ROXIE THEATER: I WAKE UP DREAMING: 99 44/100% NOIR—The Evening Class Interview With Wayne Shellabarger

Elliot Lavine [interviews one and two] continues to entertain his San Franciscan audiences with noir oddities culled from studio vaults, private collections and Blu-rays, curatorially assembled into his 2013 edition of "I Wake Up Dreaming: 99 44/100% Noir", which continues its run through Thursday, May 23, 2013 at the Roxie. Dennis Harvey wrote up the series for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, as did Erin Blackwell for The Bay Area Reporter, Pam Grady for Cinezine Kane, Casey Burchby for The SF Weekly, and G. Allen Johnson for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ever ahead of the curve when it comes to value added to the theatrical experience, Elliot invited Wayne Shellabarger to contribute a slide show of comic book panels to complement the series inbetween screenings and the effect has been stunning. I cornered Shellabarger in a dark alley near the Roxie where, unfortunately, the trash cans were only grey.

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Michael Guillén: Wayne, how did you become interested in comic book panels as a slide show project to accompany Elliot Lavine's "I Wake Up Dreaming: 99 44/100% Noir" series for the Roxie Theater?

Wayne Shellabarger: I had access to a large digital archive of comics and—as I started reading through them—I discovered artists and stories that I had never heard of or read about or seen; most importantly seen reprinted or anthologized. The vibrancy, urgency and energy of certain panels gave me a buzz—whatever you want to call it—and struck me for some reason. I felt the visceral energy of these panels. They hit me. So I began to collect them through screencaps for my personal enjoyment and to look at again for later reference.

I built up quite a library of these and decided to review what I had captured by setting up a slide show to sit back and watch them. What I discovered was that—rather than looking at a series of panels—the slide show created a third form. It wasn't cinema, it wasn't comics, and it wasn't just a slide show. The way that the panels related to each other and were juxtaposed against each other in non-predictable ways created an interesting effect. Watching this slide show for the first time, I felt something new since seeing the panels as I had collected them. I thought, "This would be a really great thing to show before a movie." Especially before a film noir, because what I was collecting was mainly crime comics.

Guillén: In some respects, I consider your slide show project an installation piece.

Shellabarger: Whatever form this slide show has ended up taking at this festival is something I never intended. It unfolded organically and kind of happened as I kept working at it, looking at the panels more, adding to the slide show.

Guillén: Elliot Lavine is a comic book fan? He's been posting several comic book panels on his Facebook timeline. Is that your influence?

Shellabarger: Probably, yeah, though he posted a lot of cool comic book stuff before I started doing this.

Guillén: What caught my eye with your slide show project is that—although the appropriation and recontextualization of comic book panels is readily apparent in American culture through the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein—his project remains essentially a parody. What you're doing is more complementary or supplementary, especially with regard to partnering it with noir films, because you have culled out a collection of panels that are genre-specific.

Shellabarger: I would like to avoid using words like "re-appropriate" or "recontextualize" because there was no brain work that went into this, no intellectual effort at all, the panels just hit me at a gut level.

Guillén: Well, I'd argue that gut reactions fall within the domain of emotional intelligence, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with intellectuality, and is no less smart for it. As I watched your slide show at the festival, and monitored how well-received it was by your audience, it made me aware of the project's visceral aesthetics: the colors are primary; the frames are succinct, self-explanatory and complete in themselves. Your skill as the compiler of these frames is to single out, for wont of a better term, the focus through light (and darkness)—and, in your case, color—on the essential dramatic moment.

Shellabarger: Yeah! For every one I picked, I saw hundreds that didn't do it for me. It was not like there were gems lying everywhere, for me personally at least, and what I respond to might be different for someone else, but it seems like a lot of people are responding to the selfsame elements that I'm responding to.

Guillén: Do you come from an art history background?

