Dear readers!

For me, it's something of an event when I manage to post twice in a month. The two most recent posts have been in various states of preparation for a number of months, and I hustled myself to finally post them and have done.

I think of myself as an essayist whose main medium is the weblog and who likes to use film as a springboard to talk about whatever subject moves me. But I do have a full-time job which pays little, gets less respect, and which I often find mentally and physically taxing. That and my constant diddling and overworking what I write means I don't post very often, though I am always on my own case to do more. I also have a touch of depressive illness or disthymia and that has an effect on my productivity as well.

If some of you have read my stuff here, have liked it and would like to read more, I imagine it can get rather frustrating to deal with months of silence before something comes up on the blog. It frustrates me as well, because it is a melancholy thing to see a seemingly abandoned website, and its air of ambitious ideas gone nowhere.

Now while I don't write for applause, I would like to keep any readers I have managed to get, and strongly urge those of you who don't use an RSS feed aggregator to start using one, so you don't have to constantly click back here, see nothing new, and then give up, thinking that I have stopped posting, because in spite of not posting often, I don't intend to stop posting. For those of you who don't consider yourselves web-savvy computer geeks, a feed aggregator monitors websites with frequently-updated content, letting you know if there is anything new on the websites you follow so you do not have to keep clicking your browser back. It's great to manage all the websites you follow, and for those like mine that tend to be inactive a lot, it also frees you from the frustrating experience of having to click back over and over before finding new content.

RSS feeds are not a new thing by any means, and as said, I was a little intimidated at first by all the talk about feeds and such, but take a little time to Google and learn about it, and I think you'll find that it'll be worth your while. Just to get you started, if you are a Windows user, you might want to try Newzie, a free standalone client (though there are lots of other freeware feedreaders out there), and if you like podcasts, as I do, you might also want to check out Newzie's sister client Ziepod, a client that allows you to manage and download all the podcasts you follow, though, again, there are many podcast aggregators you might want to try out.

This way, if there is something new here at Plastic Exploding, you'll know about it without having to make extra effort. Meanwhile, I'll try my best to post more often. Is it a deal?

For those of you who observe the end-of-year holidays, I hope you have a great holiday season.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

The title of this period political drama comes from the customary signoff of pioneering broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965). Murrow began his career in the mid thirties as "director of talks and education" at the Blue radio network of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which at the time had, strictly speaking, no news department, and in response to events in prewar and wartime Europe, built an effective, prestigious and influential news-gathering organization. He later went on to be the first broadcast journalist to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) on a special edition of CBS television's investigative news program See It Now on March 9, 1954.

The program, "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy," pointed out McCarthy's inaccuracies and points of contention from a wide variety of McCarthy's printed, audio-recorded and filmed remarks and speeches: it relayed his remark on the Democratic Party's "twenty years of treason," his inaccurate labeling of the American Civil Liberties Union as "a front for... the Communist Party," and his abusive treatment of witnesses such as World War II hero Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, whose intelligence he compared to that of a "five-year old child," and who he said was "not fit to wear that uniform." The dapper, chain-smoking Murrow, whose credibility with the listening and viewing public had been solidified through years of on-the-ground reports from Blitz-era London and the battlefields of Europe and Korea, concluded with a statement about the differences between dissent and disloyalty, between accusation and conviction, and the importance in American history and to American principles played by writing, speaking, associating, and defending unpopular causes.

Murrow was not the first journalist to criticize McCarthy -- New York Times columnist Joseph Alsop and political cartoonist "Herblock" were among those who scrutinized, in print, McCarthy's grandstanding, cockiness, bullying, his assumptions of guilt by accusation and by association, and his attempts to silence his critics -- but as a broadcast journalist, he was the critic with the widest reach, and the response to "A Report On Senator Joseph McCarthy" was huge as phone calls and telegrams -- most of them positive -- flooded the network. McCarthy's downfall came in December of that year with his "condemnation" by the Senate (a censure in all but name), but Murrow did not single-handedly turn the tide against McCarthy. McCarthy's methods had increasingly alienated many of his fellow Republicans, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, with its famous public chiding of McCarthy by Army counsel Joseph Nye Welch ("... Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? ... "), also contributed to the precipitous decline of McCarthy's public support and political power. But at a time when McCarthy was virtually unchallengeable without risk of being branded a Red sympathizer, Murrow's vigorous defense of the right to disagree with him gave many ordinary Americans a sense of liberation from a reign of terror, and the broadcast of "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy" remains an important moment in the history of American politics and media.

Good Night, and Good Luck is not a film so much about McCarthy as it is about the program that did so much to discredit McCarthy. More to the point, it is about news and the ethical problems of reporting the news, and it focuses mainly on the newsrooms at CBS where the program was created.

As the film begins, Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly (co-producer, director and co-writer George Clooney) discuss an item in the newspaper about a man in the Midwest named Milo Radulovich, who is threatened with separation from the Air Force due to the alleged political activities of some of his relatives, allegation he is not able to answer due to their secrecy and due to the secrecy of his accusers. While the Radulovich piece is not about McCarthy as such, it is manifestly a story about McCarthyism, and See It Now's report brings the broadcaster to the attention of McCarthy's office, who cook up a dossier of innuendo about Murrow's own supposed subversive leanings and activities which is leaked to Murrow-Friendly staffer Joe Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr.), forcing their hands to make a more frontal assault on McCarthy before he destroys the network. This they do despite the warning of CBS head William Paley (Frank Langella) that Murrow is departing from the established form of "presenting both sides." The story is book-ended by Murrow's speech before the Radio and Television News Directors of America in October 1958 in which he warned of television's emphasis on commercialism and entertainment at the expense of information and the public interest.

One of Good Night's central devices is the use of archival footage within the context of the narrative: the actors playing Murrow, Friendly, Paley and staff inhabit the same story-world as the actual protagonists of the events the film concerns: Milo Radulovich, his sister and lawyer, Joe McCarthy and his assistant Roy Cohn and others are all represented on newsfilm that has been preserved from the time. It is by no means uncommon to see historical footage being used as exposition -- President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam war footage or anti-war protests, for instance, to establish that a film is set in the sixties -- but I cannot think of a film in which actual historical figures, many long dead, are used in such close proximity to actors doing a dramatic re-enactment of history. Screenwriters Clooney and Grant Heslov scrupulously researched their story, basing the dialogues of the film on accounts of actual conversations and exchanges of memos or telegrams, and overall they did justice to the substance and truth of the events portrayed. Nevertheless, it does serve as a subtle reminder that this is a film of the age of Photoshop, one in which media can be used to serve many purposes, only some of which might be truthful. It would be just as easy to do a movie in the same style that is more "spun" and less truthful to accepted historical accounts but still convinces because it appears truthful, in the way all media appears, on first glance, to be truthful.

