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joeinfurnari · 4 years

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My Dinner with Andre

My Dinner with Andre might be one of the most difficult movies for many viewers to watch. The artsy crowd would call it minimalist while the more lowbrow among us would say it’s boring! There’s just so little to it that there is a valid case for both. The story is simply a struggling young playwright, Wally agrees to meet an acquaintance, Andre, for dinner at a nice restaurant in decaying New York city and conversation ensues. The end. But like so many things in life, My Dinner with Andre gives you so much more if you really listen closely. I recently watched it again and I forgot just how great it is and how it continues to speak to us today.

It’s so stark and unapologetic about being without plot that it’s become the subject of many pop culture parodies. I know there is a Simpson’s reference to it but I most enjoyed the episode of Community that spoofs it. You may think that this comes from a place of common dislike for the movie but it’s actually the opposite. The parodies just prove how influential and beloved it is. Why? For me, the appeal is the conversation itself. It’s been celebrated for being a complete fiction that does a great job at coming across as a documentary but that’s just appreciation on a formal level. It’s not just that they had a conversation that’s important, it’s what they talk about that matters. The content of that discussion is so important, the writers and filmmaker felt it merited being the subject of a film without any distraction. To say that Louis Malle created My Dinner with Andre for the iconoclasm alone, misses the point.

The two men seated at dinner are artists/playwrights and catch up on the long period since they last encountered each other. They’re not really friends and Wally even debates cancelling the dinner before ultimately opting to go. He’s a working writer and artist making ends meet in New York City while Andre has had a long hiatus from creative life spent on travel and self examination. Wally confirms their community speculation that Andre has money that allows his adventures. Andre at first spends dominates the conversation with anecdotes about mutual acquaintances and talks about some of the retreats and workshops he’s attended recently. Andre has dropped out of the arts and has been on a personal quest to find himself after becoming disillusioned with his life.

In the time since they last spoke Andre describes a crisis in his creative life. He left the theater and traveled to Poland where he spent time with strangers in the woods creating experimental theater. He didn’t speak or understand Polish and they didn’t understand English but the time spent together was transformative. What began for him as creative exploration in the woods forced him to act as himself and in so doing he was forced to examine his life and how he acts when he plays himself:

So, you follow the same law of improvisation…which is that you do whatever your impulse, as the character, tells you to do…but in this case, you are the character. So there's no imaginary situation to hide behind…and there's no other person to hide behind. What you're doing, in fact, is you're asking those same questions…that Stanislavsky said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character:

Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from, and where am I going?

But instead of applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself.

Andre tells more stories of his spiritual and creative adventures. For him, his journey to this dinner has been full of magic, mystery, serendipity and travel to exotic locations including India and even a Saharan Oasis. The restaurant is quite nice but it is still remarkably banal compared to Andre’s monstrous hallucinations and descriptions of his process of personal exploration. It culminates in a description of being buried alive in Montauk, NY. From that point on, Andre becomes surprised by his own reactions to things in his life. He even begins to look at himself and the sort of person who would spend his time the way he has. People in his life who he called friends, repulse him. Figures on television appear to be objectively horrible people. He says,

And I suddenly had this feeling I was just as creepy as they were…and that my whole life had been a sham…

…

I mean, I really feel that I'm just washed up, wiped out. I feel I've just squandered my life.

Moments later he goes on to say,

Well, you know, I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally.…but since I've come back home I've just been finding the world we're living in…more and more upsetting.

It’s as though Andre has a new perception of the world that is in stark contrast to his former self. He’s alone in this perspective until he sees a woman working in the theater who recognizes the trouble on his face. Where everyone else he encountered commented on how great he looked, this woman somehow knew by looking at him, the emotional state he was in. Because of this woman’s recent loss of her mother, she was able to see him clearly. Andre says,

She didn't know anything about what I'd been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan, or this shirt…or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan.

So they said, " Gee, you look wonderful." Now, they're living in an insane dreamworld.

They're not looking.

That seems very strange to me. Right, because they just didn'ts ee anything, somehow.…except, uh, the few little things that they wanted to see.

All of this has resonated with me very personally. I similarly feel as though my perspective on the world has shifted and it has made me incompatible with things as they are and people who aren’t looking. It’s as though my prior life was a dream, honestly. When I think of how I thought about the world and other people for most of my life, I also hate that prior self. I agree with Andre that that earlier version of myself inhabited an insane dreamworld. Andre describes it using the example of his dying mother. Although she was terminally ill and appeared only minutes away from death, the specialist was beaming at all the progress she was making. For this doctor, he had so narrowed his goals/perception to her arm that any healing on that front was cause for celebration. Insane.

I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance. We're walking around like zombies. I don't…I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things.

We…We're just going around all day like unconscious machines…and meanwhile there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness…just building up and building up inside us.

And later, Andre continues to describe this state of mind:

Isn't it amazing how often a doctor…will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? When you see a terrorist on television, he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers…or single people, or artists…are all trying to live up to someone's fantasy…of how a father, or a single person,or an artist should look and behave.

They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves…at every single moment…and they all seem totally self-confident.

For two men involved in theater, they are approaching the idea that who we fashion ourselves to be, is selected from clearly defined character behaviors and appearance. For an actor, it must be disturbing for there to be no leap between the actor and the character. Why is it that someone who adopts the role of artist in real life, chooses to look like what we expect? As average people in our world, we’re acting our roles as they have been defined for us by someone else. This should be alarming to everyone and not just Andre and Wally.

I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now.…on our so-called careers…automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority…because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career…well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way. You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot.

How many of us are doing this right now? I did it for many years, always overlooking the here and now for some future reward that all of it was building towards. I also think if your focus is on a career, it’s less on the experience and wisdom needed to fully embody that role. This is why this is such a great film. It may not wow you with realistic explosions but it challenges you to question your view on your life and your world. You shouldn’t be content with the way things are. If you are, you are part of a very fortunate few and you may be overlooking much of the world to do so.

people's concentration is on their goals.…in their life they just live each moment by habit.

…

And if you're just operating by habit…then you're not really living. I mean, you know, in Sanskrit, the root of the verb " to be".…is the same as " to grow" or " to make grow. "

This is something I think about a lot. I live as a cartoonist dedicated to writing and drawing and designing and promoting and tweeting and posting and editing etc. in a driving need to produce, produce, produce. Am I really living? I don’t think so. It’s okay to admit it. This wasn’t a world of my creation but if I’m alive and active in it, I can change it. This film gave me a way to understand the things that I’ve gone through over the last few years. Without art, I wouldn’t have evidence that others have been where I stand. I feel less alone and more hopeful.

Wally talks about the need for escapism and comfort from art against the harsh reality of every day life. The choice is to create art that is comforting but for all its warmth, fails to acknowledge reality and might contribute to a collective disengaging with reality and most importantly, each other.

…we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality…that we're not getting any real sustenance,'cause we don't see the world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other people.

This is heady stuff, for sure. All of this is to get us thinking about the nature of our lives and really see the things we’ve chosen for ourselves. To truly be free is to be able to think outside the characters and roles defined for us…even the ones we think we chose but didn’t create. Only by looking at ourselves honestly and as objectively as possible can we see how far from our own humanity we have come. Andre went through a personal crisis in which he went through a dramatization of his own death and rebirth. The fresh eyes this has given him as illuminated a very dark reality. There are no fancy distractions in this film because it is a battle cry for humanity’s future. Under the guise of a polite conversation about things most average people would discount as having no bearing on reality is actually about a fundamental reality that has changed without our conscious consent. His advise:

Get out of here.

…

the 1960s.…represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished…and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, now…and that from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around…feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them.…that there once was a species called a human being…with feelings and thoughts…and that history and memory are right now being erased…and soon nobody will really remember.…that life existed on the planet.

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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House of Dark Shadows: The Craziest Vampire Movie You’ve Never Seen

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This article contains House of Dark Shadows spoilers.

In 1970 House of Dark Shadows flipped the vampire subgenre on its head. While certainly a B-horror in the Hammer mold, this chiller wasn’t satisfied with one bloodsucker, or even two. Instead Dark Shadows would turn nearly its whole cast into the ravenous undead, indiscriminately slaughtering beloved heroes and heroines, not caring for a second that they were also the stars of a daytime soap opera—one that was appointment TV for millions of kids across America.

Clearly it was a different time. And therein lies its charm.

When the television series Dark Shadows premiered in 1966, it wasn’t an instant pop culture phenomenon. Creator Dan Curtis was savvy enough to see the appeal in a daytime melodrama draped in a Gothic aesthetic, but he didn’t yet have the necessary hook for his central character as she stepped off a train in New England. Sure, mysterious Victoria Winters (Alexandria Isles) would meet the Collins family, who more or less ruled over the town of Collinsport from their ancestral home of Collinwood, but the reason to stick around only came about a year into the series’ original run.

That eureka moment turned out to be the dapper and effortlessly suave Jonathan Frid. Cast as Barnabas Collins, the Canadian theater actor was initially hired for a single storyline (a set number of episodes) as the heavy: Barnabas was an ancient and forgotten vampire, who’d been buried alive like the family’s dirty little secret after a curse condemned him to drink blood in 1795. Now he was out and wreaking havoc by feasting on the locals and obsessing over Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), whom he was convinced was the reincarnation of his lost love Josette—a fiancée who threw herself off a cliff in the 18th century rather than become Barnabas’ corpse bride.

It was morbid, obviously, but also romantic at a time when vampires were defined by the coldness of Christopher Lee or the goofiness of Scooby-Doo. Instead here was the most pitiable of creatures, one who doesn’t wish to be a vampire, and through impeccable manners and courtesies revealed a soft love for the Collins family, even when he preyed on them. Rather than create a great villain, Curtis inadvertently invented a tragic hero who audiences flocked to, both the typical daytime target demographic and also, surprisingly, kids and teenagers, who’d rush home from school to be lost in a melancholy land of eternal loves, ancient curses, and of course fangs.

Thus Dark Shadows became a blender for all things Gothic. Following in the success of Barnabas’ introduction, the series would go on to add ghosts, werewolves, séances, multiple stints of time travel, and one particularly devilish 18th century witch named Angelique (Lara Parker). It also appropriated every classic horror trope from Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, and Edgar Allan Poe, and synthesized them for an audience that was now consuming it along with kid-friendly board games and trading cards.

So why not a movie, too? As early as 1968, Curtis began pursuing the idea of making a Dark Shadows movie, even while the series was still going. Eventually, House of Dark Shadows was the result. Released 50 years ago this week, this toothy amusement was the chance to do everything Curtis wanted with the series, but was prohibited from by Broadcast Standards and Practices censorship, budget constraints… and maybe even audiences’ good taste.

“Blood flows,” actor Roger Davis observed in The Dark Shadows Companion: The 25th Anniversary, which was edited by Scott. “It’s not like the serial. You have a few dabs of blood and the network brass have apoplexy. TV does a mock-up on life. This is in living color. And the vampires really bite.”

Whereas Dark Shadows, the television show, was appointment TV for those still in middle school, House of Dark Shadows was aimed directly at the drive-in crowd with its emphasis on blood gushing from neck wounds and stakes violently going into almost every character’s heart. As Scott’s book surmised, the film was “entirely the child of its creator,” who would at last have his evil Barnabas. And at a glance, it is an American riff on what had already become kitsch by 1970 thanks to Hammer Film Productions’ seemingly endless line of Dracula movies, plus the knockoffs.

