EDGE OF DARKNESS: ‘Dirty Harry’ meets ‘Ghost’

Every now and again my best friend, when the wife gives him time off, manages to drag me along to a current movie for a boys’ afternoon out. This is solely on the basis that he pays (I buy the ice creams) because the last movies I stumbled on that were worth the price of admission… thinking… must have been the re-releases of Gone With the Wind, Vertigo, Casablanca and The Big Sleep. Of modern films, those Johnny Depp ones From Hell, Sleepy Hollow, and the one where he plays James Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, came closest, at least showing some style and a good sense of film craft.

The original Edge of Darkness (Warner Bros, 1943) was a World War II ‘Nazi resistance’ movie set in Norway, directed by admired auteur Lewis Milestone (of All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930). Mood music was by another Hollywood legend, Franz Waxman. It starred the highly attractive pairing Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan, with superlative actors Walter Huston, Dame Judith Anderson and Ruth Gordon making it an ensemble effort. Anything even approaching this quality was obviously too much to hope for.

Mel combines his Dirty Harry self (seen here) with New Age sensitivity.

I don’t know what I was expecting from this cop-revenge movie starring Mel Gibson — maybe an unrelenting, gritty film of the old realistic school, with any luck some noir elements thrown in. Instead, after Mel’s daughter is hideously blown away before our (and his) eyes he spends the rest of the film seeing her, hearing her — and talking back to her. Now, Mel shows about the same level of spiritual sensitivity as Dirty Harry, but to update him for a New Age interpretation that supernatural gimmick that you see on every second tv series these days is introduced. What can I say?

Some redeeming features include English actor Ray Winstone with an indecisive, wavering accent. But this is a plus since the rest of the cast is lumbered with Boston accents — a little too upper crust to be gritty.

At the end, Mel walks off arm-in-arm with his daughter, expecting the audience to swallow this sugar-coated ‘happy’ ending after several outpourings of sickening bloodshed through the film — as they die happily ever after.

Mel meets his daughter's boyfriend, who survives most of the movie.

FAVORITE HITS OF 1967

Lovely Tammi Terrell, soon deceased of a brain tumor, with Marvin Gaye

Pata Pata — Miriam Makeba
Purple Haze — Jimi Hendrix
Heroes & Villains — the Beach Boys
Happy Jack — the Who
Tin Soldier — the Small Faces
Mas Que Nada — Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66
So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star — the Byrds
The Letter — the Box Tops
Mellow Yellow — Donovan
Words — the Monkees
Chain of Fools — Aretha Franklin
Let the Heartaches Begin — Long John Baldry
Rain on the Roof — the Lovin’ Spoonful
Waterloo Sunset — the Kinks
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough — Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
How Can I Be Sure? — the Rascals
The Wind Cries Mary — Jimi Hendrix
Light My Fire — the Doors
Respect — Aretha franklin
I Feel Free — the Cream
Hello Goodbye — the Beatles
Dedicated to the One I Love — the Mamas & the Papas
There is a Mountain — Donovan
Ode to Billie Joe — Bobbie Gentry
Groovin’ — the Rascals
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again — Tom Jones
I Had to Much to Dream Last Night — the Electric Prunes
Natural Woman — Aretha Franklin
Eight Miles High — the Byrds
Wild Honey — the Beach Boys
Hole in My Shoe — Traffic
Strange Brew — the Cream
Strawberry Fields — the Beatles
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You — the Monkees
When I Was Young — the Animals
Pictures of Lily — the Who
Hey Baby — the Buckinghams
The Day I Met Marie — Cliff Richard
I Was Made to Love Her — Stevie Wonder
Itchycoo Park — the Small Faces
Baby Now That I’ve Found You — the Foundations
Sweet Soul Music — Arthur Conley
Jimmy Mack — Martha & the Vandellas
Ruby Tuesday — the Rolling Stones
It Takes Two — Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston
Hey Joe — Jimi Hendrix
I’m a Man — the Spencer Davis Group
Randy Scouse Git (Alternate Title) — the Monkees
I Can See for Miles — the Who
Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings — Tom Jones
Bernadette — the Four Tops
Show Me — Joe Tex
Homburg — Procol Harum
Magical Mystery Tour — the Beatles
She’s My Girl — the Turtles
I Feel Love Coming On — Felice Taylor
Love is All Around — the Troggs
Come to the Sunshine — Harper’s Bizarre
Get Me to the World On Time — the Electric Prunes
I Got Rhythm — the Happenings

Felice Taylor, au naturale

BEFORE THERE WAS HOLLYWOOD

We are approaching, next year, 2010, the hundredth anniversary of movie stars. Motion picture photographic apparatus and film had been devised and developed by at least a dozen different people around the world twenty years before and short film clips that passed as documentaries proliferated from the mid 1890s in France, Britain, even America: trains coming into stations, boxing matches, royal events… It was never imagined at this early stage by one of its ‘inventors’, Thomas Edison, that it could be used for entertainment purposes.

