The World Of Shaft

Up To Here!

The World Of Shaft 
By Steve Aldous
Foreword by David F. Walker
McFarland Books, ISBN 9780786499236

Subtitled, on the edition I read, A Complete Guide To The Novels, Comic Strip, Films And Television Series, Steve Aldous’ book The World Of Shaft is an almost but not quite complete overview of the Shaft phenomenom, which of course was started by writer Ernest Tidyman in the late 1960s/early 1970s (indeed, that original first novel was sold to the studio before it was published and was released at more or less the same time as the original movie). I say almost complete because this was written just before modern comic book imprint Dynamite had released their comics and new Shaft novel and, this was also a few years before the advent of the fifth (and probably final) of the Shaft cinema movies, which reunited Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson for a second time. Which is a shame because of a point the author makes in this book but I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Okay, the book is written by someone with an obvious love and respect for the character and the writer behind him. Indeed, the research which has gone into this, which includes going through a load of the late Tidyman’s boxes full of notes and letters, is nothing if not thorough. And, after a potted history of Tidyman’s career which is very illuminating, I’d say the emphasis is possibly more on the books themselves but he does bring a deep knowledge of this when looking at the rest of the media involved in Shaft. 

And it’s a cool breeze to read and, since there’s not much written critically. at least all gathered in one substantial place as it is here, it’s an absolutely essential tome to own in regards to the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks. For instance, I didn’t know that of the seven Shaft books that Tidyman wrote... due to his being busy with other projects... the last four were partially ghost written by two other writers he was employing with the man himself coming in to flesh out and rewrite for the final draft. I liked those books as an early teen but never got around to acquiring the three gaps I had in the run. Silly me… I may have been picking them up for 30p a piece in second hand book shops in the 1980s but, when I looked into filling in my holes while reading this, I was shocked to find that they’ve been long out of print and mostly attract three figure sums on the likes of eBay. Apparently, the only place where the books are still in print is in Germany, where they still love the character but, you know, I don’t speak the language. 

After covering the books (Shaft, Shaft Among The Jews, Shaft’s Big Score, Shaft Has A Ball, Goodbye Mr. Shaft, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers and The Last Shaft), their collective creators and the various character traits of regular characters in the books, not to mention a load about the proposed Shaft newspaper strip which never came to fruition (with some rare samples of the artwork)... there’s also a big section on the movies and TV movies/series. This includes a breakdown of each episode/film of the series and, of course, gets to the first revival film with Samuel L. Jackson. One of the author’s sticking points is that Jackson’s Shaft couldn’t possibly be the nephew of the original Shaft because he had no surviving kin in the books (and didn’t survive the last book himself, for that matter). So this makes it a shame that there’s no coverage of the last movie because, as you may or may not know, they retconned this in that story and it turned out that, actually, he’s Shaft’s son after all. Of course, given their similar ages, Roundtree would have had to have fathered Jackson when he was four but, yeah, that’s another story. 

But yeah, this is an informative read and it would be true to say I had a ball with The World Of Shaft. What it really needs now, though, is a second, revised edition to take into account the Dynamite stuff and the 2019 movie… can you dig it?

Universal Horrors

Shock Theatre

Universal Horrors - 
The Studio’s Classic 
Films 1931-1946
Second Edition
By Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas
McFarland Books
ISBN: 9781476672953

Universal Horrors - The Studio’s Classic Films 1931-1946 is the first of, to date, three books co-written by Tom Weaver covering the horror fantasy output of Universal Pictures... the other two being The  Creature Chronicles - Exploring the Black Lagoon Trilogy (reviewed by me here) and Universal Terrors 1951-55 (reviewed by me here). 

And once again, a book written by Tom Weaver took me ages to get through (what with my very limited weekly reading time)... not because it’s in any way dull (it’s exactly the stuff I love to read about) but because it’s a doorstep of a tome with a deceptively dense amount of enlightening text packed between its nearly 600 pages. This one does, mostly, what it says on the tin but, with some dubious justification from the authors to enable them to also include some of the studio’s mystery output too. For instance, of the fourteen Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies based on Sherlock Holmes (the first two put out by 20th Century Fox, of course), the twelve Universal movies are also covered extensively in this book. I’m not complaining too much though... I love those films and you will find reviews of all of them in the index of this blog. 

The book tells you a load of information about the main films covered here (of which there are many) so there’s lots here that even the most jaded Universal monster kid may not know. For instance, I know now that Gloria Stuart did not get on well with Claude Rains on the set of The Invisible Man reviewed here). I know now of Henry Hull’s intervention on his make-up in my favourite werewolf movie (Werewolf Of London, reviewed here) to make him look more human so that, as in the script, his on-screen wife would recognise it’s him. 

And then there’s the time that Boris Karloff put his foot down with a director on Black Friday so that Anne Gwynne could get some decent close up shots. And I was also surprised to hear that Abbott and Costello were working the burlesque circuit for years and that their respective wives were strippers. And upset when I learned that Lon Chaney Jr’s dog was run over on the shoot of Cobra Woman. And smiled at the tales of Chaney Jr’s hidden vodka hip flask with a straw beneath his bandages on the Mummy movies... as well as his obsession over buying and preserving huge amounts of canned food, in case something ever happened.

Now there are some personal caveats here for me as I was reading. I like both the English and Spanish versions of the 1931 Dracula (both reviewed here) so I was a little disappointed to find that the writer does not seem to like this film much at all. And, with an extensive ‘also ran’ index including capsule reviews for such notable entries as the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials (those four reviews found in my index also), I was not happy that that, though it was a 1949 film and therefor outside the field of this book somewhat, one of my favourite Universal monster rallys, Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (reviewed here) was not mentioned more than it was. Especially since it was Lugosi’s second and final time playing Dracula and Glenn Strange’s third time as the Frankenstein monster. 

