Mike Vraney (1957-2014)

Mike Vraney, collector of weird movies, weird movie memorabilia, and founder of Something Weird video, succumbed to cancer on January 2.  He is survived by wife Lisa Petrucci and two children, Mark and Danielle.  Vraney was 56.

As a teenager, Vraney was exposed to exploitation and sexploitation films when he worked as a theater projectionist in Seattle.  According to Something Weird's press release, he became active in the local punk rock music scene, being instrumental in the founding of the local music venue The Showbox, and going on to manage bands such as the Dead Kennedys, TSOL, and Seattle's own The Accused.  He founded Something Weird in 1990 as an outlet for his burgeoning collection of penny-arcade nudie loops, prints of exploitation and sexploitation films, trailers, short subjects and film ephemera.  First marketing his films on VHS with covers based on original one-sheets and lobby cards, he went on to the DVD medium in 1999 when he entered a production deal with Image Video.

His unique approach to marketing video began with his VHS releases, the two-hour length of which he would typically pad out with two features (which we commonly an hour or less), along with as many trailers, loops, odds and ends, and supplementary material as he could fit.  When he graduated to the DVD format, he could utilize the 220 minutes of a double-layered DVD to fit in even more of his seemingly endless collection of sleazy obscurities and bits and bobs.  His endless quest to seek out and preserve these forgotten and half-remembered slices of history led him to befriend and collaborate with a number of figures from the exploitation film scene, in particular David F. Friedman, who boosted Vraney's collection with films from his own vault and who also appeared on some 25 commentary tracks with Vraney, and who paid him the best compliment when he dubbed Vraney "the forty-first thief" (a reference to the exploiteers' reference to themselves as "The Forty Thieves"), in recognition of his love for these films and his efforts to preserve them.  He also got to know other exploitation and sexploitation filmmakers such as Joe Sarno, Doris Wishman and Herschel Gordon Lewis.

I own something like 25 or 30 DVD titles from Something Weird, and they occupy a place of honor in my home, not only because they are fun to watch and were great value for money, but also because they were put together with the right combination of love, humor, and respect.  When SWV was getting off the ground in the nineties, it was a hey-day of alternative music, art and publishing, of photocopied zines, alternative newsstand magazines, comics and cassette music releases and even radio, and the Something Weird DVD collection carried the DIY spirit from the analog realm into the digital.  Putting on a SWV DVD always manages to carry me back to that era of exploration and discovery.

Something Weird Video, in its announcement of Vraney's death, promises to carry on the mission further, and in addition to DVDs, the company also has an on-demand channel with Comcast and also some of its titles on Netflix.

For my part, I still intend to continue writing this blog, although I am also devoting considerable time to my sister blog, on atheism, on Wordpress.  Again, the best way to keep abreast of my blogging is probably to use a blog aggregator, as I don't finish things quickly, though there are always works in progress.


This clip has opened SWV's video releases from the analog into the digital era and puts the weirdness, wildness, and coolness of the films (and Vraney's approach to them) into a two-minute nutshell.

Something Weird Video on Facebook
Something Weird Video on Wikipedia
Something Weird Video Official Site

Tom Brown's School Days (1940)

Dr. Thomas Arnold (Cedric Hardwicke) is working as a private tutor when he is appointed by the board of governors of Rugby School to serve as headmaster.  There he takes a hard line on disruptive behavior, expelling many students who will not respond to any other measures.  His new approach appalls the masters, the public and most of the school's governors, but one of these, Squire Brown, assures him of his unqualified support, and as proof, sends his own son, Tom (Jimmy Lydon) to Rugby as a student.  At Rugby, Tom quickly learns the ropes from fellow student East (Freddie Bartholomew).  He also learns to look up to sixth-former Brooke, the decent and upright head of the house, to revere the strict but benevolent Doctor, and to dread the cruel bully Flashman (Billy Halop), who treats him to a tossing in a blanket and also to a "roasting" -- exposing his backside before the fire.  Brown recovers from the roasting but honors the students' code of silence by not telling on Flashman, and with East leads a rebellion against bullying by the other students, culminating in a fist-fight that brings both Brown and Flashman up to the Doctor's study.  Both are disciplined for fighting, but Flashman is expelled for the roasting, and the other students believe mistakenly that Brown is the one who tattled, and he is ostracized by the students, most of all his close friend East.

