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Manos and the Myth of the Bad Movie

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October 13, 2022

Having gone B-movie with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and down to C with Carnival of Souls, I flirted with the idea of descending deep into the bowels of the filmworld underbelly with the infamous Manos: The Hands of Fate. Not that everyone shouldn’t experience Manos at least once in their lives but there’s just not enough to the movie or its presentation to justify an entire review. But there is something to be said about its reputation.

Manos has replaced Plan 9 from Outer Space as the worst movie of all time. It rests in the crosshairs of the definitive, and still best, MST3K episode. It’s the movie that gave us Torgo, with no good way to exchange the gift for something a little less repulsive. I’m taking the time to write about it partly because, like Linus, I don’t think it’s such a bad little movie, and partly because most people don’t even know what a bad movie is—at least not when it comes time to make, or accept, “worst ever” lists.

There are all kinds of ways for a movie to be bad—it can stem from a bad idea, it can have a terrible script, it can be shot poorly, the editing can suck, the director can have all kinds of great resources at hand but just have no idea what he’s doing (the most common cause of badness—especially on the star-studded, big-budget level), it can be well made but utterly inert, and on and on. But the gulf between run-of-the-mill bad movies and the worst ones ever is vast. While any of the things listed above can be a paving stone on the path to a truly abysmal film, there’s only one thing that can unassailably qualify a movie as worst—it has to be unwatchable.

The world is awash in unwatchable movies. But none of them ever make the “worst ever” lists. And therein lies the rub. That’s because those lists never—ever—represent the worst movies of all time—just the ones we find easiest to make fun of.

The ones we call worst tend to be stuff that’s in some way naive—or, to reference Linus again, sincere. It’s less a reflection on the movie and more on our cynicism that we usually pick on the ones that wear their hearts on their sleeves.

“The movies we call worst tend to be stuff that’s in some way naive. It’s less a reflection on the movie and more on our cynicism that we usually pick on the ones that wear their hearts on their sleeves.”

a little touch of Manos in the night

Defined this way, Ed Wood, who, by consensus, is considered the worst director ever, is actually a pretty good filmmaker with a strong body of work. Wood, with his pulpy fascination with the occult, sci-fi, and skin flicks, did an extraordinary job of channeling the vast pool of muck that’s been a fertile source for American pop culture since the beginning of the Industrial Era and the rise of the big cities. Yes, it’s raw—but it’s also unfiltered, and there’s a considerable virtue in that.

And to make the key point, we’re only able to bully Wood and his films because they’re actually entertaining. If he wasn’t able to engage and hold an audience, Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda or Bride of the Monster or The Sinister Urge wouldn’t be on anybody’s lists because we would have been bored or repelled and unlikely to even remember their names, let alone their plots or favorite scenes.

Ditto for Manos. It’s exactly because Harold P. Warren was a fertilizer salesman who had never made a movie in his life and only made this one as part of a bet that he couldn’t get too fancy and had to stick to an unvarnished tale from the dark undercurrents of the culture. Sure, just about everything about the film is inept—or, to quote MST3K, “there’s a buffet of loathsomeness in this movie”—but once we start watching it, we don’t turn away. It could be argued that’s because it gives us something to feel superior to, but that just underlines my point about the dubiousness of the whole “worst of” thing.

When we ridicule a “bad” movie, we get the high that comes with thinking we’re owning it. But we’re actually the ones being owned, duped as easily as a bunch of rubes at a county fair. The world of “worst ever” is actually a Potemkin village erected to divert your attention from the fact you’re being tricked into paying to watch a bunch of movies you otherwise would never go near. Like almost everything in contemporary culture, it’s all just a marketing exercise, and whether it’s some mega-budget effects-laden action film or some made-on-a-dime exploitation throwaway from the ‘50s is irrelevant. Your money still ends up in somebody else’s pocket. (The irony is that something like Jail Bait will always have a way longer shelf life than the blockbusters that make $250 million their first weekend then disappear forever.)

Let’s not be so smug. Let’s stop treating the past as in some way inferior—less enlightened, less accomplished, or whatever than the present. There is nothing in human history (or human nature) to support that position—just the money-mad need to make us believe we’re somehow better than our forebears so we’ll more readily snap up the cultural equivalent of junk food. The next time you come across Manos or Ed Wood or Coleman Francis or Bert I. Gordon (even I hesitated to type that last one), give them the benefit of the doubt. Put yourself in their shoes and look at their work on their terms instead of the way the carnies want you to see it. You’ll be doing all of filmmaking a huge favor.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

“When we ridicule a ‘bad’ movie, we get the high that comes with thinking we’re owning it. But we’re actually the ones being owned, duped as easily as a bunch of rubes at a county fair.”

What Have You Done with His Movie?

What Have You Done With His Movie?

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Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Brazil was hugely influential at the time of its release, changing movies forever, but nobody talks about it anymore. Why?

by Michael Gaughn
September 19, 2022

I approached revisiting Brazil with extreme trepidation. About a year ago, wanting to write something about my admiration for Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I was horrified to find that it hasn’t held up at all, that it’s just an exercise in stylistic indulgence, as dull and thin and lifeless as tissue paper, and that the studio was right to be furious with Gilliam for pissing all its money away.

Certain things immediately set Brazil apart, though—all related to its reputation and influence and not the film itself but that still lend it some stature. It was the movie, thanks to Gilliam’s long and bloody battle with Universal, that established the modern conception of the director’s cut. And, thanks to the exhaustive and gorgeously presented Criterion boxed-set laserdisc edition, it set the standard for home video releases going forward, laying the groundwork for DVDs and Blu-rays, with their alternate cuts, extensive bonus features, and so on.

But all of that is obviously secondary to reapproaching Brazil as a movie. Adding to my concern was that, while all kinds of films from the mid ’80s are being buffed, repackaged, and remade because they appealed on a preconscious level to the uncritical child and teen audiences of the time, Brazil has faded from view. It didn’t make sense that something that had once had a seismic influence on moviemaking didn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar anymore.

Having now watched it again, I can affirm that it remains a masterpiece—a flawed one, more deeply so than most films of its rank, but still something that stands many tiers above almost anything else that was made during that mostly dismal decade. The irony is that it appears to be the things that make it great—specifically its very deliberate and trenchant reaction to the carefully calibrated vacuousness of popcorn cinema—that have led to its repression. But I’ll get to that.

Brazil is so labyrinthine and rich it’s hard to zero in on a best point of entry. It could be its style—so influential its presence can be felt in almost every movie made since, even if the filmmakers have no idea where that influence came from—but I think the best place to begin, oddly, is with Tom Stoppard’s screenplay. Gilliam and Charles McKeown get a screen credit for it too, but given that they’re the ones who made an unholy mess of Munchausen you have to assume Stoppard had something—or everything—to do with Brazil holding together as well as it does. (Sorry to be quoting Thoreau for the zillionth time, but there is something in his maxim that there’s no reason you can’t have your dream castle as long as you build a foundation beneath it as well.)

The casting is flawless—with one exception that comes dangerously close to sinking the whole enterprise. I didn’t fully appreciate until now how extraordinary Johnathan Pryce’s performance is, even when he’s doing material for Gilliam he doesn’t seem to be fully on board with. Pryce immediately establishes the contrast between the real and fantasy Sam through his presence alone, and he fully embodies both, even to the slightest details of their gestures.

Ian Holm’s Kurtzmann is similarly pitch perfect, as is Jim Broadbent as the obsequious plastic surgeon. (The precision of British acting can often feel affected but when it’s in a groove with the material, like here, it can be pure pleasure to experience.) De Niro is in full Rupert Pupkin mode, right down to the mustache, obviously enjoying not having to play De Niro for a change—and it’s sad that this was probably the last time he was able to get away with that.

