Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Seems like everyone in LA, every single person who writes about film, was doing the same thing over the last few days. Wrap up whatever outstanding business you’ve got, squeeze in a few last-minute press screenings, and then pack for ten days of festival going just before hopping a plane.
Of course, most of them were heading for Toronto.
Suckers.
The way I figure it, I’m going to see 90% of the big titles out of Toronto in the next three months anyway, and that’s not counting the ones I’ve already seen. There’s such a logjam of films there that it seems to me like it would an exercise in potential frustration more than anything. Sure, I’d love to see friends like Dusty Cohl or Anton Sirius or Copernicus, and I’ve heard about how electric the atmosphere is at some of those Midnight Madness screenings. But in the end, I’d much rather visit Austin, hang out with friends, eat some great barbecue, and overindulge on whatever madness Quentin’s got in store for us this time around.
The first time I ever visited Austin was for QT III. I came in for three days of the festival, and I had an amazing time. When QT Quattro came around, I cleared my schedule and stayed for every lunatic minute of it. Thanks to prior commitments, I had to sit out QT 5 altogether, and it killed me to read all the coverage of it here on the site. When I heard the first whispers of a possible QT 6 this year, I decided I was going to attend no matter what.
I flew in on Friday afternoon, and because I worked right up to the last moment, I didn’t really have time to get excited until I was in Austin. That’s when it hit me... that familiar anticipation.
Standing in the badge-holder’s line on the stairs of the Alamo, I saw lots of familiar faces filing in. There’s no question in my mind that I will eventually move my family here. It may even be sooner rather than later. I have so many friends in Austin already, and I’m so comfortable here. Robogeek, Tim McCanlies, Annette Kellerman, Johnny Wadd, RoRo, and even Headgeek himself all showed up and greeted me warmly as we waited to get in. Everyone seemed excited, ready to get started. It’s hard to believe it’s been four years since the last QT Fest. At that point, KILL BILL was still just a script, a rumor, something we were hoping was going to happen.
When they finally let us inside, it was after 7:00 and the theater filled quickly. No one had seen any sign of QT yet, but the top priority was looking over the festival program, talking about which titles we had or hadn’t seen already, what you’re most looking forward to. Finally, once the normal announcements about the Austin Film Society were out of the way, Quentin was introduced, and the place exploded, everyone releasing all this pent-up anticipation at once.
”So... where were we?”
It always amazes me how at-home Quentin seems when doing his introductions. He doesn’t lecture, either. There’s not a hint of that smarmy “I know something you don’t” attitude that you get from some people. I get it. As much as I am driven to write films, there’s a part of me that enjoys the discovery and presentation of movies even more. I love to share films with my wife or my friends. I love finding something obscure and then ambushing people with it. There’s a particular pleasure that comes when you see on someone’s face how much they’ve enjoyed this thing that you found for them.
Quentin didn’t waste time with preamble. He just launched right into a discussion of the MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. phenomenon. When it first aired on TV, it was an immediate hit, especially with younger viewers. David McCallum became an overnight teen idol. MGM decided to cash in by taking some of the two-part episodes and adding a few minutes of footage, then releasing them to theaters as feature films. QT seemed really amused by the sheer gall of this.
”That would be like if I took my C.S.I. episode, added ten new minutes, then put that in the theater and charged you all $10 to see it.” He paused. “Hey, that’s a good idea...”
As always, Tim League put together a great trailer ring to kick things off. Roy Orbison in THE FASTEST GUITAR ALIVE, a Western where he’s got a guitar that also doubles as a rifle was first up, followed by Elliott Gould in WHO?, a film that I absolutely must track down now. It looks to be a Cold War thriller about an American scientist who disappears in a car crash inside Russia, only to show back up rebuilt out of metal. The Americans aren’t sure they can trust this mechanical man, no matter how much he swears he is himself. Finally, Tim showed one of the PUTNEY SWOPE trailers, which always get a huge reaction from the crowd. If you’ve never seen Robert Downey’s film, it’s a piss take on ‘60s Madison Avenue advertising tropes, and he packed the film with fake ads that feel real.