Shellabarger: Well, I've collected comics since I was a kid and then I did art history in college and I draw and illustrate and things like that. Once this slide show started to take shape, then it began to speak to me and dictated what it needed to build itself. Once I had in mind that it might be shown in this form, then it was easier to find a path—"This will work. This goes with this theme or that motif."—which I discovered as I was reviewing my collection. It's not that I'm imposing these themes or motifs. I'm receptive to what's already there.

Guillén: Which is where I would agree with you that this is not recontextualized art. If anything, it's punctuating or emphasizing what's intrinsic to the images.

Shellabarger: Or celebrating them. I'm not trying to make something different out of them.

Guillén: The simple genius of this project is the converging of two popular forms that focus on generic elements.

Shellabarger: One really nice surprise that I noticed was that—if these are noir panels (and I do think there's a hardcore noir sensibility to every single one of them)—they're at the same time the most garish, brightly-hued, and colorful comics, much more so than the comics I grew up reading in the '70s and '80s. For example, there will be a guy walking down a deserted alley and the trash cans will be a bright blue, bright green and bright red. The coloring works perfectly and doesn't take away from the dark attitude of the panel. It's very strange that it works.

Guillén: Even as a child reading comics, I became aware early on of the importance of inking and the individuals responsible for adding color to the stories. I noticed how sometimes the bleeding of color added to the effect, whether intended or not, and that quality especially stood out watching your panels projected onto a large screen.

You mentioned earlier that you were taken by panels unfamiliar to you. I was sitting in the theater with a fellow comics enthusiast and both of us couldn't recognize or source a single frame.

Shellabarger: Yeah, I thought that was another really attractive trait. What attracted me was that I was unfamiliar with a lot of these artists, probably because most of them are anonymous to this day in a lot of cases, except for people like Craig Yoe [official website].

Guillén: So these comics are from the '50s?

Shellabarger: Yeah, they're late '40s and then early '50s before the Comics Code. It seemed like it took the noir sensibility a little longer to inject itself in comics than in film. I noticed that it's in 1948 that it starts in comics more.

Guillén: So did the Comics Code prohibit these kinds of images?

Shellabarger: Exactly. That's what it was designed to do. I mean, look at them! They're terribly harmful. [Laughs.]

Guillén: But then if you look at contemporary comics they're filled with violence.

Shellabarger: Yeah, but it's senseless, not beautiful.

Guillén: So what you're offering in your slide show are significant pre-Code panels that mirror but don't actually time with pre-Code film?

Shellabarger: Right. The same phenomenon happened in comics as happened in film but some 20+ years later.

Guillén: Other than by way of this slide show at the festival, do you intend to further this project in any way?

Shellabarger: A friend of mine compelled me to gather some of the panels together that he'd seen me post to accompany a musical performance that he was doing and that's when I started to gather them with the idea in mind of presenting them publically, rather than just for my personal use. So that's made me aware that I can build different programs to accompany different events, be they music or film. So there might be more slide shows coming. I've also collected a lot of romance panels, and monster panels, and surrealistic panels.

Guillén: About how many images did you use for this slide show?

Shellabarger: Just under 500, about 450, in constant rotation. The randomness of it helps underscore its effect.

Guillén: We're saying "slide show", but are these actually slides?

Shellabarger: No, they're jpegs and they're intended to run in a completely random order. Whatever juxtapositions and connections people make between the panels is what's most interesting about the project. The randomness allows new juxtapositions and connections to be constantly made and I find that stimulating, and—combined with the soundtrack underneath them to glue the images together—I'm surprised how well it works.

Guillén: Did you compile the soundtrack as well?

Shellabarger: I actually got a couple of my buddies—Tom Lynch and Jeremy Wheat, who are as much into music as I am into comics and who share my sensibility on a lot of things—to create the soundtrack. They hooked in to what I was wanting to do and they came up with these great mixes of '40s-'50s jazz and TV crime soundtracks.

Guillén: Thanks, Wayne, for taking the time to talk with me.

