Succubus

 A Fool There Was (1915) is one of the few Fox Studios silent pictures to have survived the 1937 Fort Lee, New Jersey, fire, and one of only a handful of surviving movies starring Theda Bara. This Edwardian melodrama, adapted from a play by Porter Emerson Browne, which was itself based on a Kipling poem, portrays Good just about how you’d expect, but the entire movie is energized by the kohl-eyed, fleshy Bara, who is listed in the credits as “The Vampire.” She’s extraordinary — a femme fatale viper who gloms on to men — hapless fools — and drags them away from the light of society and family down into her lair, draining them of their fortunes, jobs, and willpower. The vamp destroys them and their wives and children. The movie’s perspective — that these men are to blame for their own destruction — is encapsulated in numerous intertitles that quote from the poem (“The Vampire”). Evil isn’t specifically blamed, let alone punished. In retrospect, the movie feels like a firebrand’s response to male domination and misogyny.

Countess Dracula

In the earlier scenes of family life, the movie is a little draggy and the direction is uninspired — the camera sits and observes in static repose, with characters moving into and out of the frame in the style of stage entrances and exits. But Theda Bara has some sort of mad charisma — at times, she resembles Nazimova in Salomé (1922) — and when she’s on the screen, images and tableaux of immense sophistication and cruelty hit you between the eyes: the first “fool” (Victor Benoit) shoots himself aboard ship and his casket is carted up the loading ramp like baggage, the second “fool” (Edward José, who starred in Theda Bara’s screen debut the year before) turns into a hollow-eyed husk, rejects his young daughter yet again (the child, named Baby, is terribly underfoot in earlier scenes) and slithers down the stairwell like a wounded snake, and in the final shattering scene (a grotesque distortion of romantic love), the vamp, clad in a wispy nightgown, hovers over the moribund husband and drops dying rose petals across his face as he gasps for breath. These are decadent, erotic, warped images you can’t shake or explain outside of the work of German directors like Pabst, Murnau, and Lang. The best elements in this movie reach forward, across Edwardian domesticity and Christian homilies directly into the haunted desiccation of the Weimar era.

Boring Your Enemies to Death

François Truffaut screws around with tone so much in The Bride Wore Black (1968) that we’re alienated from the characters, and all there is to do is sit back and observe the revenge roundelay dispassionately while Jeanne Moreau knocks off the hapless, shallow men who mistakenly shot and killed her husband. I get the feeling that Truffaut was trying to replicate his own earlier triumphs with random narrative twists and disjunctive edits (as
in Jules and Jim and

Back in black. Moreau and Brialy

Shoot the Piano Player) or try his hand at Godardian displacement in a Hitchcock-like suspense thriller. But Hitchcock was never this blasé. Whatever Truffaut thought he was doing, he apparently didn’t have much feeling for human beings and emotions anymore or even how to generate a sustained arc of suspense. What happened to the director who showed such love and exuberance for the bohemian trio in Jules and Jim (also starring Moreau, gloriously) or for the neglected Antoine falling through Parisian society’s postwar cracks in The 400 Blows? 

In The Bride Wore Black (adapted from the Cornell Woolrich noir novel), a pulp sensibility prevails, but the director’s distancing techniques — heavy symbolism (black scarves blown about by the wind, the murderess posing as Diana, the goddess of the hunt), jump-cutting, bright lighting, and what can only be called Brechtian staging — kill most of the suspense. Moreau is monotonous (even her wig seems to be unnaturally weighing down her forehead) when she should seem driven by unhinged passion. Her victims all behave like oafs with stereotypically French male swagger, so we don’t feel any of the terror in their dispatching. The effect is a bewildering brew of overt cruelty and slapstick. With the exception of the first murder victim, pushed to his death off a balcony, most of the shocks are completely predictable because the setups are dragged out interminably; in the end, the movie feels like an affectless chore. A thriller black comedy that deadens one’s responses is a contradiction in terms.

