Thirty-second season

1593.) Vintage: I say a final farewell to Bernardo Bertolucci with the fifth and last of my tributes to his work. In this case I discuss, and give the American TV premiere to, scenes from his last film, You and Me (2012). Based on a young adult novel, it is a film that encompasses themes from his earlier pictures and has imagery and plot developments that seem derived from a film that clearly influenced his work, Les Enfants Terribles, written by Cocteau and directed by Melville. A teenage boy decides to avoid going on a school ski trip and instead inhabits a storage area in the basement of the apartment building his family lives in – finally alone with his imagination and his devices, pets (an ant farm), and books, until his junkie step-sister invades his secret hideaway. The film is a well-made character study that avoids the sentimentality found in so many films for teens and ended Bertolucci’s career on a very positive and (thankfully) small-in-scale note. One of its bonuses: a touching scene set to the rare single “Regazzo Solo, Regazza Sola” (Lonely Boy, Lonely Girl), the unusual Italian rewrite of “Space Oddity” (having nothing to do with space travel or Major Tom), sung by Bowie himself.


1594.) Vintage: To celebrate mine birthday, I always dig up something that you can potentially see somewhere else (the majority of Funhouse offerings being pretty damned rare items for U.S. television). This time out, as I turn “one year older and deeper in debt,” I salute again the wonder that is Massacre Mafia Style, Duke Mitchell’s crime opus. The film was restored beautifully for a Blu-ray/DVD package a few years ago (after having only been available on VHS as “The Executioner”) and even played two or three times on TCM, but then was mysteriously pulled from circulation on disc (as was its successor in weirdness, but more on that in a future show). Thus, this week I’ll be showing scenes from “MMS” and also giving you a glimpse at one supplement, a doc which offers a rather candid (and at times damning) view of Mitchell, who was known as “Mr. Palm Springs” and made his bones primarily as a nightclub entertainer in that city. So, join me for simulated violence, jaunty Italian-American songs, and protracted speeches about the position of the Italian mobster in American society, courtesy of the auteur who had previously met a Brooklyn gorilla.


1595.) Vintage: I return to the topic of cult actor-singer-moviemaker Duke Mitchell this week again – this time to do the first of two episodes about his mind-bendingly weird film Gone with the Pope (shot in ’75; edited and released in 2010). The most significant thing about the film is that it is, hands-down, the best restoration job done on an exploitation film, ever. That is due to the fact that Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski assembled the film (which was completely shot but never assembled by Duke himself); for a method of comparison, Murawski went from assembling Pope to being the main editor on the creation of Orson’s Other Side of the Wind. There are several striking things about Pope – the flat acting, use of stock footage to simulate a trip to Italy, long monologues by even minor characters – but the single most unique is the fact that the films actually has three plots (or “movements” if you want to get highfalutin’ about it). The second one is the most talked about – it involves Duke and his chums kidnapping the Pope and demanding a ransom of 50 cents from every Catholic in the world. That said, it’s not a comedy, although it has some comic touches. Duke Mitchell was very convinced of his own skills as an actor, writer, and director – when one watches Pope, one marvels that there’s not a minute where Duke doesn’t think he’s making a gangster-movie masterpiece.


1596.) Vintage: The third and last of my episodes saluting the cinematic efforts of one Duke Mitchell covers the startling “third act” (startling in that it makes little sense) of his Gone with the Pope. I discuss the film and show clips from both the feature – assembled by master-editor Bob Murawski, who graduated from assembling a Duke Mitchell unfinished feature to an Orson Welles unfinished feature (Other Side of the Wind) – and the home-video extras. These extras include stories from the cast, crew, and Duke’s close friends, behind-the-scenes footage of Duke directing (listen to him feed words to a non-actor who doesn’t speak English well). The most stunning of these revelations is that Duke attempted to make a hardcore porn reel that would overlap with Pope (he was nothing if not confident in his abilities in all areas, but this didn’t work out, to put it mildly).


