‘Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection’ Is One of the Year’s Best Home Video Releases

Filmmaker Al Adamson was one of a kind, and while his movies appeal only to a small segment of film lovers those that dig his work really and truly dig it. His life was tragically cut short by murder, but what a life it was. Severin Films has done something amazing in the world of dwindling practical media by putting together an ultimate box set of his films. It’s an epic undertaking given the condition, availability, and conflicting information surrounding many of the films, but the result is among the very best of the year’s home video releases.

Thirty one films are collected here — most are standalones while some are variations on others — and all but two were new to me before digging in to the set. It’s quite the endeavor as the films are joined by an abundance of special features ranging from trailers to commentaries to interviews and more. There’s a lot to take in here, but this is a set deserving of time and attention.

Now let’s go explore Al Adamson – The Masterpiece Collection.

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Disc One

A recent and excellent documentary called Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson is paired with one of the filmmaker’s more popular releases. The doc is a fascinating glimpse into the artist’s life with archival footage and interviews with friends and collaborators. He story is one of persistence, if not talent, and his end is tragic, and the film makes for an engaging introduction to his career and filmography as it explores his ambitions and efforts against the odds.

The Female Bunch opens with a chase that sees the survivor share a story of how she got there, and that story is the bulk of the film. She tells her story all the way until the final ten minutes, and the core of it involves a gang of women — feminists? not quite — who run rampage over the American southwest harassing men and women alike. It’s fun and violent, and Russ Tamblyn’s appearance as a man who threatens the gang only to pay a hefty price is an interesting wrinkle into the wild narrative. Less entertaining is the state of an unwell Lon Chaney Jr. in one of his final film appearances.

Special features:

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson

• Outtakes [20:10] – additional scenes and interviews from the doc
• Beyond This Earth promo reel
• Trailer
• Al Adamson poster gallery

The Female Bunch (1971)

• The Bunch Speaks Out [15:26] – Leslie McRay, Russ Tamblyn, Sharyn Wynters, Bud Cardos, and others including archival footage of Adamson himself talk about the film’s production, its various titles, their memories of Lon Chaney Jr., their time at Spahn Ranch, and more. One highlight involves Cardos having to fly out of state to buy liquor for Chaney Jr. as they were filming in the dry state of Utah.
• Extended scenes [2:02]
• Trailers

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Disc Two

Three movies — that are essentially one movie as they share a lot of footage between them — are collected here. Psycho a Go-Go is a heist tale of sorts that sees the thieves stymied when the goods end up inside a child’s doll, The Fiend with the Electronic Brain keeps that same basic plot but moves it slightly to the side to make room for John Carradine’s mad scientist, and finally Blood of Ghastly Horror repeats step two by adding in even more crazy scientist shenanigans. Seeing the progression of ideas from one film to the next, each trying to land box-office gold in a different or bigger way, is actually more entertaining than the films themselves. You can see the thought process evolving even as the films grow sillier.

Special features:

Psycho a Go-Go (1965)

• Trailer

The Fiend with the Electronic Brain (1967)

• Alternate title sequence
• Trailer

Blood of Ghastly Horror (1973)

• Commentary by producer/distributor Samuel M. Sherman
• Trailer

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Disc Three

Here we get two westerns paired together with Half Way to Hell and Five Bloody Graves. The former is the oldest film in the set and technically directed by Adamson’s father, Victor (aka Denver Dixon), and it’s in many ways the most traditional film here too. Of course, it’s arguably the least engaging and entertaining for that very reason as it’s both straightforward and only teases the more exciting or exploitative elements that would become Adamson the younger’s trademarks.

Five Bloody Graves is a different story all together, though, as it offers up a saucy, bloody, rude slice of western exploitation. The Native Americans are bloodthirsty savages (and played by White guys in makeup), the women are whores (or dead), and the white men move between morally upstanding and utterly cruel. The film follows a man’s quest for revenge throughout the gorgeous landscapes of rural Utah, and while things get pretty nasty at times there’s a playfulness to it all starting with the realization that it’s narrated by Death.

Special features:

Half Way to Hell (1960)

• None

Five Bloody Graves (1969)

• Outside of Tucson [16:06] – Actor/writer Robert Dix shares memories of his actor father, his own move into movies, and his work on the film that included writing, acting, stunts, boom man, and more.
• Partial archival audio commentary with producer/distributor Samuel M. Sherman
• Alternate title sequence
• Trailer and radio spot

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Disc Four

Once again Severin brings together three films sharing some DNA. Blood of Dracula’s Castle sees a young couple inherit a castle in Arizona, but when they arrive in the hopes of moving in they discover a pleasant vampire couple have been calling it home for centuries. Oh, and there’s also a serial murderer who fancies himself something of a werewolf and a Frankenstein’s monster-like servant to contend with too. House Hunters International this isn’t. Dracula’s Castle, meanwhile, is simply a television edit that mixes things up slightly by completing the killer’s transformation into an actual werewolf.

Horror of the Blood Monsters may not recycle any of the footage from those films, but it’s still a vampire tale that mashes up scenes from different sources including a creature feature from the Philippines. It’s about a vampiric apocalypse that sees scientists send astronauts into space in search of help only to find all manners of trouble. The film plays around with color tinting as a story device and makes for a fairly trippy watch at times. It’s wonky fun with nonsensical science, an abundance of ascots, and some of the grooviest sci-fi sets you’ve ever seen.

Special features:

Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969)

• Partial audio commentary with expert Brian Albright
• Audio interview excerpt with Alex D’Arcy [?]
• Trailer

Dracula’s Castle (1969)

• None

Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)

• Partial audio commentary with producer Samuel M. Sherman
• Trailers, TV spots, radio spot, and alternate title sequence

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Disc Five

Here we get two films paired together that share footage and ideas, and it starts with The Fakers (aka Smashing the Crime Syndicate, which is the actual on-screen title here). The story centers on an FBI investigation into a counterfeit ring but also makes time for mobsters, Neo-Nazis, Russian spies, and more. The hero is a pretend bad guy who draws the line at statutory rape which is how you know he’s a good guy. It’s a fun romp made with more skill and production qualities than many of Adamson’s films, and part of its appeal comes in its riffs on the James Bond films. Hell’s Bloody Devils takes that same film with its spies, counterfeiters, and underage girls and adds in a Nazi motorcycle gang. The sub-plot meshes poorly into the existing narrative, but worse, the difference in picture quality is never less than immensely noticeable. Does that make it entertaining? Possibly, but The Fakers is the stronger film.

Special features:

The Fakers (1972)

• Alternate title sequence

Hell’s Bloody Devils (1970)

• Archival audio commentary with producer/distributor Samuel M. Sherman
• Sam Sherman interviews actor John Gabriel [20:03] – The producer talks with the actor about the film’s production and their shared fondness for Adamson.
• Trailer and TV spot

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Disc Six

It’s a double feature starting with one of Adamson’s most popular films, Dracula vs Frankenstein, which sees a mad scientist team up with a bearded Dracula to resurrect Frankenstein’s monster. I already hear you asking, “but Rob, is there a biker gang involved somehow?” and to that I answer with a resounding yes, obviously. We also get some hip cats, gory beats, more sad Lon Chaney Jr., and archival footage of protests that appear to be ancestors of the ongoing Black Lives Matter marches. It’s an oddity all right.

Brain of Blood is Adamson’s attempt at aping the style of genre fare from the Philippines — for some reason — with a tale about a brain transplant gone awry. Has one of those operations ever worked out flawlessly in the movies? I think not. It’s suitably ridiculous, but as is often the case with his films that’s just part of its charms as a hulking brute with a “normal” guy’s brain is caught up in terrors beyond his apparent control.

Special features:

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1972)

• Zandor and Friends [22:36] – Zandor Vorkov, John Bloom, Sam Sherman, Gary Graver, and more talk about the film’s production and the crazy days of late 60s/early 70s filmmaking with Adamson.
• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Feed Your Head! Lose Your Head!: An Appreciation by cult film historian Howard S. Berger [55:43] – This is a well crafted video essay offering a sincere appreciation of the film, and even if you don’t agree with all of its points (spoiler, you won’t) it’s impossible to walk away without something of a stronger understanding for it.
• Monster protest home video footage [5:28]
• Sam Sherman interviews Forry Ackerman [4:51] – A brief chat at a horror convention sees Sherman pitching his new (at the time) DVD release of the film as Ackerman shares some memories.
• Outtakes and extended scenes [20:33]
• Trailer, TV spot, and radio spots

Brain of Blood (1971)

• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Memories of Blood [7:30] – Archival interviews with Al Adamson, Samuel M. Sherman, Zandor Vorkov, Fred Olen Ray, and more are collected from outtakes from the recent documentary.
• Trailer and radio spot

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Disc Seven

Two biker flicks filled with leather, denim, exhaust fumes, violence, and sexual assault, are paired here, so proceed accordingly. Angels’ Wild Women opens with a woman being chased and attacked by two men, and her gang of tough women arrives too late to stop it but in plenty of time to kick the rapists’ asses. Adamson tosses in a killer cult and some time at Spahn Ranch for good measure. Satan’s Sadists focuses more on the guys in the gang as antiheroes, possibly, who wreak havoc across a desert on the men and women who cross their paths. They eventually collapse from within but not before a lot of carnage and death unfolds. Both films go heavy with the tough gals/guys theme as they take apart others, and while punishment wins out it’s a long, dusty ride getting there.