Shellabarger: Thanks to Elliot Lavine for creating a forum for this project!

ROXIE: NASTY-ASS FILMS—ANN DVORAK X 2

I got so excited about the two Joan Blondell films screening at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!" (March 2-8, 2012), that I neglected to note that Lavine's opening night doublebill includes not only Three on a Match, starring Blondell and Ann Dvorak, but, another 1932 Dvorak vehicle: Howard Hawks' Scarface (featuring Paul Muni), which will be shown in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print.

Of Scarface, Lavine writes: "This blistering pre-code gangster saga towers over the rest—an unnerving portrait of a brutally evil and immoral man (patterned very loosely after Al Capone) obsessed with the power that crime and other perversions have carved out for him. Blissfully violent and sexually profane, Scarface sears itself onto your unsuspecting brain like few other films can."

Of Ann Dvorak, film historian Matthew Kennedy has already bemoaned her status as "shamefully neglected." Opening night at "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!" redresses that neglect. Here's a couple of lovely publicity shots of Dvorak from Scarface. You would think from her experience in Three on a Match that Dvorak would have learned that cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health; but, I guess during pre-Code the Surgeon General was merely a gleam in his father's eye?

ROXIE: NASTY-ASS FILMS—JOAN BLONDELL X 2

As Juliet Clark wrote in her introductory program note for the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) retrospective "Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda" (which ran June 13-29, 2008): "With a lush figure, bright, platter-sized eyes that missed nothing, and a mouth equally ready to dish a wisecrack, pull a sneer, or plant a kiss, actress Joan Blondell (1906–1979) was a staple of Hollywood's studio heyday. The fact that she rarely got first billing testifies more to the wealth of star power in her era than to any shortage of talent or hard work on her part: she made close to a hundred films over half a century, and brought freshness and spirit to every role."

Blondell is featured as a pre-Code staple in two "nasty-ass" films from Warner Brothers programmed into Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", upcoming at the Roxie Theater (March 2-8, 2012); both films in B&W HQ Digital.

Lavine synopsizes the first, Three on a Match (1932), screening on opening night, Friday, March 2: "Three young women, friends since childhood, reunite after years of separation. But the random hand of fate has determined that at least one of them will descend into the depths of drugs, depravity and death before the breathless pace of this tragically exciting sixty-three minute pre-code melodrama has exhausted itself." That "random hand of fate"—later avoided by Sydney Greenstreet in Three Strangers (1946)—is the WWI superstition that if three people lit their cigarettes off the same match, the third was doomed to die.

Juliet Clark synopsizes in her PFA capsule: "Compressing thirteen years into sixty-three minutes of screaming headlines and sordid melodrama, Three on a Match draws a triangle of types—bad girl, good girl, rich girl—only to tweak the social-determinist schematic with bitter irony. A chance meeting in a beauty parlor reunites a trio of childhood classmates: Blondell the reform-school graduate, pegged in girlhood as 'just not serious enough'; Bette Davis, the serious one; and Ann Dvorak, the snobbish striver who, ambitions fulfilled, finds adult life 'tiresome and pointless.' As the scenario rapidly descends into an underworld of drugs and crime, it becomes clear that there are worse things to be than a bad girl. The film showcases Blondell's knack for combining charming vulgarity with basic decency, and Dvorak's alarming talent for depravity; only Davis's character is underdeveloped (although her full physical development is on frequent display). Watch for an early appearance by Humphrey Bogart."