1597.) Vintage: Can you discuss Roman Polanski’s films without discussing his life? I’ve decided to attempt this by discussing his work he did in the 2010s, which began with his creation of two “filmed plays,” one of which (Venus in Fur) I believe was the best thing he’d done since The Pianist and Bitter Moon. The third film never played in the U.S. because of the MeToo movement (although it should be noted that the victim in Polanski’s statutory case, now a grandmother, has asked all parties everywhere to move on, has accepted his privately-made apology to her, and in fact even advocated on behalf of him winning the Oscar for Pianist). It’s a thriller called Based on a True Story that some great moments of suspense but its All About Eve-ish script (cowritten by Olivier Assayas) is not all it could be. The lead performances by Emmanuelle Seigner (Mrs. Polanski) and Eva Green are great, though.


1598.) Vintage: Going on a glorious tangent off the work of Jacques Rivette, this week I present a discussion of and scenes from the debut film by Argentinean filmmaker Eduardo de Gregorio, who co-scripted The Spider’s Stratagem with Bertolucci and Celine and Julie Go Boating for Rivette. The film discussed here, Surreal Estate (1976), is a sort of odd spin-off of Celine and Julie, as it finds stars Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier in an old mansion that seems to be spawning its own narratives. Corin Redgrave stars as a blocked novelist who discovers the house and figures that he can write a novel about its occupants (including a dominant servant, played by Leslie Caron) – but soon finds that the house controls its denizens, rather than the other way around. de Gregorio made four later features, but this one is the most intriguing, as it deals with storytelling and sexuality, and is itself a sort of “hallway” running alongside Celine and Julie.


1599.) A vintage episode, airing to note the passing of Gena Rowlands: From spring 1996, my phone interview with Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel. The chat was conducted to promote the first-time-ever debut of Cassavetes’ Shadows and Faces on home video (on VHS). We discussed those films at the outset, but since I had the opportunity to speak to two of the people who were closest to Cassavetes, I made sure to bring up the things I had always wanted to talk about with his intimates: his love of character people, the fantasy elements that appeared John’s last few works, and the different cuts of several of his films (Faces being the one that was cut down the most between its film-festival debut and its commercial run). Also, for bonus trivia points, find out which Fifties comic book Gena wrote for!


1600.) Labor Day continues to be Jerry Day in the Funhouse. I thought I couldn’t top last year’s Jerry/Clown-related discovery but a few months back I came across a “Pageant” magazine from 1960 in which the happily liberated Dean Martin reflected back on being Jerry’s straight man for a decade. What he said was quote-worthy, and so I’m reading from the article on this year’s Jerry show. The rest of the episode features a look at the Dean and Jerry relationship through their appearances on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” from 1950 to 1951 — I’ll cover ’52 through ’55 on an upcoming show. What must be kept in mind when watching these clips is that Dean was asked by a British interviewer when he stopped having fun being in the act and his instant answer was “1950.” Which means that watching the Colgate shows is essentially seeing a two-man team where one guy’s ego is inflating to crazy proportions, while the other guy is dying to go out on his own and stop providing “set-ups” for his partner’s antics. In the process I discuss the current releases of the Colgate shows versus the old public domain tapes and discs that contained the episodes (edited very differently) and also the other talents who appeared on the Colgate shows, from the future A-listers (who I had no time to show in this compilation) to Funhouse favorites (including one long-ago interview subject). The best part of all this? The clips get even more starkly illustrative of how the team were dying to break up in Part 2!


1601.) Part 2 of my Martin and Lewis TV retrospective shows the team’s movement away from each other, even when performing on the same stage or in the same sketch. In this episode I present clips from the “Colgate Comedy Hour” episode from 1952-55, in which there were certain odd signs that there was no longer a “unified front” in the M&L comedy team. For one thing, Jerry demanded to have “in one” sequences where he could perform several minutes of solo comedy (presumably because he wanted to “balance” Dean’s songs with even more screen time for himself), which usually consisted of some musical shtick — all of the sequences were underwhelming, with the exception of one pantomime bit that was so successful that Jerry kept performing it for the rest of his life (after having it fine-tuned by Frank Tashlin). The other interesting element, besides the fact that both Dean and Jerry were starting to perform in sweaters and other easygoing, non-tux outfits (reminiscent of Crosby, Como, and Hope), were the songs the duo sang to convince the public that they would “partners forever,” each of which had special lyrics written by Sammy Cahn. By the last episodes the sketches function as if Dean was guesting on Jerry’s show, or vice versa. I tried to balance the “distance” between the duo here by inserting some of Dean’s songs (which did indeed get catchier and catchier as the years went on, reflected in the fact that “That’s Amore” hit the Top Ten and found him singing more original, non-movie tunes) and Jerry’s musical mime that he continued to perform until the 2000s onstage.


