Who would've guessed that the opera ghost can't carry a tune?
The setting is Budapest, circa early 20th Century - we are not told when, but Bartok is considered a young man of promise. Elena Korvin sings Marguerite in Faust. She hasn't the disciplined talent or voice for it but is encouraged by her doting husband Sándor, who is the opera's conductor. Also keeping her in employment is the opera house's owner, the lecherous Baron Hunyadi. After a disastrous opening night, Elena is further hit by a scathing review paid for by the Baron as retribution for spurning his advances. She throws herself from a bridge. Sándor's revenge on the critic leads to a fight and ubiquitous accident with acid that leads to his disfigurement.
Four years later, aspiring singer Maria Gianelli becomes an understudy in a new production of Faust. Hunyadi still owns the theater. Korvin survives in the catacombs beneath, having been rescued by the homeless who live there. When Korvin sees Maria, and hears her natural talent, he believes her to be his Elena returned. Both roles, Maria and Elena, are played by Jane Seymour. Korvin determines to groom Maria to his late wife's vindicator.
This Phantom was produced by the Halmis, both Roberts Sr. and Jr. They're a prolific pair, having put out a handful of worthy productions and a library's worth of mediocre ones. Phantom is one of the latter. A few of the notes are there but the script and direction fail to find a melody.
Phantom stars Maximilian Schell as Korvin, Seymour, Michael York as an English director overseeing the new production, and Jeremy Kemp as Hunyadi. They're a good cast doing their earnest best, but the script by Sherman Yellen doesn't support them. Their characters are inconsistent, lurching from scene to scene as the plot requires rather than developing naturally. Korvin is meant to be a musical genius but cannot tell that his wife is a terrible singer. When at first he tutors Maria, he is singularly disinterested in her as a person...later he will kidnap her in a demented effort to protect her from the world, yet at no time does he ever evince an inkling of genuine affection for her. Meanshile, Hunyadi's villainy remains restrained until the story needs it as a plot device. York as the love interest is all over the map, one minute throwing an conceited fit and the next acting the gentleman and detective to boot. Presented thus, no chemistry ever develops between any of the characters...and what is the Phantom of the Opera without passion?
The editing is sometimes unhelpful as well, such as the backstory: a stranger helps the ailing Korvin escape to the underground, and I was left wondering who this samaritan was and what his motivation might be until well late n the story. The director neglects to let us in on it. I thought he'd been forgotten. We never really do learn except by inference near the finale. The Phantom has made a lair for himself but allowed the homeless to remain with him. What are thy to each other? No one involved has any interest in exploring this. Is he a kind of leader to them, or an eccentric that they tolerate?
Filmed on location in Budapest, photographer Larry Pizer makes the whole affair very...brown. Perhaps the idea was to emulate a sepia tone to suggest antiquity, but no amount of lit candles lend warmth or make for a golden aura, it's just...brown. After a while you long for a splash of color. You want a splash of emotion.
As a phan, I hate to dislike any telling of the Phantom of the Opera. Alas, of all the versions of this story I've seen this is the least inspired, without flair or feeling or sense. There are no scares to be had, nor romance, both vital to any good Phantom. Even the Phantom's masks look defeated.
This is currently available on YouTube.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Ye ban ge sheng (Weibang Ma-Xu, 1937)
aka Song at Midnight
Every midnight Xia listens for the song of her lover, dead ten years now. He never fails her.
Song Dan-Ping had been a revolutionary forced to flee his home and take up a new life and new identity. Changing his name, he became an actor. Success and fame followed, and soon he had met an admirer in Xia. The two fell in love. Unhappily for them Xia's father, a general, had already arranged for her to marry another, a financially advantageous alliance. Actors being amongst the lowest class, Song never had a chance.
The fiance Tang Jun was a cruel and proprietous man. When Xia defied him for Song, Jung flung acid into Song's face. Disfigured and ashamed, Song had word sent to his beloved that he had died - hoping to spare her. Instead, it sent her mad.
We learn all this in flashback halfway through the movie, related by the very-much-alive Song who serenades Xia every night. It's not a spoiler, for a ghost he's very physical. Ye ban ge sheng was inspred by the classic Universal horror films of the Thirties, and by the silent classic The Phantom of the Opera. Director Weibang Ma-Xu imbues his frames with gloom, dread, and loneliness, not a single moment taking place in daylight hours. Rain falls, fog drifts, cobwebs waft. Men and Women in Western dress emerge from Western automobiles to seek shelter in a ton closed down for the night. it's a town where the people lurk in superstitious fear of the ghostly singing that comes every night. They all know the legend of the doomed love. The performances are often exaggerated, adding to a creeping sense of unreality and theatricality.