And to be sure, House of Dark Shadows is in many ways a Dracula movie. It’s also insight into how Curtis originally viewed the Barnabas character before Frid went on a charm offensive. Playing almost like a CliffNotes version of Barnabas’ first several storylines on the show, the vampire is awakened during the film’s opening moments because of the foolishness of groundskeeper Willie Loomis (John Karlen). Barnabas then forces poor old Willie to become his living slave and creates a fictitious narrative about being a distant cousin descended from the original Barnabas Collins, whom family lore claims sailed away to London in 1795, never to be heard from again.

Bringing back the “original” Barnabas’ family jewels to ingratiate himself, the Barnabas of 1970 is free to attend family gatherings, fix up an old ruined house on the estate, and even feed on cousin Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), a dear relative who becomes a dead ringer for Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s famed novel. Even so, Carolyn cannot displace Maggie (still Scott) in Barnabas’ eyes, who he is sure is the reincarnation of Josette.

It very much has the narrative beats of a traditional vampire movie, but the charm that lingers a half-century later comes in part from seeing these actors, who are intimately familiar with their characters, going through the paces with better production values. That quality also manifests in Curtis’ sense of atmosphere, now liberated from the stage-bound quality of daytime drawing room drama. I would even argue House of Dark Shadows is one of the more satisfyingly atmospheric vampire movies to come out of the 1970s.

Curtis filmed in the upstate New York’s Tarrytown area, mostly on the actual Gothic Lyndhurst Estate, built in the 1830s, and shot much of the exteriors in the legendary Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Whereas Hammer films tended to rely increasingly on sets during this period, and most B horror movies had no budget for evocative locations, House of Dark Shadows was filming its sequences in between tours of the Lyndhurst Mansion and in the same atmospheric cemetery that helped birth the myth of a Headless Horseman.

Regarding the filming location, screenwriter Sam Hall remarked, “It’s a wild house. I’d hate like hell to live in it.”

This is only accentuated by the fact Curtis knows how to drain a spooky location dry. Images like vampire Carolyn standing in a window, draped in white, beckoning her lover to become one of the damned is a better use of Lucy iconography than any Dracula movie made before House of Dark Shadows. And the film’s ending sequence reaches an operatic opulence rarely seen, even in vampire cheapies. Barnabas, bathed in a blue light and shrouded in inexplicable fog in the interior of his decrepit home, beckons Maggie, now in a wedding dress, toward him as the famous melody of Josette’s music box twinkles, only now in a weeping minor key.

The corruption of that wistful melody is intriguing. An original part of the Dark Shadows television series, Josette’s music box, and Frid’s soliloquies about it, is what first gave Barnabas his soul, distinguishing him from the general depravity of other pop culture vampires. One could even say Barnabas is the first significantly sympathetic male vampire in fiction. In House of Dark Shadows, he has a more sinister mean streak, but the pathos remains.

Hence why the film plays at times like a gonzo delight. It may feature the original, more wicked Barnabas, but it is still derived from the genteel series, and many of those elements carry over. Take Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) spending half the movie trying to cure Barnabas, a subplot that eventually ends happily for the pair on the show, but less so here. It’s soapy pulp, yet it’s given as much stone-faced gravity as the Collinsport Police Department unquestioningly agreeing to patrol around town with standard issue police crucifixes. One might ask if they keep silver bullets in every squad car too?

The overall effect is bizarre, but endearingly so. It’s also fairly influential, as confirmed by what happened after Dan Curtis dropped Barnabas in favor of another vampire.

Dark Shadows’ Witch Was As Influential As Its Vampire

By Tony Sokol

Movies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

By David Crow

In 1974, following Dark Shadows’ cancellation, Curtis wrote and directed a Dracula TV movie for CBS that within its opening titles billed itself as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Far removed from Stoker’s novel, the little remembered television film nonetheless starred Jack Palance as the vampire, and introduced several significant elements to the story by overtly making Dracula an undead version of historical figure Vlad the Impaler (which he is not in the novel) and turning Lucy into the reincarnation of his great lost love.

Curtis was in essence trying to recast Dracula as Barnabas Collins. Like House of Dark Shadows, Curtis even sought to build a Gothic atmosphere by filming in real locations, albeit now Eastern Europe. The result was effective in those scenes, even if the rest of the movie failed in no small part because Palance could never wear the tragic cloak so well as Frid.

In spite of its shortcomings, many have fairly speculated on whether Curtis’ Dracula influenced James V. Hart, the screenwriter of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hart was certainly more successful at turning Dracula into a lovelorn prince, and Coppola made that idea permanent in the pop culture imagination. Yet, at the end of the day, they were still remaking the pop culture image of Dracula so as to be closer in line with Barnabas Collins, instead of the other way around.

I would even argue that Coppola’s film is closer in tone with Dark Shadows, at least in its romantic moments, than Tim Burton’s big budget Dark Shadows movie was in 2012. Burton of course attempted to avoid some of the mistakes of House of Dark Shadows, namely by keeping Barnabas as the good guy who is trying to save his family instead of ultimately destroying them, as well as retaining the other fan favorite character, the witchy Angelique (who like all other non-vampire elements was omitted from House of Dark Shadows). But Burton also played her and the whole concept as pure camp, making the Collins’ a subject of ridicule, and their problems a punchline.

Admittedly, there is something faintly camp about the 1960s daytime series and its ‘70s drive-in remake; plots turn on ludicrous developments like Julia falling in love with Barnabas, and then intentionally sabotaging his vampire cure when she realizes he loves a younger woman. But they were sold with absolute sincerity, and in the case of Frid, a palatable conviction.

House of Dark Shadows continues that conviction, no matter how batshit things become. Thus the ending where, accepting he’ll never be cured, Barnabas transforms family patriarch Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds) and even the film’s version of Van Helsing (Thayer David) into vampires. And we get to a finale so madcap that it turns “Renfield” into the last remaining hero. Madness, indeed.

Ironically, House of Dark Shadows was blamed by some for the eventual death of the series. Every character in the film, including Barnabas, had to be written out of the show, for some weeks at a time, so the actors could go shoot a movie upstate (another reason Angelique and other significant characters were left out). This correlated with some of the series’ weaker storylines that lost audiences’ attention.

Additionally, it’s believed parents who went with their children to see the movie in October 1970 were appalled by the amount of blood and sensual subtext in the film. As a result, some may have forbidden their kids from watching the series further… with the show getting cancelled in April 1971.

“The TV ratings fell after the movie,” Scott’s The Dark Shadows Companion revealed. “It has been suggested by some that House of Dark Shadows led to the series’ eventual demise. Perhaps it was the audience’s reaction to seeing their hero Barnabas in an evil light. Perhaps it was because parents attended House of Dark Shadows with their children and, seeing the amount of blood spilled across the screen, discouraged their children’s choice of television viewing material.”

Star Frid was even more unsparing in his final analysis.

“[The film] lacked the charm and naivete of the soap opera,” Frid said. “Every once in a while the show coalesced into a Brigadoonish never-never-land. It wasn’t necessary to bring the rest of the world into Dark Shadows, which is what the film did.”

Nevertheless, both the series and movie left a few marks on the throat of pop culture. The series certainly paved the way for more multidimensional portraits of vampires to be explored, opening the door for, yes, the Coppola Dracula movie, but also Anne Rice and True Blood. In fact, even if House of Dark Shadows might’ve been considered too brutal by parents in 1970, decades of pop culture refinement would find a way to make the sympathetic vampire archetype much more tolerable when instead of drinking from his cousin, he sparkled in the daylight and told his prey they needed to wait until marriage.

Without Barnabas, his series, and his slice of bananas role is House of Dark Shadows, we may never have gotten Lestat, Edward Cullen, or Gary Oldman’s Dracula. At least not as how we know them. Fifty years on, that’s a bloody good legacy for a daytime drama and a B-movie you’ve never seen.

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thedeaditeslayer · 5 years

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Sam Raimi on his favourite horror movies.

This interview from Den of Geek showcases a look at the horror movies that influenced Sam Raimi. The interview is below.

Sam Raimi might not have directed a movie since 2013’s Oz: The Great And Powerful, but he remains one of the industry’s most beloved and respected genre filmmakers. As the creator of the Evil Dead series and the man who rescued Spider-Man from development hell and introduced him to the big screen, Raimi has more than earned his geek stripes. And while he hasn’t stepped behind the camera for a while, he has been supporting other horror filmmakers as a producer, on films such as Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe and, most recently, Alexandre Aja’s gator thriller, Crawl.

A snappy (pardon the pun) creature feature that clocks in at under 90 minutes, Crawl is a lean and tense example of effective genre filmmaking. And that’s just one of the reasons why Raimi was tempted on board to produce the project. “I’ve never been a brainiac or a guy who works with very deep horror themes,” he admits when Den Of Geek catches up with him to talk about Crawl and horror movies in general. “It’s really a primal experience, and for me the simpler the better, the more direct the more effective, the shorter the better.”

“I think what Alex understands so well – and certainly demonstrated on Crawl – is that the audience wants a rollercoaster ride that kicks them in the butt, flips them on their head and then dumps them out before they’re ready. I don’t think two-hour stories – or longer nowadays – suits the subject matter. A campfire ghost story is the right length for me. If you could make horror movies that were eight minutes long, that would be perfect. Unfortunately, movies don't let you do that – no one wants to go into a theatre and be kicked out before they’ve even finished their popcorn.”

Funny, affable and an all-around good egg, Raimi is happy to chat at length about the genre in which he made his name. Having been a flag-waving supporter of horror since his breakout movie, 1981’s The Evil Dead, Raimi is clearly a man who knows a thing or two about what makes a decent chiller. He might not have directed Crawl, but it’s clear to see how it fits with his sensibilities as a genre lover. He’s also, as it turns out, a big fan of a monster movie.

The premise of Crawl is, as Raimi says, simple and direct. Uni student and aspiring swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) and her dad (Barry Pepper) are trapped inside their Florida family home during a hurricane, faced with rising flood waters and a congregation of invading alligators. “What I liked about the movie was that it’s a plausible scenario: alligators seek high ground in the floods and more and more in the US, the southern area of our country is being flooded,” Raimi explains. “It’s like instant horror.

“I love the fact that it doesn't take a science fiction premise to bring this to life,” he adds. “I don't need a giant monster – I'll take my radiation at the beach and I’m happy to cook a hot dog with it, but I don’t want my monsters to be radioactive. I love the fact that these monsters just live in Florida and the circumstance of this screenplay brings them into a person’s home.” Or, as Raimi’s co-producer Craig Flores puts it (while still chuckling to himself at Raimi’s take on mutated monsters): “The invasion of this natural element into an unnatural environment like our homes, where we have TVs and computers and couches, is a terrifying thought. It's a very disturbing image.”

Not only does Raimi love a good old movie monster, but he’s also a fan of the less-is-more philosophy, too – the “great craftsmanship” of Spielberg’s Jaws being a prime example (although, Raimi says, he counts that as “more of a brilliant adventure film with very effective elements of horror” than a horror film per se).

“It's true, the audience can craft more frightening things than we can show them, but it’s also the filmmaker’s responsibility to plant the fertile seeds in the minds of the audience so they can grow their own monster,” Raimi explains. “On Crawl, I think Alex was aware of not showing the creatures too much. You have to let the audience use their imagination and just give them the right amount to build their nightmare.”

Producing films is one thing, but there’s one big question on our lips: will we see Raimi returning to the director’s chair in the near future? “I’m trying to find a good script,” he says. “I don't want to give the audience something they expect. You know, it’s hard to find a great original script and it’s even harder to recognise it as that because it is so different. So that’s the nutty search I'm on right now.”

