Day: May 31, 2012

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty in The Atlantic: ‘Black Lagoon’: The First, Great Pretty-Girl-Attacked-By-Aquatic-Beast Film?

[Editor’s Note: the article below appears today on the front page of The Atlantic.]

Chatting with Julie Adams, the star who helped set the formula followed by the new Piranha 3DD.

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. From piranhas and sharks to brain-eating crabs and giant leeches, Hollywood has provided some frightening and improbable reasons over the years for why pretty girls in bikinis should stay out of the water. Long before this week’s Piranha 3DD or even classics like Jaws, however, it was the lustful Gill Man from 1954’s Creature From the Black Lagoon who first made young women think twice about going swimming.

A beauty-and-the-beast tale of an aquatic humanoid who falls for a female scientist during a research expedition to the Amazon, Creature helped inspire the 3D science fiction craze of the 1950s. It also made its young star, Julie Adams, sci-fi’s first pin-up girl—and launched her distinguished career in film, TV, and on stage.

Still vibrant and active at age 85, Adams remains a popular draw at sci-fi and classic film conventions, where she’s currently promoting her lively new autobiography, The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon, which she cowrote with her son, Emmy Award winning editor Mitch Danton.

From "Creature" to "Piranha": why pretty women should stay out of the water.

Over her lengthy and colorful career, Ms. Adams has seduced Elvis Presley and Dennis Hopper on screen, played John Wayne’s wife, tussled in a burning basement with Barbara Stanwyck, and played the love interest to James Stewart, Rock Hudson, and Charlton Heston. She’s been directed by Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh—and more recently has appeared in projects like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and TV shows like CSI and Lost.

Yet Adams still remains best known for her role as Kay Lawrence, the sultry brunette in a plunging one-piece pined over by the Gill Man in Creature.

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What was your initial reaction upon getting offered Creature?

[Laughs.] Well, I wasn’t thrilled, you know, and I thought I could turn it down, but then I would go on suspension [from Universal Pictures] and wouldn’t get paid … and so I thought, well, the studio wants me to do it, what the hey, it might be fun. And it was!

What was director Jack Arnold like, and how did you two get along?

I got along great with Jack Arnold, and he was a wonderful director. He was very low key, he seemed almost casual—but it was very easy to work with him. Any suggestion he made always made sense.

Did you interact much with William Alland, the producer?

Not that much, because he was not on the set that much—but I liked him. He was always very nice to all of us.

Actress Julie Adams.

Alland played the reporter in Citizen Kane, and he apparently attended a dinner party hosted by Orson Welles while they were shooting Kane. Welles’s lover Dolores Del Rio was also there, and she brought along Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa had heard a legend as a child about an Amazon water creature, half-man and half-lizard. And the story went that there was an Amazon village that would bring a virgin to the creature once a year in order for the creature not to terrorize the village.

Poor virgin!

Right. So Alland went home later and wrote Figueroa’s story down. And then about 12 years later the whole 3D craze started, and at that point he pulled out the story and started to make a movie of it.

That’s a very interesting story—it fits in, in a wonderful, cuckoo way.

>>>FOR THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT The Atlantic.

Special Note to LFM Readers:

Julie Adams’ autobiography The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon is available exclusively at her website . Featuring 300 photos of the gorgeous Adams and her famous co-stars, the book provides a charming look at Adams’ experiences working with movie greats like James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Ida Lupino, and many others. While supplies last, the book also comes with a bonus CD of the iconic score for Creature From the Black Lagoon, re-recorded by Monstrous Movie Music and featuring music by Henry Mancini, among others.

Posted on May 29th, 2012 at 10:13am.

When Papa Met His Match: LFM Reviews HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn

By Joe Bendel. Ernest Hemingway deliberately cultivated his notoriously macho image – yet he somehow found four women willing to marry him at various points of his life. That was a lot of optimism, on everyone’s part. Though she had the shortest tenure as a “Mrs. Hemingway,” war correspondent Martha Gellhorn was the most notable. Matching and at times surpassing his feats of war zone journalistic daring, Gellhorn fired his passion and inspired his professional respect and jealousy. Their tempestuous relationship is dramatized in Philip Kaufman’s HBO Film Hemingway & Gellhorn now currently airing on the network.

When ambitious young magazine writer Martha Gellhorn first meets the funky, grungy Hemingway in a Key West bar, they can barely resist tearing the clothes off each other. The fact that he is married hardly matters to either of them. However, their animal attraction will have to briefly wait until they reunite covering the Spanish Civil War, at the behest of ardent Spanish Republican supporter John Dos Passos.

Working with Dutch Communist documentarian-propagandist Joris Ivens, Hemingway and Dos Passos film The Spanish Earth (with Gellhorn tagging along), for the purpose of rallying American audiences to the Republican cause. Frankly, it is considerable more compelling to watch their run-and-gun shooting process in H&G than the historical documentary itself. That adrenaline also fuels the war reporters’ torrid affair.

Just like Hemingway and Gellhorn’s relationship, the film really clicks during their time together in Spain. Viewers are served a liberal helping of Nationalist atrocities, but the portrayal of the Soviet forces is also refreshingly unvarnished, particularly with respects to the fatal purging of heroic Loyalist soldier Paco Zarra, a stand-in for Dos Passos’ doomed friend José Robles. While the literary power couple is shown fawning over Chou En-lai and sneering at the gauche Chiangs in China, Gellhorn also reports from Finland, unequivocally siding with the Finns against the Soviet invaders.

Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in HBO's "Hemingway and Gellhorn."

Unfortunately, the film loses vitality with the aging Hemingway, sliding into the long denouement of his dubious u-boat chasing Cuban years and sad final days in Idaho. By the time America enters WWII, screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner clearly suggest Gellhorn was more of a man than Hemingway. Of course, this is a common problem with bio-pics. To be accurate, they can almost never end with the good stuff.

Regardless of his character arc, Clive Owen totally goes for broke as Hemingway. One of the few actors working today who can come across as both manly and literate, he bellows and carouses with relish. It is a larger than life performance, bordering on camp, yet he is still able to convey Hemingway’s inner demons and nagging self-doubts. He also manages to dial it down periodically for some saucy Tracy-and-Hepburn bantering with Nicole Kidman’s Gellhorn. Likewise, Kidman is on a very short list of actresses who can play smart, sophisticated, and alluring, simultaneously. In fact, she could be channeling Hepburn and the Rosalind Russell of His Girl Friday as the fast-talking, khaki-wearing journalist crusading against injustice, which is frankly pretty cool.

A tempestuous relationship.

In addition to the strong chemistry between the leads, H&G boasts a strong supporting ensemble. David Strathairn is particularly engaging as the disillusioned idealist, Dos Passos, serving as a subtle corrective to Hemingway’s ethical malleability. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich adds notable color as Ivens, while Tony Shaloub conveys a sense of both the menace and tragedy of the Stalinist true believer Mikhal Koltsov, who is considered to be the source for the Karkov character in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Again, the most inspired work comes during or prior to the Spanish Civil War sequences.

Frequently approximating the look of black-and-white news reels and Ivens’ documentary footage, H&G is highly cinematic (getting a vital assist from cinematographer Rogier Stoffers). Kaufman is a big canvas filmmaker, with sufficient artistic stature to merit a recent MoMA film retrospective—a high honor indeed. While steamier and gossipier than The Right Stuff, it is downright staid compared to his Henry & June and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

An appropriately messy film sprawling all over the place, H&G is rowdily entertaining, capturing a good deal more historical insight than one would expect. Definitely recommended for those who appreciate the Hemingway oeuvre and persona (as well admirers of Gellhorn or Dos Passos), Hemingway & Gellhorn airs again on HBO June 2nd, 7th, 10th, 11th, 15th, and 19th and on HBO2 on June 4th, 6th, 12th, 17th, 21st, 25th, and 30th.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on May 31st, 2012 at 9:21am.

Terrorism & Multiculturism: LFM Reviews Wallander: The Revenge

By Joe Bendel. Ystad police inspector Kurt Wallander just turned sixty-two—and they were a hard 62. Though still not exactly a people person, the detective is relatively at peace with himself now and even has close friends on the force to get hammered with. Inconveniently, a series of spectacular crimes will soon interrupt their revelry in Wallander: The Revenge (trailer here), the first episode of the second season of the Swedish television adaptation of Henning Mankell’s bestselling crime series, which opens theatrically in New York tomorrow (with the entire second season already available on VOD).

Wallander is good at his job, but he is not a counter-terrorism expert. Unfortunately, when the sub-station powering Ystad is destroying by a sophisticated set of explosives, it appears he has such a situation on his hands. To make matters worse, the gallery owner hosting a controversial exhibit of Muhammad portraits is viciously murdered under the cover of the resulting darkness. Is the assassination related to the terrorism attack? The national authorities assume so, but investigating will be difficult until power is restored to the Malmö exurb. A rash of exploding cars does not help either.

Given the big picture themes of terrorism and multicultural tension, Revenge, competently helmed by Charlotte Brändström, is reasonably cinematic for series television (clocking in at ninety minutes, much like most installments of Masterpiece Mystery). In fact, it also premiered in Swedish cinemas before the second season subsequently bowed on TV. However, as a whodunit, it is not particularly baffling. Viewers are clearly primed for resolution absolving all suspicious terrorist types in favor of a more politically correct villain. Indeed, Revenge largely delivers accordingly. (However, the precise culpability for each crime is ultimately rather vaguely defined—a bit of a shortcoming for a straightforward procedural.)

From "Wallander: The Revenge."

Wallander will be familiar to many American mystery fans from Kenneth Branagh’s Emmy winning turn as the agonizing detective on the PBS-BBC English language series. Actually one of three Swedish actors to play the part, Krister Henriksson is decidedly jowlier and less angst-ridden than Branagh. Over time, that probably makes him a more welcome home viewing staple. Nonetheless, he has some genre-fan pleasing moments of prickly intensity in Revenge.

American Swedish mystery enthusiasts will also enjoy seeing Lena Endre, recognizable as Michael Nyqvist’s co-editor and on-and-off lover in the Dragon Tattoo franchise, appearing here as Wallander’s potential romantic interest, state prosecutor Katarina Ahlsell. In Revenge, they show the promising stirrings of some smart, mature chemistry.

It is fun to watch Henriksson’s Wallander go about his police business, when not walking his beloved dog or growling at his inter-agency colleagues. However, the middling Revenge is a wee bit polemical, at the expense of the story’s credibility. Still, the character is an established international warhorse, so it is sort of reassuring to see him return in a more contented frame of mind. For Wallander/Mankell diehards, it opens this Friday (6/1) in New York at the Cinema Village and is available with the rest of the second season of Wallander on VOD and DVD.

LFM GRADE: C-

Posted on May 31st, 2012 at 8:35am.