I can’t think of a better way to celebrate America’s birthday than with this bit of 1976 pop art psychedelia courtesy of animator Vincent Collins via the United States Information Agency, who apparently wanted the nation to think of the Bicentennial as one long, strange acid freak-out. Which it might just be.
This is one of the most exciting pieces of archival film news I’ve heard in years.
As you all undoubtedly know, Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction cautionary masterpiece, METROPOLIS, originally premiered in a three hour version that was cut after a negative response. Through the years, the film has been available in a few different versions, none of which had the hour of cut footage, considered to be lost to time forever by historians. But…
These cut scenes have been located in the vault of a film museum in Buenos Aires. Green Cine Daily has the full story here. The image above is from a never-before-seen sequence showing the underground city being flooded from the city above the ground. If you idolize Lang as I do (even mentioning him in the EXCALIBUR Retro-View below) you’ll be salivating at this fantastic news. Now if only somebody could dig up the Holy Grail of cut footage, the censored “spider pit” scene from the 1933 KING KONG…It’s out there…
Now we go back to the medieval future of the 1980’s and the first, most defining sword epic of the era: EXCALIBUR, co-written and directed by John Boorman. I saw EXCALIBUR at the Roseville Tower, a lush deco-movie palace where I spent most of my high school movie going. Tuesday nights were two for one, and it was a good place to meet with friends, or if you were lucky, have an actual date (tho my only date there seeing FLASHDANCE was a bit of a disaster which has slightly tainted my thoughts on that wretched MTV trifle. O’ what a feeling!); better still, my wayward friends and I loved going there to see every horror film of the day, smokin’ drinkin’ in the alley behind the theater with Marty, Bruce and Mike before a double-feature of FRIDAY THE 13TH and FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2. We’d laugh and scream, freak ourselves out with every bloody murder. Glory days. Or is that Gory Days?
Happily, EXCALIBUR was both gorious and glorious indeed. The 1980’s had a rich (and often poor) fantasy culture, with HEAVY METAL magazine at the apex of its popularity, the graphic avatar of every pre and post-pubescent sex and violence adventure wet dream. Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons influential role-playing game was given wider release in a nifty new box, being played and condemned at high schools across the nation (they banned my 8th grade peers from playing it after I brought the game to Rocklin Elementary). As for film, it was a grand period for geeks, with THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) keeping the STAR WARS myth alive and dominant at the theaters. But EXCALIBUR broke the sword and sorcerey movie mold and left it asunder.
I’ll always recall the film’s opening at the Roseville Tower, crouched in my seat as that powerfully prophetic Wagner music from “Siegfried” tells you immediately, “This is a big film about big men with big swords and desires and the hot mystic women who love and kill them.” Audiences saw an English sixth century battle of knights that bathed their armor in a preternatural glow and showed the clumsy grandeur of these Iron Men as they hacked and slashed opponents. You knew the movie was for real when an arm gets lopped off with spurting blood and the knights fall into the mud screaming. We all tittered when Uther Pendragon had full body armor sex with his naked conquest, one of the most erotic scenes in cinema history (there, I said it). You couldn’t help but feel inspired as young Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone to become King, and a great one at that. By the end, the film had held back on nothing, especially not the magic of Camelot and its dream of noble warrior legends. I saw EXCALIBUR three times in its first release. Definitely a high school water-cooler film.
Made four years after the disastrous EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, John Boorman had been trying to forever set up a movie version of LORD OF THE RINGS but the financing fell through, so he fell back on the source of all things Sword and Sorcery: King Arthur and his wizard adviser Merlin, adapted from Sir Thomas Malory’s LE MORTE D’ARTHUR. This was the perfect outlet for Boorman’s mystic primitivism and his wide screen compositional gifts. Thanks to Bob Ringwood’s costume design, never before or since has armor looked so tactile and luminous, glowing with an unearthly cobalt and emerald sheen. It almost forces you into a visual relationship with this battle-wear as you try to comprehend how difficult it must have been to fight in a giant sculpted can wielding heavy swords. Even the ladies’ sexy, ornate costumes ebb and flow with mythic grace among the lush green landscape. The deep dark forests and mountains seem alive. This is what Camelot would look like. Rightfully, the gorgeous cinematography by Ted Thomson was nominated for an Academy Award.
