nazis

Went the Day Well? (1942)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Austin Film Society Cinema is currently programming a series entitled “Nope to Nazis,” consisting of films contemporaneous to Germany’s descent into nationalism and fascism, celebrating “the resilience of spirit deployed in opposition to these monsters” and their “authoritarianism, racism, and fraudulent populism.” The series contains some notable and well-known examples of films of this type, notably 1942’s Casablanca and 1940’s The Great Dictator alongside lesser-known examples, like John Farrow’s 1940 The Hitler Gang, which uses the framing of a gangster picture to show the rise of the titular monster and his ilk. All of these are American productions, but I was most intrigued by a British title that was new to me, Went the Day Well?, from 1942, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. 

The film opens with an introduction and welcome to the quaint British village of Bramley’s End by local Charles Sims (Mervyn Johns), who shows us to a small gravestone in the village’s churchyard, upon which are written several German surnames. They came to claim Bramley’s End, he says, and this small plot of land in which they are buried is all that they managed to hold, with Sims’s narration clearly placing this framing device after the end of the war. From there we go “back” to the film’s contemporary setting of May 1942, which finds the village going about its end-of-week business under all the wartime restrictions, when several lorries (trucks for us on this side of the pond) arrive filled with soldiers who will need to be billeted in the town for exercises. The leader of the soldiers, Major Hammond (Basil Sidney) goes around town and meets the various prominent locals before surreptitiously rendezvousing with Bramley’s End’s local squire, a quisling named Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks, of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much). After all of the men, who are secretly German paratroopers, have been placed in homes about the village, the treachery is exposed, and we learn that they are tasked with using some kind of ultimate weapon which, upon Monday morning, will ensure that Hitler’s invasion of England cannot be repelled. Wilsford, as a double agent, is rounded up with the rest of the villagers in the town’s church while the children are taken to Bramley End’s large manor house to be held separately, under the care of Mrs. Fraser (Marie Lohr). Later, when the town’s vicar refuses to go along with the Nazis, telling them to their faces that they are an evil force and an affront to God, he is killed while attempting to ring the church bell to call for help. His daughter Nora (Valerie Taylor), in her “hysteria,” is sent to the manor house to help mind the captive children.

What follows are two days and nights of the villagers finding ways to resist and attempting to get news to the outside world of what is happening in Bramley’s End, with each moment of hope that arrives, those hopes are dashed. In order to prevent the neighboring towns from growing suspicious, the German soldiers force the village’s phone and telegram operators to remain in place, but at gunpoint. When two women manage to write a message on an egg, they manage to get a half dozen to the paperboy from the next town, but he’s run off of the road and his eggs are smashed when Mrs. Fraser’s cousin comes to the village for tea. Mrs. Fraser manages to entertain her cousin and get her back on the road, without the Germans ever seeing that she slipped a note into the visitor’s pocket, but said cousin merely uses the paper she finds in her pocket to try and stop her car window from rattling, and it blows away before it can ever be read. Courageous postmistress Mrs. Collins (Muriel George) manages to kill the guard assigned to her by throwing pepper in his face before attacking him with her kindling hatchet, but the switchboard operators in the next town over are too busy gossiping and badmouthing her to take the call before she’s caught in the act and shown the sharp end of a German bayonet for her troubles. 

The message throughout (because make no mistake, this is a propaganda film, even if it’s one where the lecture we get—Nazis are bad—is the morally correct one) is about the moral failures of laxity in wartime, even if you think that you’re far from the warfront. The whole thing could have been over more quickly and with far fewer casualties if it weren’t for the carelessness of individual citizens, multiple times over. The switchboard girls, Mrs. Fraser’s careless cousin (twice!), and even the hometown members of the Home Guard who hear the peal of the church’s bell and shrug it off all share their complicity with the treacherous Wilsford. Even Mrs. Fraser herself laughs off Nora’s concerns when she notices that the “British” soldiers were keeping score in their card game with “Continental” numbers, marked by elongated number fives, and she pays for it with her life, as she bravely grabs a German grenade and runs into the hallway with it to protect the children under her command as the Nazis advance on the manor house. Unusually for the time, the violence is rather explicit and shocking, certainly with the intent of driving home the dangers of failed vigilance. Mrs. Fraser does manage to save the village’s children, but the film does not spare us from seeing another boy shot by Nazi soldiers as he attempts to run to the next village for help. Dozens of men, women, and children are felled in this movie. The Home Guard are gunned down in the street; the father of one of the Home Guard boys is attacked from behind by Wilsford, having tagged along on an escape attempt in order to prevent its success; an old poacher is shot while attempting to help the aforementioned shot boy escape to the next town; Wilsford is shot in cold blood by Nora, who has figured him out and manages to stop him from unbarricading an entry point for the encroaching Nazis. It’s in black and white, but it sure is bloody. 

This one was admittedly a bit difficult to get into at first. We’re introduced to what feels like far too many people within the film’s opening minutes: milkmaids and milkmen, constables and vicars, telegraph operators and rabbit hunters. It’s a bit overwhelming, and the sudden appearance of the infiltrating soldiers, some of whom will be important later but who are indistinguishable from the rabble upon first sight, muddies things even further. I assume that there would have been obvious differences to the contemporary viewer between the uniforms of the soldiers needing to be billeted and the Home Guard who were going into the surrounding area for their own exercises, but those differences were lost on me. As a result, we have Germans disguised as British soldiers, all of them coming into Bramley’s End at the same time, while there are also actual British soldiers (technically militiamen), and it confuses some of the early plot points in the film. At the film’s climax, as the Germans attempt to wrest control of the manor house of Bramley’s End back from the locals who have successfully rebelled and holed up there, the cavalry finally arrives in the form of the neighboring villages’ own Home Guard (or maybe they’re proper British soldiers. As we’ve established, my eye is not trained to differentiate between them), but when those two opposing factions are fighting, I couldn’t properly tell you which was which. 

