Why Ten Days’ Wonder? I certainly wouldn’t call it one of Chabrol’s masterpieces. That’s a description I’d reserve for Les Bonnes Femmes, Le Boucher, Á Double Tour, La Rupture, The Cry of the Owl, Story of Women, La Cérémonie, or any one of a half dozen others.

No, the reason I chose Ten Days’ Wonder for the Claude Chabrol Blogathon is because it’s fun. Fun to watch. Fun to write about.

To begin with, it co-stars Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles. How cool is that? Perkins and Welles had already co-appeared in three films, including Is Paris Burning? (René Clément), Catch 22 (Mike Nichols), and – most memorably of all – in Welles’ The Trial (which is a masterpiece). They played well off each other. There was a palpable emotional tension between them, not unlike the tension between Falstaff and Prince Hal in Welles’ Chimes at Midnight.

Ten Days’ Wonder is a film that deliberately reminds the viewer of the past screen performances of its stars: Welles, with his putty nose, as a power-obsessed patriarch like the characters he played in Citizen Kane, Mr. Arkadin, and The Immortal Story; Perkins as a tortured son like the characters he played in Desire Under the Elms, Fear Strikes Out, Psycho, and The Trial. Chabrol wants his audience to see Welles as the archetypal Father, Perkins as the archetypal Son.

Which brings me to another reason why I love this crazy film. I have always been fascinated by the role of myth and archetype in filmmaking. In Ten Days’ Wonder, Chabrol and his co-scenarist Eugene Archer (an American auteurist who had been a mentor to Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich) took a typical Ellery Queen detective novel and intentionally overlaid its story with as much mythic and archetypal resonance as possible.

There are four principal characters. Welles is Theo Van Horn, an Arkadin-like multi-millionaire who has created a world of his own, a country estate where everyone who lives or visits there must dress as though they were living in 1925. Perkins is Charles Van Horn, Theo’s adopted son. Marlene Jobert is Helene, Charles’s beautiful young stepmother, and the wonderful Michel Picolli plays Paul, the Ellery Queen detective figure, a former teacher of Charles, whom Charles asks to help investigate whether Charles has committed certain criminal acts while blacked out. Just as Oedipus investigates himself – but more on this anon.

Both the Old and New Testaments are evoked. The Old Testament’s archetypal son, Adam, is recalled in a shot where the adulterous Charles and Helene lie as naked as Adam and Eve in their own private Eden.

The New Testament’s archetypal Son of Man is evoked in a shot of Charles splayed on an iron fence in a pose that deliberately recalls the Crucifixion. (I can picture a certain type of reviewer clutching her head at the “pretentiousness” of it all.) Welles’ Theo Van Horn stands in for Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament who is father to Adam and Eve. The name Theo is Greek for God, and Theo’s surname Van Horn suggests the horns of another Old Testament patriarch, Michelangelo’s Moses. Which is more than appropriate for this particular film, because Charles happens to be a Michelangelo-like sculptor who sculpts a statue of Theo as Zeus, Greek mythology’s Father God. Zeus was also known as Jove, who was Jehovah’s precursor. In a further reference to Moses, the convoluted plot of Ten Days’ Wonder requires Charles to violate each of the Ten Commandments.

The relationship of Theo, Helene, and Charles also deliberately recalls the Greek myth of King Theseus, who corresponds to Theo, his young wife Phaedra, who corresponds to Helene, and Theseus’s son by another woman, Hippolytus, who corresponds to Charles. Suspecting Phaedra and Hippolytus of adultery, King Theseus called on the god Poseidon to destroy Hippolytus. (Perkins had already played a similar role in a modern version of Phaedra directed 9 years earlier by Jules Dassin.) The fact that Charles is having an affair with his mother – albeit his stepmother – additionally invokes the myth of Oedipus.

The icing on this rich “slice of cake” (as Hitchcock would call it) is Chabrol’s visual style. The faux-1925 setting allows the costume designers and set decorators to have a field day, with the emphasis on Chabrol’s favorite color, ice blue. The opening of the film, in which Charles awakes from a drug-induced blackout, is a tour-de-force of skewed camera angles and superimposed writhing sea creatures, recalling Kane’s rubber octopus and setting us up for the later Poseidon references. A spectacular crane shot at a railway station prompted a reviewer for the Village Voice to suggest that parts of the film had been directed by Welles himself. When I was lucky enough to meet Chabrol – a great guy – I asked him about this, and he responded, “Who do they think I am, Norman Foster?” *

* Norman Foster was the Welles stooge solely credited for the direction of Journey Into Fear.

