The Sunday Intertitle: Culminating Stroke

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , on January 18, 2026 by dcairns

Yes! It’s the final installment of our thrill-packed British movie serial from 1917, A BID FOR FORTUNE. Ladies, please remove your hats. Note: if you have difficulty maintaining upper-lip stiffness, try waxing your moustache. Now read on:

Dr. Nikola, fiend in human guise, aided by the ersatz Lord Beckenham, abducts the fair Phyllis from the Governor’s Ball in Sydney. A last-ditch attempt to extort the Rod of Wisdom from her father, Wetherell.

Our hero, a tall, violent painter, a sort of scrappy Sickert, arrives — too late!

Don’t look at his eyes!

One of the neatest things about this serial is the interstitial moments of non-diegetic staring, performed either by Dr. Nikola or his cat, Mr. Bigglesworth.

Phyllis has been imprisoned in a cheap set with uneven wainscoting and print damage. The old fellow, her abductor, is not actually wearing a false red nose on his old fellow, that’s just part of the print damage. It only lasts a frame, but that’s the frame we’re stuck with.

Some actual detective work from our cyclonic Seurat — Phyllis’ chauffeur had been slipped a mickey — staggering home, he leads the tempestuous Tanguy to the hostelry where said mickey was dispensed, and the welterweight Wyeth discovers a discarded Evening News stamped with the address of its newsagent. A clew!

The helpful and very-smartly dressed newsagent is able to direct our warlike Warhol to Dr. Nikola’s pied-terre, the sinisterly named 22 Calliope Street, Woolara, an address destined to live in infamy. They arrive — TOO LATE! (again) — Dr. Nikola is currently rowing Phyllis to a waiting sailboat, the Merry Duchess. The quarrelsome Quesada has to settle for rescuing the real Lord Beckenham, who’s lying trussed and insensible at the Calliope Street residence.

Wetherell, Phyllis’s phather, receives Nikola’s ransom note by manservant and silver salver — if you’re going to be extorted, at least do it in style. Wetherell is to row out to sea at midnight, bearing the Tibetan rod this whole thing has been about. He’s allowed one boatman. A cinch! The brawling Bronzino accoutres himself in boatmanlike garb — Van Dyke beard, slouch hat and scarf — his own mother wouldn’t know him.

The filmmakers throw in a giant out-of-focus closeup of Mr. Bigglesworth in case we’re not feeling suspensed enough.

Boarding the Merry Duchess, the Rembrandt of right hooks finds only a note, warning Wetherell not to attempt such tomfoolery next time.

Though purportedly occurring at midnight, these scenes are all obvious broad daylight, so we’ll just have to imagine the appropriate tinting. But suddenly we get a very nice day-for-night shot, shooting into the sun and stopping right down so the sun stands in for the moon:

Unfortunately we don’t seem to know who photographed this movie/serial, but director Sidney Morgan also made a 1920 LITTLE DORRIT and 1925’s BULLDOG DRUMMOND’S THIRD ROUND. Actor A. Harding Steerman, who plays Dr. Nikola with gravitas and not too much ham, was in a modest bunch of silent movies but then made numerous appearances in late 1930s television plays.

Dr. N. sails with Phyllis to the island of Pipa Lannu (?), stranding her there until he can get his sweaty hands on her dad’s rod. But Wetherell and the confrontational Constable have chartered a steamer and are in hot pursuit with cops in tow.

They land! They run about the beach, serpentine fashion! The Uribe of the uppercut still has on his false beard and slouch hat, for some reason. A couple of henchmen jump them, they tussle, but the brutal Breughel the elder makes short work of his foes.

Dr. Nikola has a premonition of foiling.

Wetherell, the true Lord Beckenham, and our knock-down Nolde beard the master-criminal in his lair, but he draws a pistol!

They rush him boldly, but the painting conceals a secret passage, and in a flash Dr. Nikola has vanished!

The hostile Hopper is reunited joyously with Phyllis, but meanwhile, the stuck-up Wetherell is stuck up by Nikola, pulling the same pistol (or its twin). He demands the rod. Why not just give it to him?

He does. And while Nikola is having a good old gloat, Wetherell finds Phyllis and finally gives her permission to wed the paroxysmal Parrish.

They certainly do! While Phyllis is canoodling with her vicious Velázquez in a moodily lit interior, a spectral Dr. Nikola ambles in and deposits an all-too-corporeal missive.

Briefly, the note says that the five pounds delivered by mouse in Port Said (see previous instalment) has, through “a chain of circumstance” increased to £750, and Dr. Nikola, a peculiarly honest master criminal, encloses a cheque for that sum. Meanwhile, he says, the Rod of Wisdom is proving invaluable in his experiments to prolong human life.

