Monthly Archives: December 2015

Forgotten Films: Between Two Worlds (1944)

Posted on by
1

Between Two Worlds is quite a different film from The Thing From Another World.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 146th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

I really enjoy doing these columns and seeing the variety of films that I have enjoyed or, in some cases, not enjoyed. Every now and again I stumble across a film that I have never heard of but catches my interest. This week I had intended to review The Thing From Another World and give some background story about it and me. But after watching it the other night, I decided to go to sleep rather than immediately put my thoughts down on the computer.

The next morning I got up and as I scanned the channel guides, I ran across this film Beyond Two Worlds. I read the brief synopsis and looked at the cast. I was sold on it. I was already five minutes into the broadcast, but I figured I could catch up with it pretty fast.

I am so glad I did. First let’s look at the cast. The leads are Paul Henreid as Henry Bergner and Eleanor Parker as his wife Anne. That’s a pretty decent start. I saw John Garfield listed as Tom Prior, Edmund Gwenn as Scrubby the steward, and Sydney Greenstreet as Tim Thompson. The pairing of Henreid and Greenstreet just a year after Casablanca got my interest up. And there was a score from Eric Wolfgang Korngold, which immediately makes any film worth watching.

The characters in Between Two Worlds try to unravel the mystery of how they ended up together on a ship at sea.

Henry Bergner is an Austrian pianist turned soldier living in London. His hands are injured and he can no longer play. He and Ann want to get to America but are having trouble securing exit visas. (Where have I heard something like that before?) Distraught, he leaves the diplomatic office and returns home, where he seals the window and plays his favorite record.

Ann has missed Henry at the office but sees a group of people getting their documents and leaving. As they leave, there is an air raid and the fleeing car suffers a direct hit. Everyone is killed instantly. She returns to their flat to find Henry in the act of suicide and refuses to leave him. They drift off.

Suddenly they are on a large ship with a group of people, mingling in the bar. They don’t recall how they got there nor does anyone else. The friendly steward helps people with drinks and conversation. The film sort of becomes a Grant Hotel at sea. You have the business executive Mr. Lingley (George Coulouris), the minister (Dennis King), the upper class couple who don’t know why they have to associate with the riffraff (Isobel Elson and Gilbert Emory), the journalist (Garfield), the actress (Faye Emerson), the housekeeper (Sara Allgood) and the sailor (George Tobias).

Eventually, Ann realizes that she has seen these people before. They were the ones in the vehicle hit by the bomb. Suddenly both she and Henry remember that they were in the process of dying just moments earlier. They are on a ship between two worlds – sailing to Heaven and to Hell.

They realize that none of the others knows what is happening. The steward asks them to let everyone relax and enjoy the ride for the moment and not bring it up their conclusion. But there is tension in the room. Prior, the journalist is washed up and unemployed, partly due to a series of articles he did on Lingley, who is a capitalist at all costs and could be a President of the I’m for Me First party. He gets what he wants no matter what the cost. The Reverend is off on a trip to begin a new series of work for the betterment of his church. The actress is hanging with Prior, but Lingley is making a play. The sailor has just gotten word that he has become a new father. He’s heading home after having three ships torpedoed beneath him.

Prior overhears Henry and Ann and tells everyone that they are dead. The steward reluctantly confirms this. When asked what happens next, he tells everyone that some the Examiner will be there to… examine them. The Examiner turns out to be the Reverent Tim Thompson, an old colleague of the minister. Together they examine each of the passengers one at a time to determine their final destination.

I’m not going to go into the further details, but it goes much as you would expect, until it comes down to Henry and Ann, who are the last to be examined. As a suicide, Henry presents a problem to them. Heaven is not his destination, but it is for Ann who did not actively pursue that course.

I thought this was a fine film. Apparently it is based on a 1924 play titled Outward Bound, which starred Leslie Howard. It was filmed in 1930. In the original play and film version, the audience did not know the passengers were dead until the end of the performance. Leonard Maltin in his Movie Guide liked Outward Bound better than Between Two Worlds. I will have to be on the lookout for that one now.