THE SPY WITH MY FACE was fun ‘60s kitsch, a nice way to cleanse the palette. Maybe it’s because of when I grew up and the influence of my father’s tastes when I was a kid, but I love everything about ‘60s spy films. I love the aesthetic. I love that they emphasize spying over stunts. What passes for spy cinema now is markedly different. Basically, you look at something like XXX or MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE or the Brosnan Bond films, and they’re little more than action set pieces stitched together with a bare minimum of plot. The only thing even remotely like the spy films of the ‘60s being produced now is ALIAS, and even that can’t help but pump up every encounter into aerobic kung-fu excess. For me, Patrick McGoohan was the best of the best, whether it was DANGER MAN or THE PRISONER. I can see the appeal of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., though. Robert Vaughn and David McCallum have a real easy chemistry, and even though the plot of THE SPY WITH MY FACE is totally ludicrous, it’s played exactly right, tone-wise. You’ve got to love any film that tries to pass off the Griffith Park Observatory as the Swiss Alps, and I’m a total sucker for anything involving evil twins. Vaughn’s the model of unflappable cool as Napoleon Solo, and I love how nothing seems to bother him. He handles an argument with his stewardess girlfriend played by Sharon Farrell with the same aplomb that he does being tortured by the bad guys. Nothing phases him.
What makes McCallum so funny is the way he handles each new crisis that arises. When he’s ambushed by tiny toy robots outside the dry cleaner’s that doubles as the headquarters of U.N.C.L.E., he seems as amused as we are by it. When he has to cover up a murder of an enemy agent, he’s conveniently carrying a stack of cards in his pocket that identify the carrier as a diabetic. You can tell that this film was shot on a TV budget, but that’s part of the charm of the thing. It all comes down to chemistry, and I like that. Anyone can make something slick when they’ve got all the money in the world. But when you’re limited and you still make something that endures 30 years later, that’s the trick.
Since it was opening night, they were still working out the kinks in the way things were going to work. They forced us all to clear out completely, and in the process, they took the pitcher of Diet Coke I bought, which was still half-full, and threw it out. That must have happened to a number of people, because that was the only time they made us do it so far. In this instance, it took almost 20 minutes before we were able to get back into the theater, and another 10 or 15 before Quentin was back onstage. This time, he introduced THE VENETIAN AFFAIR, another Robert Vaughn vehicle. He talked about how MGM bought this book and figured they would capitalize on the success of MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. by casting Vaughn. The two projects couldn’t be more different, though. Back at QT Quattro, Quentin showed us HICKEY & BOGGS, a film that starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. That was pretty much the anti-I SPY, a rough and bloody action film. QT called this the HICKEY & BOGGS of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., and that’s a great description of it. This is one of those films that QT just stumbled across when buying prints, and he flipped for it.
This was one of those QT intros that got me drooling. He talked about the director Jerry Thorpe, who was the guy behind the first season of KUNG-FU, an experienced TV director who made a few forays into film but seemed dissatisfied with how much control he had to give up when working on features. The trailer ring included Dean Martin as Matt Helm in THE SILENCERS, Charles Bronson in RIDER ON THE RAIN (“He takes the law into his own hands and squeezes it to death”), Connie Stevens in a really silly looking BULLIT ripoff called SCORCHIE, and a hippie musical called THE COOL ONES.
Both of Quentin’s prints must have been English, because they both had the British Censor’s certificates on the front. His VENETIAN AFFAIR print was scope, IB Technicolor, and quite striking right from the start. This film hit me dead-center in the pleasure center. It’s much closer to the world of John le Carre than it is to any of the Bond films. It’s a genuinely great spy movie, written and directed with real integrity. The film opens at an international conference about nuclear disarmament. The American representative opens a trick briefcase and blows up every delegate that’s been assembled. Immediately, everyone starts to blame everyone else, and the uneasy peace dissolves right away. Bill Fenner, employed by IWS, a wire service, is sent to Venice to take some pictures and file a story about the incident. Robert Vaughn is totally different than Napoleon Solo here, and it’s a pretty wonderful performance. Fenner used to be with the CIA, but he washed out because of a situation involving a woman, and he responded by crawling into a bottle, basically. When we meet him in the film, he’s a drunk, a shell of a man. He sort of shambles his way through the first act of the film. When he runs into Rosie (Ed Asner in one of the best film roles of his life), his former CIA handler, we get the first few signs of life. Fenner meets Dr. Pierre Vaugiroud, played by Boris Karloff, who is supposed to be preparing a report about the actual cause of the incident. For some reason, Vaugiroud takes a shine to Fenner, and he asks him to set up a meeting between representatives from every country so he can present the report to all of them at the same time. When Vaugiroud’s assistants all turn up dead, Rosie presses Fenner into service to help figure out what’s really going on. Things become personal when it turns out that the guy who blew himself up in the beginning of the film was involved with Sandra Fane (Elke Sommer) at the time he died. Fane is the woman who ruined Fenner’s life the first time around, and once he tracks her down and starts to sort out how she was involved in all of this, his life starts to unravel again. There’s a sense of grim fatality to the way things happen, and Fenner just keep moving, refusing to be beaten. I love the performance by Karl Boehm as Robert Wahl, the film’s main villain. He strongly reminds me of Ronald Lacey as Toht in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. He’s a brave man, too, for diving into the waters of Venice for one of the sequences towards the end of the film. I’m not sure how he died in real life, but that water may have had something to do with it.