Miss Show Business

By the time Presenting Lily Mars was filmed in 1943, the twenty-year-old Judy Garland had already mastered the clowning, fumbling earnestness in her character’s single-minded pursuit of stardom and, for the first time on film, was displaying some of the world-weary show-biz brass that would point the way to her concert triumphs in middle age — that voice like a Big Band trumpet with a mute on it, moaning low or careening into the stratosphere. Chronologically, the Andy Hardy bloom was just barely off her, but she had come into her own mature talent, inexorably and rapidly. She had made an excellent picture the year before (For Me and My Gal, with Judy and Gene Kelly doing their “Ballin’ the Jack” routine) and had even separated from her first husband by then (having had an affair with Johnny Mercer in the interim). The character Garland plays in Lily Mars is a typical Booth Tarkington teenager, a homely duckling with a pie-in-the-sky dream and the gumption to chase it no matter how many obstacles she smacks into. There’s a lot of Alice Adams in Lily, but it isn’t high society Lily craves — it’s the energy that stage performers lap up from audiences (Garland took that energy and apotheosized it in 1961 at her famed Carnegie Hall concert).

A star is born. Judy Garland, Faye Bainter

I’ve always thought that Garland’s core was comedic rather than dramatic, despite her intelligence and honesty in serious roles like Esther, in A Star Is Born (1954). Garland was always at her loopiest and least self-conscious in movie comedy (she said that she learned how to put a song across from Sophie Tucker). She would have made a dazzling farceur in screwballs, with her verbal and physical gag skills and her short stature and elongated limbs (she looks like a Tex Avery drawing from his 1941 classic “Hollywood Steps Out”), but the genre had all but died out by the early 1940s. Joe Pasternak and Norman Taurog, who made Lily Mars, should have done so much more with her comedy savvy here, but they didn’t have the burn and drive that her better directors often did (Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, or Busby Berkeley). Pasternak and Taurog misinterpreted her appeal and kept her suspended in the bland Jell-O of wholesome “family” entertainment. Instead of giving her energetic modern numbers to sing, the Pasternak machine saddles her and her irrepressible quiver with mopey love ballads. It’s a huge relief when the movie finale moves from a starchy “Where There’s Music” into “Broadway Rhythm,” but songs like “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own” or “When I Look at You” don’t exactly help build the Garland legend. Lily is supposed to be the antithesis of the starched-collar “perfection” of Marta Eggerth (whose operetta swill makes your head drop), much the way Garland herself was the swinging antithesis of the ridiculously popular Deanna Durbin at MGM. 

Despite the family-market machinery and misconceptions, Garland swings through and maps out a route forward for her career in Lily Mars, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. Her triumph in Lily Mars was a blueprint for Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968), which re-created several gags from it in the “Lovely Bride” and roller-skating numbers. By 1943, Garland, who would make Meet Me in St. Louis the following year and dispense with the last of her childhood pudge, was paving her own yellow brick road.

Moldy Camp

Death warmed over.
  Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz

The Mummy (1999) is a stab at camp, a remake of the shlocky Valley of the Kings (1954) with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker, and the tasty adult adventure movie King Solomon’s Mines (1950) with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. This version has nothing at all to do with the arch, creepy, Teutonic 1932 version directed for Universal by Karl Freund, an Expressionist chiller whose troubling imagery is like being entombed with moldy corpses in a graveyard. This version can’t meet any of its humble, imbecile obligations: even the character actors (the movie saviors and scene stealers of the past) are awful. 

The jocularity is so broad and cringe that twenty minutes of it puts you in a sour mood. At over two hours and five minutes of frenetic stupidity, you might come out of it convinced that movies have never provided charm or magic.

Another unintended bit of residue of The Mummy is that it makes you hate the affable Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, Industrial Light and Magic, CGI, Egypt, and even bandages. How can it be ethical — or even legal — to treat the Bronze Age this way?