Regardless of those weaknesses, this was a very effective thriller, and that’s coming from someone who’s ultimately pretty apathetic to war films. It’s a kind of proto-Red Dawn, and the film is quite tense throughout as one winces over and over again upon seeing yet another failed attempt to call for help. Worth seeking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freaky Tales (2025)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Marvel Studios’ output is quickly thinning in both volume and in cultural significance, with most of the studio’s episodic superhero adventures now being siphoned off to their rightful place: television. Superhero movies’ stranglehold on multiplex screen space is finally loosening, and the newfound breathing room is allowing for a wider range of theatrical counterprogramming to share the marquee with the usual Disney-brand corporate clutter. It’s also allowing former Marvel Studios directors to express themselves in more personal art, freed from the boardroom & shareholder obligations that come with billion-dollar IP. In the past, whenever Marvel picked up an indie-darling director like a James Gunn or a Taika Waititi, it meant that they would be trapped into churning out corporate #content for the rest of their careers, the same way James Cameron has voluntarily imprisoned himself in an Avatar sequel factory of his own design. This year has seen two exciting breaks from that trend, and together they suggest that there’s a very specific formula for escaping the creative funk that usually results from Marvel Studios employment. Both Sinners and Freaky Tales find MCU alumni from Oakland going out their way to depict cunnilingus and white supremacist ass whoopings in gory genre-mashup musicals, begging to be categorized in one of those two-movie Letterboxd lists with absurdly long titles. While one of those Oaklander pattern-breakers found great financial success in every American multiplex, the other had only a whisper of a theatrical rollout before quietly popping up on HBO Max months later. Still, they combine to represent a hope for a brighter future, one with fewer superhero blockbusters, more onscreen sex, and populist art that’s unafraid to alienate fanboy bigots.

Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck have assembled a mixtape homage to Fleck’s youth in 1980s Oakland. Old school rapper Too $hort acts as a local cultural ambassador for the scene, which is a smart move for two white directors depicting a city so widely associated with Black pop culture. Besides coining the title Freaky Tales in one of his classic tracks, Too $hort also acts as the anthology film’s wraparound narrator, appears in a cameo role, and is depicted as an onscreen character by fellow Bay Area rapper Symba (who acts out the film’s onscreen depiction of cunnilingus, an essential part of the Marvel-deviation formula). More improbably, Freaky Tales also features a lengthy battle-rap performance of the infamously raunchy Too $hort track “Don’t Fight the Feelin’,” something I can confidently say I never expected to see given the superhero origin story treatment in a movie. Likewise, I never thought I’d see a fictional depiction of an Operation Ivy concert in a movie either, which is where this violent Oaklander saga begins. In the first section, the local Oakland punk scene bands together to violently dispose of the Nazi skinheads who repeatedly crash their (seemingly nightly) Operation Ivy shows. This is followed by the “Don’t Fight the Feelin'” origin story, a video store crime spree featuring celebrities Tom Hanks & Pedro Pascal and, finally, a heist sequence in which Golden State Warrior star Sleepy Floyd plays a career-high basketball game before slaughtering the home-invading thugs who kill his family while he’s on the court. Besides the local legend of Too $hort, Ben Mendelson is the main connective piece between these freaky tales, playing a creepy cop who houses & deploys Nazi skinheads to do his evil bidding. Every tale is about stomping those Nazi shitheads into the ground, and yet the mixtape soundtrack does not include the Dead Kennedys classic “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” likely because that song spiritually belongs to San Francisco on the other side of The Bay.

There are some retro cult-cinema signifiers here that ring a little hollow, especially in its Pulp Fiction-aping anthology format and its dual use of both video tape tracking and visible reel changes via digital filters. Still, Freaky Tales feels convincingly authentic to Fleck’s civic pride, adapting his & Boden’s superhero filmmaking impulses to something more personal & heartfelt. The visual manifestation of there being something special in the air in mid-80s Oakland is in the frequent strikes of green lightning, a supernatural power that flows through major players like Too $hort, Sleepy Floyd, and the Operation Ivy scenesters. It’s a communal energy that sometimes translates to Scanners-style superpowers, but for the most part it’s more vibe than fact. The real power here is the communal ability to stomp out Nazi bigots when everyone works in unison, which the movie has a lot of fun depicting in absurdly bloody detail during its biggest action set pieces. There are no fewer than four song changes during Sleepy Floyd’s slaughter of the home-invading skinheads, so that he can act out his Bruce-Lee-doing-Blade superhero fantasy for as long as the budget will allow. Freaky Tales loves Oakland, hates Nazis, and believes Too $hort to be the golden god of the local scene, which is a sentiment with more auteurist specificity & political conviction than you will find in any Marvel movie. It cannot pretend to share the same cultural impact as fellow Oaklander-done-good genre mashup Sinners, but it does share its refreshing glimpse into a post-MCU future, where big-budget movies are surprising & fun again and the furthest-right end of their potential audience is no longer coddled for the sake of making a few extra bucks.

-Brandon Ledet

Feels Good Man (2020)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have surprisingly been defined more by the daily stunts & shenanigans of unelected government official Elon Musk than they have been by the actions of the president himself. Sure, Trump is signing a relentless barrage of hateful, unconstitutional Executive Orders that are threatening to crumble decades of social & economic progress in a matter of days. That was fully expected, though, especially if you paid any attention to the “Project 2025” agenda advertised during his election campaign. Musk’s overt, oligarchic influence on these Executive Branch actions have been just as nefarious but much more bizarre, especially as an extension of the failed meme humor of his current reign as the Villain King of Twitter. It’s not enough that Trump & Musk are wielding institutional power to reshape America with a straight-up Nazi agenda; they’re also irony-washing that Nazi ideology through several layers of internet meme humor, so that their above-board, bought-and-paid-for coup is read as a humorous prank meant to “trigger the libs,” not to welcome in a new, shameless era of American fascism. Between Musk’s “DOGE” branding, his juvenile obsession with the numbers 69 & 420, and the bar now being so low that his executing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration now qualifies as a “dog whistle,” it’s clear that we’re living through America’s first 4chan presidency. Evil has never been so inane.

