Shanks (1974) – ***
I’d known about Shanks for years, and had even owned it for years on Blu-Ray, but only tonight got around to watching it. But even knowing it exists is more than most viewers can claim, which is too bad, since it’s not only a rather fascinating little film, but one which arguably fell into obscurity simply by being made a decade or so too early. In 1974 it was mostly dismissed as an oddity, a gimmick from the king of cinematic gimmickry, William Castle, but now it can be seen as a forerunner to the type of macabre fantasy Tim Burton made his own.
Malcolm Shanks (Marcel Marceau) is a deaf-mute puppeteer who lives with his cruel step-sister (Tsilla Chelton) and her drunken husband (Philippe Clay). He gets a job offer from Old Walker (also Marceau) an incredibly elderly scientist who’s experimenting with reanimation, developing a wireless electrode which can be used to manipulate dead bodies…rather like a puppet. When Old Walker dies, Shanks decides to experiment with his body, and soon becomes an expert manipulator of the dead. When his brother-in-law comes to Walker’s house angrily demanding money (he and his wife view Shanks’ money as their own), Shanks kills him with a reanimated rooster (!) and turns him into a “puppet,” using him to lure his step-sister into a fatal accident, after which he makes a “puppet” of her as well.
His closest friend is the teenage Celia (Cindy Eilbacher) whom he’s promised to put on a puppet show for for her birthday. He keeps his promise using his reanimated relations, and despite her initial horror, they return to Old Walker’s mansion to celebrate her birthday in style. Unfortunately, a biker gang barges in with the body of a dead comrade (!!!), and everything goes to hell—even the movie, to some degree, because it takes a turn into territory far darker than it can do justice, and then because it tries to undo that with a final twist that doesn’t quite work.
It’s the third act, and ultimately the writing throughout, that keeps Shanks from edging into the realm of ***½. The premise itself is fine, and there are some great moments of twisted humor, but it feels like writer Ranald Graham didn’t quite know where he wanted to take the story after Celia learns just what Shanks is up to, and the story loses its way. It remains true to its own strangeness enough to not completely fall apart, but without giving too much away it makes choices which keep me from eagerly recommending it.
But there’s a lot here that I can recommend. Marceau does a fine job in both his roles, particularly in balancing Shanks’ general sense of innocent gentleness with a darkness that comes out in the film’s own darker moments, and his body language, especially as Old Walker, is impeccably performed. Clay and Chelton were both colleagues of Marceau’s, and they’re both quite good as well, especially when they’re reanimated and show us how well the dead can dance. Eilbacher fares slightly less well, in part because her role is rather dubiously conceived, but she brings some down-to-earth sweetness to this self-proclaimed “Grim Fairy Tale.”
Far better than the writing is Alex North’s Oscar-nominated score, which ranges widely in style from the dreamlike to the comic to the eerie, apparently using some of his rejected 2001 score, which explains the “celestial” quality of some of the themes. The makeup is fantastic, especially on Marceau as Old Walker and Chelton, who looks like one of Cinderella’s evil step-sisters. And Boris Leven’s production design is good, particularly in Old Walker’s quietly Gothic mansion.
What it might have needed was a slightly better director than Castle; he does an adequate job, but a shade more style, or maybe a better job at handling the violence of the climax, would’ve made for a more satisfying overall film. It’s ultimately limited by its material, rather than transcending it. That aside, I mostly found Shanks a nifty little macabre trifle, a must for any Tim Burton fan and worth rolling the dice on if you’re at all curious.
Score: 76
Valley of the Dolls (1967) – **
They had to know what they were doing…right? They had to. They had to know they were making a piece of absurd camp, with characters who behave not like human beings but like creatures of some alternate universe where God is Judy Garland (who was supposed to be in this—more on that presently) and Satan is Truman Capote. Does that make sense? Does it make enough sense? Then it’s good enough for discussing this movie, the soapy story of three young women who come to New York to try and make it big and are met with love, loss, success, failure, and drug addiction—the “dolls” of the title are Dolophines, also known as methadone; it frequently makes no damned sense at all.
After all, this is a movie where Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins) gets offered a lucrative job as the face of a cosmetics advertising campaign within 30 seconds of the company’s CEO meeting her. This is a movie where Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) becomes a star in French “art films” (read: nudies) which have no real nudity and don’t play like any actual movie ever made. This is a movie where we’re told what an enormous talent Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke) is, when the evidence suggests she’s…not. This is a movie where veteran actress Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) gets into a huge catfight with Neely, culminating in her getting her wig ripped off to reveal the shocking truth…she has a perfectly respectable head of gray hair. She’s never heard of dye? She doesn’t know any hairdressers?
Valley of the Dolls exists in its own realm of reality, and when it hits its stride, it can be quite enjoyable. The ludicrous faux-mod montages, Neely’s drunken rants (“Boobies, boobies, boobies!”), Helen doing a (not very impressive) solo in the midst of a giant Alexander Calder mobile, Anne collapsing upon the beach during a low point just so the waves can wash dramatically around her, Jennifer taking her own life because she’ll have to have a mastectomy (and “All I know how to do is take off my clothes”)…what people act like this? Jacqueline Susann people, that’s who.