In the meantime, given all this talk of horror, monsters and “primal experiences”, we decided to ask Raimi about his favourite genre movies – and here’s what he had to say…

The first horror movie I saw

Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

Raimi says that he was just a boy when he first encountered George A Romero’s seminal zombie movie, and it left a huge mark on the future filmmaker. “I was about nine years old, and my sister snuck me in because I wasn't old enough,” he recalls. “In Michigan [Raimi’s home state], we have tremendous winters and so she had this long coat, and I was tiny enough that I could do this little shuffle walk underneath it and believe it or not sneak into the theatre.

“God I wish I had stayed in that coat,” he laughs. “I really had never been so terrified in my life. I was screaming and shrieking, begging my sister to take me home, and she was trying to shut me up. I'd never experienced horror like that before. It felt so real, like a docu-horror. I had never seen a black-and-white movie in a movie theatre before; it looked like a documentary. There was nothing Hollywood about it – it was just unrelenting and complete madness and very upsetting for me. It left a tremendous impression on me as a filmmaker and I think that’s why The Evil Dead was so influenced by Night Of The Living Dead, because that’s really what a horror film was for me.”

My favourite Hitchcock horror

Psycho (1960)

When Flores and Raimi showed early cuts of Crawl to two of their peers, they both independently referenced the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, saying that it felt like “The Birds with alligators”. But The Birds isn’t Raimi’s favourite Hitch flick… “I love Psycho,” he says. “Bernard Herrmann's music is so thrilling, so rich. I love that Hitchcock recognised the greatness of making the audience identify with the hero and then ending her life and introducing the real horror of the story, completely blowing our minds.

“It’s shocking even to this day that he had the audacity to do that. When that happens, you realise you're in the hands of a filmmaker who's capable of doing anything. The whole grasp of the experience is quite terrifying: anything can happen, nothing is sacred, the hero can and does die. So nothing is off-limits. But his choice of shots, his composition, and the brilliant performances that he gets from all the actors are stunning.”

My most influential horror movie

Night Of The Demon (1957)

While Night Of The Living Dead ignited Raimi’s love of the genre, there was one film that cemented it – Jacques Tourneur’s occult classic, Night Of The Demon. “That was such a great film,” says Raimi. “I’m very much influenced by that film even today. My brother Ivan [a scriptwriter] and I were affected by it so much that its influence can be seen directly in a movie we made called Drag Me To Hell, which really is based on Jacques Tourneur’s film. The whole idea of a curse that can be handed down to another, of an unstoppable thing from hell that's coming to get you, is really terrifying. That was really the basis for our movie.”

The modern horror that impressed me

Switchblade Romance (2003)

One of the reasons that Raimi wanted to produce Crawl was the opportunity to work with Alexandre Aja, a director who’d been on Raimi’s radar since his audacious breakout, Haute Tension – better known as Switchblade Romance in the UK. “Around 2004, I asked Alex to direct a movie I was producing called The Messengers, starring Kristen Stewart, but he was busy on The Hills Have Eyes at the time so he couldn’t,” Raimi reveals (the gig eventually went to The Eye’s the Pang brothers).

“I love Haute Tension,” he continues. “I think it was as simple as the way I felt in the theatre – terrified and on the edge of my seat. I didn't know what was going to come next – my expectations kept being thwarted and I really felt that he as a filmmaker knew what I was going through. He was like a puppeteer, pulling one string and then another, and then knowing that I would react one way and then and waiting for me down that alley, where he’d planned yet another surprise. I really felt he had the mind of a maze-maker. He seemed to have a complex awareness of the audience and what their thought process must be, and understanding the timing of things. It’s really a kind of frightening ability if you think about it: how could he know what I would be thinking; how would he be prepared for my reaction? And yet he was. I felt like I was in the hands of a master.”

The last horror I saw and loved

Get Out (2017)

Jordan Peele’s much-lauded social horror Get Out was the last film to really get under Raimi’s skin. “I think that was the last one that really knocked me for a loop,” he says. “It’s just brilliant and original. I love the social commentary, I love the brilliant performance from the lead actress, Allison Williams – she was great. Great directing and funny, too – I just thought that was beautifully done.”

But, as a filmmaker with experience on both indie horrors and big-budget studio pics, Raimi says that Get Out’s awards-season success, while deserved, could come at a price for the genre. “That respectability – it's something gained and something lost, honestly,” he reckons. “I love that makers of the genre are finally being recognised as artists, and yet personally I like working as a filmmaker in disrespected genres - they are better places to hide out and practice my craft. Somehow it's healthier making horror movies there in the darkness away from the sunlight, where things can fester and mould, decay…”

#Sam Raimi

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upontheshelfreviews · 5 years

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And now we come to the final piece of Walt Disney’s original animation trifecta, Fantasia, and it’s one I’m both anticipating and dreading. Fantasia isn’t just one of the crowning jewels in Disney’s canon, a landmark in motion picture animation, and second only to Snow White in terms of influential music and storytelling in the whole medium, it’s one of my top three favorite movies of all time. Discussing it without sounding like an old history professor, a pretentious internet snob, or a hyper Disney fangirl is one hell of a daunting task.

“Did someone say hyper Disney fangirl?! I LOVE Disney!!”

“I thought you only liked Frozen.”

“Well, DUH, Frozen is my favorite, which makes it, like, the best Disney movie ever! But Disney’s awesome! There’s a bunch of other movies I like that are almost as good!”

“And Fantasia’s one of them?”

“Yeah!!…Which one is that again?”

“The one with Sorcerer Mickey?”

“Ohhhh, you’re talking about the fireworks show where he fights the dragon!”

“No, that’s Fantasmic. I’m referring to Fantasia. Came out the same year as Pinocchio? All done in hand-drawn animation…has the big devil guy at the end?”

“THAT’S where he’s from?! Geez, that’s some old movie. Why haven’t I heard about ’til now?”

“Probably because you spend twelve hours a day searching for more Frozen GIFs to reblog on your Tumblr.”

“Ooh, that reminds me! I need to go post my next batch of theories about the upcoming sequel! Toodles!!”

“Thanks. Another second with her and I would’ve bust a gasket.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Anyway, it’s no surprise Sorcerer Mickey is what people remember the most from Fantasia, and not just because he’s the company mascot. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was the reason we have the movie in the first place. It began as a pet project between Walt Disney and renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski.

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“Yep. THAT Leopold.”

However, between the upscale in animation and the use of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the cost grew too high to justify the creation of only one short. Over time more sequences featuring animation set to various pieces of classical music were added in what was initially dubbed “The Concert Feature”. Later it was wisely changed to the more memorable “Fantasia”. It works not only because it’s derived from the word “fantasy”, but because “fantasia” is a term for a musical composition that doesn’t follow any strict form and leans towards improvisation. Combine the two meanings and you get the whole movie in a nutshell.

And this leads us to –

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #1: “It’s SOOOOOO boring! Nobody’s talking and nothing ever happens!”

You know, few recall that decades before Warner Brothers was known as that studio that made rushed prequels to beloved fantasy franchises and a hastily cobbled together superhero universe, it had humble origins in the music business; their Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes shorts began as music videos made to sell their records. Disney’s Silly Symphonies followed in the same vein, though they focused more on pushing the envelope in animation technique and character resonance than selling music, as did the lesser known Harman-Ising Happy Harmonies.

And if that’s the case, then Fantasia is the Thriller of animated music videos. It’s the result of years of technological advancement and trial and error, all culminating in the flawless weaving together of visuals and some of the greatest music mankind has created to tell seven stories and elicit an emotional response for each one.

Let me repeat that: FANTASIA. PREDATES. THRILLER.

“And unlike Thriller, Fantasia has the advantage of NOT being directed by a man who literally got away with murder or involving an artist whose pedophilia accusations are still discussed a decade after his passing…at least as far as we know.”

By the way, if you’re watching the current version of Fantasia that’s available, do me a favor and pause the movie to watch the original Deems Taylor intros; while they’re shorter than the ones on the blu-ray, they have Deem’s original voice. All later releases have him dubbed over by Corey Burton because the audio for these parts hasn’t held up as well over time. Now Corey Burton is a phenomenal voice actor who’s done countless work for Disney before, but there’s a problem I have with him taking over these segments: One, he and Deems sound nothing alike, and Two, he makes him sound so dry and dull. Not to mention the longer intros practically spoil everything you’re about to see whereas the cut versions give you just enough to build some intrigue for what’s to follow.

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Regardless of whichever one you’re watching, Deems gives us the rundown on what Fantasia is all about and lists the three categories that the sequences fall under.

A concrete story

Clearly defined images with something of a narrative

Music and visuals that exist for its own sake

And the very first of these parts falls directly into the last one.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – Johann Sebastian Bach

Some hear this tune and attribute it as stock horror music, but for me it’s the start of a grand, dark, fantastical journey through realms of the imagination. While it is intended as an organ piece, this full orchestration blows me away. Capturing the orchestra in bold hues and shadows with colors specific to certain highlighted instruments was a brilliant move, setting the stage for what’s to come.

And if the previously referenced Bugs Bunny cartoon was any indication, the real Leopold Stokowski is one of the main draws to this segment. Stokowski’s claim to fame was that he ditched the traditional conductor’s baton and used his hands to guide the orchestra. His passion and restraint is plain for all to see, even in silhouette.

Ultimately Stokowski and the orchestra fade away into the animated ether. The idea behind Toccota and Fugue was to show a gradual transformation from the conscious world to the subconscious, providing a literal and figurative representation of what you see and hear with the music. That’s why the first animated images resemble violin bows sweeping over strings. Over time those distinct objects evolve into abstract geometric shapes.

Honestly, no amount of stills can capture what it’s like to watch this sequence play out. It’s a radically unique experience, almost like a dream.

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #2: “It’s the world’s first screensaver/musicalizer!”

This is something I hear often from people (ie. the people making the complaints I’ve chosen to highlight). First, read the previous Thing. Second, Toccata is not so much about recreating a story as it is capturing a feeling. And yet a story isn’t out of the question. I always saw at as glimpses of a battle of light versus dark, heaven versus hell, albeit not as overt as the opening of Fantasia 2000. That’s the beauty of this segment. It’s all up for interpretation. You can let the images and sounds wash over you as if you were dreaming it, or attach whatever meaning you find.

And on that note (ha) –

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #3: “God, all these animators must have been so fucking high to come up with this shit.”

I tell ya what, if you’re one of those people who think that, take whatever drug is handy, grab some crayons or whatever you feel comfortable doodling with, and when you’re comfortably high, draw one full second of animation. That’s 24 consecutive drawings that need to flow, squash and stretch into each other realistically. It doesn’t have complicated; it can be a ball bouncing, a flower blowing in the wind, an eye blinking, but it has to work.

Not so easy, huh?

Classic Disney animators who lectured at art schools received comments like this all the time. While there were some like Fred Moore who would go for the occasional beer run on breaks, there’s no record of narcotic or alcoholic influence on the animators’ turnout. I’m pretty sure Walt would’ve fired anyone who turned in work produced while high because it’d be awful. Animation was still a fairly new medium at the time, and Disney was constantly experimenting with what it could do, which is why we got things like this, the Pink Elephants, and other delightfully trippy moments throughout the 40’s, not because of drugs. Isn’t that right, classic Disney animator Bill Tytla?

“Of course! I’ve never done drugs, and I never drink…wine.”

The Nutcracker Suite – Pyotr Illich Tchaichovsky

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #4: “Yawn. Nutcracker is SO overplayed. Of course Disney had to jump on the bandwagon with their version!”

