Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 5

Posted on November 8, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Gotham Calling’s curated retrospective of Cold War cinema arrives at the 1960s and, for the most part, the mood is one of doom and different types of terror… but this is nevertheless a creatively fertile period, generating a bunch of pungent films around the world.

41. Letter Never Sent, aka The Unsent Letter, aka The Unmailed Letter (USSR, 1960)

The first Soviet entry on this list is a ruthless survival adventure featuring a small group of geologists in Siberia on an expedition in search of diamonds to fund the USSR’s industry and space programme, shot through virtuoso camerawork and jaw-dropping photography. Despite the overtly political framing by the initial scroll, much of the film – made during the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ era – actually paints quite a skeptical picture of typical motifs of socialist fiction such as the authorities’ efficiency and humanity’s ability to harness nature… Hell, you can even read into it an allegory of labor camps or of nuclear destruction. (Director Mikhail Kalatozov followed this with I am Cuba, an even more spectacular-looking chronicle of the lead-up to the Cuban Revolution, but although the Cold War connection is more blatant in that one, I much prefer the genre thrills of Letter Never Sent.)

42. The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (West Germany/Italy/France, 1960)

The culmination of one of the most eccentric trilogies in the history of cinema: if in 1922’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler Fritz Lang captured the social chaos of post-WWI Germany through the schemes of the titular master criminal, and in 1933’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse Lang conjured up an expressive symbol of the rise of fascism while elevating him to supervillain, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse blasts this dark, pulpy series into the Cold War. And while this offbeat sequel is a heady puzzle box where new characters mysteriously circle each other with no clear connection to the previous films until the final minutes, thematically the series’ overarching narrative frames nuclear danger and expanding surveillance within a genealogy of evil across the decades. Moreover, many of the movie’s concepts and set pieces pave the way to the spy-fi strand that will gain prominence throughout the rest of the ‘60s.

43. Village of the Damned (UK/USA, 1960)

Similarly, the primary horror in Village of the Damned doesn’t originate from the geopolitical division itself, even though the latter appears to be in the mind of the authorities responding to the odd occurrences of a small British village, including a batch of children with mental powers… The enemy within and collective thinking have never looked so sinister, but, while the military and the Home Office defend coercion in the name of national security (and monitor how the Soviets are dealing with the situation), a scientist dreams of a new generation that can push the world beyond wars, disease, and human misery. And so, despite the supernatural twist, we get another atomic-era cautionary tale about science’s destructive potential. (The premise was reworked in strident pacifist terms for 1964’s Children of the Damned, where the Cold War themes are much more pronounced, but I prefer this version’s creepy restraint and ambiguity.)

44. The Day the Earth Caught Fire (UK, 1961)

Focusing on the disruptive potential of nuclear bomb tests regardless of whether or not they lead to actual war, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is one of the most atmospheric entries into the early apocalyptic cycle, combining an over-the-top premise with an ‘adult,’ realistic treatment. Much of it is told from the perspective of a newspaper, complete with witty, rapid-fire dialogue worthy of His Girl Friday and Ace in the Hole.

45. One, Two, Three (USA, 1961)

If it’s rapid-fire dialogue you want, though, look no further than One, Two, Three, an absolutely frantic screwball farce about the head of Coca-Cola in West Berlin trying to impress his boss to get a promotion… If A Foreign Affair was Billy Wilder’s caustic take on Trümmerfilme, here the whole storyline about the capitalist’s daughter falling for a communist plays like a madcap spoof of the subgenre of divided Germany romance I brought up a few posts ago, with both sides of the Cold War cynically presented as grotesque (each in its own way) and horny (in pretty much the same way).

46. Paris Belongs to Us (France, 1961)

Part mystery, part conspiracy thriller, part existentialist drama, even without the explicit references to McCarthyism the extraordinary Paris Belongs to Us would’ve earned a place on this list for the way it eerily nails a general zeitgeist of anxiety and paranoia.

47. Pigs and Battleships (Japan, 1961)

A youthful, irreverent, and vibrantly directed gangster picture, Pigs and Battleships offers a biting portrayal of the black market rackets – and widespread prostitution – surrounding the expansion of US military bases abroad, particularly in Japan.