It’s a hard film to rate accurately. On an objective level, it’s not well directed, it’s badly written, and the acting isn’t much better. Even on a subjective level, it’s an uneven experience, and tends to sag when Neely isn’t on screen. This is only partly because her arc is by far the most interesting—Anne has a mostly brand career-girl trajectory and poor Jennifer seems like an afterthought (it’s not even entirely clear how the other characters know her)—and more because Duke was by far the most accomplished actress of the three leads; she has a blast chewing the scenery and being hilariously nasty to everyone around her. Parkins, on the other hand, is competently generic and genetically dull, whilst poor tragic Tate, notoriously shy in real life, tends to be overshadowed by the garish camp around her.
Speaking of tragedy, Judy Garland was originally cast as Helen Lawson, but when her various personal issues got in the way, Hayward was given the role. It’s hard to say if the film was better for it or not. On the one hand, Hayward’s big solo number is a dud; she has none of the passion or vigor (or skill) that Garland would’ve brought to it, and it’s hard to buy her as a musical-theater legend. On the other hand, would Garland’s performance have been too raw, too emotional, too human in this defiantly artificial context? I suspect so. So it’s probably better this way.
In any case, Valley of the Dolls is a film serious devotees of cinema should see at least once, and there are those—they know who they are—who’ll want to see it time and again. For me, one trip to the Valley is probably enough…but I might soon need to go Beyond it.
Trivia note: John Williams’ work on the score of this film (he adapted and conducted it) earned him the first of his 52 Oscar nominations.
Score: 44
Dumbo (1941) – ****
I’d been trying to find my copy of this so I could continue my series of classic Disney rewatches, but after a lengthy and fruitless search, I broke down and bought another copy. So here we are, with another classic—albeit the most controversial of the first five Disney features. But does it deserve to be?
The bulk of the controversy, of course, revolves around the crows, the jive-talking corvids who find Dumbo and Timothy Q. Mouse up a tree one morning, lend him a “magic feather” to convince him to fly consciously, and get the last word as they see him off to a brighter future as the brief (64 minutes) film closes. They also get the jive-heavy song “When I See an Elephant Fly,” full of wordplay like “I seen a peanut stand/I seen a rubber band.”
Diplomatically put, the crows are “of their time,” from the very choice of species to the fact that the leader of the crows was originally named “Jim” (he’s never named in the actual film) and was voiced by the white Cliff Edwards. They’re the most dated aspect of the first five films by a mile, especially since the infamous black centaurette, Sunflower, was permanently edited out of Fantasia. I wouldn’t show the film to a first-timer, especially a child, without properly contextualizing them and explaining the controversy around them.
But at the same time, in of themselves the crows are likable and empathetic characters, who help Dumbo to realize his full potential without having to humble or sacrifice themselves, and their own teasing of him isn’t based on the size of his ears but on the notion that he could fly. Compared to the Black characters in live-action films of the era (like, say, the same year’s Blossoms in the Dust), they’re not servants or subservient, and they’re not aggressively ignorant or superstitious. They do mark the film as a product of its time, but on the whole, in my view (and as I am not Black, I fully admit my lack of authority on the matter*), they don’t harm the film all that much.
There’s also the point—first raised to my attention by Colin Jacobson in his review—that the roustabouts who appear early in the film are arguably just as problematic, as they to be Black men who sing about working all day, spending all their money on alcohol, and being illiterate; “We’re happy-hearted roustabouts!” But consider some of the other lyrics and ask yourself if the song’s tone isn’t meant to be bitterly ironic:
Muscles achin’/Back near breaking
Eggs and bacon’s what we need (Yes, sir!)
Boss man houndin’/Keep on poundin’
For your bed and feed.
There ain’t no let up/Must get set up
Pull that canvas! Drive that stake!
Want to doze off/Get them clothes off
But must keep awake!
It’s considerations like these that balance out Dumbo’s status as the shortest and simplest of the major Disney features. And it is simple, not just in its story but in its style, a broader, cartoonier style than the lush artistry of the films around it. The human characters, especially the clowns, are as far removed from reality as Snow White, Prince Charming, and the Evil Queen attempt to reflect it. The backgrounds are simpler and the action is broader—look at the scene where the crowd flees the collapsing big top, streaming out like a liquid rather than a group of individuals. But the style works for Dumbo the way the other films’ styles work for them.
For if the story is simple—and it is; rewatching it this time, I was surprised to realize how quickly we move from Dumbo being made a clown, to the revelation of his capacity for flight, to the finale—it’s also a powerfully resonant story of bullying, of the trials of being different and being vulnerable, and of how bullies cannot bear a taste of their own medicine; just look at how the other elephants react when Mrs. Jumbo stands up for her son, or how the humans react when she defends him from their abuse. Who isn’t upset by the cruelty inflicted upon the poor little calf, or the agony his mother feels when they’re forcibly separated? Who isn’t itching to see Dumbo get back at his tormentors by literally rising above them?
But the highlight of the film for me isn’t Dumbo’s triumph, the achingly tender “Baby Mine” sequence, or the hilariously ridiculous “Save My Baby” routine. It’s “Pink Elephants on Parade,” one of the single best scenes in the entire Disney canon. It wholly justifies the film’s Oscar for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, should’ve won Best Song (it wasn’t even nominated, though “Baby Mine” was), and marries the pure experimentation of Fantasia’s most surreal sequences with wholly original (and wholly delightful) music. Words will not do the images justice; you have to see it for yourself. I will only share the wonderful song itself, either to whet your appetite, or to remind you of the sheer genius of the sequence.
Even Tim Burton knew better than to compete with that.
Score: 88
*Floyd Norman, an African-American animator who worked for Disney, offers a defense of the crows in this article.
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