Noir Diary # 9: Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

Before he went on to establish himself as one of the directors most closely associated with the ‘noir’ aesthetic via ‘The Killers’ (1946), ‘Criss-Cross’ (1948) and ‘Cry of the City’ (1949), German émigré Robert Siodmak’s first dip in dark waters of the retrospectively defined genre slipped out fairly quietly from Universal’s cash-strapped war-time production line in January 1944, lost in the shuffle to some extent, even as it managed to beat such first wave Film Noir landmarks as Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Preminger’s ‘Laura’ and Dmytryk’s ‘Murder, My Sweet’ to the screen by a few months.

Though ‘Phantom Lady’ stands as quintessential Film Noir in terms of its maniacal, pulpy tone, pungent urban atmospherics and brooding cinematography, it is nonetheless easy to see why it has been somewhat overlooked by critics and academics in comparison to those aforementioned, textbook-ready trendsetters. Despite the fact that its story originally emerged from the none-more-noir typewriter of Cornell Woolrich, this one is an odd duck in the line-up, to say the least.

With no femme fatale figure, no doomed ruminations on masculine guilt and no spectre of implacable fate hanging darkly over its characters, those who insist on defining the genre purely in terms of its story elements and underlying thematics will likely have a hard time explaining why ‘Phantom Lady’ even is noir, even as the film’s overall ‘feel’ screams it to the rafters.

In terms of its script in fact, this is really more of an audience-friendly mystery/suspense joint, despite traces of the characteristic pessimism underlying Woolrich’s plotting. In trying to account for this, we’re perhaps best to zero straight in on the contribution of associate producer Joan Harrison, a key collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock throughout the 1930s who followed him to Hollywood, overseeing the scripts for his early American films and gaining a coveted co-writing credit on several of them.

At this point in her career, Harrison had managed to negotiate her own contract as a producer for Universal, and ‘Phantom Lady’ became her first project in this capacity. Most sources seem to agree that it was Harrison was primarily responsible for adapting Woolrich’s book for the screen (despite the on-screen credit going to Bernard C. Schoenfeld), and if we view the film with the Hitchcock connection in mind, then, BINGO, everything falls into place.

Basically, ‘Phantom Lady’ splits protagonist duties between a sympathetic ‘wrong man’ (New York architect Scott Henderson, played by Alan Curtis) racing to prove himself innocent of his wife’s murder, and his loyal ‘girl Friday’ secretary (Carol ‘Kansas’ Richman, played by the striking Ella Raines), who continues sleuthing around trying to clear her boss’s name after he’s been sent down by the judge, going to increasingly extreme lengths to try to locate the titular “phantom lady” in whose company Henderson insists he spent the evening of the murder. Chief clue, or dare we say, ‘macguffin’: the ostentatious, one-of-a-kind hat the lady in question was wearing at the time.

In a quote-unquote ‘true’ noir, this set-up would soon have veered toward the dark side of the street. If not murder, Henderson would sure as hell be guilty of something – a ruined shell of man, tormented by the shadow of his implied infidelities and marital cruelty, likely as not – whilst Richman, for her part, would almost certainly have been coded as having an affair with her boss before Mrs Henderson kicked the bucket, casting heavy shade on the purity of her own motives.

None of this is explored here however, as Raines’ character keeps her infatuation with blame-free nice guy Mr Henderson primly under wraps until it can be safely revealed in the final reel, and Harrison’s script instead keeps things determinedly light and linear, prioritising logical plot progression, casual wit and forward momentum over introspection or moral ambiguity.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of story one could imagine her prepping for Hitch – a breezy, engrossing yarn in which a pair of relatable, good-natured characters race against time to solve an inscrutable, clue-laden mystery, leavened with just a touch of macabre ghoulishness (the film’s initially unseen antagonist is a rampant necktie strangler, predating ‘Frenzy’ by three decades).

Siodmak may well have had his own ideas on how best to approach this material, but for the most part, he serves his producer’s vision well here. As with many of the director’s later films, ‘Phantom Lady’ sets out its stall as an exercise in stylish, efficient movie-making, offering up a few dutch angles, deep focus shots and smooth, gliding camera moves to keep us on our toes, before unexpectedly transitioning into stretches of breathless, almost overpowering, gothic / expressionistic pulp beauty, realised with a mastery guaranteed to knock even the most jaded of cineastes off their straight-backed chairs.

The first of ‘Phantom Lady’s two real stand-out ‘bits’ is a narratively inconsequential sequence which see Raines’ character tailing a desultory bartender (a great turn from veteran character actor Andrew Tombes) as he travels home across the city after shutting up shop at 4am on the dot. A classic, leisurely paced pursuit sequence of the kind we’d go on to see time after time in later crime movies, these few short scenes become a tour de force for both DP Woody Bredell and the film’s production team, showcasing a shadow-haunted back-lot recreation of nocturnal New York whose atmospheric depth and level of detail is pretty jaw-dropping.

Like just about all Hollywood movies of this vintage, ‘Phantom Lady’s street scenes were entirely confined to a sound stage, judiciously enhanced by some theatrical backdrops and stunning matte effects, but when Raines creeps her way up the creaky stairs to an El-Train station in pursuit of Tombes, and as they stand huddled on opposite ends of the freezing platform, eyeballing each other suspiciously until the train shudders into view, it’s almost impossible to believe we’re not traversing the same location used so memorably by Friedkin in ‘The French Connection’ nearly three decades later.

And, when they step off the train a few short minutes later, the mainline hit of raw, set-bound visual poetry Siodmak gives us is just immense; the steam rising from the sidewalk, the bums playing dice on the corner, the hypnotic, ever-present flash of neon, all culminating in an economically staged, off-screen hit-and-run, rendered with just a screech of tyres on the soundtrack, and someone flinging Tombes’ hat back into frame! If this ain’t Film Noir, I don’t know what is.