48. Town Without Pity (USA/Switzerland/West Germany, 1961)

Town Without Pity addresses a similar topic, but using a very different approach. Making the most out of an ultra-catchy song, this is a courtroom drama about the trial of Germany-based GIs accused – and guilty – of gang-raping a local girl. Based on a novel inspired by an actual incident, Gottfried Reinhardt’s picture may not be as ambiguous as Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, but it provocatively engages with the violence of putting a rape victim on the witness stand to be confronted by a defense lawyer whose job is to publicly discredit her… It’s also a potent film about the oppressive presence of the US military abroad, about a conservative West Germany dealing with more foreign troops and military bases than any other country in the world, and about the social disruption that can be found in the various fronts of the Cold War.

49. Advise & Consent (USA, 1962)

Speaking of Preminger… His willingness to delve in moral complexity and treat audiences like intelligent adults is in full display throughout Advise & Consent, a sophisticated political thriller about the nomination process for a US Secretary of State which tackles the era’s recent witch hunts. (If Anatomy of a Murder was no doubt on the watch list for the writers of The People v. O.J. Simpson, this one comes across like a convincing pilot episode for The West Wing!).

50. Escape from East Berlin, aka Tunnel 28 (USA/West Germany, 1962)

And so we get to the Berlin Wall, which didn’t just alter the Cold War’s landscape (drastically materializing division and adding yet another source of suffering), but it also fuelled an entire subgenre of movies about daring escapes from East Germany. Although openly propagandistic and sensationalistic – including documentary-like voice-overs and archival footage – these works nevertheless provided genuine tension and thrills by borrowing the effective dramatic structure of prison/POW narratives (having us root for heroes in search of freedom, with deadly stakes) while also resonating with outrage over the real-world situation. Still, emotional manipulation and suspense can be done with varying levels of cinematic skill… Made less than a year after the Wall’s construction, Escape from East Berlin delivers the goods with classical clarity, benefitting from a particularly taut mise-en-scene. While the acting isn’t always top-notch, director Robert Siodmak uses the expressionistic visual style he developed doing horror and film noir to create a tighteningly claustrophobic GDR. And for all its anti-communism, it’s also a story about teamwork and solidarity.

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (6 November 2023)

Posted on November 6, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

It may not be much of a consolation in the grand scheme of things, but here is your weekly reminder that, hey, at least comics can be awesome…

The Ambassadors #1

Five Ghosts: The Haunting of Fabian Gray #2

Namwolf #1

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Catching up with crime comics – Ed Brubaker edition

Posted on November 2, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Last time I did one of these ‘Catching up with crime comics’ posts was a year ago, back in November 2022, looking specifically at Texas-set yarns (in the meantime, I’ve finally read Ethan Hawke’s and Greg Ruth’s Meadowlark, a superb-looking graphic novel that does a fine job of developing an emotional father-son dynamic among the genre thrills…). This time around, I’m focusing on more-or-less recent works written by Ed Brubaker. After all, having discussed his hit-and-miss work on Batman, I figured it’d be fair to also devote some of the blog’s attention to Brubaker’s field of expertise: no-holds-barred crime comics!

Ed Brubaker’s greatest opus continues to be Criminal, the irregular series he has been doing with Sean Phillips since 2006, chronicling the gritty dramas of different generations of low-level figures in the criminal underworld of the fictional Center City.

From the outset, Criminal stood out as a series of tense, cleverly plotted yarns about engaging characters that played with readers’ expectations, from the guy who looked soft yet turned out to be holding back violent instincts to the badass on a personal killing spree who ended up compromising when push came to shove. Having recently reread the whole thing, I found it even better than I remembered – and it felt like a much more intimate project. You can find plenty of recurring motifs from Brubaker’s comics, such as substance addiction, voyeurism (especially people seeing somebody they know having sex through windows or cupboards), and a referential attitude, explicitly commenting about movies, music, or books that influenced him (including a geeky, self-reflexive interest in how they were made and how they impact people). Like many of Brubaker’s other collaborations with Phillips, Criminal isn’t merely a case of expertly crafted genre comics – these are also comics *about* genre… and, consciously, about comics.