In his biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2007), film historian Matthew Kennedy adds: "In early 1932 [Joan Blondell] made the trenchant Three on a Match, all about the divergent fortunes of school friends who meet ten years later. Vivian (Ann Dvorak) has married a wealthy lawyer. Ruth (Bette Davis) is a secretary, and Mary (Blondell) has taken to the stage after a stint in reform school. With its attention on violence, drugs, and kidnapping, Three on a Match was judged by the New York Times to be 'tedious and distasteful,' but it has become a minor pre-Code classic. It is a wonder of economic film making, as a fully realized story covering thirteen years is contained in sixty-three minutes. The plot hinges on Dvorak's character, who squanders loveless, conventional respectability and winds up ensnared in the underworld. The idiom-filled dialogue had forward momentum and gutter-inspired realism. With its uncompromising conclusion, Three on a Match became a primal scream against the injustices visited upon women." (Supra, p. 48)

When I spoke to Matthew Kennedy during the PFA "Fizz on the Soda" retrospective, he said of Three on a Match: "If you want gritty pre-Code, they don't come any grittier than Three on a Match. It's part of volume two of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood series and it involves three women who were friends in grade school and then it catches up with them several years later and the different paths their lives have taken. One in particular—played by the shamefully neglected Ann Dvorak—burns a hole through the screen. The three women are Dvorak, Blondell and Bette Davis and, interestingly, of the three the one who makes the least impression is Bette Davis. Her role is quite underwritten. What's also interesting about Three on a Match is that it's only 63 minutes long and it covers something like 15 years. It is the most tight, economical, without-feeling-rushed movie you will ever see. It's a text book lesson in filmmaking efficiency and storytelling; it's absolutely amazing that way."

According to a positive review of the film in the November 17, 1932 issue of The Spokane Spokesman, Three on a Match depicted the passage of time through "a brand new approach and treatment... The parade of time is cleverly portrayed through news headlines down the years, popular song sheets, reproduced on screen, and excerpts from the news weeklies from 1919 and 1932." Within these montages, Three on a Match made clever use of its titular superstition by including a graphic of a "Believe it or Not" newspaper clip explaining Swedish match tycoon Ivar Kreuger's attempt to get people to use more matches by exploiting the WWI superstition.

The second Blondell film in the "Nasty-Ass" lineup, screening on Tuesday, March 6, is Blondie Johnson (1933). Lavine writes: "Against a graphically depicted Depression-era backdrop, the story of a wise-cracking gal who rises to the top in the male-dominated crime rackets is played out with enough gusto and sexually charged ammo to load a dozen tommy guns. A rapid-fire exercise in economy and excitement, this is first-class pre-code entertainment of the highest order!"

In my conversation with film historian Matthew Kennedy referenced earlier, I asked him to profile a Blondell film not included in the PFA series that he would want audiences to catch and his prompt suggestion was Blondie Johnson. "It's one of the few times," Kennedy told me, "where Warner Brothers said to Blondell, 'You are in no uncertain terms the name above the title and you're not co-starring with a man, not supporting somebody, it's a movie about you.' She's in every scene. It's a fantastic, low-budget gangster movie where Blondell plays the gangster. She's not the gangster's moll; she's the gangster."

Kennedy wrote about the film in his Blondell biography: "Joan finally had her chance at a solo turn with Blondie Johnson. This was her movie outright; she worked every day of its four week schedule. Conceived as a female Little Caesar, Blondie undergoes an extreme transformation at the hands of an indifferent society. As a Depression victim, she appears before a magistrate begging for assistance so that she may care for her sick mother. She gets no sympathy, then goes home to find her mother dead. She hardens quickly. 'This city's going to pay me a living, a good living, and it's going to get back from me just as little as I have to give,' she says with bitter certainty.

"Blondie Johnson gently twisted movie storytelling and sexual stereotypes. This time Joan was not a gangster's female sidekick, she was the gangster. She became that way by the malfunctions of government, not because of a predisposition to be bad as was often the case in roles played by Cagney and Robinson. There is humor and authenticity in Blondie Johnson, and Joan enjoyed a personal success. She showed a new command on screen, occupying the space with full, confident strides and persuasively shifting from charity case to tough Mafiosa to vulnerable woman in love. It was a tidy hit at the box-office, grossing $325,000, more than twice its negative costs." (Supra, pp. 50-51)

ROXIE: NASTY-ASS FILMS—THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933)

With miscegenation their common theme, The Cheat (1931) has been coupled with Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", reeling at the Roxie Theater on Sunday, March 4 in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print. "An exotically adventurous film from a most unexpected director!" Lavine exclaims, "A beautiful American missionary is, through fate, thrown into a romantic interlude with a charismatic Chinese warlord. Breaking many Hollywood taboos—mainly the issue of miscegenation and, in this case sprinkled liberally with simmering displays of passion—Bitter Tea is a primal slice of pre-code erotica, a film that will amaze you from start to finish!"

