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Visit to a Small Planet (Savoy Film/Sunfilm, Germany, Region 2, 8.95 Euros)

I’ve never seen the original Gore Vidal play on which this film is based, although I’ve read it and frankly don’t remember it as being any great interplanetary shakes. The property was acquired by Paramount, which thought it would make a good vehicle for Jerry Lewis. They should’ve waited a couple of decades and cast Robin Williams.

Jerry is Kreton, a goofball exchange student from 8 million light years away. Whatever the spacemen got in the exchange, get it back. Jerry’s not only fascinated by the Civil War, which he's accidentally landed on Earth 100 years too late to observe, but his race has done away with sex, so he shows a keen interest in observing it, which doesn’t bother Joan Blackman but annoys her boyfriend, Earl Holliman doing an intolerable Jethro Bodine impersonation, a great deal, and isn't THIS an impressive sentence.

Needless to say, Jerry mugs like mad, steps in and out of character, and acts like his usual cross between a nebbish and a nitwit (if there’s a difference). Still, the film is harmless enough, and Jer’s been a lot worse. Fred Clark, Gale Gordon, and John Williams are all on hand to stand around and look exasperated at Jerry’s antics, and if Edgar Kennedy had been alive, he’d probably be in the cast, too. If you do make it to the end of the film (which is a brisk 80 min. long but seems a great sluggish deal longer) you’ll love Jer’s beatnik dance with a gorgeous coffee shop chick. You’ll also be sorry Dean’s not around, I’ll bet.

The Savoy Film DVD is pedestrian, with some scratches here and there and at one point some water damage, it looks like. No trailer, but there is a nice photo gallery of promotional material from around the world. The DVD's in anamorphic widescreen, too. You have your choice between English or German soundtracks, but the opening credits are in German only(!).

It! (Warner Home Video, Best Buy exclusive, $14.99)

This Halloween season, Best Buy is offering a pair of rather obscure double-features from the vaults, all from that magical year of 1966. Chamber of Horrors introduces the Baltimore Strangler, who dispatches his victims in a plethora of gruesome ways. Cesare Danova and Wilfred Hyde-White star. It’s paired with Brides of Fu Manchu with Christopher Lee, and while I can’t tell one Lee Fu from another, I have never seen one that I thought was anything less than abysmal.

The other disc gives us The Shuttered Room with Young and Carol Lynley in a house haunted by Oliver Reed, or something like that, and – finally – a film with which I’m intimately acquainted, It! This latter film seemed to have been on the Late, Late Show all the time, and while I found it not without interest, it seemed to go on forever. Finally shorn of all the commercial interruptions and in pristine widescreen format, it stands as… well, if not a good movie, at least a pretty good bad movie.

Roddy McDowall is a nutty young man who keeps his mummified mum in a rocking chair and talks to her. At some point, somebody decided Mr. Bloch and Mr. Hitchcock and their solicitors would not be amused, and they’d better bring in a giant Golem to stomp around a museum and murder most discriminately on Roddy’s insane say-so. So that happens for a while, and then Jill Haworth puts on a skimpy outfit and runs around an old mansion flashing skin for a bit, until finally… well, you know how in these movies, the monster always turns on its ‘creator’ and kills him, thereby teaching him a valuable lesson that man was never meant to tamper in God’s domain, and stuff like that? Well, folks, you won’t BELIEVE how this one ends. I applauded and watched it again to make sure I hadn’t fallen asleep and dreamed it all. What a nutty movie. The DVD – sans any bonus material, not even a cheesy trailer – gives us a film that just bursts off the screen; sound and vision are outstanding. Happy Halloween.

The Earrings of Madame de… (Criterion, $39.99)

I was originally planning to present nothing but sci-fi or horror reviews this month, but what th’ hell. Criterion has just released a trio of Max Ophuls films and I watched The Earrings of Madame de… and loved it so I may as well mention it.

Danielle Darrieux finds herself in embarrassing financial straits due to her wasteful ways, so sells a pair of earrings that her husband (Charles Boyer) gave her for a wedding present; she considers them the possession she least cares about. For the first half of the film, the earrings are the star, as they make their way across Europe. Eventually, they come back to her as the most cherished things she owns.

Gorgeously photographed and one of Criterion’s most distinguished packages, stuffed with bonus material and even the novella on which the film was made. One of the best DVDs of the year. Just a beautiful film.

Earlier Reviews

Space Angel is an early ‘60s TV cartoon series that’s about as animated as a light pole. From the creators of Clutch Cargo, Space Angel is an interstellar secret agent named Scott McCloud, who – like the rest of the cast – stands perfectly still all the time. Except for his lips. See, a human mouth is superimposed on each of the cartoon characters in what was called “Synchro-Vox. It doesn’t look cheap, impressive, or even particularly cost effective. It simply looks creepy. Now, I watched this show when I was a kid, and I don’t think I ever noticed the lips moving. I was too busy banging on the side of my TV set trying to get the “cartoons” to move. I would’ve stood a better chance banging on the side of my sister’s Barbie and getting her to leap out of the toy box and dance the Mashed Potato. The DVD (marked “Collection #1) is from VCI Entertainment ($14.99) and contains 9 full episodes that look pretty good. They still don’t move, but they look pretty good.