Brubaker’s talent, to a great degree, lies in the way he takes these elements and manages to make them personal and thematically layered through rich characterization (usually in the form of inner monologues). For instance, the two-parter ‘Bad Weekend,’ about a cranky old artist at a comic book convention, could’ve been a fan fest of industry in-jokes, deep cuts, and peeks behind the curtain, either parodying or romanticizing the medium’s milieu and history. And yet, Brubaker somehow finds a pitch-perfect tone that humanizes this odd subculture, acknowledging both that comics are often made in shitty exploitative conditions and that the result can nevertheless have a mesmerizing effect.

Suitably, part of what makes this story work so well is precisely the magic of the art form as conjured by the stylish, chiseled drawings and ultra-moody colors of Sean Phillips and his son, Jacob… 

Criminal (v2) #3

Criminal’s latest arc, ‘Cruel Summer,’ came out as single issues in 2019, as a hardback collection in 2020, and, finally, as a softcover a couple of years ago. With its carefully put together mise en scène and smoky palette, this is a brilliant graphic novel (it could’ve been one of Gotham Calling’s 2020 Books of the Year, by I preferred to highlight another notable Brubillips venture, Pulp), spinning one my favorite types of crime narratives, in which the perspective keeps jumping from chapter to chapter (each focusing on a different character than the last), so that instead of a firm center of identification – and morality – you spread your empathy around while being aware of various angles that the individual cast members can’t see. There are echoes of Kubrick’s The Killing, but everyone is so lovingly fleshed out that you can get lost in their dreams and anxieties and sometimes forget you’re in the middle of a concentric tapestry of heists.

In a way, Cruel Summer feels like a culmination of the whole series (it could satisfyingly be the final book, although I’m certainly not complaining about last year’s short ‘Teeg’s Christmas Carol’ in the anthology Image! #9), revealing mysteries that were hinted at in the very first story, paying off character arcs that have been developing for years, and providing the origin of the status quo we found when we initially joined the ride. Yet this is also a taut, self-contained tale that can just as easily be appreciated by newcomers or by those who don’t fully remember past installments… In fact, since the series isn’t chronological (this story takes place in the summer of 1988, both before and after previous stories), this may be as good place as any to jump aboard. It means you’ll know a few secrets when you check out other volumes, but if you had read other volumes before you’d know a few secrets coming into this one anyway… Regardless, such background knowledge doesn’t necessarily work as a spoiler, but more likely it serves as a kind of foreshadowing, since Criminal’s power resides in the specific details.

Or, better yet, much of the power resides in little moments, especially when you get a whiff of hidden aspects of characters’ personalities combined with an awareness of their inexorably tragic fates. I’ve complained before about Ed Brubaker’s flair for overexplaining symbolism and motivations, but I think that in Cruel Summer he generally pulls this off with a pleasant literary sensibility. His beautiful narration suggests just enough for us to get a hint of who these people are, like when he links Jane’s ethics to the context of nuclear panic:

Criminal (v2) #8

The best way to explain it is with a detour about Quentin Tarantino (bear with me). I can often tell where Tarantino’s films are coming from. His sensibility was clearly formed by exploitation movies like Navajo Joe and Black Caesar (especially the perverse racialized killing near the end). The thing is that Tarantino manages to produce moments that deliver the same kind of thrill beyond a mere sense of recognition. There is an element of pastiche, for sure, but it tends to gain extra layers through remix and collage: thus, just as François Truffaut reworked a bunch of Hitchcock set pieces in the awesome, surreal black comedy The Bride Wore Black, Tarantino somehow remade that film as an even more awesome and more surreal black comedy, Kill Bill. There was a panel on Radio versus the Martians years ago that nailed it: trashy flicks from the ‘70s have great moments in them, but also a lot of lame stuff your memory deleted… yet Tarantino has successfully metabolized that age of cinema, drawing on its best ideas to create something that feels, not like the original movies, but like many of us (mis)remember them.

To a large degree, I get that from Criminal, where Ed Brubaker seems to have digested his influences and carefully synthetized them into the best version of what they can be. An early arc, ‘Lawless,’ combines the formulas of revenge and mystery with a classic heist thriller (plus a brief homage to nuns-with-guns schlock). There was a sequel of sorts, ‘The Sinners,’ which boiled down to a detective story within a gangster yarn… and it even included a deadpan riff on The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank. And the thing is that all of this worked perfectly fine regardless of whether or not you had come across any such material before!