If you catch yourself wondering how, exactly, we got here over the last few years, I’ve seen no better explainer than the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. A 90-minute history lesson on the memeification of a cartoon stoner frog may sound trivial in the context of America’s Nazi takeover, but Feels Good Man somehow does a better job explaining & contextualizing that far-right political shift than any other film I’ve seen – predating and overriding all of those QAnon docs that auto-populated on every streaming service in the years following the January 6 coup attempt of 2021. The stoner frog in question is, of course, Pepe the Frog, the breakout character from alt-comics artist Matt Furie’s cult series Boys Club. A soft-spoken San Francisco stoner who’s been drawing goofy frog doodles his entire life, Furie confides that Pepe is the Boys Club character he most personally identifies with . . . which is a brave thing to admit given the character’s eventual perversion and radicalization in the Hell pits of 4chan once it escaped the pages of his comic book. A single frame of Boys Club in which Pepe explains to his burnout roommates that he urinates with his pants completely lowered to his ankles because it “feels good man” was a funny enough image that it started getting shared on the internet outside the context of its source material and, as the movie argues, somehow snowballed into Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.

I have a general affection for Anthropology of the Internet documentaries that immortalize disposable online ephemera for cinematic prosperity, especially when they capture the sinister atmosphere of the Internet’s dankest dungeons (see also: the Russian dashcam compilation The Road Movie, the evil-clown sightings doc Wrinkles the Clown, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Slenderman doc A Self-Induced Hallucination). Even so, Feels Good Man does a better job than most at explaining how its own subject’s online virality led to real-world consequences outside niche meme forums. It chronicles Pepe the Frog’s transformation in the hellfires of 4chan from loveable frog to “the new swastika”, explaining how users who identified with Pepe as much as its creator had to force the frog to “go dark” to protect him from “normies” (i.e., women) who might identify with him as well. Because 4chan is an attention-economy culture that mostly traffics in “ironic” racism, this effort manifested as Pepe becoming a mouthpiece for Nazi rhetoric and an online dog whistle for alt-right C.H.U.D.s. Making Pepe as bigoted as possible became a kind of online game, and it gave real-world Right Wing ghouls a way to signal to the keyboard Nazis at home that the Trump-led establishment shared their values without abandoning their more buttoned-up, traditional voter base. That co-opting seems a little quaint now that Elon Musk is Sieg Heiling on an official government stage, but it was a major stepping stone that led us here.

The half of Feels Good Man that explains how 4chan memes created a new Nazi America is populated with all the expected demons of 2010s alt-right ascension. Pepe’s Nazi radicalization was directly inspired by Steve Bannon’s political strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” which has become the go-to playbook for the Trump-led Republican Party. During the infamous street interview when Richard Spencer is punched in the face by a protester, he’s explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin to a reporter at the moment the fist connects with his jaw (which the movie graciously repeats in several loops for our viewing pleasure). Pepe is even transformed into a direct stand-in for Trump himself, outfitted with a new smug facial expression and a Trumpian wig. Most critically, former Infowars blowhard Alex Jones is sued for copyright infringement by Matt Furie after using Pepe’s image on a fundraising campaign poster, marking Furie’s too-little-too-late attempt to reclaim his intellectual property from the worst people alive. The half of the film that’s about Furie’s astonishment & unpreparedness for the Internet’s hateful perversion of Pepe is adorably naive and populated with fellow alt-comics artists who are sad to see their friend suffer in this exponentially shitty shithole of a world: Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, Aiyana Udesen, etc. Their attempt to reclaim Pepe and save his reputation was heavily outgunned, though, since the opposition included literal White House occupants.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the twee preciousness of Furie’s pleas for good vibes and kindness as opposition against the hateful scum who’ve stolen & desecrated his art, but I appreciate the sentiment. I could not have sat through an exhaustive recounting of how 4chan “elected a meme as a president” and ushered in a Fourth Reich for the LOLs without a little kindness & levity. Being reminded that there are still sweet, reasonable people in the world who are oblivious to the deep well of evil on the other side of their computer screens was a calming counterbalance to the infuriating co-opting of meme culture to enact real-world fascism detailed elsewhere in the film. Five years later, it’s clear which side of that divide is winning the Culture War, but it’s also clear that they cannot create anything substantial themselves worthy of sharing & celebrating; they can only pervert, corrupt, and drain the humor & life out of previously existing art & language (which explains their more recent fondness for generative A.I.). As evidenced by the interstitial animations that imagine what it might be like if Boys Club had been adapted into a psychedelic Adult Swim sitcom instead of a Nazi dog whistle, Pepe deserved so much better than the hell-world we live in. He’s a cool frog.

-Brandon Ledet

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

At the time of posting, the social media platform TikTok is back online after briefly being banned in the United States over some vague Red Scare surveillance paranoia involving the app’s ownership by a Chinese company. Despite having called for this ban during his first presidency, Trump has found an executive-order workaround for the Supreme Court’s decision against TikTok’s fate in the US, retroactively pinning the unpopular decision to the recently concluded Biden administration. The brief banning of the app inspired US TikTok users to flock to an alternative platform to alleviate their #content addiction (including the Chinese-owned app RedNote, which spiked in American usership), and it also had me reflecting on what TikTok has contributed to Online Film Discourse. Like with all platforms, there are both good & bad data points that color TikTok’s character, from the shameless shilling for corporate media that the app’s Influencer class indulge for red carpet access to the stray surges of interest one out-of-nowhere video could draw to obscure works like Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Overall, though, when I think of what “MovieTok” (which I would happily rename “FlikTok” if I had the power) brings to Film Discourse, my mind goes to the trend of slagging art films as purposefully inscrutable puzzles that cinephiles only pretend to appreciate in order to appear smart. Anytime a celebrity lists a European art film during their “Letterboxd Top 4” interviews on the platform, a TikToker mocks their supposed pretention in a parodic video listing fictional titles.  Instead of expressing curiosity in any film outside the bounds of the MCU (or their more recent Major Studio equivalents), they make up a “4-hour black and white film about the Serbian government through the eyes of a pigeon.” It’s a stubbornly ignorant way to approach unfamiliarity with art, and I personally hope it dies with the app.