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the films of Orson Welles (and not just Citizen Kane) should immediately check out American: Exhibits from the C.F. Kane Museum, described at The Auteurs’ Notebook, where it is temporarily posted, as “a six-part video investigation into the work of Orson Welles by B. Kite.”

Kite’s technique – deconstructing and recombining images and sounds from Welles’ films while a narrator comments on them – is reminiscent of what Jean-Luc Godard did in his multi-part Histoire(s) du Cinema. But Kite does it better! His video poem/essay reminds me why I love Welles so much in the first place.

Thanks to D. Cairns for the link.

Sometimes one role is all it takes – if it’s the right role.

Blacklisted Dorothy Comingore didn’t have much of a film career, but she will always be remembered for having played Susan Alexander in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane – or if not always, for at least as long as film is revered as an artistic medium.

Similarly, Maxine Cooper (later Maxine Cooper Gomberg) appeared in only a few movies and a handful of television shows (Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone), but for as long as people remember and talk about film noir, Maxine Cooper will be remembered for having played “Velda,” secretary and helpmate to conscience-less private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in “the Holy Grail of apocalyptic noirs,” Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955, above).

The L.A. Times obituary is here.

The name of the film is Black Magic, it was released in 1949, and it stars Orson Welles in one of his most flamboyant performances as Joseph Balsamo, aka Cagliostro, the hypnotist/charlatan whose schemes in pursuit of wealth and power were a factor in bringing about the French Revolution. I am delighted to report that TCM will be screening this rarity on the morning of July 14th (Bastille Day) at 2:30 a.m. Pacific Time, 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

The film is credited to the Russian-born Gregory Ratoff, but I daresay most of it was directed by Welles himself. It is far more obviously Wellesian than some of the other films, e.g., Journey Into Fear or Jane Eyre, which he directed uncredited in some part – most notably in a Magnificent Ambersons-like tracking shot where Welles and his accomplice, played by Akim Tamiroff, make their way through the French court.

A note on Akim Tamiroff — Black Magic is the first of several films where Welles, relishing the contrast in their physical appearances, employed the short, round character actor as a sidekick or nemesis. The others are Mr. Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Trial (1962). Welles also cast Tamiroff as the ultimate sidekick, Sancho Panza, in his uncompleted Don Quixote.

The screenplay was written by one of England’s most accomplished scenarists, Charles Bennett, writer of Hitchcock’s Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, etc. and Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon. I once saw Bennett at a Los Angeles County Museum tribute where several scenes from his work were shown. He particularly exulted in a clip from Black Magic where Cagliostro, demonstrating his hypnotic powers, compels a subject to “CRAWL … CRAWL …“

The historical events behind Black Magic also provided the basis for 2001’s Affair of the Necklace, a Hilary Swank vehicle in which Christopher Walken played Cagliostro. Unfortunately, Cagliostro has far too little screen time in this version which consequently lacks the bite of Welles’ film.

And speaking of late ‘40s French Revolution noir that you cannot miss, TCM will also be screening Anthony Mann’s masterfully shot The Black Book aka Reign of Terror (1949) just a few hours later. Happy Bastille Day, indeed.

Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira – actress, comedienne, artist, and horror hostess – was one of the most interesting and extraordinary persons I have ever met.

MAILA KNEW EVERYBODY

The first thing she asked me was, “Are you a genius?” adding, “I only associate with geniuses.” Taken aback, I realized that if I wanted to keep talking to her, I had no choice but to answer yes. She then asked me what I did, arts-wise. I told her I took photographs. “Who is your favorite photographer?” she inquired. “Man Ray,” I said. “Oh yes,” she responded, “I modeled for him.”

Her lovers included Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and James Dean. (I’m not 100% sure she slept with Dean, but they were certainly very close.) She was brought to Hollywood in the late ‘40s under contract to Howard Hawks. She did not sleep with Hawks, which is most likely why she does not appear in any of Hawks’s films.

BLACKLISTED

The original Vampira Show premiered on Los Angeles’s KABC in 1954, and it made her an instant celebrity. She got into a dispute with the network over who owned the rights to the Vampira character, which resulted (according to her) in her being blacklisted. Maila’s big media career was essentially over – hardly a year after it began. (She did go on to play small parts in films by Albert Zugsmith, Bert I. Gordon, and – most famously – in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space.)

Knowing she was a friend of Orson Welles’s, I asked Maila whether she believed Welles’s post-Citizen Kane problems were due to the studios, or to his own purportedly “self-destructive” tendencies. She responded without hesitation that it was the studios. Welles, too, was essentially blacklisted – for daring to criticize William Randolph Hearst.

