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!

Early films (1900-1904)

A film for each year from 1913 onwards!  It seemed a good, clear concept when I began the project, but now that 1913 is no longer exactly a century ago, it seems a rather arbitrary start-point.  Shall we go a little earlier?

The Enchanted Drawing (1900)

I’ve been aware of ‘The Enchanted Drawing’ for most of my life, as it garners a mention in ’The Rudiments of Wisdom’ by Tim Hunkin, an excellent book of illustrated facts that probably accounts for a very large part of my education.  The film combines live action and animation (though not in quite the way Hunkin remembers), as an artist is seen sketching, then plucking his illustrations from the paper, like Smarty Arty in ‘ZZZap!’ (1993-98).  He draws some wine, then picks it up from his drawing and drinks it, somewhat to the chagrin of the face he has rendered.  He cheers the face immeasurably by granting it a hat and a cigar.

It’s a short, satisfying film, augmenting J. Stuart Blackton’s pre-existing live performance piece with the cinematic innovation known as the stop trick, or locking off (stopping the camera, adding or removing elements, and starting the camera again, making the elements appear or disappear as if by magic).  These days we all know exactly how it's pulled off and have the resources to do so ourselves, but this remains a very lively and effective example of it, with a pleasing sense of humour behind it.  You can watch it here, and marvel at such a thing being produced during the reign of Victoria.

Stop Thief! (1901)

The first chase movie!  The film is short, and the plot simple: a vagabond steals some meat from a butcher, and is pursued by dogs.  He hides in a barrel, but they join him there, and eat the meat.  The man is then caught and belaboured about the head.  For its time it was pretty technically impressive, joining together a variety of consecutive shots to show the man’s route - though this very soon became the standard, and within a couple of years a film so simple would seem crude and obvious.

The film is enjoyably silly, but ends with more violent aggression than the crime, or the genre, seem to merit.  It's the earliest British film I've looked at, and you can watch it here, though I wouldn't really encourage you to do so.

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

Georges Méliès was an amazingly dedicated early director, building his own film camera, and making several hundred films between 1896 and 1913.  He was also a stage-magician, with all the ingenuity for trickery that comes with such an occupation.  He invented the aforementioned stop-trick, and makes thorough use of it here.

This is the source of that famous image of the moon with a rocket in its eye, though that shot makes up only a fraction of the wonders on display.  We follow a court of elderly wizards, or perhaps just wise old men who dress for a holiday, and climb into a capsule which is fired into space, where they witness several astounding phenomena, and tussle with exploding moon-men.  It's beautifully stylised, and feels like 'Mary Poppins' (1964) in ways that I can't quite pin down.

After the wizards' rocket arrives in the moon's angular marshlands, I worried about how they would take of again, since they lacked the telescoping launch contraption seen on Earth.  Clearly, I hadn’t grasped the charming naïveté of the science at play: the film seems to assume that all gravity comes from Earth, meaning one can land on the top of the moon, but make your return voyage by pushing the rocket off a cliff, and falling back to Earth.

It's certainly the best of the films I've watched for this entry.  At this point in history, Georges Méliès was the most exciting director on the planet, and it was quite a while before anybody caught up with his witty and surprising visuals, and genuinely attractive designs.  I can't think why you wouldn't look the film up on Youtube.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

I’ve already written about a film from 1903, ‘La Vie et Passion de Jesus Christ’, which was in colour - albeit of the crudest sort - was most of an hour long, and was filled with special effects.  Given how rarely 1900s movies are spoken of, and how crude and terrible films from later decades could often be, I was astounded to find such technical and artistic competence so early in the history of cinema.

Edwin S. Porter’s ‘The Great Train Robbery’, at a more modest twelve minutes, shares some of its ambition, using techniques of compositing and back-projection to bring trains into the studio.  It also features a fist-fight on a moving train - something I’d been impressed by in ‘Dr Nicholas og den Blaa Diamant’ a decade later in 1913.

The film is the more urgent of the two 1903 works, and (unusually for so early a film) never holds its shots too long.  It has two highlights: the first comes around the five minute mark, when Broncho Billy Anderson plays a man who is shot trying to escape the bandits.  The flailing death he gives us is wonderful to behold.  The second is the final shot, the film’s only close-up, in which Justus D. Barnes pulls out a gun, aims it at the camera, and so at the audience, and fires.  The End!  Watch it here, if you dare.

Welding the Big Ring (1904)

I was disappointed not to be able to source any fiction films for 1904, indeed, the only footage I could find from that year was ‘Welding the Big Ring’.  I dwell in Sheffield, so feel obliged to take some interest in the history of industrial metalcrafting, which may have made the piece a touch more approachable.

