Beyond Godzilla: Latitude Zero

It was released in 1969, but this Japanese-American co-production (more Japanese than U.S., since Hollywood bailed mid-stream) eerily predicts the fashions of the disco era. There is gold lamé, plunging necklines, and sporty scarves. Keep in mind, we’re still just talking about the guys here. That is just how they dress in this technologically advanced Atlantis. Two scientists and a Yankee journalist will see it for themselves in Ishirō Honda’s The H-Man (trailer here), which screens during the Japan Society’s new film series, Beyond Godzilla: Alternative Futures & Fantasies in Japanese Cinema.

Japanese team leader Dr. Ken Tashiro and his French colleague Dr. Jules Masson had invited Perry Lawton to document their undersea exploration mission in James Cameron-style submersible, but an unexpected volcano eruption swept them away from their life lines. Fortunately, the two-hundred-year-old Nemo-esque Captain Craig McKenzie was there to save them. He commands the submarine Alpha, the flagship of Latitude Zero, a utopian combination of Shangri-La and Galt’s Gulch, where principled scientists are free to pursue their work confident it will not be ill-used by either side of the Cold War.

Alas, not every two-century-old genius inhabiting these deep equatorial waters is as progressive as McKenzie and his colleagues. There is also Dr. Malic, a traditional super-villain bent on world domination. He hunkers down in his lair at Blood Rock, sending out the Black Shark sub and its tragically loyal captain Kroiga to do his bidding. Like Dr. Moreau, he has a thing for grafting humans and animals together, blowing them up to gigantic size to create kaiju. Inconveniently, Malic has just kidnapped Dr. Okada, a Japanese with a game-changing formula to counteract the effects of radiation, who had intended to defect to Latitude Zero.

Latitude is certainly enjoyable as a groovy time-capsule, but it never taps into the Japanese national subconscious in the way Honda’s The H-Man and Godzilla do. There is a bit of hand-wringing on behalf of a more neutral Cold War position, which has not dated well in retrospect.

Yes, that is Joseph Cotton, from Citizen Kane, Niagara, and The Third Man sporting the V-neck as Capt. McKenzie. He plows through as best he can. That is also Cesar Romero hamming it up as Dr. Malic. Since this is post-Batman, you know his performance will come in only one speed: high camp. However, Akira Takarada and Masumi Okada maintain their dignity while looking relatively alert and willing as Tashiro and Masson (remember, he’s the French one). Linda Haynes is also far better than snarky reviews have suggested as Latitude Zero’s bikini-top rocking Dr. Ann Barton (also looking ready for a night at the discotheque). However, it is a little awkward watching Richard Jaeckel embrace just about every crass American stereotype as Lawton.

Honestly, Latitude Zero is so ludicrous, it can’t miss. It too is a film that was released in multiple cuts. Logically, the Japan Society has opted for the 15-minute shorter Japanese-language version, which wisely jettisoned Cotton’s unnecessary voice-over narration. Judging from the American version, the Japanese cut is probably the one to see. Amusing in a giant flying Griffin way (yep, that’s in there), Latitude Zero screens this Saturday (3/25) at the Japan Society, as part of the ongoing Beyond Godzilla series.

Unknown Welles: Journey Into Fear [Preview Cut]

In the Orson Welles’ filmography, this 1943 espionage thriller always has an asterisk next to the title in fans’ minds. Throughout his life, Welles insisted it was directed by his friend Norman Foster, except when discussing the scenes he helmed. Thanks to the misadventure of It’s All True, much of the daily directorial work was indeed left to Foster (who would make a bit of a name for himself with some nifty little noirs), but the Eric Ambler adaptation definitely bears the Welles stamp. Its ragged narrative edges also reflect RKO’s desire to edit it down under seventy minutes. Oh, but there were longer versions screened for preview audiences and European markets. The intrepid Munich Filmmuseum tracked down the various cuts as well as the shooting script to reconstruct a more coherent and surprising funny super-cut of Foster’s Journey Into Fear, which screened last night at MoMA as part of the 2015 To Save and Project International Festival of Preservation’s Unknown Welles sidebar.

It is the early “Phony War” days of WWII, when Britain still expected to forge an alliance with Turkey. It was therefore all fine and dandy that munitions expert Howard Graham was in Istanbul working to rearm the Turkish navy. Graham and his wife Stephanie are due to sail to Batumi (which really doesn’t make sense, since the USSR was allied with Hitler at this time, but so be it), but they will be waylaid by a convoluted conspiracy. Kopeikin, a corrupt representative of Graham’s company drags him to a nightclub, ostensibly to meet the alluring dancer Josette Martel. Through blind luck, Graham escapes an assassination attempt that claims the life of magician Oo Lang Sang instead.

