The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

Today's film is a dinosaur Western which really frightened me as a child.   The setting, according to a slide at the start, is 'Somewhere South of the Rio Grande.......... Around the turn of the century'.  I'm not entirely sure where or what the Rio Grande is* - I've always assumed it to be pretty-much the same thing as the Alamo or the Grand Canyon, and this movie does nothing so salve my ignorance.  Anyway, it's cowboy time in cowboy land.  There's a cowgirl (Gila Golan) who does horse-related stunts for the circus, and she really talks a good sass: 'Trouble!' she says, 'They say it comes in threes.  I wonder what the next two will be.'

The recipient of this brazen greeting is  James Franciscus.  Oh, you know - he's the man in 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' (1970) who isn't Charlton Heston, because Charlton Heston didn't want to do a sequel.  Well, he's just as Heston-y here to an extent that verges on impersonation.  It's something about the way he shows his teeth when he's listening.  The real star, though, is Ray Harryhausen, master of stop-motion creatures.  His are the dinosaurs, but before we get to them...

A little horse.

'El Diablo' is a very nice tiny horse, the size of a household cat, with a waggly mouse-tail.  No screen-capture can adequately express his sweet and tender motions.  This slightly capybara-esque animal is an 'eohippus', an ancestor of the modern horse.  It's a charmingly sleek creature, and for quite a while it seems that the film will be all about El Diablo's antics.  The best thing about the film's first half is the solemnity with which the cast keep saying the words 'little horse'.    A blind Latina woman gives terrible warnings about it: "I tell you, unless the little horse is returned we shall all suffer the curse of hell!"  She believes the film's dinosaurs are not just giant and hazardous but actively evil.  The little horse is merely their harbinger.  "Superstitious claptrap!" says the British professor, "There's nothing hocus-pocus about that little horse!"

And so we get into the adventure.  A valley of LIVING DINOSAURS is uncovered, and a child is carried off by a sparkly magenta pterodactyl, but a rodeo cowboy manages to wrestle it to death.  All the dinosaurs in this movie are purple - except in scenes with more than one at a time.  There's a fantastic dinosaur-on-dinosaur fight between Gwangi, the purple Allosaur who is also a T-rex, and an unnamed purple-sometimes-but-green-in-the-fight Styracosaurus.  It's probably the best dino-on-dino fight I've ever seen - no quick cuts or urgent editing, just fighting and biting and blurts of blood.

...and so will you be doomed - all of you -
unless the evil one is set free!

Finally, the scene came that haunted me in my youth.  I remembered it very vividly: the dinosaur has been put in a cage, covered by a tent, ready for its reveal to the world.  A young child sneaks into the tent and is torn apart by the dinosaur, and the tent is opened at the crucial moment, allowing the crowds to see the horrendous death.  As a six-year old this really shook me up.  Children aren't normally killed in films - not with this sort of brutality.  Watching again, I realise it's not a child, but a dwarf - a Latino dwarf who we've already seen acting violently towards the heroes, so it's kiiind-of okay to see him meet this grizzly end.  Nonetheless, when I saw this back in 1990ish, it was the scariest thing I'd seen in my life.  Of the horrors I've seen since then, I wonder which I found the most frightening.  What has toppled Gwangi's wrath from its position at the top of my nightmares?  9/11, perhaps?  The rise of xenophobia and the fall of compassion in 21st Century Britain, or perhaps the bit with the raptors in the kitchen from 'Jurassic Park' (1993)?  Who can say.

The climax of the film likewise lodged in my child memory: the townsfolk flee into a cathedral, and the giant dinosaur chases them, biting people in half.  The crowds find no sanctuary, but the dinosaur ends up trapped inside the cathedral, where a fire breaks out, and it burns to death, screaming in agony.  The crowds watch with a tense, silent sort-of sadness, as the building burns to the ground.  And then the film is over.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Like the last time I tried to face a childhood terror - returning to the York Dungeon after twenty years - I expected to find the situation pretty mild and amusing, and the old fear risible.  In both cases I actually found the revisitation weirdly upsetting, at times verging on distressing.  Consequently, I had a much stronger reaction to the end of this film than I feel it merits.