For any younger audiences doubtful that black & white European art films can be accessible & entertaining, I’d recommend checking out the 1966 Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, which was accessible enough to American audiences in its initial release that it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Closely Watched Trains is a shockingly light entertainment for a black & white Czechoslovakian art film about making sure the trains run on time under Nazi occupation. Its historical circumstances and its final scene are tragic, but structurally it’s a 90-minute boner comedy packed with prurient goofball schtick. While the MovieTok commentariat would have you to expect a Czech New Wave art film about Nazis to be a non-stop misery parade, Closely Watch Trains mostly plays out like one of those coming-of-age comedies about a teen’s sexual misadventures while working their first summer job … except it’s set at the edge of a frosty, war-torn Prague. There’s even a little “Welcome to my life” narration track at the start, as if you’re watching the original foreign-language version of Ferris Bueller instead of a project that was passed over by Věra Chytilová for seeming too difficult to adapt from page to screen. Sure, its final beat is deadly serious about the violent circumstances of Nazi rule, but its scene-to-scene concerns are refreshingly honest about what a teen working their first job outside the house would be paying most attention to: getting laid. It’s a shame that the MovieTok platform isn’t used to introduce younger viewers to a wilder world of cinema through accessible gateway films like this and instead tends to dismiss the entire concept of European Art Films outright for an easy punchline. Or, more likely, the more dismissive responses are the ones that reach a wider audience thanks to the algorithm’s bottomless love for Rage Bait, which is exactly how it works on my own evil #content app of choice, Twitter.

As a coming-of-age story, Closely Watched Trains keeps things simple. A scrawny sweetheart named Miloš attempts to follow in his father & grandfather’s footsteps by apprenticing as a railroad dispatcher. The circumstances of the job might have become a little more strained now that the trains are under Nazi command, but he’s told that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll get to retire with a pension. At the start of the job, he’s offered a crossroads of three different priorities: work, politics, or women. Unsure of which direction he wants his life to go, he tries his hand at each – flirting with rigid professionalism, flirting with a plot to bomb a Nazi supply train, and flirting with a cute train conductor who’s his age and eager to become his girlfriend. His physical urges overpower his higher mind for most of the runtime, leading to a series of proto-Porky’s sexual escapades that include train car orgies, ink-stamped butt cheeks, and a lot of vulnerable discussion of premature ejaculation. As silly as some of these sexual encounters can be in the moment, Miloš has Big Teenage Feelings about them that occasionally raise the stakes of the story into more traditional War Drama territory, sometimes under Nazi threat, sometimes under threat of self-harm. It would be reductive to present the film purely as a comedy, given its political & historical context, but for the majority of its runtime it’s more adorable than grim. Even its more overt indulgences in the art of the moving image are less challenging that they are cute. Wide-shot frames arrange the actors & trains with dollhouse meticulousness, which combined with the dark irony of the sex & romance recalls the work of Wes Anderson – maybe art cinema’s most widely accessible auteur.

I do not have much at stake in the ultimate fate of TikTok, but I do have something to say to the art-phobic influencers of MovieTok. There is no reason to be intimidated by the Great Works of European Cinema just because they’re initially unfamiliar. No matter how artsy, The Movies are ultimately just as much of a populist medium as TikTok #content; you can handle it.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Notorious (1946)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon & Britnee watch Notorious (1946).

Boomer: For many years, I’ve been calling Notorious my favorite film of the Hitchcock oeuvre. I’ve recently been filling in some blind spots—most notably The Birds and Dial “M” for Murder, which are pretty big ones in that canon—so I wasn’t sure if I would still hold this one in such high esteem, or if I had simply been trying to be cool as a teenager and cite a lesser known one as my favorite and had been, perhaps, wrong all these years (even if I were, I was still of a feather with Roger Ebert, who named it as his favorite work of the director’s). I still remember the first time I caught this one on TCM when I was in high school, with the requisite intro and outro presented by Robert Osborne. He drew attention to the way that the camera at one point provides a point-of-view shot of Ingmar Bergman’s inebriated driving, her view occluded by her errant hair, and how this was meant to give the viewer a sense of her drunkenness; he talked about how Hitch had received a visit from some men from the state who were curious about why the British director seemed to know so much more about uranium than one would expect for someone not involved in espionage. He praised the arch performance of Madame Konstantin and pointed out the way that the story is bookended with a Nazi’s back to the audience as he faces judgment. And, of course, there was discussion about all that Hayes Code-skirting kissing and nuzzling. 

Notorious is a love story. Girl’s father is imprisoned for treason, girl meets boy, boy recruits her to infiltrate a cabal of expatriated Nazis who are living in Brazil, boy gets inexplicably jealous when she is able to ingratiate herself with the mark, girl and boy are able to solve the mystery of her new husband’s dealings. Tale as old as time. In more specific terms, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is, at the story’s outset, present for the sentencing of her father to a Miami prison for his sedition and espionage, and although we are never made privy to the details, his final statement to the court reveals that he is unrepentant. She has a party at her house to drown her sorrows, and is drawn to a mysterious handsome man named Devlin (Cary Grant). She finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by his calm stoicism, and her attempts to get him to crack escalate to her insisting that the two of them go for a drive, where her reckless speeding catches the attention of a motorcycle cop, who lets them go when he sees Devlin’s identification. The next morning, he reveals to Alicia that he has been sent to recruit her for a job in Brazil. Once there, the two of them fall in love, although their little state-sponsored honeymoon comes to an abrupt end when her mission is revealed; she is to ingratiate herself with one Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former contact of her father’s who, in the past, was infatuated with her. Devlin has a little pout about this and freezes Alicia out when she begs for some other way she could help, one that wouldn’t tear the two of them apart. It doesn’t work, and Sebastian proves to be an easy mark, and within a short time, he asks her to marry him. Alicia gives Devlin one more chance to speak up and pull her out, but he doesn’t, and she ends up the new Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband adores her completely, but his hard-nosed mother (Madame Konstantin) is more suspicious of her new daughter-in-law. 