So — wait — Dr. Nikola was the hero all along? And also he has the power of astral projection, but never used it?

The nature of Nikola’s quest, as it’s revealed, makes me think of Dr. Phibes, another master-criminal who always wins and is seen seeking eternal life. I’m seriously tempted to read Guy Boothby’s original yarns now to see if the doctor is being faithfully represented here.

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Bale Out

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2026 by dcairns

I finally caught up with Werner Herzog’s RESCUE DAWN, which I’d always been mildly curious about — the only instance of Herzog turning one of his documentaries into a dramatic feature film so far as I know, though I would welcome a whole movie about the cigarette-smoking chimp in ECHOS FROM A SOMBRE EMPIRE.

Aged 65, Werner decided to go Up The Jungle again.

In LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY, we meet Dieter Dengler, German-American aviator, shot down over Laos and held as a POW, who then managed a dramatic escape. In RESCUE DAWN we meet Christian Bale, Welsh actor, playing Dengler, getting shot down and escaping.

In neither film is any room provided to really consider what Diegler was doing in the air over Laos (dropping bombs) — or, we could be generous and say there’s plenty of room because you can wonder about that for the whole runtime. It’s just that the film rarely nudges you to do so.

It DOES begin with documentary footage of real bombing. This unfortunately makes you wonder why the dramatised bombing we see in the movie looks so different. The answer being that the actuality film shows incendiary/fragmentation bombs and the fake stuff is petroleum explosions (or, if they’re CGI, someone has erred in making them look like standard movie bombs).

The film’s apparent bias in Dieter’s favour can partly be explained by Herzog’s disinclination to get into ideology or take sides, though in fact the film very obviously takes Dieter’s side by narrating things through his viewpoint. So his captors are just vicious monsters and we don’t get prodded too much to think about why they might feel so hostile to the people bombing them. To Dieter it’s just inexplicable, and he cries “Why doesn’t anyone listen?” despite being presumably familiar with the concept that some people speak different languages.

Also, Dieter is a big weirdball, inspired to become a pilot after being bombed by Allied planes during his German childhood. So maybe, apart from being born without fear, he was born without the ability to resent being bombed, and so couldn’t understand why anyone else would.

The one place where we’re given information independently is the film’s opening text, which lets us know that this is SECRET bombing. This will be relevant later. What the text doesn’t say, and easily could, is that this is secret because ILLEGAL bombing. That one word would do much to make what follows more legitimate.

The film is a conventional harrowing survival story, enlivened at times by Herzog’s handheld long takes, his dedication to weird-because-true detail, and the excellent performances of his committed, starving actors. Jeremy Davis seems to be auditioning for the role of Charles Manson — successfully, as it turned out. Steve Zahn is typically great. As with his doc WINGS OF HOPE, Herzog is here telling the story of one “lucky” person equipped with the knowledge and determination to survive in the precise very bad situation they find themselves in.

Unfortunately, the film also features some truly horrible cliches. The heroic freeze-frame ending. The slow-motion shoot-out.

A word on the slomo gun battle. When Peckinpah borrowed from THE SEVEN SAMURAI for his WILD BUNCH the notion of cutting between a killer and witnesses moving at normal speed and a slain man falling in slow-motion, he was getting at the idea of adrenalin’s effect, the world slowing down for you at a critical moment of stress. Just two years later, in THE GETAWAY, Bloody Sam was using slomo for smashing headlights. Bits of glass do not experience an adrenalin rush. The true purpose of slow motion, towards which it gravitates, Peckinpah had found, was to celebrate (eroticise) movement.

The slomo in RESCUE DAWN seems deplorable to me because it is used uncritically, as pure cliche, and so becomes a celebration of violence. Perhaps Herzog had got this from Dengler, perhaps he said that when he shot his enemies they seemed to go into slow motion. I sort of feel the slow motion should not have been reserved for the moment of victory, but should kick in the moment Dengler is seen by his enemies and everyone reacts. But even that would be a really tired trope and something new and better needed to be found.

Time travel is real — seeing THE WILD BUNCH today, the slomo goes back to signifying what it did at the time, though we also see, perhaps more clearly than contemporary audiences and even the director himself, that the sequence wants to be thrilling and enjoyable as well as horrific. RESCUE DAWN’s obscene slaughter arrives already dated — I feel confident saying that even though the film is now 20 years old. And through such decisions it steers us into a reactionary political position even while trying to maintain quasi-plausible deniability.

RESCUE DAWN stars Bruce Wayne; Glenn Michaels; Charles Manson; Richard Chesler (Regional Manager); General Owen; Kahn Souphanousinphone Sr.; Agent John Burger; Shelly Nix; The Great Sage; and Cheddar Bob.

