DANTE'S INFERNO (1935, 1924) - black and white visions of hell

Three films inspired by storyboards from the 19th century...
I'm not interested in the concept of hell as a final destination, but it's a great scenario for a horror movie - demons, chaos, torture and the like. The new video game (and spin-off animated movie) of Dante's Inferno demonstrates that the story still powerfully captures the imagination.

While 13th century poet Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy in three sections, the first part Inferno focussed on the punishments of hell. While Dante's epic poem is highly regarded in Italian literature, it's the 1857 illustrations by Gustav Doré that are regarded as definitive. Doré's printing methods off wood engravings make his visualisations appear deceptively older.


Doré's fantastic and evocative work also drives the cinematic visions of Dante's Inferno, able to inspire camera composition and lighting effects. The movie adaptions that I've seen (1924, 1935) are more interesting to me than any recent incarnations, because they bring to life the black and white gothic of Dore’s engravings. The scratchy faded quality of unrestored film even adds to their dreamlike quality. The films could almost be ancient newsreels of expeditions through the depths of hell.

I first became aware of the movies called Dante's Inferno from a few startling stills in Classics of the Horror Film and A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen (all shown here), before I encountered any of Gustav Doré's work. In both films, ambitious underworlds were realised through huge sets shrouded in flame and smoke, with special make-ups to transform actors into demons. The limited information around repeatedly guessed that the 1935 film had recycled the 'hell' footage from the 1924 version. But having seen both, this doesn't appear to be true.

The biblical morality and the classical precedents of art and literature also enabled film-makers the licence to fill the screen with torture and nudity...



 

DANTE'S INFERNO(1935, USA)

The title actually refers to a fairground attraction, the story is of the people who run it. Spencer Tracy plays Jim Carter, a lazy sailor who loses his job as a ship's boiler stoker. He hits rock bottom when he has to make up as a black guy, (gulp), poking his face through a hole in a sideshow tent as a target for Coney Island punters to throw wooden balls at! I shudder to think what that game was called... Tracy remains in blackface for several more scenes, even as Pop McWade (Henry B Walthall - a regular performer for D.W. Griffith, also the scientist in Tod Browning's The Devil Doll) shows him around his elaborate exhibit devoted to Dante.

The two team up when Carter drums up new business for the empty attraction by hyping up all the famous, beautiful women of history that have been damned for eternity and the tortures they now endure. (Ironically, the film also sold itself by exaggerating the horrors of hell and the nudity of its inhabitants.) As the exhibit becomes a hit, Carter builds up an entertainment empire, only to fall foul of too many shortcuts in health and safety and the results of bulldozering his rivals...

The meandering storyline fails to portray Carter as being that much of a baddie, as his business practices are infinitely less shoddy than Gordon Gecko's. At home he's such a convincing family man it's hard to dislike him. He's hardly 'hell' material and the story is often far removed from anything from Dante. The climax is also confusingly off-topic, a spectacularly fiery disaster at sea which, luckily, only an ex-boiler stoker can avert.
The movie's highlight is Carter's guilty fever dream - an eight-minute descent into hell that absolutely looks like Gustav Dore's engravings. This haunting sequence is quite extraordinary, the focus of the film's publicity and posters. Huge elaborate sets, incorporating pools, fires, smoke effects and stuntwork, covered in dozens of half-naked extras. Cavernous functional scale models and matte paintings blend with the live action. Admittedly it all looks like it's from an entirely different film.

Obviously the writhings of the nearly naked actors had to be sufficiently subdued to get past the Hays Code, but the visible lessening of their suffering makes hell look, well, not that bad, and even a place I'd like to visit. There are only fit young men and women in this underworld. The women's bodies are practically obscured by overlong wigs, leaving the men to bear the brunt of the nudity. Frankly, they're all rather hot.
The hooded figures trooping around the underground mountains obviously inspired the hellish sequence 'inside' Disney's The Black Hole. Most of the 'vision of hell' is on YouTube, re-edited to the music of Enigma...