What struck me on this most recent viewing is that this film is unhurried, and while an argument could be made that this is to its detriment, I think that true only insofar as one reads this as a thriller, and that it is to Notorious‘s benefit as a love story. So much of the romance is already raced past in order to establish Devlin and Alicia’s passion for one another, and I think that it might be a disservice to the believability of that love to try and abbreviate it any further. It’s fascinating that, as with the previous collaboration between Bergman and Rains, Casablanca, the things which sever our two lovers are duty and patriotism; except that in that film, released at the height of the war in 1942, our reunited Ilsa and Rick are rent asunder for what can be assumed to be the rest of their lives, while this post-war 1946 picture sees Alicia and Devlin get a happy ending (or at least are implied to have one). Spending this much time with the two of them means that the plot doesn’t really kick in until the midpoint of the movie, after an appropriate amount of time to lull you into forgetting that there’s something inevitably coming to rip the two lovers apart. It lends an air of tragedy and gravitas to their parting that they must continue to see one another but deny their passions, which Devlin does behind a screen of sex shaming while Alicia has a harder time concealing her happiness with his company, even when doing so arouses suspicion. 

I’m not here to question the late master of suspense and the choices that he made, but I do think that there was room for at least one more close call for Alicia in the Sebastian manor. Madame Sebastian regards Alicia with a constant air of appraisal and unspoken but nonetheless present disapproval. The party sequence in which Alicia and Devlin, through some exciting near-misses, manage to enter the wine cellar in which the secret uranium is hidden and abscond with evidence, is a thrilling one, and there’s some truly magnificent camerawork that swoops over the great Sebastian house entryway, with its checkered tile pattern calling to mind a chessboard that Alicia must cross, before it zooms in on the tiny key in her hand. But I do wish that Alicia had almost been caught another time before or after this, to really build up the tension, although that would risk making the Sebastians seem more naive and less threatening, if she were able to get away with too much before they catch on to her. And when they do catch on to her, we get one of the great lines that I think about all the time, stated by Madame Sebastian to her heartbroken son: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.” 

It’s interesting that this one comes right on the heels of the war, when the potential for a Nazi resurgence on another continent after a short breather was something that would have been on the minds of every member sitting in that audience. I’m hard pressed to think of a contemporary or even recent analogy for how that plot point must have felt for the people watching the film, for whom the revelations of just how depraved and barbaric the regime had been within its borders were still an unfolding series of horrors. I wonder, Brandon, if you feel that the way contemporary events were folded into the narrative is as effective now as it was then, if the film would function as well without that element (and instead focused on a fictional cabal of more generic evil plotters), and if you have any other thoughts on the matter? 

Brandon: As you’ve already implied, this is a love story first and an espionoir second, with most of the thrills in the first hour generated through the bitter flirtation between Bergman & Grant.  The dialogue walks right up to the line of spilling the details of Bergman’s loose morals every time they bicker, and it’s not hard to imagine Hays Code censors tugging their collars in the screening room.  As for contemporary audiences’ reaction to the secret Nazi cabal in the second hour, it’s also not hard to imagine that feeling like a more immediate, chilling threat in the 1940s that it is all these decades later.  I just don’t think Hitchcock is interested enough in their fascist violence or ideology to make the specifics of their villainy central to the text.  Would the movie be all that different if it were made a few years later and our reluctant couple were spying on Cold War Russians instead of Nazis in exile?  I have my doubts.  Casablanca was specifically about the futility of attempting to remain politically neutral in the face of Nazi fascism, and it was filmed before America joined the war.  Comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be parodied the specifics of Hitler’s racism & mannerisms while he was still alive and ascending to power.  Besides the Brazilian setting and the Uranium smuggling plot, there isn’t much specificity to the Nazi presence in Notorious, except as shadowy villains whose suspicion raises the tension of the espionage romance that’s front & center.  The specifics of exactly why that romance is so tense (mostly Grant’s closed-minded frustration with Bergman’s disregard for womanly virtue) also go unstated, but most of the fun of the movie is in watching Hitchcock chip away at the restraints that block him from fully vocalizing them.  Most of his interest is in the fictional, bitter romance he’s created, not in the real-world politics.

The only way I really felt Hitchcock’s disgust with Nazi scum was through the ghoulish specter of Madame Sebastian, who radiates pure hate in every scene while her younger cohorts act like proper gentlemen.  Most of the Nazi cabal’s villainy is hidden behind locked doors, but the matron of the house proudly parades her cruelty out in the open as a voluntary enforcer and a true believer in the cause.  She can’t even crochet in her rocking chair without coming across as a Nazi piece of shit, which is a major credit to Madame Konstantin’s performance.  Britnee, as our resident hagsploitation expert, I have to ask where you think Madame Sebastian’s legacy falls in the cinematic canon of evil old women.  It wouldn’t be for another decade or so that Hitchcock literally put the “Psycho” in “psychobiddy” (speaking of menacing rocking chairs), but it seems he was already interested in the horrors of a hateful, overbearing mother here, assigning most of the onscreen evil to the elderly Madame.  The question is, was she evil enough for the task?  Did she give you the proper psychobiddy tingles?

Britnee: I’m honored to be considered a hagsploitation expert and will immediately add that to my résumé. With such powerful performances from Bergman and Grant, it’s hard to focus on anyone else, but Madame Konstantin earns your attention. I’m always excited to spend time with a mean old lady who wears fancy dresses, so I was riveted during her scenes. Her cold, emotionless tone & face alone gave me the chills, along with her being Nazi trash. The scene where Alexander wakes her up to tell her the news about being married to an American agent was gold. Madame Sebastian is covered in satin sheets and lights up a cigarette with a devious smile before she starts calling the shots in a “Mommy knows best” sort of way. Alexander’s mommy issues were the icing on the cake for this thriller. It created a very eerie atmosphere, especially in the latter half of the film when we’re stuck in the oedipus mansion with a poisoned Alicia. I got goosebumps when Madame Sebastian appeared in that creepy black dress while Devlin was rescuing Alicia from their evil clutches. Once again, this is more evidence that elderly women with horrible hair make wonderful villains, and Hitchcock knew it. He may just be the godfather of hagsploitation. 