At the same time, as empty as Tarantino’s pop-eats-itself M.O. may seem, I do think there tends to be something there to grapple with underneath the loud surface, as he is one of those auteurs who fascinate me precisely because they keep finding new approaches to their pet themes, much like Peter Milligan or Woody Allen. Milligan has written over a thousand very different stories and practically all of them are about the fluidity of identity in one way or another, up to his latest crime comic, Dogs of London (with a focus on class identity). In Allen’s case, the 21st century has not been kind to him (in terms of either personal reputation or general quality of output), but his proto-noir exercises – like Match Point, Irrational Man, or Coup de chance – are interesting variations on the subject of life’s amoral meaninglessness, just as his dramas – like Blue Jasmine or Wonder Wheel – keep going back to characters whose retaliation for emotional hurt has devastating consequences (read into that what you will).

As for Tarantino, his 21st-century works have explored cinema’s relationship with the notion of cathartic payback in truly original, riveting, and provocative ways. Indeed, as much as I was let down by Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, conceptually I do appreciate that the movie once again pushed revenge fiction to a new level. Rather than merely retread the historical revisionism of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Tarantino created a whole new sort of retroactive revenge: since the protagonists aren’t driven by a thirst for vengeance (because they have no idea what they’re doing, unlike the previous films’ Jews and slaves) and since there is no diegetic crime to avenge (at least compared to the one we know took place in our own reality), ultimately the revenge fantasy is only in the viewers’ minds, because we’re the only ones who truly know the stakes.

It’s this sort of extra levels I find missing in some of Brubaker’s other comics. For instance, when it comes to revisionist forays into vigilante justice, for every compelling tale that elevates or reinvents his influences and obsessions, like the devastating second arc of Criminal, you get one that comes across as uninspired fanfiction or as an on-the-nose illustrated essay about its genre or medium, like Kill or Be Killed.

Kill or Be Killed #4

I love the whole subgenre of stories deconstructing vigilantism’s problematic appeal by engaging with its practical and moral questions as much as – or perhaps even more than – I like thrillers that play it straight. While promising to daringly dramatize the inherent tensions of this narrative tradition, however, Kill or Be Killed mostly settles for directly discussing each trope and device with the reader… I guess this is meant to be metafictional, but it feels more like an obnoxious commentary track constantly asking you: ‘Do you get what I’m doing?’

Given that the book has such a clear mission statement, I miss not only Tarantino’s inventiveness, but also the unsettling weirdness and the thematic breadth of a film like Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice or a comic like Steve Gerber’s and J.J. Birch’s Foolkiller. Even when Kill or Be Killed turns into a walls-closing-in-on-upper-class-white-guy-versus-xenophobic-stereotypes kind of tale, the result lacks the irony of a show like Ozark (whose subversive gesture was only fully acknowledged at the very end). This is all the more frustrating because the art team of Sean Phillips and colorist Elizabeth Breitweiser give it their best, making the series look nothing less than absolutely stunning.

By contrast, I’m having a much more enjoyable time with Brubillips’ other ongoing project, Reckless, which I’ll discuss in a couple of weeks…

Reckless: Destroy All Monsters

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (30 October 2023)

Posted on October 30, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

I tend to use Halloween as a pretext to write a bit about recent horror movies in Gotham Calling. One trend that has been quite prominent this year – in cinema as well as in literature – is the entanglement of horror with social and political satire. This is hardly a new approach to the genre: George A. Romero built much of his career upon it – and it has been a while since comedians Jordan Peele and Charlie Brooker reinvented themselves as horror masters, bringing their former sensibilities with them. Nevertheless, we seem to be living through particularly fruitful times…

For instance, as the incredibly successful – and incredibly fun – M3GAN evolves from family drama to creepy suspense to grindhouse schlock, it is constantly sprinkled with bits of comedic sci-fi about corporate capitalism and technophobic paranoia. Rated PG-13, this amusing entry into the ‘killer doll’ subgenre doesn’t go very far with the gore, yet it’s in that Gremlins tradition of mischievous gateway movies for young audiences getting into horror. On the whole, the film is derivative but clever. On the one hand, M3GAN knows that it doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel: there’s just something intrinsically nightmarish about having an unstoppable robot come after you – as exploited throughout the ages, from the original Westworld and The Terminator all the way to the ‘Metalhead’ episode of Black Mirror (or, if you prefer something trashier, Chopping Mall). On the other hand, it’s hard to deny this fear has gained a new resonance in today’s hyper-technological world of Alexa and ChatGPT (not to mention screen addiction and viral fake news), where our lives appear to be controlled by machines and our emotions twisted by artificial intelligence whose scary limits we are yet to fully figure out.