In his autobiography The Name Above the Title (1971, The Macmillan Company), Frank Capra admitted it was because he had to get an Oscar® that he decided to film The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Secretly, he had thought his previous film American Madness (1932) would score him the statuette and—when he expressed his disappointment to Harry Cohn—Cohn told him, "Forget it. You ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk." "Okay," Capra decided, "If the Academy voted only for arty films (not true), I would make the artiest film they ever saw—about miscegenation! That ought to stir up some arty votes." (Supra, p. 140)

For Capra it was easy to consider Barbara Stanwyck for the role of the young American missionary Megan Davis, who he envisioned as "externally frigid but internally burning with her 'call.' " It was General Yen who proved a casting problem. "I knew what I did not want," Capra wrote, "a well-known star made up as an Oriental. I looked for a tall, overpowering, real Chinese. But there were no tall Chinese in casting directories, or even in laundries; most Chinese-Americans were short Cantonese. After many interviews we settled on a not-too-well-known Swedish actor, Nils Asther. He was tall, blue-eyed, handsome; spoke with a slightly pedantic 'book' accent; his impressive face promised the serenity and mystery of a centuries-old culture.

"But how could we make a Swede look Oriental? His blue eyes would photograph steel-gray in black-and-white film. That was an unusual plus. But what about the slant of his eyes? The prevailing method of 'changing' Caucasian eyes into Oriental ones was to stretch and tape the outer ends of the eyes towards the ears, fooling practically nobody. Besides which the actors looked more hideous than Oriental. There must be a better, more natural way. There was.

"Closely studying Chinese features, I noticed two major differences between Oriental and Caucasian eyes: One, the upper Oriental eyelid is smooth and almost round, lacking the crease, or fold, of the Caucasian eyelid; and, two, Oriental eyelashes are much shorter than Western eyelashes. We followed up the two clues: The make-up man covered Nils Asther's upper eyelids with smooth, round, false 'skins,' and clipped his eyelashes to one-third their natural length. Without adding any other make-up we made photographic tests of Asther's face. On the screen he looked strange—unfathomable. The stiff, upper eyelids kept his eyes in a permanent half-closed position. Of a certain he was not a Caucasian—and his face looked natural, uncontorted! Bedecked in Mandarin costumes, and a fez-like, black, tall skullcap for added height, Asther could pass for an awe-inspiring warlord. I added one final touch: an eccentric walk—long slow strides with both his long arms moving back and forth together—in parallel—with each stride. By keeping the camera low to accentuate height, Nils Asther became General Yen—ruthless, cultured, mysterious, and devastatingly attractive."

But not without incident. "In clipping Nils Asther's eyelashes, we forgot that long eyelashes protected Caucasian eyes against harsh light. The first day we exposed him to the glare of studio sun arcs he came down with the worst case of eyeburn (klieg eyes) studio doctors had ever seen. He was ordered to remain locked up in a dark dressing room between shots, and to wear dark, red glasses during rehearsals. Only during actual photography did we expose his unprotected eyes to the sun or studio lamps. Despite those precautions, Asther suffered constant acute pain throughout the whole picture. Fearing for his eyesight, doctors attended him night and day, administering poultices, eyedrops, and pain killers. Yet the gallant Swede gave a performance that one has to call an elegant tour de force." (Supra, pp. 141-142)