Actually, the presentation – or lack thereof – of violence and death in ‘Phantom Lady’ is interestingly handled throughout. Although it essentially concerns the exploits of a serial killer, and includes a body count to rival that of any ‘40s thriller, the film maintains an almost obsequious adherence to the Production Code, pushing absolutely everything off-screen. Each time though, Siodmak (I’m assuming) manages to include some kind of gut-wrenching detail to help make these invisible events real and upsetting for the viewer; witness for instance the grief-stricken Curtis berating the off-screen ambulance crew for apparently dragging his wife’s hair across the floor(!) as they remove her corpse from his apartment; brutal.

The real highlight of the movie however is ten or so minutes we get to spend in the company of everyone’s favourite natural born loser, the one and only Elisha Cook Jr, who enjoys one of his best ever roles here, playing the keen-eyed drummer in the band at the theatrical revue Curtis and his “phantom lady” attended during their ill-fated night out together.

Functioning almost as a kind of stand-alone short film, and featuring a wilder, more exuberant visual style than much of the material that surrounds it, Cook’s sub-plot finds him absolutely not believing his luck when Raines, sexily dolled up in black as a ‘bandrat’, or whatever the appropriate ‘40s synonym for ‘groupie’ is, comes on to him as he clocks out from his theatre gig, as part of an unlikely ruse to try to pump him for information.

Playing a brasher, more confident character than he was usually allowed to, Cook initially seems to be flying about fifty feet high in some bout of pre-coital amphetamine fury here (“stick with me snooks, I’ll buy you a whole carload of hats,” he tells Raines at one point), and it’s an amazing thing to witness. As he leads her through the shadowed back streets to a darkened doorway, through which muffled music can be heard, we’re expecting of course to be ushered into some dingy nightclub or basement bar, but no - when the door swings open, to our surprise, the musicians are way up close, as is the back wall.

Yes, it’s an after-hours rehearsal room jam session, half a dozen amped up hep-cats wailing away, sound bouncing off the brick, with just a low table covered in half empty liquor bottles providing a focus in the centre, and it is likewise magnificent. Chaotically framed by Siodmak and beautifully shot by Bredell, it is one of the rawest and most intoxicating musical sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie of this vintage, all the more so once the performance reaches what I’ve read several reviewers straight-facedly describe as Cook’s “erotic drum solo” – but really, what else could you possibly call it?

With his eyes bulging from their sockets, his gap-toothed grin looking as if it’s about to consume the rest of his face, Cook frenziedly beats his pagan skins whilst leering at Raines like some Big Daddy Roth cartoon come to life – an astonishing outburst of full tilt craziness from an actor most of us will remember for so expertly portraying the walking embodiment of the word “pathetic” across five decades of American film.

It’s all the more remarkable in fact given that Cook is able to segue straight back into his more familiar ‘fall guy’ persona when, after Raines inevitably gives him the slip, he returns to his apartment to find the Mad Strangler (top-billed Franchot Tone, making his first appearance in the film) waiting in for him in the darkness, his sinister, serial killer monologue all prepared.

“Oh, how interesting a pair of hands can be,” Tone reflects, staring at his appropriately massive mitts as Cook cowers before him, that unique combination of pride and outright terror dancing across his face. “They can trick melody out of a piano keyboard, they can mold beauty out of a piece of common clay, they can bring life back to a dying child. Yes, a pair of hands can do inconceivable good. Yet the same pair of hands can do terrible evil. They can destroy, whip, torture, even kill. I wish I didn't have to use my hands to hurt another human being…”.

So long, Elisha, it’s been nice knowing you.



Such is the ability of this film’s Woolrich-derived plotting to continually knock us off balance, twisting the story’s seemingly relentless linear through-line to pull the rug from under us, evoking a sense of ‘mystery’ that puts me in mind, not so much of Hitchcock, but of the weirder end of French crime fiction with which his influence cross-pollinated via the auspices of ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Les Diaboliques’ originators Boileau-Narcejac.

We can see this early on, immediately following Curtis’s evening out with the “phantom lady”. All we know of his character as this point is that he’s a seemingly carefree man-about-town who picked up a woman in a bar and took her to the theatre, but when he returns home to his cozy apartment, he, and we, are suddenly confronted with a coterie of almost surreally grotesque police detectives holding court in his living room, primed to give him a hard time. For a few moments, we’re completely disorientated, before being left to digest the news that a) this guy is married, and b) his wife is dead, all in a matter of seconds.

Subsequently, Woolrich’s touch can also perhaps be discerned in the way the film stretches the real world feasibility of its tale gossamer thin, to the point where we find ourselves almost prepared to believe there must be a supernatural explanation for the seemingly impossible (at the very least, Kafka-esque) series of events our unfortunate protagonist finds himself faced with.

Could this “phantom lady” have been an actual phantom, we’re momentarily inclined to wonder, as the police do the rounds of potential witnesses with a bedraggled Curtis in tow, only to hear a bartender and cab driver both confirm unequivocally that he was alone during his big night out. (The subsequent revelation that these witnesses have merely been bribed by the seemingly omniscient villain of the piece meanwhile snaps us back to reality with a sadistic glee that ‘Fantomas’ authors Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre would surely have appreciated.)

Some may find the more elaborate contrivances of ‘Phantom Lady’s script bit clunky, but approach it in the right frame of mind and Siodmak’s careful pacing and command of dramatic atmospherics will help ensure that the unlikely twists and revelations of the film’s second half hit home in an appropriately macabre, pulpy fashion.

Sadly however, the movie significantly loosens its grip on our collective throats during the final reel, wherein an emotionally weightless, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it conclusion to the drama is followed up by a pat happy ending which feels contrived and smug in the extreme, making us feel foolish for having been so engrossed in the action of the preceding 70 minutes.