Sheila Reid’s Mrs. Buttle is stunning—I never realized just how good until this time around. Everything pivots on the scene where Pryce brings her the refund check for her husband. If Gilliam hadn’t risen to the potential of the material here, if he had played it too light, the entire film would have foundered. But it remains powerful—with a lot of the credit going to Reid for bringing a tremendous depth and breadth of emotion to the character, the scene, and the movie, every ounce of which is needed to counter the more arch and glib material elsewhere.

(And any movie that includes a cameo by Raymond Chandler’s Orange Queen—“‘It’s the wall,’ she said. ‘It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.’”—can’t be all bad.)

The one massive mistake is Kim Greist as the object of Lowry’s obsession. What was Gilliam thinking? She clearly isn’t comfortable with anything about the role, making her scenes just unpleasant to watch. The only explanation that makes sense is that she’s part of his savaging of the giggly adolescent conventions put in place by movie brats like Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, and Ridley Scott, who clearly weren’t comfortable with women (and still aren’t) and instead leaned on tomboys for the traditional female roles. But you can get all that and still feel like Greist doesn’t belong in this film at all.

There’s so much to savor here, though, that you can even look past a bungled female lead. The intricacy of the staging is dazzling, with Gilliam exhibiting masterful control, never letting it become gratuitous or indulgent. And the fantasy sequences, surprisingly, still work—mainly because they’re actually about character and story and theme and not just an excuse to goose the audience awake every 15 minutes with some artificially generated excitement.

There are a few moments where Gilliam gets overly ambitious—which in itself isn’t a bad thing but does lead to some sloppiness in the execution. And he hits some rough spots at around the two-thirds point—like most movies do, usually because the director has come up with amazingly fertile and provocative base material but, not fully realizing its implications, begins to let it get away from him. Gilliam doesn’t completely lose control but his grip on the film, which was iron tight until that point, does start to weaken. And although the ending remains powerful, it becomes so inchoate that it veers damn close to becoming the kind of sound and fury cinema he was trying to skewer—partly because he severs the bond between plausible cause and effect too soon, seriously diluting the impact of Sam’s descent into madness.

But let’s get to why Brazil has come to be shunned like a black-sheep uncle. Almost all dystopian films undercut themselves by fetishizing technology, which results in conveying the idea of, “Well, yeah, people suck, but aren’t their machines wonderful?” which in turn ends up feeding the whole capitalist/positivist impulse dystopian fiction is putatively meant to counter. In other words, by misplacing the emphasis, it ultimately gets us to take comfort in our own annihilation.

But Gilliam, very much like Godard in Alphaville, deliberately downplays the tech—here, making it decidedly analog and archaic—so Brazil doesn’t slip into the superficially dystopian but actually boosterish technocratic hoohah most sci-fi films embrace. Both he and Godard wanted to keep their movies about people, not their things—even if those things are meant to replace them.

Brazil has been swept under the rug because we now stand on the other side of our utter capitulation to both technology and bureaucracy. Having abdicated individual responsibility and placed our faith in a world of invisible hands, we would rather get lost in fantasy than be reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there were and are alternatives. We’ve come to see not just controlling but defining bureaucracy as inevitable and rationalize its dominance through our indulgence in franchises, in all their various forms.

And we’ve completely bought into one of Gilliam’s sharpest barbs—that if you tell somebody convincingly enough that crap is caviar, they’ll accept it blindly and devour it with zeal. If we didn’t passively embrace that core tenet, our franchise-driven society would quickly shrivel up and die.

Most importantly, though, Brazil is about the death of romanticism and the limits and costs of fantasy, with how getting swept up in fantasy worlds is a far from free ride—something Woody Allen was examining, just as incisively, at that same moment in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Both Gilliam and Allen must have felt the same tremor because it was right after that the massive eruption of fantasy occurred that has since engulfed cinema, thriving on the beyond dangerous notion that this is all somehow healthy and benign.

Simply put, we’ve so completely become Gilliam’s creatures—and worse—that we don’t want to be reminded of how far we’ve fallen. Having come to believe it’s OK to exist suspended in a perpetual adolescence in a world of perpetual play, we want to purge anything that would suggest it could be any other way. Which is why watching Brazil is a better investment of your time than any movie released in the past 40 years.

Brazil on Prime

That Brazil wasn’t one of the first titles out when 4K became available shows just how irrational the release patterns have been. That we’re now this far into the format without a release is an even stronger indictment. While Brazil deserves to be seen in 4K, I’m not so sure HDR is the best way to go. Being such a brash, stylistically extravagant film, it would take a very deft touch to bring anything meaningful to its look. Go too far and it would become all artificial highlights, whereas a constant murk is essential to its effect, or it could become cartoonish, in the pejorative sense.

In HD on Amazon Prime, it ranges from acceptable to surprisingly vivid—which is to say that it gives you an accurate sense of the brilliance of Roger Pratt’s groundbreaking cinematography but all feels just a tad flat. I suspect, without having any way of knowing, that a new transfer in 4K that hews as closely to the original material as possible without wandering into the netherworld of restoration would be a significant step up.

The stereo mix—apparently the original—is unexpectedly engaging, even exhilarating. I hadn’t realized how much Gilliam leaned on sound to compensate for his insufficient budget, drawing deeply on his animation background—how he used sound to significantly up the impact of the primitive cutouts in his Python vignettes—to make his visuals work.

Not a big fan of Michael Kamen, I’ve always liked his score here. It’s all basically just one big Mahler pastiche but it works because it underlines both the grandiosity of Sam’s fantasies and desires and the key theme of romanticism’s demise.

Thankfully, no one’s gotten around to enhancing the titles, which look, as they should, like type on film not a cold, distracting digital reinterpretation of the originals.

—M.G.

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Why This Isn’t a Review

I ultimately decided to not review this release of Strangelove because 4K HDR takes away as much as it brings to the experience, so while there’s no great harm in watching it that way, there’s no real benefit either.

One of the biggest problems is one common to many 4K upgrades of older films. Nobody has figured out how to accurately translate backdrops and matte paintings that looked convincing when run through a projector and shown on a big screen. Here, the opening painting of Burpleson Air Force Base and the later one of the Pentagon are so obvious that they pull you out of the film. Similarly, the model shots of the B-52, which were only borderline successful on film, look too clean and sterile and model-y now.

While someone could argue that the HDR increases the impact of the nuclear bomb blasts, I would have to counter that this isn’t an action or war film and that, since Kubrick relied on archival footage rather than effects shots, that’s not what he was after. Pumping the shots up that way is akin to adding cannon blasts to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—which I’m sure has been done, but not by anybody who deserved to live afterward. A more accurate example might be someone deciding to improve the impact of the Scherzo in the Ninth by doubling all the orchestral lines with synthesizers. I suspect that would make the work more compelling for those listeners with duller nerve endings but it would be an egregious violation of Beethoven’s original intent and a travesty of his work. Sure, anyone’s free to reinterpret Beethoven—or Bach or Stravinsky or Mahler—but don’t pretend you’re presenting the original work. Leaning too heavily on HDR is like deciding the original compositions need an injection of testosterone.

And then there’s the kerfuffle over the aspect ratios. The best I can determine, Kubrick decided it would enhance the home video release of Strangelove by showing the frame ratios of the original footage, alternating between various ratios for the War Room, the Burpleson interiors, the bomber interior, and the documentary footage of the attack on Burpleson. Yes, this was him allowing for the Academy ratio of pre-HDTV home video and, yes, his similar tack with the release of The Shining was a disaster. But the point is that, with Strangelove, it worked, and I don’t get why this current release reverts back to 1:66:1.

But, again, this isn’t a review. It’s just an explanation of why I didn’t want to do a review.

—M.G.

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Who Killed Film Noir?