So I’ll be back next week with The Thing From Another World, unless fate intervenes.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Cocktail Hour: The Nightflyer inspired by George R.R. Martin’s novella “Nightflyers”

Posted on by
Reply

The cover of the 1985 TOR edition of Nightflyers

Before the HBO series, the best seller list and the late night talk show appearances, Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin penned science fiction that was every bit as dark and rewarding as his epic fantasy. Some, including the 1980 novella “Nightflyers,” was dark enough to drift in that chilling stretch of space between sf and horror.

“Nightflyers,” available in Martin’s Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective, opens by describing an ancient alien race, the volcryn, who have been traveling the universe for millennia without direct human contact. “When Jesus of Nazareth hung dying on his cross, the volcryn passed within a light-year of his agony, headed outward,” the story’s unnamed narrator explains.

We learn that a man named Karoly d’Branin has assembled an underfunded research mission to seek contact with the volcryn. His motley collection of academics travels on a starcraft called the Nightflyer to reach the enigmatic aliens. Strangely, the ship’s sole crewmember, Royd Eris, hides behind the bulkheads, limiting his contact with the passengers to his intercom and a holographic image.

After some deadly and suspicious accidents, the team begins to suspect Royd is an artificial intelligence who’s covering up for a menacing inhuman presence stalking them on the ship. The rising body count and growing paranoia make for a ripping tale of deep-space terror. Think Alien shaken with Scanners and served with a 2001: A Space Odyssey chaser.

The Nightflyer cocktail is complex and mysterious yet easy to drink.

Martin masterfully builds tension during the novella’s hundred pages by throwing one difficulty after another at the research team. Beyond unraveling the nature of the ship’s inhuman presence, they must stave off the craft’s destruction, deal with an undead menace and be prepared for their pending encounter with volcryn. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air — especially with one character after another perishing under increasingly grisly circumstances.

The fear is also heightened because we’re never sure who will be next to be blown apart or shot into space. It’s clear Martin began honing his no-one-is-safe philosophy decades before using it to keep fans riveted to Game of Thrones. Don’t expect any of the characters to be as vibrantly drawn as those in GOT, though. Probably because Martin is throwing so much into so few pages, none ever seems to be more than the sum of his or her quirks.

All told, though, “Nightflyers” is a worth your time if you enjoy the darker end of the sf spectrum. (If you like the novella, you also might want to search for the 1987 low-budget movie it inspired. Just be prepared to dig out your VCR; it’s never been released on DVD.)

This week’s cocktail attempts to capture “Nightflyers'” dark, cryptic feel by bringing together the complex flavors of gin with the complimentary floral notes of creme de violette, a liqueur made from violet flowers and a brandy base spirit. Orgeat, a sweet mixer flavored with almonds and rosewater, also adds another intricate layer of flavor. Together the ingredients make for a mysterious, slightly sweet and incredibly drinkable cocktail with a lingering floral complexity. The eerie lavender color is part of the appeal.

Nightflyer

2 ounces gin
1/2 ounce creme de violette
1/2 ounce orgeat
1/2 lemon juice
Lemon twist for garnish

Shake the liquid ingredients over ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with the lemon twist.

Forgotten Book: The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs (1969)

Posted on by
4

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 168th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Once again I have to apologize for those few regular readers, After Thanksgiving I began a new work project and that consumed my time. Normally over the holiday I would have spent some time reading but we had guests and that didn’t happen. I hope it doesn’t happen again anytime soon, but it will, so hopefully we can all bear through it.

This week’s title is a book I have had for many years and somehow never got around to reading, even though I knew it had a great reputation and that I would enjoy it. The Face in the Frost is by the great YA writer John Bellairs, but this is not a real YA book. This was meant for the adult fantasy market and it deserves the reputation it has maintained for the last 46 years.