Ironically, the extended Deems Taylor intro has him mention how nobody performs Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker; in light of its modern seasonal popularity, the sentiment is rendered archaic. True, the ballet wasn’t an initial critical hit and Tchaikovsky himself virtually disowned it, but much of its ubiquity is largely due in part to Disney adapting it for Fantasia. It eschews the title character in favor of a nature ballet portraying the cycle of seasons. Initial planning included the overture and the famous march featuring woodland critters, though they were eventually cut. Walt considered pumping scents into the theater during this part, but was unable to figure out how to do it naturally. If they had Smell-O-Vision that might work, but what scents would you have to scratch off for the other Fantasia segments? Wood resin? Wine? Wet hippo? Brimstone?

The sequence begins with The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. In the night a group of fairies dance like fireflies, gracing spring flowers and spiderwebs with delicately timed dewdrops.

“Any of you girls seen Tinkerbell?” “She ditched us to hang out with that obnoxious flyboy.” “Again?! That’s the third time this month!”

The scene is atmospheric with beautifully rendered pastel backgrounds. After the fairies comes The Chinese Dance performed by a group of little mushrooms. It’s a cute number, and just another that was parodied more than a few times in other cartoons – wait do those mushrooms have slant eyes? And they’re prancing around nodding like extras in The Mikado…

You fungi are lucky you’re so darn adorable otherwise I’d sic the self-righteous side of Twitter on you.

Dance of the Reed Flutes follows. Lilies gently float on to the surface of a pond before inverting themselves to resemble twirling dancers with long, flowing skirts. And since I’m not always one to take the easy route, enjoy this niche reference instead of “You Spin Me Right Round”.

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A gust of wind blows the spinning lilies over a waterfall into some moody underwater caverns, where a school of unusually sultry goldfish perform the Arabian Dance.

Cleo, does Gepetto know about this?

A novel idea, using the basic swimming motions of a goldfish and their naturally diaphanous tails and fins as veils to resemble exotic dancers, though like other animated characters in a similar vein, this has led to some…”interesting” reactions from certain people.

Right, well, bubbles transition us into the penultimate movement, the Russian Dance. Thistles and orchids resembling dancers clad in traditional Russian peasant clothing spring to life in this brightly colored energetic minute. You’ll be chanting “hey!” along with it.

And finally, the Waltz of the Flowers. As a little girl I would often hold my own “ballets” to this scene, which mainly comprised of me in a ballet costume or fancy nightgown spinning around in circles for family members with this playing in the background. Top that, Baryshnikov.

Fairies similar to the ones from the beginning transform the leaves from fresh summer green to autumn orange, brown and gold. Milkweed seeds blossom forth and float through the air like waltzing ladies. This piece above all else is what really shows the beauty of nature. I feel more emotion watching the leaves pirouette in the wind than any plain live-action drama.

Fall turns into winter, and the fairies, now snow sprites, skate across a pond creating ice swirls while even more spiral down from the sky as snowflakes. The secret of animating these snowflakes was nearly lost to time. Several years ago a notebook by technician Herman Schultheis was rediscovered, revealing how many of the special effects in Disney’s early films – Fantasia in particular – were brought to life. The snowflakes were cels on spools attached to small rails from a train set that were filmed falling in stop motion and black and white, then superimposed on the final picture.

In conclusion, The Nutcracker Suite is a lovely piece of animation and music, and I’ll pop in Fantasia at Christmastime just to watch it. This was my introduction to The Nutcracker, and it’s an excellent and unique one.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Paul Dukas

The symphonic poem of the same name now gets a proper name with Mickey Mouse stepping in the title role. It’s impossible to imagine any other character in his shoes, but for a time there were other considerations.

“Nope. Too wooden.”

“Too angry.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re just too darn loud.”

As we all know, Mickey was given the part since his popularity needed a boost. He doesn’t talk here, and I know those who find his voice grating wholeheartedly embrace that fact, but what we’re given is proof that Mickey works just as well silently as he does speaking. Very few cartoon characters can pull off that kind of versatility.

And while we’re on the topic of sound, Walt was so determined for the sound quality to match what was happening on screen that he devised a system he dubbed “FantaSound”, where it would seem as though the music would move around the the theater instead of just blare out from one speaker.

You read that right. Fantasia is the movie that invented SURROUND SOUND.

But that’s not the only technological leap Fantasia is responsible for – this is the first time we see Mickey with sclera.

That’s the white of the eyes for those who don’t speak science.

Before Fantasia, Mickey had what we refer to today as “pie eyes”, a relic of the era he was created in. As the art of animation progressed, animators found it increasingly difficult to create believable expressions with two little dots. Fred Moore is responsible for the mouse’s welcome redesign. Mickey as the apprentice serves the sorcerer Yen Sid, named after his real world counterpart.

“Hey! I didn’t teach him that!”

Mickey’s craving a taste of his master’s power, so he borrows his magical cap after he goes to bed and enchants a broom to finish his work of gathering water. It’s fun and bouncy, though the part where Mickey dreams he can control the cosmos, seas and sky is something to behold.

“The power! The absolute POWER!! The universe is mine to command! To CONTROOOOOOL!!!”

But Mickey is jolted from his dream of ultimate conquest when the broom begins flooding the place. Unfortunately the sorcerer’s hat doesn’t come with a manual so Mickey doesn’t know how to turn it off. He resorts to violently chopping the broom to pieces with an axe. The animation originally called for the massacre to happen on screen, but was altered to showing it through shadows instead. I think it’s much more effective this way. The implied violence is more dramatic than what we could have gotten.

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One of my favorite stylistic choices in Fantasia is what follows. The color is sucked out, drained if you will, mirroring Mickey’s exhausted emotional and physical state after committing broomslaughter. But it slowly returns as the broom’s splinters rise up and form an army of bucket-wielding drones. They overpower Mickey and catch him in a whirlpool until Yen Sid returns and parts the waters like a pissed off Moses.

“You! Shall not! SWIM!!!”

Mickey sheepishly returns the hat, and I have to give credit to the animators for the subtle touches on Yen Sid. He appears stern at first glance, but the raised eyebrow borrowed from Walt? The slight smirk at the corner of his mouth? Deep down, he’s amused by his apprentice’s shenanigans. Even the backside slap with the broom, while rendered harshly due to the sudden swell of music, is done less out of malice and more out of playfulness.

The piece ends with Mickey breaking the barriers of reality to congratulate Stokowski on a job well done.

“Hey! I didn’t teach him that!”

If you haven’t already guessed, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is easily one of my preferred sequences. It’s energetic, perfectly matches the music, and features my favorite mouse in one of his most iconic roles. I joke about the scene where Mickey controls the waves and the sky due to Disney’s far-reaching acquisitions in the past decade, but within the context of the film it’s one of the most magical moments. Some theorize that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an allegory of Walt’s journey to create Fantasia itself, and there’s some merit to it – Mickey’s always been Walt’s avatar after all, and here he dreams big only to wind up way in over his head. But you don’t need to look for coincidental parallels to enjoy this part.

Rite of Spring – Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is admittedly my least favorite part of Fantasia, though I don’t hate it by all means. Thematically it’s the furthest from the original work’s intent: instead of a pagan ritual involving a virgin sacrifice, we witness the earth’s infancy. I was never really into dinosaurs as a kid (I didn’t even see Jurassic Park until I was in fourth or fifth grade), and the thundering, threatening music put me off. I found it too long (twenty-two minutes is an eternity in child time), uninteresting, and dour compared to the other sequences, with the exception of one moment. I can appreciate it now that I’m older, though.

A solitary oboe echoes through the vast darkness of space. We soar past comets, galaxies, suns, and down into our lonely little planet still in the early stages of formation. Volcanoes cover the earth. They spew toxic gas, but their magma bubbles burst in precision with the music. Once again this is due to Herman Schultheis. He filmed a mixture of oatmeal, coffee grounds, and mud with air pushed up through a vent, and let the animators go to town on it.

The volcanoes erupt simultaneously. Lava flows and the ensuing millennia of cooling form the continents. But deep in the sea, the first protozoan life wriggles, divides, and evolves into multi-cellular organisms. One of them crawls up on to land, and finally we’re back in the time where dinosaurs weren’t just confined to zoos.

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #4: “Dinosaur inaccuracies…brain melting…”

True, most of the dinosaur and plant species here never shared the same period of existence, but try telling that to the animation studio or John Hammond. They mostly went for whatever looked cool and prehistoric regardless of scientific accuracy. Some of the designs themselves are a bit off, but the animators did their best considering how much we knew about the creatures in the 30’s and 40’s. Heck, we’ve only recently discovered that most dinosaurs were covered with feathers or fur, and I don’t see anyone harping on Jurassic Park for omitting that detail. Thank God Steven Spielberg doesn’t harbor George Lucas’ affinity for reworking his past movies with extra CGI.

Believe it or not, this scene was once considered the height of accurate dinosaur depictions on film, because nobody else had done it before with this level of research and care in animation. Without Rite Of Spring, we wouldn’t have The Land Before Time or Jurassic Park in the first place. Look at Land Before Time’s bleak, orangey atmosphere and the Sharptooth fights and tell me this didn’t influence it in any way.

The dinosaurs themselves have little character and, while fascinating to see how they might have lived, are not particularly engaging. Until…

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Yes, when the king of all dinosaurs makes his entrance, bringing a thunderstorm along with him no less, all the others are wise to run and hide from him. I would hide under a quilt but still peek through the holes in awe. He snaps about throwing his weight around, but when it goes toe to toe with a stegosaurus? That’s when things get real.

This battle, by the way, is animated by Woolie Reitherman, who had a knack for bringing gargantuan characters to life. He was responsible for animating Monstro in Pinocchio, and was behind Maleficent’s dragon form in Sleeping Beauty.

Though what follows is far from triumphant. The earth has become a hot, barren wasteland. The dinosaurs trudge through deserts and tar pits, their fruitless search for water turning into a slow death march. Not even the mighty T-Rex can survive this.

California: present day.

Some time later, the dinosaurs are all gone. Only their bones bleaching in the sun remain. Without warning, a massive earthquake hits and the seas flood through, washing away the remains of the old prehistoric world. The sequence comes full circle as the lonely oboe plays over a solar eclipse, which sets on an earth ready to step into the next stage of life.

If Walt had his way, the segment would have continued with the evolution of man and ended on a triumphant note with the discovery of fire, but he was worried about the possible backlash from zealous creationists. And I don’t blame him for wanting to avoid a confrontation with that crowd.

“It’s bad enough he makes a mouse act like a people with his dadgum pencil sorcery, but propagandizin’ evil-loution in mah Saturday mornin’ toon box? That’s just plum un-okkily-dokkily!”

“…You wouldn’t happen to have a dictionary on hand, would you?”

“DICTIONARIES ARE THE DEVIL’S BOOSTER SEAT!!”

Subsequently, those edits made to Stravinsky’s score pissed off the composer so much that he considered suing Disney for tampering with his work. He opted not to, yet the experience turned him off animation for good. A crying shame; Stravinsky, apart from being the only classical composer alive to see his work made part of a Fantasia feature, was excited to work with Walt. The two deeply respected and recognized each other as artists ahead of their time. Who knows what else could have come from their collaboration if things ended better?

With that knowledge, it makes sense that one of Stravinsky’s most famous pieces, the Firebird Suite, was included in Fantasia 2000: perhaps on some level Disney wanted to apologize for how the finale of Rite of Spring was mishandled by making Firebird the grand finale (though knowing Stravinsky he would have hated the little changes made to his music there as well).

Following the intermission, the orchestra reconvenes and has a fun little jam session. Deems Taylor takes a moment to introduce us to the most important – but rarely seen – figure that makes Fantasia and most music in movies possible, The Soundtrack.

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Once again, Disney does what it does best and anthropomorphizes what no one thought was possible. Think about it: giving personalities to animals is one thing, but they’ve successfully done the same for plants, planes, houses, hats, and here, sound itself. It may seem silly and out of place, but I think it’s brilliant and charming. The visuals it creates to represent different instruments are perfectly matched; some of them harken back to Toccata and Fugue. This, combined with the improv from the orchestra, is a good way to ease us back into comfort after the harshness of Rite of Spring.