This is an ethical qualm I have not seen expressed in reviews of this film, and I am a little surprised that it has not been brought up by others. But the double-edged way that historical footage is used in this film can be considered to be noted in the film when we see Strathairn-as-Murrow interviewing entertainer Liberace (represented by actual footage) on his other program on CBS television, Person To Person: in an age before satellite feeds, interviews over long distances could not be done live; therefore a film of the interviewee, giving answers to scripted questions, was shot beforehand and the host went through the motions of posing the questions and chatting while reading from cue-cards. This obvious artifice is shown in the film, and it is difficult determine if the set-up was meant to fool the audience or merely considered a convention and understood as such. It does suggest that Clooney and Heslov gave some thought about their postmodern use of narrative-blending in a film that is otherwise in straightforwardly-done, comprehensible style.

While Murrow and Friendly tangle with military brass, network executives, McCarthy's office and finally McCarthy himself, we also see the discussions of Joe Wershba and his wife Shirley (Patricia Clarkson), who, in order to keep their jobs with the network are keeping their marriage a secret from their employers: At the beginning of the film, Joe has received his copy of the new loyalty oath which all members of the staff must sign; both these factors, the secret marriage and the loyalty oath, serve to put you in the repressive atmosphere. In part, the conversations are a concession on the part of the outspokenly liberal Clooney and Heslov to the conservative beliefs of Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Joe, and he poses to Shirley the nagging ethical questions as to whether what they are doing is right or proper. Meanwhile the newsroom prepares for scrutiny as staffers who have any ties that may attract notice come clean, leading to Murrow's famous comment that "the fear is right here in this room."

The Wershbas provide one Greek-chorus-like counterpoint to the film; another is the singing of Dianne Reeves, whose rendition of standards such as "I've Got My Eyes On You" and "How High The Moon" provide a different, mood-centered counterpoint for the events of the film (the latter is particularly effective for the other subplot of the film, concerning troubled Murrow colleague Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), a journalist whose recent divorce and unremitting Red-baiting attacks from Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian results in his suicide). The soundtrack CD of the film, which I happened to find recently, is, incidentally, a treat for fans of fifties-style small-group jazz.

Ed Murrow never wavered from his conviction that the broadcast media had a responsibility to educate and inform that took precedence over its powers to amuse and divert.. He resigned from CBS in 1961 for a position as director of the United States Information Agency (which gives the official US government position abroad, and parent of the Voice of America broadcast service) under President Kennedy. Illness forced Murrow to resign from the USIA in 1964, and he died in Pawling, New York on April 27 1965.

I viewed Good Night, and Good Luck on a letterboxed 2006 DVD release from Warner Home Video, which also includes a commentary track by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, a making-of documentary which includes appearance by the real-life Wershbas, Milo Radulovich and Edward R. Murrow's son Casey Murrow.

See it now: An excerpt from Murrow's March 9, 1954 broadcast, with his famous concluding remarks on dissent and disloyalty.

And while we are talking about McCarthy, let's learn about the actual, little-known history of the Communist Party itself, in a little side article I like to call:

About the Communist movement in the United States

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was founded in 1919 by members of the Socialist Party who were impatient with that party's moderate, reformist stance and who were galvanized by the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which resulted in the first national government to be founded explicitly on socialist ideals (although whether and how it lived up to those ideals is another discussion entirely). The party, modeled after the Bolsheviks and adopting Leninist principles, was one of many similar organizations forming throughout the world in response to events in Russia and soon joined the Communist International, an international organization of Marxist-Leninist parties intended to coordinate efforts in what was then expected to be an imminent global revolution.

After a first decade of intensive government persecution and factional conflict, the party became one of the most dynamic and visible organizations on the American left in the 1930s and 40s. American Communists were instrumental in labor organizing as well as prominent and consistent opponents of segregation and racism. The party's attraction to artists and intellectuals led to an influence on American cultural life and thought that went far beyond the party's numbers and political clout.

But on the other hand, their dependence on the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) for nearly all their policy cues led them through a succession of contradictory positions. They opposed working within the mainstream labor movement and then supported it; they opposed FDR and the New Deal and then supported them. They opposed working with other organizations on the left and then called for a "United Front" against fascism, after which they went virtually silent on the issue of fascism with the signing of the non-aggression pact between Hitler's Germany and the USSR, advocating a "peace platform," which changed to a pro-war platform when Germany broke the pact and invaded the USSR. And as documents in former Soviet archives confirm, the party did indeed recruit certain of its members to gather intelligence which ended up in the hands of the Soviet government, doing this through a parallel secret party apparatus which was, in part, a relic of the early party's illegal existence at the height of anti-radical government activity in the 1920s.

Part of the rationale for the CPUSA's close relationship with the Soviet Union can be found in the long-standing socialist tradition of internationalism and in the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, whereby in theory, individual members within the party, and individual parties within the International, had a voice in shaping policy, but policies once adopted were to be strictly adhered to, just as troops in the field are expected to carry out orders and not subject them to additional debate. In practice, since the International was sponsored and largely administered by the CPSU leadership, the world's Communist parties increasingly became appendages of the CPSU and became apologists for Soviet domestic policy and instruments of Soviet foreign policy, and this became especially pronounced with the accession of Josef Stalin to the leadership of the CPSU after Lenin's death. This continued in a less open fashion after Stalin's public dissolution of the Communist International in 1943.

After the end of the Second World War, a wave of back-to-normalcy and conservatism turned the US government's sights on the Soviet Union and on radical activity in the United States, including but not limited to the activities of the CPUSA. Congressional investigations, prosecutions of party leaders under the Smith Act, infiltration of the party by informants, blacklists, loyalty oaths, and, for a time, the outlawing of the CPUSA under the Communist Control Act, devastated the party. Further blows to the party came with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin.

The CPUSA attempted to recover in the sixties as the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements gathered momentum, but the party was largely written off by the sixties New Left as irrelevant or even dangerous in view of the USSR's increasingly hegemonic role in global politics, their new role as a new set of "bad guys" to be struggled against. The party finally severed its ties with the Soviet Union in the late eighties over the political and economic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, and further soul-searching and readjustment came with the fall of the Soviet Union and the satellite regimes of the East Bloc.

The CPUSA continues to soldier on with an active membership of about 2500 and without patronage from foreign capitals. The party never regained the influence of its heyday, and today very much follows rather than leads what remains of the American left with its "me-too" positions on every progressive issue from unemployment to war, from racial and gender equality to LGBT rights, from health care to the environment, while promulgating its vision of "Bill of Rights socialism" and its view of the capitalist causes of the problems facing the world today.

By most estimates, over a million Americans have, at one time or another, been members of the Communist Party. The majority of these American Communists were not engaged in cloak-and-dagger machinations but in peaceful and constitutionally-protected political activity. The Cold War anti-communist crusade demonstrated what could happen to anyone who stepped outside the boundaries of mainstream politics, and in so doing effectively marginalized dissent in the US without resorting to open and violent repression. It also institutionalized red-baiting as a permanent factor in American political discourse: even today, a generation after Communism ceased to be a factor in world politics, branding one's opponent a "communist" or "socialist" continues to be an effective weapon in the dirty game of American electoral politics and in reining in the limits of what is thinkable. The legacies of Murrow and McCarthy, the one who insisted on dissent as the foundation and the test of American freedom and the other who rode to political power on innuendo and fear, continue their mutual combat today.