"The result of these labors, not surprisingly," wrote David Sterritt for his Turner Classic Movie essay, "is a Hollywood stereotype." Less dismissive and, perhaps, my favorite write-up on The Bitter Tea of General Yen is Kevin Lee's for Senses of Cinema: "Back then, audiences could not accept a film that showed a Chinese man and a white woman achieving unprecedented levels of intimacy. Today, audiences may regard the white characters' stereotypical denunciations of Chinese culture, or the interracial love story with the Chinese romantic lead played by a Swedish actor in yellowface makeup, with either camp irreverence or a queasy sense of shame for Hollywood's racist legacy. It is a film orphaned between historical and cultural norms." Veined with poignant subjectivity, Lee qualified: "I think the film's failure to find a home within a prevailing social convention was what made me fall in love with it. ... This is what I find to be of such value in The Bitter Tea of General Yen; that it risks offence for the sake of constructing a dialogue, one fraught with so many perils in the realms of politics, religion, cultures and sex, that it would not be worth it if it weren't necessary. Despite the social prejudices that informed its production, it dared to carve out a space where two people might live not as Chinese and American, heathen and Christian, man and woman, but just 'you and me'—while reckoning soberly with the impossibility of achieving such a space. Whatever faults it may have, its daring puts contemporary films of similar subject matter to shame."

Though The Bitter Tea of General Yen once again failed to secure Capra his desired Oscar®—"Damn those Academy voters! Couldn't they recognize a work of art when they saw one?"—it did bear the honor of being the first film to open the Radio City Music Hall in January 1933, even though scandalized audiences convinced the Hall to shorten the film's scheduled two-week run to eight days. The theme of miscegenation had been "made palatable and attractive as a natural outcome of passions molded by tumultuous times" (Wikipedia) and that proved unacceptable to the prejudices of the time, which contributed to the film's dubious distinction of being one of only two Capra films to lose money at the box office. As Barbara Stanwyck phrased it, "The women's clubs came out very strongly against it, because the white woman was in love with the yellow man and kissed his hand. So what! I was so shocked [by the reaction]. It never occurred to me, and I don't think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it" (quoted in Joseph McBride, The Catastrophe of Success, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992, p. 281).

ROXIE: NASTY-ASS FILMS—THE CHEAT (1931)

"My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine."—Tallulah Bankhead.

My upcoming visit to San Francisco promises to reward me with cinematic treasures. First in line is Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", reeling at the Roxie Theater from Friday, March 2 through Thursday, March 8. As detailed in the Roxie film notes: "It's been nearly fifteen years since the last great Hollywood Pre-Code Festival at the Roxie Theater but ... the Roxie is proud to announce its exciting return to blatantly profane pre-code motion picture entertainment.... Hollywood films produced before early 1934 were often marked by an unwholesome indifference to delicate sensibilities. Filled with erotically charged images, dangerous, graphic violence, and bizarrely aberrant behavior, these are films that over seventy-five years later continue to batter us with an arsenal of artistic bravura!"

As a huge Tallulah Bankhead fan, I am delighted to have the chance to watch my foghorn-voiced diva in this Pre-Code vehicle The Cheat (1931), directed by Broadway mogul George Abbott and co-starring Harvey Stephens and Irving Pichel in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print. Having seen the 1915 Cecil B. DeMille version with Sessue Hayakawa and Fannie Ward, I'm intrigued to see where Bankhead and Abbott will take this provocative tale of white slavery and miscegenation.

In her eponymous autobiography (1952:191), Tallulah Bankhead candidly admitted that all three of her 1931 ventures with Paramount Astoria—Tarnished Lady, My Sin and The Cheat—were banal. Despite their talent, these films "fizzled". "Why?" she mused, "For the same reason that though the eggs, the cracker crumbs and the salt used for the soufflé may be topnotch the resultant dish may be rancid." Paramount was teetering on bankruptcy and their "corporate jitters were reflected in their products," she surmised. "Patched, scissored, and victimized by all sorts of hocus-pocus", these "operas" (as she termed them) ended up messes.

