Thursday, August 30, 2012

Critically Reviled Film, Part One

 

It's that time of year when I take a couple weeks off and tell myself the blog and my readers will patiently await my return.  This assurance lasts for roughly the length of time it takes to refill a coffee cup and savor the thought of a few lazy days...


Then, other thoughts intrude.  A writer should never take his audience for granted or cavalierly wander away from his word-processing program.  Readers, particularly those who regularly follow a column or blog, deserve more respect.  There will be a time later this year when I likely will be away from electronic connectivity for two or three weeks and I don't want to have overindulged myself in writing something like "Gone fishing!  See ya in two weeks!"... 


My solution to this dilemma is to give myself a brief but needed hiatus from researching and writing and revising and share some scenes from movies that critics love to hate because they're both so bad technically and so much fun to watch.  They're Saturday pizza and beer movies.  Down the line in this blog, we can talk about the sociology of clunkers like these flicks and how they reflect the fears of the Atomic Age or an incipient revolt against the conformity of Ozzie and Harriet's America.  But, today, we're just friends finding an excuse to play hooky from work before Labor Day unofficially closes out another summer in the USA...

 

Robot Monster, 1953, Astor Films, Director: Phil Tucker
 

The score for Tucker's cinematic masterpiece was written by Elmer Bernstein who went on to compose the music for lesser quality flicks such as The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill A Mocking Bird, and True Grit.  Director Tucker himself was a mere 26 years of age when he conceived the idea for what some consider the worst film of all time.  He'd come to Hollywood, an ex-Marine and dishwasher, with cinematic experience as the projectionist for strip pictures at a sleazy Fairbanks, Alaska, theater...

 

From Hell It Came, 1957, Allied Artists, Director: Dan Milner


Unfortunately for fans of walking killer plant movies, there is a dearth of titles exploring this particular theme.  The nearest competition for being acclaimed the best of the genre might be Day of The Triffids, a 1962 film based on a science fiction novel by John Wyndham.  From Hell plumbed the metaphysical depths linking native curses and aggressive flora while Triffids examined the aftermath of a meteor shower which blinds approximately 99% of the human race and paves the way for alien spores to animate plants as they attempt to colonize a new planet...

 

The Brain From Planet Arous, 1957, Marquette Productions, Director: Nathan Hertz
 

Director Nathan Juran took such pride in the quality of this film that he demanded to be credited as Nathan Hertz.  Juran also directed Attack of the 50 Ft Woman, a cult classic now widely seen as a celebration of female empowerment.  He won an Oscar in 1942 for Best Art Direction for work on How Green Was My Valley.  Romanian born, Juran immigrated to the United States at the age of five with his parents.  A Master's Degree in Architecture (even one from MIT) did little good during the construction slowdown of the Great Depression.  Juran moved to Los Angeles where he got a job as a draftsman in a Hollywood studio.  Volunteering for military service during World War II, Juran left Hollywood briefly and was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency...

 

Attack of the Crab Monsters, 1957, Allied Pictures Corporation: Director: Roger Corman


No student of quality filmmaking overlooks Roger Corman's contribution.  This is not a facetious remark, by the way.  Known today for B Movies of the car chase and scantily clad girls variety with a healthy dose of explosions to salt viewer interest, Corman likely had no idea he would be a producer and director as he walked across the stage at Stanford University with a degree in Industrial Engineering in hand.  He worked four days as an engineer, according to some sources, before realizing he'd made a career mistake.  It was back to school at Oxford University where he studied English Literature.  Generous when it comes to fostering talent, Roger Corman mentored director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro.  Another protégée, James Cameron of Terminator fame, describes himself as having trained at the Roger Corman Film School...

 

 

 

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Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: all images are still photographs from the films reviewed.  The Fifty Worst Films of All Time by Harry Medved with Randy Dreyfus provided valuable insight into the career of Phil Tucker.
 

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Today In History

 

People have daily rituals and I'm no exception to the rule...

 
Most mornings find me trekking several hundred feet to the road to retrieve the daily newspaper.  Once back inside, I check out the comic strips since a brain needs food before starting the day's work.  Then it's on to Section A for the daily history lesson...

 
Newspapers have long carried a daily Almanac feature of some sort.  Such columns fill space under the guise of educating readers.  They remind us of solemn events which we should not forget.  They offer trivia for those inclined to astound or annoy co-workers with their encyclopedic knowledge.  I learned this past weekend that Saturday, August 18, was the 231st day of the 2012th year common to both Jews and Christians.  There were 135 days remaining for the calendar year...

 
Virginia Dare, on August 18 in 1587, became the first child of English parents to be born on American soil.  She drew her first breath on what is now Roanoke Island in North Carolina.  We, unfortunately, have no idea of how many years Virginia enjoyed the clear air of the New World since the Roanoke Colony is usually known as the Lost Colony...