At first it seems like nothing will happen.  Muscle-men stand with an urgent sort of attention, surveying a huge metal ring.  Suddenly, it’s all go.  The ring is pulled out of the flames and the men descend on it with long-handled hammers.  The thing’s obviously red-hot, but they leap on it, attacking with a rhythm that makes them seem mechanical.  The work looks perilous, but the men have no fear.  They’re machines!  The ring, I assume, was later handed over to Sauron.

It was a little uninspiring, after the works of ingenuity and excitement further up the page.  It presents real working men, rather than schlock or frippery, which is commendable, but isn't what I tend to look for in a motion picture.  In the future, documentary footage tends to be coupled with innovative editing as in 'Man with a Movie Camera' (1929).  But these were early days, and no amount of perilous hammering can make 6 minutes of static footage hold the attention.  You can watch it here, but I'd stick with the first two minutes.  Your time is precious, dear reader.

Tune in at an undisclosed later point for some films from 1905 to 1912 -- and beyond!


P.S. I'm particularly delighted to add 'Stop Thief!' (1902) to the Penciltonian roster, as it joins 'Shaft's Big Score!' (1972) in that most unusual sub-genre, films with exclamation marks in their titles.

High Noon (1952)

I don't like Westerns very much.  There are so many of them, and they play incessantly on television in front of old people who live without aspirations or energy.  The overwhelming quantity means there are plenty of poor ones - not badly made as such, but tediously efficient, competent, formulaic and uninspired.  The aesthetic doesn't appeal (though I like the hats), and neither does casual violence against indigenous Americans, so if I need to watch a film set in the age of the Wild West (about 1865-1895), I'd generally rather it was set in Khartoum or Transvaal, to avoid such well-worn cliches and over-familiar pictures.

There are a few notable exceptions.  A friend showed me Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy, which starts slowly and dustily, but ends with the breathtaking 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966) which I embraced despite its genre and count as a favourite film, and I likewise find delight in 'Back to the Future Part III' (1990) and in 'Living in Harmony', the unexpected Western episode of 'The Prisoner' (1967), though the first of these three is quite unlike the genre as it stood, and the other two subvert it to make unusual points as parts of bigger plots.

I really like the framing that's possible in the Academy ratio.
Who needs the wild novelty of widescreen, unavoidable from the next year.

It was put to me, though, that I oughtn't to avoid the Western; I'm aiming to see a good range of 20th Century movies in this Penciltonian project and the Western is one of the most significant genres of American cinema.  I'd watched 'Laurel and Hardy Way Out West' for 1937, but it was even more out-there than the films listed above, since it lacks gunfights of any kind.  So, I resolved to watch 'High Noon', having had it recommended by accident by an unseen stranger.  In short, a man sitting behind me in the theatre was recommending it to his daughter, telling her it was beautifully shot, was told in real time, and stood over and above the rest of its genre.  I'm more than happy with a second-hand recommendation, so watched the film at Noon-ish on a Sunday, the traditional week-day for Western-viewing, and the day on which the film is set.

To my surprise, the film turned out to be a really good drama, with well-written, well-played characters and an interesting story, which I later learnt was a metaphor for Hollywood blacklisting.  The film wasn't just a set of hollow cliches - it was genuinely atmospheric, crisply shot in handsome greys, and without the simplistic morality I've tended to associate with fifties Westerns.  Crucially, it didn't have John Wayne in it, an actor who stands for all I dislike in the genre (and who, as keen McCarthyist, vocally opposed this film, deriding it as un-American).

Grace Kelly gets the high billing, but Katy Jurado's Helen Ramírez is much more interesting.
She seems far more honest and more in control of her destiny than most in the town,
and almost the only person to leave the film with their credibility intact.

The story regards Will Kane, a town marshall retiring on his wedding day, who finds he has to take up his old job for just ninety minutes more to face off against a threat to the town and (since he hasn't fled) to him in particular.  The people he's long protected tell him to escape the town, but he refuses to run from his obligations.  He has an hour to round up a posse of allies before the unavoidable showdown, but nobody will give him the support he needs.  Will is the just about the only person in the town with a social conscience, and for that reason the townsfolk are ready to let him go to his death.  It's like the parable of the Good Samaritan, without the Samaritan.

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Lilies of the Field (1963)

One of the regular listeners to my weekly radio show - though to my great discredit, I can't remember which listener - recommended this as a film I might enjoy watching.  I'd been talking about The Penciltonian, and this recommendation, while the synopsis sounded rather unappealing, filled a 1963-shaped gap in my plans.  It's a significant year, as it marks the midpoint between 1913, my earliest limit, and the present day.  Thinking about it, it may also be the last year when I'd expect films to be in monochrome.  Oh, there've been plenty in colour, including an unlikely outlier in 1903, and in earnest since about 1939, but colour has always seemed an exception to a rule, a mark of something expensive and glossy.  From 1964, though, everything will be in colour unless it has a good reason not to be.

