Picture of the Week #2

It’s been  a bit of a monster-fest around here lately. I promise to write something about Bela Tarr, and a piece on Shinoda’s Double Suicide will follow shortly. In the meantime, let’s all enjoy the spectacle of Boris Karloff hanging out with a family (does anybody know who they are?) on the set of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein. I love these backstage portraits, especially when they show such an iconic figure with his guard down. So complete is Karloff’s physical performance, and so distinctive the make-up that completes the character, that it is strange to see him acting loose and cool. These shots (there’s another one I’ve seen of him taking a cup of tea and cigarette break with Colin Clive) demonstrate the totality of his onscreen presence – all it takes is a bit of slouching or an incongruous prop and all of a sudden he’s just some guy again, albeit one with some apparent cranium issues.

[Picture sourced from Dr Macro's incomparable gallery of high quality movie scans.]

Tarzan and the Amazons

By the time you get to the 9th in the series of Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, the ideas, in contrast to the leading man’s waistband, are beginning to thin. The isolated escarpment that is home to Tarzan, Jane, Boy and Cheeta doesn’t seem all that isolated – there’s always a plane or a boat arriving, bringing new visitors from civilisation to act as fodder for Tarzan’s prejudice against the outside world (at no point does he acknowledge or reflect upon his own arrival as a baby from a distant land). In this installment, it turns out there’s a nearby race of female warriors, sworn to destroy any man who enters their kingdom. Nobody noticed this massive city of Amazons before, except for Tarzan, who kept it secret from his family.

The plotlines are nothing special, though the arrival of Nazis in Tarzan Triumphs was relatively diverting, with Tarzan revealed as the “perfect isolationist” until he decides to intervene and kick some fascists right in the swastikas. (Incidentally, there are plenty of these rallying cries towards interventionism in Hollywood’s wartime output (Casablanca, anyone?), and I’m wondering how many films plead for the reverse: were there any films made urging Americans not to support the nation’s joining WWII?) To watch the Tarzan films is to observe a gradual depletion of a star’s grace over time: supposedly playing an ageless paragon of physical perfection, Weissmuller is prey to the aging processes that don’t afflict fictional beings, but he is always an engaging and amiable presence. I’ve enjoyed spending time with these characters, but what has regularly impressed me has been the process photography, including some superb composite shots and matte paintings.

I’m not sure who did the special effects on this film, but earlier Tarzan films boasted a credit for Warren Newcombe, a prolific director of photographic effects who also oversaw the amazing matte paintings on The Wizard of Oz. A lot of the time, the Tarzans are plainly shot somewhere out in California, but every now and then there’s a sequence of composites that remind you this is a fantasy world of hyperbolic mountain ranges and deep chasms. The escarpment on which Tarzan has established his family reveals itself to be far more capacious, far less isolated with every movie.

Picture of the Week #1

Because it’s Friday, here’s a new quick n’ easy regular feature, showing off an interesting image that has crossed my path in the last seven days. Tuesy really enjoyed the new adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which she watched in preparation for a visit to Matthew Bourne’s production in Cardiff tonight, though I’m not there to join her for either show, alas. We were both reminded of Ivan Albright’s painting of Dorian Gray that was used in the 1945 film adaptation. We saw it at the Chicago Institute of Art last year, and it’s really a standout, not least for its garish grotesquerie. It certainly looks pretty striking even here on my little blog.

It was interesting to see in a gallery a painting that had been designed to have a particular impact onscreen; the black and white movie switches to three-strip Technicolor just for two shots of the painting, first in its original form, then in Albright’s aged and corrupted version. The painting is round a corner in one of the galleries, so you can’t see it from other rooms – it’s a real jolt to the eyes when it appears in front of you. Above is the photo I took of it in Chicago, hopefully preserving most of the colour. The blistering effect reminds me of the way film decays.

Albright’s twin brother was originally asked to paint the earlier picture of Dorian, but in the end Henrique Medina came up with this:

John Coulthart has more about these paintings, including a picture of the Albright twins preparing their portrait from a dummy of the decayed Dorian at his blog. Well worth a look.