seance

Ministry of Fear (1944)

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As we browsed our local video store last weekend, my friend and I were at the directors’ wall and I picked up Ministry of Fear, prompting my companion to tease me for being on such a Fritz Lang kick lately. I’m now decently familiar with his pre-Hollywood films, having seen (and loved) Metropolis, M, and Die Nibelungen, and I’ve seen some of his Hollywood noirs both pre-(Fury) and post-(The Blue Gardenia) WWII. I was curious what he was up to in the years leading up to and during the war, however, especially if he was doing any of the same kind of espionage thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock was churning out consistently, with his pre-war thrillers (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes) presaging the troubles to come, his wartime pictures (The Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur) highlighting the contemporary cost of war and the paranoia of the homefront, and his immediate post-war films (Notorious) dealing with the aftermath. Lang, perhaps because he was more personally affected by the war, didn’t deal with the subject very much at the time. His 1943 film Hangmen Also Die! was loosely based on the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, with his following feature in 1944, Ministry of Fear, being the only other time he touched on the subject, other than in post-war flick Cloak and Dagger, which echoes Notorious in that it follows someone tasked with finding Germans who have run to ground. 

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) departs the Lembridge Asylum, where he has lived for some number of years. He makes his way to the train station, where the ticket clerk recommends he visit the village’s fundraising fête to kill time while waiting for passage to London. After entering the drawing to win a cake by guessing the exact weight, he goes to the fortune teller’s tent. Once he crosses the matronly Mrs. Bellane’s palm with silver, she gives him the ordinary spiel about love, but when he grows defensive about a past relationship, she instead tells him the precise weight of the cake, which he wins. Neale departs with the cake over the protests of a young man who arrives just as he’s leaving, and it’s clear that he was the one who was “supposed” to win. Just before the train to London leaves the station, Neale is joined by a blind man in his carriage. When he offers a piece of the cake to the man, he notices that he’s crumbling it instead of eating it, as if searching for something, but before he has much time to ponder this, the train stops due to a Nazi air raid, and the “blind” man makes off with the cake after beating Neale with his cane. Neale pursues him, and the man takes shelter in a derelict cabin to shoot back at him, only for the raid to blow the structure to pieces. 

Once he makes it to London, Neale engages private detective George Rennit (Erskine Sanford) to help him figure out who’s trying to kill him, and their investigation leads them back around to the Mothers of Free Nations, the charity that had organized the Lembridge fête. Neale meets siblings Willi (Carl Esmond) and Carla (Marjorie Reynolds, of Holiday Inn) Hilfe, who run the organization, and Willi agrees to help Neale make sense of things. To that end, they visit Mrs. Bellane, only to discover that, instead of the older woman Neale met in Lembridge, she’s a young, beautiful woman (Hillary Brooke, who appeared as one of the inconsiderate houseguests in Maisie Was a Lady). She invites them to attend the seance she’s hosting, and Neale meets fellow guest Dr. Forrester, a psychiatrist. The last person to arrive is the same man who tried to take the cake from Neale at the fête, and who is introduced as Mr. Cost. During the seance, a woman’s voice calls out, accusing Neale of killing her. Neale grows upset, and a shot rings out. When the lights come up, Dr. Forrester pronounces Cost dead, and suspicion falls upon Neale, who escapes. He attempts to reunite with Rennit at his office, but finds it ransacked. When another bombing forces him to take shelter with Carla, he explains the reason that he was institutionalized in Lembridge, and what it had to do with his wife’s death. With an unknown man (Percy Waram) tailing him everywhere he goes, presumably at the behest of the spy ring that has infiltrated the Mothers of Free Nations, he begins to fall for Carla, while remaining unsure where her allegiance lies. When he learns that Forrester has connections within the British government, he sets out to expose the league of spies before they can deliver intel about troop deployments to their German allies, but his veracity is challenged by his troubled past. 

Unfortunately, Ministry of Fear is little more than a knockoff Hitchcock, complete with a McGuffin, a wrongfully accused fugitive, a fight on a train, and a blonde love interest. In fact, one could easily mistake this for a Hitchcock film, were it not for the fact that the police in Ministry are shockingly competent. It has a few interesting things going for it, but it’s ultimately fairly run of the mill. This appears to have been a product of executive meddling, as reportedly neither Lang nor Graham Greene, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, were very happy with the final product. By opening with Neale being released from an asylum, rather than a prison, the film implies that he might have been there for reasons relating to his mental state, and there was a potentially rich narrative question about just how much we could trust our lead which could have been mined, but the film never chooses to go there. Some of Lang’s trademark visual flair comes through; the obliteration of Neale’s “blind” attacker by an air raid is a shocking site, and I was also particularly taken with a sequence in a tailor’s shop near the end that’s shot mostly in the reflection of a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The seance sequence is effectively spooky as well, and it was an inspired touch to have the only light in the final gunfight sequence be provided by the flash of muzzle fire. Alas, it’s not quite enough to propel this one to greatness, and I can really only recommend this to Lang completists and anyone curious about what his take on a Hitchcock style plot would be.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

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The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

You’ll Find Out (1940)