VAMPIRA MEETS CARL JUNG

I once loaned Maila a copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. In particular, I wanted her to read the chapter on the “anima,” Jung’s term for female archetypes – witches, goddesses, vampires, saints, etc. – that are actually fantasy projections of the inner male psyche, i.e., of the male’s unacknowledged feminine aspects. (When a woman does it, the projection is known as an “animus.”) After returning the book Maila declared, “I am an anima.”

I have written about Maila previously here and here.

Perhaps the most famous of all uncompleted film projects is the Orson Welles version of Don Quixote (starring Francisco Reiguera, Akim Tamiroff, and Patty McCormack, above). Like so many of Welles’s projects – from his first short film, The Hearts of Age (1934), to his final films, The Immortal Story, Chimes at Midnight, The Other Side of the Wind, and the unrealized King Lear – Welles’s Quixote project reflected the director’s obsession with aging and solipsistic delusion. But Welles was neither the first nor last auteur with a yen to film Cervantes’ masterpiece. Terry Gilliam also started – and notoriously failed to complete – a film version of Don Q. Even Howard Hawks wanted to do a version of the story – starring Cary Grant!

I might be in the minority on this, but I think casting an aging Cary Grant as Don Quixote was an excellent idea. I once saw an episode of the ‘60s television series I Spy (“Mainly on the Plains”) in which Boris Karloff – of all people – played the aging Don. And he did a damned fine job of it, too. To be exact, Karloff was playing a 20th Century Spanish scholar who only thought he was Don Quixote. But that’s not so far from Cervantes’ original, which is also about an old man who only thinks he is “Don Quixote.”

Such is the power of a great archetype. Anyone can inhabit it, or be inhabited by it. So that any aging man is potentially a Quixote

or a Lear …

It’s official now. According to Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo “belongs among the great musical works of the century.” And surely, if Herrmann’s Vertigo is among the great musical works of the last century, Herrmann’s highly influential, formally radical, strings-only score for Psycho is there as well.

Herrmann’s ability to add layers of color, emotion, and meaning to the films he scored is evident even when he worked with lesser auteurs. See, e.g., Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), or The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran, 1958). Not to mention the scores he did for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and other distinguished collaborators. Would Scorsese’s Taxi Driver be one half as effective without the noirish solo Herrmann composed for saxophone, his percussive punctuation, and those brooding strings?

Herrmann’s stature among 20th Century composers should no longer be a matter of controversy – particularly when one is looking at the second half of the century. The American Minimalists, for example, (Philip Glass, John Adams, et al.) owe him everything.

Years ago – when I was a teenage film buff, so to speak – I remember reading someone’s description of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as “a perfect film.” “Perfect?” I asked myself, “What about that rubber octopus? I’ve never seen anything so phony looking in my life!”

I was thinking, of course, of the rubber octopus we see in Kane’s “News on the March” segment, the one that appears *swimming* toward us as the narrator (William Alland) portentously describes, “Xanadu’s livestock, the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea….” That octopus is as plainly and outrageously fake as the one Bela Lugosi wrestles in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster. It might even be the same one!

Years later, I would realize to what lengths Welles went to make Kane’s newsreel seem authentic, how the film was scratched and in some shots deliberately misframed, how he got the RKO newsreel department to edit it so it would look like any other newsreel, how he got them to score it with stock music from the RKO library (rather than assigning that part of the scoring to Bernard Herrmann, who scored the rest of the movie), and made generous use of stock footage, just as would be done in a *real* newsreel. That shot of the octopus was most likely something Welles or his editors found in RKO’s stock library. (Much, no doubt, to Welles’ amusement.)

Kane’s newsreel and its boldly faked authenticity would turn out to be one of the most influential aspects of the film. Woody Allen would construct an entire movie, Zelig, around Welles’ device of having himself (as Kane) appearing in what looks like stock footage of other famous figures. Welles himself would reexamine Kane’s newsreel – and the whole idea of faked authenticity/authentic fakery – in his documentary-cum-essay, F for Fake. Today, experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin regularly scratches, flashes, and otherwise stresses his footage to make it look like it was shot in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Similarly, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez applied computer-generated scratches and splices to the image, and inserted “Reel Missing” title cards and other *mistakes* in their Grindhouse to make it look like an authentic double-feature from the 1970s.

Thus, Kane’s rubber octopus swims on, forever representing those obviously phony or erroneous elements inserted within the fake to make it look real.