Lolita (1962)

After European émigré writer and academic Humbert Humbert (James Mason) confronts depraved, hedonistic playwright and screenwriter Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) in his rambling, disordered house and shoots him to death, we see the events leading to the murder unfold in flashback. Humbert, four years earlier, stops in the suburban New Hampshire community of Ramsdale for the summer before taking up a teaching appointment in Ohio, and lodges in the house of widow Charlotte Haze (Shelly Winters). Charlotte is immediately smitten by Humbert's old-world charm, but he is captivated by Charlotte's teenage daughter Dolores, nicknamed Lolita (Sue Lyon). Humbert deflects Charlotte's advances until he can figure out a way to stay close to Lolita, and decides to allow Charlotte to believe that her feelings for Humbert are reciprocated. He agrees to marry Charlotte while Lolita is off at summer camp, but his plans are threatened when Charlotte discovers his true feelings. As he puzzles out how to deal with this, fate intervenes and Charlotte is hit and killed by a car. Humbert collects Lolita from camp and the two embark on a cross-country motor trip, in the course of which Lolita initiates their physical relationship. As they wander, Humbert begins to suspect that they are being followed by a mysterious man, unknown to him, but apparently uncannily aware of the nature of Humbert's feelings for Lolita. They settle in Ohio at the end of the summer as Humbert begins his new job and enrolls Lolita in school, but he is frightened by another encounter with the man and they once more take to the road, with the man in pursuit. Lolita is suddenly taken ill and is admitted to a hospital, then vanishes before Humbert can check her out. She remains missing until three years later, when a letter arrives from her, now married, pregnant and in need of money. Traveling to see her, he learns what has become of her and learns from her the identity of the man who took her away from him and how their subsequent relationship ended.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was first published in 1955 and rapidly became the decade's most controversial bestseller, and one which finally gave its author a measure of financial independence. Nabokov (1899-1977) was born in St. Petersburg to an affluent, socially prominent and cultivated family descended from minor Russian nobility who fled Russia with the Bolshevik revolution and eventually settled in Berlin via the Crimea, France, and Britain, where Nabokov attended Cambridge. In Berlin Nabokov acquired a reputation among Russian exile literary circles as a poet and novelist, and with the outbreak of World War II, settled with his wife and son in the United States, where he began to work as a university lecturer and to write in English. Lolita was his third English-language novel, and after initial hostility from critics who found the book's narrative of a middle-aged man's obsession with a young girl unpalatable, and a reputation among readers as a "dirty" literary work in the vein of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the book was eventually hailed as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, full of linguistic and literary puzzles, allusions, wry observations on American culture, dark humor and tragedy. The book's title became a common expression for a sexually precocious young girl, or alternately a young girl who is the focus of middle-aged men's infatuation, and the book also gave the language the word "nymphet," a term of Nabokov's coinage meaning a girl on the cusp between childhood and pubescence.

In bringing Lolita to the screen, director Stanley Kubrick had more to deal with than the novel's mostly undeserved reputation as an "erotic" novel (it is better described as a novel with erotic elements, mostly in the opening chapters of the book) and the shocking premise. The book, and the screenplay Nabokov wrote a couple of years after the book's appearance (a screenplay that Kubrick found mostly unusable and rewrote with producer James B. Harris, though Nabokov was credited as sole screenwriter), did not assume the moral simplicity that was enshrined in the Hollywood film industry's Production Code. The novel and screenplay dealt not only with a sexual relationship between a mature man and a young girl, but also with the sexuality of young people and sexuality outside of marriage, striking more or less at the heart of the Code, which existed, in part, to validate current standards of morality. Most Americans were increasingly aware that a gap existed between how sexuality and gender were discussed in popular entertainment and how they played out in personal experience. Chances are, most of these same Americans were probably not yet willing to demand that that gap be addressed in the media, and certainly, institutions like the Production Code, local censor boards and watchdog groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency were still sufficient factors in how the media addressed those issues.

One thing that Kubrick did was bring the Clare Quilty character and subplot into the foreground of the story: he altered the order of scenes so that Quilty's murder begins the film and the subsequent events lead up to it. He found the Quilty character and his role as Humbert's double one of the book's most fascinating themes, and emphasizing this aspect of the story also served to retain the interest of the audience after the question of Humbert and Lolita's relationship is answered. He also omitted just about all of Humbert's backstory -- his lifelong attraction to nymphets and the formative sexual experience with a childhood sweetheart underlying it -- as well as the more unpleasant aspects of his personality, He also raised Lolita's age from twelve to fourteen -- the minimum age that the censors would accept for a girl who is sexually active, and cast a fourteen year-old girl who looked more mature than her age.

He also toned down the eroticism of the novel and turned up its dark, ironic humor and sardonic observations on American sexual hypocrisy. Charlotte Haze is a lonely and sexually frustrated woman whose protested fidelity to the memory of her spouse does not prevent her from having an afternoon fling with Clare Quilty after a speaking engagement with her women's club (an encounter of which Quilty recalls only having met Lolita beforehand), any more than it prevents her pursuit of Humbert. Charlotte's neighbors, the Farlows, reveal themselves, through code-words like "broad-minded," to be enthusiastic suburban swingers: they even send their daughter, Lolita's best friend Mona, off to summer camp every year to facilitate their spouse-swapping. Charlotte, in order to pursue Humbert without interference from Lolita -- whom she seems to regard less as a daughter than as a rival -- packs her off to this camp as well, which is called Camp Climax, and is where Lolita has her first sexual encounter with a boy. Lolita starts off her seduction of Humbert (rather than the other way around) by playfully confessing her summer-camp experience to Humbert. Quilty has a conversation in the lobby with the sniggering night desk clerk, Mr. Swine, who comes across something like a pimp or pander. And Lolita herself plays Humbert against Quilty, whom she finds attractive for his sophistication and his artistic accomplishments, in other words for much the same star-struck reasons her mother was attracted to him and carries on an affair with him after leaving Humbert, only leaving when Quilty demands she participate in his depraved lifestyle, including appearing in the pornographic "art films" which are his hobby. The most orthodox relationship in the book and the film is only seen at the end, when Humbert encounters Lolita for the last time, pregnant and married to Dick (Gary Cockrell), an earnest but struggling laborer who knows nothing about her past. What is astounding is that all this lurid Peyton Place soap-opera is expressed quite indirectly, though the viewer never mistakes what is meant. The best innuendo in the film must be in the early scene of prospective lodger Humbert being taken through the house by Charlotte, and being thoroughly unimpressed by her inane chatter about her fine art reproductions and her prize-winning cherry pies until he begins to politely beg off, when she desperately tries to hook him with a view of the back garden, where he sees Lolita for the first time and immediately agrees to move in. When asked what was the decisive factor, he improvises the answer "Your cherry pies!"