This movie is of interest as a Spencer Tracy vehicle, and as a melodrama with two spectacular scenes of disaster. But the vision of hell is easily worth the price of admission. Dante's Inferno (1935) needs a release on DVD, though it can still be spotted on TV on Turner Classic Movies.

DANTE'S INFERNO(1924, USA)

To check if the 1935 version used any footage from the earlier film, I resorted to a 67 minute bootleg of this silent movie version. Here the story sticks closer to Dante's message, and spends far more screen time in hell.

Mortimer Judd is rich and ruthless. He kicks his pet dog, he's that bad. He's a slumlord during the depression, and his business has just bankrupted his next door neighbour, Craig, driving him to the brink of suicide. As a parting shot, Craig sends Judd a volume of Dante's Inferno, inscribed with a curse...

As Judd reads the book, the curse visits him in the form of a demon, causing him to visualise Dante's story. As the poet strays from the path, Beatrice summons Virgil to protect him (pictured) and lead him to safety, but the only way out is through hell... An angel even flies in with a blade of light, to force away attacking the demons and predatory creatures. As Judd watches Virgil leading Dante through hell, his life also descends in a downward spiral. The demon sends a few just rewards his way while he's alive, as a taster for his inevitable punishment in the fiery pit.

The story owes much to A Christmas Carol, though it's harder hitting in many ways, showing enthusiastic devils arriving to take away doomed souls from their expired bodies. The difference is that, unlike Scrooge, Judd can't see the supernatural visitor who is inspiring his visions and steering his fate.

Like the 1935 remake, hell is realised with huge sets, crowded caverns covered in naked extras, surrounded by flame and clouds of smoke. Foreground miniatures and forced perspective angles expand the scale of the vision, adding giant demons. The smaller devilish inhabitants are a lively lot, wielding flaming pitchforks and, ahem, whips. I noticed that the tableau of the naked girl being whipped (pictured above) had been censored out of this print, only showing the whipping, not the whippee. Possibly it was too sexual, too violent or too naked!
The damned being trapped under slab-like tombs, the curtain of fire, the forest of suicide victims, all come from the pages of Dante as drawn by Doré. But while several tableau are inspired by the same images as the 1935 remake, the footage has been filmed very differently, as far as I could see.

Coincidentally, this 1924 movie also has a character in blackface make-up, Judd's butler. A then-typical portrayal of slow-moving, eye-rolling comic relief. Watching some of his short films recently, it was interesting that Buster Keaton used black actors as incidental characters in his short films, around the same time and earlier, without such stereotyping or the need to use white guys in make-up.

This version of Dante's Inferno has the most lively and twisty plot, intertwined with many more ancient visions of damnation. But it isn’t available on DVD either. The consensus is that two reels (about twenty minutes) of the film has been lost forever (the original running time should have been 91 minutes), though the story didn't seem to suffer for it!

INFERNO
(1911, Italy, L'inferno)

While researching this article, I learned of an even earlier silent version from Italy. It's a straightforward recreation of Dante's tour through hell, led by the Roman poet Virgil. There's no 'wraparound' story set in the present day. Typical of the time, the action is presented wide and distantly, like a stage, with few cuts or close-ups.

This very early film starts off resembling the short films of George Melies, with very basic visual effects and pantomime devils, the main difference being the exterior locations, quarries and cliffs standing in for the caverns of the underworld, but rather overlit for somewhere that's supposed to be underground.

The achievements of the film become more evident further on. Dozens of near-naked extras portraying the damned in various stages of suffering, even being buried headfirst in the ground with their legs sticking out. Some basic splitscreen work to make the sky black, render a walking corpse headless, and portray the gigantic Lucifer.

More interesting costumes are the winged demons, and some elaborate animal suits of a lion, harpies and a gryphon. Though the wirework to make them fly is more like a scenery change. It's still an ambitious achievement for a time when movie-making was so young.

This version, the nearly-nude inhabitants of hell at least look like everyday folk, rather than the beautiful denizens of Hollywood's hell. Limbless people are even used to represent the damned, predating the climax of Michael Winner's The Sentinel!

