Black Gate

I picked five random SF movies from the 1950’s across the quality spectrum to review this time around but while doing my due diligence research discovered that actually three of them had been directed by Bert I.. Gordon, so, not exactly random. But it’s too late to changer the line up.

Kronos: 1957 (8)

Interesting alien invasion flick, with some rather original concepts for the time. The aliens are energy creatures, though they do the thing many aliens do in these movies: take over human bodies via mind control. Sometimes the enslaved human manages to warn others, but, of course, no one actually listens until it’s almost too late.

This time around, the aliens want our electricity and atomic energy, so they send down this whopping big robot (although no one ever calls it a robot) from their flying saucer (though everyone, including the scientists who discover it, call it an asteroid for some reason) who then gobbles all the energy it can. The always dependable Jeff Morrow plays the astronomer who also has mad skills in nuclear physics or some damn thing, because he comes up with the plan to stop Kronos, despite all the best efforts of his hot girlfriend to get him to think about her for a change.

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Silvana Mangano and Kirk Douglas in Ulysses (1954)

Ryan Harvey has written extensively here about the peplum movie or Italian sword-and-sandal craze of 1959-65, a phenomenon that had an immediate origin in three films: Ulysses, which showed that there was a postwar Italian market for adventure films from the era of myth; Hercules, which proved you could make such a movie popular on both sides of the Atlantic; and Hercules Unchained, which demonstrated there was a formula for repeated success. These were well-crafted movies that aimed much higher than most of their successors and provided solid, and occasionally even thoughtful entertainment. If you’re unfamiliar with them I’m pleased to introduce you, and if they’re old friends you can join me in appreciation.

Ulysses

Rating: ****
Origin: Italy, 1954
Director: Mario Camerini
Source: Lionsgate DVD

Kirk Douglas made his reputation in Hollywood in the late Forties as a leading man in a series of intense, dramatic roles. By 1954 he was ready for a change of pace: action hero! He signed on with Disney for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and with Dino De Laurentiis in Italy for the epic Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer’s The Odyssey. This was a big-budget production, with lavish sets, exteriors shot on Mediterranean islands, and a lovely full-scale Greek galley. Plus, of course, a cyclops.

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Le Capitan (1960)

As you might expect from the country that gave us Cyrano and d’Artagnan, the French film industry has always been enthusiastic about making swashbucklers. A lot of them have no available English-language versions, alas, but here are three of the best that do. I think you’ll agree they all have a certain je ne sais quoi.

The Captain (or Le Capitan)

Rating: ****
Origin: France/Italy, 1960
Director: André Hunebelle
Source: Pathé DVD

This French film may be the best swashbuckler you’ve never seen. It’s set in France a dozen years before the events of The Three Musketeers, when King Louis XIII was only 15 years old and still ruled by his mother, Marie de Médicis, and her lover, the Italian adventurer Concino Concini, whom Marie has elevated to the rank of prime minister. Concini’s hired thugs are killing nobles who oppose him and looting their estates, and the movie opens with a mêlée in which Concini’s assassins, led by their boss, Rinaldo, are raiding a count’s château. The count’s friend, the Chevalier de Capestang (Jean Marais), gallops up and leaps into the fray, turning the tide, but not before Rinaldo knifes the count in the back. As the thugs retreat Capestang is wounded by another thrown knife and is about to slain by the last assassin when the killer is shot down by a mysterious lady (Elsa Martinelli) in a male cavalier outfit.

The mystery woman nurses Capestang back to health but then disappears. Was she just a vision of delirium? Once healed, Capestang agrees to represent the grievances of the local nobles and travel to Paris to appeal to Concini — and maybe even the young king. Concini (Arnoldo Foà) tries to co-opt the capable Capestang, but he haughtily refuses, and Concini, in Italian, dubs him “Il Capitano” after the stock commedia dell’arte character of the strutting braggart. Capestang accepts the moniker as a badge of honor.

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The Black Hole (Disney, 1979)

Stephen Spielberg may have said that “the arc of the cinematic universe is long, but it bends towards quality,” but that’s a crock. (Actually, he didn’t say that. No one did. But I need to establish something here, so cut me some slack, will you?) Much as we may wish otherwise, cinema history, like the other, capital H kind, isn’t linear or progressive – it’s cyclical. This means that there will be times when things are trending up and times when they’re heading down, periods of boom and periods of bust, seasons when excellence commands the stage and epochs when utter crap towers so high over everything that it blots out the sun. Perhaps no film genre demonstrates this inevitable ebb and flow better than science fiction.