Neither the novel nor the film offer much insight into the character of Lolita: the novel is mainly concerned with Humbert's dysfunctions and mental instability, his rationalizations and his attempts to recapture his own past, while the film focuses on the dark humor of the situations and gives a detached, ironic picture of human relationships divorced from sentiment. Lolita's character is more humanized in the film because of the nature of the medium, but Lolita's own feelings are not given center stage in either book or film: she is not so much a person as a way things happen, as well as a prize the possession of which is contested by the film's adult protagonists. The storyline of Lolita is a parody of a love story, and is not meant to be a cautionary tale about messing with minors. Lolita's lack of a point of view has been extensively considered by critics of the book and the film, and has also been considered in various other adaptations of the book and in derivative works such as the 1995 novel Lo's Diary. Iranian writer Azar Nafisi also wrote in her memoir Reading Lolita In Teheran about teaching Western literature, including Nabokov's book, in a women's reading circle in the Islamic republic and draws parallels between Humbert and Lolita's relationship and life in Iran.

Lolita was the first film made after Kubrick, in search of greater creative freedom, relocated to the UK. Some rear-projection, connecting and establishing footage was shot in the US, mainly on streets and roads, with the balance of the film being made on British soundstages, using mostly Canadian and American actors based in the UK. There are some trademark Kubrick visual flourishes, such as the backwards tracking shot, but the shooting style of the film remains mostly in the traditional Hollywood mode.rather than the classic wide-angle style associated with Kubrick's later films. He would return to the theme of sexual obsession in his last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Further notes:

• Even with the film's attempts to make Charlotte Haze unlikable, Shelly Winters (1920-2006), who began as a chorus girl and developed into an actress whose loud, brash public image belied a subtle and sensitive talent, gives a performance as sympathetic as her character is unattractive. My own familiarity with her work is sketchy, and so my experience of her is rather eclectic: I liked her in Mambo and Night Of The Hunter (both 1955), and in a film adaptation of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963).

• Like Richard Burton, James Mason (1909-1984) was known as a "classy" British actor who starred in some great films and some real turkeys. In addition to some fine moments, such as that opposite Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954) and North By Northwest (1959), he also appeared in Mandingo (1975) and The Boys From Brazil (1978).

• Working initially in his parents' stage comedy act and serving in the Royal Air Force in World War II as a camp entertainer, Peter Sellers (1925-1980) came to prominence in the fifties as a writer-performer on the long-running BBC radio series The Goon Show and in a number of British films, At times, Lolita seems more than a little indulgent of his prodigious gift for creating and inhabiting characters -- much of his dialogue seems ad-libbed or at least very freely interpreted -- but his performance as Clare Quilty is creepy and funny and furnished much of the comic aspect of this black comedy. Sellers bettered this performance when he worked again for Kubrick in 1964, playing three separate roles in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; the same year, he also created his most memorable character, Inspector Clouseau, in The Pink Panther. He continued to work through the sixties and seventies -- including a number of Pink Panther sequels -- before giving the performance of his career in the 1979 Jerzy Kosinski adaptation Being There.

• Sue Lyon (b. 1946) had done modeling work and appeared on television (The Loretta Young Show, Dennis The Menace) before appearing in Lolita, which appears to have been the moment that defined her career and her image; she appears forever destined to be associated with the heart-shaped-glasses-and-lollipop image of the film's poster (the glasses and lollipop don't appear in the film, by the way). The film netted a number of nominations in different categories for the Academy Awards, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Venice Film Festival, but Lyon was the only one to actually win an award -- a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. Though she continued to work on and off in films and television until 1980, her major film roles came in the years immediately following Lolita (Night of the Iguana, 1964, 7 Women, 1966, and The Flim-Flam Man, 1967). Along with ups and downs in her acting career came also a number of personal setbacks and difficulties, including marriages and divorces, some physical injuries and difficulties with manic-depressive illness. Retired from acting, she shuns interviews and the limelight generally.

• The pop tune playing on Lolita's transistor radio when she and Humbert first meet was composed by Nelson Riddle and was meant to parody what most people thought of teenage-oriented pop music at the time -- childish, vapid and kitschy, with nonsensical lyrics. Nevertheless, under the title "Lolita Ya Ya" and released under Sue Lyon's name, it became a hit single, and a cover version by instrumental surf-guitar group The Ventures also became a popular and much anthologized tune. The novel and its eponymous character has also been worked into popular songs by the Police, Katy Perry, Celine Dion, Marilyn Manson, and others.

• After the success of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov relocated with his wife to Montreux in Switzerland, where he lived and wrote for the rest of his life. Some of his works from this final period include Pale Fire, Ada, and Look At The Harlequins!

• Nabokov's novel was brought to the big screen again in 1997, with Humbert being playd by Jeremy Irons and Lolita by Dominique Swain. While truer to the book than Kubrick's, the film lacked the comic bite of the original, opting to play it straight. The film's release was delayed due to the subject matter and the film more or less flopped at the box office. The novel has also been adapted to the stage many times and has also inspired derivative literary works and parodies.

I viewed Stanley Kubrick's Lolita on Warner Home Video's 2007 DVD package, which includes theatrical trailer, English and French soundtracks, subtitles, and a list of awards and award nominations.

Michael S. Hart (1947-2011)

Michael S. Hart, inventor of the electronic text or "etext" and founder of Project Gutenberg, passed away at his home in Urbana, Illinois on September 8 at the age of 64.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois, Hart entered the text of the US Declaration of Independence into the university's mainframe on the night of July 4, 1971, almost literally at a keystroke creating the first electronic text and inaugurating what was to become Project Gutenberg, the mission of which is to make electronic versions of as many literary works as possible available to anyone at no cost. He followed the Declaration of Independence a year later with the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. A year later, a volunteer entered the entire text of the US Constitution.

For the first two decades of Project Gutenberg, Hart and a handful of volunteers worked at entering by hand works such as the King James Bible -- released as an ebook in 1989 -- and the collected works of William Shakespeare -- released in 1994. The development of hypertext and the World Wide Web in 1990, and the availability of the first public web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, facilitated the distribution of ebooks and the recruitment of volunteers, and from 1991 to 1996, the production of new ebooks doubled every year. Distributed digitization and proofreading led to further growth, and in August 1997, Project Gutenberg released its one-thousandth ebook, the original Italian text of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Other milestones in PG's growth included:

• #2000: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote (original Spanish text), May 1999
• #3000: Marcel Proust, Á L'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (original French text), December 2000
• #5000: Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, April 2002
• #10000: The Magna Carta, October 2003
• #20000: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, December 2006
• #30000: Chester Albert Reed, The Bird Book, October 2009.