1602.) Again offering stuff you ain’t seein’ anyplace else, this week I present another visit to the world of William Klein, noted photographer/filmmaker, this time in documentarian mode. The film in question, “William Klein aux grands magasins” (William Klein at department stores), was made in 1964 for a French TV show called “Les femmes aussi.” It features profiles of various women who shop (and one who works) in a Parisian department store. Klein may be mentioned in the title, but the biggest name who worked on the project is the woman who conducts the interviews, namely Simone Signoret (already a star for a decade and a half). Klein has Signoret not only speak to the women inside the department store, he also has her eat with them in their homes. As an addition to the proceedings, he interviews Signoret herself midway through the proceedings, asking her about her work and her relation to stores at this point in her career. (As onlookers gather to see the interview occurring in a cafe, we realize that Simone’s statement that she generally avoids department stores has some heavy basis in fact, and fandom.)


1603.) I return to the work of the great Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson in this episode. This time out it’s an obscure short he made around the time his style had changed from a more conventional one into the all-in-one-tableau style he adopted for his shorts and commercials, and his later darkly comic feature films. This particular short was quite very different, as “Something Happened” (1987) began life as a PSA about AIDS and ways to protect oneself from the virus. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare funded the film, up until Andersson decided to include scenes that reflected on the derivation of the virus – or, more accurately, the racist stories about how it had begun in Africa and made its way to Europe and America. At that point the National Board bowed out of the film, so Andersson funded it himself with money from his work on commercials. In this episode I show scenes from the short film and also discuss how its darkly satiric sequences reflecting the question of the virus’s origin tackle the very important (and to date, never truly resolved) question of where AIDS came from – and by extension, bring up questions that arose around a later pandemic (which also had a racist derivation story at its core). As it stands, the film is a key work in Andersson’s filmography, predating his 1991 short “World of Glory” (in which a similar narrative about governmental control of the populace emerges out of a series of darkly comic vignettes) and his blissfully satiric feature films of the 21st century.


1604.) The temptation to sum up decades in culture has existed for quite some time, but it reached its first peak in the second half of the 20th century. Witness this week’s focus, a variety TV “spectacular” that CBS aired called “The Fabulous Fifties.” The show, which aired in January 1960, was directed by soon-to-be feature director Norman Jewison and Charles and Ray Eames (yes, the couple who designed furniture) and featured a bunch of segments about the past decade, ranging from the recounting of straight news events to comedy sketches and musical numbers. I discuss the show’s rather odd structure, its at-times stern demeanor (conveyed by hosts Henry Fonda and Eric Sevareid), and shameless promotion of CBS shows over those of the other networks (and Elvis as the one-person representation of rock ’n’ roll). But the entertainment portions of the program are memorable, thanks to the talent hired. Dick Van Dyke (a year and a half before his sitcom debuted) does a salute to popular Fifties dances, Shelley Berman gets put in a sitcom bag in a sketch about a father and son, Rex Harrison does a tune from My Fair Lady, and Nichols and May are wonderfully tongue-in-cheek in two sketches (a conventional N&H two-hander and a deftly-handled ad for GE refrigerators). Add to that a catalog of both famous faces and a necrology of the famous who died during the Fifties.


1605.) Vintage: Taking a break from the high art for a week, I hereby introduce another no-budget, sincerely clueless auteur. Neil Breen is a deadpan actor-director-writer-producer who works in the Las Vegas area and produces drama-crime films-fantasies that have ambiguous characters, overloaded plots (all info supplied in a voiceover and much of it rarely mentioned ever again), really poor acting, and a pace that is at best uneven, at worst slow beyond even the wildest imaginings of the most laidback experimental filmmaker. Breen has acquired an Internet cult that takes his bloated features and cuts them down to “just the funny parts” – what I do on this episode is to tackle his first film Double Down (2005) with both a verbal review and my own “super-cut” that not only supplies some unintentionally humorous scenes (Breen gets a phone call indicating a young girl he knows has died of brain cancer, interrupting with “I’ve got to take this other call…”), but also some moments that indicate the “longueur” of his work. In the case of this film that meant including alternate takes of various scenes, so dialogue and action is repeated. And the plot – well, it’s at base level the story of a super-spy-turned-terrorist who will “take down the Vegas strip,” but don’t expect that to happen anywhere in the picture. His films are NOT Christian, but they have the sincerity of Christian entertainment, which is all I need say….