For his own safety mind you, Colonel Haki of Turkish intelligence has Graham whisked away on a dodgy tramp steamer, assuring the baffled American he will personally see to his wife’s safety. In fact, one of the rediscovered scenes suggests Haki does indeed give Ms. Graham some ambiguously special attention. (Let’s not forget, Welles was quite the ladies’ man, who was once married to Rita Hayworth. Plus, Haki’s fur hat looks smashing.) Meanwhile, Howard Graham is spending quite a bit of time with Martel on that dodgy steamer, because she is the only passenger he really doesn’t think is out to kill him.

Journey has always been an entertaining yarn, but the more complete version makes considerably more sense. Even though the Filmmuseum restoration team was again forced to resort to intertitles in places, the reconstructed preview cut gives us a fuller sense of the wit and irony of the script co-written by Welles and star Joseph Cotton. It is rather delightfully mordant.

As Graham, Cotton prefigures many of the classic everyman Hitchcokian protagonists as well as his turn as Holly Martins in the even more classic The Third Man. He credibly portrays Graham’s evolution from clueless passivity to resentful exasperation. While his screen time as Haki is limited, Welles made the most of it. He was also clearly feeling the power of the hat. Everett Sloane also adds some comedic noir flavor as the dubious Kopeikin, while Dolores del Rio’s Martel brings plenty of femme and a hint of fatale.

What RKO did to their Welles catalog makes you want to pull your hair out. A longer, smoother cut could have become an iconic film, much like Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man. Even with intertitles, the Filmmuseum version is the best way to see it, so hopefully it will be more widely screened in the future. Of course, it is a perfect selection for To Save and Project, which concludes its Unknown Welles sidebar tomorrow night at MoMA.

Orson Welles’ Too Much Johnson

It is not exactly the missing forty minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons, but for Orson Welles fans it is still quite significant.  Long considered lost to the ages, the silent short films Welles conceived for an ahead-of-its time stage production have been found (in Italy, as it happens) and restored by the film preservation department of the George Eastman House. Despite their strange genesis, the shorts known collectively as Too Much Johnson perfectly represent the Welles filmography—they are brash, innovative, and unfinished. Always fascinating and sometimes genuinely entertaining, Too Much Johnson, Welles' first stab at filmmaking, had its long awaited New York premiere last night, courtesy of the Eastman House (promo here).

William Gillette’s summer stock staple Too Much Johnson is not revived very often anymore—and the Mercury Theatre’s disastrous production probably deserves its share of the blame.  It literally bombed in New Haven. Welles’ original vision was rather ground-breaking.  Each act would be preceded by a short silent film in the Max Sennett tradition that would dramatize all the play’s exposition and backstories.  Of course, Welles never finished any of the shorts (and it is unclear whether the Stony Creek Theater could have accommodated them anyway), but since he had cut all the presumably redundant background information from the text, the production reportedly baffled critics and patrons alike.

To help contemporary viewers, the Eastman House’s preservation and curatorial staff provided running commentary throughout the New York screening, in addition to the requisite piano accompaniment.  Eastman House made no editorial decisions, preserving every frame that came in the can.  As a result, there are plenty of gaps, as well as repetitive takes of the same scene.  Yet, the finished restoration is a smoother audience experience than it might sound like. Serendipitously, the multiple versions are often madcap hi-jinks that when viewed continuously appear as if the characters are caught in a surreal loop.

The first act prelude is the most complete and easiest to follow. Joseph Cotten plays a man named Billings, who has been romancing another man’s wife under the assumed name of Johnson.  Coming home earlier than expected, the betrayed Dathis chases the man he thinks is Johnson across the future Meatpacking District, eventually ending on the ocean liner that will take both men’s families to Cuba for a dubious vacation.  (Once there, Billings looks up an old friend, only to find his plantation is now owned by a man who really is named Johnson.  Hilarity no doubt ensues.)

Frankly, Cotten’s prowess for Harold Lloyd comedy is quite impressive.  He shimmies across ledges and drags ladders over rooftops like a rubber-boned pro.  As if that were not enough, the first short also delivers Welles’ ever indulgent producer, John Houseman, as a bumbling beat cop.