According to a comment on IMDB, this was the first feature-length film to be screened in the US, breaking the feared 'one-hour' barrier, at a time when exhibitors didn't think audiences would sit still that long for a relatively new entertainment! Arguably this could then be described as the first ever horror film. Once again the main draw of the movie was a mix of nudity and torture.

Sadly this, the least interesting version of the three, is the only one out on DVD (pictured), as it was recently restored and rescored by Tangerine Dream.

The 1911 Inferno also has a website with more images.

Watching these again, my allegiances changed from 1935 to 1924 as my favourite film version, though the hell sequence in the 1935 version is easily the most spectacular.

 

EYE OF THE CAT (1969) - animal attack psycho-thriller still Not On DVD

EYE OF THE CAT
(USA, 1969)

(Updated article, July 2014 - first reviewed December 1st, 2005)

A twisty, atmospheric thriller written by Joseph Stefano, the scriptwriter of Psycho no less. After the success of Psycho, Stefano famously turned down Hitchcock's offer of scripting The Birds in order to help write and produce classic sci-fi series The Outer Limits with Leslie Stevens. His career in film, after that decision, was far less busy than his work for TV. But in Eye of the Cat, Stefano mixed eerie elements from both Psycho and The Birds into one carefully tangled scenario.

Wylie (Michael Sarrazin) and Cassia (Gayle Hunnicutt) are a scheming young couple trying to worm their way into a hefty inheritance. Wylie's step-mother (Eleanor Parker) is severely ill with a lung condition, but has written him out of the will after he left the family home years ago. As he returns to regain her good intentions, he discovers that 'Aunt Danny' now has a hundred cats in the house, and he's intensely ailurophobic, that is intensely frightened of having any cat around. The cats also seem to be protecting their ailing owner...

I was first aware of the film from Ivan Butler's Horror in the Cinema, which presented it in the sub-genre of cat-horror! A supernaturally-intelligent ginger moggy appears to know all about the murder plot and all its friends will fiercely try and prevent it. Slow-motion photography, harsh lighting and extra-loud growling and hissing (overlaid with a similar ferocity to The Birds soundtrack), together with the terrified reactions of cat-phobic Wiley, sells the idea of the dozens of cats as malevolent and violent. A queasy score by Lalo Schifrin (Bullitt, Dirty Harry - also very SF movies) describes Wiley's paranoia whenever there's a cat nearby. Their appetites are made more threatening by having their catfood awash in bright red blood.

It's also a smartly written thriller, set in San Francisco at its most 'happening', with sixties sexual attitudes and hip-words. One scene, in a smoky pot-den, presented one of the first non-judgemental gay jokes that I'd ever seen. Stefano exaggerates the amount of black humour that he'd subtly laced throughout his script for Psycho.

My favourite scene is when Aunt Danny's electric wheelchair malfunctions on a steep San Francisco hill... It's cleverly laid out, in a suspense sequence obviously inspired by Hitchcock, Eleanor Parker reaching out to the camera just like Martin Balsam did on that staircase.

Eye of the Cat stars Michael Sarrazin (who next starred opposite Jane Fonda in her Oscar-nominated performance in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? as well as The Reincarnation of Peter Proud) and Gayle Hunnicutt (The Legend of Hell House) both at their sexy heights, along with Tim Henry adding extra beefcake as Wiley's subservient younger brother. Eleanor Parker (The Naked Jungle), despite playing an ailing society dame, is still alluring enough to add a sexual element to the relationship with her stepsons.

You may recognise the doctor, actor Laurence Naismith, from Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Persuaders (1971), The Valley of Gwangi (made the same year) and the original Village of the Damned (1960).

Director David Lovell Rich (left) 
with Eleanor Parker and Tim Henry

Director David Lowell Rich and the cinematographers do a fine job, especially with the agile and precise camerawork. Rich's biggest film was Airport 79: Concorde (ahem), and dozens of TV movies, including cult favourites Satan's School For Girls and Horror at 37,000 Feet.

Eye of the Cat was last available on home video on VHS in the US, but also used to play regularly on late night British TV. The action is framed very low in the 1.33 frame, presumably to protect fully exposing many of the actors' during nude scenes. I'd love to see it available on DVD and the soundtrack on CD.