I'm really not sure whether this film is good.  It's certified 'U', so you should probably show it to your infants and see what they make of it.

P.S. This really couldn't be much more different from the other 1969 film I watched, 'The Bed-Sitting Room'.  I think they would make an astonishing double-bill.

P.P.S. *Let's pick up that dangling asterisk!  I don't like to languish in ignorance, so I've looked up the Rio Grande.  It's a big old river, running from the Southern States into Mexico, and coming out at around-about the spot where the asteroid/space-freighter hit the earth, thus destroying the dinosaurs.  Where, then, is this movie set?  'South of the Rio Grande' is all we're told.  South of which part?  If it's South of the Northernmost source of the river, the film could feasibly be set in Omaha, Ibiza or Kurdistan.  If it means South of the entire river, that opens up anywhere from Monterey and Mecca down to the South Pole.  Decide for yourself!

Jurassic Park (1993)

I had planned to avoid watching any movies this week as I've worked up a backlog of eleven watched-but-not-written-about films, and had meant to write, if not necessarily post, blogs about a few of them before consuming any more material.  On St. Christmas's Day, however, I was at my friend Blodeuwedd's house for Christmas pancakes, and made the mistake of examining the Radio Times legendary double-issue.  A quick glimpse provided a pleasant surprise: Jurassic Park is on after Doctor Who.  And since Blodeuwedd is a great ambassador for dragons*, and since my erstwhile housemate Philip J. Cook had recommended this film to me as the best possible slice of 1993, we could hardly resist.

I've meant to revisit this film for some while.  If I'd been patient and waited for its 2013 rerelease, of course, I could have seen it on the big screen in 3D - but I was not patient.  Nobody is patient when it's Christmas.  The reason I'd been so keen to give this another viewing?  In my memory, the dinosaurs on display are Real Live Dinosaurs, photo-realistic, actually present, no fakery about them.  Perhaps, I thought, nineties technology and low-grade VHS had fooled my infant eyes.  I was a little fearful of dinosaur-disappointment.  '93 is practically the eighties, after all, and most of a decade passed between this and the CGI-fests of of the Star Wars prequels, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings (listed here in ascending order of beauty and believability).  Would the majestic creatures now look as if they had sauntered out of a computer game?

If you haven't seen the film, this must look a dull screen-cap.

Well, first of all, this Steven Spielberg is an excellent director.  I had completely forgotten this, or never noticed it when I was younger, but he made this film excellent.  Perhaps I've heard his more recent films maligned so often that I've forgotten why he's famous - but this is amazingly tense, brilliantly exciting, perfectly constructed.  It looks handsome and it sound terrifying.  Hitchcock couldn't have made pursuit by velociraptors more tense, and Kubrick could not have made a more attractive or intriguing film about a Tyrannosaurus.

But what about those CGI dinosaurs?  How have they fared?  To my surprise, relief and delight, they are real live, actual dinosaurs.  How, nineteen years ago, it was possible to computer-generate creatures so convincingly present in the same place and lighting conditions as the actors, I cannot say.  Looking at a chronology of CGI, this was the age of 'Reboot' and 'Veggie Tales'.  Much of the praise must go to the compositing, but the basic ingredients are so good that, if you were to tell me this film made use of some actual living dinosaurs, I might just believe you.

There are only fifteen minutes of dinosaur footage, this economical use presumably allowing far more time, money and attention to go into those beautiful minutes.  Of this, about half is computer-generated dinosauriness, the other half animatronics - basically any shot where you only see a head and neck, or just a claw, is animatronic.  I really couldn't tell which was which - and that, to my mind, is the mark of photo-realism.  Like Fritz Lang's frightning dragon* in Die Nibelungen (1924), there was, apparently, a full-size real live physical T-rex built for this film.  A scary prospect.

A real live dinosaur!