Strangelove is considered a classic comedy and an unequaled satire, but a recent re-viewing revealed that comedy and satire might not have been Kubrick’s ultimate aim here

by Michael Gaughn
December 25, 2020

I wasn’t going to review the latest release of Dr. Strangelove. After having basked in the 4K HDR editions of 2001 and The Shining, it didn’t feel right to underline that this newest upgrade isn’t all it could or should be. Reviews of older films should focus on the ones worth watching, not the ones to avoid. But, on a whim, I watched Strangelove again a few nights ago and experienced it in ways I never have before, and ultimately decided that, transfer quality be damned, it’s well worth encouraging others to go check it out.

Keep in mind, before we dive into this, that I’ve seen this movie countless times. I’ve studied various drafts of the screenplay and pored over every relevant comment from the cast and crew. I’ve even watched an archive print on a Moviola at the Library of Congress. But this last time around, the film, for whatever reason, revealed things that had always been hidden to me before.

The biggest revelation—and what will be the crux of my comments here—is that Strangelove is only superficially a comedy. At its heart, it’s a film noir—and, at the end of the day, might even represent the pinnacle of that genre.

For that conclusion to make sense, you have to be willing to roll with my definition of noir in “Who Killed Film Noir?”—that the crime element is just a pretext and that these movies are instead always about chumps—more specifically, male chumps—guys who think they know the score only to find they really don’t have a clue, only to then have everyone and everything conspire against them, usually with fatal results. If you accept that definition, then noir fits Strangelove as snugly as the mad doctor’s Rotwang glove.

Yes, the film is heavy on noir atmospherics—dark recesses, menacing shadows, closeups that make it look like the subject is being interrogated under hot lights, etc.—but dwelling on that kind of misses the point, because Strangelove pulls just as many stylistic elements from crime dramas, war films, horror films, psychological thrillers, documentaries, and newsreels. The one genre it doesn’t look anything like is comedy, and that is central to what I’m positing here.

Strangelove is really comedy by other means. Its laughs—which are many and legitimate—spring almost solely from the extreme gruesomeness of the situation, from a kind of squeamishness and disbelief that ultimately reinforces the dominance of the Death Drive over the Pleasure Principle, and that people will blindly follow through on the inherent logic of their institutions and devices—all the while believing they’re exercising intelligence and will—even if it will result in their own annihilation.

This movie is satire first and comedy second. And it’s stunning, on reflection, what a serious film it is, that it trumps all of the more sophomoric stuff that considers itself satire by diving down deep into the same disturbing roots and unblinking take on humanity that motivated Swift. This is satire with some real meat, with more than a little gristle, on its bones—definitely not for the SNL crowd.

It’s also stunning to realize what a leap it is beyond the mess of Lolita. You can sense Kubrick trying to recover his creative integrity after the rout of his previous film, where the material, the censors, and, most importantly, the narrative tradition all got the better of him. Knowing that the story is always the least interesting thing about a movie and something filmmakers tend to lean on as a crutch, he had tried to subvert the conventions by notoriously moving Humbert’s murder of Quilty to the beginning of the film—a huge miscalculation that only served to deflate the whole enterprise. He was way bolder with Strangelove, exposing the sheer contrivance of narrative by taking a clockwork-type suspense plot and twisting it around to serve ends no one would have thought it could ever possibly serve, and along the way exposing storytelling for what it mainly is: A manipulative mechanical device for efficiently getting you from Point A to Point Z, which in this case is the end of the world.

With Strangelove, Kubrick hit on the formula that would serve him well for the rest of his career of mimicking just enough genre conventions to entice and enthrall the groundlings and ensure the studio’s ROI, while having the movies actually function at levels that ultimately made hash of their seeming reasons to be. So Strangelove has just enough silly comedy and thriller elements to keep the masses in their seats but continuously moves up a creative chain, subsuming the more rudimentary elements along the way, until it ultimately arrives at noir—but noir in a way no one had ever seen it before.

To put it another way: Having been too conservative with Lolita, Kubrick decided to completely trust his gut with Strangelove, and his gut told him to make a suspense thriller that was, incongruously, a comedy, but was actually, ultimately, a film noir. But that’s not the genius part. The genius part is that he made all three dovetail so seamlessly that the transitions from the cheap seats on up don’t feel so much perverse as inevitable.

Watch Strangelove through the lens of noir—noir stripped of most of its genre clichés in order to expose its white-hot core—and it becomes a different, much more nuanced and brilliant film. Noir wasn’t new to Kubrick. Killer’s Kiss and The Killing are both overt takes on the genre, the latter unapologetically feeding from John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. (Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre was another Kubrick favorite.)

But there’s another dimension to this that also deepens the experience of the film and that hadn’t been obvious to me until this most recent viewing, when I realized how heavily Kubrick tapped into his photo-journalistic beginnings. Fresh out of high school, he had been the youngest staff photographer ever at Look magazine, and it was his experiences there that supplied the subject matter for his early documentary shorts and for Killer’s Kiss, which look like photo essays come to life.

He returns to those formative experiences and that style in Strangelove, with much of the film resembling his magazine work, most obviously in the faux documentary attack on Burpleson Air Force Base, but far more subtly and strikingly in the War Room. He went there mainly to underline that no matter how surreal, irrational, and immature a lot of the behaviors and actions are in the film, they have very real consequences.

(But there are more layers to it than that, because Kubrick hired the controversial tabloid photographer Weegee—whose body of work essentially transformed sordid reality into noir—as his on-set photographer. That led to Peter Sellers, fascinated by Weegee’s edgy hardboiled patois, using his voice as the inspiration for Strangelove.

(And to complete my digression, It should be mentioned that Kubrick got to know fashion-turned-art photographer Diane Arbus well during his Look years, and later referenced her work explicitly in The Shining—which raises the point that his films are far more autobiographical and personal than the cliché take on him as cold, detached, clinical would allow.)

Rather than give a complete recitation of all the ways noir permeates and defines the film, I’ll just highlight a couple of key moments and you can work backward from there. Just before Sterling Hayden’s General Ripper trudges off to the bathroom to commit suicide, Kubrick holds on an uncomfortably close shot of his face, rimmed so tightly with shadows that it already resembles a death mask. As Sellers’ Group Captain Mandrake sits next to Ripper, prattling on about the recall code, Kubrick just stays on the general. And although there are no obvious changes in Ripper’s expression, you can tell he’s realizing the full enormity of what he’s done right before disappearing completely into madness. But this is done with amazing restraint, with Kubrick resisting the temptation to go to the kind of crazy stare he would later cultivate with Jack in The Shining and Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. You just sense the descent happening—almost imperceptibly, but undeniably. It might be the ultimate film noir moment.

This shot could have been Hayden as Johnny Clay in The Killing or as Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle—it wouldn’t have looked out of place cut into either of those films. And Kubrick uses that commonality to create a through-line that traverses all of noir, pointing inevitably to Strangelove as its culmination.

Comedies usually rely on master shots instead of closeups, but Kubrick comes in similarly close on Strangelove to emphasize how much he’s caught up in, and boxed in by, his own calculations and obsessions, his own form of culturally sanctioned insanity. You’re placed just inches from a madman, and it’s as frightening as it is funny.

The most outrageous noir before Strangelove was Robert Aldrich’s beyond cheeky Kiss Me Deadly, which took the hugely popular Mike Hammer character and exposed him for the clueless goon he was. This isn’t the place to go into it, but Strangelove seems to riff on Deadly, seems to devour and digest and regurgitate it, taking the cocksure bumbling of an L.A. detective and projecting it onto the whole world, making chumps of us all.

Watching Strangelove today is hardly just an exercise in either nostalgia or film appreciation, something only tangentially relevant to our present. The basics of human nature haven’t changed since 1964—if anything, the blind, primal aspects have only become emboldened as the machines have taken over and we’ve become free to play. It’s not like the methods of the West have changed all that much either—except that they’ve been so successfully exploited that a YouTube video from Melbourne looks identical to a YouTube video from Bhopal looks identical to one from Des Moines. And it’s not like the world doesn’t continue to bristle with nuclear arms. And it’s not like it’s become impossible for a madman to ascend to the highest levels of power.