The last time I saw it on ITV, there were a few scenes missing - so there's possibly a couple of versions out there (US and UK?). These include a wonderful 'catfight' in a women's toilet!

Here's a rare original trailer...

and here's a clip on YouTube (no spoilers)...

And here's an Eye of the Cat location visit, which we tracked down on a visit to San Francisco...

The filming location for the exteriors of the great house on the hill, and the park opposite - can be found at the junction of Octavia Street (the name can be seen inscribed on a kerbstone in one scene) and Washington Street. We took these photographs (below) in 1998. The wheelchair hill runs downhill northwards from the big house, which sits on a T-junction backing onto Lafayette Square park, also used in the film.

The 'wheelchair incident' happened in front of this wall.

Across the street from that wall, you can see into the big house. 
Note also 'Octavia' carved into the kerb.

Down the hill, looking up at the big house.

Finally on DVD: DOUGAL AND THE BLUE CAT (1967) - the original Magic Roundabout movie

DOUGAL AND THE BLUE CAT
(1970, France)

The original Magic Roundabout movie is finally on DVD

(Updated article from 2006)

The story so far... The Magic Roundabout started off in 1963 as a French TV series for children, created by stop-motion animator Serge Danot. A little girl called Florence and her friends meet Zebedee, a boxless jack-in-a-box, and a bevy of talking animals, notably Dougal, a sarcastic low-slung dog, and Brian, a chirpy snail. Their friends included Dylan, a dopey rabbit, Ermintrude, an enthusiastic bossy cow, a rather aloof train that didn't need tracks, Mr MacHenry the gardener and Mr Rusty who runs the magic roundabout itself. For years they had surreal, low octane adventures together in the magic garden, with Florence in no hurry to leave and go home. It was all made using stop-motion animated figures moving around a sparsely decorated white limbo that represented the garden.


The BBC bought the series in 1965, but Play School regular Eric Thompson (Emma's dad) threw away the translations of the French stories and wrote all-new dialogue, before revoicing every episode. Each 5 minute story was transmitted at the end of the late afternoon Children's Hour and for years lead into the evening news, the start of BBC 1's evening programmes for adults. Thompson's scripts catered to this unique TV slot by appealing to all age groups, with in-jokes and references to current affairs for the grown-ups.

The show became so popular that a feature film, Dougal and the Blue Cat, was released in the UK in 1972 (after it premiered in France in 1970). In the story, the magic garden gets an unwelcome new visitor, a snarky blue cat called Buxton. While the animals try to welcome him, the ever-suspicious Dougal is watching his every move...

With some weird French songs and genuinely frightening moments (at least for six-year olds) the film has lodged in many minds, and would have been the first chance for some to see The Magic Roundabout characters in colour. Following the format of the TV series, Eric Thompson dubbed all the dialogue into English using his trademark voices for each character, with one surprise exception...


In all there were a whopping 441 episodes (according to Toonhound.com) that ran until 1975, inspiring a ton of spin-off games, annuals, toys...

Much later, in 1992, Channel Four discovered that the last 39 episodes of the original French series hadn't been seen in Britain. But with Eric Thompson no longer around, comedian Nigel Planer was drafted in to rewrite and revoice them, though I didn't feel that they were nearly as much fun without Thompson.


Presently, none of The Magic Roundabout series are available on DVD. Several volumes of the original colour episodes were released on VHS, easily confused with the video releases of the Nigel Planer series. I'm surprised and sad that this hugely popular and nostalgic children's favourite has still not emerged on DVD, even when there was a 2005 CGI feature film incarnation, voiced by a mixture of actors and pop stars.

The only good thing about the recent movie was that a single black-and-white episode of the original series was included in the 2-DVD set, in both English and the original French versions.


The good news is that the 1970 movie, Dougal and the Blue Cat is now being released on DVD in the UK in November. This was last seen on home video as a VHS release (below), sourced from a badly damaged and very scratchy print. Now digitally remastered, this new special edition set (pictured at top) includes both the English and French audio tracks as well as several featurettes.