Special features:

Satan’s Sadists (1969)

• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Outtakes [8:57]
• Trailers, TV spots, and radio spot

Angels’ Wild Women (1972)

• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Trailer, TV spot, and radio spot

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Disc Eight

Things gets saucy with a double feature of stewardesses out of control. The Naughty Stewardesses features plenty of the title character shenanigans, but rather than be a straightforward T&A story line Adamson adds in a kidnapping too. Boobs, butts, and bad guys abound, but even with an assault the film’s most questionable scene involves a little boy watching as a stewardess drops her underwear and gets fondled — it’s all in a master shot, so that kid got an eyeful. And then there’s Blazing Stewardesses… the buxom flight attendants are back, and the film opens with more of their naughty shenanigans, but the main story line shifts to focus on some older film/TV stars in a western tale. Bad guys on horseback, Yvonne DeCarlo as a madam of a cowboy-themed brothel, and some belabored attempts at comedy follow as the film tries and fails to balance two halves. Still, the Adamson beats you know and love are all present.

Special features:

The Naughty Stewardesses (1973)

• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Fly Girls: the Stewardess as Lifestyle Icon in the Golden Age of Exploitation Film [13:43] – Author Kier-La Janisse explores the popularity of stewardesses in the real world alongside their portrayal in films, and the result is an education for the rest of us.
• Trailers, TV spot, and radio spots

Blazing Stewardesses (1975)

• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Alternate title sequence
• Trailer, TV spots and radio spot
• Bedroom Stewardesses [18:22] – A selection of scenes from a different film credited to Rolf Olson but actually directed by Adamson.

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Disc Nine

Severin triples down on the saucy antics with a trio of T&A fueled thrillers populated with double-dealing dudes and bad-ass broads as only Adamson can deliver. Girls for Rent is up first and follows a road trip of sorts as two tough women chase down a third while dealing with all manner of perverts and complications. It’s a solid ride even with budget limitations thanks to some fun interactions, car chase antics, and action beats. Keep an eye out for a pretty nasty mid-coitus kill, too.

Nurses for Sale shares a similar sounding title, but instead of being bad girls these ladies are good women forced into action by circumstance and bad guys. It all starts straightforward enough — nurses getting naughty in between patient care — but soon enough the action shifts to a third world country filled with bandits, rebels, and a need for visiting nurses to do their stuff. Adamson tosses in some broad comedy here alongside a surprising amount of time spent with soldiers, thugs, and weirdos. I say surprising because, come on, there’s a bunch of nurses just standing around! Adamson remembers that fact for the third act just in time for things to get nasty with assaults, acid attacks, and more.

The disc wraps up with a rape/revenge western called Jessi’s Girls that sees a wronged woman team up with some female outlaws to dish out justice with a side of fleshy shenanigans. Adamson once again takes good advantage of his rural locations and delivers some entertaining action leading up to a solid shootout in the end. It’s honestly one of Adamson’s better films, and even with his indie budget he delivers a pretty well crafted slice of western exploitation.

Special features:

Girls for Rent (1974)

• Archival audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Alternate title sequence
• Trailer, TV and radio spot

Nurses for Sale (1976)

• Trailer

Jessi’s Girls (1975)

• Trailer

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Disc Ten

Adamson dips his toes into the blaxploitation sub-genre with this double feature, and it starts with Black Heat. The film pits a determined cop named Kicks against a vicious gangster played by Russ Tamblyn (in his final collaboration with the filmmaker), and the action features shootouts, skinny-dipping, car crashes, and more. Title aside, it actually avoids most of the tropes of blaxploitation cinema and instead plays it straight with a tough Black cop kicking ass to avenge his partner and bring down the big bad. It’s good stuff although this being an Adamson film, there’s of course an out of the blue and fairly vicious rape scene too.

Dynamite Brothers sees an Asian and a Black man — named Larry Chin and Stud Brown, respectively, and of course — handcuffed together and forced on the run. Gangsters and bad memories plague their journey, but it’s a dirty cop who’s the biggest threat. This one’s again categorized under blaxploitation, but the Asian element actually gets more screen through martial arts fight scenes, a central subplot, and the always welcome presence of James Hong. Brown’s storyline sees his friends crossing paths with rival tough guys and nameless cops, though, too. It’s the weaker of the two films as things drag at times, but it’s still a somewhat more mature effort from Adamson even if it does feature a car explosion and another crash recycled into Black Heat.

Special features:

Black Heat (1976)

• Partial audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Trailers
• Alternate intro and title sequence

Dynamite Brothers (1974)

• TV spots

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Disc Eleven

Adamson’s foray into blaxploitation films continues with these two titles, and both are a bit closer to what you’re probably expecting from the sub-genre. Well, within reason. Mean Mother is an odd hybrid of a film utilizing footage from a Spanish feature alongside new material shot by Adamson. The new scenes are focused on a Black Vietnam veteran who returns to America and finds himself knee deep in criminals, dead bodies, and beautiful women. His friend from the war, meanwhile, heads to Spain with similar results. The two halves don’t quite gel, but we get plenty of tough dialogue, mild shoot outs, action beats, and T&A. It’s not a highlight in Adamson’s filmography, but it’s an interesting oddity.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin might seem like a strange bedfellow with Adamson — might? it absolutely is — but the story of its production is exactly what you’d expect from the filmmaker. The film existed for a decade before Adamson was brought in to kick things up a notch with extra sex and violence, and the result is something. The bulk of the film is original with his additions spliced in fairly well. They blend in in part because the original film, while essentially rated G, is still a grim affair that suggests plenty. Adamson just leaves little to the imagination.

Special features:

Mean Mother (1973)

• Partial audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• The Joy of Marilyn Joi [17:00] – The actor shares memories from her early career as a dancer, the highs and lows of being a Black performer in the 60s, and her move into movies. She shows a real affection for Adamson and sadness over his death, and her anecdotes about auditions are good fun.
• Trailer

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1977)

• TV and radio spots

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Disc Twelve

Two more films round out Adamson’s foray into blaxploitation, but once again these films don’t quite meet expectations for the sub-genre. Instead they’re action films with a Black lead in Jim Kelly who kicks ass across the board. Secret agents need vacations too, but when the Black Samurai learns that his girlfriend has been abducted by baddies he jumps into action. Jumps, punches, kicks, drives, and flies a mother fucking jet pack. It’s silly and rough as hell around the edges, but you can’t argue with a movie that pits Kelly against a pissed off vulture in a battle of fists and beak.

Death Dimension is more of the same as Kelly chases thugs in possession of a “weather machine” capable of instant freezing people with targeted snow storms. Sure, whatever. It opens with a precise but nasty little surgery — I still can’t decide if it’s special effects or someone actually getting their hairline sliced open to insert a small disc — before shifting into more traditional martial arts fights, car chases, and shootouts between helicopter and gondola. As with Black Samurai, it’s a film that entertains despite itself.

Special features:

Black Samurai (1976)

• Trailer

Death Dimension (1978)

• Alternate title sequence
• Trailer

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Disc Thirteen

A trio of one-offs take up the thirteenth disc, but they’re arguably some of Adamson’s most accomplished (ie professional looking) filmmaking. First up is a high school T&A comedy called Sunset Cove, and while it sounds like a soap opera the shenanigans are far sillier. It feels very much in league with other skin and sin romps from the 70s and 80s as the “kids” enjoy some sexual antics, and the plot pits the “teens” against greedy developers as some kind of underdog tale. The humor rarely earns an audible laugh, but it’s a fun enough romp for fans of the sub-genre.

Nurse Sherri sees a young woman possessed by a dead cult leader and willed into doing some heinous things, and it’s an oddly atmospheric little thriller. There are beats throughout that play into the bloodletting and T&A of the genre, but there’s also a lot of downtime as the film moves slowly between set pieces and interactions. Better is the overall atmosphere as the opening with the cult shifts into the supernatural shenanigans at the hospital. There’s a low-rent uneasiness to it all — it never quite reaches sleaziness — that adds to the vibe.

Last up is a rare foray into science fiction for Adamson, and it’s an unexpectedly fun time. The plot involves a world where sex is declared illegal which, of course, leads hot young couple to want all the more of it. Oh, and it’s a musical that riffs on Cinderella? The effects move between the nifty and the cheap, but Adamson delivers a good-looking indie comedy. Softcore sci-fi is a relatively small sub-genre, but Adamson nails it right out of the gate with a goofily entertaining romp.

Special features:

Sunset Cove (1978)

• Sunset Toolbox [11:31] – Producer Tony Didio recalls transitioning from being a stock broker providing funds for films to actually producing movies himself. He shares some fun anecdotes and, as expected, a fond affection for Adamson.
• Trailer and TV spot

Nurse Sherri (1977)

• Dr. Dracula [25:17] – This is a collection of scenes shot by Adamson to turn the film into a “different” film.
• Trailer, TV spot, and radio spot

Cinderella 2000 (1977)

• Partial audio commentary with Samuel M. Sherman
• Trailer and radio spot

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Disc Fourteen

The final disc in the collection features the filmmaker’s final two features — fittingly — but they’re not quite what you might be expecting. Adamson isn’t exactly the kind of director you’d expect to see directing a kids movie, but that’s just what we get we these two. That said, they’re definitely family films through his peculiar lens. Carnival Magic involves a small circus struggling to survive, but in addition to there being no children in the film it’s entertainment that leans decidedly adult with its lecherous chimp, abusive animal trainer, and sketchy humor. It’s not a good movie, traditionally speaking, but there’s entertainment to be had in its ridiculousness.

Sadly, the final film in the set is easily the least interesting. Lost is another family feature, but where Carnival Magic entertains with its talking chimp and inappropriate antics this one is just all kinds of dull. A family moves to the wilds of Utah, and while they try to make it a new home the young daughter heads out into nature and loses track of herself. It should be an engaging tale of survival, but it’s never suspenseful and the little girl is annoying enough that we really don’t want her to be found.