1606.) The Deceased Artiste department makes a return, as I pay tribute to the first decade of Shelley Duvall’s career by discussing and showing excerpts from her work with Robert Altman. Duvall was discovered by Altman while he was making his very unconventional comedy Brewster McCloud (1970); she went on to feature in his work up to 1980, when she costarred in Popeye (the film that was labelled a “box office bomb” but actually was a big success money-wise in the U.S and worldwide, and one of Altman’s biggest grossers). Sure, she had two side gigs, one small (Annie Hall) and one that loomed large in her legend (The Shining, where Stanley clearly decided he had to treat her the way Jack treated Wendy), but the films with Altman were her greatest legacy. They found her playing more and more complicated roles, from the hippie chick of McCloud to the failed “Cosmo” reader of 3 Women (1977) who ends up the leader of a family of women. In the process, Shelley established herself as an excellent actress who was also one of American cinema’s more unconventional beauties. As a bonus, I include a post-Altman clip of Duvall acting for premier fantasist (and Funhouse fave) Guy Maddin in the late 1990s.

1607.) Screw-up for Access HQ! Shelley airs again.

1608.) A case study of another cult movie, this one being the incredible flop Some Call It Loving (1973), a fable for adults directed by James B. Harris and based on a story by fantasy author John Collier. The film is indeed an American approximation of an “art film,” but it has enough curious elements to make it worth watching. The first of these is the odd and potentially super-unpleasant premise (played here in “dream” fashion), in which a young jazz musician becomes obsessed with a “Sleeping Beauty” carnival attraction and buys the young woman from her carny keeper. He brings her back to a mansion where game-playing is the mode of the day – to the extent that the alpha female of the house (Carol White, from Ken Loach’s Sixties films) plays a “mother superior” role to the younger women who come into their household. The two elements that made it a must-show for the Funhouse are one of the performances that the alpha lady conducts with her protegee (in which both do a vaudeville-style dance number dressed as nuns) and the fact that the lead’s best friend is played by a young, lean, and clearly ad-libbing his brains out Richard Pryor (doing his drunk character). The film is similar to Funhouse favorites Young Playthings (by Joe Sarno) and Singapore Sling. The only incredibly bad aspect of the film is the performance by lead actor Zalman King – yes, the later monarch of cheesy but fun softcore pics.

1609.) Vintage: This week: We return to the weird, ultra-low-budget world of cult moviemaker Neil Breen this week with his second, even more befuddling, feature I Am Here… Now (2009). Breen is in that category of amazingly clueless writer/director/producers whose work is singularly his own. In his case, overly complicated plots are conveyed with voiceover narration, a series of not-very-active action scenes, symbolic interludes, and a startling amount of “Neil’s character walks” and “Neil’s character drives” scenes (not forgetting a good deal of stock footage and stock music, and desert vista shots). This particular outing finds Neil as an otherwordly being who created the human race and has come back to Earth to judge us. He interacts with a pair of twin sisters (who waver between helping the human race with sustainable energy or becoming hookers), an assortment of corrupt governmental figures (who identify themselves as such in their dialogue, always a help), and a street gang whose violence can only be overcome by Breen’s character, who can freeze time and help the helpless. One may wonder whether Breen has been affected by the cult status his films have achieved. The answer is a decisive “no” – he’s still as clueless a writer/director/producer/star/caterer/makeup-effect maker in his later pics as he was in the first one.