Never was this more evident than during the late 70’s and early 80’s, a low end of the bell curve era if there ever was one. For every Star Wars or Alien, there was a Metalstorm or a Spacehunter. Actually, given the iron logic of Sturgeon’s Law (“Ninety percent of everything is crap”), for every Empire Strikes Back there were nine (!) Laserblasts. In fact, you could argue that this arid stretch invalidates the law altogether – by proving Sturgeon wildly optimistic. Ninety percent? Anyone who spent time in the mall multiplexes during those years could be excused for thinking that the offal percentage was closer to ninety-nine than ninety.

(By the way, if you think I’m being unduly hard on these films, we can easily talk about some of the era’s other cultural products. How about music? Where shall we start – Martha Davis and the Motels? A Flock of Seagulls? Loverboy? Yeah… that’s what I thought. Back to crappy sci-fi movies it is.)

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The Mark of Zorro (1940)

November 27, 1920, a century ago plus a few weeks, saw the release of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s The Mark of Zorro, and the beginning of the swashbuckler film as we know it. There was a lot more Zorro to follow, some of it very good indeed, so this week we’re looking at the early post-silent career of the Masked Man in Black.

The Mark of Zorro

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1940
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Source: Fox Studio Classics DVD

Tyrone Power’s family had been on the stage for generations, and he considered himself a serious actor. He finally broke into the movies in the mid-1930s and became a popular leading man for 20th Century Fox in parts both serious and not-so-serious. Meanwhile Warner Bros. was making a pile from Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers; though Fox didn’t have Flynn, they did have Power, and Darryl F. Zanuck decided Power was going to be Fox’s sword-slinging hero. To launch him in that new role they chose to remake The Mark of Zorro, the film that had launched Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s swashbuckling career. It wasn’t the kind of part Power really wanted to play, but he dutifully agreed, and the result was a classic that typecast him, rightly or wrongly, for the rest of his career.

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The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)

During the American occupation of Japan after World War II, one of its many social restrictions was a prohibition on the making of violent movies, which meant no historical samurai adventures. When the occupation was lifted in 1952, the chambara, or swordplay action films, gradually returned, and by the late Fifties they made up a significant portion of the movies and TV shows made for Japanese domestic consumption. Based on a story by the novelist Kan Shimozawa, The Tale of Zatoichi was just one more minor chambara feature, but Shintaro Katsu’s portrayal of the blind swordsman was surprisingly popular and the Zatoichi films went on to become the longest running chambara series of all, running to 25 feature films and four seasons as a TV series. And yet its hero is no noble samurai, or even a masterless ronin, but a mere low-ranking member of the criminal yakuza. Nonetheless, he’s a character you’ll never forget. Elements of the Zatoichi films showed up later in the Lone Wolf & Cub series, which in turn helped inspire The Mandalorian, so these films are relevant even today.

The Tale of Zatoichi

Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1962
Director: Kenji Misumi
Source: Criterion DVD

In Japan in the late Fifties and early Sixties, mid-level studios like Daei Motion Pictures churned out samurai action films and TV shows much like Hollywood did Westerns in the same period. These were mostly disposable and forgettable, and most have been duly forgotten. You can be sure that nobody who worked on The Tale of Zatoichi thought they were making anything but one more quickie chambara feature, but somehow they created a story that transcended its genre limitations and spawned the longest-running samurai series in Japanese film.

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You’d have to not be on social media to not know that Disney+ just released its newest Marvel Cinematic Universe offering, WandaVision. The first two episodes dropped last night and additional episodes will appear every Friday until season one is done.

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After the grim years of World War II, a large part of the moviegoing public was looking for lighter fare in their entertainment, and Hollywood returned to making swashbucklers, many of them in the happy hues of Technicolor. Pirates were back on the menu, but as America headed into the conformist Fifties, the pirates on its movie screens were more rascals than cutthroats, good-hearted rogues who would plunder some buried treasure and maybe hold a lady for ransom, but for whom keel-hauling and suchlike barbarisms were out of the question. Wholesome buccaneers as family entertainment! Absurd, of course, but fun if it was done with a wink at the viewer.

Anne of the Indies

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1951
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Source: Amazon Streaming Video

We usually award the title Queen of the Swashbucklers to Maureen O’Hara, but Jean Peters makes a grab for her crown in this fine pirate melodrama. As an orphan girl, Anne (Peters) was raised aboard ship by Edward Teach — Blackbeard himself! — and now commands her own fighting ship, the Sheba Queen, under the name Captain Providence, and she’s a real hellion. Since her brother was hanged as a pirate by the English, she preys on English shipping and kills English sailors without mercy, making the captives walk the plank. But one captured sailor is the strikingly handsome Louis Jourdan playing a Frenchman named (what else?) François, who claims to be a privateer’s navigator who’d been captured by the Royal Navy. Captain Providence frees him, adds him to her crew, and takes him to Nassau to meet Blackbeard — which is where the real trouble starts.

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