The December 12, 1931 review in The New York Times granted reprieve from Bankhead's own disappointment, however, praising the film as "a most satisfactory production", no masterpiece but captivating, and noted that it was gratifying to observe the "handsome and talented" Bankhead—"who has been somewhat unfortunate with her previous screen vehicles"—at last appearing in one that "really merits attention."

At DVD Verdict, Daryl Loomis offers that "this remake of the even more bizarre 1915 Cecil B. Demille original has shocking moments even today. Tallulah Bankhead was a phenomenal actress and her lead performance, guilty and innocent at once, is dripping with sexuality. ...[T]hose interested in early 20th Century America's fixation on Oriental culture will [find] a lot to sink their teeth into."

Glenn Erickson adds at DVD Talk: "The script equates 'Asian' with 'perverse'. Pichel has spent a good deal of time in the Orient, and his mansion is decked out in Japanese style. For a party, he dresses Bankhead in an elegant Chinese outfit, like a trophy. The script gives him some barbaric Eastern ideas about sex—like a secret cabinet with dolls fashioned after his female conquests. When Bankhead refuses to play ball at the last minute, he brands her with a hot iron, to claim her as his possession! Like a demented version of The Letter, further complications involve a shooting and a rather hilariously exaggerated trial, where, of course, the 'truth burned into the flesh' must be publicly revealed. With Bankhead overdoing most of her scenes, it gets pretty sticky. The Production Code specifically rules out branding as acceptable subject manner; almost certainly with this film in mind."

At The Sheila Variations, Sheila O'Malley asserts that "Blue Velvet has nothing on the perversity shown in 1933′s The Cheat." To illustrate same, she cites the film's opening sequence where a tuxedoed Hardy Livingstone ("played with stiff creepiness by Irving Pichel") makes a welcoming speech to the wealthy party-goers attending a fundraiser. "His first line of the speech is something like, 'I suppose anything I say right now will seem rather banal…' And there is a snicker around the table, and one guy calls out, 'Careful, there are ladies present!' and someone else says, 'Nice word!' What I am trying to say is that the movie opens with a joke about anal sex—in the midst of a chi-chi fundraiser. Laughter runs around the room, and Livingstone, the creep, continues, 'As I said, it might be banal…' Another burst of knowing laughter. It takes a dirty mind to hear the word 'banal' and immediately think of assholes—but that is what the movie does. Everyone in the scene is in on the joke. It's not a 'code'. It's out in the open."

O'Malley provides a thorough narrative scene-by-scene synopsis of The Cheat, describing Bankhead's character as "a woman who knows how to handle men. She's got the banter down, she has an air of plausible deniability, and yet she also projects a smoldering kind of wild sexuality." Of Bankhead herself, O'Malley writes: "There's something about Tallulah that could never seem young. I am sure she was a child at some point, but she probably had a middle-aged soul from the beginning."

HALLOWEEN MAUDIT AT THE ROXIE

When I was a child trick or treating in my neighborhood on Halloween, word would travel fast between us kids of which house had the best treats—gooey popcorn balls, handfuls of candy corn, or homemade cookies—and we would all converge on that doorbell in greedy anticipation like a flock of Hitchcock birds. Years later, my insatiable sweet tooth has turned into an equally insatiable cinematic tooth and—during this heightened season of ghouls and ghosts, muertos and the Bay Area's orange and black baseball team poised to win the World Series—I touch base with Hell on Frisco Bay's listing of festival treats awaiting the Bay Area cinephile, gleefully aware that I will not go home empty-handed. As Brian Darr has mentioned in his thorough survey of our local "in-fest-ation", The Roxie celebrates Halloween with three events: tonight's double bill of 1950s horror/sci-fi (The Creature With the Atom Brain and The Man From Planet X), tomorrow's double-bill featuring archive prints of David Cronenberg's The Brood and the Hammer studio's Corruption, and a third on Halloween night consisting of two films by director Alex Cox (Straight to Hell Returns and Searchers 2.0)—who will be present at the screenings! (and at the Rafael Film Center the following night).

