Dementia

Good Intense-ions

Dementia
USA 1955 (possibly earlier)
Directed by John Parker
(or possibly Bruno VeSota)
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Well now. Dementia is a strange film and reminds me of something I wrote myself when I was a teenager (which I tried to get shot three times and when it was finally shot and halfway through the edit, the videocassette tape was physically lost, quite literally fallen off the roof of a car... so a story fated never to be told). 

Anyway, my woes aside, Dementia was not released when it was made because it was, from what I understand, scaring people and was just too surreal for the perceived public consumption. It was continually denied certification in the US and banned for a while in the UK as well, until a few screeings in the 1970s. I believe an interracial dance scene at a jazz club was also something censors were keen to deny people the right to see (with the legendary Shorty Rogers playing jazz in the sequence).  

So, a black and white, surreal and noirish thriller with, I should add, no dialogue. There was another version a few years later, a bastardised version with cut footage (taking account that this original version is already only 56 minutes long), with a different score and added voice over dialogue, called Daughter Of Horror. This cut is also on the BFI Blu Ray but, out of respect for the original, uncompromised version, I have only watched the original, dialogue free version with a score by George Antheil... I might circle back to the other version at some later point because, at one time, it was better known and perhaps the memory of that led to this version being rediscovered. It’s the Daughter Of Horror version which is being watched by a bunch of teenagers in the original 1958 version of The Blob.

Adding to all the confusion, director John Parker is said to have ‘disappeared’ shortly after... or perhaps he never existed in the first place... although his secretary, Adrienne Barrett, plays the main protagonist in this, known as The Gamin. All of the characters have names like this, cyphers for their function, such as The Evil One, Mother, Father and, in the case of the actor who actually claims to have directed at least half of it, Bruno VeSota... The Rich Man.

And it’s an interesting film, for sure.There’s not a lot of plot and its a fairly abstract story but it does tell a tale, of sorts... and it certainly holds the attention. Antheil’s score features a prominent wordless voice and it sounds very much like a theremin or ondes martenot, specifically the theremin used in one of the two films this one strongly reminds me of... Spellbound. I can’t help but think that the director, whoever it was, was significantly  influenced by the Salvador Dali dream sequence in this classic Hitchcock movie and also, very much so, by the score by Miklos Rosza. And, the other film it reminds me of is another Dali work, his co-creation with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou. Not just in tone but also in specific moments, such as the importance and focus on a specific severed hand at a couple of points in the narrative (such as it is). 

That story being about a half deranged woman who is living in a world where women seem to be used and abused by men and who ends up killing some specific men... both in her past and during the course of the events which are told as graveyard flashbacks to her childhood. 

A few things of note... firstly two of the actors. Dwarf Angelo Rossitto, who is perhaps best known for his role in Tod Browning’s Freaks but also turns up in films by Al Adamson and the like, plays a newspaper seller... which is a profession he also fell back on in real life between acting jobs, from what I can make out. Another interesting and important name is an uncredited night club patron being played by, of all people, Aaron Spelling. Yep, the same Spelling who would become a giant TV mogul in the 1960s and beyond... and into the mid 2000s... you’ll see his name in lots of credits for shows such as Honey West, Starsky And Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, T J Hooker, Fantasy Island, Hart To Hart, Beverly Hills 90210 and oodles more. 

One last thing... lets talk about the nature of censorship. Anyone watching this now will wonder why a film which has been given a 12 rating by the BBFC was once banned for many decades. Well, it’s interesting because there’s a scene where The Gamin is looking in a mirror and she pulls out a switchblade and, after popping the blade out, looks at it almost lovingly, obviously relishing the lethal potential in the blade while smiling to herself. This attitude, to me, is way more frightening and stronger than any gory death a child might stumble on in, say, a gruesome American slasher movie... but the kind of imagery in those are the things which garner them a stupidly high rating. I think little scenes like this make more of an indelible, psychological impact than any kind of strong graphic imagery so, yeah, you have to wonder just why any censorship other than both self-censorship or parental censorship are allowed to exist. It frightens me that censors can wield such power, especially if they let this movie (which, to be fair, features a severed hand) go out with a 12 rating. Preposterous. 

All in all, though, I would say I really quite liked Dementia and think it would be a good one to programme for an all nighter of dark movies, for sure. I will definitely be watching this one again, at some point. 