Hopefully this could spark off interest for some of the original TV series to finally hit DVD. At the moment, the only Magic Roundabout DVDs are some CGI spin-offs from the 2005 movie.

Time for bed, I think. Yes, time for bed.

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN (1929) - not on DVD

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN
(1929, USA)

Rare, creepy Hollywood silent from the director of Haxan

A fearless bespectacled adventurer (Creighton Hale, also in The Cat and the Canary, 1927) and his fiance (Thelma Todd) get trapped in a house of mystery after panic breaks out at a society party.

They're kidnapped and imprisoned in a huge house filled with secret panels, torturers, assassins and a gorilla on the loose. Quarelling factions help and hinder them from escaping. A Chinese mystic, a dwarf and a monkey man inform them they are unwilling guests in the house of Satan, pawns in a deadly game...

With subtle tracking shots and a masterly use of shadows, the director was already a horror veteran. Benjamin Christensen made the extraordinary Haxan (1922) in his native Denmark, an unsettling and unique history of witchcraft and demonology, visualising devils and their worship. The other-worldly special effects make-ups must have caught Hollywood's eye, though I was surprised that he could adapt to the mainstream after creating such an experimental vision. He also worked on the epic adaption of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1929) which, like Satan, was hurriedly adapted into a version with sound, when silent movies suddenly had to compete with the synched dialogue of The Jazz Singer.



From the very first scene, the audience gets wrong-footed, misdirection sustains the surprises that literally leap out of the woodwork. These are often better staged than many modern horrors, where you can easily anticipate the next 'shock'. He often springs surprises just as a scene begins, before the audience has had time to get its bearings.

The parade of weird-looking characters predates Freaks, Angelo Rossitto appearing in both films - here (above) he has a rather strange beard. The use of animalistic make-ups look like a warm-up for Island of Lost Souls. A grotesque character on crutches called 'The Spider' reminded me of a Lon Chaney make-up - the actor is Sheldon Lewis, one of the first actors to play Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a movie (in 1920).

Seven Footprints to Satan has the fast pace of a slapstick two-reeler sustained for feature-length, though it's not intended as comedy. With all the sliding bookcases and hidden panels, it plays like an early Scooby Doo cartoon. I'd love to see it restored, as it should take its place alongside the classic creepy movies of the period. It's as much fun as the highly-acclaimed The Cat and the Canary, and more eventful than The Bat Whispers and Lon Chaney's The Monster. The plot twists are still rewarding at a pulp fiction level, though it's not very faithful to the source novel by Abraham Merritt, whose story Burn Witch, Burn was later adapted for Tod Browning's The Devil Doll (1936).



Christensen's earlier Haxan has been remastered by Criterion but Seven Footprints to Satan seems to be floundering in the grey area of 'public domain'. I've only ever seen this same wobbly, over-exposed print, with its Italian intertitle cards. Some clever person translated them all and edited a new all-English version that was briefly presented on YouTube. Perhaps that makeshift presentation will eventually lead to a proper restoration. Seven Footprints is the only surviving film from Christensen's Hollywood horrors.



The bleached-out visual quality and scratchy print is poor but watchable, though not a great introduction to silent cinema. But it was the only way I've ever been able to watch this film in English, and there might not even be any better prints out there (there's a rumour of one possibly stored in a Danish archive). But anyone enticed by the startling publicity photos, and fans of the director or the period had better hope it'll emerge again one day soon.

The fan-translations of the Italian Intertitles are online, listed here.

Some great stills of the leading characters, on Yesterday's Papers.

More rare stills and posters, here on Gorilla Men and here on a Thelma Todd blog.


All that I can find online now are a few clips (with Italian intertitles) on Vimeo here and here...

WIRED (1989) - and bad movies about movie stars

WIRED

(1989, US)

Michael Chiklis IS John Belushi...

This isn't about recommending good movies. This is about movies that I've watched because I couldn't believe that Hollywood had dared to make them. When taste and logic have flown right out of the window, really exceptionally fast.