If this sappy ending feels tagged on, well, that’s because it was. As with so many ‘40s studio productions, studio-mandated re-shoots were apparently inserted at the last minute before release – a decision which is reported to have enraged Joan Harrison to the extent that she resigned from her newly minted position at Universal on the spot, refusing to return to work for the studio for a number of years.

In truth, I don’t think there is any reason to believe that the film’s original ending would have been significantly darker or more ambiguous than the one we’ve been left with, but at the same time, I have little doubt that the footage signed off by Siodmak and Henderson would have at least sold us on the Hitchcock-ian happy ending a lot more successfully than the the studio’s bland and blundering amendments.

(As it is, you can almost pinpoint the moment when the original footage gives way to the reshoots – when Thomas Gomez’s detective character inexplicably barges through the door of the killer’s apartment to rescue Raines from his clutches would be my guess.)

For the most part however, ‘Phantom Lady’ is fantastically rewarding viewing – a resolutely hard-boiled, richly evocative and deeply eccentric production that does a pretty fair job of embodying everything I love about lower budget ‘40s Hollywood noir, whilst at the same time providing tons of uproarious, earthy fun.

True, there’s not a lot of psychological depth to explore here, and the tight-knit mystery plotting allows for precious little blurring of the tale’s rather arbitrary moral black & whites, but even if this rubs you up the wrong way, the nocturnal New York and Elisha Cook Jr sequences raise the movie to a whole other level – flat-out incredible films-within-films that cement ‘Phantom Lady’s status as essential viewing for all noir aficionados.

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Bloody NEL: The Omega Point by George Zebrowski (1974)

On first glance, the back cover blurb for this one suggests a kind of post-apocalyptic variation on Edgar Rice Burroughs style science fantasy, but venturing inside, it soon becomes clear that George Zebrowski had his sights set a little higher than that.

Chapters pointedly begin with quotes from Freud, Gorky and Shakespeare, and the protagonist spends the entirety of the second chapter enjoying a “percussion cantata”, beamed live to countless millions of spectators across the galaxy:

“There were a hundred performers seated at the various instruments on the raised platform. Each sat at an electronic console which was covered with oversize push buttons and giant levers. The only really novel presence on the stage was the massive percussion batteries – traditional instruments, with some of the designs dating back two and three thousand years to old Earth and the first solar confederation. There were drums of all shapes and sizes; two of the drums were taller than the male performers who stood ready to operate two mounted hammers hanging above each drum. Elsewhere on the stage stood celesta, xylophones, six grand pianos, giant triangles, massive bells, clickers, and iron anvils, and two gargantuan wooden blocks which would be struck by giant wooden mallets swinging freely on chains. All the instruments were wired for sound in the modern manner.”

(Something makes me think Zebrowski might dig The Boredoms..)

Anyway, the iffy grammar in the above paragraph may have tipped you off to the fact that sadly‘The Omega Point’ rarely seems able to live up to it’s author’s grand ideals, but, this seems to be have been his first novel, so perhaps we can cut him some slack?

Born in Austria in 1945, George Zebrowski has continued to write SF well into the 21st century, with the last published work listed on his Wikipedia page appearing in 2009, so, uh, good for him. I’m glad he persevered.

‘The Omega Point’ was originally published in the U.S. by Ace Books in 1972, by the way.

Searching elsewhere online, it seems generally agreed that the - excellent - cover art for this NEL edition is another Ray Feibush joint.

Valkoinen Peura / ‘The White Reindeer’ (Erik Blomberg, 1952)

Although the roots of Finland’s film industry date back to the silent era, relatively few features made in the Finnish language have travelled beyond the country’s borders over the years, and its perceived contribution to commercial/genre filmmaking remains negligible. As such, it’s safe to say that ‘Valkoinen Peura’ (‘The White Reindeer’), a full strength supernatural horror film that concentrates entirely upon the oldest and most isolated aspects of the nation’s culture, must have been quite a novelty for international viewers back in 1952. (All the more so, given that it appeared right in the middle of the horror genre’s “dead zone” that stretched roughly from the tail end of the Universal/RKO horror cycles in the mid ‘40s to ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ in 1957.)

With this in mind, you can appreciate that we’re looking today at a pretty unique motion picture, and indeed, perhaps it was this very sense of geographical novelty that led to the inclusion of a great deal of what seems almost like straight documentary footage in ‘The White Reindeer’, as director Erik Blomberg sets out to document (or at least, purports to document) the almost entirely reindeer-based culture of the Sámi people in the mountainous region of the country’s far North (more colloquially known as Lapland).

Due to the sheer unfamiliarity of the setting, modern viewers will likely be uncertain whether or not the film is meant to be taken as a period piece. The elaborate folk costumes and complete lack of references to modernity certainly suggest as much, but then, can we really say with any great authority that folk in rural Lapland didn't live like this at around the mid-point of the 20th century?

Certainly, many of the film’s early scenes carry a strong feeling of realism, and much of the footage – including rousing scenes of reindeer-racing on purpose-built snow slaloms and people travelling from place to place via the use of small, intricately carved ‘snowboats’ – is absolutely fascinating, culminating in one extraordinary moment in which we see a young woman on skis casually grasping a wild reindeer by the antlers and wrestling it to the ground.

Even if their garb and behavior may be to some extent contrived by the filmmakers, incidents like this are difficult to fake, and it is certainly easy to believe that the people on-screen did more or less live the life assigned to them in the film, just as it is no surprise to discover that director/cinematographer Blomberg actually spent the majority of his career working on documentaries for Scandinavian TV.

Alongside this documentary-style approach though, Blomberg also draws deep from the well of classic Hollywood romanticism, as witnessed by the stunning, high contrast b&w photography used to frame the snow-covered landscapes, alongside frequent close ups of leading lady Mirjami Kuosmanen that see her lit like Lauren Bacalle, and an exploration of community vs. wilderness themes and scenes of domestic bonhomie that could have pulled straight from a John Ford western.

