my new plaid pants

... you can learn from:

Dracula (1931)

Oh we all go a little mad sometimes, Mr. Renfield. The great director Tod Browning was born on this day in the year 1880 - it's crazy to think he was 17 when Bram Stoker released the book Dracula, isn't it? I can only imagine what kind of an effect that book would've had on a 17 year old. Before Browning started making movies in 1915 he spent years working in traveling circuses and carnivals, an experience he tapped several times in his work but most prominently a year after Dracula with Freaks, the film that ruined his career. (But which assured his legacy even more than Dracula, if you ask me.) But there's no denying the impact Browning's Dracula has had on over 85 years of our international imaginations. What music of the night he made...

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If you've ever seen Tod Browning's 1932 horror classic Freaks then you know who Schlitzie is. If you've never seen Freaks, well, you need to get on seeing Freaks. But even if you've never seen Freaks then you still might know who Schlitzie is, at least if you've been around these here parts of the blogosphere before, because I have posted about him often. (We try to recognize his birthday every September 10th.) Anyway Schlitzie was a circus performer with microcephaly who steals Tod Browning's whole damn movie with his charm, and I'm not alone in this fondness -- he's become such a cult icon that he's about to get his own damn documentary! Read about the project at that link and then click on over here to donate a buck or two to help get it made. The world needs his story!

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Hey you guys know that it's almost Halloween, right? Otherwise known as the greatest time of the year! Now that I've put the Film Festival and Comi-Con behind me I feel as if I can finally start to focus in on what matters - spooky oogy boogy stuff! Hooray! I am really feeling the mood this year. We've got something exciting coming later this week (fingers crossed, anyway) but til then this here is a wonderful way to start off the Frank. N. Festivities.

This month's Team Experience Poll over at The Film Experience was split into two parts - we were asked to choose our ten favorite horror movies that cam out before The Exorcist, and our ten favorite horror movies that came out after The Exorcist. (Why The Exorcist? Head over to TFE to have that explained.) 

A sidenote though: The Exorcist is having it's 40th anniversary on December 26th and here's a fun fact: my parents went to see that movie on their first date! Without Linda Blair stuffing a crucifix up her hoo-ha, I never would've been born. Thanks, Linda Blair's hoo-ha! Thanks, Satan!

Alright so you can see the communal list over at The Film Experience, and you should it's wonderful. And the comments are wonderful too - everything everybody's naming was on my long list, but man, my long list had like 75 titles on it, ya know? Narrowing this down to a top ten, well you have to make concessions. But that's the fun of it - the conversation it starts. So here's my own personal top ten. As I always say with these things, ask me this in another five minutes and my list will be different. Well some of it. My top six is my top six, although five and six might swap back and forth. Anyway, boo! Let's do this!

10. I Walked With a Zombie - Jacques Tourneur's Cat People made the communal list at #7, and that film's great but I prefer Zombie's sleepwalking sense of foreign menace. Those shots of of the zombie-slave Carrefour wandering through the sugar cane still haunt my nightmares.

9. The Wicker Man - I don't care how many times I see it, I get chills every time Sergeant Howie crests that hill and see that giant stick figure and they dance, they dance and dance and dance, nightmares licking at our feet.

8. Bride of Frankenstein - A lot of people discredit this as a straight horror film because it's so comic at times, and the film is very very funny, it's true, but it's also just insane and sad and weird and unbelievably astonishingly beautiful to look at. And it's scary! The bride is a scary thing - the way Elsa makes her move, the sounds she makes - she is all kinds of wrong.

7. Peeping Tom - Poor Tom always stands in the shadow of Norman Bates (here on this list, too) but Michael Powell's film deserves its own day in the sun, if by sun I mean the harsh light of the studio lamps as they blind some poor unsuspecting girl to the camera turned murder weapon coming towards her. This movie is maybe more Hitchcock than Hitchcock could have ever been. It's the movie Hitchcock's therapist might make from his most personal notes. Dark, darker...

6. Psycho - Darkest. A knife slashing through cinema - before we're soapy skin and bright blonde hair, and after we're muck, sunken, cackling bones.

5. The Haunting - Such a profoundly sad film, the loneliness of Nell echoing down the disturbed corridors - her pent-up fury banging on the doors and pressing against the walls, and her darkness - inescapable, all-encompassing - swallowing her up.

4. Night of the Living Dead - Romero's film is a perfect metaphorical snapshot of a moment that is actually more like a mirror that we stepped right through, all of us - we're on the other side of his looking glass, in the world he envisioned, now.

3. Nosferatu - I still consider Count Orlok to be the scariest movie monster ever put on screen. Everything about him terrifies me. Murnau bleeds images out of our subconscious that we've never wanted realized above board, and yet there they are, and they are looking right into us.

2. Freaks - There is something so primal and so terrifying about the ending of this film, down in the mud, the rain, the knives in their teeth coming at you... it will never ever leave you.

1. Rosemary's Baby - I think I've made it clear time and again that Rosemary's Baby is my favorite movie of all time. Every single frame of this film is a part of me. We are one, from Minnie's garish pastel dresses on downward. Anyway I did the proper write-up for it over in the list at The Film Experience where it came in at second place, so go read that over there!

 

Next week comes our Top Ten Post-Exorcist Horror Films!

So tell me: what does your own list look like?

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The real star of Freaks was born on this day in 1901.