Special features:

Carnival Magic (1983)

• A Boon to Science [11:47] – Zack Carlson and Lars Nilsen offer up an honest appreciation for the film while also recounting its discovery and return from oblivion.
• Commentary by producer Elvin Feltner
• Outtakes
• Trailer and TV spot

Lost (1983)

• The Happy Hobo [22:42] – Adamson had begun work on a third family film which he never completed, and this is the silent footage that remains.
• Trailer

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My previous awareness of Adamson’s filmography was limited to a handful of titles to the point that I never really connected the singular filmmaking voice behind them. Exploring this glorious love letter of a box-set one to two films at a time offers a new appreciation for the ultra low budget auteur. Are they all winners? Not even close, but with only an exception or two the films are never boring or dull. They’re entertaining exploitation fare powered by as much by violence as they are by memorable dialogue and silliness, and more often than not they’re good, inappropriate fun.

Severin Films shows epic amounts of affection for Adamson and his films with this set from the packaging on through the presentations. The sturdy slip case houses the book-style set of all fourteen discs, and an included booklet offers detailed breakdowns of each film’s production and release. The films themselves will never be reference material quality despite the TLC afforded them by Severin, but there’s no denying that they’ve never really looked better. Given the scope and cost of this set, it’s ultimately a release for true Adamson fans only — casual viewers need not apply — but if that describes you then Al Adamson – The Masterpiece Collection is a necessary pick up.

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Five Comic Books to Read Before ‘Project Power’

This article is part of The Reading List, a monthly column in which we encourage you to take your enthusiasm for a particularly groovy film and direct it into a wide array of extracurricular studies. This one begins with the new Netflix film ‘Project Power’ and expands into various thematically-related comic book properties.

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The first X-Men film is twenty years old. So much has changed since its release. The average movie-goer has developed a palate for an incredibly eclectic buffet of superheroes. Not only that, but they know which characters taste best with other characters. Give me a little of Iron Man and Hulk, but I’ll pass on the Batman and Superman. Been there, done that.

What if we combine Batman and Iron Man? While corporate legalities will never allow such bliss to exist, filmmakers are starting to learn how to blend flavors while masking them in different costumes. Netflix’s upcoming Project Power is the latest venture in comic book deconstruction, and after a couple decades of dynamic duos and bickering avengers, we’re ready to consume a big bowl of stir-fried spandex.

What you’ll find below are recently constructed tales. Most of the titles come from the period after Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. Bringing an “adult” edge to a medium that originated as kiddie entertainment invites a lot of weirdos. These stories tend to be purposefully aggressive in their posturing, but you know what? Batman and his comrades deserve a little spanking.

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The Boys

If you’re craving superhero deconstruction, and you’ve already plowed your way through Watchmen and Batman: Year One, then the next comic book series you turn to is The Boys. This is especially the case now that we have an excellent companion television series to pair with your reading experience. Written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Darick Robertson, The Boys is a crass and joyously adolescent assault on authoritarian costumed crime-fighting.

Look around you. Turn on the television. Watch the news. Do you think our society would birth a Superman or Justice League? No way.  We deserve The Homelander, a demon with an angel’s face, corporate dollars, and governmental approval.

The Amazon series and the comic book share the same basic plot as well as a devilish desire to offend (born from the creators’ anger toward the world outside their window), but the source material is somehow even more profane. More sex, more violence, more sex and violence. Not for the faint of heart, unless they’re your enemy, and you’re looking to stir some malicious panic in their psyche.

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The Brat Pack

Before The Boys, there was The Brat Pack. Written, illustrated, and self-published by Rick Veitch, The Brat Pack is an equally twisted satire detailing the tumultuous lives of superhero sidekicks. It ain’t’ easy being Robin to Batman, and while Veitch can’t specifically call out the dynamic duo, it’s clear that Chippy and Midnight Mink are stand-ins for everyone’s favorite Gotham crusaders.

For decades, rumors, whispers, and jokes circled the relationship between Bruce Wayne and his young ward Dick Grayson. The Brat Pack drags the gossip out of the dark and jams it under an interrogator’s lamp. As underground comix sensibilities started to eek their way into mainstream books, the independent artists were given the excuse to push boundaries of taste even further. In The Brat Pack, Rick Veitch operates like a dog off the leash.

Inspired by the 1988 DC Comics publicity stunt in which the publisher asked fans to vote on whether Jason Todd’s Robin would live or die under the crowbar of The Joker, The Brat Pack begins with a cackling madman calling into a radio program making the same request regarding Midnight Mink’s Chippy. As you already know, a shock jock’s audience is bloodthirsty and unforgiving. Of course, Chippy’s number is up.

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MPH

Mark Millar made his career deconstructing superheroes. Both Kick-Ass and The Kingsman belong to him, and if you’re looking for his takes on the Justice League or Superman, you should give Jupiter’s Legacy and Huck a read, not to forget Nemesis, Superior, or Wanted. However, the first comic that sprang to mind once I saw the trailer for Project Power was MPH.

After a group of jerkwad teenagers – sorry, just “teenagers” (the “jerkwad” is already implied) – devour a stash of the synthetic street drug MPH, they exhibit super-speed abilities. What do they do with such a magnificent gift? They rob banks and cause all manner of ruckus and mayhem. All of which is fabulously detailed through Duncan Fegrado’s rigid yet kinetic art style.

Problems arise for the teens when the original owners of the drug come looking for them. Once you’ve touched the power of immortals, would you give it up easily? No way. Neither do these punks.

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Daredevil: Lowlife

Mark Millar did not invent the super drug. Previously, characters got hooked on Velocity 9, Kick, Miraclo, Venom, Goloka Root, and oh yeah, Captain America’s bootleg super-soldier serum. Some crime-fighting role models can’t, “Just say no.”

In Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil: Lowlife, the heroic man without fear discovers that The Owl is attempting to take over the Kingpin’s territory through his endless supply of the Mutant Growth Hormone (MGH). When digested, the drug gives its users temporary access to the super-powered abilities from whomever the hormone was extracted. Meaning, if the drug were mixed with a little Cyclops DNA, the user would have access to his optic blasts.

Like Millar, Bendis came up in the business deconstructing comic book tropes, and his run on Daredevil is his masterwork. Hell’s Kitchen is Bendis’ film noir playground, tackling ridiculous ideas like MGH and dragging them to their logical and often tragic conclusion. The Owl was never going to succeed, but it’s less about the big bad at the finish line and more about all the various New York citizens he destroys along the way. When you reach the source of the MGH, your heart will break.

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Invincible

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In the early aughts, while Brian Michael Bendis was reinventing the concept of Spider-Man in Ultimate Spider-Man, Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) was reinventing the concept of Spider-Man in his creator-owned series Invincible. The set up is similar minus the radioactive spider.

While chucking the trash out at his crappy little retail job, teenager Mark Grayson discovers he has superhuman strength when he accidentally hurls a bag of garbage into space. His body is changing, and while it is exciting to explore its boundless possibilities, it’s also a total hassle when it comes to normal human interactions. School, jobs, girls – how can you bother with the regular stuff when it’s on you to stop the destruction of Earth every week?

Here’s hoping that the upcoming Invincible Amazon series can bring as many eyes to the source material as The Boys and HBO’s Watchmen have done for their original art. While Kirkman reigns over Hollywood thanks to The Walking Dead, Invincible remains his most treasured property. The comic contains multitudes, jumping from exhilarating to gut-wrenching in the space between two panels.

Project Power is another example of an audience eager to muck about in comic book properties. They want to smash their action figures together. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Comics adaptations have taught the average viewer the basics. Now, they’re ready to tear it all down and reinvent the genre.

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The poet of dynamic immobility: Ennio Morricone: A guest post by Jeff Smith

Ennio Morricone holding his principal instrument, the trumpet, in a picture taken in the 1970s. Photo by Roberto Masotti.

 

DB here: For our blog entry #1001, who better to memorialize Morricone than our stalwart collaborator Jeff Smith? He has provided many music-sensitive analyses of films both recent and classic. Our most popular entries from last year were his two looks (here and here) at the music and musical culture behind Once Upon a Time. . . . in Hollywood. Herewith his warm appreciation of a maestro.

 

Jeff here:

On July 6, 2020, the legendary composer Ennio Morricone passed away in Rome at the age of 91. As expected, several encomia were published reflecting upon Morricone’s musical genius. Of particular note were reflections by two writers for Variety, film critic Owen Gleiberman and film music historian Jon Burlingame.

The tributes highlighted many notable features of Morricone’s film work: his gift for melody, his sense of humor, his eclecticism, and his amazing productivity. Having written more than 500 film and television scores, Morricone’s compositional output was jaw-dropping. After all, even Josef Haydn wrote only 106 symphonies.

Throughout my own career as a film scholar, I frequently engaged with Morricone’s music. In preparation for the writing of my dissertation, I did an independent study with David on Hollywood film music. My final project? A detailed analysis of the score for Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, complete with handwritten transcriptions of every musical theme and motif I could identify.

I vividly remember the satisfaction I felt in being able to play the main title from start to finish on the piano. It is one thing to read music and play it. It is another to take what you hear and try to put it in some reproducible form on paper. Playing back Morricone’s famous theme, I felt I’d gained insight into the mind of the great composer.  That work eventually became the basis for chapter six in my first book, The Sounds of Commerce.

My fascination with Morricone’s work has continued to the present day. Last summer, I wrote a review of Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, a book of interviews conducted by Alessandro De Rosa. This past April the Criterion Channel posted my most recent “Observations on Film Art,” which examines musical motifs in Morricone’s score for The Battle of Algiers.

That’s close to thirty years of near-obsessive fascination with Morricone’s music and his compositional style. In what follows, I share some additional thoughts on the Maestro’s legacy, offering some insight on the reasons for his seemingly inexhaustible creativity.

 

The Sicilian defense

The first section of Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words is all about the maestro’s love of chess. Although the composer would describe himself as a hobbyist, his chess skills surpassed those of most amateurs. Morricone played against Boris Spassky, Garry Kasparov, and other Grand Masters. When asked about his passion for the game, Morricone explains that he sees important parallels between music composition and chess. Both activities involve mathematical relations. These relations are further expressed in axes of verticality, horizontality, and graphics.