A case in point. 1978, hot off Saturday Night Live John Belushi was becoming Hollywood's hottest comedy actor. I'd never even seen Saturday Night Live (we've never had it on TV in the UK), but I was immediately won over by his performance in National Lampoon's Animal House and I wanted to see him in many more movies. He was priceless as Bluto, the legendary student anti-hero slob, a prototype of the overweight slacker that's currently in favour. The next film of his I saw was Spielberg's 1941, which he wasn't in for enough time for my liking. And then there was the role he's best remembered for, as Jake 'Joliet' Blues, in The Blues Brothers (1980). I didn't see his later films (like Continental Divide, Neighbors) which can't have had a wide release, if any, in the UK. And then he was gone. March, 1982. Dead from a speedball overdose. He was at the forefront of 'comedy as the new rock 'n' roll' but didn't live nearly long enough to reap the benefits.


Movie biographies about movie people, living or recently deceased, have to be done extremely carefully and cleverly. Wired (1989) isn't one of them. John Belushi's life and death was poorly dramatised and drained of humour. The complete opposite of a fitting tribute. I haven't seen it in years, and I always like to watch movies afresh for Black Hole reviews. Problem is, I haven't got a copy any more.

Last time I watched my VHS of Wired, I decided I'd never watch it again. I keep getting that wrong. (Don't be like Mark - don't get rid of stuff). There's always a reason for going back, but please remember the ravenous way that VHS tapes ate up shelf space. In short, I'm relying on memory here.

I originally wanted to see if Wired shed any light on why and how Belushi died. This was definitely the kind of project that Hollywood unites in avoiding, blacklisting actors who dared to show up show business under a bad light. By bad light, I mean a drug-fuelled system with no means of support to prevent their brightest stars from imploding. (Little seems to have changed, except the same self-destructive results are now possible with 'prescription drug' abuse).


Besides the cast risking the ends of their careers appearing in a controversial tragedy literally in the heart of Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, it was double jeopardy because they were also in a badly flawed film that was destined to be a critical and financial flop.

Wired uses the movie Sunset Boulevard as a starting point, having it narrated by a corpse, and borrowing the opening that Billy Wilder couldn't use, with a dead man sitting up in a morgue. The character of Belushi then looks back at the highlights of his life. But with so little material legally allowed, and so few actors and movie-makers allowing their names to be used in the story, the recreations of his famous sketches and behind-the-scenes dramas are almost unrecognisable.


Unsurprisingly, Wired was last seen on VHS and has never surfaced on DVD.

Wired was too abstract in its story-telling, so I tried the book, written and researched by no less than Bob Woodward, co-author of All The President's Men which blew the lid on the Watergate scandal of President Nixon's administration. But the totally uninvolving style reads like a court transcript - dense with legally-approved facts, but lacking subtext, opinion or conclusions. (A fictional representation of Woodward is played by the late J.T. Walsh).


Because it was so widely reviled, I honestly thought I'd never see the star of Wired ever, ever again. But that's why I'd like to see it again. I was halfway through watching the first season of The Shield when I looked up the previous credits of Michael Chiklis (who plays the lead, Vic Mackey). I was shocked to see he was the one, the unfunny guy who'd dared to play Belushi. I'd not seen him in anything else, having missed his heavily disguised turn in the series The Commish. Quite a career turnaround - maybe even worthy of a TV movie...


In fact, before he nabbed The Shield, Michael Chiklis again tempted fate with another celebrity impersonation. While Hollywood is now attempting to tackle a big screen version of the lives of the beloved Three Stooges, Chiklis has already appeared in a similar TV movie, as Curly. More details and pics on this are here on As Seen On TV. The Three Stooges (2000) was sort of interesting, but again, couldn't expect to be funny like the originals.


Worse still. Much, much worse. The epitome of disastrous casting in an impersonation movie is the (presumably) deliberately humorous casting of Patsy Kensit as Mia Farrow. In a TV movie made to cash in on the media storm that surrounded Woody Allen and Mia's spectacularly public bust-up, entitled Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story, I shit you not.