It’s a
volcanic landscape in black and white. Is it Beckettian? No, this man is a
comfortable bourgeois in suit, tie, overcoat and gloves. The edge is the
seashore, amid myriad pilings in geometric forms.
A woman is knitting
in a rocking chair, drawing on a ball of yarn within a glass jar. The man takes
the yarn and runs with it, a long pale string of yarn into the distance, where
he is lost in bubbling mud (Rauschenberg later recalled this, perhaps, in a
construction for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The woman calmly winds
the skein back up, The End.
The music is
evidently by Charles Ives (bells and strings).
Night Tide
Tourneur’s Cat
People is the avowed model. Harrington may have acted on the sea of inspiration
in Eliot’s Four Quartets thunderstruck by Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, which is
cited. The “high-born kinsman” there leads to the arch-duke in “The Waste
Land”, and so on to the Thames-daughters and the storm, with a tarot reading
along the way. Ultimately, Night Tide encompasses such works as “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”, “Sweeney
Agonistes” and “Marina”, as well as a surreal portrait of Eliot in London.
The scholar-gipsy
Drake (Dennis Hopper) is a sailor on liberty, he meets a mermaid (Linda Lawson)
in a sideshow on the pier, two lovers have died at her hands, some say. Her
guardian is an English captain (Gavin Muir) who found the orphan on a Greek
isle.
The specific
extension of the theme puts the captain in possession of a thief’s hand in a
jar, a gift from a thoughtful sultan.
Games
The kind of life
you only find in the New York magazines. Did you read so-and-so’s book? “He
actually was in a flying saucer.” A
chic, strained vision.
Roy Lichtenstein
and George Segal are not admired by everybody. George Furth as the Pinball
Wizard well before Ken Russell’s Tommy.
“Valentino isn’t
visiting you, is he?”
“No, I haven’t
seen him.”
A foreign guest,
“I’m afraid I’m used to infinitely more exciting and dangerous games,” the Avon
lady.
Harrington has a
way of eliciting an apartment off Central Park, as Kubrick has with Greenwich
Village in Eyes Wide Shut.
“Get the Grocery
Boy” does him in (as his body ascends in the gated lift, the score echoes
Herrmann’s trombones in Welles’ Citizen
Kane).
Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, a great and
irresistible study (a tinge of Hitchcock’s Psycho
as well).
Les Diaboliques (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot), with Simone Signoret. Nice young
couple, she has money, he has taste.
Grauman’s Lady in a Cage, with James Caan, just
suggested.
The one-eyed
victim.
Vincent Canby of
the New York Times found the
particular genius of this most elusive, “a most diverting pastime.”
Variety,
“more appeal to the intellect than to the emotions.”
Ebert of the Sun-Times saw right through it, “turned out exactly the way I guessed it would.”
The Catholic News
Service Media Review Office, “mediocre”. Halliwell’s
Film Guide, “tedious”.
How Awful About Allan
Debussy says,
“you have to know when to spit in the censers.”
A film the root
of which can be traced to Whale’s The
Bride of Frankenstein (she hisses at her bridegroom and turns to her
maker), a film of incalculable genius.
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
We know because
of Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles that
the witch destroyed by Hansel and Gretel is a sad figure, but the word used
here by Inspector Willoughby is “tragic”.
Her daughter died
from a fall in 1914 because it’s the Great War between parents and children,
“where ignorant armies clash by night” since neither can help themselves.
None of it was a
clue to Roger Greenspun of the New York
Times, who sat on his tuffet and puffed at it.
What’s the Matter with Helen?
The great satire
on the little woman back home, lost in Hollywood because little kids and
midgets act her part there.
She’s a flop in
the sticks, her sons have gone to jail for killing a girl.
Adelle moves her
dancing school out West to feed the business, Helen is her partner and
accompanist.
Extremely
beautiful performances by Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters. Micheal Mac
Liammóir hires on as an elocution teacher, Timothy Carey is a bum, Dennis
Weaver a Texas millionaire, with Agnes Moorehead as Helen’s religious comfort,
Sister Alma.
The screenplay,
as noted in oblivious notices, is by Henry Farrell.
The Killing Kind
Here is the
opposite of Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, the witch eats Hansel and by
extension Gretel.
At least four
films are cited as points of reference, Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Psycho,
Nichols’ The Graduate, and Buñuel’s Los Olvidados.
Harrington’s
psychological studies are the most accurate and telling of any in the cinema.