By June 2011, the collection listed over 36,000 titles in sixty languages, available in formats capable of being read using computers, PDAs, smartphones and ebook readers, and all freely downloadable and redistributable. Affiliated projects exist in Europe, Australia and Canada, and tens of thousands of titles are downloaded every day from the main sites and from 40 mirror sites worldwide.

I don't know who coined the phrase "information wants to be free," but Michael Hart embodied the spirit of that slogan. For four decades, he worked to make the collected cultural legacy of humankind available to all. Our thoughts are with Hart's family and friends. Project Gutenberg continues, a living monument to one of the digital age's most important yet uncelebrated visionaries.

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She Shoulda Said No! (aka Wild Weed) (1949)

On Sept. 1st 1948, police raided the home of actress Lila Leeds and arrested four people, including Leeds herself and film actor Robert Mitchum, both of whom were charged with possession of marijuana, then a felony in the state of California, after which followed an agreeably scandalous and highly publicized trial. Mitchum was still in the initial stages of his career, but a hot property, with a number of film roles under his belt (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Nevada, West of the Pecos, Crossfire), and a lot of potential. Leeds was a relatively unknown starlet, who before beginning in films, had as a teenager run away from her rural Kansas upbringing to become a dancer in St. Louis, and in LA met, married and was annulled from a bandleader who was already married. Twenty-one years old at the time of the bust, Leeds' filmography consisted of a handful of bit roles and walk-ons, often uncredited. Both were eventually convicted -- Mitchum of conspiracy to possess, Leeds of possession -- and served prison sentences. After serving his time, Mitchum picked up the thread of his film career with scarcely a murmur (Rachel And The Stranger, The Red Pony, The Big Steal, Where Danger Lives): his public image as a nonchalant bad-boy was even burnished by his recent brush with the law, and his conviction was eventually overturned in 1951. But Leeds' career, such as it was, ended with her arrest. Job offers simply stopped, except for an offer from producer Richard Kay to appear in a film called Wild Weed, written to capitalize on her recent arrest. The film's publicity made much of her desire to inform others her age of the dangers of illicit drug use, but as she confessed to a magazine in the fifties, she took the job because it was the only offer available, and she was broke.

Leeds played Ann Lester, a chorus girl in a nightclub who is working to put her younger brother Bob (David Holt) through college. Through friend and fellow chorine Rita (Mary Ellen Popel), she meets Markey (Alan Baxter), who proves to be a peddler of marijuana. Rita and Markey pressure Ann to try the drug at an impromptu gathering, and she soon becomes hooked. Reefer parties with Rita and her marijuana-smoking friends, as well as a dependent relationship with Markey take up most of her energy, and her work suffers, leading to the loss of her job. But Ann is soon working for Markey, helping him peddle dope to new customers. Finally Bob discovers the secret of Ann's new, sordid lifestyle, and commits suicide, after which she is arrested as a drug addict and sentenced to sixty days in prison. Ann is defiant and unwilling to divulge Markey's name to the cops when she enters prison, but she is soon plagued with guilt over her brother's death and has a nervous breakdown (or a drug withdrawal) in her cell. She leaves prison clean, reformed and determined to cooperate with Lieutenants Mason and Tyne (Robert Kent and Don C. Harvey) of the narcotics squad, and their superior, Captain Hayes (Lyle Talbot) to apprehend Markey and his boss, Treanor (Michael Whalen), by luring them into a phony deal with a big supplier.

Wild Weed (the original title -- others included The Devil's Weed, Marijuana: the Devil's Weed, and most unwieldy, The Story of Lila Leeds And Her Exposé of the Marijuana Racket) shared at least two personnel with a film hailed as the definitive "dope movie," and for many, the definitive "cult film" as well, 1936's Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children) -- story writer Arthur Hoerl (the screenplay was written by Richard H. Landau) and cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh. That film focused on high-school students being enticed into moral ruin and lives of crime as a result of exposure to the weed; while this film opens with a prologue that serves to introduce Markey -- he sells four teenagers some marijuana and they promptly crash their car in a stoned joy-ride, leaving one legless and comatose survivor -- the film otherwise dispenses with the teenage-maltshop angle and instead leavens its moralism with noir-esque situations, visuals and dialogue.

Shot on a six-day schedule, directed by Sherman Scott aka Sam Newfield, and marketed through independent distributor Eureka Productions, the film did poorly until the distribution rights were picked up by veteran showman and exploitation pioneer Kroger Babb, who showed the film "roadshow" style, booking venues for short dates and touring the film from town to town, bringing along Leeds to appear personally and even to lecture. Though figures are not available, this tactic was reportedly quite successful, as Babb could build up hype for the film and then blow for the next town before word-of-mouth and local reviews could depress attendance.

As was generally the case for Production Code-era "dope movies," She Shoulda Said No! was silly regarding the subject of marijuana and its effects and dangers. The drug is referred to in the film as "tomatoes" because it is shipped -- already rolled -- in labeled tomato cans. Smoking the short brown cigarettes leads to uncontrollable giggling, manic behavior, delusions, hallucinations, and utter indifference to the distress of others. One of the guests of Ann's tea parties (Rudolf Friml, Jr.), sits at the small upright piano and immediately imagines himself giving a recital at the Hollywood Bowl, playing virtuosic Romantic themes, only to show him picking out "Chopsticks" with two fingers. Brother Bob finally discovers what has been happening one morning after one of these get-togethers, when he finds the living room of their neat little house, left to them by their deceased parents, an utter wreck, as a strange man awakes and groggily rasps, "You got a stick?"

But ultimately the point of these films was not to give a realistic portrayal of marijuana use any more than they were sincerely motivated by public service or moral uplift: these existed to give viewers a spicy, vicarious experience of sin and thrills denied them in mainstream Hollywood films. She Shoulda Said No! more or less closed the era of the "dope movie" until Frank Sinatra appeared in the serious-minded mainstream production The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) and made drug addiction a more palatable subject in American film, but the legacy of the old dope movies lived on in sexploitation from the mid-sixties onward, in movies in which the device of portraying illicit drugs as magical substances that turned chilly or timid good girls into exciting, up-for-anything bad girls resurfaced in films such as Alice In Acidland, Smoke And Flesh, The Brick Dollhouse, The Acid Eaters, and Aphrodisiac: The Sexual Secrets of Marijuana, films that made the suggestive innuendo of the earlier era a little more explicit.

To this end, She Shoulda Said No! exploits Lila Leeds' looks as well as her story. Many user reviews on the IMDB have commented on Leeds' resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, but this resemblance was superficial at best. The same age and, before her arrest, at roughly the same stage in her film career, Leeds shared with Marilyn a similar starlet packaging: shiny blonde bobbed hairdo, plucked and pencilled arched eyebrows, and catlike eye make-up. But Leeds was thinner and more angular than the voluptuous Marilyn, and she had none of the naive sensuality or childlike vulnerability that became key to Marilyn's persona. In every way, she looked the very image of the "bad girl," as though she had stepped off of a pulp-novel cover painting.