Boorman is out to demystify as well as deify, with Merlin the Magician being the prime example. Although the studio did not want Nicol Williamson for the role due to his legendary trouble-making, it’s hard to think of a better choice. Along with Sir Ian McKellen’s towering Gandalf, this is one of the screen’s great wizards. Williamson plays Merlin quite broad and provides EXCALIBUR’s only intentional humor, but it makes sense since this old magician has seen much in his many lifetimes. Even he loves being surprised by the world, as when Arthur allows a foe to knight him with the Excalibur sword: “I haven’t seen this before,” Merlin coos with delight to himself. Better still, Merlin has a worthy enemy in the form of Arthur’s half-sister, the burgeoning witch Morgana Le Fey, played to the hilt by Helen Mirren. Clad in headdresses and cobwebbed outfits, she’s both sensual and repellent, yet you can have sympathy for her vengeful desires. After all, it was Merlin’s magick that broke her mother’s heart and forced an unwanted brother on her.
Another one of EXCALIBUR’s pleasures is the cast of excellent actors, a few of whom would go on to bigger things much later. I didn’t realize until my recent retro-viewing that Gabriel Byrne played the fiery Uther Pendragon, even watching him in it now I can see little of the sleepy-eyed soul I associate with MILLER’S CROSSING etc. Then there’s Patrick Stewart in his first film as well as Liam Neeson, sporting a samurai-style hair do. And somehow the actors have pulled off the remarkable feat of going from youth to elder with only graying hair and the power of performance. Nigel Terry plays Arthur from 16 to 50 through sheer force of personality and it’s a shame he hasn’t been seen much since, for he encapsulates all of King Arthur’s heart and wisdom. His relationship with Merlin is also touching as it’s his love for the wizard that frees him from Morgana’s spell.
The story stumbles in the third act as Perceval’s quest for the Holy Grail takes center-stage. Boorman’s mysticism gets jumbled here, a typical flaw in his ouvre such as ZARDOZ and THE EMERALD FOREST, but this is the one film most suited to his flights of soft-focus fantasy. Speaking of, look how vast and expansive the sets and battles are with only a sprinkling of mattes, miniatures and studio walls. I particularly love the expressionistic last duel between Arthur and his unholy scion framed by a burning red sun and a tableau of crumpled knights at their feet. Fritz Lang would have been proud. And the lo-fi effects are still startling. I didn’t have any idea how Lancelot yanks Excalibur from his nude torso in one of the most memorable scenes. When Boorman explains it on the DVD audio commentary, the mind boggles at the simplicity. As he states, often times the best effects require nothing more than a little ingenuity. Along with MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975), another film that creates a completely believable medieval landscape, the strength of EXCALIBUR comes from its verisimilitude. We can only imagine what a LORD OF THE RINGS directed by John Boorman would have looked like, but it’s clear that Peter Jackson is a fan of this film.
A big hit through the spring and summer of 1981, EXCALIBUR ushered in the new age of 1980’s cinematic fantasy, followed quickly by CONAN THE BARBARIAN; DRAGONSLAYER; THE BEASTMASTER; KRULL; LEGEND; RED SONJA; LADYHAWKE; and a personal favorite, THE SWORD & THE SORCERER (1982), a low budget, high imagination movie directed with verve and style by Albert Pyun. I have fond memories of this genre yet none matched the gritty grandeur of EXCALIBUR. If ever a film could be considered “forged” it’s this magnificent epic that dazzles to this day.
For Hal and all the lost prophets out there.