To complete this triangle of potential influences, it is worth noting that ‘The White Reindeer’ has a strong “silent movie” feel to it too, perhaps necessitated by the technical limitations of a film industry still in the early stages of its development. Action is notably under-cranked for most of the running time, bringing a welcome feel of frantic momentum to sections of the story that might otherwise have drifted off into beautifully-shot dullness, and all of the film’s sound is obviously post-synced - sometimes quite awkwardly - with on-screen dialogue wisely kept to a minimum as a result.

Whether by accident or design, the combination of pre-sound methodology and bold, expressionistic visuals can’t help but suggest the influence of Murnau, Dreyer et al upon proceedings (one shot in particular is a blatant nod to ‘Nosferatu’), and it is this element that very much comes to the fore when, it’s social context sufficiently established, ‘The White Reindeer’ kicks things up a gear and heads for significantly darker and more fantastical realms.

As the cheery Disney documentary tones that soundtracked the domestic and communal scenes (cue the piccolos, etc) are once again swallowed by the more chilling folk refrains that accompanied the film’s blurry and baleful opening, the horror aspect begins to make its presence felt, as Pirita, our newly married protagonist, pays a visit to a snow-covered cabin straight out of a fairytale, where she consults with an intensely creepy, sing-song-voiced shaman.

As the flames of an open fire flicker in the wind, he begins to brew her a potion, including such choice ingredients as “a little bit of death mold” and “the testicles of ten reindeers”. Banging a drum-skin marked up with various primitive symbols as a counter carved from a reindeer vertebrae dances across the surface by way of divination, the shaman speaks enigmatically of the necessity of Pirita performing a sacrifice at “the altar of the first living thing”. (1)

He soon changes his tune however once Pirita, her inner witch apparently invoked by these sinister goings on, suddenly takes on a dramatic, Barbara Steele-like aspect, staring with bulging, blank eyes as she utilizes previously unguessed at supernatural powers to move the counter across the drum-skin. “Witch!” shrieks the shaman, cowering in terror, and thus their encounter ends with tormented flames and a super-imposed blizzard.

Mirjami Kuosmanen – who also co-wrote the film’s script – is, it must be said, an astonishingly beautiful woman, and the performance she give here is equally remarkable, turning on a dime from newlywed innocence to snarling, cackling evil. As mentioned, European horror fans will instantly be reminded of Barbara Steele in ‘Black Sunday’, but, coming almost a full decade before that particular redefinition of gothic feminine evil-ness, I suppose we might distantly suppose that the filmmakers are going all the way back to the likes of Theda Bara or Irma Vep for their model.

Oh, and as it turns out, that “altar of the first living thing” is actually be real place within this movie – a terrifying reindeer graveyard surrounding a skull-topped 2001-esque obelisk towering above an isolated hilltop. The macabre garden of antlers rising from the snow around the monument implies that many other sacrifices have already been made here, and not too long ago either, cementing ‘The White Reindeer’s portrait of an entirely pagan world, existing wholly beyond the reach of Christianity.(2)

It is here that Pirita raises her pocket-knife and spills the blood of her pet deer, consummating her possession by what I suppose we might read as some kind of malign nature spirit, and finalizing her transformation into a card-carrying were-creature, as, a few solarized, proto-psychedelic shots later, she gallops off through the show in the form of a proud, pure white reindeer.

Hereafter, Pirita’s supernatural affliction follows a pattern that seems to merge elements of werewolf, witch and vampire, as she undergoes involuntary transformations into the white reindeer, during which she is driven to tempt the area’s hunters and herders with her striking coloration, luring them toward a deep ravine referred to in the English subs as “the valley of demons”, wherein they meet their doom as she approaches them in the form of a cackling, spectral witch, fangs at the ready.

An acknowledgement of Christianity does briefly intrude upon proceedings in the film’s final twenty minutes, during a wedding scene in a small Lutheran chapel, where, brilliantly, close ups of Pirita standing alienated amid the crowd are accompanied by composer Einar Englund’s sinister folk laments, which crash in over the top of the timid sound of the community's hesitant hymn-singing, reflecting the turmoil (or else mere other-ness) of the witch’s internal world, and perhaps, at a push, the conflicted identity of the Sámi culture as a whole.

Shortly after this, as the white reindeer’s unprovoked attacks upon the region’s menfolk continue and unease amongst the local people grows, we see Pirita’s husband enthusiastically forging an iron spear with which to join his comrades in hunting the supernatural foe. Behind him, his beloved wife looks on with scarcely concealed terror, and it is clear that there is only one way this story can end.

The question that will be burdening viewers of a more logical persuasion through much of this is of course, WHY has this previously happy young woman become subject to this sorry fate, and how and why has she found herself embarking upon all these evil deeds?

None of this is ever very clearly explained to be honest. The film’s rather oblique opening sequence appears to show Pirita’s mother being bothered by some wild wolves as she goes into labour with her daughter during a hike through the snow, but what that’s supposed to imply is largely left to our imagination. Is Pirita doomed to her fate merely due to the circumstances of her ill-stared birth? If so, that’s a bit of a grim message for us to take away, although it does at least convey a notion of brutal medievalism that fits the film’s antiquated feel quite nicely, I suppose.

Actually, another way in which ‘The White Reindeer’ prefigures the European horror films of subsequent decades comes via the fact that, like so many of the genre’s landmark classics, it makes no damn sense whatsoever once you stop to think about it for five minutes. Why does Pirita go to the shaman in first place, and what did she intend to achieve through the sacrifice she performed? Why, after transforming into a reindeer, does she gain fangs of all things? And come to that, who ever heard of a werewolf-like creature feasting on human blood via transformation into an animal that is actually entirely herbivorous?