Noir is who we are when we have the guts to face ourselves squarely in the mirror. And it says a lot that it’s been more than five decades since the last time any one’s bothered to take a good look.

Where in Hell is Major Kong?

Another thing that jumped out at me watching Strangelove this time around was the missile attack on the B-52, which is for the most part an extremely believable documentary-style scene (especially for 1964) with nothing remotely funny about it. Of course, I’ve noticed this scene before—it’s so compelling it’s hard to ignore—but I realized this time how unique it is, since the list of comedies that can afford to go full-bore dramatic for this amount of screen time without losing their momentum or completely throwing the audience is so short it probably doesn’t exist. One of Kubrick’s most brilliant set pieces, it convincingly places you inside the plane with the crew as they fight for their lives, so you identify with their efforts and then root for them to complete their mission—which has to create extremely conflicted emotions in all but the most jaded. The crew’s ability to overcome is the thing seals the fate of the world. The scene is also worth savoring for the way its chaotic handheld camera goes from documentary to abstract, turning it into a mini art film. Most movie scenes are too stage-bound or veer too close to radio—even today. This one is pure cinema.

—M.G.

Dix Handley

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The most powerful, nuanced, and incisive film genre America has ever created has been hounded into an early grave

by Michael Gaughn
November 27, 2020

From the World Monitor, November 23, 2020:

Film Noir, 76, died this past Saturday writhing on a traffic median in Bel Air, California, his final throes noted with amusement by motorists passing by. No one came to Mr. Noir’s aid, although a couple of prominent film directors did stop long enough to pick his pockets clean. At the same time, on the opposite coast, Mr. Noir could be seen lying on a sidewalk, bleeding profusely, outside a warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He died surrounded by a crowd of people in their mid twenties to mid thirties. Oddly, all of them were dressed identically to the victim, and while they all bore large knives, none showed any evidence of blood. Again, not a single onlooker came to Mr. Noir’s assistance, although each member of the throng did take a little slice of him with them after he expired.

Film noir is dead. We, in our addiction to re-iteration and our blind political zeal, have managed to kill off what was probably the greatest—or at least arguably the most influential—American art form. But, before getting into all that, let me first define my terms.

Let’s start with what film noir isn’t. While many people confuse crime movies with noir, very few fit under that umbrella. In fact, most crime films, as exuberant celebrations of unbridled strength and will, are the antithesis of noir.

The definition of noir can perhaps be summed up most succinctly via the title of a quintessential serie noire: You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up. Translated: Film noir is always and without exception a celebration—and a lament—of the chump. Its heroes always think they know the score, only to find that virtually everything around them is actively or blindly conspiring to do them in.

Noir is about total paranoia. It’s also about emasculation—more specifically, about the emasculation of white males. And, as such, it’s the antithesis of the myth of the American Dream. And, as such, it’s the thing that keeps us honest—real.

Or at least it did until the same regressive, Puritanical forces that have recently gutted so many other vital aspects of American culture got their hands on it. The rabid reactionaries, in their bratty petulance, seem to have an unerring instinct for taking down the things we all need to remain balanced, (relatively) sane, and whole. Of all the things we’ve lost over the past few years, the demise of noir may prove to be the thing we most greatly come to regret.

Noir could not be allowed to live, you see, because it was deemed irredeemably misogynistic. But let’s pause for a second to define misogyny. If misogyny hinges on always seeing women as inferior, servile, on denigrating them in an effort to assert the superiority of the male, then that tag can never be hung on film noir. The female characters in noir tend to be sharper—certainly more dominant—than the males—to a degree that tends to put the male protagonists literally to shame.

And it also needs to be said that the characters in noir, both male and female, tend to display far more shades of gender identity than the characters in any other film genre, past or present. That this isn’t done within the narrow, sterile lanes of the current rulebook makes noir’s take on gender more relevant, not less.

But what about that great bugaboo the femme fatale? The whole point of noir is that everything is trying to do in the male protagonist—close relations, colleagues, strangers, institutions, objects, environments—everything. So why would the female the lead feels most strongly drawn to be excluded? Wouldn’t it be logical that, given his desire to feel whole, but fearing the ferocious power of sexuality unbound, he would come to see her as his greatest threat? Again, to watch noir you have to understand that everything is a paranoid perception. There are no exceptions.

Given all that, explain to me how noir isn’t an evisceration of traditional notions of white male power, how it somehow empowers and emboldens the oppressor. And just so this whole exercise doesn’t come across as an expression of my own paranoia, let’s talk some specifics. Who perpetrated this crime? Who has noir’s blood on their hands?

The list is long but I think the most telling example is the freshly recruited World War II bomber crew of hosts over at Turner Classic Movies. Carefully selected to address faddish ethnic and gender stereotypes but apparently not for their understanding of film, they espouse dogma, smile, then wait for someone off camera to throw them a treat rather than offer any unbiased insights into the movies they’re presenting.

Essentially, TCM has become a school for political re-education, looking to so rigidly rewrite history that it becomes impossible to see older films on their own terms but only by the current, borderline meaningless, standards. And given that film noir remains the most subversive of genres, it should come as no surprise that it’s the body of films they have most firmly fixed in their sights.

TCM guts noir by turning it into propaganda. The mannequin-like hosts will tell you all that really matters about noir is its female leads, who are all wonderfully strong, independent, and assertive—in other words, role models. The day anybody goes to noir for positive life lessons is the day the trumpet sounds, the moon turns to blood, and we break the Seventh Seal.

But it’s hard to say who are the guiltier criminals here—the commentators or the so-called creators, the latter largely a herd of film-school replicants safely skating atop genres they don’t understand because they’re too damned scared to look beneath the surface, cranking out bright, nasty objects without life or soul.

I would posit that the labyrinthine and woefully misguided rules about what can and can’t be presented, how what can be presented has to be presented, and who’s deemed acceptable to represent and present have made it impossible to create anything resembling true noir. (I originally wore “honest” noir, but what value would the genre have if it wasn’t inherently dishonest, the shabby, disreputable home of iconoclasts, tricksters, and other miscreants who no longer have a place in the contemporary world?) The only form that could possibly survive the current puerile gauntlet is faux noir—and who needs that?

We seem fated to a near future—and likely further—of makers and their Pavlovian subjects who believe embracing “dark” somehow wards off true darkness, little ornamental rituals of pain somehow inoculate them against true pain, and rigidly codifying and policing behavior can protect them from any and all transgressions—i.e., reality. Self-pitying masochism offers no basis for legitimate expression. Noir has nothing to offer a tribe that silly and shallow.

At a time when the paucity of new releases has led to more and more people being exposed to older films for the first time, it’s never been more important to approach classic movies with due respect for the way they were originally created and perceived. How anybody could look around at the fine mess we’ve made of current society and think we’ve advanced in any meaningful way, let alone in a way that would allow us to damn the past, would be laughable if it wan’t so grisly. No other film genre is as challenging or insightful as noir. Considering it with an open mind can provide a new, healthier perspective on the present. Approach it with blinkers on and you might as well watch a Teletubbies marathon instead.

“The rabid reactionaries, in their bratty petulance, seem to have an unerring instinct for taking down the things we all need to remain balanced, (relatively) sane, and whole.”

“TCM has become a school for political
re-education, looking to so rigidly rewrite history that it becomes impossible to see older films on their own terms but only by the current, borderline meaningless, standards.”

Keeping It Family Friendly

related review

The Wizard of Oz

Shifting values can make showing classic films to the family a bit of a gamble—here’s a guide to five movies that will entertain, not offend

by Amanda Davis
September 14, 2022

Born in the early ’80s, I grew up on movies like Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Princess Bride. Most children of that time have a nerd-like knowledge and fondness for all things Star Wars, but for some reason my family was more into Spaceballs (Schwartz, anyone?). After film school, I really came to enjoy great cinema and have a harder time watching anything that doesn’t hold together.