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story

Hedy’s Hoppers

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story
USA 2017
Directed by Alexandra Dean

Just a brief note of a review to give some praise to this film, which had a short theatrical release last year in the UK. Written and directed by Alexandra Dean, Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is a kind of love letter of a documentary to the once famous Hollywood star and is a culmination, it seems to me, of various people trying to redress the balance of a life once lived where a person's beauty and public personae was a blindfold to the true genius of the individual in question. It also reveals how the US government, it seems, cheated that star out of both reward and recognition for something which was secretly put to good use and which, when one looks at the benefits of just one of her achievements, has been a boon to mankind since the lady in question first put her mind to it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little.

This documentary starts at her beginning, shortly after Hedy’s birth as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 and highlights the things which helped shape her personality... such as her inventiveness being due to her admiration for her father, who meant a great deal to her. Also, it mentions her experimentation with the effects of her beauty on people and her frequent visits to a local photographer to take various shots of her... many of them ‘arty’ in nature (and by arty, perhaps I also mean revealing). Then the determined pitch to be in movies in her own country which, of course, built up to her infamous nudity and orgasm scenes in Ekstase (1933).

The film also documents her various marriages including her first, to a prince, which was so stifling that she eventually slipped a sleeping draft into one of the maid’s drinks, swiped her clothes and rode off into the night on her bike to avoid discovery as she exited that marriage and then tried to get into motion pictures... at first turning down Louis B. Mayer of MGM’s offer before then hopping onto his ship going back to Hollywood (along with a load of cheaply signed starlets going with him) and ensuring she got herself noticed enough by him that she could almost name any deal she wanted. The film also documents her decline in later years, as the hardworking Hollywood ethos of drugs to keep you awake and then make you sleep, such as what was being done to many of the workers to keep them going (famously, even child actors like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney), took their toll on her personality and her status as a single mother in the 1940s. Not an easy life to live.

And, of course, the film also makes much of her brilliant invention, co-created with composer George Antheil, where she came up with the idea of frequency hopping to stabilise the course of guided torpedos and stop them from being jammed. The military turned the patent down but evidence has since come to light that they were using these ideas on their stuff all the time and, when it was later followed up to get the patent back from the Navy, the word came through that it belonged to them and they could do what they liked with it because, technically, Lamarr was an ‘alien’. This shocking attitude towards somebody who was, by this point, a lady and patriot of America. Someone who had sold unbelievable millions of dollars in war bonds for the American government due to her appearances (something which a lot of movie stars were doing at the time).

The film is presented to us by various people giving commentaries... a few of them famous movie personalities themselves such as Diane Kruger and Mel Brooks. However, the majority of the interview clips are from relations of the lady, such as her son who the film focuses on quite a bit and, surprisingly for a film of this type, from the lady herself as a reporter, who is also in the film a lot, has unearthed a lost, taped interview he conducted with Hedy many decades before and which is used as a complement to the voice-over narrative on the film. So you do hear a lot of her, ‘in her own words’, so to speak, looking back over her life.

The film is pretty interesting and just about varied enough in its execution and enthusiasm not to get dull and to hold the interest throughout. Much is obviously made of her unique invention of ‘frequency hopping’, which is used as the basis for mobile phone technology, bluetooth, satellite navigation etc and all that stuff is really interesting. All that being said, though, we don’t get to hear about many of her other inventions throughout the documentary and I really wanted to know more... although I think the cooling cube which she thought of as a failure due to information she was unaware of about the difference in water between various states, was a pretty cool idea. I mean, she was so often coming up with stuff that her friend Howard Hughes set her up with a miniature version of his own laboratory when she thought up the concept of swept back wings to help make his planes go faster, after doing a bit of research on fish and birds (which is deftly illustrated in this film)... so it would be really nice to see what else she was dreaming up.

Jeremy Bullock and Keegan DeWitt’s score is a little like the music of Philip Glass in its approach and that’s not a bad thing... but everybody seems to be trying to sound like Glass or sometimes Nyman in their documentary movies these days and it seems a shame that this is the only kind of score we are getting for these kinds of things at the moment. That being said, you can’t fault it and I would have quickly plonked down the money for a CD of this thing, had one been available.

Well, I said this was a short review and I wasn’t lying. Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is extremely entertaining and informative, at least to the point where it whets your appetite and makes you want to go and read one of the books currently available about the lady. On the surface it would seem that this is not the most likely subject for a documentary movie but, once you step back and think about the import of Ms. Lamarr’s contribution and her legacy to the world we live in, it does make you stop and think how long it would have taken for somebody else to come up with the idea. Definitely worth a watch as this lady’s story deserves to be better known.