This initial discussion of chess struck me as a key to understanding Morricone’s creative process. The game of chess is often analogized as a battle where stratagems and tactics are deployed in an effort to outmaneuver – and thus, defeat – one’s opponent.  That comparison undoubtedly rings true. Yet when one looks at the board before the game starts, it also represents something simpler: a field of open possibilities. Not every move is permissible, of course. But when you consider possible combinations of moves, the permutations can number in the millions. And even though the rules of chess constrain the patterns of moves that can be made, all of these possibilities are generated by the dispositions of up to 32 pieces on a field of 64 squares.

Morricone seems to approach the blank space of staff paper as though it were a chessboard at the start of the game. A chess player works with sixteen pieces that can be used in various combinations. A composer works with the twelve tones of the chromatic scale to create intervals and chords. As with the chessboard, there are millions of different permutations in the way these twelve tones can be arranged. More importantly, since each note in the scale can be varied by pitch class, duration, articulation, dynamics, and instrumental color, the options seem endless.

Yet while the “terror of the white page” can be an obstacle to the creative process, that has never appeared to be the case with Morricone. Why? I think it is because the composer found a method of composition that reduced the apparently infinite possibilities to the level of the merely multitudinous.

In Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, the composer characterized himself as a student of the Second School of Vienna. Unlike Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, who were part of the first Viennese School, Morricone tried to transpose the former’s twelve-tone technique into a seven-tone system while retaining the latter’s commitment to the rules of serialism that ordered all other musical parameters. For Morricone, this system had the advantage of enabling him to write tonal music without having to slavishly adhere to its characteristic tensions and resolutions. By adopting Webern’s principles of serialism, the notes, according to Morricone, “are freed from their reciprocal constraints.”

Over time, Morricone learned how to adapt this simplified version of twelve-tone serialism to the needs of each film score he wrote. In some cases, he would work within a pentatonic system. In others, he might base his compositions on a row of six or eight tones. In still others, he might jettison the system altogether.

This simplified serial technique provided Morricone with a compositional framework that was extraordinarily generative. Once the composer has determined the tone row and the ordering of other musical parameters, he simply spins off hundreds of variations that are then fitted to the film’s dramatic situations. The smaller tone row still acts as a guarantor of harmonic unity. Morricone describes it as the music’s DNA, something like an identifying marker in every musical “cell.” Specific changes in rhythm, tempo, orchestration, volume, and tessitura all provide means of refreshing the basic musical schema.

Indeed, Morricone’s compositional system proved so procreant that he sometimes wrote three or four versions of a score’s theme in order to give the director some options to choose from.  In Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, he offers an example with the police triumph theme in The Untouchables. The theme was the last one written for the score, and Morricone prepared three pieces that were recorded with two pianists. He then sent them off for director Brian De Palma’s consideration. De Palma didn’t like any of them. Back to the drawing board,

Morricone wrote three more pieces and shared them with De Palma. In a phone call, the director told Morricone that he still wasn’t convinced. Morricone completed three additional pieces and sent them. This time, though, he included a brief that summarized the strengths and weaknesses of all nine proposals. Morricone himself recommended against variant number six, claiming it was most triumphant and therefore the least convincing.  Concluding his story, Morricone asks, “Guess which one he chose?”

After I sniggered at the composer’s dig at De Palma’s musical sensibilities, the larger implications of Morricone’s anecdote began to sink in. My mind was well and truly blown. If Morricone had written eight other themes in lieu of the one that was ultimately chosen, how much music had he actually written for The Untouchables? And if this, as Morricone indicates, was not an isolated case, how many unused cues are likely sitting in boxes somewhere in Rome simply waiting to be discovered? As noted earlier, Morricone had written music for more than five hundred films and television shows. Were the aggregated number of unused cues and alternate versions of themes the equivalent of another one or two hundred scores?  And if we trust Morricone’s judgment, some of these versions are actually better than the ones we already know.

All of this is a reminder that Morricone’s output is astonishing. This is evident both in terms of the size of his corpus and the sustained quality of his work over a period of almost sixty years.

Much of that productivity, I think, was fueled by Morricone’s transposition of serialist concepts to the film score. Like the rules of chess, which prohibit certain moves, Morricone’s use of simplified tone rows gave him a set of “rules” that fruitfully limited certain options in terms of melody and harmony, but still preserved the usual range of choices for other musical parameters. It also shaped our sense of Morricone’s style by favoring certain compositional devices over others. Pedal points and ostinati are completely permissible in Morricone’s system. But a rapid chromatic run of the type used in classical Hollywood “hurries” would be out of bounds.

Such a rapid chromatic run is also ill-suited to Morricone’s aesthetic for another reason; it is a musical gesture that implies directional movement. Instead Morricone strives to produce a sensation of “dynamic immobility” in his work, the musical equivalent of the swirls, eddies, and ripples we associate with lake water. The sense of immobility derives from Morricone’s interest in writing tonal music outside of the strict rules governing the Western tonal system. One hears chord changes. But you couldn’t describe any particular change as a modulation insofar as there is no definite key to ground these harmonic relations. Consequently, you discern harmonic change, but without the sense of teleological movement toward a cadence as a definite endpoint.

If Morricone’s approach to harmony strives for a feeling of moving stasis, what then accounts for the music’s dynamism? For Morricone, it is the constant change evident in the other musical parameters: texture, pitch, dynamics, and timbre.

Listen again to the cue from The Untouchables. Do you notice the sorts of surges and swells produced by its chord changes? Does it sound like it moves to a definite endpoint?  Or does one instead get the feeling of an endlessly deferred resolution?  If those surges and swells produce the latter, that’s Morricone’s “dynamic immobility” in situ.

Morricone’s creative spark seems all the more remarkable when one considers that he worked in a production environment guided by the notion that “I don’t need it good; I need it Tuesday.” That Morricone flourished within this milieu for more than five decades eventually made him “untouchable.”

 

Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news

A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

In The Sounds of Commerce, I argued that the 1960s proved to be an important period in the history of the Hollywood film score as the dominance of its neoromantic style began to wane. Driven partly by the popularity of theme songs and soundtrack albums, composers infused the classical Hollywood score with elements of both jazz and pop music. To be sure, those styles all had their place in Hollywood films. Characters performed Tin Pan Alley songs in musicals. Dance bands played jazz as part of the nightlife featured in gangster films and films noirs. And one even heard the occasional bit of Gershwin-style orchestral jazz pop up in a score. The changes I discerned in sixties film scores were more a matter of degree than of kind.

What prompted the change? Besides the emergence of new ancillary markets for film music, Hollywood also saw a generational shift take place throughout the industry, including film composers. Sadly, some of the greatest proponents of the classical Hollywood style, such as Herbert Stothart, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Victor Young, were dead before 1960. Others, like Roy Webb, Max Steiner, and Miklós Rózsa, remained active, but they saw fewer assignments come their way.

Taking their place was a new breed more attuned to changes in the jazz and pop idioms.  Instead of aping Gershwin, these new composers were more likely to draw upon swing music or West Coast jazz. Similarly, several film composers also began to incorporate elements of pop music’s newest sensation: rock and roll.  In an interview I did with Henry Mancini, he described his famous “Peter Gunn” theme as a rock tune due to its “straight eight” rhythms and its twangy guitar line. Not coincidentally, John Barry’s arrangement of the James Bond theme foregrounded Vic Flick’s guitar in a similar way. The middle section of the tune features a swinging, Dizzy Gillespie-ish break. But that guitar sound stood out, much closer to Carl Perkins than to Wes Montgomery.

During the 1960s, no film composer was as thoroughly steeped in the rock idiom as Ennio Morricone. Yet, unlike Mancini and Barry, who were drawn toward rockabilly in their use of electric guitar, Morricone cribbed from the slightly more modern sounds of early sixties surf-rock. Morricone tells Alessandro De Rosa that he used the electric guitar long before he wrote the scores of his spaghetti Westerns, albeit not as a solo instrument. Yet he opted to feature the electric guitar in the main theme of A Fistful of Dollars because he liked “its tough and sharp timbre,” which he felt was perfect for the atmosphere of the film.

De Rosa also notes that the Shadows’ surf music was extremely popular on Italian record charts in the early sixties, especially their Western-themed classic “Apache.” The distinctive twang of Hank Marvin’s Fender Stratocaster was widely imitated by Italian beat bands. By the time A Fistful of Dollars was in production, the Shadows’ influence had seeped into Italian popular music culture. When they topped the Italian charts in 1963 with “Geronimo,” another paean to the American west, it probably seemed quite natural to make the Stratocaster’s sound the centerpiece of Leone’s groundbreaking film.

Morricone made the electric guitar the star of many more spaghetti Western scores.  But none so prominently as the “Man With the Harmonica” theme of Once Upon a Time in the West.  Famously, the film features no main title in the opening credits, “scoring” the scene instead with the sounds of the wind, a creaking mill, the clanging of a metal gate, and an especially persistent horsefly (among other things). Morricone’s score doesn’t come into Leone’s film until about the twenty-minute mark.  But when it does it makes quite an entrance.

Frank and his gang have just slaughtered the McBain family. The only survivor is a red-headed boy who comes running out of the house after hearing gunshots. As he comes into a close-up, Bruno Battisti D’Amario’s guitar starts blasting through the theater speakers. The sound is loud and distorted, cutting through the silence like an axe through a chicken’s neck.