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In the belly of that steel beast

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 16, 2026 by dcairns

The subject of directors hitting kids, touched on in yesterday’s Damiani post, comes up again when we look at Ewald André Dupont, fired by Warners from the set of HELL’S KITCHEN (1939) for hitting one of the Dead End Kids (which one? history seems not to record).

I could be accused of double standards here because in this case the phrase “the punk had it coming” springs unbidden to mind, but the fact is I don’t know if the punk actually had it coming. Dupont being a graduate of the German school may have been heavy-handed, or he may have been provoked beyond endurance. We can certainly admit that Warners exercised a double standard, since they never punished Jimmy Cagney for his actions on ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES where, by his own account, he hit one of the Dead End Kids with one of the Dead End Kids — pushing the forehead of the foremost Dead End Kid so that his cranium collided with that of the Dead End Kid behind. Satisfying and reverberant.

Ronald Reagan is in HELL’S KITCHEN, so I have no trouble asserting that Dupont punched the wrong guy.

Dupont, by contrast, spent 12 years between movies. No idea how he supported himself, but he bounced back with a burst of activity in the early fifties, co-writing 23 episodes of the TV show Big Town, and writing and directing mini-masterpiece THE SCARF and directing mini-monsterpiece THE NEANDERTHAL MAN and W.I.P flick GIRLS IN TROUBLE, all in the space of three years. He then derailed his reblossoming career by making another serious miscalculation: he died.

He got a script credit on William Dieterle’s Wagner biopic MAGIC FIRE in 1956, the year he was busy dying, which leads me to suspect that that misbegotten dream project was a trunk item prepared years or decades earlier.

During that early fifties period where Dupont’s heavy, Teutonic, but very solid, focussed, intense approach graced both quality pics and trash, he made THE STEEL LADY (1953) which is somewhere in the middle. It’s a perfectly decent story with decent actors, filmed decently. And it’s unusual — it’s what I wish more B-pictures were like.

An air crew prospecting for oil in the Sahara crash-lands in a sandstorm. Their radio is out of commission — it can receive but not transmit, so they know the rescue parties are looking in the wrong place. They’re low on water.

But they have what seems like a great stroke of luck — they find a WWII German tank and are able to repair it. But the history of this tank is going to spell trouble.

The movie gets the FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX part out of the way quite quickly so it can deal with the troubled legacy of this Nazi heirloom. Smartly, the script establishes early on that the locals hate all outsiders because of something that happened during the war. In the tank, along with the mummified crew (the dopey-looking but strangely disturbing corpse-dummies are recognizably the work of NEANDERTHAL MAN’S auteur), our heroes find and translate a note from the commander referring to the tank’s “secret shame.” We, and our desperate band, are about to find out what can make Nazis ashamed…

This kind of survival yarn depends on both the writing and the casting — Dupont doesn’t have the resources Robert Aldrich could draw upon for his version, so we have Rod Cameron, always a somewhat lumpen presence, plus Tab Hunter as the radio wiz, Richard Erdman as the joker who normally would play a harmonica but doesn’t here, and John Dehner as the rogue alcoholic. A perfectly acceptable group. Dehner is a compelling actor and I love Erdman due to his work in Community, decades later, and Tab is always fun to gaze upon.

The “Arabs” are a disparate crowd of non-Arab actors with disparate accents or shall we say modes of speech, but John Abbot, Anthony Caruso and Frank Puglia aren’t horribly inappropriate. I mean, none of them is Dale Robertson in SON OF SINBAD.

The desert is alternately a real sandy stretch somewhere in America, and a studio set with an unconvincing backdrop. The confines of the tank seem well suited to Dupont’s typically crammed, intense, graphically striking compositions, but alas he doesn’t quite assert himself stylistically, despite having Floyd HIGH NOON Crosby lensing. Sure, the picture quality is cruddy but one thing that ought to survive is the framing.

The action is a tad flat, though one fistfight has unusual force, aided by subtle undercranking and the heaviness of the men’s bodies. Flesh impact!

The treatment of the Arabs is very similar to Indians in the more “progressive” westerns — they may go on the warpath due to the depredations or lies of white men — but once they do, their slaughter can basically be revelled in.

I guess it matters that these Arabs aren’t the rightful owners of the treasure (yes, there’s treasure), they just want to steal it. And three out of four of the men in the tank want to return it to the owner (to win his gratitude and get an oil deal).

The film left me ultimately a little underwhelmed but it’s good to see that Dupont could still whelm somewhat, and THE SCARF isn’t a total one-off in his later career, because this is certainly a competent piece of work.

THE STEEL LADY stars Old Firehand; Todd Tomorrow; Henry Luce; Sgt. ‘Hoffy’ Hoffman; Wolf(voice); Dr. Leonardo; Louis Ciavelli; Moe Levinsky; and Crazy Horse;

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