Pastoral Symphony – Ludwig Van Beethoven

There’s a famous story about Walt Disney while he was pitching this segment. When met with complaints that it wasn’t working, he cried out This’ll MAKE Beethoven!” In a way, he was right. This was the very first piece of Beethoven I ever heard, even before the famous “da da da DUUUUUN” of Symphony #5. And as far as I know, it was for a good many Disney fans too. We still get a romantic depiction of the countryside as was the composer’s intent, but instead of an rural utopia, we see the Fields of Elysium at the foot of Mount Olympus. It’s home to a variety of mythical creatures from the golden age of Greece: fauns, unicorns, cherubs, centaurs and Pegasi.

If there was ever a Disney world I wanted to spend a day in, this would be it. It’s so innocent, laidback and colorful; it takes me right back to my childhood. A great portion of this sequence was used in my favorite music video in the Simply Mad About the Mouse anthology album, “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” sung by Ric Ocasek from The Cars. Whether that was my favorite because it featured Pastoral Symphony or Pastoral Symphony was my favorite because it was featured in the video I don’t know. There’s nothing that could ever destroy it for –

Oh son of a…

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #5: “RACIST. FUCKING. CENTAUR. EQUALS. RACIST. DISNEY… RACIST!!!”

Yes ladies and gents, that image is real. Meet Sunflower (or Otika, I’m not sure which one she is) one of the the censored centaurettes (for very obvious reasons). I’m of two minds when it comes to their inclusion. First off, yes, they’re crude and demeaning blackface caricatures that have no place in a Disney movie, let alone one of the best ones and in one of my favorite sequences. But my inner art/film historian that despises censorship feels that erasing these depictions is the same as pretending they and other prejudices of the time never existed.

Thank you, Warner Bros.

As time and the civil rights movement marched on, all traces of the Sunflower squad were removed from later releases of Fantasia. The downside to that was editing techniques at the time weren’t as high-tech as they are today; I was lucky to see a film print of Fantasia at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015 that must have dated as far back as the ’60s because she wasn’t there, but the cuts were very noticeable. Sad to say the amazing remastered tracks done by Irwin Kostal in the 80’s used a similar print because the shift in the music is very jarring at points in this segment. It wasn’t until Fantasia’s 50th anniversary that they were able to zoom in and crop the scenes that had Sunflower in them while recycling other pieces of animation over parts where they couldn’t get rid of her, eventually managing to digitally erase her from some of the film entirely (look carefully at the part where the red carpet is being rolled out for Bacchus on the blu-ray. Unless he got it from the Cave of Wonders, carpets normally don’t roll themselves…)

I completely understand the reasoning behind Sunflower’s removal, but can also see why animation aficionados would try to pressure Disney into bringing her back with each new re-release for Fantasia, possibly with one of those great Leonard Maltin intros putting everything into context like in the tragically out-of-print Disney Treasures dvds – though the chances of that happening are as likely as Song of the South being made public again (the Disney+ promo should have made that clearer when they claimed Disney’s entire back catalogue would be available for streaming, but I doubt the tag line “We have everything except Song of the South” would hook people). It’s an issue I’m very torn on. So if there was ever a chance that a version of Fantasia with a restored Sunflower was possible, either through Disney themselves or fan edits, my thoughts on it would be a very resounding…

The first movement of the symphony is “Awakening of Pleasant Feelings upon Arriving in the Country”, and this part does just that. As the sun rises and we get our first glimpse of the technicolor fantasyland. Pan flute-playing fauns and unicorns frolic with each other while a herd of Pegasi take to the sky. Again, going back to other notable movies taking cues from Fantasia, Ray Harryhausen carefully studied the movement of the Pegasi here when creating his stop-motion Pegasus for Clash of the Titans. They canter through the air as they would on land, but in the water they move with the grace of a swan.

And look at the little baby ones, they’re just too cute!

The second movement, “Scene by the Brook”, takes place exactly where you think it does. A group of female centaurs, named “centaurettes” by the animators, doll themselves up with the help of some cupids (and the aforementioned Sunflower) in preparation for mating season.

“”I used to like the centaurettes not just because they were pretty but because each of them having different colors could be interpreted as women of all colors hanging out together and finding love. But no, having Sunflower there confirms that they’re all supposed to be lighter-skinned ladies. Racism given context makes it no less of a pain in the ass.”

The male centaurs arrive and hook up with their conveniently color-matching counterparts. The cherubs help set the mood for their flirting interludes until they discover two shy, lonely centaurs (Brudus and Melinda, because I’m that big of a Disney nerd that I know their actual names) who haven’t found each other yet. They lure them to a grove with some flute music a la The Pied Piper and it’s love at first sight.

One of my favorite details throughout the Pastoral Symphony is that we keep coming back to Brudus and Melinda. They’re a cute couple, one of the closest things we have to main characters in this sequence, and it’s nice to follow them.

Our third movement is “Peasants’ Merrymaking”. The centaur brigade prepare an overflowing vat of wine for Bacchus, god of booze and merrymaking. Bacchus, forever tipsy, arrives backed up by some black zebra centaurettes serving him. Maybe they were considered attractive enough to avoid being censored.

The bacchanalia is in full swing with everyone dancing and getting loaded. But Zeus, who appears more sinister than Laurence Olivier or his future Disney counterpart, crashes the party with a big thunderstorm. I used to think he was a jerk for endangering his subjects just for kicks, but in light of recent revelations maybe he had ulterior motives.

“Feel the wrath of the thunder god, you fucking racists!”

“Come on, dad, you used to be fun! Where’s the Zeus turns into a cow to pick up chicks?!”

“He grew up. Maybe you should too, son. Now EAT LIGHNING!”

“The Storm”, our fourth movement, provides some stunning imagery against the torrential backdrop, from the centaurs being called to shelter to the pegasus mother braving the gale to rescue her baby.

Ultimately Zeus grows tired and turns in for the night, ending the storm. Iris, goddess of the rainbow, emerges and leaves her technicolor trail across the sky. The creatures revel in the effects it has on their surroundings, then gather on a hill to watch the sunset, driven by Apollo and his chariot. Everyone settles in to sleep, and Artemis, hunting goddess of the moon, shoots an comet across the sky like an arrow that fills the sky with twinkling stars.

Pastoral Symphony was the one part of Fantasia that always received the most derision from critics, but racist characters aside I simply don’t get the hate for it. It may be longer than Rite of Spring but feels nowhere near as drawn out. I love the colors, characters, and the calm, bucolic fantasy world it creates. This was my first exposure to Beethoven and the world of Greek mythology and I still hold plenty of nostalgia for it. I admit it’s not perfect, and not just for the reason you think. Out of all the Fantasia pieces, this is the one whose quality is closest to an original Disney short than a theatrical feature. It’s a bit more cartoony and there’s some notable errors, particularly when the baby Pegasi dive into the water and emerge different colors. Also, Deems and the animators flip between using the gods’ Greek and Roman names, and the stickler in me wants them to pick a mythos and stick with it. But for all it’s flaws it’s still among my very favorite Fantasia pieces and nothing can change that.

The Dance of the Hours from the Opera “La Giaconda” – Amilcare Ponichelli

Like I said before, Disney was a master of the art of anthropomorphism. And nowhere is this more true than Dance of the Hours. Animals portray dancers symbolizing morning, noon, dusk and evening – only they’re the most unlikely ones for the job. The characters of our penultimate act are as cartoony as any you’d see in a Disney short from the era, but what puts the animation above it is the right balance of elasticity and realism. The exaggeration is on point, but there’s enough heft and weight to the animals that I can buy them being grounded in (some semblance of) reality. The animators studied professional dancers and incorporated their moves and elegance flawlessly. Half of the comedy derives from this.

The other half comes from how seriously the mock ballet is treated. We’re never informed who the dancers will be, leading anyone who hasn’t seen this before to assume they’re people. The ballet itself is a parody of the traditional pageant, but the performers carry on with the utmost sincerity. It doubles the laughs when it comes to moments such as Ben Ali Gator trying to catch Hyacinth Hippo in a dramatic pas de deux or an elephant getting a foot stuck in one of her own bubbles as she prances around. The familiar lighthearted refrain of the dance provides wonderful contrast to the caricatures on screen, particularly if you recall its other most famous iteration beyond Fantasia.

No one ever told me Camp Grenada was this Arcadian or zoological.

Morning begins with a troupe of uppity ostriches in ballet gear waking up, exercising and helping themselves to a cornucopia of fruit for breakfast. They fight over some grapes only to lose them in a pool. Something bubbles up from beneath and the ostriches run away in terror, but it’s only the prima ballerina of the piece, Hyacinth Hippo. She prepares for the day with help from her handmaidens and dances around a bit. Then she lies down for a nap, but no sooner do her ladies in waiting leave than some playful elephants come out of hiding and dance around Hyacinth unawares.

Elephants blowing bubbles in a Disney feature…nah, it’ll never catch on.

The elephants are blown away by a gust of wind (must be a really strong breeze), and with the coming of night a sinister band of crocodiles sneak up on Hyacinth. They scatter at the sudden arrival of their leader, Prince Ben Ali Gator, who immediately falls in love with Hyacinth. Surprisingly, the feeling is mutual.

I’m calling it – first body positivity romance in a Disney flick.

The climax of the piece has the crocodiles returning to wreak havoc on the palace and pulling the ostriches, elephants, and hippos back into a frenzied dance which brings down the house.

No bones about it, Dance of the Hours is a comic masterpiece and one of Fantasia’s crowning jewels. And the moment it ended was always the signal for younger me to stop the tape and rewind it to the beginning, due to what follows making a complete and terrifying 180…

Night on Bald Mountain – Modest Mussorgsky / Ave Maria – Franz Schubert

At last we come to our final part, two radically different classical works that blend perfectly into each other. And brother, what a note to end on.

Composer Modest Mussorgsky passed away before completing his masterwork “Night on the Bare Mountain”, a tonal poem depicting a witches’ sabbath from Slavic mythology. His friend, the great Rimsky-Korsakov, finished it for him while adding his own personal touch. The result is some of the most iconic and terrifying music ever created, and the accompanying animation, with the exception of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is the most faithful to its source material.

The scene takes place on Walpurgis Night, which is the closest thing Europe has to a real-life Summerween (those lucky so-and-so’s), on the titular mountain. The mountain’s peak opens up revealing Chernabog, the Slavic deity of darkness.

Chernabog is a masterclass in design and form. It’s easy to mistake him for Satan himself – Walt Disney and Deems Taylor both refer to him as such – though considering he’s technically Slavic Satan, there’s not too big a distinction. Chernabog radiates power, terror and pure darkness from his intro alone. You can imagine him influencing all other Disney villains to do his will, essentially filling in the horned one’s hooves. Chernabog was skillfully handled by Bill Tylta, an early Disney animator with enough talent to create characters as diverse as Stromboli and Dumbo. Bela Lugosi, the original Dracula, posed for reference pictures in the early design stages, though Tylta ultimately discarded them in favor of some different inspiration – sequence director Wilfred Jackson as model, and Tytla’s own Czech heritage. He grew up with folktales of Chernabog, which served him well during the production.

“Soon, master. The one known as Jackson shall take up your mantle and we shall feast upon humanity yet again.”