In his instructions to D’Amario, Morricone insisted that the theme was meant to “wound the audience’s ears like a blade” the first time we hear it. As a coup de théâtre, it is brutally effective. I’ve seen it more than twenty times, and the moment never fails to give me chills. Here we see Morricone experimenting with the timbre of the guitar by heightening the effects of high volume and high voltage to overdrive the power valves of the amplifier. The effect was such that some critics even described Morricone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West as a sort of “post-Hendrix” rock. The comparison was undoubtedly flattering. No musician had done more to explore the timbral possibilities of the electric guitar than Jimi Hendrix.

Morricone experimented in other ways that seemed to merge elements of avant-garde classical music with more vernacular forms. Consider his “Harmonica” motif in Once Upon a Time in the West alongside Henry Mancini’s main title for Wait Until Dark, which was released about a year before Leone’s epic. Both film scores explore microtonal effects, albeit in quite different ways.

In Mancini’s case, he asked the studio to give him two pianos that were tuned a quarter tone apart.  He then asked his two performers to play the chords of an accompaniment figure in rapid succession.

The dissonance produced through this effect is unlike any produced in atonal writing. There the composer deliberately emphasizes intervals that create a sense of disharmony, such as minor seconds, major sevenths, and tritones. Yet Mancini’s microtonal experiment does something else entirely. Our ears tell us we should be hearing the same chord, but the repetition on the detuned pianos sounds a bit off. Mancini’s score evokes a kind of dislocation well suited to Wait Until Dark’s generic trappings as a psychological thriller. The effects, though, were even more pronounced for the two pianists who played on the main title.  Pearl Kaufman and Jimmy Rowles both reported having to take frequent breaks during the recording sessions. The sort of “swimming” effect produced by the detuned pianos gave them a feeling of vertigo and nausea commonly found in motion sickness.

Morricone’s approach to microtonal harmonies proves to be much more elemental: the wavering sounds of two notes played on the harmonica, ostensibly a half step apart. Anyone who has played a harmonica knows it requires great breath control. Inhale and you make one pitch. Exhale and you make another. Beyond that, skilled performers can also bend pitch on a harmonica by changing their embouchure. Harmonica players can also use their hands as dampers, altering the sound in much the same way a wah-wah mute alters the tone of a trumpet.

All of these techniques give the harmonica player a number of means to bend pitch.  Morricone takes full advantage of them with the “Harmonica” motif in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Listening to this passage, one can hear how Franco De Gemini’s mouth harp straddles the fence between sounding bluesy and sounding strident. Morricone viewed the half-step relation in the motif as a key element in building musical tension since it is heard in the flashback that explains Harmonica’s life-long quest for revenge.  Yet De Gemini’s subtly wavering pitch seems to capture the full range of microinterval variants that fall between the D# and E that comprise the last two notes of the motif.

Both composers’ explorations of microtonal effects prove effective. But the precision of the quarter tone difference in Mancini’s detuned pianos gives the music a mechanistic quality that seems cold and brittle. By contrast, the harmonica’s fluid pitch-bending in Once Upon a Time in the West is looser, freer, more improvisatory – all of which fits the types of vernacular music played on harmonica.

This effect was enhanced by Morricone’s recording techniques. He first recorded the orchestra and then recorded De Gemini’s harmonic track individually. Although the latter recording was less precise, Morricone said that “the tension generated by the performance made his harmonica float over the orchestra. Now on the beat, then behind it, this time ahead….in short, it was almost as though it was fluctuating.”

Morricone’s compositional and recording techniques in Once Upon a Time in the West might seem less daring than Mancini’s more avant-garde experiment in Wait Until Dark. Yet Morricone’s music gains something in its more organic placement within Leone’s film. The harmonica’s wavering pitch is akin to the sorts of portamenti and string-bending frequently heard from saxophones, guitars, and basses in a multitude of rock and roll songs produced throughout the idiom’s history. And the harmonica as an object has long been a common feature of the Western’s iconography. In this way, Morricone’s experimentation is grounded in the dramatic, stylistic, and symbolic structures of Leone’s epic.

 

A horse of a different tone color

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

Unquestionably, Morricone’s most audible innovations came through his approach to orchestration.  As nearly every obituary noted, his unusual combinations of instruments became a hallmark of the Morricone sound. In a summary of the signature elements found in the score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,  The Economist declared:

And then there is the freewheeling range of sounds with which he chose to make that music: the whistling, the yodeling, the gunfire and the squeaky ocarina, an ancient Italian wind instrument that looks like a sweet potato and is better known to a younger generation as the soundtrack of a Nintendo video game.

As I suggested above, Morricone was part of a cohort that moved outside the neo-Romantic style of film composition associated with the studio era. Unconventional orchestrations were an important part of that push.

Several factors provided impetus for this change. One was the embrace of jazz and pop styles. Incorporating those elements often meant writing for the instruments typically associated with those idioms. Mancini, John Barry, Frank De Vol, and Nelson Riddle all were prominent exponents of this approach during the 1960s. Indeed, many of Mancini’s orchestrations simply add strings to the usual forces of a jazz big band.

A second factor was the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s. The majors’ retrenchment saw them making fewer films and reducing their overhead costs. They sold off parts of their backlots and leased their soundstages to independent producers or television crews. They also tried to shed labor costs, including those associated with maintaining an in-house orchestra.

This was bad news for musicians, who suddenly found themselves working in a gig economy as independent contractors. But it was good news for composers who now could write music for something other than a standard chamber orchestra. (During the Golden Age, studio bosses would sometimes chafe at the notion of hiring extra musicians, since they were already keeping as many as fifty regularly on call.)

With more flexible options when it came to musical labor, composers began to experiment with more unusual combinations. Whereas the typical studio orchestra employed one or two keyboardists, Bernard Herrmann arranged one cue in Journey to the Center of the Earth for nine organs. Three organists played electronic organs and one played a cathedral organ.

In many ways, Herrmann’s experiments with orchestration provide an interesting foil for Morricone’s own flights of fancy. For two of the scores Herrmann wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, he self-consciously limited his palette to the sounds of a single section of the orchestra. On Psycho, Herrmann wrote only for strings, claiming that the more monochrome sound was fitting for a black and white film. Yet, within that uniformity, Herrmann wrought an extraordinary range of subtle differences in timbre through the use of pizzicato, mutes, and unusual bowing techniques. The famous bird shrieks produced by the violins during the shower murder recall the avant-primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. But Herrmann achieved this effect only with strings rather than a full orchestra.

Herrmann did something similar in his unused score for Torn Curtain, which was written for sixteen French horns, nine trombones, two tubas, twelve flutes, two sets of timpani, eight cellos, and eight basses. For Torn Curtain, Herrmann’s restriction of his palette was inspired by the setting rather than the cinematography. By emphasizing the low brass and lower-pitched strings, the composer sought to find a sonic equivalent to the drab cheerlessness of life behind the Iron Curtain. Alas, Hitchcock rejected the score under pressure from Universal to produce a saleable music tie-in. The studio wanted something like the Beatles. What they got from Herrmann was more like John Philip Sousa on an acid trip.

If Herrmann’s orchestrations were the musical equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting, exploring a range of subtle shadings within a single color, Morricone’s were closer to the collage principles of Robert Rauschenberg. Just as Rauschenberg’s work juxtaposed unconventional materials and objects within a single canvas, Morricone enjoyed the wild, discordant collisions that could come by combining oddball instruments with one another. The composer is often described as a postmodernist because of his “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to orchestration. No doubt this is one of the reasons his work was so appealing to “downtown” musical avant-gardists like John Zorn.

Consider, for example, the way Morricone uses vocal textures throughout his score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It features Edda Dell’Orso’s gorgeous soprano, natch.  But it also features a variety of other vocal sounds, some of which border on the “unmusical.” These include the famous “coyote incipit” that has become something of a meme for the spaghetti Western more generally.

There are also plenty of other chants, grunts, and yelps that add their flavors to the musical stew.  Morricone even had his singers vocalize through various trumpet mutes to produce the “wah-wah-wah” that is a motivic counterpart to the coyote incipit.

Morricone also made marvelous use of library effects to incorporate the sonic iconography of the Western into his score. We hear gunfire, whipcracks, and ricocheting bullets as elements of rhythmic punctuation throughout the music of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (Since cowboy yells and whipcracks both appear in the opening theme of Rawhide, perhaps both of these tactics are a sly reference to star Clint Eastwood’s television career.) Even these audacious touches are supplemented by simple, but effective solutions to musical problems. In need of a rhythmic pulse underneath the melody, Morricone coaxed Bruno D’Amario to tap the pickup on his electric guitar.

All of this suggests something very Cagean in Morricone’s approach to orchestration. It is though he took the idea of Cage’s “prepared piano” in which different objects could be laid on the strings of piano’s soundboard, and applied it to the full orchestra.

 

What is the sound of one wing flapping?

The Mission (1986).

Although Morricone’s spaghetti Western scores displayed his boldest experiments in orchestration, his interest in unusual sonorities continued throughout his career.  Some choices are a bit more conventional than others. But they always strike me as inherently right. The oboe seems like a fairly idiosyncratic instrument for an 18^th-century Jesuit missionary. Surprisingly, though, its melancholic yet dulcet melismas are a perfect complement to the big sound of The Mission’s double chorus, the latter itself inspired by the luminous sacred music of Palestrina.

Or think of Morricone’s use of the panpipe.  He seems attracted to its airy timbre, using it in several scores throughout his career.  Yet, comparing its appearance in both Once Upon a Time in America and Casualties of War shows that the panpipe’s sound resists any easy associations. In Leone’s gangster epic, the panpipe is introduced in “Cockeye’s Theme” in a scene where Noodles buys a one-way ticket to Buffalo. After completing his purchase, his attention is drawn to a large poster encouraging tourists to visit Coney Island. The music suggests Noodles’ memories of childhood and his grief after hearing the news that his three childhood friends all died in a battle with federal agents.

It comes back, though, at the moment when Dominic is killed by Bugsy, a rival gang member. As Morricone noted, Leone identified this scene “as a definite point of no return in the story, the watershed marking the end of youth.”