Sir Walter Raleigh, financier of the Lost Colony,
famously embodies chivalry as he places his cloak
at the feet of Queen Elizabeth in this illustration of
an event that likely never happened.
 

Sir Walter Raleigh, he who lay his cloak across a puddle that Queen Elizabeth's dainty feet might not be made wet and he who was executed by her drooling successor King James I, financed the colony.  We know of Virginia's birth only because her grandfather was John White, governor of Raleigh's ill-fated settlement.  Governor White returned to England at the end of 1587 for supplies, intending to return within a few months.  But war with Spain prevented this.  It would be almost three years until a relief ship arrived at the colony only to find it abandoned.  The only clue as to its fate was a word carved into a fort palisade-- CROATOAN...

 

Mystery lovers have spent more than four centuries offering solutions to the enigma of Roanoke Colony.  A popular theory is the colonists sought help from Native Americans and eventually intermarried with them.  One of the earliest writers to advance this idea was John Lawson whose 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina asserted that the Croatoan Indians of Hatteras Island claimed some of their ancestors were white men who could "talk in a book" and that these Native People showed great fondness for the English...

 
Other solutions have been offered:  hostile tribes killed (and possibly cannibalized) the Roanoke colonists, a passing Spanish ship destroyed the settlement and slaughtered its inhabitants, drought forced the settlers to relocate to another area where they failed to survive, the desperate residents grew tired of awaiting Governor White's return and set sail for England themselves in an ill-fated voyage...

Governor White and a party of soldiers ponder the enigmatic
"CROATOAN" carved into the palisades of the mysteriously
abandonded colony at Roanoke Island.
 
[As for Sir Walter, skeptics doubt he actually laid his cloak at Her Royal Highness' feet and believe the tale originated with an imaginative historian named Thomas Fuller who wrote in the 1680s.  But, why should we allow facts, to interfere with a tale of dashing chivalry in this shiny age of intrigue and courtly romance when Raleigh's friend Edmund Spenser dedicated The Faerie Queen to Elizabeth?]

 

August 18, 1838 saw the start of a voyage.  A marine expedition, the first sponsored by the United States government, set sail from Hampton Roads, Virginia.  Its destination was the South Pacific where the crews gathered scientific information...
 

The notion for an expedition went back to 1828 and the administration of President John Quincy Adams who prodded Congress to approve a voyage to promote commerce.  For readers inclined to a jaundiced view of our elected officials, I note the legislature voted to approve the expedition in May 1828 but didn't approve its funding until 1836.  After a delay of two years in outfitting ships, the United States Exploring Expedition (or, more catchily, the US Ex Ex) left port under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes.  The original leader, Commodore Thomas Jones, refused to accept the appointment.  Other senior officers followed the Commodore's lead.  Finally, the Navy found a man up to a challenge...

"US Ex Ex" artist Alfred T Agate recorded this scene in the
Andes Mountains of South America, circa 1839, during the Wilkes
Expedition.
 
Lieutenant Wilkes' voyage was no sightseeing trip.  It was tasked to survey uncharted lands it encountered and to resurvey those already visited but poorly mapped.  And its commander was charged with supervising not only a military crew but civilian scientists drawn from the disciplines of zoology, botany, philology, and mineralogy.  He also was in charge of a taxidermist.  The expedition traveled as far as the Philippines and New Zealand and the icy lands at the very ends of the earth, returning to the United States in 1842... 

 

Wilkes was court-martialed after the voyage and convicted of over indulging a fondness for flogging subordinate officers.  This apparently did little to harm to his naval career inasmuch as he retired from military service in 1866 as a rear-admiral.  His gravestone at Arlington credits him as the discoverer of the "Ant-arctic" Continent.  Some historians, by way of trivia, speculate Wilkes served as the model for Herman Melville's tyrannical and whale-obsessed Captain Ahab in Moby Dick...

Alfred T Agate's sketch of a Tuvalla man of the
Ellice Islands is one of many valuable records
made during an expedition whose leader may
have inspired the character of the mad Captain
Ahab in Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
 
General Stephen W Kearny led the U S forces which captured Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1846 on August 18th...

 
This was during the early days of the Mexican-American War.  It was an easy victory since the Mexican military forces simply strategically withdrew into Mexico before any fighting began.  General Kearny moved on to California where he became the military governor following a dispute with Lieutenant Colonel John Fremont that resulted in the latter war hero's court-martial for insubordination and disobeying a direct order. 

 
Poor Lt Col Fremont was convicted but President James K Polk immediately commuted his sentence.  In disgust at his treatment for following orders issued by an officer of equal rank to Brigadier General Kearny, Fremont resigned his commission and bought a stretch of land in California.  It turned out to be loaded with gold.  Now a rich man, he became one of the first Senators sent to Washington, DC from the new state.  In 1856, the recently formed Republican Party nominated him as its first Presidential candidate...

