Black Gate

The Court Jester (Paramount 1956)

Swashbuckler heroes tend to be boisterous and aggressively cheerful, embracing whatever life throws at them, not reacting so much as over-reacting to every joy and challenge, happy to be outside the constraints that keep normal folk like us from picking up apples in the grocery by impaling them on the points of our swords. Swashbuckler films often have comic overtones because it fits the character of their devil-may-care protagonists. And some swashbuckler movies take the plunge into outright parody. Here are two of the latter, plus an immediate predecessor that helped pave the way.

The Flame and the Arrow

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1950
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Burt Lancaster burst onto the Hollywood scene in 1946 playing a tender tough guy in The Killers, a dark film noir based on a Hemingway story, and he soon earned a reputation for excelling at edgy, dramatic roles. But before Hollywood, and before his service in World War II, Lancaster had been… a circus performer. In the 1930s he was one-half of Lang & Cravat, a comical acrobatic act with his diminutive partner and lifelong friend Nick Cravat, who, as part of his shtick, never said a word, leaving all the snappy patter to Lancaster.

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Tone is one of the most important characteristics of a story, one of the hardest to get right, and one of the hardest to discuss. The feel of a story, what is above and beyond the mechanics of plot or the construction of character or even the specifics of imagery, is a large part of what comes to mind when you think of a story after the story’s done. And tone can be the main concern of a storyteller; it’s a perfectly valid artistic choice to subordinate narrative logic or character motivation or whatever else to the feel the story’s supposed to instill. Or, at least, it’s a valid choice when it works. Which brings up the difficulty in describing tone. It’s often hard to explain what creates it and how well that succeeds, but more, the perception of tone can vary wildly. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. Particularly when the tone is abstract.

Which is all useful to remember in viewing Laurin. A German production shot in Hungary, it was written and directed by Robert Sigl and released in 1988. A 4K restoration’s drawn attention to the movie, and this year’s Fantasia hosted its Canadian premiere. The movie aspires to the tone of a dream or a fable, and whether it succeeds will likely depend on the individual viewer.

It’s set in a small town in Europe in the very early twentieth century. People have begun to disappear, particularly children. Laurin (Dóra Szinetár) is a young girl whose mother has died a bizarre death, and whose father is absent at sea. She’s drawn into the mystery of the missing youths, investigating castle ruins and a mysterious man in black.

And that’s essentially the movie. It aims at creating a dreamlike tone more than a tight dramatic plot, and at only 84 minutes, that’s not unreasonable. It is very slow, and the story simple. Dialogue’s mostly underwritten. Does it work? I would say some aspects, certainly. For me the movie was undermined by its way of telling its story. But that approach is probably central to what the film’s doing, and it’s possible I’m overly concerned with a narrative structure in which Laurin itself is less invested. There is the raw matter for a structured story here, but the movie is more interested in tone than structure. If you can put aside the desire to follow the development of a story and instead dwell in the moment of what you see, that tone might be enough for you.

To go into more detail, let’s start with what clearly works. The film’s gorgeous. There’s an intense autumnal atmosphere in the rich colours of the woodlands and the deep shadows of the night photography. Interiors of homes have the close, overstuffed feel of the late Victorian era (or, in this case, early Edwardian). Contrasting with both is a schoolroom setting that is appropriately muted and drab. There’s a lushness too in the detailed costumes, as there is in the movie’s use of long shots of forests and stone ruins. Note also that despite the feverish tone that emerges there are no special effects to challenge the mood.

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Yesterday I wrote about a horror-comedy that worked because it found a strong balance between its horror and its comedy, while deriving both tones naturally from its characters. The movie I watched after that one was also a horror-comedy. But it was less successful.

The Day of the Beast (El día de la Bestia) was released in 1995, and has a 4K restoration on the way from the fine people at Severin Films. Directed by Álex de la Iglesia, and written by de la Iglesia with Jorge Guerricaechevarría, it follows a mild-mannered Spanish priest, Ángel (Álex Angulo). He’s cracked the secret code of the Book of Revelations, and worked out that the Antichrist will be born on Christmas Day. But he’s not sure where. So he’s decided to catch the attention of Satan, by committing all the sins he can think of. He’ll then sell his soul to learn where the Antichrist is being born, and go there to kill the infant. (Presumably, if you’ve gotten to the point of selling your soul to Satan, infanticide becomes a triviality.)

Ángel wanders through Madrid, gathering an eclectic variety of supporting characters. A friendly metalhead, José María (Santiago Segura), becomes his henchman. A mysterious TV psychic, Professor Cavan (Armando De Razza) may know something. And then there’s a mysterious gang going around murdering homeless people and leaving graffiti commanding “clean up Madrid”.

It all works very well for the first half of the film. Ángel’s plan is a ramshackle bit of plotting, but it works to get across the basic comedic idea of a cloistered man who doesn’t understand sin very well trying to be evil. Thanks to Angulo’s performance the movie gets a lot of mileage out of meek Ángel being bad, and on top of that the secondary characters are sketeched in with verve and originality. De Razza’s arrogant psychic makes for a good contrast with Ángel, and the way he’s set up and brought into the film works well.