Lagniappe

Britnee: Notorious was made into a 5-act opera that premiered in Sweden in 2015. From the clips I’ve stumbled upon, it looks absolutely amazing!

Boomer: I’m embarrassed to admit how late in my life I learned that Isabella Rossellini is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (this year!). I’ve seen Bergman in a couple of other flicks since learning this, but Notorious is the one in which I see the most direct ties to her daughter. Even though this one comes after Gaslight and Casablanca, both of which I have seen in abundance just as I have Notorious, her accent here is perhaps at its most undisguised. There are moments throughout where I can almost hear Rossellini speaking through her mother, as the more senior actress’s pronunciation here is the most like her daughter’s. 

Brandon: Bergman’s intro in the opening sequence is magnificently badass.  Who could help falling for a cop-hating lush with a death wish and a sparkly top that exposes her midriff?  The fabulously talented pervert that he is, Hathcock puts just as much effort into establishing her character in this opening sequence as he does shooting the espionage payoffs in the final act.  The hair-in-eyes effects shot while she’s drunk-driving is one of his great flourishes of camera trickery, and it’s immediately followed up by extreme, twisty Dutch angles from her POV while she sees the room spinning in bed, failing to sober up.  As far as noir’s great femmes fatales go, I can only think of one ferocious character intro that outpaces Bergman’s here: Ann Savage’s relentless viciousness in Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945).  And even she was meant to be seen as less loveable than she was, uh, savage.

Next month: Britnee presents Babycakes (1989)

-The Swampflix Crew

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

WW Cinema (formerly Wildwood) is a Wednesday-night screening series at The Broad in which filmmakers and other artists introduce classic repertory titles to an eager film-nerd audience.  These introductions are usually pre-recorded via webcam, but occasionally a low-level celebrity sighting will shake up the weekly routine.  Simpsons & Spinal Tap vet Harry Shearer was the most recent in-person presenter for the series, providing some quick, concise insight about what he thinks makes Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be a great work of art, then sticking around after the film to answer questions about his own comedic career.  Shearer mentioned that he had a personal, professional connection to the film’s star, Jack Benny, working with him briefly in his first role as a child actor.  He also argued that the film stands as proof that if you feel passionately about a topic—in this case the political & moral evils of Nazism—you should make a comedy about it instead of a drama (with Dr. Strangelove & Taking Off presented as examples of similarly effective satire).  WW Cinema’s programming has had a lot of influence on what gets reviewed on this blog since they moved their screenings down the street from my house, but I don’t always mention the pre-film intros because they’re not the reason I consistently go; I go because their film selections are consistently rewarding.  I’m only mentioning Shearer here because he put on a masterclass of how to present a movie to an audience who might not have seen it before.  He made the screening personal without distracting from the film.  He voiced his reverence for the artist behind it he found most essential to the piece (in his case Benny, not Lubitsch, the opposite of my connection to it).  He rooted the film in its historical context, both within the timeline of WWII and within the timeline of Benny’s career.  And, most importantly, he kept it brief.  I got the feeling that Shearer has suffered through so many poorly curated film intros and Q&As over the decades that he knows exactly how to not fuck it up, which I’m quickly learning at these WW Cinema screenings is a practiced skill; he’s a professional.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be should not need an intro at all, given that Lubitsch’s comedies are just as riotously funny now as they have ever been; just the gift of laughing along with a live audience instead of streaming it alone on The Criterion Channel is enough to make a modern screening of a Lubitsch classic feel like a cultural event.  Even so, I found myself confused as to why this film isn’t as ubiquitously referenced & recommended as The Great Dictator as the best contemporary Nazi satire.  Jack Benny may not be as enduringly popular as Charlie Chaplin, but To Be or Not to Be is just as daring as The Great Dictator – and twice as funny.  Benny first appears onscreen in full Hitler drag, roaming the streets of pre-occupation Poland and attracting a crowd as if he were a space alien who crashed a UFO.  That’s because Hitler had not yet arrived in the country, and Benny is instead playing a famous Warsaw actor who’s rehearsing to play the Nazi dictator on stage.  Even with the threat of Nazi invasion looming over their heads, most of the film’s scene-to-scene drama involves the lives & squabbles of Benny’s theatre troupe, mostly revolving around the love-triangle maneuvering of his even more famous wife (Carole Lombard) and her flirt-crush of the week (Robert Stack).  It’s just like any of Lubitsch’s classic adultery comedies, except that things get deadly serious at the top of the second act when the Nazi invasion of Warsaw starts in earnest.  Miraculously, Lubitsch gradually builds back to the playful humor of the first act as the theatre troupe schemes to survive & subvert occupation, eventually weaponizing their acting skills as dissident spies within the Gestapo.  The dramatic tension of the second act is shockingly brutal for a comedy, especially considering that it mirrored real-life atrocities happening in real time outside the theater walls during this film’s initial run.  The release of that tension when Lubitsch decides to get goofy again is much needed and incredibly effective, sometimes earning huge laughs just by repeating exact dialogue from earlier scenes.  It helps that most of the jokes are at the expense of artists’ narcissism instead of Nazi violence, which is handled with appropriate mourning & disgust.