Believe it or not, Sid and Marty Kroft, creators of H.R. PUFNSTUF, won a huge copyright infringement case against McDonald’s for their blatant giant psychedelic man-puppet thievery in this beguiling commercial. More important, how can I get a copy of that groovy song?
I defy you not to watch and bask in the boogie glory that is Chick Vennera. If Jackie Chan did a 70’s disco dance number, it would look like this. Comprendo?
I love it when justice prevails from our friends in the Supreme Court. What giants of law and tradition they are compared to these greedy fishermen. Don’t they know that $507.5 million is almost four days of Exxon profits? Sure, Exxon wiped out an entire community and their businesses along with vast ecological destruction. Too bad. Oil executives gotta eat too:
A lot of people he knows were planning their retirements with the $2.5 billion in punitive damages that Exxon Mobil Corp. was expected to pay the nearly 33,000 victims of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
But the Supreme Court dashed their hopes Wednesday, deciding to cut the punitive damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to $507.5 million. That translates to an average of $15,000 per victim.
“I always felt that big oil was going to win,” said Lytle, 56. “But now I found out what true meaning of punitive damages is: puny.”
A jury decided in 1994 that Exxon should pay $5 billion in punitive damages. In 2006, a federal appeals court cut that verdict in half.
Sylvia Lange, also of Cordova, used to fish commercially for salmon and haul for the doomed herring fishery. But for her, the spill was about more than lost money.
It also was about the end of Alaska Native traditions and a subsistence lifestyle for several villages in the region. Because of the spill, many Alaska Natives were forced to stop harvesting seal, salmon and herring roe and move to urban areas, never to return, said Lange, who is part Aleut and Tlingit.
“A cultural link was definitely broken,” she said.
The spill killed hundreds of thousands of birds and other marine animals, inflicting environmental injuries that have not fully recovered, according to numerous scientific studies.
If you’re feeling the weight of the world, imagine for a moment that you’re a tiny Hobbit on the shore confronting your big destiny. Works for me.
To celebrate the Summer Solstice of Movie Days Past, now we get our heads straight and taste the colors of madness. You dig this trip? Outta sight. PSYCH-OUT was released in March of 1968 by American International Pictures, produced by teen maven Dick Clark, and based on a screenplay by Jack Nicholson called THE LOVE CHILDREN, to be directed by rising maverick Richard Rush. The duo’s previous motorcycle film from 1967, HELL’S ANGELS ON WHEELS, grossed millions so they were brought in to give the hippie exploitation film counter-culture verisimilitude — and do it in 18 days with a 200 grand budget. AIP old school owner Samuel Z. Arkoff and others thought THE LOVE CHILDREN was a story about bastards, so like the carny barker at heart he was, Arkoff combined LSD with Hitchcock and came up with PSYCH-OUT. Another set of writers, E. Hunter Willett and Betty Ulius were brought in to revise Nicholson’s lengthy experimental script to a more linear AIP narrative, namely that of Jenny (Susan Strasberg), a 17 year old deaf girl searching for her artist brother in the paisley streets of San Francisco circa Summer of Love ’67.
I first saw PSYCH-OUT on VHS when I was working at Broadway Video in Long Beach way back in 1992 (I was the token straight employee of the gay owned/operated movie rental place, but that’s a whole other amazing post). I was immediately mesmerized with the credits (see it here), a musical journey through the heart of the Haight at the very peak of its cultural power. Buoyed by the pretty theme song, apropos named, “The Pretty Song from Psych-Out” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Jenny watches this new kaleidoscopic world through her bus window. As photographed by Lazlo Kovacs’ liberated camera, Strasberg’s face radiates a child-like glee at the colorful denizens of Hippie Land and it was a wise narrative move to let her be our surrogate. Her innocence is reflected by the atmospheric music and flower people of Golden Gate Park. The location footage also provides a perfect time-capsule glimpse at the apex of the legendary love summer. I consider this whole opening section a minor film in itself; even possibly my favorite credit scene of the 60’s.