Unfortunately, the movie then switches gears for the second half. It doesn’t really become a straight-ahead horror film as the first half occasionally hinted, though. It instead becomes something of an action movie, starting with an extended sequence in which the film’s leads escape from an apartment building. Various running-around ensues, none of which is particularly interesting, and the movie concludes with a sequence in which the leads are irrelevant to the working-out of the story. (You can almost see a parody of the visitation of the Magi, if you squint, but for no obvious purpose.)

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Macbeth is one of the earliest true horror stories, in the sense of a story whose main aim is to play with the emotion of fear, and there’s a notable comic-relief scene with a gatekeeper right after the first gruesome murder. That scene became the subject of a famous essay by Thomas de Quincey arguing (roughly) that the horror’s made greater by contrast. So from the point where horror first began to emerge as a genre, storytellers have been conscious of the effect that comes from balancing horror with the everyday, and even with the comedic.

Which was in my mind on the next-to-last-day of the 2020 Fantasia Festival, which began for me with two horror-comedies. The first was a Canadian film called Anything For Jackson, which looked like it would lean more to the horror aspect. More precisely, it looked a little like Rosemary’s Baby, only in this case perhaps intentionally funny and maybe actually scary.

Directed by Justin Dyck and written by Keith Cooper, it stars Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy as Henry and Audrey Walsh, an elderly couple still mourning the death of their daughter and her young son Jackson. As the movie opens, they’ve abducted a young pregnant woman, Becker (Konstantina Mantelos), a patient of Henry, an obstetrician. Henry and Audrey have an evil ritual that will implant Jackson’s soul in Becker’s child’s body. Whether Becker likes it or not. Becker doesn’t want a child and doesn’t want an abortion, but she also doesn’t want this. Yet her attempts to escape are only one of the complications and challenges the Walshes encounter.

This movie works because Dyck and Cooper nail the tonal balance of the horror and the comedy. The first shot is a long take, about two and a half minutes, of a nice slightly dotty older couple going about their morning routine and then abducting a terrified young woman. The shift from gentle comedy to something deeply wrong is managed well, and the movie consistently gets that shift right not only from scene to scene but within a scene as well. The pacing and the scripting are exactly right in exactly the ways they have to be.

The film looks nice, too, colours muted and shadows thick. Winter snow echoes the emotional coldness underlying the story, and emphasises the Walshes’ home as both a place of confinement and a kind of sanctuary (for the Walshes). But over the course of the film horror imagery grows, as the Walshes experiment with the Satanic text they’ve found — possibly the oldest book in the world, we’re told — and more and more innocents stumble into the story.

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Brazilian director José Mojica Marins died earlier this year at the age of 83. He made low-budget films across a number of genres, with his horror work best known. His character Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão), introduced in the 1963 film At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (A Meia Noite eu Levarei sua Alma) is a kind of national ghoul of Brazil. Fantasia decided to honour Marins by making three of his films available on-demand through the festival, and scheduling a talk about Marins with his friend Dennison Ramalho on the last day of the festival; you can watch the talk here. I, who had never heard of Marins before this year’s Fantasia, decided to remedy my ignorance by watching the three films they were hosting back-to-back-to-back: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, 1968’s The Strange World of Coffin Joe (O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão), and 1971’s The End of Man (Finis Hominis). They’re three very different movies, and together made a fascinating experience.

What I’ve since learned about Marins from various sources: he was born in 1936 in São Paulo, and grew up making amateur 8mm and 16mm films. He released fumetti (comics with photos for illustrations), founded his own film company at 18, and in 1958 put out his first completed feature, a Western. He self-financed At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, which was based on a nightmare he’d had. Unable to find an actor for the lead role, Marins played it himself; he was already a striking figure, with fingernails grown out several inches, and for the film he added a beard, top hat, black cape and suit. Joe was an undertaker who grew obsessed with having a perfect son by the perfect woman, a character who threw overboard all morality and received ideas of good and evil in pursuit of his will — an explicitly Nietzschean monster. Joe was instantly popular in Brazil, returning in sequels and hosting horror TV shows. Marins would go on to make films in other genres until 2008, though (so far as I can tell) he remained on the margins of the Brazilian industry.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul is a black-and-white film in which we’re introduced to Joe, an undertaker in a small town, and follow him through a story of murder and rape in which he tries to father his ideal son. There is a fortuneteller who predicts a bad end, and a curse, a nasty bit with a spider, a climax in a graveyard at midnight. There’s an energy to the movie, and a definite fascination to Joe as a character — a monster in the gothic tradition, a human being who aspires to be something more than human.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe is an anthology film. The first segment, “The Dollmaker” (“O Fabricante de Bonecas”) gives us the story of an old dollmaker with three beautiful daughters; three youths plan to rape them, but their plans don’t work out as they expect. The second, “Obsession” (“Tara”), is a silent piece about a balloon seller who becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman; she is murdered, and he breaks into her tomb to violate her corpse. “Theory” (“Ideologia”) begins with an appearance on TV by controversial professor Oãxiac Odéz (played by Marins), who argues that humans are driven by instinct and not by intellect or by emotions such as love; this leads to a colleague and his wife, who disagree, being imprisoned and tortured.

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