Jack Greenhalgh's camera focuses on Leeds' face in tight closeups throughout the film, whether dolled-up, molled-up, tortured or touseled (there is one scene, in fact, when she is awakened by her as-yet unaware brother the morning after one of her nights of tea-smoking, and her disordered hair, un-made-up face and eyes still puffy with sleep make her knock-down sexy in a way that her usual pancake-and lipsticked looks couldn't approach); the effect is almost a perverse, Poverty Row version of the wrenching closeups of Renée Falconetti in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. The intent, again, of the close scrutiny was to get the most out of Leeds' looks, but the cumulative effect is one of pathos, even empathy, especially if one is aware of the basic outline of Leeds' biography. She reminds me of one or two women I have befriended by chance over the years who could be labeled real-life "bad girls," women whose impulsiveness, poor decision-making or simple circumstances have sometimes led to hardship or even tragedy; they are often judged harshly and unfairly by others, but they also have a lust for life, testify to humans' resilience, strength and persistence in the face of adversity, and number among the most genuine people I have known. In between the limitations of She Shoulda Said No!'s script and Leeds' own limitations as an actress, Greenhalgh's closeups give you the sense that you can read her checkered past in her youthful, pretty, yet already careworn features.

With her aura of tarnished virtue, Leeds was clearly one of those actresses who would not have gone very far in mainstream Hollywood as a youthful ingenue in that repressive time. Given some maturity and some more acting chops, she might have made a good character actress in cynical-dame roles, a flair for which the third act of the film, in which she poses as a hard-bitten jailbird in order to trap Markey and Treanor, definitely shows. Born a few years later, she might have also been a natural for juvenile-delinquent films. As she was, she might have been a fixture in exploitation films, where being a "bad girl" was a more marketable asset than in the mainstream.

We have already mentioned the use of noir-style situations, visuals, and dialogue that make She Shoulda Said No! a more enjoyable film than Reefer Madness: the film also benefits greatly from a good supporting cast, who while not always A-list talent, were quite good at their jobs and kept the film on something like a solid foundation. Alan Baxter (1908-1976) was a busy lead in B-pictures and supporting actor in A-pictures in the thirties and forties, transitioning to television in the fifties and sixties, equally good at tough-guy leads or heavies. We met Lyle Talbot a while back in connection with his role in Ed Wood's Glen Or Glenda, and this movie is also notable for the debut appearance of Jack Elam (1918-2003), memorable in such noir classics as D. O. A. and Kansas City Confidential, as well as in westerns such as Rawhide and Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, and who later appeared in the opening scenes of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West.

Lila Leeds herself appeared -- uncredited -- in one more film, The House Across The Street, her tenth film appearance, before leaving LA and films for good. She continued as an entertainer in the Midwest, working mainly in nightclubs, married and divorced twice, and reportedly began to use heroin at one point. In later years she developed a religious commitment, moved back to LA, and volunteered at various local missions. She passed away in 1999 at the age of 71.

A number of DVD releases exist of She Shoulda Said No!; I viewed the film on Passport Video's 5-disc, 24-film budget compilation, Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection.

Today we are all Egyptians

Been sitting all day at my local library, using the wireless internet and watching the live feed of Al Jazeera English which has been showing the jubilation of Egyptians in Cairo at the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Celebrations have also been going on other parts of the Middle East, Obama has said some good words, in spite of not having previously called for Mubarak to step down. Today is a relatively good day for the world, and I find myself quite moved, and happy and proud for the Egyptian people.

Congratulations on your victory, people of Egypt, and know that we here and everywhere share your happiness, and are inspired by your example, and keep partying.

Tura Satana RIP

Tura Satana's longtime manager Siouxzan Perry announced that the actress, who played Varla in the Russ Meyer film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! passed away on Feb. 4. Perry gave Ms. Satana's age as 72, though other sources say she was 76.

Ms. Satana's other credits included Irma La Douce (1963), The Astro Zombies (1968), and The Doll Squad (1973), as well as appearances in episodes of television series such as Burke's Law and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

She is survived by two daughters and two sisters. Our condolences and best wishes to them.

Glen Or Glenda (1953)

After 30 years of working in Hollywood as actor, screenwriter, director, producer and pulp novelist without artistic or financial success, Edward D. Wood, Jr., recently evicted and staying with his wife at a friend's North Hollywood apartment, his health broken by years of alcohol abuse, his films largely forgotten, died in 1978 at the age of 54. In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, called his Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the "worst movie ever made," and sparked a revival of interest itheradiatorn Wood's colorful and trsequencemic life and bizarre career in cinema; today he is probably one of the best known, and also most well-loved, makers of cult film. He has been the subject of essays, books, documentaries and even a Hollywood bio-pic directed by Tim Burton in 1994, Ed Wood.

While the Medved brothers' largely patronizing and derisive treatment of Wood definitely set the tone for much of Wood's posthumous reputation, the books and films mentioned above have done much to rehabilitate his status from a laughing-stock to cinema's quintessential outsider artist, someone whose devotion to movies was heartfelt and passionate enough to surmount lack of funding and contacts, public indifference and even his own lack of aesthetic discernment, craft, and sophistication: Wikipedia's article on Wood lists thirteen feature films directed by him, three television films, and seventeen produced scripts written by him. His drive and zeal, his love of his chosen medium, and his pride in his own work would do any artist credit, and his films have the power to delight, enchant and even inspire. They are uncynical, bewilderingly different from just about anything else, and above all personal, bearing witness to his own enthusiastic, ebullient and eccentric personality.

Glen Or Glenda was originally to be a film called I Changed My Sex, capitalizing on the notoriety of George Jorgenson, who became Christine Jorgenson after the world's first gender-reassignment surgery. When Wood agreed to producer George Weiss's offer to write and direct the project, Wood rapidly turned the bulk of the film into a docudrama about cross-dressing. For one of the major aspects of the Ed Wood legend was his cross-dressing: he was particularly drawn to angora sweaters -- the latter are so much associated with Wood that one of the above-mentioned documentaries was called Look Back In Angora.

The film opens in a rented room where Patrick, a man who has been arrested four times for wearing women's clothes in public, lies dead in his favorite outfit, a suicide who would rather die a happy woman than live as a miserable man. Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot), the detective in charge of the case, is puzzled by the young man's motivation for suicide and consults psychiatrist Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell), who tells him of one of his patients: Glen (played by Wood himself under the name "Daniel Davis"), a man with a compulsion to wear women's clothes. Glen agonizes over whether to tell his fiancée Barbara (Wood's then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller) about his "other self," Glenda, whom Glen becomes when in women's clothes. Dr. Alton also tells Inspector Warren of another case: Alan-Ann ("Tommy" Haynes), who decided to actually go ahead and have his gender reassigned, and who, after hormone therapy and many grueling surgeries, faces the world as a happy and attractive young woman. The detective and the doctor return to Glen's case and discuss how Glen and Barbara worked out the problem of "the other woman" with the help of true love and the understanding of modern medicine.