Pursued by cops, Jenny stumbles into a Haight street coffee shop and is saved from The Man by one Stoney, played by Jack Nicholson in a role written for himself. Jenny finds herself drawn into the pot, bead and incense mindscape of Stoney and his band, Mumblin’ Jim (who I like to imagine had a single song that made it to number 27 on the charts: “One Big Plastic Hassle”). She’s been following the clues left behind by her brother, known only as “The Seeker” by the local heads and rednecks. The other band mates, played by AIP stalwart Adam Roarke and THE MACK star Max Julian, are joined by future director Henry Jaglom as a poster artist with the most outrageous mutton chops I’ve ever seen. Rush stages their cafe conversation in a loose, casual fashion, and there’s more verite here than almost all the exploitive hippie films of the decade. They seem like actual drop-out artists basking in coffee shop lassitude. And since the filmmakers were indeed on the fringe of the industry, their self-absorbed exuberance is palatable. I also love Roarke’s rejoinder to a friend’s too obvious pot smoking in the cafe: “Man, you are totally uncool.”
Of course, what’s probably most cool about PSYCH-OUT is Jack Nicholson, in a role very much like his famous outsiders. As this was his last film before EASY RIDER would make him a star, I find this a unique, terrific performance, his method style and libertine philosophy percolating under the dewy guise of a counter-culture musician. Nicholson nails all of his dialogue, managing to rise above the exploitation elements of the film. What’s particularly interesting is that Stoney is not an idealized peace and love archetype of the era. He’s tough, cynical and pragmatic; when his band mate accuses him of seeing only dollar signs, Stoney flashes that famous Nicholson devil grin and says, “Oh, the old bad thing, the root of all evil, right?” His character wants fame and fortune, not to mention a stable of liberated partners. He’s honest about his desires, less concerned with the socio-political implications of the period. And he has a pony-tail.
Credit is also overdue to Susan Strasberg in one of her few starring roles. It’s a shame that she was overshadowed not only by her famous father, Lee Strasberg, but by Marilyn Monroe, who seemed to have a stronger thespic relationship with him. Strasberg deserved better than what she was given, but she’s very appealing in PSYCH-OUT and easily matches Method with Nicholson. It’s also nice that in a movie decade not revered for its portrayals of female empowerment (Pussy Galore doesn’t quite count), that Strasberg stands out as a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. She emanates a joy of discovery, sexual and cultural, and the film is always on her side.
Along her journey, Jenny ends up falling in love with Stoney, of course. But his open warmth is replaced by cold indifference after he beds her in a love scene equivalent of a 60’s blacklight poster, their nude bodies covered by swirling psychedelic colors, soundtracked by that “Pretty Theme From Psych-Out.” Stoney’s friend, Dave (Dean Stockwell) the resident guru of the group, acts as his conscience, throwing out pithy koans like a hippie Pez dispenser. Stockwell’s yin to Nicholson’s yang are fun to watch together. Their banter about art versus commerce, love versus lust, reality versus illusion are the verbal high points of the movie. There is a lot of wit here, even in the expert photography of Laslo Kovacs (singled out as the only good thing in the film by the New York Times review). My favorite moment is a long, single-take tracking shot of Stoney and his band jamming a nifty organ tune as the searching camera goes from hippie to hippie, each doing his or her own thing, capturing the boredom and malaise of the love children.
Jenny finds herself disgusted by the stoned lethargy of the household and Stoney’s indifference. She finds little comfort with Dave, The Love Guru, who himself is painted as a hypocrite. The sexism of the day is still manifest, especially when Stoney shows up and gives her an ugly harangue, even though he’s the one who blew her off. Angered, she ends up taking the dangerous speed/acid drug, STP, offered by Dave, just as Stoney finds her brother Steve, played by Bruce Dern (in a wild, stringy mane wig). I like it when Dern is babbling about his fiery visions, and Nicholson cuts him off with, “You’re a little high.” But Dern gets a good scene to himself as he tells Stoney exactly how Jenny became deaf.
