The Weekly Gravy #2

I love the idea of themed movie marathons. A cherished idea I had in college was to do a “depressing animation day” with my friend Ethan, comprising Grave of the Fireflies, The Plague Dogs, When the Wind Blows, and Ringing Bell. We never did get around to doing it (we did see Foodfight!, which was depressing in its own way), but it’s an idea which has stuck with me ever since. And the idea of linking other movies by subject matter, style, or theme—overt and subtle alike—continues to fascinate me.

So, since the last movie I watched last week was the fine giant-ant thriller Them!, I decided to kick off this week with…

Phase IV (1974) – ***

I first saw Phase IV in 2011 or 2012, but as I was living with roommates and was watching it late at night, I had to keep adjusting the volume to keep from bothering them, and since my copy of the film lacked subtitles, I found it the harder to appreciate. I ended up not thinking much of it and rating it a 64, a high **½. Here’s what I said then:

When PHASE IV acts as a sort of abstract semi-documentary—especially when Ken Middleham’s fantastic insect photography is put to use—it’s decently compelling and effective. But as a sci-fi thriller it falls flat, due to Mayo Simon’s one-dimensional script, the serviceable but forgettable acting, and the weak ending (the product of studio interference). Credits designer Saul Bass’ only directorial effort, and to his credit, it’s visually interesting and certainly unique. Just not that good.

This time around, I didn’t entirely change my tune. The sequences which focus on the ants are by far the film’s strongest, thanks to Middleham’s striking imagery and the stunning ways in which the ants do what the story asks of them. Whether this was achieved through wrangling, great patience, or something in between, the results were more than worth the effort. But there are other striking images; the distorted image of a truck approaching across a heat-warped horizon, the characters moving across the desert landscapes, the bizarre towers constructed by the ants, and numerous other shots which remind us of Bass’ fantastic work in the credits sequences of other films. It’s a fascinating film just to look at.

At the same time, I haven’t changed my mind about the script, which has a thin story, threadbare characters with unclear motivations, and an abrupt, vaguely mystical ending—yes, the result of studio interference, but the storytelling up to that point isn’t that much better. And the acting isn’t all that good; Nigel Davenport is mildly entertaining as the scientist who seems more interested in ants than other humans, not least as when he smashes up his lab trying to squash one ant, and Michael Murphy is okay as the game theorist who acts as his voice of reason, but Lynne Frederick, as a farm girl who ends up staying at their lab after her home is overrun by ants and her family killed (by the insecticides used by Davenport to repel the ants), is pretty terrible…though apparently the production was rather rough for her.

But this time around I was able to focus more on the ants (as does the film—it’s a full 10 minutes before we first see a human face) and the scenes built around them, like the haunting sequence where a glob of insecticide is relayed by a series of worker ants, each dying in turn, until it can be given to the queen who starts birthing ants which are immune to it. And I was able to appreciate the nifty score, by Brian Gascoigne and other hands, with its trippy, heavily electronic eeriness. It’s got “cult film” written all over it—it was shown on MST3K during their first season—and I was able to enjoy it as something closer to that than to a truly good creature-feature like Them! But of course, here the ants are of normal size—simply abnormal intelligence.

It’s far from a great film (another quibble: the whole subplot about Davenport getting an ant bite on his arm which gets grotesquely infected never goes anywhere), but I’d say it’s worth at least one viewing, for the amazing ant sequences, the intriguing premise (it does seem a little too plausible for comfort), and for its status as Bass’ only feature directing credit. And now, perhaps I should consider rewatching Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees…

(NOTE: Since writing the previous I’ve watched Bass’ original ending, which can be found online. It’s not markedly more illuminating, but it’s at least cool to look at and less abrupt than the ending of the theatrical version. I’m not really sure why the studio had it cut; it’s not like this was ever going to be a big hit.)

Score: 70

The Naked Jungle (1954) – **½

Thank my dad for reminding me to continue the ant-film theme with this, the only film George Pal produced that wasn’t fantasy or science fiction. Here, the threat posed by the ants—the marabunta, or army ants—is all too real, as they eat their way across the South American landscape, devouring plant and animal—and human—alike as they go. And for the picture’s purposes, their target is the cocoa plantation run by imperious Christopher Leiningen (Charlton Heston), who has spent 15 years establishing his empire in the heart of the jungle and isn’t about to give it up without a fight.

But the marabunta aren’t even mentioned by name until the halfway mark and don’t appear until about two-thirds of the way through. Until then, the film is focused on Leiningen’s relationship with New Orleans native Joanna (Eleanor Parker), whom he’d married by proxy. Even though she’s charming, friendly, and gorgeous, he treats her like crap, shutting down her attempts to break the ice and behaving as if she were a possession rather than a person. And when she reveals she had been married before (a fact his agent had withheld from him), he decides it was all a mistake and plans to send her back.

Of course, the threat of the marabunta takes precedence, and of course they warm to each other and end up living happily ever after, but he’s been such a dick that it’s hard for us to care. And that’s if, 65 years later, you’re inclined to care about a white man’s efforts to protect “his” swath of land, even if the natives treat him like a king, and even if he’s at least a more humane boss than the nasty Gruber (John Dierkes).

Credit to Heston for doing his best to find the humanity in Leiningen, a man whose obsessions have brought him material wealth, but at the cost of his manners and possibly his soul. And Parker is solid as well; the film was made in the midst of the period in which she earned three Oscar nominations, before being remembered mainly as the Baroness in The Sound of Music. The film is technically solid in that mid-50s studio-picture way, with a good score, an impressive enough finale, and some effective flashes of myrmecological destruction.