1610.) Vintage: The first of two episodes about Italian avant-garde filmmaker Carmelo Bene. A contemporary and colleague of Pasolini, Bene was first and foremost a theater director and playwright, but for a handful of years in that most turbulent of times (’68-’73) he made a handful of movies. They are colorful and crazy, alternately profound and ridiculous, and feature moments of visual beauty and rather goofy shtick. His influences encompassed various theatrical artists and also American underground filmmakers (most notably Anger and Jack Smith) and Funhouse deity, Uncle Jean. In this episode I discuss and shows scenes from three of his features: Our Lady of the Turks (1968), an overlong episodic work that introduced his experimental style; Capricci (1969), an off-the-rails provocation that costars Godard perennial Anne Wiazemsky; and One Hamlet Less (1973), his warped and truly gorgeous-looking adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic.

1611.) A very special, very under-known film about memory starring the great Bulle Ogier is the topic of this week’s episode. Jamais Plus Toujours (1976) is a film I found quite moving; I’ve watched it twice again since I initially saw it and it has maintained its freshness. It was made by Yannick Bellon, who was a well-known French filmmaker, probably best known to Funhouse viewers as the co-director with Chris Marker of the film-essay about her mother Denise Bellon’s photographs, Remembrance of Things to Come (2001). Her knowledge of her mother’s photography surely factored into the structure of this film, which is a meditation on memory, photography, aging, and that old killer of us all, time. It begins with a woman (Ogier) at a presentation of items that belonged to dead persons which are to be auctioned off. She finds a photo album and see pictures of herself with the dead woman — from there Bellon sketches a moving tale of what happens to our possessions when we die. Friends acquiring (or in this case, buying) the items, strangers acquiring them, the items being sold at auction, in an antique store, at rummage sales on blankets, or, for those items that are too big and have no meaning to others, a garbage truck. Bellon follows the lives of a few people who attend the pre-auction presentation, focusing in on Ogier who meets an old acquaintance, with whom she may or may not have an affair. The film is one of those tiny curios (much like the items you see at a rummage sale) that has a far greater value than is initially expected.

1612.) Vintage: The first in another series of episodes about a filmmaker whose body of work is *so* consistent that it’s a joy to watch their works in succession. Vera Chytilova is the focus of this series, and I start off with a discussion of, and scenes from, the two other films she wrote with costumer-scripter Ester Krumbachová (the one film fans know and love is the 1966 cult classic Daisies, which was shown on the Funhouse in late ’95 and is now readily available on disc). The first film was one that the two cowrote and which came right before Chytilova was effectively (covertly) banned from working for seven years as a filmmaker in Czechoslovakia – Krumbachová was banned for two decades. Fruit of Paradise (1970) is a version of the Garden of Eden story that features glorious animation and step-printing effects, as well as elements from other fictional tales (including “Alice in Wonderland”). The second film is the only reunion of the co-scripters, The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun (1983). Intended as a comedy mocking older men fancying young women, the film is also in the mode of Chytilova’s post-comeback sex comedies (which made an appeal to male viewers with sexy sequences spotlighting the charms of the actresses) and features gorgeous images of foliage, harkening back to the montages found in Daisies and Fruit of Paradise.

1613.) Vintage: Part two of an ongoing tribute to Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilova focuses on two of her subversive genre pictures. The first is her comeback film (after Czech authorities prevented her from working for seven years), The Apple Game (1977). The film is an odd, Altman-like ensemble piece that focuses on a playboy doctor (Jiri Menzel) who is constantly on the make. The second feature under discussion is the oddly titled Wolf’s Hole (1987), which is a spoof of horror flicks in which a group of young people go to a remote area and are immediately in danger. Chytilova’s version of this scenario involves no violence (but some weird behavior) and no sex at all. The film in fact begins as an odd spoof and then becomes a parable about the benefits of fraternity and solidarity (punctuated by arresting images of frost and snow).

1614.) Vintage: Part four of my tribute to cult Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilova focuses on her collaborations with the actor Bolek Polívka, who coscripted as well as starred in certain of Chytilova’s films. The first film discussed is the amazingly titled The Inheritance, or fuckoffguysgoodday (that’s its real title, 1992). It’s a yokel comedy that is a minor work by Chytilova but was a big hit in its afterlife on video and on television. The “feature presentation” of this episode is The Jester and the Queen (1988), which is a fascinating comedy-drama in which the groundskeeper of a castle (being used as a summer hunting lodge) imagines that he and visitor knew each other in another life – she as a queen, he as her court jester. The film is a gorgeously shot character study/fantasy that is simultaneously about class, sexual domination, fantasy, and memory; unlike The Inheritance, it’s most definitely a major work by Chytilova.