Then there’s Pablo Larraín’s bloody gothic fairytale El Conde, which reimagines Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a literal vampire. If it feels heartless to be discussing horror fiction at a time when there is so much horror reality plastered all over the news, this is a reminder of how the former’s imagery can help translate the latter’s inconceivable extents into something easier to process. Every single image in El Conde looks absolutely gorgeous – with black & white cinematography emulating the all-time classics – even though, for a while, the film threatens to use its offbeat premise as little more than a hook to expose the corruption and violent repression of the former regime (with blood-sucking as a pretty blatant metaphor). The twists keep piling, however, and the final half hour is especially bonkers. The result may be uneven, but this is certainly an original ride full of unexpected turns.

That said, my personal favorite this year was Brandon Cronenberg’s latest foray into his signature blend of speculative science fiction and psychological horror. Set in a luxurious Eastern European holiday resort, Infinity Pool tauntingly draws on orientalist fears of foreign peoples and customs, although it ultimately casts a scathing gaze on the tourists themselves, who dismissively exploit economically dependent countries and populations while flaunting their privileged status. What could’ve been a fairly shallow – if kinky – class satire, however, is elevated by the immersive way the film engages with its mind-fuck of a story premise (which I won’t spoil here, so as not to take any edge out of the moody, suspenseful build up). Suffice it to say that Infinity Pool explores what has become one of the central motifs of our times, the doppelgänger, disturbingly illustrating how we constantly negotiate our masks and split identities as winners and losers, victims and perpetrators, defending ethics and creative intellect while caving into carnal desire and embracing the disposability of otherized bodies.

Certain aspects of Infinity Pool brought to mind one of the most brilliant horror comics in recent years, The Nice House on the Lake, where a group of young people get together at a lavish summer house, only to find out the rest of world has suddenly come apart (just the first of many shocking revelations). It has a similar vibe of an affluent, compressed First World paradise whose enjoyment depends on disregarding what takes place outside. James Tynion IV’s script is more elaborate than Cronenberg’s – including a more richly developed cast and a much more ambitious scope – but the parallels aren’t just in terms of plot points or themes… Like the abovementioned film, The Nice House on the Lake looks stunning, making the most out of its medium’s aesthetic potential in order arouse both repulsion and a sensuous allure (which may lead to disgust with one’s own temptations). Every corner of the house, every panel angle, every shade and tinge, every line of ink and dialogue appear to have been fully thought out and carefully rendered. Crafted with minute attention to detail, the series reads like nothing else on the market, firing on all cylinders when it comes to the artwork, by Álvaro Martínez Bueno, the colors, by Jordie Bellaire, and the lettering, by Andworld Design.

To be sure, horror casts a large shadow in North-American comics, from the relatively crude yet charmingly entertaining anthologies of the ‘50s (including the macabrely comedic short stories that led to the introduction of regulated censorship in 1954, some of them collected earlier this year in Fantagraphic’s lovely volume Deadly Beloved and other stories by Johnny Craig), whose spirit was revived in the black & white magazines of the ‘70s (which avoided the censors through a loophole), to the sleazy, in-your-face depictions of gory ultra-violence and all sorts of taboo-breaking content now published by the likes of Avatar (taking maximum advantage of the freedom from the Comics Code Authority earned since the ‘80s), not to mention the more sophisticated – if often pretentious – strain of experimental storytelling and bizarre, disconcerting visuals found in mind-bending works like Lore, Blue in Green, Stray Toasters, or The Department of Truth.

