Wise: Werth, I found it!
Werth: What? All the Oz: The Great and Powerful merch you've been trolling Toys 'R' Us and the Disney Store for?
Wise: Not yet, but I did find a movie I've been hunting for years. Back in the 80's, Superstation TBS used to program "Friday Night Frights," an anthology of all the best—and maybe I mean worst—horror films of the disco era that showed classics like the original Piranha (1978) and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978).
Werth: I love a good killer animals flick!
Wise: I'm not a fan of scary movies, but as a kid I used to sneak downstairs to see how far past the opening credits I could last. Most nights I was scurrying back to bed within minutes, but one film had me hooked. This was long before the age of the internet, and if you missed the title of a late night movie, you could wait years hoping someday you'd stumble across it again. And all I could remember about this flick—aside from my own abject terror—was that it was told in three parts and involved killer cats enacting revenge.
Werth: Oh, you mean Cat's Eye (1985).
Wise: Actually, Cat's Eye was the stumbling block to my search because it has a similar structure and theme. And because it was written by Stephen King and starred a young Drew Barrymore, it had a level of fame that obscured the film I was looking for. But thanks to YouTube and an overlong search for cute kitten videos that turned down a dark alley of cat attacks caught on tape, I found my prize: The Uncanny (1977).
Werth: Dark alleys and pussycats. Your therapist is gonna have a field day.
Wise: Peter Cushing plays a milquetoast sci-fi novelist who has made the terrifying discovery that cats are really an alien life form bent on human destruction, and ventures to his publisher's (Ray Milland) house late one night to discuss three examples of feline perfidiousness. In the first, a housemaid kills her wealthy mistress
(Joan Greenwood) in the hope that she and the woman's ne-er do well nephew can collect the inheritance and marry, only to be mauled by the old lady's cats. In the second, an orphan uses witchcraft to punish her aunt and uncle for disposing of her cat.
And in the third, an actress murdered by her husband is avenged by her cat. The film is pretty schlocky with deep shadows to cover the cheap sets and most of the cat wrangling is just about as terrifying as a commercial for Fancy Feast—but the score by British TV vet Wilfred Joshephs is spine tingling, and whoever designed the sound effects of cats shredding human flesh either deserves an Oscar or a long rest in tightly locked sanitarium.
Werth: All this late night, animal terror talk reminds me of one of my favorite horror movies—Them! from 1954.
Wise: Is that the prequel to Us!? Or the sequel to Object of the Proposition!?
Werth: Them! is the first US "giant monster" flick and actually came out the same year as Godzilla. But the two movies are very different. Where Godzilla revels in showing a giant rubber costume stomping on Japanese cities and lots of Japanese people running and screaming, Them! starts small in the barren, beautiful New Mexican desert.
A young girl clutching a battered doll is found wandering in a somnambulist state, unable to tell kindly Police Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) what has happened. Peterson finds out soon enough as they come upon the shredded remains of the mobile trailer of her parents, the body of the eviscerated trailer standing in for bodies of her parents that aren't there. The only clue is a pile of sugar.
Wise: Maybe they were baking a cake.
Werth: It doesn't take long for the intrepid sergeant and FBI agent Robert Graham (the ever-so-tall James Arness) to stumble upon an unbelievable discovery. The atom bomb tests at White Sands nine years ago have created a colony of giant ants, and with the help of ant know-it-all Dr.Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn sans Santa whiskers) and his assistant daughter Pat (Joan Weldon) this brave team attempts to save the world from being wiped out of existence by a species that is just as vicious as we are.
Wise: But maybe not Michael Musto.
Werth: What is so timeless about Them! is how it thrills and scares by not showing us the giant villains. The strange trill-like sound they make crescendos on the wind, making us imagine the terrible creatures several times before the mostly believable monsters are shown. What Them! gets right is how to scare us by hiding what we're up against. These monsters don't stomp on cars and eat radio towers on a sunny day in front of a lot of tourists with their Kodachromes.
They lurk in the sewers, taking their victims at night, remaining hidden. The warning about the unseen dangers of messing with nature's tiniest element, the atom, is not lost amongst the sci-fi plot and car-sized, wiggily six-legged creations of what is still today, a genuinely scary movie.
Wise: Ugh! I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep tonight.
Werth: Buck up, Wise. Just count Oz water bottles until you fall asleep and meet back next week for more Film Gab.
Wise: Hello, Werth.
Werth: Hi, Wise. What's with the mega-jumbo-latte and the Times' real estate section?