In essence, Glen Or Glenda is a film about "gender identity" decades before the term would be coined and defined through reams of abstruse academic and polemical prose. Dr. Alton takes pains to define what transvestitism is and is not: it is not homosexuality (and indeed it isn't: cross-dressers are overwhelmingly straight males who are very secure in their sexual orientation and masculinity), neither is it transexualism. Here it is difficult to tell how "accurate" Wood is in his assessment of men who want to be women: Alton refers to Alan-Ann as a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" who carries physical characteristics common to both genders. What is clear is Wood's open, tolerant, and non-judgmental attitude towards all the groups discussed: if one is only allowed to be what one feels one is, then one is happy. As a denizen of the Hollywood fringes, Wood knew all sorts of eccentrics and people whose lifestyles did not fit the molds of a repressive time. At a time when gender, class, and race were strictly defined and as immutable as the law of gravity, Wood's message was subversive and forward-thinking, and one that is more comprehensible and relevant today than he probably ever imagined.

Ahead of its time though it may be, and historically significant for its message, Glen Or Glenda is still an Ed Wood film, and the message of tolerance comes in Wood's own inimitable way. While Dr. Alton discusses the stories of these two patients, the comfort of women's clothes as opposed to men's, and the differences between transvestites, homosexuals and transsexuals, actor Bela Lugosi, whom Wood befriended and revered as a sort of touchstone of the old Hollywood films which inspired his own career, appears at intervals in a dark study-laboratory set and offers cryptic comments, strange metaphors, mysterious platitudes about modern life, and nursery rhymes. At one point he fiddles around with laboratory glassware, mixing vaporous potions with his test tubes and flasks; at others, characters such as Glen, Barbara and Alan-Ann enter and kneel before his chair and disappear with a wave of his hand. Often he utters his cryptic pronouncements while looking at crowded streets in split-screen, or superimposed over shots of stampeding bison. Billed as "Scientist" in the credits, Lugosi's role in the picture resembles nothing so much as a distant, god-like figure, observing his creation and offering his comments to the viewer, but never deigning to intervene or even to judge.

Meanwhile Dr. Alton compares present-day objections to transvestitism and transexualism with the objections that were supposedly once raised against automobiles and airplanes. Men and women say "If the Creator had intended us to be born [boys/girls] we would certainly have been born [boys/girls]," accompanied by extreme close ups of faces and ears. A close up of the radiator in Patrick's room accompanies the reading of Patrick-Patricia's suicide note, for no discernible reason (it has been reported that this random cutaway inspired the "woman in the radiator" sequence in David Lynch's Eraserhead). But the centerpiece of the film has to be the nightmare sequence, where Glen's fears of social ostracism and losing Barbara are played out. "Normal" men and women point and laugh, Glen alternately appears as himself and as Glenda, in a jumbled, half-struck version of the set that served as Barbara's apartment, where Glenda cannot lift a log that pins Barbara but Glen can. Glen and Barbara are married by a minister with the Devil (played by a man credited on IMDB as "Captain DeZita" and who also appears in the film as Glen's father) as witness. Suddenly a number of shots of scantily-clad women, dancing, posing or even in light bondage appear to blaring jazz music, with the faces of Glen, Glenda and Lugosi's character intercut at intervals (this last being added by producer Weiss after Wood completed the film). Glen awakens from his nightmare determined to come clean with Barbara, and after explaining everything to her, Barbara reels in shock... but slowly decides to accept him as he is, and in a moment that is as touching as it is ridiculous, removes her angora sweater and gives it to Glen.

God knows what George Weiss, whose name can be found associated with films from the forties to the sixties, from burlesque to poverty row noir to sexploitation, thought of what he received from Wood, but it was released because it had already been presold to theaters. However, from this point on, Wood became his own producer, going on to make films like Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1961) before he became unable to find financing. As the sixties wore on, he did more screenwriting, production assistance, and occasional acting on titles like The Violent Years (1956), Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), Shotgun Wedding (1963), and Orgy of the Dead (1965), this last a nudie-cutie with a horror theme directed by Stephen Apostolof that breathes pure Ed Wood in its cheapness, overblown dialogue and an appearance by television psychic and Plan 9 player Criswell. His only other appearance as a lead is in one softcore sexploitation film, The Love Feast (1969), which is also worth checking out. He also made at least one hardcore porn movie, again with a horror theme, Necromania (1971). Screenwriting and pulp writing occupied his last years.

(My own library contains three titles published by Four Walls Eight Windows in the late nineties: Killer In Drag and Death of a Transvestite, and his memoir, Hollywood Rat Race. Feral House had reprinted a number of his other titles, but have suspended publication and sales of their Wood titles as of late last year. The Ed Wood article at Wikipedia, linked above, explains why.)

Dolores Fuller (b. 1923) appeared in two other Wood films: Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster, after which their relationship ended. According to the IMDB, She went on into the music business, writing songs for Elvis Presley, and started a record label, Dee Dee Records, where she was instrumental in the careers of Johnny Rivers and Tanya Tucker. She also has frequently appeared at showbiz conventions, often with the angora sweater she wore in her Wood films. Since 2003 she has been living in Las Vegas.

Lyle Talbot (1902-1996), an actor of some ability, performed in A and B pictures, often as a heavy. He also appeared in Plan 9 as a general. A busy, prolific actor, his career in films and television lasted from the early 30s to the 50s. Timothy Farrell (1922-1989), who also appeared in Jail Bait, was an actor of less ability, with a stone face matching his monotonal delivery, but memorable to exploitation fans in such films as Girl Gang (1954) and Dance Hall Racket (1955), a film directed by Phil Tucker (Robot Monster) and written by Lenny Bruce, who also plays Farrell's violence prone henchman.

I viewed Glen Or Glenda on a 2000 Image Entertainment DVD, which contains the original theatrical release version and a trailer. Another version, which I viewed some years ago on VHS, contains a longer cut including some footage of Glen being approached by a homosexual man.

Postscript: 5-14-11: The Los Angeles Times reported that Dolores Fuller passed away at her home in Las Vegas on May 9 at the age of 88. She is survived by husband, film historian Philip Chamberlin, a son, three grandchildren, and a number of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren, to all of whom we send our condolences and best wishes.

Branded To Kill (1967)

Elliptical, surreal, and absurdist, Branded To Kill is an assassin film stripped down to the essentials and twisted to near-unrecognizability as a genre film. Although the plot is actually very simple (when an assassin botches a job by accidentally killing a bystander rather than his target, he is marked for death by his employers), the film takes more than one viewing to really take in, and more viewings only underline the weirdness of the film that ended director Seijun Suzuki's career at Nikkatsu.