Chernabog unleashes his might on to the sleeping village below and raises the dead from the cemetery. A cabal of witches, wraiths and demons gallop on the wind and take part in his infernal revelry. Yet they are but playthings to the evil being. He transforms the creatures into alluring sirens and wretched beasts, sics harpies on them, condemns them to the flames, and lustfully embraces the hellish blaze. It’s an in your face pageantry of pure malevolence that you can’t look away from

Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing #6: “This is too scary for kids!! What the hell were they thinking?!”

I think it’s time we made one thing clear: Fantasia was NOT made for children – or to be more accurate, not EXCLUSIVELY for children. While Disney movies are made to be enjoyed by both kids and adults, Fantasia is the only one who dared to appeal to a more mature audience, and Night on Bald Mountain is proof of that. It had the audacity to explore some of the most darkest, ancient depictions of evil in a way that no Disney feature has before or since. Most importantly, it’s not done for shock value like any random horror movie you could name. It’s meant to show the juxtaposition between the darkest depravity and purest good; combined with Ave Maria it makes for the perfect symbolic climax to Fantasia. Light versus darkness, chaos versus order, life versus death, profane versus sacred, and the quest to master them all are the themes that unify the seemingly disparate sequences, and this finale is the apotheosis of that.

I stated in my Mickey’s Christmas Carol review that Bald Mountain was one of my first introductions to the concept of eternal damnation at the tender age of…I wanna say four, five? It was easily one of the most petrifying things from my childhood, but at least I could avoid some exposure to it thanks to its position at the very end. Though now I adore Night on Bald Mountain for how bold and striking it is. Tytla’s animation, Kay Nielsen’s stunning demon designs, and Schultheis’ effects culminate in harmonious diabolical artwork that’s impossible to extricate from the music. It’s a shame Schultheis left the studio after Fantasia. He met a mysterious, tragic end in Guatemala, right around the time Bill Tytla left too as a matter of fact…

“He knew too much…about the secrets of animation, I mean. Nothing at all about das vampyr walking the earth. No sir.”

Yet at the height of his power, one thing stops Chernabog cold – the sound of church bells. Disney historian John Culhane saw Fantasia during its original theatrical run (lucky so and so…) and he recalled how much having FantaSound affected his screening: when the bells rang, he could hear them coming from the back of the theater and slowly course their way up front as their power grew. It was an awe-inspiring moment that took the Bald Mountain experience one step further into reality.

The bells and the rising sun drive Chernabog and his minions back into the mountain and the restless spirits return to their graves. In the misty morning a procession of pilgrims glides through the woods like a parade of tiny lights, and thus the Ave Maria begins. It’s one of the rare times Disney has gone overtly Christian. Maybe Walt wanted to get back into the God-fearing American public’s good graces after the sorcery, paganism, devil worship and evolution theory we’ve witnessed in the past hour and fifty minutes. It does relieve the tension from the previous turn of events.

The first pitch had the march enter a cathedral, but Walt didn’t believe recreating something people can already see in Europe. So instead they move through a forest with trees and natural rock formations resembling the Gothic architecture of a cathedral. It’s the stronger choice in my opinion. The implication speaks greater volumes than a specific location, subtly connecting nature to the divine. It’s difficult to make out most of the hymn’s words, but regardless it sounds beautiful, especially those final triumphant notes as the sky lights up over a view of the verdant hilltops.

“When the sun hits that ridge just right, these hills sing.”

And with that, Fantasia comes to a close.

Really, what else can I say about it at this point. I keep forgetting this movie came out in 1940. It’s virtually timeless, and a must-see for anyone who loves animation and classic film and wants to jump into either one.

Fantasia was a critical and box office success…sort of. Despite the praise and high box office returns for the time, it sadly wasn’t enough to make up for the cost of putting it all together. Like Pinocchio before it, the war cut off any foreign revenue. And not every theater was willing or able to shell out for that nifty surround sound so the effects were lost on most people. Then there’s the audience response, which is the most depressing of all. The casual moviegoers still viewed Walt as the guy behind those wacky mouse cartoons and called him out for being a pretentious snob, while the highbrow intellectuals accused Walt of debasing classical music by shackling it to animation. The poor guy just couldn’t win.

Fantasia marked the end of an era. Never again would Walt attempt a feature so ambitious. His plans of making Fantasia a recurring series, with old segments regularly swapped out for new ones, would not be seen in his lifetime. There’s been the occasional copycat (Allegra non troppo), a handful of spiritual successors (Make Mine Music, Yellow Submarine), and of course the sequel which I’m sure I’ll get to eventually, but through it all, there is only one Fantasia. And no amount of my ramblings can hope to measure up to it. Fantasia is one of those movies you simply have to experience for yourself, preferably on the biggest screen available with a top of the line sound system. I know it’s a cliche for Internet critics to name this as their favorite animated Disney movie, but…yes, it’s mine too. It opened a door to a world of culture and art at a young age. The power of animation is on full display, and it’s affected the way I look at the medium forever. Fantasia was, and still is, a film ahead of its time.

Thank you for reading. I hope you can understand why this review took me nearly three months! If you enjoyed this, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Patreon supporters get perks such as extra votes and adding movies of their choice to the Shelf. If I can get to $100, I can go back to making weekly tv show reviews. Right now I’m halfway there! Special thanks to Amelia Jones and Gordhan Ranaj for their contributions.

You can vote for whatever movie you want me to look at next by leaving it in the comments or emailing me at [email protected]. Remember, unless you’re a Patreon supporter, you can only vote once a month. The list of movies available to vote for are under “What’s On the Shelf”.

Artwork by Charles Moss. Certain screencaps courtesy of animationscreencaps.com.

To learn more about Fantasia, I highly recommend both John Culhane’s perennial book on the film and The Lost Notebook by John Canemaker, which reveals the long-lost special effects secrets which made Fantasia look so magical.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to be spending the rest of the month with my handy dandy garlic, stake and crucifix and pray Bill Tytla doesn’t visit me this Walpurgis Night. I suggest you do the same.

March Review: Fantasia (1940) And now we come to the final piece of Walt Disney's original animation trifecta, Fantasia, and it's one I'm both anticipating and dreading.

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heatherrosebabcock · 5 years

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Beer and Blood: The Birth of the Public Enemy

THREE DETROIT GANGSTERS MASSACRED: DEAD VICTIMS STILL HOLD CIGARS THEY SMOKED WHEN GUNS SPOKE, screamed a rather poetic real life Globe newspaper headline on September 17th, 1931.

Prohibition, now over a decade old, had transformed ordinary citizens into lawbreakers and everyday hoodlums into wealthy, bloodthirsty demigods. 1931 could arguably be summed up as “the year of the gangster”: the newspapers were full of ‘em – stories of “bloody bootleg rackets” and “bootlegger bandit death trysts” dominated the headlines and, thanks to the Warner Brothers studio, the silver screen as well. The studio, which only a few years earlier had revolutionized the industry by ushering in sound (or “talkies”) with 1927’s The Jazz Singer, began 1931 with a bang when they released Little Caesar.

“Be somebody,” Rico, Little Caesar’s ambitious thug, played by the incomparable Edward G. Robinson, enthuses at the start of the film. To “be somebody” is to be rich but as Rico warns “Money’s all right but it ain’t everything. Be somebody. Look hard at a bunch of guys and know that they’ll do anything you tell ‘em. Have your own way or nothin’.”

In other words, to “be somebody” is to live the American Dream and in an America caught in the double fisted grip of Prohibition and the Great Depression, it was a dream gone dangerously delirious - a dream fueled by buckets of bathtub gin; a dream which could be poisonous if taken straight.

Little Caesar was a massive hit – so much so that theaters had to keep it running twenty-four hours a day just to satisfy audience demand; they had done the same thing almost four years earlier with Underworld, Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 gangland epic for Paramount Pictures. Underworld, a film dripping with both beauty and brutality, is considered by many to be the first successful gangster picture – the Grand Daddy of all gangster movies if you will – but it was a silent film; it wasn’t until the gangsters began to talk when the genre truly secured its choke-hold on the public’s imagination. It is a testament to the power and influence of the movies that when we picture Prohibition-era gangsters today it is not the real-life criminals, such as Al Capone or Jack “Legs” Diamond, who immediately come to mind but rather Edward G. Robinson, a cigar anchored between his lips, or James Cagney, shooting his words out quicker than bullets from a Tommy gun.

Riding the wave of gunfire, Warner Brothers followed Little Caesar with The Public Enemy, released in April of that same year. In The Public Enemy, James Cagney stars as the nasty break-your-word-and-I’ll-break-your-face bootlegger Tom Powers. One wonders if we would still be discussing this film eighty-seven years later if it were not for Cagney. I say that not to lessen the talent of the movie’s other stars, but there has never been any question that The Public Enemy is Cagney’s picture. Originally Edward Woods was signed on to play Tom Powers, with Cagney as his side-kick Matt. However when director William “Wild Bill” Wellman was viewing the early footage he realized that it was Cagney, and not the handsome but reticent Woods, who crackled with an almost frightening intensity. Wellman switched the actors’ roles and both a classic movie and a star were born.

He was beloved by both cast and crew as the nicest guy on the lot but onscreen Cagney could be as terrifying as he was captivating. Watch closely his movements in The Public Enemy – particularly his hands – his gestures are as sharp as a boxer’s jab yet as graceful as a ballet dancer’s pirouette. Indeed, the street smart Cagney had been both a boxer and a dancer. In his own words, from his 1976 autobiography Cagney by Cagney:

“I learned how to dance from learning how to fight. It was feint, duck, quick dance around your opponent on your toes mostly, then shoot out the arm like a bullet.”

Cagney ignores the rules of the early talkies – to speak slowly and to enunciate clearly – instead he spits words out at breakneck speed in his proud Lower East Side New York accent. As we follow Tom Powers’ rise from a young roller-skate snatcher to a vicious bootlegger, we can’t keep our eyes off of him. That is, until Jean Harlow shows up. There is a very good reason why Warner Brothers borrowed her from Hughes for The Public Enemy and for why she shares top billing with Cagney even though she has less than half of his screen time: in the 1930s, studios catered to a female audience and they undoubtedly knew that women would be more likely to buy a ticket to see a gangster flick if Jean Harlow, the original Platinum Blonde and most influential 1930s style and beauty icon, was in it. Just one year later, Harlow would come into her own both as an actress and a comedian: she would make them laugh in Red-Headed Woman (1932) and cry in Red Dust (1932). But her early acting, particularly in The Public Enemy, has always inspired negative criticism and cruel mocking. I for one though appreciate the glitter and grit that Harlow brings to the role of Gwen, Tom’s trophy moll. In Harlow’s hands, Gwen is not a society dame but a dame who craves society – like Tom and Rico she wants to “be somebody”. Working class audiences, the audience that Warner Brothers proudly catered to, adored Jean Harlow. Whiplash may be a viewer side-effect of watching Cagney and Harlow together on screen – it feels as though we are watching a game of ping pong but the ball is their fire. Make no mistake though – the passions that they unleash are at each other, not for each other; Gwen and Tom are not a couple mating but rather individuals fighting for their own place in the world. Their one love scene together is the only time in the film when Cagney appears truly vulnerable but when Harlow says to him “You don’t give – you take,” she could easily be talking about herself. That love scene goes unconsummated, ending with a frustrated Harlow smashing a champagne glass against the wall as Tom carelessly walks out with his friend Matt. Cagney didn’t do romance and The Public Enemy isn’t a romantic film – nor is it really a movie about guns and bootleggers. The Public Enemy is a film about family. The script was adapted from Kubec Glasmon and John Bright’s novel Beer and Blood and that title sums up all of Tom’s world: his “beer” family of bootleggers and his “blood” family, played here by Beryl Mercer as his naïve, loving mother and Donald Cook as his conservative big brother Mike.

