wilsonbond_99

The story of the brief life (1877-1904) of French-Russian-Swiss traveler and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, this dark little film is almost impossible to find. I saw it years ago on IFC a couple of times, but haven't been able to find it in any other format.

This movie is wildly uneven in style, but does manage to touch on many of the salient points of Isabelle's life, including her relationship with the French military governor of Morocco, Lyautey, who is played here by Peter O'Toole in a clever bit of casting. We all associate O'Toole with the desert and Lawrence of Arabia, and the scenes here of the two of them walking together, she in her stylish new Arab threads, seems to be almost a passing of the torch. The fact that the real Isabelle died long before Lawrence ever set foot in Arabia is irrelevant. This is purely a gesture of cinematic homage.

I also like the way the film drives home the desperation of Isabelle's poverty throughout life, and the way that she and her fellow souls are constantly pushed to the margins by the need to keep sickness and starvation at bay. Paul Schutze's moody film score helps these scenes immensely.

This movie is a minor gem, imperfectly realized, maybe, but unique. I wish somebody would see fit to release it on DVD.

Funny, I'd read most of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantasy adventure novels by the time I saw this movie, and knew that this wasn't Pellucidar: where were the vast, open spaces of the hollow earth, the blazing sun, the endless forests and lakes and mountains? Where were the friggin' tarags and thipdars?? And yet, this cheesy movie has managed to stick with me over the years. I love the cramped, fake-looking sets, the dazed actors playing slaves, the hyperactive Sagoths acting like Japanese prison camp guards in some WWII flick. And best of all are the dinosaurs, looking more like something from a medieval bestiary than actual prehistoric animals. They seem to combine aspects of human, rhino, frog, titanothere, you name it. All this, and cave princess Caroline Munro running around screaming, shooting smoky glances at Doug McClure from her sexy, kohl-rimmed eyes. It was TOO MUCH.

I can't help it. At the Earth's Core is one of my all-time great guilty pleasures. I only wish I could see it properly in a movie theater with an audience some day before I die.

There have been a number of strong arguments posted on the boards that the many visible boom-mike shots in this film were a simple formatting accident, and not intended as a postmodern commentary on the nature of film-making, etc. I'd like to back up red-666's earlier assertion that they were, indeed, intentional.

The opening credits sequence of Lord Love a Duck is unusual in that it consists almost entirely of scenes from the movie we are about to see. The credits function very like a trailer, both highlighting and undercutting central parts of the story to follow. I think that this device helps to deflate the dramatic aspects of the tale and heighten the satirical ones, already placing the viewer at one remove from the average moviegoer's experience of "being told a story." Intercut with this footage are shots of a film crew doing setups at a beach party. We see light filters being changed, a DP checking his viewfinder, props being moved around. Is this T. Harrison Belmont's film crew shooting one of his infamous bikini pictures? No, it's George Axelrod's film crew shooting Lord Love a Duck! We see Axelrod himself in one shot, along with a drawing of the Mollymauk that Roddy McDowall later inscribes in cement for Tuesday Weld. All these shots are visual cues that what we are about to see is not a standard Hollywood beach flick but a meditation on artifice, role-playing, and storytelling in Hollywood.

Seen this way, the visible boom mikes and patently fake sets in much of Lord Love a Duck begin to make perfect sense as the projected world-view of a man who who saw everything around him as exuberantly fake, delusional, tinsel-covered, and hollow. Welcome to Hollyweird, George! You were one of its greatest bards.