Tom Brown's School Days was published in 1857 by lawyer, parliamentarian and social reformer Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), inspired by his own experience at Rugby during Thomas Arnold's headmastership, and the novel had a profound and long-lived influence on juvenile literature and popular fiction.  The success of the novel inspired a whole genre of fiction set in boarding schools, from novels such as Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. to the very popular "school stories" serialized in boys' penny papers in the 20th century (George Orwell writes about them in his essay "Boys' Weeklies") to American prep-school novels such as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye and John Knowles' A Separate Peace.  Hughes' warm, sympathetic voice and the loose, episodic structure of his story broke with the heavy-handed moralizing of most literature aimed at young people while subtly showing his young hero's development into a young man with a sense of moral responsibility and duty.  In the introduction to his follow-up, Tom Brown At Oxford (1861), Hughes steadfastly denied that the Tom Brown character was autobiographical, but like Tom in the novel and like others of his generation who attended Rugby during Arnold's tenure, he had been deeply impressed with Arnold's gravity and moral uprightness and held him in awe all his life.  So influenced was he by his period at Rugby that his most grandiose social reform project -- a utopian settlement in the American state of Tennessee -- was named Rugby.  Flashman, the bully who is expelled for his behavior, went on to have an interesting career in a series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser relating his roguish adventures in the far-flung corners of the British Empire.

Thomas Arnold himself (1795-1842) is known to modern readers not only through his reverent depiction in Hughes' book but also through a more sardonic portrait in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  A historian, an Anglican churchman, and a man of religious zeal and staunch conservatism, father to poet and critic Matthew Arnold and great-grandfather to biologist Julian Huxley and novelist Aldous Huxley, he became renowned as an educational reformer for his changes to the system at Rugby and their subsequent influence on schooling in nineteenth-century Britain.  By our standards, his changes to the curriculum were slight: to the Greek and Latin classics that formed the basis of the syllabus, he added history, modern languages and mathematics (but not the physical sciences).  In fact few if any of his reforms were institutional or systemic in nature, and if they were effective at all, it was mainly due to the force of Arnold's own personality.  His main interest was in character-building and in instilling the Christian values he felt were missing from society at large.  He did not disturb the practice of corporal punishment for which English schools were notorious; in fact he considered it beneficial and Biblical and delegated its use to the sixth form, that class of oldest and most advanced students which he designated as an intermediate authority.  Nor did he abolish the peculiar instititution known as "fagging", in which junior students were employed by sixth formers as servants for tasks such as cleaning and errands.

Under Arnold's influence, the English public school (the term is a misnomer -- these were, and are, private, élite, fee-charging institutions catering to the sons of Britain's wealthy and high-born) became a sort of character-factory, impressing young men of wealth and privilege with the values needed to ensure the power and prestige of Britain at the height of its imperial age: loyalty to sovereign and country, adherence to the established religion, and a standard of personal rectitude commensurate with social expectations -- "brave, truth-telling English gentlemen", as Squire Brown says in the novel (and in that day and age, the word "gentleman" still carried a connotation of class status -- a working-class man was, by definition, not a gentleman).  In practice this meant that public-school boys learned, in the school environment, the necessity of social hierarchy, the importance of fitting into that hierarchy, and the responsibilities that came with class privilege.  In spite of the classical basis of the curriculum, the public school was not primarily intended to cultivate the intellect or to advance scholarship, still less was it meant to foster the arts and sciences or to provide occupational skills, but to provide the empire with its owners, statesmen, churchmen and officers.  The system quickly came to be closely associated with other things as well: corporal punishment, bullying, abuse of authority, situational homosexuality and sexual abuse, wealth and class snobbery, and neglect of health and safety.

As the empire declined and dissolved and the public-school system grew more anachronistic, these and other criticisms began to appear in English culture, illustrated by some random examples.  Orwell, who as a boy attended a small preparatory academy called St. Cyprian's in order to qualify for a scholarship to Eton, wrote in the 1940s the essay, "Such, Such Were The Joys", that described his experiences at that school: a context-free, cram-school approach to learning, bullying by students and by teachers, neglect, underfeeding, preferential treatment for the wealthier boys, and a gradually-internalized sense of inadequacy and helplessness characterized his account of the school, which he renamed "Crossgates" in the piece.  Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If... allegorically attacked Britain's class system and empty traditions as a group of underclassmen, fed up with their treatment at the hands of the sixth-formers, find a cache of arms and open fire at a Founders' Day gathering, in a dreamlike fantasy of revenge and rebellion (and a clear reference to Jean Vigo's 1933 Zéro de Conduite).  In the 1970s, the debut episode of Michael Palin and Terry Jones' comedy series Ripping Yarns, called "Tomkinson's Schooldays", was more a Monty Python-style lampoon of the clichés of the school-story than social criticism, but even here the brutality, the indifference to the well-being of students, the empty and mindless traditions, and the experience of the school as a molder of conformity rather than a means of physical, intellectual and emotional development, generated the typically surreal and irreverent treatment (a foppish, elegant School Bully who even intimidates the headmaster, the "school leopard" that catches boys who try to escape, junior boys chained to stakes to watch a football match, and the compulsory fight with the grizzly bear).

