Mil gracias, Noir City, para "El Vampiro Negro"

The Noir City Film Festival outdid itself tonight with a screening of the only existing English-subtitled 35mm print of "El Vampiro Negro" ("The Black Vampire"), a 1953 Argentinian reworking of Fritz Lang's "M." Hopefully, this beautifully photographed and tense obscurity will get the solid Blu-Ray release it deserves. The film's raw sordidness serves as a reminder of how much saltier foreign crime films were than their American counterparts. One of the high points of "El Vampiro Negro" is a roving tour of a dive bar where one of the protagonists sings, all set to a torch song she's gorgeously moaning out onstage. Shot in high noir style, the sequence is all smoke, chiaroscuro lighting, and misery, and in the best sense. One wretched tableau vivant follows another: a tart passed out on a table in the foreground as her equally blousy companion gazes uncertainly around behind her; a hideous barfly and his blonde companion flash each other oozing grins over their drinks; a haggard and obviously horny patron staring entranced by the chanteuse; and another drunken, smoking degenerate after another, after another, after another. Later, the singer catches a glimpse of the Peter Lorre-esque child-killer through the club's basement window and bursts into hysterics. On the dance floor up above, a floozy nonchalantly tells her dancing partner, "I like to be beaten, too, but I don't scream." As I said, much saltier.

I don't want to give too much else about this little wonder away for right now, but I strongly recommend it.

A Cinema of Miracles: Remembering George Pal

Producer/director George Pal confers with his star, Rod Taylor, on the set of Pal's most popular film The Time Machine (1960).


In 2008, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' celebrated producer/director George Pal's centennial with a screening of his feature films and shorts. AMPAS asked me to write that screening's program notes--here is the essay: "A Cinema of Miracles: Remembering George Pal." David Pal, George's eldest son, told me that he thought this was the best article about his father ever written, which I am incredibly flattered by.

Without further ado:

In 1949 the expressions “science fiction” and “blockbuster movies” were antithetical to each other. Science fiction was considered pure Flash Gordon/Saturday matinee stuff, unfit for adult consumption. Like the Moon itself, the genre was a vast, unexplored territory, with barely enough masterpieces in it to be counted on one hand. Unimaginative producers and executives wouldn’t entertain absurd notions like interplanetary travel, let alone gamble on filming or – heresy  – venerating them.

That is, until George Pal did.

With his Destination Moon (1950), Pal, then 42, ignited the science fiction film boom of the 1950s, oddly enough with a “science fact” movie – a “documentary of the near future,” as Pal described it. His exhaustively detailed, full-color portrayal of man’s first lunar voyage was a hit, proving that intelligent science fiction had a massive audience eager for more. The film’s closing title fittingly reads “The End of the Beginning.” The genre’s infancy was over. Pal had almost single-handedly fathered the most profitable and popular film genre of the last sixty years.

Pal next upped the ante by destroying Earth in his cataclysmic When Worlds Collide (1951), and then trumped himself again by producing arguably the finest depiction of an alien invasion ever filmed in The War of the Worlds (1953). (Pal enthusiast Steven Spielberg went so far as to remake the latter in 2005.) Despite their tight budgets and relatively unknown talent, these movies weren’t haphazard poverty row quickies stocked with klutzy rubber monsters. They were crafted to exacting standards and overseen by some of the finest minds in astronomy and rocketry of their day, and they came alive with breathtaking (and Academy Award-winning) visual effects. Over the years, Pal closely collaborated with some of the biggest names in 20th century science fiction and fantasy, including Robert Heinlein, painter Chesley Bonestell, Robert Bloch (Psycho), Philip Jose Farmer, and Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont. Pal gave stop-motion animation titan Ray Harryhausen his first professional job in the film industry.

As Pal blazed a trail with his genre works, he endured the skepticism and ridicule that allowed those who followed him – filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro – to popularly legitimize science fiction and fantasy movies to an unprecedented extent. His films inspired a generation of astronomers, scientists, writers, special effects magicians and artists to persevere in their love of the awe-inspiring reaches of space and time, their infinite mysteries, and the shared dream of cracking them.

In 1960, Pal produced and directed his most popular work, The Time Machine. Like several of his earlier hits, it was disdained by its own studio and filmed for pocket change, only to score big at the box office and become a beloved perennial favorite. Several flops and near-misses followed, including 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), a charming and whimsical western fantasy whose makeup artist, William Tuttle, earned the Academy’s Honorary Award “for his outstanding makeup achievement” for the film. It was the first time in Academy history that a makeup artist was honored by the organization.

Pal passed away in 1980, and his reputation today rests primarily on his live-action science fiction and fantasy features. However, his (unjustly) neglected animated shorts remain some of his most sublime and enduring works. Filmed in Holland and Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, Pal’s stop-motion Puppetoons occupy a unique niche in animation history. They were shot using the painstaking replacement-animation process that incorporated dozens of different hand-tooled model limbs, torsos and faces to create frequently seamless, elegant and graceful sequences.

One of Pal’s finest Puppetoons is “John Henry and the Inky Poo,” a film that treats its folkloric black hero with far greater respect and dignity than 1940s Hollywood’s live-action fare seemed capable of. Beautifully animated, inventively staged and shot, and moving in its denouement, John Henry transcends the politics of race: it’s a paean to humanity’s indomitable spirit and its superiority to machines.

Therein is a major part of the longevity of Pal’s films: their very human artistry. Unlike many of today’s CGI spectacles and their retina-assaulting, headache-inducing onslaught of un-special effects, the visual effects in Pal’s work were art. They are aesthetically stunning, and even at their most gloriously imperfect, they bear the imprint of gifted artists’ hands. Props and models like the Time Machine, the Martian warships of The War of the Worlds, and the Luna rocket of Destination Moon still have the capacity to astonish.

But there remains much more to Pal’s legacy than special effects sleight of hand. His work is deeply optimistic and genuinely uplifting, easy to enjoy and delightfully unjaded. His oeuvre bespeaks a love of humanity and of the genre to which he devoted his life. This extraordinary cinematic visionary, his fabulous celluloid labors of love, and his joyful spirit may be best captured in the words of one of his protagonists, Dr. Lao: “I’m alive, and being alive is fantastic.”

More Exquisite Corpses With Paul Komoda and Max Wedner

Was the Lucy statue sculpted by Walter Paisley?

Am I the only person who sees a strong resemblance between the infamous Lucille Ball statue at the center of all this Media hubbub and Walter Paisley's "Murdered Man" statue from A Bucket of Blood (1959)? Did somebody just re-purpose the prop from Roger's movie and sculpt a dress and hair on it? That would be oddly appropriate considering the movie.