Now that I have my own kids, watching old favorites is a risky business. A lot has changed in four decades—kids wear bike helmets, don’t know what a landline is, and probably haven’t even heard of kick the can. Social norms have also changed, making some elements of classic movies taboo. What may have passed for kid-friendly in the ‘40s comes with a whole lot of ‘splainin’ now.

Here, I dive into a few family movies I’ve watched recently with my kids (8 and 5 years old), which are all great options for family movie night.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

E.T. is one of those genius movies that doesn’t come with a lot of exposition. You’re thrust into the story right off the bat, and it’s very apparent this is not in the same vein as today’s kids’ movies. There is no animation. It’s not formulaic. There’s no CGI. Frankly, it’s a breath of fresh air for a film-nerd mom who’s craving realism. No sugarcoating necessary here. Since the E.T. character is an animatronic, the interactions between him and the child actors are more realistic and believable. The story builds on the relationship between E.T. and the children, creating a sense of magic that culminates in a palpable moment of distress when E.T. and Elliott are separated. This scene may distress the youngest viewers, but on a whole, the film stands out as one of the most unique and affecting movies from the ‘80s that works as well today as it did back then.

The Wizard of Oz

There’s something magical about movies that were filmed on sets with practical effects. It’s almost a whimsical, textural quality that creates a nostalgic suspension of disbelief not achieved with today’s shaky handheld cameras and sloppy CGI. Don’t get me wrong—done well, CGI can be a great tool, but too often it becomes a crutch. The Wizard of Oz is a movie that benefits greatly from the well-constructed sets and a large cast of extras. The attention to detail in the makeup and costuming bring the characters to life in a way that is still impressive. Further adding to the magic is the strategic use of soft focus, something that seems to have gone by the wayside. The way the camera ogles the ruby slippers and softens Judy Garland’s face in closeup makes me long for the early days of cinema and hopeful that maybe, someday, we can revive a few classic cinema techniques.

Hook

It’s a tragedy this film didn’t receive higher critical acclaim. For something so rich in original storytelling, stunning visuals, and a magical score (John Williams), Hook holds up as a fantastic family film today. The story, based on an adult version of Peter Pan, who’s now an executive and doesn’t have enough time to spend with his kids, is a fascinating commentary on the experience of growing up. When I was a kid, I related to the children in the movie—I’d be sad if my dad couldn’t make it to a ballet recital or had to travel for work. Now, I am the guilty parent who feels like she works too much and needs to “throw her phone out the window.” Watching the film now with my kids, it’s hard not to be captivated by the magic of the story and the emotion it evokes. The costumes and sets are still fantastic, and there weren’t any effects that pulled me out of the movie. I wholeheartedly recommend this for today’s families.

The Love Bug

What a delightful film. I had not seen this as a kid but when we all sat down to watch it recently, I couldn’t help but be swept up in the whimsy of it all. The story is fun and the practical effects made my kids giggle. There are a couple of scenes where Herbie (the anthropomorphic Volkswagen Beetle) squirts oil on people’s shoes, showing his anger, and there’s a hilarious scene where he gets “drunk” off Irish cream-laden coffee that’s poured in his gas tank. Little moments like this, done well, make this movie worth revisiting. As an adult, I loved the sets and the costume design—it took me on a trip down memory lane. A movie from the 1960s, there was a moment or two of your typical mid-20th-century chauvinism and a handful of negative stereotypes, but nothing unpalatable. This movie has a great mix of nostalgic humor and fun storytelling beats that still work for families with young kids.

School of Rock

We took a risk watching this one recently since it’s rated PG-13. The Common Sense Media rating suggests this for ages 11+ but the only thing that seemed inappropriate for younger kids was language. Let me start by saying that this was a fun movie to watch all together. We had three generations watching, and even though School of Rock is just about 20 years old, it is still fun and relatable to the grandparents, parents, and kiddos alike. Jack Black’s performance is inspiring, heartfelt, and fun, and Joan Cusack rocks it as the uptight principal. There is definitely language that my kids haven’t heard before (at least that I’m aware of) but nothing too off-putting. Overall, we really enjoyed this as a family, and I would suggest it for anyone with kids around 9 or 10 years old. That said, my 5-year-old may have enjoyed this more than the 8-year-old!

Amanda Davis has worked at Kaleidescape for more than 15 years. With a background in film history and screenwriting, she started in the content department writing movie synopses before transitioning to movie-store marketing and then corporate marketing. In addition to movies, she loves outdoor adventures with her husband and kiddos, nestled in the heart of Salt Lake City.

The Cineluxe Comfort Viewing Guide to The Lord of the Rings

The Cineluxe Comfort Viewing Guide to The Lord of the Rings

menus from the iTunes 4K streaming version of the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring

also on Cineluxe

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 1

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 2

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 3

Tackling this legendary trilogy for the first time can be daunting—here’s a map for making that epic journey with ease

by Dennis Burger
updated April 28, 2022

So, you’ve decided to watch Peter Jackson’s epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time. You’re certainly not alone. More and more, I’m seeing YouTube clips dropped onto my timeline with some variation of the title, “Reacting to Lord of the Rings for the first time” or “I’ve never seen Fellowship of the Ring,” or “FIRST TIME WATCHING Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”

I don’t understand the appeal of these “reaction” videos any more than you do, but it speaks to the power of these films that so many people are deciding to commit to an 11-plus-hour movie marathon for the first time. Despite its focus on hobbits and elves and dwarves and magical artifacts, The Lord of the Rings is, at its heart, about times like those we’re currently living through. It’s about defiant endurance in the face of uncertainty, about clinging to hope when there seems to be none.

But, my goodness, it can be a daunting endeavor to dig in now if you’re not already a fan. The first question you have to ask, of course, is: “Which version of these films should I watch?”

Wait, there are different versions of The Lord of the Rings?

Yep! There are the theatrical editions, which are the versions people saw on the big screen back in the early aughts. But every November that followed, each film was released in an Extended Edition on DVD, with 30 to 50 minutes of additional footage and hours of in-depth supplementary materials spread across four discs.

Jackson has famously said the theatrical cuts are his preferred edits, and that the Extended Editions are simply “a novelty for the fans.” This is absolute rubbish. The theatrical cuts are a roller coaster of unevenness, with the first and third films—The Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King—being perfectly enjoyable for what they are, but only as self-contained movies with no connection to the rest of the trilogy. On the other hand, the second film, The Two Towers, is a confusing mess in its original edit. At 178 minutes, it’s a laborious slog, filled with one non sequitur after another, packed with characters whose motivations make little sense. The 228-minute Extended Edition, by contrast, positively whizzes by. It also gives you a deeper understanding of the histories and motives of its primary and secondary protagonists and the mythical lands they populate.

From a purely narrative perspective, the Extended Editions of Fellowship and Return are almost, but not quite, that essential. They do add some much-appreciated depth and context, and also insert some connective tissue that ties the three films together into one unified work. If you skip the Extended Edition of the first film, for example, you may be left wondering where certain items and artifacts central to the plot of the second and third films came from. Watch the shorter theatrical cut of the third film, and one of the second film’s major characters just disappears from the narrative with no explanation and no resolution.

Your best options for viewing the Trilogy

So if you’re committing to watch all three films—and why wouldn’t you?—the Extended Editions are the preferable option. But where to acquire them? The 4K Blu-ray box set released in late 2020 is the most obvious option, as it contains both the theatrical and extended editions so you can compare the differences, if you care to, purely as an academic exercise. The extended trilogy is also available in the digital domain, either in streaming quality via services like iTunes/Apple TV or in full-bandwidth downloads from Kaleidescape.

There are pros and cons to each format, with the main benefit of the physical release being that each Extended Edition film is split across two discs. This actually works to the advantage of The Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King, though, since you can treat the first and second half of each as a film in its own right. Take a break between each half to take a nap or grab a meal or even sleep for the evening and you won’t disrupt the flow of the experience too much. The Two Towers—the middle film in the trilogy—doesn’t break quite so cleanly, so you’re better off treating it as one long film with a quick potty break between scenes.