Wise: My insomnia has been acting up lately, and I've been fantasizing about a boondock cottage somewhere I can catch up on sleep.
Werth: One thing all New Yorkers have in common is the urge to sprint for the nearest railroad station to catch a train to our favorite out-of-town refuge whenever New York City life gets a little too... well, New York City.
Wise: Based on Peter Cameron's novel, The Weekend (1999) follows Lyle (David Conrad) as he and his new (and much younger) boyfriend Robert (James Duval) flee New York City for a quiet getaway at the upstate home of his old friends Marian and John (Deborah Kara Unger and Madmen's Jared Harris). Unfortunately, the weekend retreat turns out to be anything but quiet as long held frustrations, sorrows and resentments begin to surface, particularly Marion's complicated feelings for Lyle's deceased partner Tony (D.B. Sweeney).
Werth: She obviously watched The Cutting Edge one too many times.
Wise: Adding to the tumult is their glamorous but sharp-tonged neighbor Laura Ponti (Gena Rowlands), her snappish actress daughter Nina (Brooke Shields), and Nina's married lover Thierry (Gary Dourdan). Despite the large cast, the film is composed mostly of small scenes between pairs of characters, interspersed occasionally with blued-tinged flashbacks to Tony's past bons mots that feel something like an old Calvin Klein fragrance ad.
Werth: Don't you mean like an old Calvin Klein jeans ad?
Wise: I have to admit that I've avoided this film for over a decade because the novel it's based on is one of my favorites, and I was worried that Cameron's treasure box could only be butchered onscreen. And it turns out that I was only half right. Writer/director Brian Skeet has an instinctive feel for the rhythms of Cameron's prose, capturing the languorous feeling of the country after escaping the fetid heat of the city. If anything, he's perhaps too respectful of Cameron's words, cramming in entire passages of dialogue that feel spare within the expanse of a novel, but overblown on film.
Werth: Show it, don't say it, Skeet!
Wise: Still, Skeet gets a lot more more right than wrong. He is not slavishly faithful to his source, adapting and enriching the more cinematic parts of the book, eliding the rest. The cast is almost uniformly excellent, particularly Rowlands, who is at the center of the most lively scenes, and Unger, who manages to portray both her character's unlikability and her emotional frailty. Less successful is Sweeney who is forced to play more of a symbol than a character and whose Long Island inflection makes a stark contrast to Tony's platitudinousness while being posed like The Dying Gaul.
Werth: At the beginning of Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) the main character is also packing for a trip to the country to get away from New York City. But Don Birnam (Ray Milland) quickly decides that instead of leaving by way of Metro North, he will take his usual escape route through a bottle of rye. You see, Don is a raging alcoholic.
Wise: Which is a lot cheaper than a house in the Hamptons.
Werth: Don handily ditches his well-meaning brother Wick (Phillip Terry, who at the time was spoused up with Joan Crawford) and his "best girl," the ritzy Helen St. James (the doe-eyed Jane Wyman wearing leopard courtesy of Edith Head) and begins a four day drinking binge that would put Mel Gibson to shame.
Before the film is done, Don is kicked out of his favorite bar, installed in a drunk tank, and roams up and down Third Avenue looking for a pawn shop that is open on Yom Kippur.
Wise: Clearly he should be taking the Day of atonement a bit more seriously.
Werth: Before its treacly ending, Lost Weekend is a disturbing look at how the mind of an alcoholic works—or doesn't work. Milland doesn't play for sympathy, his silky, gentlemanly demeanor turning into a web of disgusting lies, selfishness and criminality as he descends into a gin-fueled spiral. But because he's Ray Milland, we also can't bring ourselves to hate this jerk. He knows how pathetic he is, he is just powerless to stop himself from pursuing the next drink.
Wilder works his typical magic with story rather than a flashy cinematic style, but he does take the time to have fun with closeups on a booze-filled shot glass, water rings on the bar, and a DT fantasy with a bat and a mouse that is laughable until it's not.
The film made quite an impact when it was released—winning four Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Milland—but perhaps the most definitive proof of its popularity is that two years later the film was spoofed in the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Split Hare".
Wise: What's up, Drunk?
Werth: Whether you're packing your bags, or blacking out, join us next week for more Film Gab!
Didn't know that the Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder (1954) had a limited release in 3-D? Well it did, and starting Friday 6/17 for one week only, Film Forum is showing Grace Kelly and Ray Milland in Naturalvision 3D. Don't miss this classic thriller that reminds you to always keep a pair of scissors on your desk!