One of the tropes of the hippie film was the inevitable psychedelic freak-out, with the best of the decade belonging to Peter Fonda’s movie-length THE TRIP (1967), followed by Jackie Gleason’s 8 minute acid fest in my beloved SKIDOO and then the Mardi Gras hallucinogenic bad trip of EASY RIDER (1969). There are three trip sequences in PSYCH-OUT: the first with Max Julian seeing himself as a knight while he beats the shit out of some junkyard rednecks. The second is Henry Jaglom having scary visions hopped up on LSD. “I’m the guy who psych-outs!” he told me when I talked to him about his role as Warren. It’s hilarious when Warren says all he has to do is snap his fingers and he can come out of it…then he snaps his fingers and without a beat says, “It’s not working this time.”
Finally, Strasberg has an epic trip, effectively portrayed as a living hell, culminating with her body falling, tumbling through golden flames in a striking image. That the film ends on a bummer note is typical of the era, with the promise of Dionysus reduced to the threat of Hades. Just like THE TRIP was altered by AIP to make it seem that Fonda’s experience destroyed him (by adding cracks to the final image!), here we leave our flower children tangled in thorny vines with a tiny hope of redemption for Jenny. Or as Stoney says to Dave, “The acid has curdled and made you sour.”
Despite the cultural baggage, PSYCH-OUT is actually flat-out enjoyable, moreso than you might think. If you want to be limited in your thinking, you can watch the movie to laugh at the dirty hippies. Or you can find pleasure in a team of young artists working on a budget to create a work of period artfulness that would reflect their later work. There’s also a terrific score by Ronald Stein with memorable songs by The Strawberry Alarm Clock (who I got to sign my LP soundtrack at the Mods & Rockers Film fest) and The Seeds. Anybody interested in sixties cinema can find pleasure here. When I praised PSYCH-OUT to Jaglom, he said, “But it’s still an exploitation film.” I said, “But one more honest and adventurous than the others.” And I think it is. The movie also shows the roots of the discord and violence that would reflect the less loving year of 1968.
I’m also big fan of iconoclast director Richard Rush, who claims to have invented the rack-focus shot, one that alternates between the foreground figure and the background figure, except he calls it “critical focus” and it’s in ample use here. Along with Kovacs’ atmospheric lighting, Rush has a gift for framing. Sometimes he goes for obvious points, like a group of hippies outside a church who just happen to look like Jesus and his disciples, but I like the attempt to make visual metaphors into social critique. He was sympathetic, but not slavish, to the youth movement.
Oddly, when PSYCH-OUT was finally released with THE TRIP on DVD under MGM’s fantastic Midnite Movie series, almost 8 minutes of footage was shorn, possibly as it might have been a better print (in fact, I saw this shorter version at the late, great University Theater in Berkeley). The cuts are unfortunate, because they’re all interesting bits of business including a whole dressing room montage and an extended version of the lovely “Beads of Innocence” scene. The coveted DVD is out of print now, so hopefully MGM will find the longer version for re-release. But purists can track down the VHS from HBO Video for the uncut version.
PSYCH-OUT is an important pop movie foot-note since it was the last exploitation film of the 1960’s for many of the principals. It’s almost a cinematic graduation. Along with Nicholson on the cusp of stardom, co-stars Bruce Dern and Jaglom were about to embark on their next career phase. Richard Rush would direct the hit student-protest film, GETTING STRAIGHT (1970) for Columbia, and Nicholson, Jaglom and Kovacs would all be part of the creative team for the groundbreaking EASY RIDER. If anything, PSYCH-OUT is the missing link between AIP’s exploitation drug/motorcycle genre and the coming 70’s storm of the New Hollywood. Next to SKIDOO and EASY RIDER, it’s my favorite counter-culture film of the decade.
Tonight’s the biggest baddest full moon of the year. Sagittarian of course.
Make a wish.
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