General Stephen W Kearny triumphantly occupies the undefended
settlement of Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the Mexican-American
War.
 
Not quite six years after Fremont's failed bid for the nation's highest office, an omen of bloody and brutal things yet to come began when warriors of the Dakota Nation began an uprising in Minnesota.  The Dakota, also known as the Sioux, were increasingly tired of treaty violations by white settlers and being cheated by traders and corrupt officials.  One night, a young Dakota warrior and three companions killed five white settlers they encountered on a hunting expedition.  A tribal council met on August 17, 1862, voting to drive Americans from the Minnesota River Valley.  By some accounts, 800 whites died in the attacks that began the next morning...

 
One of the first to die in the revolt was an Agent named Myrick who'd answered Chief Little Crow's complaints about a lack of food for his tribesmen by saying "Let them eat grass or their own dung."  His corpse was found with grass stuffed in the mouth.  In addition to causing a stampede by settlers evacuating the area, the uprising effectively halted stagecoach traffic and steamboat commerce in northern Minnesota.  Demands placed on the Union Army by the Civil War delayed full scale military response by whites.  Eventually, in September, the Dakota were trapped in a ravine and decisively defeated.  Thirty-eight of the survivors were hanged on the day after Christmas, 1862, in the largest mass execution in United States history.  The bodies were then buried.  After dark, doctors disinterred them and distributed cadavers among themselves.  One of the ghouls participating in the shameful act was W W Mayo, who established a private medical practice that evolved into the Mayo Clinic...

Little Crow, seen here in an 1857 or 1858 portrait, led the
Dakota Nation in revolt against white settlement of Minnesota
after a white Indian Agent suggested the starving Sioux tribe
could either eat grass or their own dung if they were hungry.
 
Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on August 18, 1920.  This changed the face of American politics by guaranteeing the right of women to vote.  We've yet to elect a woman President in this nation, but, as an old cigarette commercial from the 1960s said, you've come a long way, baby...

Late 19th Century anti-women's suffrage cartoon depicts a world
run by cigar-smoking harridans whose tamed men take care of
babies.
 

And speaking of the 1960s, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair ended mid-morning August 18, 1969, with Jimi Hendrix performing the festival's final set...

 
Woodstock was, according to its organizers, "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music".  It took place on slightly less than a square mile of land, a 600 acre dairy farm owned by a fellow named Max Yasgur, in upstate New York in the Catskill Mountains where borscht belt comedians once reigned supreme.  The first act to sign a contract for an appearance at the festival, after its promoters decided in April that it was feasible to pull off such a huge event, was Creedence Clearwater Revival, newly arrived to musical superstar status.  Band leader John C Fogerty agreed to a 3 PM start time and refused to allow the group to be included in a 1970 documentary about the event, decisions that rankled his band mates...

Jimi Hendrix during the final set of the
Woodstock music festival.
 
It's as impossible to imagine the Sixties without Woodstock as it is to imagine the Sixties without Easy Rider.  Some events simply define decades and generations.  An estimate of 400,000 people attending the festival at its height seems about right.  In moves which surprised some, many of the Sixties' biggest musical acts declined appearances at the Woodstock Exposition.  Joni Mitchell chose not to perform, opting for a television gig on the Dick Cavett Show instead.  Ironically, Mitchell would pen the most famous musical ode to Woodstock, singing of how it turned warplanes into butterflies over our nation's skies...

 
Bob Dylan and the Beatles were also declinees.  Dylan, who then lived just up the road from the site, had other contractual obligations.  He was reportedly upset with the large number of scruffy people Woodstock attracted...

David Byrd's lovely design for a poster
advertising "An Aquarian Exposition" in
upstate New York was not used, in part
due to a change in venue.
 
When Jimi Hendrix took the stage at 8:30 AM on the morning of August 18th, about a tenth of that number still remained.  About three quarters of the way through his set, Hendrix (who was part African-American, part European, and part Native American) proved that he could do what he said he would do when he launched into a psychedelic and stunning version of the National Anthem before morphing into Purple Haze.  He'd said he would do with his guitar what Little Richard could do with his voice...
 

And what Jimi Hendrix did with his guitar was something else, as well.  He created pure magic, on this day in history, this man born of America's many races and many cultures, plucking it from metal strings and turning his country's national song into a statement of unlimited personal freedom on a summer's day at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius...

 

Jimi Hendrix: Star Spangled Banner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMhq1L0cJf0   

 

The U S Postal Service commemorated
Virginia Dare's 350th birthday with this
stamp issued in 1937.
 

