interest as a curiosity, but is not something I’ll ever return to for entertainment.