There are some characters and in this film too, and they're all just fine, but I'm sorry to say we don't really watch Jurassic Park for anything but the dinosaurs.  I'll give them a moment, though - because as exciting as the dinosaurs are, they aren't just here to add spice to something dry.  On the contrary, this is a highly quotable script, full of witty characters, divided into the likeable and the hope-they-die-soon-oh-good-they-just-did-horribly.  I found, some decade-and-a-bit since I last saw this, I still know a few exchanges line for line and shot for shot.

I feel I've written an overwhelmingly positive review for you here, which may seem either naive or insincere.  Perhaps it's just nostalgia, and the fact I watched it most merrily on Christmas Day, but I really did find re-visiting 'Jurassic Park' an enjoyable experience.  It's a fair bit more accessible than some of the films I've been watching lately, and I'm interested to hear what young viewers, seeing it for the first time, may think.  I understand it's returning to the cinemas in April 2013, so we may find out whether the world shares my delectation.  As much as I tend to shun 3D, I may make an exception on this occasion.

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Something else to check out: a video trailer for a low-budget live production of 'Jurassic Park' from a little earlier this year.  It's everything you might hope, so be sure to at least take a glimpse.

---

Can't wait til April?  Need to see a Dinosaur?  Why not resort to materialism?



* P.S. Dinosaurs are basically dragons, aren't they?

Die Nibelungen (1924)

The terrifying dragon, Fafner

Sometimes I like to browse Amazon's recommendations page  - a curious set of things the site believes I ought to want, along the lines of "I see you've bought a bright green pancake pan from us, so you'll be wanting this Ken Dodd DVD" and other such eccentric and confusing links.  I'd almost lost faith in them when, once upon a time, the site happened to mention that ace German director Fritz Lang had made a five-hour silent film about the Nibelungs.  "Oh Amazon," I cried aloud, "you do know me!"

It's a movie in two films - which isn't to say it's an original and a sequel.  Rather, it was the fashion in the early twenties to make films with 22-hour intermissions, so go to the cinema, watch part one, go home, and come back the next day for part two.  The back of the box describes it as 'stately' and 'hypnotic', which in combination with the stated duration made it sound like it might be rather slow.  I was daunted, but cautiously optimistic.

If you're at all familiar with Wagner's four-opera 'Ring Cycle' (and I'll quite understand if you aren't - I only am because I like an epic, or feat of endurance, and perhaps because I like it be known that I like an epic), you might reasonably expect the plot of this double film to be familiar, for they both draw on the same source, concern Siegfried and Brunhild and the Nibelung gold.  But no!  Wotan and the rest of the Norse gods are out, Attila the Hun is in (with amazing makeup and performance that make him seem like some kind of space alien).  Brunhild is not a Valkyrie, just a brilliantly strong woman with a hat that looks like the offspring of a saucepan and a goose.

Brunhild's amazing hat

Fritz Lang certainly put in some effort to make the film he wanted to see.  Rather than going to a forest to shoot his forest scenes, he built the trees out of concrete.  If he wants to burn a building down and have it collapse he'll just burn it down, and if it falls on the actors it's all to the good so long as the cameras catch the moment.  Rather than waiting patiently for someone to invent CGI or stop-motion animation, he built a real live dragon and had it breathe real fire on his lead actor.  Indeed, this last thing is so extraordinary I feel I must compel you to see a clip of the terrifying dragon, inside which are many terrified technicians and puppeteers.

It's a big old story full of battle and flame grand vistas, but at its heart all about the knotty personal dramas of its key characters, with their extraordinary dancing movements, their strange silent faces acting out the intense drama of it all.  To my surprise and relief, the film sustained my attention and interest across its great duration.  I'd recommend it highly, if its combination of silence, length, ancientness and German-ness weren't sure to put y'all off.  Tell you what: watch Lang's Metropolis instead, and come to this as a long pudding, should you want more of the same.

---

Got a lot of time on your hands? Then why not buy the film on blu-ray or DVD and wonder at the crude beauties of 1920s film-making. Fear the dragon! Observe the magnificent hat! Feel the flames!