It is a story of magic and magicians and friendship and how all these things work together. The two main characters are both magicians with familiar names, Prospero and Roger Bacon. Prospero lives in the South Kingdom while Roger lives in the North Kingdom. The two realms have no other names than that. They each have their quirks.

The two magicians are old friends and see each other rarely. So it is with joy that Prospero greeted his old friend who came telling of a book he had been searching for. The book is in an unknown tongue and has last been owned by a wizard named Melichus who had trained with Prospero and, during that training, the two had become not friends, more like adversaries.

Strange things are happening in the kingdoms and the two wizards find themselves on a quest to find the book before evil really happens. They shrink down and travel on a small ship. They get separated. Prospero finds an evil pseudo-village and nearly dies. The wizards are reunited and find themselves traveling in a smaller version of Cinderella’s coach, made form a squash.

All the above makes this sound formulaic and squeaky. It is not that at all. The writing is so wonderful it practically leaps off the page. I found myself not wanting to finish the book because I was enjoying it so much, but this column was not going to write itself if I didn’t finish. But, let me cite an example from the first chapter:

“Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there was a tall skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest filled with elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces: a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads. And fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed twisty-copper-columned observatory…”

Your mileage may vary but I was hooked from those words on. There are not any cutesy elves or orcs or hobbits or warrior-kings. This is the good stuff, not the derivative stuff that passes for fantasy these days.

Take the time. Enjoy the ride. Treasure the words. Live. You won’t regret it.

I know this is a shorter column, but the time is late and I have a 5 a.m. wake-up staring me down.

Buy some great books for your friends and yourself for Christmas. Spread the words.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Moment of Wonder: Pluto up close

Posted on by
Reply

NASA’s New Horizons mission just keeps on giving.

The agency last week released photos — including the one above — that give the closest view available of Pluto’s glaciers, mountains and craters. Most of the craters shown above lie in the 155-mile-wide Burney Basin, named after Venetia Burney, the English schoolgirl who first proposed the name “Pluto” when it was discovered in 1930.

Check out the layering in the interior walls of craters such as the large one in the center. Such layers usually signify an important change in surface composition or a major geological event.

If you want to see a larger swath of Pluto’s surface, check out this mosaic of images NASA created to show a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide trending from its horizon across the al-Idrisi Mountains and onto the shoreline of Sputnik Planum. Posting it here would really do the image no justice.

Forgotten Films: Porco Rosso (1992)

Posted on by
Reply

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 145th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

It is no secret that I like the anime films of Hiyao Miyazaki. Back in 2011 I reviewed Nasicaa and had nice things to say about that. So this week, I decided I needed to return to Miyazaki’s vision of the world. My friend, Sam Hudson, gave me the DVD of this film some time ago, but I never quite got around to watching it. This happens far too often. He had previously lent us the Canadian production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra starring Christopher Plummer. He had been by the house of Thanksgiving, so we watched it then and I was able to return it to him.

Now, back to Porco Rosso. I’m not sure why I had not watched it. It hit several of my hot spots – Miyazaki, air pirates, animated films and true fun. So, Sam, I publicly apologize. I should have watched this sooner and credited you for making it happen.

Porco Rosso is the story of Marco (voiced by Michael Keaton in the English language version), a World War I flying ace for Italy, who is the last of his old squadron. His best friend died in their final battle just two days after marrying the lovely Gina. During the battle, he sees the ghosts of various pilots and planes heading into the light. He tries to follow them but is rendered unconscious. When he awakens, he finds all the others gone and he has changed. When he sees his reflection, he finds that he has been given the face of a pig. Marco is gone; enter Porco Rosso, the Crimson Pig. He is a loner who works as a bounty hunter stopping air pirates working the Mediterranean Sea. He fights the sea planes, never killing, but disabling planes for fees from the ship owners.