Narrative fiction on film got underway around 1900, by consensus in France first. This was entertainment. But actors, who virtually all came from the stage, were loath to be recognised on screen — for having strayed so far from legitimate acting and sunk to such moral depths: these early entertainments were mainly appreciated worldwide by poor people, who couldn’t afford to go to The Theatre. By 1909 such brave souls as ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson, the boss of leading Chicago studio Essanay, and comedian Ben Turpin who worked there, ‘came out’ and allowed themselves to be named in public.

The first international stars predated the worldwide fame of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin by four years. The first American star named and promoted as such was Florence Lawrence, formerly the Biograph Girl, in April 1910 lured by Universal Studio founder Carl Laemmle for the huge salary of $200 a week. The Vitagraph Girl, protostar at Biograph’s rival studio nearby in New York, had started three years earlier at $18 a week, boosted to $24 a week for including in her duties sewing costumes while off set.

Now the lid was off and new record salaries continued to be set over the next few years. The best-publicized race for loot was between Pickford and Chaplin, each on effectively a million dollars a year by 1916. In the early Twenties, with Chaplin, Pickford and husband Douglas Fairbanks owning and running United Artists, they could name their own price.

Parallel with the conscious, hucksterish invention of stardom in the States, in 1910 superstardom in Europe was also flourishing. In early 1911 a Russian popularity poll listed:

1. Max Linder
2. Asta Nielsen
3. Valdemar Psilander

Linder is the recognised first comedy stylist of film. Having overtaken in popularity his Pathe studio colleague Andre Deed, who created the first internationally popular screen character in 1905, Max had been popular too for a couple of years and was just becoming known in America. He was Chaplin’s prime influence.

Asta Nielsen was a truly international superstar from Denmark, a small nation that became instrumental in the new film industry, especially via the Nordisk company that exported films to America. The Abyss, about sexual betrayal, made her a sensation across Europe by the end of 1910. She influenced fashions across continents (at first outside America) and became a powerful producer in Germany with her director husband Urban Gad. Known for her androgynous sex appeal, Nielsen went on to play Hamlet convincingly on screen. In different ways she was the forerunner of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

Psilander, a fellow Dane, was the first heroic screen idol of Europe. In a few years, having foregone offers in America, the evermore dominant nation in film, he would sink with the fortunes of his nation and commit suicide in 1917. In the meantime, Ivan Mozhukhin (Mosjoukine in France) of Russia rivalled him in screen magnetism and became the most admired actor of silent film.

American popularity surveys in 1912 had brought Vitagraph veteran Maurice Costello (seven years before one of the first screen Sherlock Holmeses) to the fore, challenged by newcomer Francis X. Bushman. Bushman’s leading lady at Essanay studio, Dolores Cassinelli, was officially named the top female box-office star both that year and the following one.

In 1913, according to the first contemporary Photoplay magazine poll, that took eight months to complete, comedienne Mabel Normand

Mabel as 'Mickey'

of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio was America’s most popular female star, until overtaken in the early months of 1914 by Margarita Fischer, Topsy in an early Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Kathlyn Williams, who had begun to star in her own adventure serial and was currently appearing in big western hits The Squaw Man and The Spoilers. When voting ended in April 1914 a surging Mary Pickford, former Griffith girl and the new favorite of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company (soon to become Paramount Pictures) was still some way down the list:

1. J. Warren Kerrigan (Victor)
2. Margarita Fischer (Flying A)
3. Arthur Johnson (Lubin)
4. Kathlyn Williams (Selig)
5. Mabel Normand (Keystone)
6. King Baggot (Universal)
7. Mary Pickford (FP)
8. Mary Fuller (Universal)
9. Francis X. Bushman (Essanay)
10. Beverly Bayne (Essanay)

Note the preponderance of females of high popularity (and accordingly high salaries) in an era supposedly of oppressed women — in contrast to today, when women are lucky to have one entry in the top 10.

Earlier, films such as The Count of Monte Cristo (Selig, 1907) had been shot in the Los Angeles area, and The Squaw Man directed by Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille for the Lasky Company in a barn locally popularized the district as a film colony. It was 1915 that a new generation of studios, including Universal and Fox, Famous Players and Lasky — soon joining to form Paramount — relocated from the East Coast to the district centered on Hollywood.