All of these questions remain unresolved, but of course anyone who lets such petty concerns affect their enjoyment of such an eminently irrational form of entertainment as this is a fool from the outset. I draw your attention to these structural lapses out merely for the sake of completeness, because they are fairly unavoidable in this particular instance, but nonetheless, I refer you back to the argument I usually feel like yelling at fellow viewers who insist on interrogating the events of loopy supernatural horror films as if they were wrestling with an Agatha Christie mystery: Of course it doesn’t make sense! We’re dealing with MAGIC here, and magic by its very nature is beyond the ken of human logic and understanding. That’s why it’s magic, you idiot. Now collect your ticket from the director at the door, shut up, and go where s/he wants to take you. Jeez, and you wonder why I prefer to watch these films on my own.

As an old man remarks at one point during ‘The White Reindeer’, “a lot happens here that you can’t understand elsewhere”, and, whilst the basic outline of the doomed were-woman story  has been recounted numerous times throughout world cinema, from Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ to Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Woman From The Sea, by the time you’ve finished watching ‘The White Reindeer’, you will know exactly what he means.

At the risk of crude national stereotyping, I’ve always thought that Lapland and far Northern Europe in general is one of those places uniquely suited to horror films, and have been surprised that more such works haven’t plundered the area and it’s ample folklore for inspiration. A sparsely populated, icy wilderness with its own strong, inward-looking culture, whose embrace of Christianity has always seemed rather like a frail blanket draped over a set of rather different, rather stranger beliefs, complete with bleak, phantasmagorical landscapes, long shadows and the uniquely eerie power of the midnight sun, as so brilliantly captured here by Blomberg’s remarkable photography - it seems a no-brainer, really.

All of these elements are utilised to powerful (if arguably somewhat exploitative) effect by ‘The White Reindeer’, making it perhaps the definitive example of what we might glibly call ‘Lapland gothic’. The film’s modest 64 minutes comprise both an extraordinary and unique addition to Europe’s legacy of fantastique cinema, and an indelible hymn to the area in which it was shot, combining an invaluable record of the landscape and culture with a mammoth dose of the kind of unhinged pagan atavism and visual surrealism that only the darkest corners of popular culture seem able to provide. A perfect movie to seek out as the temperature drops and the evenings close in this winter, it is a viewing experience like no other.

(1) According to my usual in-depth research (ahem), the Sámi people practiced a form of indigenous shamanic polytheism that formed their main belief system right up until the 18th century, when they were eventually brought into the Christian mainstream. Quoth Wikipedia: “The old beliefs are closely connected to the land, animism, and the supernatural. Sami spirituality is often characterized by pantheism, a strong emphasis on the importance of personal spirituality and its interconnectivity with one's own daily life, and a deep connection between the natural and spiritual "worlds". Among other roles, the Sami Shaman, or noaidi, enabled ritual communication with the supernatural through the use of tools such as drums, chants, and sacred objects. Some practices within the Old Sami religion included natural sacred sites such as mountains, springs, land formations, as well as man-made ones such as petroglyphs and labyrinths.” All of this, I think, can be very clearly seen in the practices portrayed in ‘The White Reindeer’, even if their malign character has presumably been greatly exaggerated to help shoehorn things into a horror narrative.

(2)Wikipedia further notes that: “In the landscape throughout Northern Scandinavia, one can find sieidis, places that have unusual land forms different from the surrounding countryside. Sami shamanism considers these spiritual 'focal points' and worships them as gateways to the spirit world. At these sieidis, sacrifices were made, of animals and objects, […] The Storjunkare are described sometimes as stones, having some likeness to a man or an animal, that were set up on a mountain top, or in a cave, or near rivers and lakes. […] The Storjunkare had power over all animals, fish, and birds, and gave luck to those that hunted or fished for them. Reindeer were offered up to them, and every clan and family had its own hill of sacrifice.”

This Month’s Zatoichi: Zatoichi & The Chest of Gold (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964)

The first of four Zatoichi films released in 1964, ‘Zatoichi & The Chest of Gold’ opens with an emblematic combat sequence staged against a black studio background, with our hero dispatching a small army of anonymous opponents in a manner reminiscent of ‘technique demonstration’ openings that later became a staple of Chang Cheh’s ‘70s kung fu epics. As it turns out, this striking introduction foreshadows the bold, pop-art-inflected style that characterizes much of director Kazuo Ikehiro’s first Zatoichi assignment, doing a great deal to liven up what might otherwise have been a fairly routine addition to the series.(1)

Once again, we meet Ichi here as he trudges toward some remote locale to pay his respects at the grave of a man he inadvertently killed a year earlier. Before he gets there though, he is reluctantly drawn into a wonderfully joyous rural festival. Initially steeling himself to silently pass by, our hero finds his feet involuntarily tapping to the beat, and before we know it, he’s caught by the boogie, enjoying the hospitality of this community of impoverished hill country farmers, and even taking his turn beating the festival drums, adding yet another skill to his impressive repertoire of hidden talents as he grins serenely at the sounds of celebration around him, temporarily at peace with the world.

Once Ichi eventually reaches the grave that ostensibly brought him to this area, we are for the first time able to actually place a Zatoichi adventure within a historical timeframe, as he reads aloud the inscription on his victim’s headstone. Add a year to the no doubt accurate Westernised date given in the subtitles of this Criterion edition, and we can pin the events of ‘Zatoichi & The Chest of Gold’ down to 1843, whatever good that may do us.

For any Japanese history buffs in the audience, I guess it will prove helpful in determining whether or not the epic battle that we subsequently see recounted in flashback is meant to represent an actual historical conflict. Either way, it’s a startling accomplished sequence, presented entirely in slow motion with all the mud, blood and chaos of a Kurosawa set-piece, as Zatoichi, apparently skirting the edges of the conflict, accidentally cuts down the fleeing soldier he is now mourning.