If you’re watching on Kaleidescape or iTunes/Apple TV, you don’t get such neat breaks since the films run straight through from opening to closing credits. But you can always hit the Intermission button on your Kaleidescape remote or just hit Pause after “The Council of Elrond” in The Fellowship of the Ring (you’ll know it when you get to it, I promise) and just after “The Siege of Gondor” in Return of the King. (That one’s not quite as obvious, but just remember to take your break right after the orcs start pushing a big flaming battering ram shaped like a wolf’s head toward the gates of the city of Minas Tirith and chanting “Grond! Grond! Grond!” That’s the name of said flaming wolf-headed battering ram.) Make your way through one more disc (or a few more hours of film) after that and you’ve finished your first journey through the lands of Middle-earth.

But if you’re like most people, once you’ve experienced all three films, you’ll be itching to know more about the books that inspired the film and the process of adapting them. That’s where the Appendices come in. Unfortunately, the UHD Blu-ray release lacks the six bonus discs that have accompanied every physical media release since DVD. You can, though, find all six Appendices on Kaleidescape or iTunes.

Making sense of the Appendices

On DVD, HD Blu-ray, iTunes, and Kaleidescape, the Appendices are broken into six parts (two per film, with each Appendix getting its own disc if you opted for physical media for this journey). The neat thing is, they follow a reasonably predictable structure, so if you know for sure you don’t want to watch all 21 hours’ worth of documentaries (not a typo), you can hone in on the sort of background information that interests you most. The odd-numbered Appendices (the first disc or batch of bonus content) tend to dig into the history, themes, and meaning of the books along with the writing and planning that went into adapting this supposedly un-filmable book into three of the best films ever made. Appendices 1, 3, and 5 explore the life of author J.R.R. Tolkien; the publication of the book; the characters, peoples, and locations of Middle-earth; and preparatory work like writing the screenplay, adapting the scripts from two films to a trilogy once Miramax passed on the adaptation and New Line stepped in, designing and building the costumes, sets, props, etc.

The even-numbered Appendices are probably more your speed if you’re primarily interested in The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of films and not so much as an adapted work. Appendices 2, 4, and 6 look at the long process of shooting the films, as well as post-production work like editing, special effects, sound effects, score music, and so forth.

Watching the films again with friends you’ve never met

“But wait!” he says in his best Billy Mays voice, “There’s more!” Each film is also accompanied by four full-length audio commentaries. Again, there’s some consistency here, with one track for each film focusing on the writing, one on the design, one on production, and one with the cast. The cast commentaries are the best by a long shot, since Sean Astin (who plays Samwise Gamgee) is a walking/talking film encyclopedia and Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd (Merry and Pippin) are straight-up laugh-out-loud hilarious throughout. Andy Serkis also performs part of the commentary for Return of the King in character as Sméagol/Gollum, which is something you don’t want to miss. The commentaries featuring Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens are also absolute gems if you want to take a deeper dive into the story than the documentaries in the Appendices provide.

The other two commentaries for each film are for hardcore fans only, so unless you’re absolutely obsessed by this point, you can safely skip them. To wit, I’ve only listened to the design and production commentaries two or three times over the past two decades. (By contrast, I watch all of 21 hours’ worth of Appendices every other year, and dig into the cast and writers’ commentaries at least once every three years.)

Summing it all up

If all of the above was so laborious that you’ve forgotten it all, here’s a handy cheat sheet to ensure you get the most out of your first viewing of The Lord of the Rings:

● Watch the Extended Editions. Forget the theatrical cuts even exist.

● Buy the films on Kaleidescape, UHD Blu-ray, or iTunes/Apple TV. The other options are too compromised in sundry ways.

● You can treat Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King each as two-part films. If you need to take a long break at the midway point, the structure of each of these films lends itself to such.

● The Two Towers needs to be approached like one long film, with a quick potty break at most halfway through.

● If you want to explore the supplemental features (and you totally should, even if bonus documentaries aren’t normally your thing) but you’re not sure you’re up for all 21 hours’ worth of extra content, you can go straight to the Appendices that suit your specific interests:

● The first batch for each film (Appendices 1, 3, and 5 in the three-film collection) focus on the book, its author, and the translation from page to screen.

● The second batch for each film (Appendices 2, 4, and 6) are more like your typical movie-making documentaries, with a focus on production and post-production, including filming, special effects, sound, and music.

● Still hungry for more info? Each film comes with four audio commentaries, which range in appeal from “must listen” to “for hardcore nerds only.

● The cast commentaries are amongst the most entertaining audio commentaries ever recorded, as long as you don’t mind a bit of silliness.

● The writers’ commentary with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens is like a college course in Tolkien lore and filmmaking.

● If you’re just getting around to watching The Lord of the Rings now, it’s probably safe to say the design and production commentaries are a deeper dive than you’re willing to take. But you never know. Save them for a rainy day (or a Noachian deluge), perhaps.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

click on the images to enlarge

Without having seen the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, Samwise’s use of the Phial of Galadriel in Return of the King has no narrative context.

available on Kaleidescape

The Films That Made Star Wars–Complete

The Films That Made Star Wars—Complete

A three-part look at the eclectic group of movies that helped provide the inspiration for Lucas’s space-opera saga

by Dennis Burger
May 2, 2022

It’s sometimes easy to forget that before it became a nine-film saga supported by three standalone films, two made-for-TV movies, three excellent TV series, a few terrible TV series, and a holiday special that is best forgotten, Star Wars was just a movie. An incredible movie, mind you, one that sparked the dreams of uncountable future filmmakers and other creative types. And one that practically created the concept of the modern blockbuster and changed the cinema industry forever (for better and for worse). It’s also easy to forget that Star Wars did not spring from George Lucas’s brain fully formed. In fact, the journey of its creation was difficult and often circuitous. But many famous (and not so famous) films and directors inspired Lucas along the way, providing tropes and influences that would become signature elements of the Star Wars universe.

PART 1

Both classic films of the ’30s and low-budget sci-fi serials of that time helped feed into the conception of Star Wars

“As unique as 1977’s Star Wars seemed at the time of its release, there was barely anything original about it. Sure, the way it was put together was fresh—mind-blowingly so—but dig down to the nuts-and-bolts level and it’s clear that this Galaxy Far, Far Away didn’t spring to George Lucas’s mind fully formed. The film was, in many ways, a reaction to the grim and gritty films that dominated cinemas in the early 1970s. But first and foremost, it was a homage to the serials and adventure movies that Lucas enjoyed seeing on the big screen in his youth.” read more

PART 2

Lucas leaned heavily on the work of a number of iconic directors to bring some weight to A New Hope

“Ask me to sum up the appeal of Star Wars as succinctly as possible and I would have to describe it as the cinematic child of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone dressed in Flash Gordon Underoos. But dig beneath the surface, and the movie we ended up with shares almost no meaningful DNA with sci-fi serials. If you really want to understand what makes Star Wars tick, you have to ignore the ray-guns and robots and starships—or at least look past them. And when you do, what you’re left with is mostly the samurai and the cowboy.” read more

PART 3

A mélange of WWII movies, classic sci-fi, and hero mythology rounds out this survey of seminal influences

“If you wanted to, you could spend years watching the westerns and samurai flicks that influenced Star Wars in one way or another, but there are other essential elements of this pop-culture collage that we can’t overlook. Namely: World War II movies. In editing the film’s final space battle, Lucas famously cut footage from old war pictures to inspire the special effects team at Industrial Light & Magic, specifically to give them the sense of pacing and movement he was looking for in the dogfights.'”
read more

the Star Wars Collection

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 3

The Cineluxe Comfort Viewing Guide to
The Lord of the Rings

review | Dune (2021)

review | 2001: A Space Odyssey

A mélange of WWII movies, classic sci-fi, and hero mythology rounds out this survey of seminal influences

by Dennis Burger
updated April 28, 2022

If you wanted, you could spend years watching the westerns and samurai flicks that influenced Star Wars in one way or another, but there are other essential elements of this pop-culture collage we can’t overlook, namely World War II movies. In editing the film’s final space battle, Lucas famously cut together footage from old war pictures to inspire the special effects team at Industrial Light & Magic, specifically to give them the sense of pacing and movement he was looking for in the dogfights. He later spliced these scenes into the movie’s working print to serve as animatics and editing placeholders. If you’d like to see some of the films he used, I would recommend The Dam Busters (which was a huge inspiration for the trench-run attack on the Death Star) as well as The Bridges at Toko-Ri and 633 Squadron.