And so, this week’s reminder that comic book covers can be awesome is a tribute to the medium’s diversity:

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 4

Posted on October 26, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

It’s time for another installment of Gotham Calling’s journey through Cold War cinema! Mixing classics with lesser-known gems, the selection below oscillates between the Cold War’s domestic, geopolitical, and fully global stakes, as the conflict’s effects are shown threatening both individuals and the planet at large.

31. The Incredible Shrinking Man (USA, 1957)

Along with its eye-catching take on the themes of emasculation and acceptance of mortality, The Incredible Shrinking Man excels in the original way it hops from one genre to the next every few minutes, gently flowing from weird humor to heartfelt drama and kickass thrills. The result is by far the best of the 1950s’ cycle of Hollywood movies about human mutations, arguably informed not only by growing concerns over the effects of nuclear radiation, but also by a society changing in unpredictable directions that threatened the idealized suburban lifestyle of Eisenhower America. (The Cold War link was made more explicit in The Amazing Colossal Man, which reverses this film’s premise, but that one is much schlockier, if charmingly so.)

32. The Spies (France/Italy, 1957)

Encroaching secrecy, surveillance, and psychological warfare come off as both unnerving and absurd in this darkly surreal entry about a doctor at a French psychiatric hospital who starts to suspect most people around him might be secret agents. In contrast to Europe ‘51, in The Spies the cold warriors are the ones who become literally indistinguishable from mental patients.

33. Ashes and Diamonds (Poland, 1958)

An astonishing historical drama/thriller/romance set in Poland immediately after World War II. The text concerns the Soviet occupation, the subtext concerns the ensuing Polish resentment, and the context is a period of relative liberalization enabled by the death of Stalin which allowed filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda to break a number of taboos. I’ve also written about Ashes and Diamonds here. (Wajda would go on to direct committed indictments of Polish politics, including the semi-satirical divorce drama Without Anesthesia and the allegorical Man of Marble/Man of Iron saga, so this entry serves to represent a larger strand of Polish oppositionist cinema…)

34. Invention for Destruction, aka A Deadly Invention (Czechoslovakia, 1958)

Gorgeously combining live action with different forms of animation, this retrofuturistic pirate adventure is set in some kind of alternate steampunk era (it’s a tribute to Jules Verne), but there’s no mistaking the implications of the super-weapon at the core of Invention for Destruction.

35. The Quiet American (USA, 1958)

The fact that The Quiet American is a noirishly shot drama set in 1952 Indochina amidst the French war against communist insurgents could be enough to earn it a place on this list. Yet this is another case where the film’s background further elevates its relevance, as writer-director-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz drastically revised the politics of Graham Greene’s novel in order to save the face of US interventionism abroad (which is especially ironic given what was about to happen in Vietnam…). Thus, every line thrown against the protagonist feels like Mankiewicz lambasting Greene! (Scholar Adam Piette adds yet another layer by arguing that Greene’s original text was also a veiled criticism of the British policy of using the Cold War to crush the independence movements in Malaysia.)

36. Carlton-Browne of the F.O., aka Man in a Cocked Hat (UK, 1959)

Parodying the onset of geopolitical competition over the Third World, in Carlton-Browne of the F.O. bumbling British diplomats try to deal with Soviet activity in a former colony whose existence they hardly remembered. Luckily, they forgot to notify their local representative of the place’s independence, decades ago, so he’s still there, completely unaware…

37. The Mouse That Roared (UK, 1959)

More farce with a British accent. In The Mouse That Roared, a tiny European nation declares war on the United States (in the hopes of getting Marshall aid) and ends up messing with the whole international order… I prefer the source novel, but the film has its own merits, including a triple performance by Peter Sellers that anticipates Dr. Strangelove. (Similar hit-and-miss comedies followed, in the same political spirit, including a direct sequel – the Sellers-less The Mouse on the Moon – and the Shakespearean Romanoff and Juliet, but your mileage may vary on whether you find them grating or endearing.)

38. North by Northwest (USA, 1959)

A different sort of satire, in a way. In Alfred Hitchcock’s playful – yet seminal – spy flick North by Northwest, an advertising executive gets mistaken for a secret agent… and it’s no wonder, since with so many games of smoke & mirrors even the actual spies are bound to get confused every once in a while. So far, most thrillers on this list have owed a lot to film noir, but this is a more modern-looking approach to the material, inaugurating a new type of cosmopolitan businessman adventure.