In contrast, for De Palma’s combat film, Morricone used two panpipes in the theme he wrote for the young Vietnamese woman who is abducted, raped, and killed by US soldiers. Here the motivation was something that struck Morricone in the staging of her death.

She buckles her legs like a dying bird, before tumbling down from the high ground.  I imagined a theme based on just a few notes for two panpipes, which by pin-ponging their sound, evoke the slowing fluttering of a bird’s wings shortly before death.

At first blush, Morricone’s description of the scene sounds like “Mickey-Mousing” where the music accents a character’s actions, movements, or gestures.  But what Morricone actually gives us turns out to be much more sophisticated. A classical Hollywood composer like Max Steiner might have caught the girl’s collapse through a downward glissando or a rapid, descending scale run.  Instead Morricone gives us a different musical gesture – the alternation of two notes on the panpipe – to suggest an action not visible onscreen: a dying bird’s fluttering wings.

As is evident in the clip, we hear the two panpipes play over the image of the young woman’s broken body. Yet Morricone associatively links it to the birdlike movement seen about a minute earlier: the buckling of her knees as she falls.

A moment such as this one nicely captures Morricone’s gift for storytelling. Many of Morricone’s fans treat his scores as absolute music, often listening to them repeatedly without ever watching the films they accompany. But Morricone also had a gift for translating a film’s larger themes and meanings into musical forms.

Morricone achieved fame for his beautiful melodies, rich harmonies, and surprising orchestrations.  None of that would be very meaningful, though, if these elements weren’t firmly rooted in the composer’s extraordinary dramatic sense.

 

The greatest?

The Hateful Eight (2015).

At the end of Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, Alessandro De Rosa asks the composer if there was a specific moment when he realized he’d become one of the greatest, most influential composers of the century. Morricone gets flustered by the question, claiming such judgments are premature. In music, it takes hundreds of years to determine whether one’s work endures. He then adds a polite, but banal conclusion, saying it is wonderful to be appreciated and even better to have one’s music reach so many people.

Still disarmed by the question, Morricone continues hesitatingly:

The greatest of the century?  It is difficult to reply….Oh dear…. where did you hear this?

De Rosa responds, “It was just to provoke your vanity…”  Acknowledging the trap set before him, Morricone smiles and replies, “You don’t say….I figured!”

Morricone’s humility might be a tacit recognition that he’s had the great fortune to write music for the movies–one of the greatest engines for pleasure that the world has ever seen. A great film surely benefits from a great score. Yet it can seem that the composer is just along for the ride.

Still, Morricone understood that his music was often better than the films it accompanied. As he well knew, fortune gives with one hand and takes with the other. Morricone wrote music for masterpieces like Days of Heaven. He also worked on schlockfests like The Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Perhaps more than other craft positions, the lot of a film composer can seem unique. Music exists as its own formal system. But film scores are always written in the service of something else and judged accordingly. Directors often hope in vain that a composer can salvage a bad scene. Yet composers themselves will say they’re not miracle workers. And even when the score can stand on its own, some pugnacious critic will ask, “Should it?”

When I was doing the initial research for my dissertation during the early nineties, I recall some film music critics dividing the field into craft workers and stylists. The paradigm case for the former was a composer like Jerry Goldsmith, who subordinated his personality to the dramatic requirements of the work.  Goldsmith could write a bittersweet jazz melody for Chinatown, a stirring horn call for the war epic Patton, cartoonish “Mickey-mousing” for the comic fantasy Gremlins, and outré dodecaphonic themes for sci-fi adventures like Planet of the Apes and Alien. Binge-watch all five films and it would seem hard to believe the music was all the work of a single person.

Stylists, on the other hand, were composers who had created such a distinctive sound that their music could not be mistaken for that of another. All three of the composers featured in my book seemed to fit that rubric – Henry Mancini, John Barry, and Ennio Morricone – a factor that likely contributed to the popularity of their scores in ancillary markets.

Looking back almost thirty years later, the label of stylist fits the work of Mancini and Barry quite well.  In fact, I have anecdotal proof of the latter in my first viewing of Michael Apted’s espionage thriller Enigma. Halfway through film, I wondered to myself who had written the score since it sounded a lot like John Barry.  Checking the poster afterward, my hunch was confirmed; it was John Barry!

For Morricone, though, the “stylist” label seems misapplied. At the time, this was due to the fact that he was so strongly associated with the spaghetti Western. He had written music for more than thirty films in the cycle and had come to define it in the public imagination. It is telling that the scores written for other spaghetti Westerns by Luis Bacalov or Riz Ortolani sound like Morricone facsimiles.

Identifying Morricone so closely with the spaghetti Western, though, ignores the inspired music he wrote for so many other genres: horror films, gangster films, thrillers, historical epics, political satires, and even the occasional romantic drama.

     

Take five Morricone classics not so randomly selected: Teorema, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Cinema Paradiso, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, and The Hateful Eight. Could any other composer have written the notes that we hear?  Probably not. They all seem to bear the distinctive Morricone signature. Yet they are also so unlike one another that it seems unfair to suggest that he didn’t mold his sound to the specific needs of each film. For Morricone, we have to throw out the “either/or” implied by the rubric. He’s both a craft worker and a stylist.

 

If that seems like a copout on my part, it’s one I will happily embrace. For me, like many others evaluating Morricone’s legacy after his death, his music is both cerebral and visceral. It warms the heart and tickles the brain, sometimes simultaneously. And that seems rare for much 20^th-century concert music, which even at its best, can feel quite cold and analytical.

Thirty years later, Morricone’s music still enthralls me in a way that’s unlike that of any other film composer, especially when the score is heard coming from the big screen. I’ve had the great pleasure of screening a 35mm print of The Untouchables the past two years. Hearing Morricone’s main title played back in Dolby Stereo with a proper subwoofer, I still get goosebumps. I even anticipate the massive bass drum hit that punctuates the rhythms played by brushes on the snare. If the stinging guitar chord that introduces Frank was intended to sound like a stab, that bass drum sound is the musical equivalent of a gut-punch.

Ciao, Maestro! You will be missed. Yet your music will live on, perhaps even for centuries. For my part, you’ve given me hundreds of joyful moments at the cinema and a lifetime of wonderful memories.

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Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words can be found here. If you want to learn more about his music, this is a great place to start.  It includes reproductions of Morricone’s handwritten musical notation.  It also includes a thorough survey of both Morricone’s film scores and his concert works.

My review of Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words is here. A brief discussion of Morricone’s score for The Hateful Eight can be found in my 2016 Oscar preview. Incidentally, Tarantino used Bernard Herrmann’s rejected score for Torn Curtain for the excerpt from Rick Dalton’s action film The 14 Fists of McCluskey in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. The cue can be found here and the scene from Tarantino’s film is here.

My chapter on Morricone’s spaghetti Western scores can be found in The Sounds of Commerce.

Henry Mancini discusses his score for Wait Until Dark in his autobiography, Did They Mention the Music? Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho has been analyzed by several film music scholars.  Among the best is Fred Steiner’s “Bernard Herrmann’s ‘Black-and-White’ Music for Hitchcock’s Psycho,” anthologized in Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974-1978.  Details of Herrmann’s orchestrations for his rejected score for Torn Curtain can be found in the liner notes of conductor Joel McNeely’s recording. They’ve been posted here.

The chess portrait above is by Riccardo Musacchio.

Morricone waits backstage at a 2010 concert of his work at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Photo by Roberto Musacchio.

 

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How They Shot the Impossible Mirror Scene in ‘Contact’

Welcome to How’d They Do That? — a bi-monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off. This entry looks into the making of the impossible mirror scene in Contact.

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Contact takes place at the crossroads of belief, truth, and reality, which is fitting. Because this film contains a shot that will make you question all three of those things.

Based on Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name, Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 sci-fi drama follows Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway (Jodie Foster), a SETI scientist chosen to make first contact with extraterrestrial life. Ellie inherited her passion for astronomy from her father, who passed away from a heart attack when she was a child. Early in the film, there is a flashback of the night young Ellie (Jena Malone) found her father collapsed on the floor. As she rushes to his side, he reaches out for help, and Ellie, distraught, runs to fetch his pills from the bathroom cupboard upstairs.

She sprints frantically up the stairs. When she reaches the landing, like a nightmare, time slows to a crawl. Every second feels stretched, near-frozen, and precious. Then, reality breaks: the camera pulls back to reveal that everything we’ve seen has been a reflection in the cabinet mirror. Ellie grabs the pills, and the door closes, and we see a reflection of a photograph of Ellie and her father. How was all of that a reflection? Did they use a double? Where was the cameraman? How the hell did they do that?

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How’d they do that?

Long story short:

There is no mirror in this sequence, only simple, but clever, compositing.

Long story long:

The DVD for Contact contains not one, but three commentary tracks. One of which is by the film’s visual effects supervisors, Ken Ralston and Stephen Rosenbaum. During the hallway scene, the pair explain thatthe goal was to find a way to convey the intensity of Ellie’s emotional state without showing her father. Indeed, from the slow-mo to the final reveal of the photograph, every single element of this sequence puts the story first. Which, VFX aside, is a big part of why this sequence is so unforgettable.

Originally, the moment where Ellie discovers her father looked very different. In an interview with vfxblog, Ralston describes how the initial vision was for something resembling modern-day bullet time: “…[Ellie’s father] was going to be in mid-fall with a lot of things flying in the air but frozen there while she is walking around her father, looking at him.” During filming, the focus of the scene shifted towards just Ellie.

What appears to be a continuous shot is, in fact, two shots and one still plate. These three elements come together with the help of a blue screen located on the bathroom cabinet where the mirror should be.