 

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Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: none

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Nine Paintings Plus Two



One day in the 1960s, a kid growing up in a magical town in the middle of Louisiana blew out blazing blue candles on a birthday cake and opened a present that turned out to be The Encyclopedia of Art by Eleanor Munro.  The book had been published by Golden Press several years earlier.  It was wonder encapsulated, perfectly arranged and designed in a way that could cure even a troglodyte of artistic indifference and ignorance...



Art, the boy learned, is not a static thing.  Movements and styles come and go...




He also learned that sometimes the easiest way to learn about these movements is to simply look at examples.  A Cubist work tends toward a different appearance than a Realist portrait.  And he learned, too, not to get too hyper about attaching labels to the painters and their work.  Some artists, like Picasso, work in many different styles...



Late in the 19th century, a style called Impressionism dominated French painting.  Its practitioners often worked outdoors, attempting to capture the scenes before them spontaneously and in vibrant color.  The art historian Sarah Newmeyer describes the Impressionist goal as an attempt to "record on canvas not what they knew was form but what they saw as light."  They intended to do this by using paint to capture immediate sensory impressions made on the optic nerve by the quick glimpse of an object or scene...

Soleil Levant, Claude Monet, 1872: Impressionism


Such thinking verged on blasphemy of the highest order to the Academy of Art of the Institut de France which held great power over art and artists.  Its members dictated line was a primary characteristic of acceptable painting and color a subservient adjunct.  Thanks to the power of the Academy, the French government in 1893 rejected 27 paintings of 65 bequeathed to the nation by the estate of a collector- artist named Caillebotte.  The rejected canvases included work by the Impressionists Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre August Renoir, and Alfred Sisley...

Le Moulin de la Galette, Pierre August Renoir, 1876: Impressionism


A visit to Wikipedia lists several Impressionist painting characteristics: relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time); common, ordinary subject matter; inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience;  and unusual visual angles...

Lydia leaning on her arms, Mary Cassatt, 1879: Impressionism


As Impressionism waned in France, another major artistic movement was coming to prominence in Germany.  This was Expressionism.  Adherents of this school had no urge to reproduce objective realities.  They were concerned with the emotions and responses provoked in the viewer by objects and events...

Lady In A Green Jacket, August Mack, 1913: Expressionism


Expressionist artists rallied around the work of a Norwegian, Edvard Munch, whose portraits of a screaming figure standing on a bridge, captured a sensation that Nature herself was shrieking in rage and pain, that shadows were coming soon to darken the world...

On White II, Wassilly Kandinsky, 1923: Expressionism


[Newmeyer, in her Enjoying Modern Art, speculated geography possibly had something to do with the styles of the Impressionists and Expressionist, noting the landscape of France offered sunny skies and coastlines while Germany lay almost totally hemmed in by its neighbors.  She didn't press the point about geography but I suspect if she wrote today, she might ponder the difference in styles in terms of the growing role of science in the daily lives of men and women in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century.  Methinks in some way Impressionists were physicists with paintbrushes, capturing data received by the human eye, and Expressionists akin to psychologists who urged primal screams long before Arthur Janov began to use the technique in the late 1960s.]

Blue Horses, Franz Marc, 1911: Expressionism


Munch, incidentally, had been earlier influenced by Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh whose work has been described as Post-Impressionistic-- a movement continuing the Impressionist tradition but modifying it to emphasize geometric forms or distort shapes to provoke an emotional response or to use unusual colors...

Strassenarbeiter, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889: Post-Impressionism

Two Women Bathing, Felix Vallaton, 1896: Post-Impressionism


La Belle France is not one to be outdone and she soon responded to the Expressionist movement by fostering Surrealism, a school that achieved widespread popularity across Europe...

The Red Tower, Giorgio De Chirico, 1913: Surrealism


Surrealism is one of the most difficult movements for a blogger prone to short overviews if that blogger wants to create a quick summary and be done with the week's writing.  To me, the artists who call themselves surrealists try to capture the world of dreams and subconscious desires, the landscapes of the collective and individual unconscious...



Its devotees consider surrealism to be a revolutionary movement, a philosophy mocking the smug self-satisfaction of the bourgeois rationalist at the same time it embraces the mystic and metaphysical.  When we look at a surrealist work, be it by Dali or Magritte or Ernst or Tanguy, we encounter surprises, the juxtaposition of objects that do not seem to belong with one another...

The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus,
Salvador Dali, 1959: Surrealism


The world of the surrealist is the world where a properly dressed woman from the 19th century walks through a landscape of classical architecture to a meeting with a skeleton as a nude woman slumbers on a recamier in the shadows of distant desert mountains under a moonlit sky.  And, in the hands of the right artist, it is a world more real than the one you and I see in our waking workaday hours...


Venus Dormida, Paul Delvaux, 1944: Surrealism



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Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by eleven artists who celebrate the majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and animals of West Texas.  Claim your part of a rugged, beautiful and dry corner of America's Southwest:


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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: None