Goro Hanada, played by Nikkatsu action stalwart Jo Shishido, is known as "Number 3," his ranking among assassins. Just back from vacation with a new bride in tow, he is in need of money and takes on a job picking up a man (Koji Nanbara) and keeping him protected while delivering him to his destination. Having finished the job, his car breaks down and his is picked up by a mysterious, death-obsessed woman, Misako (Annu Mari), who returns with a proposition for the fatally botched hit. Now a marked man, he is nearly killed by his wife, who is having an affair with his superior Yabuhara (Isao Tamagawa), and then Misako, with whom Hanada has fallen in love, attempts to kill him, hoping to die herself in the process. He escapes, as he does from subsequent setups against his opposite numbers in the organization, until he finally faces the Phantom No. 1, the master assassin whom no one has seen.

Born in 1923, Seijun Suzuki first learned the ropes of cinema production at Shochiku in the late forties after taking an exam to become an assistant director, but by the early fifties, the long lines of ADs waithing to direct their first films at Shochiku left Suzuki with few prospects for career advancement with that company. Nikkatsu, to this day Japan's oldest existing film company, had lost its film production unit in the early forties in a government-mandated consolidation of the film industry, but in the early fifties the domestic market was favorable enough for Nikkatsu to seriously consider starting up film production again. The career tracks were faster and the pay was better, so Suzuki went over to Nikkatsu and by 1956, he was directing films.

Suzuki hit on his signature style in 1963 with Youth of the Beast: a mix of slick, colorful visuals and strange juxtapositions, frequently undercutting tragedy with black humor. But he always considered himself a director of program pictures; he was assigned his scripts and his stars, and his stated aims were always to make entertainment, not art. In pictures such as Gate Of Flesh (1964, which I discussed in these pages), Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy (both 1966), he beguiled the boredom of making by-the-numbers genre pictures by experimenting with color, framing and continuity. Suzuki had an intuitive grasp of the artificiality of narrative film without all the critical and aesthetic baggage that usually goes with such insights. He realized that as long as a film cut together, all sorts of liberties could be taken with continuity and logic and the results could still be interesting. Branded To Kill shows how many of the conventional rules of creating a coherent and realistic story-world could be ignored while still creating an entertaining film, and Suzuki accomplishes this without being programmatic or theoretical.

The violence in action films, compared with real life, is frequently fanciful: hundreds of rounds of ammunition are expended without hitting anyone, fist-fights don't result in broken noses, cheekbones, jaws or teeth (or knuckles, for that matter), swordfights in Japanese films result in aerosol sprays of blood; in the finale of Brian De Palma's Scarface, Al Pacino practically stops his own weight in hot lead, shooting all the while from an incredibly heavy-looking machine gun, before he finally succumbs. But Branded To Kill dares to be preposterous: Hanada kills one target by shooting him between railroad cars from a billboard advertising cigarette lighters, timing it so that he gets the fatal shot when the giant lighter's lid hinges up; he kills another target by shooting him in the head through the drain-pipe of a sink (a little piece of business Jim Jarmusch paid homage to in his film Ghost Dog), and escapes from another hit by floating away on a balloon. He stops one pistol shot with a belt buckle, and later a certainly fatal shot to the head with one of Misako's plastic hairbands.

Thus Suzuki deftly undercuts the pretensions of the action genre to serious dramatics, showing its relation to comedy and even farce, which is one thing that might have irritated Nikkatsu studio head Kyusaku Hori. But Suzuki doesn't stop there; one of Hanada's peculiar pleasures is the smell of cooked rice, a pleasure bordering on fetishism. Other motifs are rain, birds, and dead butterflies and moths, all associated with Misako, a death-obsessed woman who only yields to Hanada's advances when she is convinced that Hanada will kill her. A quasi-mythological creature (Hanada reaches for her in one scene and comes away with a handful of mashed-up moths), Misako is one of the creepiest and weirdest femmes fatales in cinema, using the presence of Annu Mari (whose exotic looks reportedly derive from mixed Japanese-Indian parentage) to great effect. There is also the mystery of the top-ranked killer, "Phantom Number One" who in the final act engages with Hanada in a cat-and-mouse game to end all cat-and-mouse games. After an initial siege which keeps Hanada holed up in his high-rise apartment, the two spend a day or so together in the apartment under an uneasy truce where they sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom together (a sequence which again turns the typical matching-of-wits of two killers into hilarious farce as Number One sleeps with his eyes open and urinates in his pants in order to keep his vigil on his target) until the finale in a boxing stadium. Although Number One is shown doing, well, number one, he is also a character who is apparently everywhere and sees everything.

Today, Branded To Kill is considered Seijun Suzuki's masterpiece and is often compared to the films of David Lynch, a filmmaker frequently accused of incomprehensibility on his own part, and who uses genre clichés to suit himself in an intuitive and subversive fashion. But in 1967, Suzuki was not an "artiste," but a contract director at a studio known for youth-oriented action films that was also struggling to stay afloat in a film market losing audiences in droves to television. Suzuki remarked in 1997 that by the time he did Gate of Flesh, he was being warned by the company just about every time he directed a new picture, and Branded To Kill was the last straw. He was fired by Nikkatsu, and Kyusaku Hori was quoted as saying that Suzuki's pictures did not make money, and did not make sense (though Nikkatsu did release the picture more or less as delivered to the studio). There was some outcry from students, intellectuals and film fans to Suzuki's dismissal, but to no avail. Suzuki responded by taking the studio to court for breach of contract, and eventually prevailed, though it took years and left him blacklisted by the industry for ten years.

When Suzuki returned to filmmaking, it was as an independent. He made Tale of Sorrow and Sadness in 1977, and the three films known as the "Taisho Trilogy" (1979-91): Zigeunerweisen, Heat Haze Theater and Yumeji. Suzuki's post-Nikkatsu films have been praised by critics, but are also, from what little I have been able to see or read of them, very different from his earlier periods, going much further in the direction of strainge imagery and narrative incoherence. In 2001 he revisited -- sort of -- his earlier film and made Pistol Opera, which returns -- again, sort of -- to the universe of Branded To Kill, in which the current Number 3 killer, played by Makiko Esumi (known to aficionados of more serious Japanese cinema from Hirokazu Kore'eda's Maborosi) must run the gauntlet of even more eccentric ranked assassins and meets a figure of death in the form of a cute and lovable little girl, as well as the old Number 3 -- now a retired and foolish old fart with an inflated sense of his own importance (but alas, not played by Jo Shishido). Bringing together his earlier visions of action cinema with his later work in nonsensical surreal art film, Pistol Opera makes his earlier film look almost normal. Viewers less interested than I am in the oeuvre of Seijun Suzuki, or who might have less of a penchant for the cascading torrents of surreal eye-candy, but who just like to watch beautiful, elegant and deadly East Asian femmes fatales on occasion (and I think that includes most of us) might still enjoy this picture for Esumi's performance.

I viewed Branded To Kill on the 1999 Criterion Collection DVD, which includes an interview with the director from that time, as well as a gallery of film posters from the collection of musician John Zorn, who also writes a short introduction to the film in the package's booklet. Those who are interested may also see Pistol Opera on DVD from Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock label.