The second and third constituent shorts are much more fragmentary, but there are some striking day-for-night shots of a Hudson Valley quarry, decked out with palm trees to resemble Cuba.  Periodically, one gets a glimmer of Welles’ developing eye for composition. Cotten also maintains his energetic good sportsmanship as the caddish anti-hero.

Johnson might be a bunch of odds and ends compared to Welles later masterpieces, but it is strangely compelling to watch the bedlam he unleashes with his co-conspirators.  The Eastman program also includes a three minute 16mm film documenting Welles directing Johnson that seems about as chaotic as you would imagine.  Yet, there is also something very poignant about the happy-go-lucky but incomplete work, prefiguring Welles later abortive attempts to produce his Don Quixote. 

Too Much Johnson is enormously important as cinematic history but also a good deal of fun.  The Eastman House intends to hold future screenings with live commentary, so cineastes should definitely keep an eye on their website.  They also hope to stage Welles' adaptation of the stage play incorporating excerpts of the shorts, which is impressively ambitious.

Cine-Simenon: The Bottom of the Bottle

After the war, Georges Simenon whiled away some pleasant days in Nogales, Arizona. Presumably, he appreciated the charms of bordertown life.  It also became the setting of a somewhat un-Simenon-like tale of fraternal dysfunction. The spirits will flow in Henry Hathaway’s adaptation of The Bottom of the Bottle, which screens during the Anthology Film Archives’ Cine-Simenon retrospective.

It rarely rains on the ranchland outside Nogales, but when it does, the Santa Cruz floods, cutting them off from the rest of the world.  For Paul “P.M.” Martin and his fellow landowners, this means it is time for their traditional floating house parties.  However, the sudden appearance of his brother Donald puts a damper on his mood. While they never really got along, the whole escaped convict thing particularly irks the status conscious P.M. 

Of course, nobody knows about the black sheep sibling he will introduce to his wife Nora and their friends as Eric Bell.  With the river running high, the Martin brothers will just have to bluff their way through until Donald can slip across to his waiting family.  Unfortunately, the younger Martin brother is a recovering alcoholic, under severe stress, about to attend his first rainy season party, which will be all about getting pie-faced hammered.

This is an odd film, but it is a big film, rather dazzlingly shot in Cinemascope by Lee Garmes.  It starts out as a desert noir, segueing into Lost Weekend, marital strife melodrama, and finally shifts into a modern day western, as the highway patrol posse saddles up, chasing the fugitive Martin into the hills.

Granted, Bottle is not a classic classic, but it is rather strange it is not programmed more frequently.  It would certainly make an interesting double bill with Touch of Evil, the classic bordertown noir directed by Joseph Cotten’s old comrade, Orson Welles.  Sort of conceived as a follow-up to Hathaway’s Niagara, also starring Cotten, Bottle is nowhere near as gripping as those two films.  Still, it has Dragnet’s Harry Morgan as a kindly barkeep, who plays Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” during the morning hours.

There are flashes of mordant wit throughout Bottle (the doorbell that rings “How Dry I am” might have been the work of an acerbic stagehand, but it still counts) and Hathaway makes the most of his southwestern locations.  He shrewdly manages to shoehorn in one amazingly cinematic mission church as often as possible.  Indeed, this is a finely crafted production, particularly the Martin’s richly appointed ranch house, which makes the Southfork look like a welfare hotel.  Speaking of Dallas, Jack Davis (a.k.a. Jock Ewing) turns up in a minor role as a member of the Martin’s boozy social circle.  Nonetheless, Bottle’s depiction of the local Hispanic population (probably considered broadmindedly sympathetic at the time) is pretty cringy for contemporary viewers.

Cotten has the right look and presence for P.M. Martin, even if his ascot-looking bandanas are a wardrobe mistake.  Van Johnson also stretches his chops quite notably as the sad sack brother.  Surprisingly though, it is Ruth Roman who really stands out as the assertive but family-oriented Nora Martin, who is rather impressive holding P.M.’s feet to the fire. It is a smarter character and performance than one expect in what is essentially a “helper” role.

So Bottle might not be a good film, per se, but it is entertaining in its way.  A late product of the old school studio system, it demonstrates both the merits and drawbacks of the era, cramming enough interesting stuff into a misconceived vehicle to maintain viewers’ attention the all the way through.  It is definitely the ringer of AFA’s Cine-Simenon, but it still makes sense to include it, because when else could they show it.  Those intrigued should definitely check it out when it screens tomorrow (8/13), Wednesday (8/15), and Sunday (8/18) at Anthology Film Archives.