But that’s not enough to make it particularly good, mostly because the script, based on Carl Stephenson’s story “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” fails the find the right balance either between Leiningen’s callousness and his humanity, or between the domestic drama within and the six-legged threat without. There’s not enough here for Pal or director Byron Haskin (coming off the far more characteristic The War of the Worlds) to sink their teeth into; what it really needed was a team like Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk.

My dad claimed to have been disappointed when he saw it decades ago, because it was shown in a theater which typically showed soft-core cinema (so this was probably the early 60s re-release, whose posters compared Heston’s role here to Ben-Hur), but failed to deliver on the promise of the title. I was disappointed, but in a different way.

Score: 62

I have attempted to continue the theme of the week by watch Microcosmos, and fell asleep both times I attempted to watch it (great sign). So I’ll save that for a morning/afternoon watch and see about revisiting A Bug’s Life first.

Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe (1996) – ***½

Well, my copy of A Bug’s Life is nowhere to be found, which makes me wonder if I actually have one. No matter. I went back and gave this another shot when I wasn’t incredibly tired, and believe it or not, I made it through without dozing. In fact, my fears that the film itself wasn’t very good, fatigue or not, proved unfounded: it’s a magnificent achievement and a fascinating film to behold, even if the finished product is not quite on a par with the extraordinary efforts required to realize it.

What it is is a 75-minute collage of life on a minuscule scale, including ants, crickets, walking sticks, ladybugs, beetles, snails, frogs, crickets, spiders, pillbugs, woolly worms, moths, bees, wasps, and of course, ants. There is very little narration except a few lines near the beginning and near the end (in the English-language version, provided by Kristin Scott Thomas), and not much sense of narrative or even theme. If anything, Bruno Coulais’ score, very much in that whimsical-grotesque mode that was big in the 90s, provides the real commentary.

We have scenes erotic, from the way a bee crawls inside of a flower (which seems to embrace them in return) to the slimy union of two snails. We have scenes comic, as when two stag beetles fight at great length for no clear reason, at one point knocking over a sleeping pillbug, which rolls away and cheerfully begins its morning crawl. We have scenes heroic, as a dung beetle rolls its bolus of feces and soil across a landscape, determinedly freeing it when it gets stuck on a root, hell-bent on its mission…and then the camera pulls back to show that the distance they so arduously covered amounts to a few human paces.

We also get some moments of dread and terror, especially when a pheasant shows up and starts snacking on ants; it’s as towering and apocalyptic a force as Godzilla in Tokyo. And yes, we get some nifty ant action, as a colony assembles its winter food stores. But most of all, we get a sense of how sophisticated the lives of these creatures are, and how beautiful their world is. The lack of theme or even some basic explanation of just who and what we’re seeing is frustrating at times, and the pace is more meditative than thrilling (probably why I dozed off), but it’s still well worth seeing.

And how about that weird-ass theme song? I kind of love it, especially the way the singer pronounces “creatures.”

Score: 85

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – ****

I grew up with this movie, of course. Not to the degree I grew up with, say, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, but still, I saw it plenty of times. I hadn’t sat down and watched the whole thing in over 15 years, but it didn’t matter much. Most of it came right back to me—from the songs we all know to the characters we all recognize to the bits of business we could all act out to the gesture, if we had to. But this time, I noticed more. I noticed how scary the Queen is, even before her transformation, with her forbidding glare and eternal sneer. And after it, I noticed just how creepy her habit of staring directly at the viewer is—the moment when she surprises Snow White at the cottage is genuinely unsettling. I noticed a lot of the little gags in the dwarfs’ dialogue, especially Doc’s and Grumpy’s, thanks to the subtitles which picked up on the lines you could easily miss, especially as a kid. And likewise, I noticed just how much of the dialogue rhymes, giving the film as a whole a feeling of operetta.

I also noticed how brief and simple the songs really are; most are only a couple of verses. And I noticed how compressed the timeline is; from Snow White fleeing into the forest to the Queen’s death, maybe 24 hours pass. And it’s quite possible the opening scenes take the place the day before, so that 90% of the film takes place in…less than two full days. But hey, it’s a fairy tale, that’s how things work. And I noticed how Snow White herself, often written off as a bland heroine, has plenty of charm and humor (like when she teases Grumpy) of her own.

And if that’s what I discovered this time around, there’s even more which I already knew well and was simply reminded of; it may have been close to 20 years since I last saw the whole film, but I saw it enough at a formative enough age that most of it is burned into my memory: the beautiful multiplane animation for the settings, the wonderful character animation, from Snow White’s china-doll delicacy to the Queen’s cold-blooded scowl, from the dwarfs’ caricaturish charm to the woodland critters’ utter adorableness, the amazing music, fearsome and tense and haunting and lovely and lively as the moment requires, and the voice acting, especially Lucille LaVerne as the Queen (both as herself and in the peddler-woman guise), a figure of pure malevolence, and Pinto Colvig as Grumpy and Sleepy, the former everyone’s favorite dwarf (well, mine at least, and with good reason), and the latter most notable for his yodel, which offers the clearest hint that Colvig also did the voice of Goofy.

And, of course, there are the songs, from the romantic grandeur of “One Song” and “Someday My Prince Will Come,” to the sheer delight of “Whistle While You Work,” “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum” (the washing song) and “Silly Song,” to the iconic catchiness of “Heigh-Ho,” which is so memorable you might forget how incredibly simple the lyrics are. It’s a wonderful set of songs, a fitting start to one of the great musical legacies of the American cinema.

But then, this is a fitting start to the saga of Disney feature animation, with all the color, humor, charm, excitement, terror, romance, and music that most of us grew up with. It’s not the best Disney feature, nor is it my favorite (I’ve always been more of a Fantasia fan), but it’s a truly great film, one which holds up extremely well after 83 years, and which ends as such stories must:

…and they lived happily ever after.

Score: 89