Round Up 1940

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,097 films made in 1940, 32 fall under the headings of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

A Macabre Legacy 
Before I Hang 
Beyond Christmas 
Black Friday 
Chamber of Horrors 
Crimes at the Dark House 
Dr. Cyclops 
Drums of Fu Manchu 
Earthbound 
El monje loco 
El secreto de la monja 
Enoken no songokû: songokû zenko-hen 
Fantasia 
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe 
Men with Steel Faces 
Mysterious Doctor Satan 
One Million B.C.   
Pinocchio   
Sky Bandits 
The Ape 
The Blue Bird 
The Devil Bat 
The Fatal Hour 
The Ghost Breakers   
The Human Monster 
The Invisible Man Returns 
The Invisible Woman 
The Man with Nine Lives 
The Midnight Ghost 
The Mummy's Hand 
The Thief of Bagdad 
You'll Find Out

It's time this blog started living up to the 'biased' part of its name. Luckily, here we are in 1940, where one of my bigger prejudices finally emerges, full blown and unreasonable. 1940 is the year Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia were released, but I'm not going to discuss them because I'm not interested in Disney, except in their capacity as a destructive influence on fantasy cinema in general and children's films in particular.

I don't like their cryogenically frozen founder or his tattling to HUAC.

Or the way they dumped toxic waste in the Florida Everglades on the outskirts of their Magic Kingdom.

Or their inauguration of a new James Woodsian tradition of unrestrained and unamusing voice overacting, since made even more shouty and overbearing by such luminaries as Eddie Murphy (this generation's Arthur Askey).

Or their Mouseketeer child stars who grow up dysfunctional in public, get breast implants before they hit puberty, and end by shrinking the ever-closing gap between the music video and pornography even further on their way to complete breakdowns and/or rehab. (Above left: that isn't a still from Blue Sunshine, it's a pre-teen success story!) (Now, that, below, is a still from Blue Sunshine.)

 

Or the way they tried to destroy underground comix artist Dan O'Neil and his Air Pirates in the courts despite the crucially-important-to-freedom-of-speech laws protecting satire and parody.

Or the way they've dealt with genius animator and competitor Hayao Miyazaki by buying the rights to release his infinitely-superior-to-Disney films in North America and then under-promoting and overcharging for them. (Toss all those Disney discs and show your kids Miyazaki instead, so they'll grow up to be interesting people who like good movies).

Or the fact that they now own Marvel Comics (unless they break Diamond Distributor's destructive monopoly on comics, which I suppose they just might).

And I don't like Disney animated features.

Well, except for Sleeping Beauty. I like the dragon and the bramble forest and the evil queen.

Oh, and Atlantis -- Atlantis was okay.

And Winnie The Pooh was quite nice.

But, boy, they sure ruined Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wind In The Willows, three peculiarly British classics that American animators should never have been allowed to touch.

Of course, now that I think of it, the Headless Horseman half of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was better.

And their live action Child Of Glass is one of my favourite children's films, and still holds up for me even today. Wish that was on disc...

Also wish there was some information available for these Mexican horror films I keep seeing mentioned when I generate my Internet Movie Database lists for each year, but apart from their titles and personnel I can't find anything anywhere on the net (not in English, anyway).

And, finally, I wish there was something else to say about 1940, but when The Mummy's Hand is as good as it gets, it's a pretty miserable year for fantastic film. The Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard The Ghost Breakers is entertaining in a non-life-changing kind of way, but the title and the presence of Hope probably tell you all you need to know about it. Otherwise, apart from Republic's not-as-good-as-it-should-have-been Drums Of Fu Manchu serial, the year was one long round of mad scientists and lizards dressed up to look like dinosaurs (One Million B.C.), which is not my idea of a good time. I didn't read about a single film I feel compelled to add to my Want To See list. So we close the book on 1940, and it's onward to 1944 and backward to 1939.

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

The companion piece to my beloved Horror Island (1941),  Universal's The Mummy's Hand stars that film's Dick Foran and Peggy Moran. Excuse me: affable Dick Foran and pretty Peggy Moran, as they are invariably described, because there's really no better way of describing them. Both films are so entertaining, and the chemistry between the two leads so comfortable, I wish they had been teamed together fifty more times. The Mummy's Hand is essentially a 'B' sequel to Universal's previous 'A' The Mummy (1932) starring Boris Karloff, but it's a different kind of beast altogether. Where Karloff's film was a moody romance with a body count, its sequel is a fun and funny pulp adventure with a monster, and almost certainly the direct inspiration for Stephen Sommers' big budget The Mummy (1999), which is itself notable for being an infinitely better Indiana Jones rip-off than the miserable and insulting Indiana Jones And The Temple Of The Crystal Skull (2008).

(Sommers would go on to diminish the slight achievement of his Mummy movie with a couple of sequels that completely blew the modest charm of the original, and then drove the final nails into a promising genre film making career's coffin with the truly dire Van Helsing (2004), which after Ford Coppola's Dracula viewer's had a right to expect would star Anthony Hopkins and not be almost entirely computer generated.)