The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film & Television is a documentary by Jeff Adachi detailing the use and misuse of Asian actors and characters in American movies. Fascinating; in just a few years, the industry went from a genuine Asian star, Sessue Hayakawa, to Bela Lugosi’s Hungarian Mr. Wong. More than 50 film clips are included, plus interviews with actors and filmmakers spanning the decades of cinema. I picked up a copy at Sacramento’s Japanese Film Festival this year ($20) but you can order it from slantedscreen.com.

Tobor the Great is a colossal robot who carts around a scantily-clad babe on the posters and DVD cover but befriends a misbehaving rotten kid in the actual 1954 movie. I don’t care, I liked it anyway (but not as much as I would have had the posters turned out to be accurate). The Commies are after Grandpa’s mechanical man, but they’re gonna have to get past the kid first, and once they manage that (with little trouble, actually) Tobor leaps to the rescue… well, clanks to the rescue, like the Terror of MechaLassie. Fun 1950s sci-fi kiddie show. The DVD from Lionsgate ($14.98) is barebones but a terrific print of the film, and they DID throw in a fold-out replica of the poster, so SOMEBODY over there knew what the selling point of the film is.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 chiller Vampyr is out now in a mega-deluxe edition from Criterion ($39.95) that has just taken the lead for the annual In The Balcony award for outstanding DVD release of the year. Nothing I could say about this film could do it justice, so I’ll talk about the DVD itself, which is magnificent. You get a newly restored high-definition transfer of the film, audio commentary, a 1966 documentary on Dreyer (who, besides this, made another of my all-time favorite films, The Passion of Joan of Arc), additional essays and radio broadcasts, the full screenplay of the film, and Sheridan La Fana’s 1872 novella Carmilla, a source for the film. Okay, I lied, I will talk about the film: in a small village outside of Paris, a lot of weird and creepy things are happening. Shadows have more life in them than people, strange maladies affect young women, and a student of the occult wonders what it all means. I was engrossed from beginning to end, particularly by the size of the spike used to kill the vampire: you don’t just penetrate the heart, see, you have to NAIL the bastards to the earth so they can't get up and wander around. Hadn’t heard that before, but it makes sense. A great release of a great film, and God bless Criterion. 

Balcony to Bagdad

In Germany (Region 2) Universal has released, through Koch Media, a boxed set of three Bagdad-based Technicolor adventures of the 1940s. The “1001 Nacht” collection (34.95 euros) includes the Maria Montez-Jon Hall-Sabu classic Arabian Nights (1942), already available in the U.S., plus one of the follow-ups, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), with Miss Montez and Mr. Hall but Turhan Bey subbing for Sabu. (With the 1944 film Cobra Woman available on DVD in France, that leaves White Savage, Gypsy Wildcat, and Sudan so far not on DVD anywhere for those of us who’d love to complete the gallery of six Montez-Hall Technicolor extravaganzas.)

The third film in the German collection recycles costumes and sets from the Montez films as a 1949 Maureen O’Hara vehicle called Bagdad, directed by Charles Lamont, better remembered for directing a string of Abbott & Costello pictures. Created as a Saturday-afternoon matinee offering, Bagdad succeeds admirably as entertainment for the popcorn set; unlike the Montez model on which its built, it’s a fairly humorless picture (no Andy Devine or Shemp Howard here) but the sheer lunacy of the plot, cast, and situation actually makes it funnier than most of the A&C pictures Lamont gave us.

Miss O’Hara is Marjan, a Bedouin princess returning to her native country after years abroad (years that saw her appearance change from dark Arabic coloring to crimson-haired Irish, apparently) only to discover that her father has been murdered by a gang of cut-throat desert pirates called the Black Robes. She vows revenge against their unknown leader, only to discover that it’s her lover, Hassan (Paul Christian), except it’s NOT really Hassan; he’s been framed by the real leader, Hassam’s cousin Raizul (John Sutton) and the evil, duplicitous Turkish Pasha Ali Nadim (Vincent Price), who’s trying his best to romance Princess Marjan on the side. Oh, and from time to time the Bedouin princess dons an evening gown and belts out a pop song in a Bagdad café.

See? I told you it was funny. And I haven’t even gotten to the part where Miss O’Hara disguises herself as a gypsy so she can wear her old Esmeralda outfit and dance and sing in the Black Robes’ camp. One has to wonder what the film's credited technical advisor, Mahmud Shaikhaly, thought he was doing to earn the money he was making.

I love hammy ol’ Vinnie Price, and he’s quite suave and charming here as the showy villain who wants to seduce Maggie but will slit her throat if he has to. But… For some reason, Price’s right eye is closed throughout the film, not unlike Popeye. Did he get sand in it during filming, or was this part of his character? My guess is he’s winking at the audience. Seriously! He knew how silly the situation, was, surely.

Here in the Balcony we’re not above enjoying bad films that manage to maintain a high level of entertainment anyway, and Bagdad certainly qualifies. The DVD’s picture and sound are good if not great, and there’s an extensive photo gallery as a bonus, with the full German pressbook (apparently, the film was known in Germany as Die Schwarzen Teufel von Bagdad, or “The Black Devil of Bagdad”, not, as one might suppose, “The Irish Princess of Bagdad”. The three disc set cost us about $60 delivered from Germany, and is worth it.