The relationship between brothers Tom and Mike is interesting. It is complicated and intense in the way that relationships between real-life siblings often are. Tom Powers may thumb his nose at Mike’s responsible lifestyle (“He’s too busy going to school – he’s learning how to be poor”) but the hard-core gangster, who can literally shoot a man in the back before calling his moll for a date, doesn’t defend himself when his disapproving brother gives him a sock in the jaw (and the punch was reportedly real – Cook hit Cagney so hard that Cagney cracked a tooth). In one of the film’s best scenes, Mike picks up a keg and throws it across their mother’s kitchen, angrily accusing Tom that “there’s not only beer in that keg – there’s beer and blood!” Tom replies that Mike, who has just returned home from the War and is incidentally shell shocked, is a hypocrite. “You didn’t get them medals from holding hands with them Germans,” he sneers. “You killed and you liked it!” He is projecting in the way that siblings often do – for of course it is Tom, not Mike, who “kills and likes it.”

In the early 1930s, gangster movies used real bullets but the most explosive scene in The Public Enemy doesn't involve gun fire at all – yes folks, it's time to talk about the Grapefruit. The film's most notorious moment happens as Tom sits down to breakfast with his moll Kitty, played by the lovely Mae Clarke. They have obviously just had sex and Tom is acting more than a little cold and distracted. Kitty, looking fabulous in a pair of silk lounging pajamas, asks him if he has met someone he likes better. Cagney’s sneer curls up like a fist as he picks up a half grapefruit and smashes it in Mae’s face. It is a cruel scene which still shocks today and it confirms our suspicion that Tom Powers is a sociopath.

It seems that almost every man who had a hand in making the film has their own story of how this scene came to be shot; the most commonly accepted theory is also the most condescending - the belief that the scene was improvised by Cagney and Wellman, without Clarke's knowledge or consent and that her response was thus genuine. This assumption irritates me as it is dismissive of Clarke's admirable acting talents and relegates her to little more than a prop. Well, Clarke was no prop and she sure as hell wasn't a hack either: in 1931, in addition to the Public Enemy, she delivered strong performances in three important films: Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein and The Front Page. As for that grapefruit, I'm going to go with Mae's version of the story, both because I trust her talent and because I like her better than all those other mugs: in a 1983 interview with American Classic Screen, Mae said that the script originally called for Cagney throwing the grapefruit at her and then storming out. Wellman and Cagney however felt that this wasn’t quite working so they took Mae aside and asked if she would be okay with Cagney pushing the grapefruit in her face. Mae didn’t like the idea but agreed to do it on the condition that the scene be shot once and with no retakes. Still, according to her close friends, Mae always hated the “grapefruit scene”. Viewers today may honor her talent by watching this great actress in the powerful role for which she would undoubtedly prefer to be remembered – as chorus girl turned prostitute Myra in James Whale’s Waterloo Bridge. Mae Clarke was much more than just “the dame who gets the grapefruit facial". The most criminal thing about the Public Enemy is that she did not even receive a screen credit.

Like the grapefruit scene, the film’s ending also packs a wallop with rival gang members tossing Cagney’s mummified corpse through his mother’s living room door. It is Cook’s nuanced performance though that makes this scene truly haunting – his slow, stunned lurch towards the camera to the tune of a broken phonograph record. Will Mike avenge his brother’s death, we wonder? Or will this be the final straw that breaks him? And how will he tell Ma that her baby is finally home but not in the way that she hoped?

Like other gangster films from this period, The Public Enemy is book ended by title cards warning of the dangers of a gangster lifestyle. Audiences accepted these admonishments as broccoli to the film’s ice cream dessert. “(Gangster pictures) are intended to point out the lesson that crime does not pay,” insisted Harry Warner and you can almost see Tom Powers sneer in response. “Crime doesn’t pay, does it?” I picture him saying. “Baby, these days it’s the only thing that pays.” The popularity of films like The Public Enemy is indicative of how most Americans really felt about Prohibition. Eighty-five years later the film’s heat remains as unquenchable as a forest fire. Who needs CGI when you’ve got James Cagney?

#the public enemy #thepublicenemy #james Cagney #mae clarke #jean harlow #james whale #william wellman #1930s movies #gangster movies #pre-code #the great depression #prohibition #classic film review

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deborahdeshoftim5779 · 7 years

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The Marvel of Trelsi (Part VII)

I’m back for more Trelsi mania. Today, I want to expand on the disadvantages for the High School Musical franchise that Troy and Kelsi received so few scenes together throughout. We know why their friendship is so damn good, and so the natural question arises as to why they didn’t capitalize on this when showing the protagonist, Troy Bolton, headed on his journey to finding himself.

Already, I’ve answered the following questions from my Introduction:

1- Who IS Troy Bolton?

2- Who IS Kelsi Nielsen?

3- What makes the Trelsi friendship and dynamic so friggin’ special? Why does it make me want to weep and write poetry? (Part IV, Part V, Part VI)

After some consideration, I’ve added this question before I get to exploring the potential of their relationship:

Question- Why are there so few Trelsi scenes? What is the effect of this? Where could we have seen more Trelsi?

It’s necessary to recap the main value of Trelsi throughout the canonical franchise:

1- Movie Message: Be true to yourself. Troy learns that performing is a part of his identity and embraces this. Kelsi learns that she has a talent worth appreciating and shouldn’t allow people to change her music as though they know better than her.

2- Character Development: Without taking the crime committed against Troy’s character development into account, the effect of hearing Kelsi’s words and lyrics spurs him to explore his new-found interest and apparent talent in performing. Once Troy shows Kelsi her worth, she becomes more confident, more assertive with her compositions and embraces the spotlight.

3- Plot: Troy gets his chance to prove himself as a performer after hearing Kelsi’s music; Kelsi in turn gains the acumen to write for more musicals and eventually pursue a scholarship opportunity with Juilliard. Troy’s accumulated profile in the Performing Arts thanks to Kelsi’s songs inform his decision to pursue Theatre after graduating from high school.

4- Character Balance: There is a notable and enjoyable contrast between Troy and Kelsi as people. Even though they have complex shades of their individual characters, there are still some key differences. Troy is more outgoing than Kelsi, more willing to put himself forward. He’s the guy who’ll be joking with his buds at lunchtimes, whilst Kelsi is huddled over her manuscript paper, scribbling away. This is even after she becomes more popular. Kelsi appears more of a disciplinarian when it comes to composing, as you often see her frowning and crossing out notes when dissatisfied. Troy’s performing style appears more spontaneous; I tend to think that he would be the one suggesting ideas to develop his interpretation of Kelsi’s songs. This is evidenced by his practicing style in HSM I (running round the practice room whilst singing the chorus to “Breaking Free) and his routine during HSM III for “I Just Wanna Be With You”.** Kelsi is talkative and Troy is, interestingly, not talkative. Indeed, he gets alarmed when Kelsi babbles on and on about her ideas. When Kelsi becomes more confident, she can steam ahead with her beloved “ideas”, whereas Troy is more hesitant. Kelsi is more spur of the moment, whereas Troy is more analytical (although he clearly does give in to creative impulses). There are some overlaps here, particularly when considering Troy as a basketball player; neither Troy nor Kelsi are clear-cut. But they are distinct in some key areas.

5- True Friendship: Troy and Kelsi rely upon each other as an unfailing source of support and never abandon each other when things get tough. They are completely loyal to each other. Remember, East High has a Drama Club. Kelsi is certainly not the only composer in the entirety of East High, and Troy has his pick of many other talented people who might write songs just as good as Kelsi’s or even better. Instead he sticks with Kelsi’s music even when initially unwilling to do another musical or show. When the future of each show is put into jeopardy thanks to Gabriella, Troy does everything he can to ensure the show will proceed after all because he cares about Kelsi’s hard work and understands the satisfaction she gets from creating music. It would be far easier for Troy to let Gabriella go her own way (as she tells us in HSM II); after all, he owes more to his girlfriend than to his friend. Insisting upon Gabriella’s performing in HSM III was significantly motivated by his loyalty and respect for Kelsi; hence the speech about how important his new-found friendships with less popular students in East High (and I’m sure he wasn’t just talking about Kelsi and Ryan, but probably other people he had befriended as well, whose names we don’t know). The respect is clear, as is comfort, unspoken understanding and affection. Thanks to the lack of concern shown to Troy’s other friends outside of Gabriella, no indication is given of whether Troy will remain in contact with Kelsi after graduating; obviously I think he would, but we can’t say for sure.

So why don’t we get to see more of them? I’ve thought about this at considerable length, and although it’s far too easy to blame the screenwriters for not seeing the value of Trelsi right under their noses, I think there is probably a less biased explanation.

Simply put; we don’t know very much about Kelsi Nielsen. Compare how much we know about her to Troy’s other important relationships: his “romance” with Gabriella and his friendship with Chad Danforth. We hear about Gabriella and Chad’s parents, their childhoods, their aspirations, their interests outside of their primary fields (science and basketball respectively), we know their flaws, we get to see day-to-day banter between these two and Troy on a regular basis. We know about their parents: Gabriella most probably lost her father, her mother has struggled between pursuing the demands of her job and giving her daughter a sense of stability. Mrs. Montez clearly earns a lot of money, and is an excellent cook. Mrs. Danforth loves Broadway, crushes on handsome actors and probably reads too many diet magazines. ([Chad] “One of her crazy diet ideas-- I don’t attempt to understand the female mind, Troy!”) Even other characters like Taylor get more depth even though she isn’t as close with Troy; we know about her older sister, her philosophy on life, her aspirations and interests outside of science. For example, it is notable that despite being scientifically-minded (Chem Club President), Taylor wishes to pursue a degree in Political Science. This is also the same for Gabriella, who wishes to study Law, although she is shown to excel in maths and science (particularly chemistry).

Consider by contrast how much we DON’T know about Kelsi Nielsen. Who are her parents? Does she have any siblings? What is her wealth status? (She mentions having a piano at her house, so can we assume middle-class?) Given that she was the composer of the show, why didn’t we get to see her parents or other relatives in the audience? With regards to the plot, how did she become interested in music; I have theorized that her deep commitment to the art stems from a pathological shyness that probably lasted for most of her formative years. What does she like doing in her spare time, or what are her other interests outside of music? We know in HSM III that she is more than a competent dancer and may have taken ballet lessons as a child. But this seems contradictory when considering her clear clumsiness in HSM I. By HSM III, she is incredibly graceful. Did she take lessons at some point? What other creative interests does she have? We do know she likes classical literature, as her favourite book is the (extremely boring) “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte. (Credit to BoltonEvans). Her obsession with romance says a LOT about her-- where did this come from? I’m fairly sure that Jason was Kelsi’s first boyfriend, but did she have any other crushes beforehand? We don’t know things about Kelsi that go beyond the surface, like her fears and her lifelong ambitions. Sure, we can assume she might want to be a composer, but it’s VERY difficult to get well-paid, consistent work in the Performance industry, and no amount of talent can change that. Hence why I discussed her single-mindedness to her career and the disadvantages thereof.