39. On the Beach (USA, 1959)

In the notoriously bleak On the Beach, nuclear war has wiped out most of the planet except for Australia, so we get to follow the last humans on Earth as they wait for the radiation to catch up with them. While this was certainly not the first Cold War film to explore the eerie prospect of global destruction, empty streets, and isolated survivors (that would be 1951’s artsy B-movie Five), it was arguably the first to have a major impact, resonating on public debates – and future productions – for years to come. (Director Stanley Kramer went on to further thematize the Cold War in the 3-hour epic courtroom drama Judgement at Nuremberg, but there this was mostly done through eloquent dialogue, whereas On the Beach makes a more powerful use of original images – and the sheer absurd of the situation – to drive its point home.)

40. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (USA, 1959)

My favorite take on post-apocalyptic cinema in this period, though, is this more minimalistic – if sturdily shot – story in which Harry Belafonte wanders through a quasi-empty world, doing what he pleases (for a while, at least), as if only the entire end of civilization may free an American black man from racial discrimination… One of the reasons I’m such a sucker for 1950s’ doomsday fiction (it doesn’t even have to be particularly well-written, as long as it’s packed with stimulating ideas, like the novels The Death of Grass or I am Legend) is the glaring contrast between visions of the future that are still recognizable today (large-scale war, environmental catastrophes, pandemics, social breakdown) and the era’s more dated, conservative values, which are simultaneously reaffirmed and challenged by the new contexts (starting with an indictment of the authorities’ very failure to prevent collapse: just check out all the lingering posters in the background ironically mocking the limits of civil defense in the nuclear age). Some critics have taken issue with the film’s ending, but I like how its ambiguity suggests the possibility of truly reinventing human relations beyond the conventional Adam & Eve formula. All in all, The World, the Flesh and the Devil feels like the closest we’ve gotten to an EC comic on the big screen.

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (23 October 2023)

Posted on October 23, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

The past weeks were spent watching war crimes and an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe, counting down to further escalation. I’ve been feeding the blog with posts I had written in advance, mostly as a way to take brief breaks away from awful thoughts (and perhaps helping others do the same). However, among the constant search for information, the difficult discussions, and the desperate protests, I’m not really sure how long I can – or wish to – keep this up… In the meantime, for this week’s reminder that comics can be awesome, I’ve tried to look for something that feels as distant as possible from colonial occupation, apartheid, the massacre in Israel, or the Gaza genocide. The best I could come up with were the upbeat, gorgeous superhero covers of Darwyn Cooke:

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A couple of very fun sci-fi books

Posted on October 18, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

The early Cold War era was a time not just of great sci-fi cinema, but also of awesome sci-fi literature… and, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t all doom and gloom either.

Here are a couple of books, by two giants in the field, whose extremely fun approach to science fiction anticipated the sensibilities of much of today’s pop culture, including the tone of this year’s MCU entries Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

THE CYBERIAD

(Stanislaw Lem, 1965)

“One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligées, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noses, nymphs, naiads, and natrium. This last it could not do, and Trurl, considerably irritated, demanded an explanation.

‘Never heard of it,’ said the machine.”

The opening paragraph pretty much sets the tone for this whole collection of humorous short stories by Stanislaw Lem. Subtitled Fables for the Cybernetic Age, this book consists of a series of surreal tales revolving around two competing ‘constructor’ robots, Trurl and Klapaucius, involved in a game of one-upmanship that usually culminates in the construction of outlandish – and often destructive – machines (rendered in suitably playful illustrations by Daniel Mróz). In other words, be warned: this isn’t one of Lem’s classic ventures into hard science fiction, like Solaris. The science in The Cyberaid is as unabashedly – and delightfully – absurd as anything in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!