So anyway, there's this guy called Homer.  He's driving through the wilderness of America when he's stopped by a gaggle of East German nuns, who tell him they've been praying for a man to come and work for them.  He just wants to continue on his way, but the nuns are very insistent.  And after the first day of roof-mending, they tell him they want him to build them a chapel.  He doesn't want to build it, of course.  He wants to drive on, get on with his life.  Every character he meets agrees with this, and tells him to move on, not to get involved with the sisters.  But every time they tell him he should leave, Homer finds himself more compelled to stay and do the work.  The complicating factor is that the nuns can't pay him, and the Mother Superior, an extremely stubborn woman with a tragic history, won't even thank him.  Homer just wants to do an honest day's work in exchange for a decent day's pay.  Or perhaps it's slightly more complex: he wants to do something worth doing, build something worth building, and have his work properly recognised.  He's a jobbing contractor, but not without artistry and pride.

There's something excitingly liberating about Homer Smith's predicament - the idea that you could stop in the middle of nowhere and work there as long as you want to, be employed and fed, and sleep on the ground each night, with nobody awaiting your arrival at the far end, no obligations to tie you down - with nothing to your name but a car, a set of tools and an eagerness to work.  Sidney Poitier plays the part scintillatingly, and won the year's Oscar for best actor, though he apparently believes he didn't deserve it.

Inevitably, Homer is persuaded to work on the chapel - that's never really in any doubt, or there would be no film.  The question is really how he and the nuns can come to some compromise.  He's a man of action, a Southern Baptist, an American, and he takes his Sunday as a day of rest, and a chance to have a damn fine breakfast (which he describes in exquisite detail), while the nuns are strict Roman Catholics, keeping their silences and singing in Latin.  He buys them lollipops, teaches them English and livelier worship songs in the Baptist style.  It's a very enjoyable relationship that grows up between them, and I particularly enjoyed a scene in which Homer and the Mother Superior leaf through a German and an English Bible, using scriptures to argue over whether or not he deserves to be paid for his labours

They need him a lot more than he needs them, and this leaves the film with something of the feel of a Western, with Homer as the stranger who rides into an isolated community and fixes the problems before disappearing off into America more-or-less unchanged.  It's a fine film, heartwarming and with some excellent dialogues and really nice scenes.  I can well see how a listener might think it would suit my tastes, as it's really very Christian, in that it's a conflict between two denominations who both celebrate God but express their faith through remarkably different lifestyles.  Homer is very casual but very passionate, his relationship with God personal and joyful, while the nuns are far more formal, but entrust their whole lives to the power of prayer.  It isn't an aggressive message, nor does it come across as twee, though either could have been possible in a less competently-made film.  As it is, I found it a pleasure to watch.  And it's not a minute too long, either, which is always to a film's credit.

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The film on a disc.  Don't be put off by the charmless front cover.

Laurel and Hardy Way Out West (1937)

Whatever comedy I saw first after 'Daisies' (1966) was inevitably going to seem a bit ordinary.  I have nothing intelligent or faux-intelligent to say about 'Laurel and Hardy Way Out West', so will provide you with some pictures and captions to give you a sense of it all.

A man with a big beard!

They shoot the hat off of his head!

When they bow to pick up a lily, their heads

bump with a loud wooden 'KNOCK'

Some cowboys sing harmonies, so the duo have an impromptu dance sequence.

This is the best sequence not to feature Stan Laurel eating a hat.

But for the many guns on display, this film is virtually indistinguishable

from 'Chucklevision'.  Perhaps the comedy was more innovative back then,

though I'm inclined to assume otherwise.

D'oooooh!

Trying to remove a locket.  With hilarious consequences!

Early in the film, Stan Laurel says 'if this doesn't work, I'll eat your hat'.

He weeps his way through this particular meal.

Laurel is the funny one.

A comedy chase sequence!

For ages!

They hide in the piano,

with hilarious consequences!

The true heir to the gold mine is modest and dull and lowly
and inefficacious, and gullible with no capacity or wit or agency

and is the only character not to get any comedy moments

and I wish the villains won instead.

That is all.

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Normally there would be an advert for the DVD down here because I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to exploit you all, but I don't think I'd recommend watching this film unless it came on the BBC, and even then you might want the radio on too. Of course it was fun, and likely wholly typical of Laurel and Hardy, but I refuse to believe it was their *best* film, so I'm more inclined to steer you away from it.