In the face of so much arthouse festival fare and the daunting task of having to report on same, the mindless fun promised by Elliot Lavine's two evenings of "Halloween maudit" at the Roxie provide a welcome respite from exhaustive overchoice. I'm restored to the avid spirit of my childhood years curled up in the red and grey armchair in front of the Philco television watching late night creature features. It never ceases to amaze me how much comfort I still derive from black and white sci-fi films from the '50s, whose threat of nuclear proliferation feels nearly innocent in the face of festival proliferation (which seems strikingly more hazardous to my health).

The Creature With the Atom Brain (dir. Edward L. Cahn, U.S.A., 1955, 70 mins) will be presented in a 35mm Studio Archive Print for its single 8:00PM screening this evening. As Lavine advised me by email, this "hybrid masterpiece" features gangsters, a renegade former nazi scientist and lots of terrifying living dead. A major influence on both Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead, The Creature With the Atom Brain is one of the most bizarrely shocking horror hybrids of the 1950s, in which renegade Nazi scientist Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gaye) unleashes an army of zombies in order to help an exiled American gangster Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) in his demented quest to get revenge on his enemies and regain his criminal empire! "This one has it all," Elliot promises, "and it truly needs to be seen on the big Roxie screen! More terrifying than you might imagine given its meager budget." According to Wikipedia, The Creature With the Atom Brain was distributed by Columbia Pictures and was the bottom half of a double bill with another SF favorite: It Came from Beneath the Sea. Co-starring Richard Denning (check out his beefcake portfolio at Brian's Drive-in Theater) and Three Stooges alumni Angela Stevens. Written by Curt Siodmak.

The Man From Planet X (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, U.S.A., 1951, 70 mins) comes from the amazing director of the cult noir Detour (1945). This beautifully spooky science fiction tale about the arrival of an alien from a distant planet whose presence on Earth triggers a chain reaction that could threaten our planet's very existence is brilliantly atmospheric, thought provoking and an understated little gem that—according to Lavine—is "one of Ulmer's most beautiful and baffling maudit Bs, that will slither its way into your dreams for many nights to come." Starring Robert Clarke, Margaret Field, Raymond Bond, and William Schallert. Presented in a 35mm Studio Archive Print this evening at 6:35PM and 9:30PM.

The Brood (dir. David Cronenberg, Canada, 1979, 92 mins), Elliot advises, is probably Cronenberg's "most profane film. What psychological secrets compelled him to make this film?" A shattering, brilliant early shocker from the director of such horror classics as They Came From Within, Scanners, and The Dead Zone as well as recent hits like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. A sickening brood of mutant children begin a terrifying, inexplicable reign of terror with completely unpredictable results! Terrifying and gruesome, this is one that is tailor-made for Halloween! Prepare yourselves for a seriously insane movie! Starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, and Art Hindle. In Color. 35mm Studio Archive Print! Saturday, October 30 at 4:15PM and 8:00PM.

Corruption aka Carnage (dir. Robert Hartford-Davis, UK, 1968, 91 mins) is a rarely seen Hammer horror opus and a veritable slaughter-fest of gore as a crazed surgeon conducts severely disgusting acts of carnage in order to restore his hideously disfigured wife to the beautiful woman she once was. A not-to-be-missed mindbender, Corruption is—as the film's poster attests—"not a woman's picture", though I doubt the Roxie will insist on women being accompanied to this "super-shock" film. Starring the iconic Peter Cushing, Sue Lloyd, Noel Trevarthen, and David Lodge. In Color. 35mm Studio Archive Print. Saturday, October 30 at 2:30PM, 6:15PM, and 9:45PM.

Cross-published on Twitch.