After THE VENETIAN AFFAIR, I got my first chance to chat with Quentin. We talked about spy films in general, but quickly segued into a discussion of the last film of the evening, a title I’ve been trying to track down for a long time. “Oh, yeah. I just lucked out. I saw it pop up on BIG REEL and grabbed it,” he said. He went on to explain more about the film in his intro once he took the stage. He talked about the counterculture comedies of the ‘70s, particularly the animated ones. It was a very quick sort of sub-genre that had its moment, then vanished. FRITZ THE CAT, DIRTY DUCK, COONSKIN... these were X-rated cartoons that were aimed directly at the youth culture, films that were notorious and demanded to be seen as a sort of middle finger to conventional filmmaking. There were also the live-action sketch comedy films like TUNNELVISION and THE GROOVE TUBE and KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE. That attitude spilled onto television when SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was launched in 1974, and it makes sense that Michael O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts, two of the best writers from the original SNL staff, were hired to turn the French cartoon TARZOON into an American release. Thanks to a lawsuit from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, they weren’t allowed to use the name “Tarzoon” when they released the film here, so they simply reversed the audio, creating an unintelligible sound everytime they say the main character’s name. Oddly, that’s the least surreal touch in the film.
We saw some great trailers before this one, including a vintage TV commercial for an Activision/Atari game called STARMASTER, the AMERICAN POP trailer which is so good it actually made me want to see the film again immediately, a Paramount Family Matinee film called TARZAN & THE JUNGLE BOY which looked terrible, and finally another PUTNEY SWOPE spot.
Finally seeing a film you’ve waited 20 years or so to see can be very disappointing, but in this case, I think SHAME OF THE JUNGLE more than lived up to expectations. It’s technically crude, it rarely makes sense, and the humor in the film is incredibly juvenile, but taken as a whole, it’s a joyous assault on the senses that you would have to be a total Grinch to resist. It’s all about Tarzoon’s attempts to rescue his mate, June, who has been kidnapped by Queen Bazonga and her army of giant penises. That thin narrative thread is all the filmmakers required to hang together about a thousand of the most offensive and foul sex jokes you can imagine.
The reason I’ve always known about this film is because they got John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Christopher Guest to contribute voices in the American version, although it’s really only Belushi who you’d recognize. He shows up as Craig, the Perfect Master, a drunk dude flying around on a carpet that is carried by a bunch of ducks tied to a long curtain rod. It’s a strange appearance that appears to be largely improvised. For the most part, this is non-verbal humor. I don’t think O’Donoghue and Beatts had to do much work on the film, because it plays without dialogue. There are jokes about the food chain in Africa, Cheetah fucking Jane, Cheetah swinging through the trees on Tarzan’s dick, mountains shaped like a naked woman complete with a cave where the vagina would be, and much, much more. I laughed out loud every time they brought on the Molar Men, tiny little cannibals who are genuinely scary. They eat every single thing in their path, including a stampeding horde of water buffalo. Picha, the director of the original film, has an art style that reminds me of Sergio Aragones of MAD and GROO fame. It’s very cartoony, exaggerated, but there’s a real artistry to it. Watching the giant musical number where a thousand penises march into formations like a swastika and a peace sign, the crowd kept applauding the sheer audacity of it, and overall, this was a perfect way to end the first night of the fest.
I’ve got to go get ready now for tonight’s Documentary double feature, but I’ll be back afterwards with my next few days worth of coverage as well as today’s DVD SHELF column. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