Today, period films, due to their expense, are almost always considered "prestige" films: Tom Brown's School Days is a relic of the time when in-period and costume films were a staple of the American film-goer's diet.  They were more vivid than realistic, and attenuated as far as any qualities, attitudes or language which might alienate or mystify the American filmgoer.  Dialects were often inconsistent or simply not used at all, unless they were used by actors to whom the accents came naturally.  The only exterior shooting notable in this film is a football match, the rest being done on soundstages in that highly stylized but effective use of artifice that was the trademark of the golden-age Hollywood period film, with sets and costumes which could have served as well in a Dickens adaptation (and at some point probably did).  A quartet of screenwriters, including producer Gene Towne, with additional dialogue by director Robert Stevenson, supplied dialogue that betrayed a very American sense of quick timing and wit under a thin veneer of Englishness.  In fact, only Cedric Hardwicke and co-star Freddie Bartholomew, whose career as a child actor consisted mainly of roles that exploited his delicate features and (carefully cultivated) English diction, seem quite at home in an 1830s English school; while sandy-haired, snub-nosed Jimmy Lydon seems more like an American farm boy finding himself unaccountably a scion of English country gentry, and Billy Halop is quite unable to shake his Dead End Kids inner-city image.  The plotline is considerably tightened in comparison to the novel, with a development of conflict between Brown and East that is missing from the original, but which plays well in the film.

Director Robert Stevenson (1905-1986) began to direct in British film in 1932 after two years as a screenwriter.  He came to Hollywood in 1939, where he directed at various studios while under contract to David O. Selznick, then contracted to RKO in the late forties.  The lion's share of his career was spent at Disney, where he directed many of the studio's live-action features, such as Old Yeller (1957), Son of Flubber (1964), Mary Poppins (1965), The Love Bug (1968), Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971), and The Shaggy D. A. (1976).

Cedric Hardwicke (1893-1964) distiguished himself on the English stage and was given a knighthood in 1934 by George V.  He began to appear in American stage productions and films after 1936 and permanently emigrated to the United States in 1948.  His voice and polished demeanor made him a favorite character actor in films such as Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) and in the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956).

Jimmy Lydon (b. 1923) first distinguished himself as a juvenile actor in the 1930s on the Broadway stage, moving on to films for Paramount and RKO, becoming best known for his work in the Henry Aldrich series, based on the popular radio comedy.  He moved on to television in the early 1950s and finally to a career in television and film production.  He was especially memorable in Strange Illusion (1944), a Poverty Row noir drected by Edgar Ulmer (Detour) with a plot derived from Hamlet.

Born in Dublin and raised in England by an aunt, Freddie Bartholomew (1924-1992), had had London stage experience and appeared in two British films before accepting a role in MGM's David Copperfield (1935).  His earnest mien, English accent and dimpled good looks soon made him the second highest-paid child star in Hollywood after Shirley Temple and he appeared in such films as Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) and Captains Courageous (1937).  As an adult he worked mainly in advertising, the wealth he had accrued in his childhood having been spent in lawsuits, particularly one highly publicized fight between his aunt and his birth mother over the right to his earnings.  The experience embittered him and he gave no interviews about his early career until shortly before his death.

Billy Halop (1920-1976) began his acting career in radio and then on the stage.  His appearance in the Broadway play Dead End paved his way to Hollywood when Samuel Goldwyn brought the play to the screen, and he worked on many installments of the ensemble-oriented Dead End Kids/East Side Kids films for Paramount and Monogram.  He was less successful as a solo actor and eventually worked in the 1950s as a salesman and in the sixties as a registered nurse.  He did have a recurring role in television's All In The Family where he played Munson, the owner of the cab company where Archie Bunker worked part-time.

I viewed Tom Brown's School Days on a DVD release from Alpha Video Distributors, whose large selection of budget-priced video releases of classic black-and-white "late show" film offerings have unfortunately disappeared from most existing retail video outlets in my area over the past several years, along with many of the outlets themselves.  As with most of Alpha's releases, this does not include anything in the way of supplementary material and is not a "remastered" version, but made from a 16mm print of the type you used to see in late-night television screenings of old films.

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.

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.

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.