That being said though, Universal Horrors - The Studio’s Classic Films 1931-1946 is another very thorough and well researched tome that illuminates the classic movies and also gives new leads to some of the less available ones... which some people, especially in the UK, may not have had the opportunity to see. Although the Eureka Masters Of Cinema label have been doing a great service to Universal Horror fans in recent years with the likes of their Blu Ray Boris Karloff collections and their complete Inner Sanctum boxed set. So, yeah, if you are into these classic monster movies then this is certainly a ‘must purchase’ I would say... so I wait with baited breath for a fourth book in this loosely held together series of fascinating and indispensable tomes. Great stuff. 

Films Of The New French Extremity

The French Evolution

Films Of The New French Extremity - Visceral Horror and National Identity
by Alexandra West
McFarland Books
ISBN: 978-1476663487

Alexandra West’s Films Of The New French Extremity - Visceral Horror and National Identity is another book I got given for my half-century Birthday this year and, I’m happy to say, it’s one of those slightly rarer film books that is actually pretty well written and which holds a certain kind of intelligence projected at 24 frames per second into the eyes of the reader and on into the celluloidal soul.

The film looks at a certain group of films from the late 1990s to the late 2000s (a roughly ten year period) which the author, amongst others, have embraced and labelled the New French Extremity movement in cinema.

Now I like some labelled ‘movements’ in cinema because they are a useful ‘catch all’ term to group certain similar directors, regardless of the real validity of a movement which is perceived as a collective. Most cinematic groups I could think of off the top of my head are usually not trying to be part of a specific movement, although, like the French Nouvelle Vague, they can at least be said to rise from similar goals and ideals. The only ones I can think of, off hand, which were deliberately trying to be specific styles of cinema both came from Germany. The first would be the German Expressionist movement in the late 1910’s to late 1920s which was deliberately manufactured to combat the plethora of American product in the German marketplace by making films with a very specific, overtly stylised leaning. The other being, in the wake of the Oberhausen Manifesto, The New German Cinema with people like Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders making films as a reaction to the likes of the frivolous German sex comedies which were in such abundance at the time.

From what I can understand of the New French Extremity collective, if you want to identify it as that, is that this too was not, unlike those last two examples I gave, a deliberate movement but something which has been looked at and labelled in this manner. Now I’m quite happy to throw my oar in and agree with the various people defining this upsurge in a particularly extreme ‘anything goes’ version of French cinema as a specific trend but I’m not one hundred percent in agreement on certain parts of the definition, to be honest.

The writer starts off the book by giving us a long history lesson on the violent and troubled past of the country in question... as opposed to the stereotypical romantic portrayal of the country which tends to stick in people’s minds. So she looks at the various battles and wars of France and paints a picture of a nation which has always been covered in blood and viscera. She looks at the way the collective consciousness of France is troubled and confused by things like the history of the Nazi atrocities that played out on French soil, for example, and the collusion of the country with this, to a certain extent. And all of this history is great for someone like me, to be honest, as a person who really didn’t listen too much in school anyway.

The second chapter does the same for the history of French cinema, to give this latest movement some context... so again the French New Wave, the Cinema Du Look etc (that last being a term which I find as insulting and overstated as I do accurate). And when she catches up to the New French Extremity she points out really useful stuff like the films in question tending to not go for jump scares like a lot of horror movies but rather to look at the subject head on while pondering and revelling in the grotesque elements which come into play.

After this, the book then gives a chapter by chapter look at one to four films which the writer has collected into little sets and which seem to go together as miniature groups of movies, for one reason or another. And it’s quite invaluable... not always so much in the things it sometimes identifies as signposts to the movement’s concerns but more so, for me personally, as a shopping list of films I need to pick up, in the cases of the ones I haven’t already seen.

The book also seems a defence, in some ways, of the movement... specifically, it seems, in disagreement with another critic, James Quandt, who apparently rejects a lot of these films as being worthless and, in some way, failures... while still recognising the existence himself of a New French Extremity movement. A movement which has also been called ‘cinéma du corps’ - cinema of the body.

As the film wades through many films I haven’t seen, as well as some of my genre favourites such as In My Skin, Inside and Martyrs (reviewed here), various points are made which tie the films into an exploration of the troublesome country of origin and, while some of the films explored are certainly defended more fervently than I myself would bother with - I personally found High Tension, for example, to be overly obvious right from the start and problematic to the point that I really couldn’t enjoy the film - the comments of West are never trite and, even when I don’t agree with them, always have value, even if that’s just as a starting point to lead to further discussion/exploration of the subject. Something which I think Colin Geddes, programmer for the Toronto Midnight Madness festival, who is interviewed in this volume's appendix, might approve of.

The book finishes with an examination of the various ‘American remakes’ of famous horror films that some of these French directors have perpetrated on an unsuspecting public in recent years... like The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha 3D (reviewed here) and The Eye but... yeah, I’m not really into these commercially hopeful remakes so, while I found this chapter interesting, I wouldn’t have necessarily grouped them into this collective, to be truthful.

The one thing I really don’t agree with is the discussion of this movement as something which is already done and dusted. I think this particular style of French cinematic history, if one does choose to define it as such, is really still only getting started. After all, another film which left me bitterly disappointed and underwhelmed last year, Raw (reviewed here) is surely deserving of being grouped collectively with the other films mentioned here and I suspect there’s more to come soon (hopefully with a lot more bite to them, so to speak).

That being said though, Films Of The New French Extremity - Visceral Horror and National Identity is a big winner with me and I certainly welcome it onto the shelf of film books worth taking time to delve into (I’ll get around to actually physically putting them on a shelf one day). A very interesting tome and I hope the writer has some more like this up her sleeve.