Don’t get me wrong; we can infer a significant amount of things about Kelsi, as you can see from my hyperlink above. But so much remains unknown. Hence, Kelsi was simply not intended to be a very prominent or influential feature in Troy’s life. This is why Troy and Kelsi are never shown hanging out on a casual, day-to-day basis; almost all of their interaction is centred upon the titular musicals/shows and even though Kelsi eventually sits with the Cool Girls (Taylor, Gabriella and Martha) and the Cool Boys (Chad and Jason, with whom she eats breakfast during HSM II), she is never shown doing the same with Troy. In fact, this gulf between them when not near a piano or stage is so great that we don’t even get a final Trelsi scene after high school graduation, despite the fact that elements of Troy’s speech fit his friendship with Kelsi far better than his friendship with Zeke, Martha or his “relationship” with Gabriella. We get no indication as to whether they will keep in touch after graduation, and have to assume not from the canonical headline. It makes me weep and turn to drink, but my bias and wishful thinking only extend so far. In light of all this, it is simply astonishing that the film’s creators would go to all the trouble of 1)- linking Kelsi to the central character, Troy, 2)- creating a close and unique friendship between them, 3)- giving Kelsi roles and characteristics that should have been given to Gabriella, 4)- inserting Kelsi into the plot and character arcs to push things forward. They managed to be sloppy, careless and yet attentive at the same time. And though I lampoon them on a regular basis, I absolutely give them the credit for creating Trelsi. But their lack of concern for both characters is astounding, particularly since so many HSM fans love both Troy and Kelsi.

As a result of this, the film suffers from the following disadvantages:

1- Little comfort for Troy: Although there are standout moments where Kelsi comforts Troy, the paucity of Trelsi scenes means that for most of each film, Troy is either left floundering in a sea of self-doubt, self-criticism and denial, or unsuccessfully seeking understanding, loyalty and support from the wrong people. Had he spent more time with Kelsi, he would have gained a steady source of support throughout. It would not have reduced the conflict, because Troy would still face obstacles caused by Gabriella and his friends as well as by himself. It would, however, have built up his character in a realistic and consistent fashion. This was supposed to be Gabriella’s role, and as I will discuss later, she fails abysmally.

2- Promotion of unhealthy relationships: The less we see of the exemplary friendship between Troy and Kelsi, the more we see of the less exemplary friendships between Troy and the Wildcats, and the unhealthy relationship between Troy and Gabriella. Because Kelsi was not intended to have a significant influence in Troy’s life, there is plenty for room for Gabriella and the Wildcats to influence him in ways that inhibit his character growth and lead to a real decline in his ability to think autonomously. Kelsi reflects the complete antithesis of this, and thus her increased presence would provide an exemplary contrast to the drubbing Troy endures from those supposed to support him.

3- Stunts character development: The dynamic between Troy and Kelsi is thoroughly egalitarian. They raise each other up both literally and emotionally, and they have a largely unspoken way of doing so. Without this source of support, Troy has to look elsewhere, most often to Gabriella. Troy’s sense of self diminishes at an alarming rate as a result of her influence, which will be discussed in later instalments. Performing onstage and seeing Kelsi there as a source of encouragement increases his confidence and sense of self. Furthermore, potential scenes between Troy and Kelsi that weren’t related to the musicals would help Troy learn more about himself, as they clearly share much in common, a passion for the Performing Arts being one of the main commonalities.

4- Diminishes Kelsi’s value to plot: This is what annoys me the most. Even though Kelsi is the one who:

1- Composes ALL the music for said HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL,

2- Puts in HOURS getting the very best out of Troy and Gabriella,

3- Shows absolute devotion to her craft,

4- Can work with any type of performer, even difficult ones like Sharpay, who trusts her enough to keep performing her songs,

5- Arranged rehearsal times for everyone with recognition to their schedules in EVERY movie, which required excellent organizing skills,

6- Managed the entire school orchestra by herself, writing orchestrations and fixing charts, writing arrangements for different instruments,

7- Assessed the musical capabilities of characters who considered themselves non-musical or even uninterested in music so that she could include them in the musicals: (HSM II- ”...maybe Chad and Zeke can do backup and everyone can dance!”),

8- Took the generic and predictable Lava Springs Talent Show at an exclusive country club and turned it into a show-stopper (HSM II- “Kelsi’s got some great new ideas to SPICE UP the Talent Show!”)

9- Had a great understanding of each performer as an individual and could tailor her writing to suit their strengths, which is why she wrote differently for Sharpay as compared to Troy and Gabriella,

10- Made Chad forgive Troy in HSM II,

11- Provided constant loyalty and support to Troy throughout,

...she is considered a MINOR character by most accounts. This is inconceivable, unjust and patently ridiculous. Kelsi is the HEART AND SOUL of the movies. She brings everyone together***, and she is largely responsible for Troy’s magnificent transition on stage into a natural and engaging performer. To give her less scenes with Troy means that less attention goes to her and her incredible achievements and more attention to characters who have not even achieved one fifth of the above list by comparison. It sidelines a character in blatant contradiction to the whole aim of Kelsi’s character development, which was to give a shy and introverted character a VOICE. Recognition. What was the point in Troy reaching out to her in the first place if the script was just going to shove her back offstage despite everything she had done for Troy, Gabriella and the Wildcats? What was the point of Troy calling her and RECOGNIZING her as a Playmaker if she gets no credit for this either from the scriptwriters, Gabriella, the Wildcats or even Troy in his abysmal graduation speech? I reiterate: it was a crime for Troy to mention Zeke’s crême brûlée and Martha’s cheerleading, none of which had ANY effect on his character development whatsoever, but not make ONE mention of Kelsi’s music which propelled him to where he stood that day. Inexcusable. Since Kelsi was the ONLY other person described as a Playmaker, she should have received more attention. Thanks to the chronic inconsistency of both the screenwriters and Troy (too busy giving credit to Gabriella that she doesn’t deserve), the second Playmaker is routinely ignored where she should be getting the spotlight.

Sorry folks, but this makes me mad.

What kind of scenes could we have had between Troy and Kelsi that would add value to the franchise and lessen my inveterate anger?

1- Troy confiding his worries-- Although Troy and Gabriella’s first time on the rooftop is a better example of Gabriella being receptive to Troy’s concerns (”I’m sure it’s tricky being the coach’s son.../”Then they don’t know enough about you, Troy”), there’s no consistency in Gabriella’s concern. Throughout HSM II and HSM III, it almost vanishes on the spot. A scene where Troy confided his worries in Kelsi would result in Kelsi taking those worries seriously and providing solid, useful advice to help him progress.

2- Kelsi confiding her worries-- I refuse to believe that the process of creating a musical or show went off without a hitch. Despite Kelsi’s claims that everything would be fine, she must have had worries about this, and I can only see her being comfortable enough to share these with Troy, who believes in her and calls her Playmaker. That would get her back on track. But what about Kelsi’s worries outside of music? We could have had some very interesting discussions here.

3- Troy and Kelsi learning more about each other’s backgrounds-- When Troy shares some parts of his childhood with Gabriella, she just laughs in a condescending fashion and makes him feel like an awkward three year old. She doesn’t understand his dorkiness/nerdiness. Given that Kelsi shares a lot of Troy’s awkwardness, I can’t see her making fun of Troy for having a toy robot or a Batman cloak. In fact, in my headcanon, she’d quite like his treehouse. Why? Because Kelsi clearly values solitude to think and compose her songs. Troy values solitude to think as well, hence his love of trees. I can see Kelsi fitting in far better here as a companion in the treehouse. I think Kelsi probably valued her solitude as a child, and even though Troy mostly played with Chad when they were both boys, he clearly does use trees for thinking on his own. Also, because Troy always takes an interest in other people’s lives, and because he connects so well to Kelsi’s music, he would naturally want to know more about her background in this regard. (Assuming they got such a scene... *angry face*)

4- Troy and Kelsi banter-- Both Troy and Kelsi have a far more compatible sense of humour than Troy and Gabriella. Indeed, Gabriella is often incapable of taking a joke. Troy and Chad have a compatible sense of humour, but I don’t get the impression that Chad, who is more straight-forward and direct, would appreciate the value of Troy’s sarcasm, dry and self-deprecating wit. Kelsi definitely would, since she can poke fun of sensitive issues like her height: (HSM II, in response to Martha on what her summer plans are) “Grow, write music, grow.” Kelsi is quite good at making light of a serious situation with a comic understatement, as is Troy. There are some slight differences; it is Kelsi who is more prone to poking fun of others. With the exception of the hazing scene in HSM III, Troy rarely makes fun of anyone-- not even Sharpay. And we have already a little evidence that they find each other funny. Given that Troy becomes increasingly miserable in HSM III, he could have done with some of Kelsi’s light-hearted banter. So say I. :D

5- Deep conversations-- Kelsi’s songwriting reveals a maturity beyond her years. Troy already demonstrates himself as mature beyond his years, often bearing a lot on his shoulders. Gabriella, by contrast, is extremely immature despite her strong academic capabilities. Chad is too involved in either his own future, or trying to impose that upon Troy. He sees the world in black and white, with no nuanced shades of grey. Hence why Troy’s attempts to have serious conversations with Gabriella end with her pretending to listen/understand and then pulling the focus back to herself, and his serious conversations with Chad end in either mockery, sweeping generalizations and Chad once again insisting his views are correct. Therefore, it would be far more enlightening to see Troy having serious conversations with Kelsi. For example, they might discuss their futures; Kelsi is very ambitious, hence why she applied to Juilliard. What with her philosophy of pre-destination (it’s music all the way), and Troy’s philosophy of free will, they would have very mature conversations, discover more about each other and even learn from each other’s viewpoints. There’s a complementary contrast there, as both Troy and Kelsi showcase some of each philosophy in their future: Troy accepts pre-destination when he decides to keep basketball in his life, despite saying in HSM III, “Maybe I don’t see my life as a ball game anymore, man.” It would have been nice to see Kelsi being a little spontaneous when it came to her future too, given that it seems she was dead keen on attending Juilliard: “What? They got my letter?” Once again, we see Kelsi’s unmissable and scandalously underappreciated initiative.

On that note, I’ll be looking into the potential of Trelsi’s relationship next, in particular the line between friendship and romance.

TO BE CONTINUED

(*FOOTNOTE-- How tragic it is, that by the end of the film franchise, Kelsi is more confident, whereas Troy’s own confidence has withered to provide that truly horrendous ending we saw in HSM III. Read my fury about it here. Had Troy and Kelsi spent more time together she might have helped alleviate the effects of Gabriella’s negative influence upon him, and had she been Troy’s love interest, he definitely would have developed in a more linear fashion).

(**FOOTNOTE-- Of course, Troy is a disciplinarian when it comes to basketball, which underpins his skill in this area. Say what you want about Coach Bolton, he really knows how to get the best out of his son, and instils in Troy a laser-like focus on his goals. Now this does not suit Troy when he discovers his interest in the Performing Arts right on the cusp of an important game, but it does give the implication that Troy is a hard worker and is generally successful when pursuing his goals. Or, when he fails, he can pick himself back up again and try harder).

(***FOOTNOTE-- Once again, we see Troy’s astounding, though unintentional, blindness towards Kelsi and her achievements. How can he seriously claim that Gabriella is the one who “changed” East High, when it was KELSI who brought people to appreciate the beauty of music and performing through her excellent compositions?! Kelsi is the one he calls “Playmaker”-- “the one who makes everyone else look good”-- and not Gabriella, who simply has not achieved anything similar. All Gabriella did throughout the ENTIRE film series was simply be in the right place at the right time. She rarely ever took initiative, except to audition in HSM I, and to apply for Stanford’s Freshman Honors Program (which, whilst being commendable, has nothing to do with Theatre). Kelsi is the one who spent her time composing a song for Troy and Gabriella to sing in HSM II, most likely after she received her summer job from Sharpay. That’s real initiative. We will look at this in more detail later).

#Trelsi #OTP #Playmakers #TroyBolton #KelsiNielsen #LiterallyTroyandKelsiForever #AppreciateKelsiNielsenPeople #SheisSOImportant #Don'tSpeakToMeIfYouThinkTroyellaWasMoreImportantThanTrelsi #You'reFrickingKIddingYourself #ToBeContinued #IFrickingLoveThisShit

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