As is often the case with these films (and ‘60s chambara/yakuza films in general), much of what follows as Ichi becomes involved in the furore surrounding a misappropriated chest containing the farming community’s tax payments may strike Western viewers as rather meandering and overly complex, with more characters and competing interest groups than are really necessary for such a caper, and little to really hook us into the unfolding drama.(2) Such drawbacks (if indeed you see them as such) eventually matter little though in the face of some of the most kinetic and thrilling filmmaking the series has seen thus far – for that is where the meat here really lies.

If preceding films in the series have essayed a gradual shift from character-based drama to more generic, action-movie plotting, then ‘..Chest of Gold’ takes this trend one step further. Whereas in Zatoichi On The Road, the female lead was used as a macguffin to drive things forward, here the scriptwriters do away even with that pretense altogether and have the characters chasing hither and thither after an actual chest of gold, whilst Zatoichi operates in full-on invincible hero mode throughout, his occasional moments of pathos and catharsis arising solely from yet another brilliant performance by Shintaro Katsu, whose highly physical and apparently impulsive acting style by this stage seems to supercede the need for any prompting from the script.

From what little I’ve read about Katsu’s personality, it seems that these kind of earthy, crowd-pleasing action movies were very much to his taste, so who knows, maybe a pure entertainment like ‘..Chest of Gold’ spurred him on toward an even greater level of gusto than usual? Anyway, the star’s exuberance is more than matched by the talent behind the camera, as Ikehiro frequently goes all out with dramatic, gliding camera movements, elliptical cutting, extreme high and low angles and blurry ‘motion’ effects, creating an almost cartoon-ish sense of fast-moving mayhem that nonetheless slows down to allow for some wonderfully lyrical passages of cinematic imagery, as an array of unusually good sets are matched up with real rural locations, allowing DP Kazuo Miyagawa to create some of the most beautiful cinematography yet seen in the series. No small boast, given how exquisite some of the preceding films looked, but no surprise either really, given that Miyagawa had already manned the camera for such storied figures as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirô Ozu.(3)

The fight choreography also takes a real step up in this installment, as Ikehiro and ‘fight scene director’ Shôhei Miyauchi orchestrate skirmishes that are more bloody, convincing and sustained than anything we’ve seen previously, making a deliberate effort to overcome the “Zatoichi spins round, everybody dies” cliché with a more dramatic and fragmented approach that both reflects the prevailing influence of Kurosawa and Kihachi Okamoto and also preempts the emerging aesthetic of the spaghetti western with its use of crash zooms and similar visual ‘full stops’. This comparison is further emphasised by Ichirô Saitô’s music, which, though it can’t compete with Akira Ifukube’s wonderful scores for previous installments, nonetheless comes across as appropriately brash, with mariarchi-like volleys of brass perfectly complementing the breathless pace of the action.

Stand-out scenes come thick and fast through the first two thirds of the film, but perhaps the most impressive is the mid-movie set-piece that sees Ichi going off-road as he retreats from Kunisada’s mountain hideaway (see footnote # 2) with an orphaned child strapped to his back, breaking through the line of lantern-bearing swordsmen who are hunting down the outlaws. This sequence has a real epic feel to it, with the jagged angles of the forest scrubland and the bright, moving lanterns combining with exceptionally good night-for-night photography (or a creditable set-bound approximation thereof) to great effect. One particularly stunning establishing shot shows us a bucolic, moonlit landscape looking toward a line of distant, rolling hills across a lake, empty and silent. Returning to the same shot a few minutes later, we see the glowing orange lanterns of the soldiers stretching out across the far side of the lake in a long line, heading toward our hero and his allies. Incredible stuff.

Zatoichi’s main opponent in ‘..Chest of Gold’ is a scarred, whip-wielding warrior played by Katsu’s real-life brother Tomisaburô Wakayama, who is deliberately made up to ensure that he looks very different from his previous appearance as Ichi’s brother in Tale of Zatoichi Continues. A preliminary encounter between the two in a gambling house proves another of the film’s highlights, with the not inconsiderable macho swagger of the pair and Ikehiro’s bold cutting and framing again serving to raise what could have been a wholly routine Zatoichi scene into something far more memorable, as Wakayama’s character clears the table and challenges Ichi to cut a coin in half in mid-air.

The brothers’ inevitable climactic duel proves a slightly awkward adjunct to the movie proper, appearing as it does after all the major plot threads have all been neatly tied up and the farmers’ tax money returned, but, although fought for no other reason than to satisfy the fighters’ egos and the viewers’ expectations, it is still an enjoyably unconventional take on the usual samurai showdown, with Wakayama charging into view on horseback, initially snaring our hero with a rope and dragging him through the dirt – an image that once again brings us back to the inadvertent spaghetti western comparisons.(4)

Whilst ‘..Chest of Gold’ certainly packs in everything contemporary viewers might have expected of a Zatoichi movie though, it also introduces a few additions to the formula that might have taken fans aback a bit. In particular, we’re treated to a few scenes of surprisingly bawdy humour, one of which sees Ichi inexplicably popping up from beneath the water whilst a lady is taking a bath, whilst a later scene finds him being discretely ‘serviced’ by a rather unattractive prostitute (the joke being that Ichi, as a blind man, is unable to object to her physical appearance, despite repeatedly making jokes about how bad she smells).

As you might well imagine, this is all a lot saucier than anything we’ve seen in series thus far, and it could easily have proved rather puerile too, were it not for Katsu’s natural charm and comic timing, which serves him especial well here, making these awkward encounters somewhat more forgivable than the Benny Hill-esque disgraces they might have become in the hands of a less capable actor.

In fact, women are sidelined pretty much entirely in ‘..Chest of Gold’, with the aforementioned comedy scenes representing Ichi’s only real interactions with the fairer sex, thus making this the first Zatoichi film that doesn’t even try to develop any compelling female characters.

