Lost in Criterion

Robert Day’s The Haunted Strangler kicks off a pair of British period horror films starring Boris Karloff. Neither are all that great, but this one particularly so after some executive meddling that replaced a supernatural horror plot point with improbable amnesia. Great.

The only entry into the Monsters and Madmen boxset that isn’t directed by Robert Day, Spencer Gordon Bennet’s The Atomic Sub imagines a world where submarines provide intercontinental shipping and passenger service under the arctic, at least until those subs start mysteriously disappearing. Come for the alternative future! Stay for the special effects! Leave before the sworn pacifist realizes war is good!

We kick off a boxset of late 50’s scifi/horror this week with The First Man into Space. Monsters and Madmen is dedicated to films produced by Richard and Alex Gordon, who also produced Fiend Without a Face which we watched five years ago. Things kick off here with Robert Day’s First Man into Space, the tale of an American test pilot who decides to jet into outer space and things do not go well on his return. Very spoopy!

Robert Bresson followed up au hasard Balthazar with an similar film, but this time focusing on a young woman instead of a donkey. Bresson calls the tale (and the writer’s other work — Diary of a Country Priest) “Catholic realism”, and like many applications of the terms Catholic and realism it is super depressing.

Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss spent years making Border Radio and it shows, though often in weaknesses and incoherencies. But perhaps it is less interesting for its plot and more so for its snapshot of life adjacent to the LA punk scene of the era.

After pretty much everyone involved with the first project was dead except Jerry and during a weird renaissance of attention to the Beales and Grey Gardens, Albert Maysles recut unused footage from the 1975 original Grey Gardens into a new film that feels even more explicitly exploitative. Great job.

William Greaves’ 1968 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm puts the experiment in experimental film. The documentary inside a documentary inside a third documentary, shot in public, essentially boils down to the director seeing how far he can push his cast and crew before they revolt — not violent push, but still an antagonistic one. It’s fascinating and absurd and wonderful. And I suppose it could be all fake.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s exploration of self The Double Life of Veronique is a subtly surreal and beautiful film, yet much of our conversation is centered around coming to terms with the essays included in the Criterion release, particularly the one written by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

We haven’t seen a lot of silent films in the Collection so far, and we have never seen a movie with a bigger left field ending than this particular film. GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box has a lot of problems, and a just frankly amazing last 10 minutes. It’s absurd, and I love it.

Graham Greene called his thrillers “entertainments”, which sounds dismissive of his own work but really it was an accurate contrast to the more heavy Catholic novels he apparently preferred to write. Greene himself adapted two of his entertainments to film for director Carol Reed, one being The Third Man and the other (and first) being this week’s episode The Fallen Idol (1948) adapted from a short story called The Basement Room, a significantly worse name.