These can be tough to find in good quality, but The Bridges at Toko-Ri is available on Kaleidescape (in standard-definition only, sadly) and you can find 633 Squadron for rent on most digital platforms like Amazon and iTunes. It hasn’t always been an easy film for American audiences to access The Dam Busters in acceptable quality but a new Blu-ray release last year rectified that.

For a fun look at the parallels, check out this YouTube video mashup of the imagery from 633 Squadron combined with the soundtrack of Star Wars (and ignore the needless potshots at The Dam Busters—it’s still a relevant influence).

To fully understand the roots of Star Wars, you also need to consider the influence of classic science-fiction. Again, Star Wars is decidedly not sci-fi, but it certainly looks like it in places.

And to understand where Lucas got the inspiration to attempt space battles the likes of which no one had ever seen onscreen before, look to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that film, Kubrick practically redefined what was possible with special effects, and Lucas would go on to borrow many of the technicians who made those effects possible. Stuart Freeborn, who created the hominid creatures at the beginning of 2001, would go on to create Chewbacca, as well as many of the creatures found in the Mos Eisley cantina (as well as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back). Lucas also attempted to hire 2001‘s effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull but Trumbull turned him down, likely due to his commitment to work on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ill-fated adaptation of Dune.

To experience 2001 in its best form, I can’t recommend the Kaleidescape 4K HDR release highly enough. The film is also available on most digital retailers in 4K but the highly detailed cinematography really deserves the pixel-perfect transfer available on Kaleidescape.

Speaking of Dune, we can’t overlook the influence that sci-fi epic had on Star Wars. The similarities are striking. Desert planet? Check. Fascist galactic emperor? Check. Youthful chosen one with magical abilities? Check. Hell, Star Wars even calls its elicit substances “spice” as an homage to Dune. Of course, it bears repeating, Star Wars is not science fiction, and it could not be narratively or thematically more different from Dune. But Lucas certainly stole elements from the original novel where he saw fit. And there’s also reason to suspect he was, in some ways, influenced by the mid-’70s film adaptation of Dune that never got made.

Check out the excellent 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune for more details on this, but the short story is that Jodorowsky created a massive illustrated bible and script for his adaptation that was shopped around to every major studio in Hollywood in an attempt to secure the last $5 million needed to flesh out his budget. He failed in that respect and the film never got made, but you can see elements of his storyboards and designs in everything from Alien to Prometheus to Mike Hodges’ 1980 Flash Gordon film to, yes, Star Wars.

Whatever you do, please avoid at all costs David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune (which, by the way, he directed after turning down the chance to helm Return of the Jedi). Skip instead to Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation from 2021, which does its best to hide many of the parallels with Star Wars, out of fear I suppose that some would see it as a ripoff instead of a new adaptation of source material Lucas himself ripped off. Admittedly, this is all starting to turn into a bit of an ouroboros, but if you’re not up for reading the novel, Villeneuve’s Dune is a great way to explore some of the inspiration behind Star Wars, even if indirectly.

Two last influences you can’t overlook if you want to understand Star Wars (more from a storytelling than cinematic point of view) are the works of Joseph Campbell and J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was not, of course, adapted to film until well after Star Wars was made but the book certainly had a powerful influence on young George Lucas, which you can see in the numerous parallels between them. Consider, for example, the similarities between the overall narrative arc of Fellowship of the Ring and A New Hope: Young lad raised by a relative (second cousin once removed in one work, uncle in the other) befriends a mysterious wizard and goes on a quest to defeat evil. You can also see direct correlations between specific scenes, such as the sacrifice of Gandalf/Obi-wan so the young lad and his party can escape. And if you want to extend this to the entire trilogy, there are even more similarities. Compare, for example, the death of Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi to the death of Théoden in Return of the King.

While Lucas only had the original book as inspiration, we of course have Peter Jackson’s epic cinematic trilogy to enjoy (which, coincidentally, was itself inspired in parts by Star Wars). You can read more about that adaptation here.

Lastly, you can largely thank Joseph Campbell for Lucas’s ability to look at all of these disparate works of inspiration and pull from them exactly the right elements he needed to craft something that felt new and fresh while also being evocative. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth is a fantastic PBS series from 1998 that explores the author’s work on mythology, namely the common elements of all myths and how they serve as metaphor for the human experience. You can purchase all six episodes of the interview series on Amazon, but if you’re itching for some deeper reading, I also recommend Campbell’s seminal The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Without this book, there would be no Star Wars as we know it today. And if you need proof of that, just check out J. W. Rinzler’s comic book series The Star Wars, a graphic-novel adaptation of one of the last drafts of the original film before Lucas discovered Campbell’s work and transformed his own story to fit the template of the monomyth. It was between this draft and the final script that Star Wars would transform from light science-fiction into epic fantasy, and the differences—narratively, symbolically, and thematically—couldn’t be starker.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954)

Part 1

Part 2

available on Kaleidescape

the Star Wars Collection

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 2

related reviews

A New Hope

The Empire Strikes Back

Lucas leaned heavily on the work of a number of iconic directors to bring some weight to A New Hope

by Dennis Burger
September 24, 2020

Ask me to sum up the appeal of Star Wars as succinctly as possible, and I would have to describe it as the cinematic child of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone dressed in Flash Gordon Underoos. As I mentioned in the Pt. 1, what would eventually become Star Wars began as George Lucas’s attempt to make a modern Flash Gordon film. And indeed, the serial adaptations of the 1930s and ’40s strongly influenced the structure and some of the aesthetic trappings of the film he eventually made.

But dig beneath the surface, and the movie we ended up with shares almost no meaningful DNA with those adventurous sci-fi serials. If you really want to understand what makes Star Wars tick, you have to ignore the ray-guns and robots and starships—or at least look past them. And when you do, what you’re left with is mostly the samurai and the cowboy.

Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa’s influence on Lucas has been so thoroughly discussed and dissected by this point that I have little to add. But if, for whatever reason you’ve never explored the connection for yourself, you’re in for a treat. Start with 1958’s The Hidden Fortress (aka Kakushi toride no san akunin or The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress).

You’ll notice some superficial similarities, especially Kurosawa’s heavy use of wipe transitions, which Lucas employed liberally in Star Wars. But after just a few minutes’ worth of viewing, you should start seeing deeper parallels. There’s the fact that the peasants Tahei and Matashichi map nearly perfectly to Artoo and Threepio, in personality as well as their relationship to the other characters and their roles as catalysts of the plot. Kurosawa’s film also features a battle-weary general who becomes wrapped up in a rebellion led by a princess. Even the overall story beats for both films follow a very similar structure. When you get right down to it, Star Wars is effectively a remake of The Hidden Fortress, something Lucas himself has admitted to on several occasions.

But Kurosawa’s influence can’t be limited to one film. You should also check out 1961’s Yojimbo, which provides definitive proof that Lucas was directly inspired by Kurosawa, and not merely Kurosawa by way of Leone. If you don’t understand the distinction, it helps to know that Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was such a blatant ripoff of Yojimbo that Kurosawa sued.