Rollerball (1975)

I think of Hollywood in the seventies as a sort of "silver age" for American cinema after the "golden age" of the Hollywood studio-system years (the 20s to the early 50s). An influx of young, film-school-trained talent, new influences from Europe and the independent film scene, and an admirable consistency in craft, style and intelligence characterizes many films in the late sixties and the first half of the seventies (Point Blank, Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.), and the congenial environment for new ideas and approaches benefited many middle-of-the-road films as well, such as the one we are looking at today. It was also a fertile time for science-fiction films, as titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, Westworld, Soylent Green, THX-1138, and The Andromeda Strain injected social commentary into a view of the future that went beyond the space-suited clichés of the space-opera.

In 2018, corporations have replaced nation-states in a world order without war, poverty, or crime, and the global masses thrill to a spectator sport called rollerball, where two teams, on skates and motorbikes, vie for possession of a heavy steel ball shot onto the sharply-inclined circular track, attempting to get the ball into the opposing goal. The play is fast, exciting -- and violent: players can be hurt, crippled or killed in the normal course of play, which is part of the appeal for the game's fans. One of the world's top rollerball teams is the Houston team, sponsored by the Energy corporation and led by captain Jonathan E. (James Caan), who is the sport's longest-lived and most successful player. After a victory over Madrid, Jonathan is taken aside by Energy executive Bartholomew (John Houseman) and asked, quietly but firmly, to retire. For rollerball has an important social function: it is not a game in which individuals are supposed to matter, but a lesson in group effort over individual ambition, and Jonathan's success and fame are running counter to the intentions of the game. Jonathan, not comprehending why he should retire when he and his team are at the top of their game, refuses. While he refuses to budge and attempts to find out what he can on the corporate social order and how decisions are made, rule changes are announced, making the game much more dangerous and it becomes obvious to Jonathan that he may not leave the field alive.

Rollerball was based on a short story, "The Rollerball Murders," by William Harrison, who in his career as a professor at the University of Arkansas was engaged in research on management methods at multinational corporations, private entities many of which were dwarfing political states in economic size and power, and who conceived his story while watching the crowd at a university basketball game. Director Norman Jewison was intrigued by the story and paid Harrison for the film rights to it and to write a screenplay. In addition to the phenomenon of giant transnational corporations, Harrison and Jewison were also observing the increasing popularity of televised spectator sports and their escalating emphasis on violence, conflict, and warlike behavior on the playing field and among fans. American football, as well as ice hockey (a sport which the Canadian Jewison grew up on and came to regard with increasing ambivalence), were obvious models for rollerball, but there was also the phenomenon in Europe and especially the UK, where Jewison spent a lot of time, of soccer hooliganism, in which fans of rival clubs engaged in pitched battles in the stands and outside the arena. Another obvious comparison would be Roman gladiatorial games, the proverbial example of violence being used to placate the masses.

The two elements of Rollerball's premise -- multinational corporations and the exploitation of violence in mass media -- give the film a solid footing and a prescience which can be seen today, when the multinationals of Harrison's time have become even bigger and more powerful and popular entertainment has become even more atavistic and focused on violence. The film's visual impressions of the future, while dated in details (which comes with the territory: all films set in the future show their age at one point or another) still look great: Jewison's view of the future (designed by production designer John Box) recalls Kubrick's approach in his futuristic films 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with their chilly formalism -- combined in the latter with visceral violence and deft editing. Like Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, Jewison chose his locations carefully, heading to Munich where the world's largest circular sports stadium was built for cycling events at the 1972 Olympics, and where the headquarters of BMW was located. For Jonathan's trip to Geneva to consult with the world's most advanced computer, Zero, on corporate society, the old League of Nations building located there was used.

Most memorable are the game sequences, so absorbing and yet appalling that Jewison was predictably accused of what the film opposes, exploiting violence. The uniforms, based on the gear for American football -- helmets and protective pads under numbered jerseys -- were familiar to American audiences, yet subtly alienated by the alterations: the lack of mascots or logos, the nasty-looking studs on the gloves and the helmets, and the futuristic looking font of the numbers on the jerseys. The game itself was designed by Harrison and Jewison and refined by the stunt team in rehearsal, who apparently enjoyed the game so much they played it even when the cameras weren't rolling (a man in Texas who saw the film reportedly expressed interest in starting a real rollerball league). Director of cinematography Douglas Slocombe and editor Anthony Gibbs keep the action fast and furious, while the sound design prefigures the pounding, bass-heavy presentation of more recent cinema films. The violence is jarring but mostly bloodless in the hygienic style of much Hollywood violence -- a real rollerball game would undoubtedly be much bloodier.