Into this comes a theater troupe looking for a venue. Its best to warn that the most easily available copy (it's on YouTube) is difficult to follow in places. For one thing it suffers poorly translated English subtitles. They make for an amusing read, but are nearly incomprehensible - I'd advise you to skim them for a general suggestion of meaning rather than pay strict attention to them. Also problematic are the visuals, lovely as they are. It's a dark film by design with an alluring lighting scheme, and unfortunately age has only deepened it's shadows to overwhelm much of the scenery. If Ybgs could have a digital restoration, it would be a textural wonder. Are you listening, Criterion? Ye ban ge sheng is reputed to be China's first horror film surely deserving of inclusion in the Criterion Collection right there.
The troupe makes itself at home in a lodging house and begins to renovate the disused theater, not knowing that it it now the home of the "phantom" Song. Song sees in leading man Xiao Ou a chance to reach out to Xia and earns his favor by becoming a secret vocal tutor. In exchange Ou approaches Xia, who mistakes him for her lost love become flesh again. Unbeknownst to any of them, tragedy looms again as Ou's own girlfriend catches the eyes of the unrepentant Tang Jun, who - being upper class - got away with the assault on Song Dan-Ping ten years earlier.
Ye ban ge sheng is not an apolitical film, not are it's politics easy. It's backdrop and heart lay with an aversion to the warlord's feudalism that still ruled much of China in the midst of civil war. Complicating matters, conflict with Japan had finally become all-out war in 1937. Both sides were calling for solidarity against the Japanese, a spirit that isn't reflected in Ybgs as Song, ever the activist at heart, plies Ou with a revolutionist opera and encourages his new friend to keep the cause alive. Dan-Ping's cause is the director's own and he leaves no doubt who the film's true villains are.
Ye ban ge sheng's place in the pantheon of Phantom of the Opera movies is an interesting one and deserves to be better known. What it retains of Gaston Leroux is the shamelessly romantic side of pulp - it's a movie that wears it's heart on its sleeve politically and humanely. While this Phantom, like Leroux's, is a shadowy teacher or music and aspiring composer, he is not psychotic. He is a wholly innocent figure of heartbroken love, as later Phantoms will be (see some of the TV adaptations of the 90s), playing to audience sympathy. To that end, he is also a man of attractive looks until assaulted with acid, a plot twist that originated here and transplanted whole into the next adaptation, Universal's Phantom of the Opera (1943), a prestige production directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Claude Rains as Eriq the Phantom. Even people with only a passing knowledge of the Phantom of the Opera think of his as a character disfigured by acid...you can thank Ye ban ge sheng for that. Ybgs also deviates from the Leroux in its finale, though perversely echoing Lon Chaney's 1925 classic with an exciting chase sequence involving the opera ghost and an enraged public.
In 1941, director Weibang Ma-Xu made a sequel, Ye ban ge sheng xu ji (literally 'Song at Midnight - the sequel'). Ye ban ge sheng has been remade twice, once as a two-part film in 1962 (aka The Mid-Nightmare) and again in 1995. The latter was directed by Ronnie Yu and starred Leslie Cheung. As yet I have not seen any of these.
This was my second time seeing the movie, and I have to say I'd love to own a restored copy with accurate subtitles. It's grown on me considerably, having thought it soulful but confusing the first time several years ago. "We didn't be baffled forever."
Every midnight Xia listens for the song of her lover, dead ten years now. He never fails her.
Song Dan-Ping had been a revolutionary forced to flee his home and take up a new life and new identity. Changing his name, he became an actor. Success and fame followed, and soon he had met an admirer in Xia. The two fell in love. Unhappily for them Xia's father, a general, had already arranged for her to marry another, a financially advantageous alliance. Actors being amongst the lowest class, Song never had a chance.
The fiance Tang Jun was a cruel and proprietous man. When Xia defied him for Song, Jung flung acid into Song's face. Disfigured and ashamed, Song had word sent to his beloved that he had died - hoping to spare her. Instead, it sent her mad.
We learn all this in flashback halfway through the movie, related by the very-much-alive Song who serenades Xia every night. It's not a spoiler, for a ghost he's very physical. Ye ban ge sheng was inspred by the classic Universal horror films of the Thirties, and by the silent classic The Phantom of the Opera. Director Weibang Ma-Xu imbues his frames with gloom, dread, and loneliness, not a single moment taking place in daylight hours. Rain falls, fog drifts, cobwebs waft. Men and Women in Western dress emerge from Western automobiles to seek shelter in a ton closed down for the night. it's a town where the people lurk in superstitious fear of the ghostly singing that comes every night. They all know the legend of the doomed love. The performances are often exaggerated, adding to a creeping sense of unreality and theatricality.