But there’s one distinctive element of Yojimbo that Leone didn’t pilfer, but which made its way into Lucas’s movie. Check out the first fight in the film. Imagine Toshirô Mifune wearing Jedi garb instead of samurai robes, and holding a lightsaber instead of a katana. (That shouldn’t be too difficult, since Lucas actually wrote the role of Obi-wan Kenobi for Mifune, and only asked Sir Alec Guinness to play the part after Mifune turned him down.) Now imagine the scene as a gloomy cantina instead of a dusty street. What you’ll notice is that the fight plays out strikingly similarly to the cantina brawl in Star Wars, complete with the severed-limb gag that would appear in practically all of Lucas’s Star Wars films.

It wasn’t merely Kurosawa’s samurai epics that inspired Lucas, though. You should also check out 1975’s Dersu Uzala, a Soviet/Japanese collaboration about a Nanai trapper and hunter by the same name. Noteworthy for being Kurosawa’s only 70mm film, it came out not long before Lucas began filming A New Hope, and you can see visual influences throughout.

Perhaps the most striking involves a scene in which the two main characters look out over a horizon that includes both the setting sun and the rising moon. You can catch a glimpse of the scene about a minute into the film’s trailer, although the visuals there don’t do it justice. Unfortunately, the only way I know of watching Dersu Uzala, short of buying a disc, is on The Criterion Channel, but since that streaming service is also home to many of Kurosawa’s classic films, it may be worth signing up for a 14-day trial if you don’t want to buy them on Blu-ray.

Sergio Leone

When I said Lucas was influenced directly by Kurosawa and not merely Kurosawa by way of Leone, I didn’t mean to imply Sergio himself didn’t also have some measurable impact on Lucas’s style. The look of Tatooine, the desert planet on which Luke Skywalker grew up, certainly owes a lot to the aesthetics of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, not only in its landscape but also in its architecture.

But a much bigger influence on the overall visual style of Star Wars comes from 1969’s Once Upon a Time in the West. And it’s not so much the scenery that rings familiar here; it’s more the movement of the camera, as well as the characters. Watch the scene in which Frank, the villain played by Henry Fonda, strides his way into the film, flanked by his flunkies, silently strutting and letting his boots and cloak do all the talking.

Compare this to Darth Vader’s first appearance onscreen, and you can see that while Lucas wasn’t necessarily quoting Leone, he was definitely paraphrasing him. The instant you see Frank and Vader, you know they’re the baddies of the picture. You know they’re evil to the core without a hint of mustache-twirling or monologuing.

Once Upon a Time in the West has been remastered in 4K, but whether or not any of the supposed 4K releases online come from this remaster is up for debate. Until it’s officially released in UHD HDR, the best way to view the film is via Kaleidescape. You can also buy or rent it via most major digital movie retailers, and it’s currently streaming for free on Paramount+.

John Ford

While you’re in a western mood, I would also recommend checking out The Searchers. The films of John Ford certainly had an influence on Lucas’s cinematic sensibilities, but none influenced Star Wars quite so much as this one. As with Leone’s westerns, the desert landscapes here can be seen echoing all throughout the Jundland Wastes in A New Hope, but there’s one unforgettable scene Lucas would pretty much lift straight out of Ford’s film and paste into his own. It’s the one in which John Wayne comes home to find his brother’s ranch in flames and his relatives slaughtered.

David Lean

Tired of westerns but still itching to dig into Lucas’s desert inspiration for Star Wars? Look no farther than David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia. So much of that film’s style can be seen reflected in the work of Star Wars cinematographer Gil Taylor, but as the official Star Wars website points out, there were also a number of scenes in Lawrence that were practically traced in Star Wars:

Many moves from David Lean’s epic were cribbed for sequences on Tatooine. The shot of Mos Eisley from the distance as Luke and Obi-Wan look from on high reminds one instantly of shots looking down at Damascus. Shots of Tusken snipers looking down at speeders moving below echo the same sorts of shots in Lawrence of Arabia.

Unfortunately, the best way to view Lawrence of Arabia is still on disc, as part of the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection, which also includes Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Dr. Strangelove, Gandhi, A League of Their Own, and Jerry Maguire. Lean’s classic has not been released on UHD Blu-ray on its own, and the digital releases of the film all lack the Dolby Vision HDR version featured in this collection. If, for whatever reason, you’re not interested in HDR, your next-best bet is Kaleidescape‘s UHD release of the film.

Dersu Uzala (1975)

Part 1

Part 3

available on Kaleidescape

the Star Wars Collection

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 1

A three-part look at the eclectic group of movies that helped provide the inspiration for Lucas’s space-opera saga

by Dennis Burger
updated April 25, 2022

It’s just as easy to forget that as unique as 1977’s Star Wars seemed at the time of its release—especially to my five-year-old eyes—there was barely anything original about it. Sure, the way it was put together was fresh— mind-blowingly so—but dig down to the nuts-and-bolts level and it’s clear that this Galaxy Far, Far Away didn’t spring to George Lucas’s mind fully formed. The film was, in many ways, a reaction to the grim and gritty films that dominated cinemas in the early 1970s. But first and foremost, it was a homage to the serials and adventure movies that Lucas enjoyed seeing on the big screen in his youth.

And I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but have you ever actually seen the direct correlations? If not, you should spend some time with the Flash Gordon serials of 1936, ’38, and ’40. This is no great surprise given that Lucas originally intended to develop his own Flash Gordon film in the early ’70s and only set about creating his own universe because he couldn’t secure the rights to Alex Raymond’s legendary comic-strip character.

Despite the fact that Star Wars ended up being way more fantasy than sci-fi, a lot of the retro-high-tech set-dressing of Flash Gordon remains, but that’s not all. Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe in particular loaned a number of story elements to the first Star Wars and its two sequels, including character archetypes and relationships, and even settings. But the biggest thing Flash Gordon gave to Star Wars was, of course, that iconic opening crawl.

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is available in its entirety on YouTube, as are the 1936 original and its sequel, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars. They aren’t exactly high cinema, but if you’re interested in understanding the genealogy of Star Wars, this is where you want to start.

Other serials worth a look (and also available on YouTube) include 1939’s Buck Rogers (another fantastic opening crawl!) and a delicious little oddity known as The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938, shown above). The latter in particular is famous for being one of the cheapest serials ever made (and it shows), but also for including the first costumed super-villain, The Lightning, whose garb almost certainly inspired the look of Darth Vader and the bounty hunter Boba Fett, as well.

Other classics of the era that seem to have had an influence on Lucas in his youth (although he likely saw them in early TV broadcasts rather than at a movie theater) include The Wizard of Oz, from which Star Wars borrows much of its group dynamic, fairy-tale nature, and monomythic structure; the films of Ray Harryhausen, such as Mighty Joe Young, which no doubt shaped his attitude toward special effects; the works of Laurel & Hardy, which certainly had some influence on the relationship between Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio; and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, whose Art Deco Maschinenmensch (Robot), despite being feminine, undoubtedly influenced the look of Threepio. Hell, you could even argue that Lucas drew some inspiration from the 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will—not its ideology, but rather the scale and grandiosity of its imagery, especially in the triumphant Royal Award Ceremony after the Battle of Yavin, in which Luke and Han are celebrated as heroes of the Rebellion.

Of course, you could just as easily argue that all of the above (save perhaps Flash Gordon) represent superficial influences at best. But to deny the importance of these elements would be to deny that Star Wars is, at least in part, a pop-culture collage, a pastiche of cool design elements that make it feel both fresh and timeless.

In Part 2, though, we’ll dig into some of the more substantial cinematic gold Lucas mined in creating the first Star Wars film, as well as the first two sequels.

Metropolis (1927)

Part 2

Part 3

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The Star Wars Collection

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The Films That Made Star Wars–Complete

The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 3

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The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 2

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The Films That Made Star Wars, Pt. 1

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