And he is very good at what he does. So much so that the pirates hire an American pilot Donald Curtis (Cary Elwes) to bring Porco down. Curtis has met them at the Hotel Adriano, run by Marco’s longtime friend and the widow of his best friend, Gina (Susan Egan). Curtis has an interest in Gina but is upset that she is more interested in Marco. In a dogfight, Porco loses to Curtis, but manages to survive and bring most of his plane home.

He takes the plane to Milan and his old mechanic Piccolo (David Ogden Stiers). Marco is a wanted man in Italy, so he is taking a serious chance. Piccolo’s sons are all gone into the Italian military, but he has a secret weapon. His granddaughter Fio (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) is an engineer and has some radical plans for the new plane. Marco does not have enough money but eventually allows Piccolo and Fio to build the plane. Since all his sons are gone, he recruits all the women in the extended family to build the plane.

Eventually, Marco and Fio have to escape before full testing because the secret police are coming. Marco finds all the pirates waiting for him at his “secret” island lair. Eventually, though Fio’s negotiation, Marco and Curtis agree to a duel. If Curtis wins, he will marry Fio. If Marco wins, Curtis will pay off the plane’s debt.

There’s quite a bit more to the story, but that’s the basic plot. There’s lots of fun, some weird Japanese humor and lots of brilliant vistas and aerial combat. I don’t know if Neal Barrett Jr. ever saw this, but I know he would have loved it. He was a major fan of World War I aircraft and the fabulous aviation pulps of the period. I could not help but think of him as I watched this film. He’s been gone nearly two years, and it seems I think of him almost daily.

I had a great time with this film and I think if you like anime, aviation pulps or fun stories you will also. The film is available, as are most of Miyazaki’s, through Disney, who released the version I saw. They should be readily available from the usual online sources.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Cocktail Hour: Smoke Ghost (inspired by Fritz Leiber’s short story of the same name)

Posted on by
Reply

The Smoke Ghost cocktail brings a touch of smoke to the Manhattan.

Although best known for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword-and-sorcery series, many horror fans get their first exposure to Fritz Leiber via his oft-anthologized short story “Smoke Ghost.”

First appearing in the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds, “Smoke Ghost” is noteworthy as one of the first works to shift the ghost tale away from the drafty mansions and castles of 19th Century Gothic fiction. Its title apparition could only manifest amid the filth, violence and alienation of a large, modern city.

On his way home via a commuter train, neurotic businessman Catesby Wran spots an amorphous black shape lurking among the urban rooftops and smokestacks he passes. Soon, the sighting becomes an obsession, and Wran fears the shape — an embodiment of all that is dirty and frightening about the modern world — is pursuing him, attempting to taint him with its grime.

As the story unfolds, Wran finds physical evidence of his haunting, mostly in the form of soot he believes the ghost leaves behind. Although the reader is left wondering whether anything supernatural is actually taking place, we understand how Wran interprets it as the residue of “the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and Fascist wars.”

The leap is easy to follow because Leiber’s prose taps so perfectly into Wran’s paranoia. The story’s language is not evocative of the bumps and drips of the previous century’s ghost tales but of the hard, gritty prose of noir detective fiction. By emphasizes the setting’s filth and seediness, Leiber taps into his protagonist’s fear of the grim, grimy century in which he finds himself.

The opening page of "Smoke Ghost" as it appeared in Unknown Worlds.

It’s easy to see how “Smoke Ghost” left an imprint on horror works that followed — from Ramsey Campbell to the darker urban fantasy writers. A raft of movies from “Dark City” to “The Machinist” also seem to owe it a heavy debt.

“Smoke Ghost” is a landmark in the evolution of modern horror — and one worthy of raising a glass to. In its honor, this week’s cocktail introduces the element of smoke to one of the most iconic of urban cocktails, the Manhattan.