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inaworld

three star

campstamp

I was pretty harsh on the concept of the ensemble cast radio play comedy in my review of The Gift of Gab, the single Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff collaboration that brought me no joy. Perhaps it was the fact that Lugosi & Karloff were only two of thirty featured Universal Pictures stars fleshing out the vaudevillian vignettes meant to support the Phillip “Gift of Gab” Gabney vehicle. Perhaps I was just too high coming off the glorious heights of the pair’s first & best collaboration, 1934’s The Black Cat, and Gift of Gab was a letdown of a follow-up. Maybe it’s just a terrible movie. Either way, after less awe-inspiring titles like Son of Frankenstein & Black Friday, another Lugosi-Karloff ensemble comedy doesn’t play nearly as disappointingly. You’ll Find Out is far from the most exciting project Karloff & Lugosi worked on together, but since it came from a time after the decline in popularity of Universal’s famous monsters brand that made their careers, it’s about all you can ask for in terms of Karloff-Lugosi content. You’ll Find Out exceeds Gift of Gab both in quality & quantity; what was essentially minuscule cameos in Gab are fleshed out into featured parts as antagonists here. They also threw in a part for Peter Lorre, making this the only instance that he & Lugosi appeared together onscreen despite their shared Hungarian origins & similar career paths. A nice piece of lagniappe, that.

Unfortunately, You’ll Find Out isn’t exactly a Karloff-Lugosi vehicle like The Black Cat or The Raven. Instead, the film was meant to capitalize on the popularity of real-life radio personality Kay Kyser. Kyser was famous for hosting a music quiz called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (oh God, don’t focus on the first three letters of that acronym). On the program, Kyser, often dubbed “The Ol’ Professor” & dressed in a scholar’s cap & gown, asked live audience members for bits of musical trivia and followed up their answers with obnoxious, “humorous” questions like “What’s the difference between a weasel, a measel, and an easel?” (in tandem with a rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel, of course), much to the delight of an easily-pleased public. Har har. As this was during the height of big band music’s peak popularity, Kyser & his live orchestra rode the success of the craze for all it was worth, including just as many feature films that Lugosi had managed to film together in their unlikely, rivalrous collaboration – eight.

Kyser & his wacky crew are a little shrill & old-fashioned in the outdated comedy shenanigans that threaten to sink You’ll Find Out. If it weren’t for Lorre, Karloff, and Lugosi, the film would be a total wash. In a flimsy plot involving the Kyser clan entertaining an heiress during a part she’s throwing at a spooky castle (“What a beautiful spot for a murder!”) the band ends up saving her life from three oldschool horror creeps (guess who) conspiring to take hold of her inheritance. Karloff plays a seemingly congenial judge & friend of the family who pretends, poorly, that he has the heiress’ best interests in mind, despite being an obvious creep. Lugosi has the much more entertaining role of a turban-wearing mystic named Prince Saliano. Saliano insists that he communicates with the dead & that “The spirits are strongly displeased with the skeptical,” a sentiment that gives him free reign to torture the party guests. Lorre, for his part, plays a supposed “psychic expert”, brought in by Karloff’s corrupt judge to “expose” Saliano as a phoney to the unsuspecting heiress. Lorre is obviously not who he says he is & the three creeps are obviously in creepy cahoots.

The best moments of You’ll Find Out are the mere pleasure of seeing Karloff, Lorre, and Lugosi share a single frame. This happens exactly twice in the film: once when they’re quietly conspiring in a study & again at the climax when they’re holding the entire party hostage at gunpoint. In that second instance, Karloff & Lorre are brandishing pistols while Lugosi, again establishing himself as the ultimate horror movie badass, is sporting a fistful of dynamite. Although Lorre & Karloff are billed before Lugosi, Lugosi delivers what is by far the most interesting performance of the trio. As the same fate also befell him in The Raven, Son of Frankenstein and, arguably, even The Black Cat (although that last one is easily the most well-balanced of his Karloff collaborations in terms of sharing the spotlight), that distinction seemed to be his curse. Not only does Lugosi’s Prince Saliano get his own secret dungeon packed with high-tech gadgetry in You’ll Find Out; he also gets to put all the gadgets to use in the film’s centerpiece – an over-the-top séance in which he plays with Tesla coils, shows the heiress a vision of her dead father, and tries to kill her with a falling chandelier. During this séance, Lugosi delivers the film’s best line: “Presently I shall assume a state of trance in which the outer mind merges with the astral portion of the human ego. The Spirit of Evil is trying to enter this room, but the Fires of Death will guard us.” There’s also a great moment in the climactic scuffle where all of his séance equipment goes off at once, making the mansion look like an automated haunted house on the fritz.

You’d be forgiven for believing that You’ll Find Out is a trfile of an antiquated studio comedy. It most certainly is, especially in early scenes that focus on Kay Kyser’s hokey big band shenanigans. Any oldschool horror fan with a little bit of patience will have plenty of fun with the Lorre-Karloff-Lugosi trio’s dastardly villainy, though. It’s true that Lugosi steals the show in You’ll Find Out (doesn’t he always?), but the image of the three horror greats working together is the rarest of treats, something well worth putting up with a failed vaudeville gag or two depending on how much you love Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and -the most loveable of them all- Bela Lugosi.

-Brandon Ledet