Offsetting the film's strong concepts and the execution of its game scenes is a frequently plodding and heavy-handed narrative. Harrison and Jewison have constructed such a difficult labyrinth for their characters that Jonathan cannot form a coherent understanding of the nature of the society that he lives in. It's an age when books are nearly extinct as the world's libraries go through a process of being "transcribed" and "summarized" into electronic form: in essence, rewritten and destroyed. The Geneva sequence shows something of this process as the head librarian (Ralph Richardson in one of the film's real treats, by turns comical, surreal, and pathetic) takes him to see Zero, the central computer, while chatting to him offhandedly about that morning's loss of the entire 13th century: "just Dante and a few corrupt popes ... poor old 13th century." Living memories of pre-corporate society are vague and selective, like those of his older friend and trainer Cletus (Moses Gunn). So Jonathan cannot develop the knowledge which might lead to a coherent opposition. His personal grievances against the corporations -- the losses of his wife Ella (Maud Adams) to an executive who wanted her and used his privileges to get her, and of his friend and teammate Moonpie (John Beck), brain dead after a blow to the head on the track in Tokyo -- are classic Hollywood, in the tradition of the movie cop who only gets serious about going after the bad guys when they do something to his wife, family or worst of all, his partner.

Therefore Jonathan's main motivation ends up being, in essence, "you're not the boss of me," which leaves his defiance of the system hollow and futile, and the much-vaunted pro-individualist message of the film rather silly. And it seems rather silly of Bartholomew and his fellow executives not to see that Jonathan's success and fame aid their cause in the long run rather than threaten it, as we see in an era of disposable cults of personality, and the cultivation of "individuality" through the consumption of dress, music and politics. They (Bartholomew and his cronies, that is) have forgotten that while their drama has played out, the masses who chant Jonathan's name from the stands are still as ignorant and passive as when it began.

Further notes on the film:

• One of the film's nods to Kubrick is its classical music soundtrack by André Previn, who conducted the orchestral selections with the London Symphony Orchestra, played the organ music (the pregame's corporate anthems and hymns, as well as J. S. Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor for the title sequence), and also came up with the futuristic music (a sort of soul groove with Moog flourishes) for the party sequence which ends with the guests recklessly setting fire to trees with a flare-gun (an indictment of the decadence and indifference of the people for whom this society is run). Unfortunately the film depends heavily on Tomasso Albinoni's mawkish Adagio for Strings at the moments when it wants to really tug on the viewer's emotions, and overall lacks Kubrick's gift for choosing music for his films that was not only apposite thematically but also fresh and unexpected.

• Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan in 2002, an awful film gutted of the original's intellectual content, elegant design and even its futuristic setting, and symptomatic of the fetish for recycling old material that has gripped Hollywood in recent years.

• James Caan (b. 1939), a longtime sports and rodeo enthusiast off the set, began in films in 1963 with a bit part in Irma La Douce, but his career only took off with his appearance as Sonny Corleone in 1972's The Godfather. His star burned brightly during the seventies, dimmed in the eighties, but revived somewhat in the nineties as he began to specialize in character roles.

• John Houseman (1902-1988) was born in Bucharest to an Alsatian father and an English mother and turned to writing and the theater in the thirties, collaborating with Orson Welles on many theater projects, most famously the Mercury Theater, which spun off into radio projects and finally Citizen Kane (1941), a project over which the two men quarrelled and split. After the war he produced many distinguished films while working as producer and director for many New York stage productions and also teaching theater at Vassar. He is best known for his creation of the redoubtable Professor Kingsfield in the law-school drama The Paper Chase (1973) a role he reprised on television in the seventies and eighties. His combination of gentility, aristocratic bearing, and daunting intellectualism was used to great effect in a series of commercials for an investment firm I remember well in which he concludes "We make money the old-fashioned way ... we earn it."

• The filmography of Norman Jewison (b. 1926) is a mixed bag, ranging from romantic comedies to musicals to satire to serious dramas, though he is reputed a craftsman whatever the value of any particular project. Born in Toronto, he began his career in British, then Canadian, then American television before turning to feature films. His films include Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! (1966), Fiddler On The Roof (1971), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), ... And Justice For All (1979), and Agnes Of God (1985).

I viewed Rollerball on a 1998 double-sided DVD release from MGM Home Entertainment, containing a letterboxed wide-screen version and a pan-and-scan version, featuring dialogue and subtitles in English, French and Spanish, commentary track by Norman Jewison, a featurette made at the time about the film (what we would now call an EPK or electronic press kit), an illustrated booklet, and an "exciting interactive rollergame" which turns out to involve rearranging scrambled scenes from the film into their original order ( ... fun). No trailers, teasers or stills, but what the hell; it was cheap. I understand there have since been DVD re-releases of the film which contain more material, including a commentary track by screenwriter William Harrison.