The ballsy female outlaw character portrayed by Reiko Fujiwara in the previous film must have gone over well with audiences, because another variation on that character appears here (she’s the lady Ichi surprises in the bath), but sadly she doesn’t get to do much, and recieves very little screen-time. The same can be said of the entirely unremarkable ‘virtuous sister of the man Ichi slayed’ character, who seems to exist solely to make Ichi feel a bit guilty in the film’s first half, and to dutifully receive the returned gold at the end.

The fact that Ichi, who has previously been so impeccably chivalrous in his romantic conduct, ends up knocking about with a prostitute (albeit inadvertently) says much about the extent to which the emphasis of the series has shifted since the rather dour and high-minded tone of the first few installments, and a brief but unmistakably salacious torture scene further suggests that ‘..Chest of Gold’ drifting closer than ever to the realm of pure exploitation.

I must be starting to sound like a stuck record when it comes to writing the concluding paragraphs to these Zatoichi reviews, but, whilst I ended last month’s post prophesizing that the level of quality maintained by the series couldn’t possibly last, I’m happy to report that the search for a Zatoichi movie that is anything less than wholly satisfying viewing continues apace. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say that ‘..Chest of Gold’ was one of the best ones yet. In terms of storyline, it may be the silliest and least substantial Zatoichi yarn to date, but for pure entertainment and visual spectacle it’s hard to beat – a witty, fast-moving genre flick with great action, bold direction, superb cinematography, surprisingly elaborate production values and a hell of a good showing from Katsu. Top stuff, to coin a phrase.

Ikehiro was back at the helm for ‘Zatoichi’s Flashing Sword’, which hit cinemas a mere four months after this this film’s release, in July 1964. Can one of the distinctive directors on the series to date make it a double KO? Here’s hoping.

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(1) Beginning his directorial career at Daei in 1960, Ikehiro already had ten features to his name before ‘..Chest of Gold’, and he continued to direct prolifically for the studio (including work on two more Zatoichi’s) until its collapse in 1970, after which he went free-lance for a few years before, sadly but inevitably, making the move to TV, where he worked until his apparent retirement in 2003.

(2) A particularly confounding moment for non-Japanese viewers to get their heads around here comes when Ichi visits an exiled bandit leader played by Shogo Shimada. The excessive length of this meeting, the fealty our hero pays to Shimada, and the level of melodramatic emphasis given to a situation that seems largely irrelevant to the film’s central plot – all of these things struck me as pretty inexplicable, until I learned (courtesy of Chris D’s write-up in Gun & Sword) that Shimada’s character is actually Chuji Kunisada, “the famous yakuza Robin Hood”, a well-known folk hero who has appeared in dozens of kabuki plays and movies. Of course, if I'd been paying attention, I would have recalled that Chuji's exploits were recounted in a song performed during the festival sequence at the start of the film, but regrettably, I'm an idiot. Anyway, domestic audiences would no doubt have been well aware of Chuji's legend, and thus prepared to treat the meeting of Kunisada and Zatoichi with appropriate gravitas.

(3) Seriously, check out this guy’s CV. I’ve not done the math, but I bet he appears on the credits of more Criterion-released / Sight & Sound-listed films than anyone else who ever lived.

(4) Though comparisons to spaghetti westerns are inevitable when Western viewers come up against films like this one, we should bear in mind that they are of course totally inappropriate, given that, by my reckoning, ‘Zatoichi & The Chest of Gold’ was in cinemas cinemas before ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ even began shooting. And, given that film’s obvious debt to the Japanese tradition, it should be pretty clear which way the general path of influence was travelling in this period, even if the vast majority of chambara and yakuza films never made it beyond Japan.

Expresso Bongo(Val Guest, 1959)

“Y’know something Dixie? If I didn’t have my bongos to work it out on, I’d flip my lid!”

A modern viewer would be forgiven for not necessarily expecting to find a wealth of thrills n’ spills within a vehicle for none-more-sappy pretty boy Cliff Richard. But with British exploitation legend Val Guest at the controls, I’m guessing a lot of squares got plenty shook up when “Expresso Bongo” hit their daughters’ eyeballs back in ’59.

Before we get to the film proper though, I think it’s the least we can do to briefly salute the terrific credits sequence, wherein the names of cast & crew are cleverly incorporated into restaurants menus, jukeboxes, shop windows and the like. Imagine the effort they must have put into that pinball machine shot in an age before digital manipulation. That’s craftsmanship that is!



Anyway, with Cliff proving just as much of a wet blanket as a movie star as you might expect (he is actually upstaged by his own hair), “Expresso Bongo” is instead largely carried by Lawrence Harvey, fresh from his success in “Room At The Top” the same year. Harvey turns in a human-dynamo performance as unscrupulous hustler/manager Johnny Jackson, a disillusioned jazz drummer trying to make a buck off the music scene any way he can in the cruel environs of pre-Beatles Soho. Johnny is something of a Frankie Machine-like character, and, like Algren’s antihero before him, when Johnny moves, he moves like a street-punk, acting on wild impulses and dishing out hip non-sequitors thick and fast. “Get yourself a car, baby”, he advises a passing hooker, “love on wheels – it’s the only game in town!” At one point he gets in the phrase “beating those pagan skins”, a full five years before Wilfrid Bramble in “A Hard Day’s Night”!


As we follow Johnny through his nightly routine of crazy scams, Guest gives us a surprisingly candid tour of sordid West End nightlife, initiating us into a world of struggling club musicians eyeing up stockings in department store windows on their fag breaks, of down-and-out movie moguls hussling for change (“I was the one who introduced the bubblebath to show-business” yells one), and of teenage girls roaming free, carefully maintaining that post-war balance between innocence and experience, and seemingly with nothing better to do than bicker about how tall Dave Brubeck is (I LOOKED IT UP, HE’S 5’9”, NOW HOW ABOUT A DRINK FOR CHRISSAKE?).