Read some more about him here.

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This week's banner boy Schlitze is the best known and loved of the so-called pinheads from Tod Browning's 1932 horror masterpiece Freaks, and he was born on this day in 1901. He lived to the ripe old age of 70, dying on September 24th, 1971. Besides his best-known role in the aforementioned Freaks he also played "Bird Woman" in 1941's Meet Boston Blackie, "Vasectomy Patient" in 1934's Tomorrow's Children, and "Furry Manimal" in the Bela Lugosi version of Island of the Lost Souls, which I only saw for the first time last year and I didn't keep an eye out for Schlitze - guess I'll have to watch it again.

Here's a fun fact I just learned about him from his bio: He "had a relatively developed intellect for a micro-cephalic" and was "taught to talk by California speech experts, and could count up to ten but refused to speak the word eight."
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Nobody knows what Schlitze's last name was, but signs point to Mills, says this extensive web-page devoted to him. What they have sussed out is he was born on September 10th, 1901 and died on September 24th, 1971. If you've seen Tod Browning's 1932 horror masterpiece Freaks - and if you haven't then your cinematic pedigree is less than - then you no doubt recall Schlitze fondly. He sweeps in - as a she - with a bright smile and a fondness for hats with long feathers and steals the picture from everybody else on screen. You can watch the scene right here. He was magic, and the world of movies is better for having him. Happy birthday, Schlitze!
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Perhaps the way to go into watching La Vie en rose is without any expectations at all. I'd been listening to people I trust maul the thing for months, so I had little-to-no expectations for it... but hell, I can't place my lack of enthusiasm for an Edith Piaf bio-pic squarely on others shoulders; I am me, and me being the me I am, "musicals" - even ones where the singing is lip-synching - ain't my bag, and beyond knowing the name Edith Piaf I knew nothing about her beforehand, and... well, I have this inexplicable reticence to appreciate French things. Seriously, I have no explanation for it, especially as I end up liking a lot of French things - these two, and that kinda kissing come to mind - but it's there all the same. Mes excuses, les français!

The one pro the film had, from my perspective going into it, was Marion Cotillard, whom I really loved in Love Me If You Dare a couple years back, and when I'd realized it was the same girl garnering praise for playing Piaf I was happy to see her making a name for herself.

Aaaaanyway, if that garbled introduction doesn't make my point clear, I ended up loving La Vie en rose. I watched it over the course of the past two evenings - movie's long! - and even though I'd segmented the final half an hour to an entirely separate evening I still found myself entirely wrapped up in Marion Cotillard's performance and this tremendous character of Piaf.

Both the boyfriend and I had similar, not especially flattering comparisons that came to mind while watching the film - the boyfriend thought of Tod Browning's Freaks (I do believe he coined the term "Schlitze-savant," in honor of that film's pinhead character, to describe Piaf), while I was reminded of David Lynch's The Elephant Man. So... both of us were watching the film through freak-appreciative eyes. Piaf was, in Cotillard's hands (remember, I know nothing of the real-life Piaf), this tragic beast, blessed with astonishing pipes but cursed with this bust-the-walls-down bravado that, if the film is to believed, left her life in shambles and killed her before she turned 50.

But I'm sure you can tell there - I really have no idea even after watching the movie as to a lot of the basic specifics of her Point A to Point Z life. I know she had some accidents that made her addicted to, I'm guessing, morphine. Her married lover died in a plane crash. She had a daughter that died. But somehow... I never missed any of that usual bio-pic filler, the absence of a linear narrative, because this freely-associative miasma of her life that the film becomes... well, I felt as if I got to know the character, some buried truth of a woman I knew nothing about beforehand, as much as I've ever gotten from any of the best bio-pics.

I know a lot of people had trouble with the film's apparent randomness - how one moment in Piaf's early life would suddenly slam into one very late into her life, and then swing back to something in her teens, and so on - so I kept waiting to feel discombobulated by it... but it never came. I hate to say this, it's one of those things critics say that always sounds terribly pretentious to my ears, but it really holds true to what I experienced here - it felt as if the film was following an emotional thread through her life, the ups and the downs bleeding into one another, so on some instinctual, emotional level, I never felt lost. Sort of how I've heard Hitchcock's The Birds described as a "tone poem" - that the seeming randomness of the attacks, the lifts and falls of action, follow a sort of musical, internal sense of their own. The interjection of how Piaf's life was coming to a close into the middle of a scene of her height of performing splendor only served, to me, to enrich both moments, to comment back and forth upon these disparate pieces of her life, and I found by the end it was as if I knew something deeply real about Piaf, a feeling, that I might not have had in a more structurally rigid film. How much truth there is in this "feeling" is an unknown quantity to me since I know nothing of her but this movie, but on its own, this character, this performance, became something more, something with its own truth.

So yeah... knocked my socks off, it did. I'm now torn as to whether I'm rooting for Julie Christie or Cotillard for that Best Actress statue come Oscar night - both are richly deserving. As long as Ellen Page, blog bless her, doesn't sneak in there and steal it with an honorary Ingenue prize - although Page is an awfully butch Ingenue - I'll be pleased. Still can't say either way on Lovely Linney, haven't caught The Savages yet, but I like her so much my non-opinion of that performance is moot; she rocks!
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Happy October 22nd, y'all.

Schlitze (as himself),
Freaks
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