Dick Foran plays an avid but perpetually broke Egyptologist who happens upon an ancient pot decorated with the map to a lost Pharaoh's tomb. When he and comic sidekick Wallace Ford take it to George Zucco, director of the Cairo Museum, he tells them it's a fake and contrives to drop it on the floor, shattering it. Fortunately, Foran remembers what was on it, doesn't believe it to have been a phony, and convinces traveling magician Cecil Kellaway to finance his expedition. Peggy Moran, as Kellaway's daughter, thinks Foran and Ford are a couple of hustlers, and insists on accompanying the group into the desert, where against her will a mutual liking develops between her and Foran. Little do they know that Zucco, actually a priest of the cult of the soon to be revived Mummy, is not far behind, and has a yen for Peggy himself...

The whole enterprise is just great, unpretentious, sweet natured fun, light as a souffle and good for your soul.

P.S.: As an added bonus, here's the trailer for Horror Island, which I forgot to post with its review:

Round Up 1942, Part One

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,042 films made in 1942, a grand total of 28 contained elements that could be considered fantasy, horror, or science fiction. They were:

A Light in the Window 
Beyond the Blue Horizon 
Bowery at Midnight 
Cat People 
Dr. Renault's Secret 
Fantastic Night 
I Married a Witch 
I Married an Angel 
Invisible Agent 
Jungle Book   
Man with Two Lives 
Night Monster 
Sideral Cruises 
Terror House 
The Boogie Man Will Get You 
The Corpse Vanishes 
The Devil's Envoys 
The Ghost of Frankenstein 
The Hidden Hand 
The Living Ghost 
The Mad Doctor of Market Street 
The Mad Monster 
The Mummy's Tomb 
The Remarkable Andrew 
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx 
The Undying Monster 
Thunder Rock 
Tomorrow We Live 

But apart from Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, '42 looks like being a pretty sad year for fantastic film. A Frankenstein sequel (Ghost of Frankenstein), an Invisible Man sequel (Invisible Agent), a number of Karloff programmers, a number of Lugosi programmers (the relative merits of which I will ask my father, who has more fondness for such things than I, to comment upon later in a new supplementary feature I hereby christen: My Old Man's Two Cents), and a couple of foreign language films that don't look particularly compelling. You may as well know that international horror holds a particular glamour for me. If you don't have a problem with subtitles (or, if it's all you can get, dubbing) it's a painless way of easing yourself into another culture, aided by the familiar framework of genre -- kind of like accompanying The Accidental Tourist to a Parisian McDonalds -- and if you hang around this blog for any length of time you'll find that I take a particuar interest in fantastic film hailing from outside of the United States. I'm Canadian, and this kind of cinematic tourism by proxy makes me feel cosmopolitan. 

Here's the way it's going to work: we're going to have a kind of pass/fail system around here. For a film to get its own personal blog entry here is for it basically to receive the Biased Award For Extreme Interestingness To Me Personally. Everything else, if it gets mentioned at all, will turn up in a Round Up for its year. Let it be known that the Biased Award is not handed out lightly, which means that Cat People is the BIG WINNER for 1942, being the only film to get its own entry, while Rene Clair's I Married A Witch just misses making the cut despite appealing to a peculiar peccadillo/fetish I didn't know I had until I saw this movie. Veronica Lake plays an evil witch reformed by love, a plot that just pushes my buttons, which is why I am such a sucker for romantic comedies starring Barbara Stanwyck in urban tough cookie mode (most notably in Remember The Night, my favourite Christmas film). However, I Married A Witch just doesn't quite make it over the top. No offense to Veronica Lake, but Kim Novak will do witchy much, much more convincingly (not to mention sexier) a decade or two up the line in Bell, Book and Candle. Director Rene Clair also went on to much better things with the best screen version of Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians', And Then There Were None (1945), with the great Barry Fitzgerald in one of his most memorable roles. Still, I would like to see I Married A Witch again, so I'll add it to my Want To See list.

On to the biggest disappointment of 1942, from my point of view: The Mummy's Tomb, inauspicious from two points of view. First, it was the vastly inferior follow-up to Universal's extremely entertaining reboot of their Mummy series, 1940's The Mummy's Hand (available in a couple of multiple feature DVDs, linked below), which we'll discuss in its very own entry at a later date. Second, it may have inaugurated my least favourite feature of the horror sequel: the killing of the survivors of the previous film at the start of the sequel.

Here's a simple and fair rule, horror movie makers: if the audience is good enough to invest their time and attention in your film's characters, and some of those characters survive the gauntlet to see the end of it, LET THEM GO. They've won their freedom and their lives, proven their worth according to the conventions of the genre: been rendered in the crucible of terror, stripped to their true characters and abilities by all the trauma you could think to throw at them, and they have survived. For you to bring them back in a sequel just long enough to kill them -- or worse yet, have some new character offhandedly mention that they met an untimely death between movies -- undoes the payoff of the previous film. Often the best we can hope for from a sequel is that it doesn't diminish the original (yes, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I'm looking at you), and this cheap disregard for the survivors of the last gauntlet does just that. Why should I care about your new bowling pins if any left standing at the end of the sequel can be expected to be just as callously knocked over in the interval between it and the next installment?

Like all rules, this one, obviously, is made to be broken -- but not on a whim, and not because the sequel's budget requires cheaper talent. If you must make a sequel at all, figure out some other way of doing it than retroactively ruining the film you're aping.