If I were presenting what makes To Be or Not to Be great, I’d probably talk about the art of establishing an in-joke with your audience, so that callbacks to previous snippets of dialogue can become uproarious punchlines.  For instance, the title refers to a recurring bit in which Benny is interrupted while delivering the famous Hamlet soliloquy by an audience member who always leaves the room when he gets started.  It turns out that the line was used as a signal to his wife’s would-be lover to visit her dressing room while her husband is occupied.  Over time, we come to realize that she may have chosen that particular moment in his performance to drive him mad because they have a longstanding professional jealousy that fuels the fires of their marriage; we also come to realize that the husband cares more about the interrupted soliloquy than he cares about the adultery, even if just slightly.  It’s a hilarious bit that only gets funnier in repetition, to the point where the line “To be or not to be” earns instant laughs despite being one of Shakespeare’s most often repeated phrases.  It’s also a bit that would work in basically any theatrical setting, since it has nothing to do with the Nazi occupation.  In contrast, there’s another recurring bit in which a Jewish actor in the troupe (Felix Bressart) is constantly auditioning for bigger roles by delivering the “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which alternates between being incredibly funny as an example of theatre-world narcissism and incredibly poignant as a heartfelt plea against antisemitism.  Listening to these jokes build to increasingly louder laughs and starker silences in the room was like listening to a classical music piece build to an ecstatic crescendo after starting on softly bowed strings.  Lubitsch died nearly eight decades ago, but he can still command an audience like a master conductor leading an orchestra.  I’ve enjoyed each of his classic comedies that I’ve seen, but usually for the transgression of their playful view of sex & adultery.  I’ve never been so impressed with the joke-building structure of one in this way before, possibly because I’ve never seen one take such a harsh dramatic pause midway through and have to rebuild its humor on the rubble of real-life horror.

I did not present To Be or Not to Be, though, because I did not work with Jack Benny when I was a child. In fact, our time on this planet did not overlap at all.  Harry Shearer’s insistence on the film’s greatness as an argument that comedy can be as passionate & effective at addressing real-world political issues as drama was a convincing one.  His insights about his & Benny’s comedy careers did not interest me quite as much, but he did not hold command of the stage long enough for that disconnect to derail the screening.  He did a great job introducing a great film without distracting from it by making it all about himself, which To Be or Not to Be itself will tell you is extremely difficult for an actor to do.  Most actors would make a world war about themselves if they could get away with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Zone of Interest (2023)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

If you’re a particular kind of self-serious cinephile, every new Jonathan Glazer movie is a Cultural Event, largely because of scarcity.  The director only has four features to his name, stretched across two decades, with half of that time passing since his previous film Under the Skin arrived in 2013.  Glazer has been “a name to watch” since his early 2000s stunners Birth & Sexy Beast (if not since his iconic 1990s music videos like “Virtual Insanity” & “Karma Police”).  Every project is so carefully planned & crafted that there’s always intense anticipation of what shape his career is going to take overall. He makes too few films for anyone to predict the big-picture trajectory of his art; there just isn’t enough data.  So, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the announcement of his latest project, The Zone of Interest, because it doesn’t fit the shape I personally wanted for his career.  I would’ve much preferred that Glazer dove deeper into the uncanny surrealism of films like Birth & Under the Skin than where he chose to go: sinking further into ice-cold Hanekean cruelty instead.  Still, The Zone of Interest is a title of interest by default, regardless of subject or approach, and Glazer at least makes the misery meaningful & worthwhile. 

The Zone of Interest is the rare war atrocity drama that doesn’t let its audience off the hook for not being as bad as literal Nazis, but instead prompts us to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor echoes that specific moment in normalized Evil.  Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) stars as the doting housewife of the Nazi officer who runs Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel).  The couple’s idyllic home shares an external wall with the concentration camp, which soundtracks their daily domestic routines with the excruciating sounds of torture & genocide. The wife raises children, hosts parties, and tends to the garden.  The husband works tirelessly to invent more efficient ways to gas & incinerate Jews.  Both are separated from the tactile details of the violence that makes their lovely home possible, except in stark reminders when the busy work of the day is over and all that is left is the quiet of their conscience: lounging in a calm river polluted with the ashes of their victims, struggling to sleep in a house lit by the orange glow of the crematoriums, etc.  It’s a slowly escalating, dehumanizing horror that they’ve deliberately numbed themselves enough to not even notice, but it deeply sickens outsiders who briefly visit their home to smell the flowers or play with the kids.

If Glazer were a lesser artist, he would have firmly anchored his WWII drama to the tools & tones of the past, comforting his audience with the emotional distance of time.  Instead, he shoots The Zone of Interest in the style of a modern reality show, documenting the domestic busyness of his central couple on continuously running security cameras like an especially horrific episode of Big Brother.  There are even night-vision sequences that catch small acts of subversion the cameras aren’t supposed to see – good deeds that eventually go brutally punished.  Later, he interrupts the 1940s timeline with images of concentration camps’ current function as history museums, again finding a way to frame them as sites of heinous banality.  The automated-home modernization of this historical drama might initially register as a formalistic novelty, but the constant reminder that the movie is being made now with today’s technology gradually has a clear thematic purpose.  Anyone with a smartphone should be familiar with the feeling of becoming numb to grand-scale injustice & genocide as background noise while we busy ourselves with the meaningless tasks of the day.  Anyone who’s ever been lucratively employed should recognize the feeling that our jobs & lifestyles are causing active harm to people we cannot see.  We’ve all seen too many Holocaust dramas to truly feel the emotional sting of another one as if it were out first; Glazer does his best to shake us out of that numbness by making one specifically rooted in the doomscroller era.

Everything is tastefully, technically on-point here.  I was initially distracted by the automated security camera editing style, which had me looking for visible cameras in every frame, but the approach eventually proved itself thematically justified.  Mica Levi’s thunderous, minimalist score is maybe their sparsest work to date, but it’s effective in its restraint.  A24 has been well-behaved in their marketing & distribution of the film, refraining from selling boutique Nazi merch or leaning into trite FYC awards campaigning.  Glazer has again taken his time to deliver something thoughtfully crafted but not overfussed, proving himself to be one of our most patient auteurs.  I likely would not have watched The Zone of Interest if his name were not attached, since I’m generally skeptical of what yet another wartime genocide drama could possibly illuminate about history that audiences don’t already know (and have learned to ignore).  Glazer sidesteps that tedium by stating the historical facts of the narrative in plain terms – illuminating the dull, background evils of modern living instead of safely retreating to the past.  It’s not the project I would’ve greenlit if I were signing his checks, but it’s a worthy entry in his small canon of thorny, alienating features.  All I can do now is sit in the tension of what he’ll make next, likely until sometime in the 2030s.

-Brandon Ledet

Invincible (2001)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

“Why do I watch WrestleMania?  My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world.  In order to understand, you have to face it.”