Down-on-the-street as it may be though, “Expresso Bongo” still deviates from the realities of British pop management by making clear that Johnny is avowedly heterosexual. Furthermore, his main squeeze Maisie (Sylvia Syms) is an aspiring singer who pays the couple’s bills by working as stripper, providing Johnny (and Guest’s camera) with a happy excuse to take a butcher’s into one of those basement clubs where the nice boys and girls don’t venture.

And so get this – not only does the opening fifteen minutes of “Expresso Bongo” defy expectations by giving us swear words, wanton caffeine abuse and open references to prostitution… it’s actually got boobs!


And that’s not the half of it!



Jess Franco eat your heart out.

Never mind all that though; we’ve scarcely got time to catch our breath before Maisie drags Johnny along to the Tom Tom Club, where expresso-crazed kids are going wild to the sound of The Shadows!



I think it’s The Shadows anyway – they look like a bit of an uncharacteristically rough lot here, but the twangtastic sounds emanating from my TV speakers leave no doubt that that’s Hank Marvin himself wringing whammy bar gold from his Strat.


Oh YEAH!

The band have a filthy Link Wray-style rumble goin’ on, and in fact this whole scene is freakin’ fantastic, until you-know-who sticks his oar in…


Cliff is a stone drag, but Johnny sees stardust in the highly organized system by which doting girls take charge of his bongos, keeping them constantly within reach of their hero as he roams free around the club, and a fateful 50/50 management deal is inked over breakfast the next morning.


“Nice shooting kid, reminds me of my two weeks in the guards!”

Clearly a big hype and a new stage-name is needed to bum rush Johnny’s new charge into the charts, and in a moment of pure inspiration, Bongo Herbert is born!

Yes, that’s right - Bongo Herbert.


Henceforth, I’m going to make sure I refer to Sir Cliff as ‘Bongo Herbert’ at every possible opportunity.

Anyway, a couple of additional scams pulled on Meier Tzelniker’s almost offensively Jewish Denmark St label boss gets Bongo onto wax, some equally scam-assisted TV appearances provide publicity, and hey presto, the kid’s a hit! (Not that he's outselling "Cha Cha Chinee" or anything, but hey, early days.)



I thought I’d share this shot of Johnny and Maisie’s West End pad, just because the film seems to encourage us to see it as a rat-hole, whereas I think it looks like paradise;



Christ almighty. America gave us Gene Vincent’s black glove, The Killer marrying his cousin, Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’ and Big E himself. Only England could retaliate with Bongo Herbert in a smoking jacket, dedicating “Shrine On The Second Floor” to his mother.


“Bastards!”, exclaims Bongo’s senile father to no one in particular, like some prototype Father Jack. A welcome change of pace.


“Flash those Purleys, Bongo!” Johnny’s retirement fund looks less certain after Herbert is introduced to veteran American singer Dixie Collins (an enjoyably ballsy performance from Yolande Donlan). Dixie takes a shine to Bongo (and his ticket sales), and doesn’t think much of the underage star being taken for a neat 50% by his manager on grounds of highly dubious legality…


So do you think maybe Dixie, Bongo, Johnny and Maisie (who I note is STILL WORKING AS A STRIPPER, despite her boyfriend’s newfound riches) will all learn some tough lessons about the fickle whims of showbiz before this drama is through…? Only time (in this case about twenty minutes that are markedly less interesting than the preceding hour) will tell!

With a screenplay adapted by Wolf Mankovitz from his earlier stageplay, “Expresso Bongo” features a solid backbone of witty, quickfire dialogue, risqué situations and sturdy characterization, the like of which you’d never have expected to find in a cheap-shot pop star vehicle. Add great performances from everyone except Cliff, lively direction and all the additional attractions described above and clearly the result is a veritable rollercoater ride to the edge of oblivion by the excitement-starved standards of British commercial cinema in 1959.

For all the unexpected enjoyment though, there’s also something teeth-grindingly frustrating about “Expresso Bongo” – dark hints of the kind of routine disappointment that Val Guest would make his bread and butter in the dark days of the ‘70s sex comedy boom.


Largely, I think this is because it is a rock n’ roll movie almost completely devoid of rock n’ roll. Sure, the scene with The Shadows is great, but beyond that… Cliff/Bongo’s material is drippy fare indeed, and his on-screen presence carries about as much of a sense of rebellion as the Pope’s Christmas message. In fact, I don’t think anyone even dares invoke the R’n’R beast throughout the movie – characters talk about being “a singer” or working “in showbiz”, and disappointingly that’s exactly what they do. He even seems to lose his bongos after the opening club scene!

This being a 1959 movie in which delinquent teens hang out in coffee bars working out their frustration on those aforementioned pagan skins, you might also reasonably expect to find some choice beatnik action going on in “Expresso Bongo”, but that too is notable by its absence. Johnny may talk pretty hip on occasion, but sadly it’s just part of his constantly rolling patter, and there's nary a goateed hipster or a 'jazz' cigarette in sight.

In fact, the only subculture Val Guest manages to shine a light on here is, I’m guessing, the one he knew best – the seedy world of cutthroat managers, sex workers and low level showbiz hustlers.


Curiously, I found that “Expresso Bongo” also bears a certain comparison to a film whose maker’s intentions were the exact opposite of Guest’s easy-going commercial agenda, Peter Watkins’ Privilege. Both films centre on a carefully stage-managed pop singer who is denied his own voice as his bland good looks are used to channel the agenda of his controllers. And more notably, both films see their stars publicly declaring their religious faith as part of a mutual agreement with the Church of England… not an idea that I think has any real-life equivalent in the world of ‘50s/’60s British pop stars.

It’s also interesting (and faintly chilling) to note that Paul Jones – who in “Privilege” found himself overseeing a fascistic Christian ceremony in a football stadium – actually converted to Born Again Christianity during the ‘80s, following his attendance at an evangelical event in a football stadium… in the company of noted bible-basher Cliff Richard. Bongo Herbert strikes again.