Into this comes a theater troupe looking for a venue. Its best to warn that the most easily available copy (it's on YouTube) is difficult to follow in places. For one thing it suffers poorly translated English subtitles. They make for an amusing read, but are nearly incomprehensible - I'd advise you to skim them for a general suggestion of meaning rather than pay strict attention to them. Also problematic are the visuals, lovely as they are. It's a dark film by design with an alluring lighting scheme, and unfortunately age has only deepened it's shadows to overwhelm much of the scenery. If Ybgs could have a digital restoration, it would be a textural wonder. Are you listening, Criterion? Ye ban ge sheng is reputed to be China's first horror film surely deserving of inclusion in the Criterion Collection right there.
The troupe makes itself at home in a lodging house and begins to renovate the disused theater, not knowing that it it now the home of the "phantom" Song. Song sees in leading man Xiao Ou a chance to reach out to Xia and earns his favor by becoming a secret vocal tutor. In exchange Ou approaches Xia, who mistakes him for her lost love become flesh again. Unbeknownst to any of them, tragedy looms again as Ou's own girlfriend catches the eyes of the unrepentant Tang Jun, who - being upper class - got away with the assault on Song Dan-Ping ten years earlier.
Ye ban ge sheng is not an apolitical film, not are it's politics easy. It's backdrop and heart lay with an aversion to the warlord's feudalism that still ruled much of China in the midst of civil war. Complicating matters, conflict with Japan had finally become all-out war in 1937. Both sides were calling for solidarity against the Japanese, a spirit that isn't reflected in Ybgs as Song, ever the activist at heart, plies Ou with a revolutionist opera and encourages his new friend to keep the cause alive. Dan-Ping's cause is the director's own and he leaves no doubt who the film's true villains are.
Ye ban ge sheng's place in the pantheon of Phantom of the Opera movies is an interesting one and deserves to be better known. What it retains of Gaston Leroux is the shamelessly romantic side of pulp - it's a movie that wears it's heart on its sleeve politically and humanely. While this Phantom, like Leroux's, is a shadowy teacher or music and aspiring composer, he is not psychotic. He is a wholly innocent figure of heartbroken love, as later Phantoms will be (see some of the TV adaptations of the 90s), playing to audience sympathy. To that end, he is also a man of attractive looks until assaulted with acid, a plot twist that originated here and transplanted whole into the next adaptation, Universal's Phantom of the Opera (1943), a prestige production directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Claude Rains as Eriq the Phantom. Even people with only a passing knowledge of the Phantom of the Opera think of his as a character disfigured by acid...you can thank Ye ban ge sheng for that. Ybgs also deviates from the Leroux in its finale, though perversely echoing Lon Chaney's 1925 classic with an exciting chase sequence involving the opera ghost and an enraged public.
In 1941, director Weibang Ma-Xu made a sequel, Ye ban ge sheng xu ji (literally 'Song at Midnight - the sequel'). Ye ban ge sheng has been remade twice, once as a two-part film in 1962 (aka The Mid-Nightmare) and again in 1995. The latter was directed by Ronnie Yu and starred Leslie Cheung. As yet I have not seen any of these.
This was my second time seeing the movie, and I have to say I'd love to own a restored copy with accurate subtitles. It's grown on me considerably, having thought it soulful but confusing the first time several years ago. "We didn't be baffled forever."
Friday, December 2, 2016
O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)
Let it be stipulated right up front that the Schwab family are monsters. According to a number of sources I've read, they are meant to represent the middle class, but if that's so then they belong to the upper reaches of middle-classdom. They are conspicuously wealthy and conspicuously unworthy. The Schwab patriarch is a bigoted boor, his wife an oblivious alcoholic who thinks she's fooling everyone, the daughter an obnoxious brat and the son was born to sport taped-up hornrims and underwear pulled over his head by the school bullies. These people stepped out of a cartoon. Not a parody, a cartoon. I stress that because the film and its characters are an adaptation of a series of stories published by National Lampoon. We expect satire, but Robert Altman takes the clan a few steps further.
That's an awkward choice, because from all accounts he has played down the antics of the films teenage protagonists Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs. The two are meant to be taken as a couple of laid-back smartasses expressing their contempt for suburbia, for everything bourgeois, and for their peers. We are supposed to snicker at their war waged on everyone in sight. They're smarter than Beavis and Butthead and less manic than Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. Unfortunately, their contempt is not based on moral outrage, like Hunter S. Thompson's, it is because they are a couple of sociopaths. A typical day for them is to buy a Studebaker (so they can feign being too poor to have insurance), turn it into a monster truck, and crash into other people's cars. For them, an amusing wedding gift is a loaded uzi. Their dripping sarcasm spares few: Wino Bob, because he amuses them; a girl that O.C. is attracted to (he's quick to drop her for "some sluts" when she displays some humanity and taste); Dennis Hooper, a brain-fried Vietnam vet, because he can get them armaments; King Sunny Ade, because Stiggs thinks being a fan makes a political statement; and Schwab's neighbor, a self-made millionaire. The guy got rich selling tacky clothing to plus-sized women..."hogs", in his parlance.
So I have to ask, as crass as the Schwabs are, how can they be morally offensive to the titular antiheroes who value nothing? We hate them, Altman hates them, but why do O.C. and Stiggs hate them? Altman goes after familiar targets as easy as they are deserving, but he asks us to accept as surrogates a pair of champions who are every bit as loathsome. Schwab is confronted with poverty when his house is used as a "charity" front, but our heroes have no genuine concern for the homeless folk - they too are fodders for a joke, for which O.C & S hope to make a buck themselves. O.C. is no Hawkeye, and Stiggs no Trapper John. Their misanthropy has no fire in it.
It helps that it's Altman. His style is unmistakable, and he fills the movie with his usual impeccable cast (including Paul Dooley, Jane Curtin, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Mull, Ray Walston, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Cryer, Tina Louise and Bob Euker), his usual quirks, his visual and aural layering, and enough quiet touches that I almost forgot what scumbags I was being asked to sympathize with. Still, the humor never quite finds its groove nor do the nominal heroes ever earn their rewards.
I have not read the original stories from National Lampoon, nor do I desire to. It's enough to have read that Altman has excised most of their destructive swath and taken their edge off. It's impossible to guess if that was a good move....O.C. & Stiggs are too assholish for the film to be amiable, but it also fails as the black comedy it wants to be because Alltman has defanged it. Had he not done so it could have been a success, or maybe an Ishtar-caliber bomb. Instead it's simply forgotten.
That's an awkward choice, because from all accounts he has played down the antics of the films teenage protagonists Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs. The two are meant to be taken as a couple of laid-back smartasses expressing their contempt for suburbia, for everything bourgeois, and for their peers. We are supposed to snicker at their war waged on everyone in sight. They're smarter than Beavis and Butthead and less manic than Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. Unfortunately, their contempt is not based on moral outrage, like Hunter S. Thompson's, it is because they are a couple of sociopaths. A typical day for them is to buy a Studebaker (so they can feign being too poor to have insurance), turn it into a monster truck, and crash into other people's cars. For them, an amusing wedding gift is a loaded uzi. Their dripping sarcasm spares few: Wino Bob, because he amuses them; a girl that O.C. is attracted to (he's quick to drop her for "some sluts" when she displays some humanity and taste); Dennis Hooper, a brain-fried Vietnam vet, because he can get them armaments; King Sunny Ade, because Stiggs thinks being a fan makes a political statement; and Schwab's neighbor, a self-made millionaire. The guy got rich selling tacky clothing to plus-sized women..."hogs", in his parlance.
So I have to ask, as crass as the Schwabs are, how can they be morally offensive to the titular antiheroes who value nothing? We hate them, Altman hates them, but why do O.C. and Stiggs hate them? Altman goes after familiar targets as easy as they are deserving, but he asks us to accept as surrogates a pair of champions who are every bit as loathsome. Schwab is confronted with poverty when his house is used as a "charity" front, but our heroes have no genuine concern for the homeless folk - they too are fodders for a joke, for which O.C & S hope to make a buck themselves. O.C. is no Hawkeye, and Stiggs no Trapper John. Their misanthropy has no fire in it.
It helps that it's Altman. His style is unmistakable, and he fills the movie with his usual impeccable cast (including Paul Dooley, Jane Curtin, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Mull, Ray Walston, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Cryer, Tina Louise and Bob Euker), his usual quirks, his visual and aural layering, and enough quiet touches that I almost forgot what scumbags I was being asked to sympathize with. Still, the humor never quite finds its groove nor do the nominal heroes ever earn their rewards.
I have not read the original stories from National Lampoon, nor do I desire to. It's enough to have read that Altman has excised most of their destructive swath and taken their edge off. It's impossible to guess if that was a good move....O.C. & Stiggs are too assholish for the film to be amiable, but it also fails as the black comedy it wants to be because Alltman has defanged it. Had he not done so it could have been a success, or maybe an Ishtar-caliber bomb. Instead it's simply forgotten.
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