“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”

“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them.  This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often.  Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.”  His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent.  Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans.  As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work.  That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.

Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany.  Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story.  In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform.  He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup.  Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth.  Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs.  Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power.  The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army).  In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.

Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”.  In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale.  In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime.  Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages.  That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers.  The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”.  Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero.  They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time.  He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles.  It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.

Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since.  While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners.  If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades.  He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries).  Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania.  Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Freaks vs. The Reich (2023)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I’ve been struggling to find much to get excited about in theaters lately, now that “Summer” Blockbuster Season has encroached well into Spring, and multiplex marquees are once again all superheroes all of the time.  The general vibe among moviegoing audiences is that the superhero era is winding down post-Endgame, but it’s going to take a long time for Hollywood studios to adjust to that dwindling enthusiasm, since these billion-dollar behemoths take years to produce & market.  Personally, I’m so deeply, incurably bored by American superhero media that I’m avoiding all four-quadrant crowd-pleasers out there, not just the usual suspects like the new Guardians, the new Ant-Man, and the new Shazam.  If I stare at the poster or trailer for any tentpole blockbuster above a 6-figure production budget for long enough, they all appear to follow the same MCU superhero action template.  Super Mario Bros, Dungeons & Dragons, and Fast X are all essentially superhero movies to me, each with their own invincible, quippy gods among men who save the day by extending their IP.  I can’t hide from the new release calendar forever, though, so I need to re-learn how to enjoy a superhero movie or two until Hollywood fully moves onto the next money-printing fad.  Given that there are already dozens of Marvel & DC movies slated for release over the next few summers, it’s likely going to take a long time for this lumbering industry to correct course.  So, it’s somewhat fortuitous that the Italian supernatural action epic Freaks vs. The Reich finally landed a US release in this dire time of need, after years of stumbling over international distribution hurdles.  It’s the most convincing evidence I’ve seen in a while that there is still some juice left in the superhero genre, despite Hollywood’s determination to squeeze it dry and pummel the rind.

If there’s anything more frustratingly slow than Hollywood’s response to public appetite, it’s the distribution of international art films, which often fall into a years-long limbo between their initial festival runs and their wide US premieres.  I’ve been waiting to see Freaks vs. The Reich for so long that its earliest roadblocks were COVID related, and its original title has since been changed to give it a fresher, more recognizable appeal.  I suppose rebranding the film from Freaks Out to its new, more descriptive title is a useful warning for the shocking amount of Nazi imagery you’ll find in this supernatural circus sideshow fantasy.  It also helps explain why it’s so easy to cheer on the titular, superpowered freaks who take those Nazis down.  I wonder if some of its distribution delays had to do with clearing song rights, since the main Nazi supervillain in question abuses ether to mentally time-travel into the future, returning to the battlefields of WWII with visions of smartphones, video game controllers, and old-timey renditions of Radiohead’s “Creep” & Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”  The inclusion of “Creep” is important to note there, since the song also happens to be featured in the more traditional, straightforward superhero epic Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which is currently eating up a grotesque amount of American screen space.  Whether you think it’s more interesting to hear that song played on a Spotify algorithm mixtape to evoke easy nostalgia points or performed by a drugged-out, time-traveling Nazi supervillain is a question of taste, but I can at least personally attest to appreciating a sense of variety within this oppressively omnipresent genre template.

Freaks vs. The Reich opens with a full circus sideshow act, introducing our Italian superhero freaks one at a time as they show off their individual talents – a magnetic dwarf, an electric ballerina, a real-life wolf-man, etc.  Before they can bow for audience applause, however, their tent is blown to shreds by Nazi warplanes, and they spend the rest of the movie rebuilding the team so they can end the war themselves.  Caught up in concentration camp processing, Italian militia resistance, and general wartime disorientation, they are all eventually reunited by the ether-huffing, time-travelling Nazi who’s convinced he can win the war for Hitler if he assembles the freaks to fight for Deutschland.  This all culminates in a grand superpowers battle in an open field (the way most superhero epics do), and I will admit that the journey to get to that predetermined conclusion can be a little overlong & draining (the way most superhero epics are).  There’s at least some novelty in the film’s antique circus sideshow aesthetic and WWII historical contexts, though, and novelty is a precious commodity for a genre that’s been so prevalent over the past decade.  It’s like watching the cast of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children act out the plot of Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio on the leftover sets of Matteo Garrone’s live-action Pinocchio – an antique Italo horror show.  You won’t find that kind of aesthetic deviance in the upcoming Flash or Captain Marvel sequels, which you can pretty much already picture start to end in your head sight-unseen.  These superhero freaks are flawed, messy, and they fuck, including the wolfman archetype in what has to be the hairiest sex scene since The Howling Part II: Your Sister is a Werewolf.  Meanwhile, Marvel & DC are still stubbornly stuck in a chaste, sanitized universe where “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.”  They also murder Nazis, a universally agreeable target that hasn’t been attacked with such sincere patriotism since Marvel peaked in 2011 with Captain America: The First Avenger.

I’m probably doing this movie no favors by comparing it against American superhero media, since everyone’s starting to feel the same way about the genre as we felt about zombie media 17 seasons into The Walking Dead: numbly apathetic.  Within that context, though, it’s a breath of fresh ether – one of the strangest, most upsetting superhero stories since James Gunn made Super, at least five James Gunn superhero movies ago.  Maybe Freaks vs. The Reich would have fared better before our culture-wide superhero fatigue fully settled (it was initially set to be released less than a year after Endgame), but I personally needed it now more than ever, just so something in this genre didn’t look like a total snooze.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #164: The Great Dictator (1940) & Charlie Chaplin

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Welcome to Episode #164 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss four classic comedies directed by Charlie Chaplin, starting with the anti-fascist satire The Great Dictator (1940).

00:00 Welcome

00:57 Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
05:25 Last Night in Soho (2021)
09:45 Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
13:05 Studio 666 (2022)

18:50 The Great Dictator (1940)
38:30 City Lights (1931)
47:00 Modern Times (1936)
1:01:45 Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew