A Kinky Old, Dark House

In The Black Cat (1934), a perverse dark-and-stormy-night creeper, the Poverty Row legend Edgar G. Ulmer sets up his camera and lights his sets
as well as any A-string director. He builds mood through perspective and angle. Ulmer also has a supremely literary bent — you can see that his conceptual inventiveness comes from a mind that knows and loves books. He’s whack the way old ghost stories are whack. In movies like The Black Cat, The Strange Woman (1946), and Detour (1945), Ulmer isn’t a terribly good action director; neither was Josef von Sternberg. Sternberg kept his camera in motion but almost never pulled off a compelling action scene with his actors. Ulmer worked as a set designer for Max Reinhardt in the theater and apprenticed with F. W. Murnau on Sunrise (1927). His true strength was setting, not action. These directors excelled in static intensity. When Ulmer attempts to move the story in The Black Cat forward with simple action — as he does when David Manners is conked out twice, and we wait for him to come to so that he can rescue Jacqueline Wells, but he never does, or when Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi physically tussle — the effect is abrupt or incoherent, a real dud. But Ulmer is superb at creating that sense of campy dread that everyone enjoys in The Black Cat, quite like the fun of seeing the work of James Whale in The Old, Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). When Lugosi reaches over to fondle the blonde hair on the sleeping heroine, it’s a peerless kinky moment.

Good kitty. Jacqueline Wells

The Black Cat is marred with flaws, too. Ulmer lets slide a number of opportunities that probably most people in the audience expect to see fulfilled, which prevents his movies from being classics. The black cat itself inexplicably disappears halfway through the picture. You expect to see it resurface when Lugosi is ready to blow up the crazy castle (it’s both Art Deco and Baroque), trotting out of the rubble completely unfazed. Instead, we get a silly, obviously tacked-on scene in a train carrying the honeymooning couple. Ulmer should have panned the camera to the train seat to focus on . . . the black cat! Even more important, what happens to Lugosi’s daughter? The plot hinges on her, but she shows up once for a brief chat and then it’s as if the movie forgot about her. But maybe it’s Ulmer’s particular gift to guilelessly reveal his flaws (in another scene, the local police travel up and down the mountainside on bicycles) that they seem essential to the dumb theatrical charm.

A Biblical Wash

If you’re going to rewrite an ancient myth, you’d better hire a poet. 

There is no poetry — visual or verbal — in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), a weirdly bland and boring remake sunk by piffling computer graphics and a script that is obviously one of those compromise-by-committee jobs without a personal voice (the kind that goes through endless rewrites by a variety of confused lackeys). I’m reminded of an old quote, variously attributed to Dr. Johnson, Lessing, Sheridan, and Daniel Webster: 

“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

The only idea in the script that inspires awe or dread is a Yahweh that shows himself to Moses (Christian Bale) as an East London street urchin with a demanding attitude. That conceit makes those few scenes with Moses and his God both chilling and comic, but the idea seems lifted from Harold Bloom’s interpretive conception of Yahweh as a temperamental, egotistic youngster who drags His chosen people into a covenant in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine and the earlier The Book of J. Bloom imagines Yahweh as a child who almost doesn’t know and doesn’t bother controlling His own strength. The young actor Isaac Andrews is perfect in the part; he owns it. When Moses speaks up to complain, Andrews cuts him off mid-sentence. There’s a seething resentment in the young boy’s eyes as he looks away from and then squarely at Moses before telling His servant-prophet what to do.

The screenplay is far weaker than the 1955 version by Cecil B. DeMille as a coherent narrative. It lacks the earlier version’s campy, stentorian dialogue — but there was poetry in that screenplay. In Gods and Kings, the script can’t even transition smoothly or keep track of who’s who. After two hours of this tedium, I still had no idea who Ben Kingsley was supposed to be. I knew he was an Israelite, but which one — Joshua? Moses’s father? Aaron? Which Egyptian princess in the earlier scenes was Moses’s adopted mother? Sigourney Weaver? Hiam Abbass? The Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani? I couldn’t remember a single quotable line of dialogue, either. Whose boneheaded idea was it to not give any of these mythic characters a memorably juicy line?

The rest of the picture is mundane and supremely tedious. Ridley Scott has no feel for this material. The computer graphics don’t stun or raise hairs on the back of the neck — they raise doubts about verisimilitude, as for example when locusts swarm toward Memphis at what appears to be jet aircraft speed. The film’s color palette is a sickly gun-metal green. The parting of the Red Sea was preposterous the way it was conceived: enormous tsunamis, tornadoes, and chariots moving across wet sand at cartoon speed symbolize nothing so much as the law of diminishing returns with today’s technology. DeMille’s Eisenhower-era version — with all its arresting squareness — is filled with color and storytelling power behind the special effects. Kids used to fight with their parents to be allowed to stay up long enough to watch the whole four-hour movie (lovingly parodied in a scene with Roy’s family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), which has corniness and pageantry and, finally, majesty, like the scene of a defeated Rameses and Nefretiri in funereal robes, hissing at each other like the Macbeths over their dead son and the ignominious defeat of their empire. Young viewers at home would never bother nagging their parents to stay up late to see anything this dismal.

The Evil That Welles Did

Hank Quinlan (Welles) dispatches Sgt. Menzies (Joseph Calleia)

The reconstructed cut of Touch of Evil (1958) is out on a new 4K UHD Blu-ray from Kino-Lorber. The 111-minute reconstruction has all the burn of the 98-minute version we saw in years past and something epic besides. If the boutique UHD industry (Kino, Criterion, Arrow, etc.) had rescanned only this one classic movie and not dozens of others, the industry would have proved its worth and paid for itself ten times over. About four or five dozen — roughly — old American movies merit a meticulous rescan like this (a good discussion could be had debating titles), but Evil is just about the moviest movie in that pool. Orson Welles created an H-bomb out of material that other noir directors (Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Andre de Toth, Anthony Mann) would have used to create an entertaining genre melodrama. You’d have to reach back to G. W. Pabst and the Russians in the 1920s to match the abundance of artistry here — the mise-en-scène, the montage, the crane shots, the baroque angles and perspectives, the tracking, the deep well of inventiveness. Some of what Welles did here is outlandishly visionary and grotesque, overshadowing much of the experimentation since him, even the handful of greats he influenced — Sam Peckinpah or David Lynch, for example (Welles went further with audio than Peckinpah or Lynch ever did). In the late 1950s, this movie must have hit audiences the way Eraserhead hit college students in the late 1970s. Remember what you thought when you first saw that? Both movies took years to find their audience.