1615.) A Deceased Artiste tribute this week to Paul Morrissey, an ultra-cranky innovator of underground cinema who hated the term “underground cinema” and a lot of other things as well. No mind, as his films will be delighting people for years to come, as hopefully more people come to know that he alone made the later films with Andy Warhol’s name on them. (Granted, Warhol supplied the money for the movies’ production and his name got them the initial notoriety.) In this episode, I recount my two colorful meetings with the man and then go from “first to last,” featuring clips from his initial shorts, made before he encountered Andy, and two of his last features, which both came out in the Eighties. The images from the shorts are raw and real (and feature young men upon whom Morrissey’s camera fixated); I’ve added Velvet Underground music under them, as they were initially made silent (to simulate the real format, just turn down your TV or monitor). The films I offer scenes from have been out of distribution for decades now. Madame Wang’s is an off-the-wall comedy that strains for its eccentricities; blame that on it being shot in L.A. instead of NYC. It still has some memorably funny moments, despite seeming like a copy of John Waters’ films (whereas Morrissey, of course, began showing his stylish quirks when Waters was still living in Baltimore at home with his parents). The other feature excerpted is Spike of Bensonhurst, a “normal” film for Morrissey (and the last of his pics to receive actual distribution, in 1988), which still has a nasty sense of humor and (a Morrissey specialty) some Nu Yawk accents so thick you could cut ’em with a knife.

1616.) A quite peculiar and entertaining concoction, Beware My Brethren (later called The Fiend), is a 1972 horror film (non-supernatural) that offers us both a serial killer saga and the events occurring around the Xtian sect that the serial killer belongs to. That sect is in fact located in the very house that he lives in with his mother (never explained — better that way) and is run by a crazed preacher, played by the brilliant, always-on-the-verge-of-madness Patrick Magee. Unlike many serial killer pics, this one avoids the police procedural sequences (in fact, the police don’t even solve the case and are not even present at the film’s conclusion). Instead, we have both the introverted, nebbishy serial killer at home being warned against the perils of sex by his devout (and way too attentive) mother and stalking his victims, while the Xtian sect meet for their prayer sessions, which are occasionally punctuated by a rousing musical number (always, *always* a good thing). Thus, you have a murder thriller with three great lead performances, a creepy plotline, and two sudden pop-gospel musical numbers. How much more can you ask for, from an independently produced horror pic that was distributed by the third-best-known horror-pic producers in England, namely Tigon British Film Productions.

1617.) Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, as the Funhouse goes vintage TV for two episodes. I was able to obtain copies of complete vintage episodes of The Mike Douglas Show that were removed from YouTube for copyright reasons (and remain up only as very brief music clips) and I had to do some episodes about them. The week in question was July 27, 1970 when Mike’s guest host was the late, great Bobby Darin, who was “in transition” as a performer; he had moved away from his glitzy Vegas persona and made two albums of singer-songwriter material (dubbed “protest songs” by the rock press) that had flopped. He was not in demand as a live performer because of this transition, but the music he was making was still terrific and he was still a helluva charismatic, kinetic performer onstage. Thus, he accepted Douglas’s invitation to serve as his cohost for a week of shows and not only got to discuss his musical transition but also interact with an impressive line-up of performers, from comedians to iconic musical figures, who were also “in transition” from being high on the charts to becoming thought of as “oldies acts” but were still incredibly dynamic and talented performers. What I’ve done is create a “super-cut” of these episodes in order to present the best moments from the episodes and show the really great range of performers that Mike Douglas had on in an average week of his shows.

1618.) Screw-up at Access HQ – rerun of earlier episode!

1619.) Vintage: Part three of my ongoing tribute to the work of pioneering Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilova focuses solely on her 1980 chaos comedy Panelstory. The film revolves around the residents of a housing project that is going through massive renovations and being enlarged. Nothing works, everyone (including the inhabitants) get easily lost, and if the residents aren’t screwing each other, they’re being screwed by the management. Yes, it’s a comedy but it’s also a social satire that rates as one of Chytilova’s tighter films.