In Shot A, the camera is pointed at Ellie as she runs up the stairs and down the hallway. It ends with her extending her hand towards the (non-existent) cabinet handle. An operator with a Vista Vision camera strapped to his chest ran backward down the hallway, tracking Malone. “Our camera operator, who was also a great Steadicam operator, had to keep running up those stairs with [Malone] over and over…he was dying,” describes Ralston. The slow-motion effect, which begins once Ellie reaches the upper landing, was achieved by ramping up the framerate. According to Sheena Duggal, Contact’s compositing supervisor, the focus-puller had to be painted out of the entire shot. No small feat in 1996.

In Shot B, the camera points towards the blue screen on the cabinet and pulls back matching the tracking speed in Shot A. This movement synch between the two shots is a huge part of why the effect feels seamless. The smooth “transition” between Shot A and Shot B gives the impression that we are always, impossibly, moving backward in one continuous motion.

The real brain-breaking moment in the sequence is when Ellie slow-runs through the doorway of the bathroom. As she passes through, the handle of the bathroom cabinet emerges from the lower-left corner of the frame. However, because our focus is on Ellie, the peripheral cabinet handle reads like a doorknob. Perhaps the doorknob of the open bathroom door. In any case, Ellie grabbing that knob feels unexpected. What’s going on in that moment is a genius sleight of hand: the edge of the cabinet door is emerging as the camera is pulling away from the blue screen. It’s a reveal of a second shot that never feels like a reveal of a second shot.

As the camera keeps zooming out, we find ourselves behind Ellie, whose hand emerges from the right to open the cabinet and grab the pills. She exits the frame, and the cabinet door swings shut, revealing a “reflection” of a photograph elsewhere in the bathroom. Keep in mind: this is a fake mirror. So the “reflected” shot with the photograph isn’t really there. Neither are the finger smudges or the distortion created by the mirror’s bevilled edge as the cabinet swings open and shut. Another cool detail: if you keep your eyes on the “reflection” as Shot-B-Ellie opens the cabinet, you can see that the camera operator from Shot A panned away to mimic the movement of the hinged cabinet door.

On a technical level, Shots A and B never “turn from one shot into the other.” But, narratively, the two shots “trade-off” their hold on what the audience considers reality vs. reflection when Ellie reaches the mirror. As Ellie reaches out for the handle, you can tell that the distance between her “real hand” (in Shot B) and her “reflected hand” (in Shot A) doesn’t quite look right. Some of the fingers were even reconstructed digitally, according to Duggal. In any case, most folks aren’t looking at Jena Malone’s hand placement during this shot, let alone her fingers. They’re trying to collect their jaws up off the floor because they’ve just witnessed a camera pass backward through a mirror.

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What’s the precedent?

Compositing— the technique of combining different shots and elements into one image—is the backbone of visual effects. The earliest incarnations of compositing drew from still-frame techniques, namely: multiple exposures. Georges Méliès’ and F.W. Murnau’s work contains some of the most recognizable examples of silent-era matte composites, which involved covering up part of a shot during its initial exposure. Later, that covered section could be exposed again to capture a different subject.

 

In 1916, Murnau’s cinematographer of choice, Frank D. Williams, created the first traveling mattes using a black screen process. A traveling matte is an opaque matte that matches the movements of a subject so that they can be superimposed over a separately filmed background without appearing semi-transparent. In the 1930s, the effect improved with the Dunning Process. Dunning’s method shot foreground subjects with a powerful yellow light against a strongly lit blue screen, using panchromatic film stock. The captured footage could then be split into two different film elements: the foreground element and the traveling matte.

In 1940, special effects artist Larry Butler created a way of compositing color film sequences. Using the three-strip technicolor process, he shot his subjects against a plain blue background. The special effects department would then manipulate that sequence to produce a black-and-white traveling matte using a technique similar to the Williams process. This matte would then be passed through an optical printer to combine all the layers into one single element with a composited image. The technique won Butler an Academy award in 1940. The sodium vapor process, which used a yellow screen and a beam-splitting prism, was famously used by Disney to combine live-action and animated sequences. The process was technically superior, but it was so ridiculously expensive that only one sodium vapor camera was ever produced.

The basics of Butler’s technique would remain essentially unaltered until 1975 when Star Wars upped the stakes for blue screen traveling mattes with computer-controlled cameras. If you want to learn more about the rise of the blue screen in the 80s, this video from ILM’s Mark Vargo is a great place to start.

Finally, just in terms of trippy cinematic mirror effects, I’d be remiss not to mention the watery mirror of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950). In the film, Orpheus (Jean Marais) travels between the world of the living and the dead through a magic mirror, which ripples like water as he passes through it. The mirror was shot from above and was, in fact, a vat of liquid mercury. Marais had to wear protective gloves in order to interact with the “mirror.”

Let’s be thankful for blue screens: a way of passing through mirrors that doesn’t involve interacting with a toxic liquid.

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Christopher Walken Is an Action Hero in ‘McBain’

Welcome to The Prime Sublime, a weekly column dedicated to the underseen and underloved films buried beneath page after page of far more popular fare on Amazon’s Prime Video collection. We’re not just cherry-picking obscure titles, though, as these are movies that we find beautiful in their own, often unique ways. You might even say we think they’re sublime. This week, our pick is McBain, starring Christopher Walken as an action hero.

“Sublime /səˈblīm/: of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.”

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James Glickenhaus doesn’t get the credit he deserves as a director of awesome schlock. That’s probably because he only made eight movies during his filmmaking career, the majority of which have been forgotten in the grand scheme of things. Most people know him for The Exterminator, a Death Wish-esque vigilante movie that features one of the most gruesome beheadings you’re ever likely to see in a movie. But his oeuvre is very entertaining, and some of his lesser-known movies actually attracted some famous actors. McBain — which isn’t about The Simpsons character — is a prime example.

What’s it about?

The film revolves around a group of former Vietnam PoWs, led by the titular character (Walken), who stage a coup in Colombia to avenge the death of their buddy. Before the soldiers overthrow any dictators in South America, however, they must raise the funds for the mission. To do this, they take to the streets of New York and extort money from gangsters.

After blowing some cretins to smithereens in the Big Apple, the middle-aged veterans bring their gung-ho mayhem to Colombia and chaos ensues. And by Colombia, I mean the Philippines, as it was much cheaper to shoot movies there at the time. Things get blown up, people get shot, and chaos reigns.

Joining Walken in the uprising are Michael Ironside, Steve James, TG Waites, and Jay Patterson. You can’t go wrong with that cast, even though this is the Walken show for the most part.

What makes it sublime?

Glickenhaus is a filmmaker who knows how to stage a good action sequence, and McBain is filled with some very enjoyable scenes in that regard. From aerial dogfights to bad guys dangling from rooftops, the movie delivers plenty of high octane thrills and moments of carnage. The movie is a nonstop barrage of badassery after it kicks into gear, and that’s the selling point. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Walken come crashing through a ceiling, and that just so happens to happen here.

McBain also packs a punch when it comes to the violence. While it isn’t as hard-edged as The Exterminator, the movie isn’t shy about showcasing the atrocities of war. For example, there are scenes where innocent villagers are gunned down that are quite disturbing to watch. But the film’s unapologetic and provocative elements are all part of its charm. These moments don’t make for pleasant viewing, but they elevate what is otherwise a pretty conventional actioner in many ways.

However, credit also must be given to McBain for its socially conscious aspects as well. It isn’t exactly a deep commentary on the state of world affairs by any means, but on paper, it might come across as a slice of American jingoism. It really isn’t. There is corruption on all sides in the world of McBain, and I admire that kind of cynical worldview in schlocky action flicks.

Much like Glickenhaus’s other movies, McBain follows characters who are quite lost. He likes fractured heroes who can’t fully adjust to civilian life following their combat days. Perhaps this a commentary on veterans not being able to find their way in regular society again. But his heroes aren’t one-dimensional, and this ragtag bunch is no different. It’s also great seeing Walken play the lead in a movie like this, as he isn’t exactly the most obvious choice for this type of role.

Glickenhaus is also one of the masters of grimy New York filmmaking, up there with other auteurs like Larry Cohen and Bill Lustig. McBain does venture into South America, but the Big Apple exploitation that the director is synonymous with is still present and accounted for here. You really get a sense of the streets and the era, which will appeal to movie fans who love genre flicks set there. The movie does a great job of maximizing its locations, and there is a sense of scale on display that manages to exceed the film’s low-budget constraints.

And in conclusion…

McBain is your average man-on-mission movie in many ways. However, the strong cast, fun characters, and abundance of carnage make for a good time. Fans of action B movies will have a lot of fun with this one, especially if they like their violence delivered with some oomph. It’s also great to see Walken play against type to an extent, even though his general stone-faced bravado makes him a perfect fit for this type of fare. It’s actually amazing that he didn’t make more movies in this vein, but at least he gave us this gem. The Deer Hunter might be his more acclaimed war movie, but McBain is just as good in its own way.

Want more sublime Prime finds? Of course you do.

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Fleischer Studios Taught Superman to Quit Leaping and Fly

Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, our weekly column where we continue the animated boob tube ritual of yesteryear. Our lives may no longer be scheduled around small screen programming, but that doesn’t mean we should forget the necessary sanctuary of Saturday ‘toons. In this entry, we spotlight the revolutionary Superman serial from Fleischer Studios.

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Superman was a sensation the moment he hit newsstands in April 1938. Action Comics #1 sold its 200,000 print run quickly, and subsequent issues boosted their distribution to a million copies each. Two years later, movie houses were thirsting to get the character on the big screen, but where Republic Studios failed to generate a live-action serial, Paramount Pictures secured the rights to produce seventeen cartoon shorts. They had an ace up their sleeve: Fleischer Studios, their animation division. All they needed to do was convince them to take on the task.

The Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, needed cash. While their first animated feature, Gulliver’s Travels, earned a tidy profit for Paramount, their contract penalized the Fleischers $350,000 for failing to maintain the production to its budget (they projected a cost of $500,000, but it easily surpassed $1.5 million). In addition, Paramount secured all the profits from foreign sales, leaving very little left for the animation house.

When Paramount brought them Superman, Dave Fleischer was not eager to adapt the wannabe Hercules in circus tights. Yes, they needed a hit, and they needed a hit’s bankroll, but Superman was too hot a property. The demand for the character required extravagant attention to detail and a lot of money — too much money to be profitable. So, expecting a total rebuke, Dave quoted the studio $100,000 per cartoon. They said…

No.

Oh.

Instead, Paramount came back with $50,000 for the premiere cartoon, $30,000 for the additional cartoons. Considering that the Fleischers cranked out Popeye shorts for half as much, saying no to Paramount was not an option. They got to work.

Max Fleischer brought a layer of reality to animation. He knew the medium could do more than cute animals and biologically distorted humans. Cartoons could explore truth, and they could mine recognizable emotions. Max idealized performance, and to inject it into the lifeless, a new tool was necessary.

The first animated films were rigid, unforgiving ventures. The characters moved in static bursts, unable to reproduce the fluidity of a flipbook. In 1915, Max Fleischer changed all that with the invention of rotoscoping.

Combining a projector and a transparent easel, Fleischer could trace over a motion picture image frame by frame, creating an unprecedented flow and rhythm to the movement of characters. While many scoffed at rotoscoping as a short cut, the technique stole great gobs of time from the artist. If the tracer deviated from the line in any way or misinterpreted a movement even in the slightest, the image would wiggle out of synch, destroying the uncanny realism. 

When it came to animating Superman, however, many of his incredible feats could not be rotoscoped. There were no subjects who could leap tall buildings or lift cars above their heads. So, if Fleischer Studios was going to bend beyond their tried-and-true method, they might as well break the established rules of the characters. Leaping tall buildings is cool, but flying is even cooler.

The Adventures of Superman radio show, which premiered in 1940 (a year before the Fleishers began their shorts), did not worry itself with the comic book. It took the ideas established by Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and ran with them, creating their own characters (Jimmy Olsen, Perry White) and MacGuffins (Kryptonite). Their liberty gave the Fleischers permission to run wild.

The Superman cartoons needed a big bang to kick off each episode. The Paramount logo fades from the foreground, leaving a bright, blue starry night sky. From the upper right, a streak of red and blue buzzes across the screen and out again. It returns and leaves and returns.

We hear one spectator from the ground below bellow, “Up in the sky, look!’ Another responds in glee, “It’s a bird!” Another citizen disagrees, “It’s a plane!” Then, the smartest of the bunch lands on the correct answer with a confident shout, “It’s Superman!” These four sentences may have belonged to the radio show, but the Fleischers brought thunderous punctuation to them when they climaxed the phrase with an electric red title card that seared into the popular imagination.

A brief introduction to the character opened every short, explaining Superman’s abilities and origins. “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!” As with the flying, the cartoons gifted another piece to the canon. Both the radio show and the future television series picked up this mighty declaration of strength as their own.

The Superman shorts ran theatrically from 1941 to 1943. Before the series ever launched, tensions were already bubbling between the brothers (mostly spawned by an adulterous love affair that Dave had with his secretary). Dave left the company for Screen Gems, and Paramount eventually snatched control, booting Max to the curb and renaming the animation division Famous Studios — the banner of which flies before the last eight Superman cartoons.

The first batch of Superman shorts managed by the Fleischers are superb. They’re pulpy adventures in which the man of tomorrow battles evil scientists, jewelry-crazed flying robots, and dinosaurs run amuck. The Famous Studios Superman falls into predictable propaganda: Superman vs. Nazi pilots, etc. Adolf Hitler even manages to make a cameo.

Famous Studios merely towed the patriotic line. As did the comics. All comics.

With America’s entrance into World War II, the country rallied its troops, both real and fictional, to smash the Axis plague. As such, Superman appeared like any other superhero of the day, and attention wained. When Famous Studios finally pulled the plug, in 1943, they replaced the series with a much more comical Sunday Funnies hero, Little Lulu.

After Superman, Max Fleischer bounced around. He spent nearly a decade at The Jam Handy Organization, where he directed the seasonal favorite Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. When Paramount removed his credit from several of his films, he won a lawsuit against them. The victory led to a crusade against the studio, and he spent the last days of his life trying to reclaim the rights to his other cartoon creation, Betty Boop.

The money and the detail thrown at Superman by Paramount and the Fleischers elevate the shorts above all others of its day. Simply, nothing else looked like Superman. As a result, these seventeen animated films burned into the brain of those watching, and its influence is seen well beyond its comic book origins, shaping all manner of science fiction entertainment, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Castles in the Sky to Batman: The Animated Series to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

The Fleischers were wary of Superman. They had their passions and sought different avenues for their studio, but when they took a gig, they took a gig. Max and Dave threw everything into Superman, and their outsider, non-fan perspective pumped insight into an enterprise with decades still to grow. (

Remember the Fleischers when someone quotes a rulebook at you. When told, “Superman doesn’t fly,” they responded with a question, “Why not?” Then, they answered it with a legendary, redefining series of cartoons.

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The Power of Jeon Do-yeon’s Silence in ‘Secret Sunshine’

Acting is an art form, and behind every iconic character is an artist expressing themselves. Welcome to The Great Performances, a bi-weekly column exploring the art behind some of cinema’s best roles. This entry spotlights the award-winning performance given by Jeon Do-yeon in Secret Sunshine.

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Less than halfway through Chang-dong Lee’s Secret Sunshine, tragedy strikes for single mother Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon). Her young son, Jun, is discovered dead in a river after having been kidnapped and held for ransom. Shin-ae has spent the first act of the film already grieving the death of her husband. Now she is forced to learn a new kind of grief altogether.

Grief is never straightforward. Jeon capitalizes on this fact in her standout performance, moving effortlessly from intense, guttural sadness to delusional happiness, then to psychosis and back again in an exhausting, whiplash-inducing emotional rollercoaster. But between the screams and the physical collapse, the strength of Jeon’s performance lies in its quietest moments. 

Before the death of her son, Shin-ae’s everyday movements are bold and almost theatrical. In public, she is generally restrained and quiet, but when she lets go, she really lets go. Jeon expresses this through bold, fearless gestures. When she comes home one day and cannot find Jun, she melts to the ground and begins to wail in a way that is almost comically childlike. When attempting to impress her new neighbors, she lies about her wealth and drinks and laughs in a way that is jarring and unlike the Shin-ae we have become familiar with. She stumbles through the streets like a teen who has had a few too many.

After Jun is cremated, Shin-ae’s mother-in-law screams at her and tells her that she brings death wherever she goes. Shin-ae responds with a blank, lifeless stare, and the reaction is surprising, to say the least. What makes this response so noticeable is the opposition between pre- and post-trauma Shin-ae. And every time she responds to a tragedy with a cold, withdrawn expression, the intense body movements offer more of a pay-off. They give us a clearer indication of the transformation that grief puts its subject through. 

Yet, to suggest that Jeon’s expression is ever “blank” in Secret Sunshine would be a dire misinterpretation. Take, for instance, a moment after Shin-ae claims to have found “God.” She is seemingly in a state of bliss as a result and decides to visit Jun’s killer in prison and forgive him. Despite warnings from her friends, Shin-ae is optimistic that this visit will give her all the more reason to believe in God. But when Jun’s killer tells her that he, too, has found God, and, what’s more, that God has forgiven him, Shin-ae suddenly meets the depths of despair. God has forgiven her son’s killer before she has had a chance to. Now she has to reconcile with another massive loss in her life, that of God. She hardly says a word, but instead, her face falls slightly, and she merely looks at the killer. In this subtly hopeless stare lies the turning point of the film. 

One of the many strengths of Jeon’s performance, which earned her the best actress prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, is that the core of her character never changes. Not in her desperation for popularity in the beginning, nor in the frantic grief, nor in the blind faith, nor in the dull and depressed anger. When she makes the transformation into faith, she’s smiling, happy. She says that believing in God feels like “falling in love.” But her smile is never entirely convincing. We know that she is in pain. Her face is happy, but her eyes are not. Although Shin-ae lies to herself, Jeon refuses to lie to the camera. 

Indeed, Shin-ae is only able to maintain this facade in public. After a meeting with her religious friends, she returns to her home and turns her back to the camera. She is alone; for a moment, she is even shielded from the audience. When the camera cuts to a medium close-up of her face, we see tears welling up in her eyes. She says the Lord’s Prayer but is unable to keep the tears from rolling down her cheeks. It’s just us and her now.

Just as it is again later in the film when she convinces a married man to have sex with her to “get back” at God. The scene is not between Shin-ae and the man. As she gazes up at the sky and speaks with God, she by extension speaks with the audience. She whispers something at the sky that is, at first, impossible to make out. But we feel her sentiment, and it doesn’t even really matter what she is saying because her eyes tell us precisely the pain that she is feeling.

A similar moment occurs when she hijacks the audio at a religious meeting and plays rebellious music. As she walks away, her expression is blank: she does not need to look proud or angry because the action speaks for itself. Jeon finds similar power in gesture when she throws a rock at the window of the house she used to praise God in. We can hardly see her through the crack in the window, but, like when she convinces the man to cheat on his wife with her, and when she plays the music, we know exactly what she’s thinking and feeling. 

Jeon’s performance shows us early on in Secret Sunshine that Shin-ae is a character subject to dramatic changes — from lost, to heartbroken, to blissful, to angry, and back again. She seems to feel it all. But, in her performance, Jeon goes beyond these emotions, and in a tearful prayer, a gaze at the sky, or a blank stare, she gives us powerful insight into the core of Shin-ae. 

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