Smoke Ghost

2 1/2 oz Smoky Whiskey, such as Ranger Creek Rimfire Mesquite Smoked Texas Single Malt Whiskey
3/4 oz Red Sweet Vermouth
1 hefty dash Angostura Bitters
1 Maraschino Cherry

Combine whiskey, vermouth and bitters with a few ice cubes in a mixing glass. Stir gently until the mixture is chilled. Put the cherry in the bottom of a chilled coupe glass and strain the mixed drink into the glass.

 

Forgotten Films: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)

Posted on by
Reply

The Brain That Wouldn't Die: It's bad but not Plan 9 bad.

By Scott A . Cupp

This is the 144th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Sandi and I did our usual thing of having some old friends over then we went down to the Riverwalk and did the Thanksgiving buffet at the Hilton Palacio del Rio. Great food, great company and conversation, and some not-so-great football afterwards.

As we were doing all of this, I was reminded of the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 Thanksgiving Turkey marathons and remembered that I had this lovely film queued up on my DVR. Somehow when the MST3K folks showed this, I always ended up missing it, so I went in unsullied.

I got this off of Turner Classic Movies (the wonderful TCM, perhaps the greatest channel on cable). Ben Mankiewicz, one of the TCM hosts, did an introduction where he mentioned that some films are just so bad that they can achieve cult status. This is one of them.

Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers, though he was billed as Herb Evers) is a brilliant but flawed surgeon. He is assisting his father (Bruce Brighton) when the patient died. After his father gives up, Bill asks to try something on him and manages to bring the corpse back to life. Bill has been doing some experimentation on transplanting human tissue, though not through normal research channels. The hospital has been missing parts and pieces from the morgue and the elder Dr. Cortner feels that Bill has probably been committing the thefts.

Bill receives a message that there is a problem at his mountain cottage. He decides that he needs to go there and takes his lovely fiancée Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) with him. On the way, after a truly boring series of moving vehicle and traffic sign shots, there is an accident. Bill is thrown from his convertible. Dazed he returns to the burning car and finds Jan has been decapitated. He wraps the head up in his jacket and walks/staggers some distance (probably miles) to his cabin where he hooks the head up to a contraption.

He is helped with the head installation by Kurt (Anthony LaPenna, billed as Leslie Daniels. I guess nobody wanted to use their real name…). Jan wakes up and finds she is a disembodied head, sitting in a pan of liquid. She must have suffered some brain damage from oxygen deprivation during the period when she was being transported to the cabin because she just wants to die.

Bill wants to transplant her head onto a new beautiful body, because he wants a beautiful wife. So, obviously, this means going to strip clubs to find a woman he can then kill and transplant Jan’s head onto it. So we get several scenes of Bill talking up strippers, trying to determine who he can kill without anyone recognizing him or remembering him as the last one being with them.

He gets talked into judging a bathing suit contest where one of the strippers reminds him of Doris Powell (Anne Lamont) who is now only working as a photo club model who keep a portion of her face covered to hide a disfiguring scar. Great body and scarred face = potential murder victim.

Jan, meanwhile, has been talking to something — the thing that Bill and Kurt have previously experimented on — and is being held captive in a locked closet. Jan wants nothing to do with the murder/transplant and is communicating with the closet thing. As you might expect, things do not go as planned and Bill, the mad scientist, does not accomplish his murder.

The dialogue gets pretty florid or awful or both. The story was developed by Joseph Green (the director and screenplay author) and Rex Carlton (the producer). Special effects are pretty weak. The strippers are pretty. The film was originally shot under the title The Black Door according to IMDB. According to Ben Mankiewicz in his intro to the film, the original release title was going to be The Head That Wouldn’t Die and that this was not changed on some of the end credits.

The version TCM showed ran just under 70 minutes. Apparently the original release was 82 minutes which included a great deal of gore not shown in the film I saw.

It’s a bad film – maybe not Manos or Plan 9 bad, but still not good. So I’m glad I got to see it and without the MST3K dialogue, though I would like to see that now. Well, maybe not now, but sometime.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.