After three cartoonish preliminary stories, the book delivers the first piece of genius with ‘The Trap of Gargantius,’ a parable – somehow equal parts misanthropic and humanist at the same time – about two warring alien kingdoms whose attempts to develop their armies’ efficiency go wildly astray. Given when and where it was written, it’s very hard not to read this as a satire of the nuclear arms race, especially since Lem situates the narrative in a world of insane authoritarianism…

“The kingdom to which Trurl repaired was ruled by King Atrocitus. He was militarist to the core, and an incredible miser besides. To relieve the royal treasury, he did away with all punishments except for the death sentence. His favorite occupation was to abolish unnecessary offices; since that included the office of executioner, every condemned citizen was obliged to do his own beheading, or else – on rare occasions of royal clemency – have it done by his next of kin.”

…and overblown espionage:

“His greatest reform was the nationalization of high treason. As the neighboring kingdom was continually sending spies, he created the office of Royal Informer, who, through a staff of subordinate traitors, would hand over State secrets to enemy agents for certain sums of money.”

The translation from Polish to English was made by Michael Kandel, who not only had to do justice to the various plays on words, but at one point had to come up with several impressive verses (in what is arguably the most hilarious tale, where Trurl builds a pre-Chat GPT machine that can write poetry), including a whole poem about a haircut, ‘lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom’ – and ‘cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!’ Kandel did an astonishing job: The Cyberiad reads superbly. Practically every sentence earns, at the very least, a smile (‘Of the arts Atrocitus supported only those that entailed little expense, such as choral recitation, chess and military calisthenics.’).

It reminds me a lot of Terry Pratchett. Among all the frantic slapstick involving body-switching, convoluted mind games, and a host of eccentric – and usually quite greedy – space tyrants, Stanislaw Lem is able to combine witticisms with a sense of fable-like adventure (‘To the one who inquires what he should do if a real quake descends upon his vessel, most wags will answer that then it is quite enough to heave a sigh, there being little time for prayer or the writing of wills, and as for the eyes, these may be open or shut according to personal preference, for the fire will burn them out in any event.’). Plus, like Pratchett, his comedy sometimes takes the form of a parody of both specific political systems and more general structures of power – in one of my favorite tales, ‘The Seventh Sally or, How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good,’ an egomaniac scientist creates an entire civilization from scratch just so that an exiled king can vent his despotic urges.

The book reaches its peak in ‘Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius,’ a delirious, mischievous, and occasionally debauched labyrinth of narratives within narratives within narratives that reads like a missing link between Arabian Nights and Futurama.

Like I said, the tone could hardly be more distant from that of Solaris. And yet, if you squint, you can find some continuity in the way both books mimic the jargon of specialized academic theories and debates, creating tension between the highly logical and the seemingly irrational… It’s just that The Cyberiad brazenly plays this contrast for laughs:

“Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonesistent, but they nonexisted in an entirely different way. And then there were the imaginary dragons, and the a-, anti and minus-dragons (colloquially termed nots, noughts and oughtn’ts by the experts), the minuses being the most interesting on account of the well-known dracological paradox: when two minuses hypercontiguate (an operation in the algebra of dragons corresponding roughly to simple multiplication), the product is 0.6 dragon, a real nonplusser. Bitter controversy raged among the experts on the question of whether, as half of them claimed, this fractional beast began from the head down or, as the other half maintained, from the tail up.”

SECOND FOUNDATION

(Isaac Asimov, 1953)

“The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included all the planets of the Galaxy in a centralized rule, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes benevolent, always orderly. Human beings had forgotten that any other form of existence could be.

All except Hari Seldon.

Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. It was he who brought the science of psycho-history to its full development. Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.

The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions.”

The excerpt above is from Second Foundation’s prologue, filling in new readers – and perhaps reminding old ones – about the premise of the series and what took place in the first two volumes (discussed here and here). Although elegantly written, this isn’t really necessary, given that the main text competently weaves all required exposition into the ensuing narration and dialogues, but I guess it can help reassure hesitant or impatient readers fearful of traveling blind. That said, unless you find yourself stuck in a library or a bookstore without any appealing alternative, I don’t recommend making Second Foundation your starting point… Although, like in the previous novels, the chapters – set decades apart along the series’ extensive timeline – were initially published separately (in this case, as two novellas in Astounding Magazine, in 1948 and 1950), so much of the book cleverly pays off what Isaac Asimov spent years setting up (most notably the cliffhanger at the end of Foundation and Empire) that it’s way more satisfying to approach this as the culmination of a trilogy, rounding up one of the greatest masterpieces of the genre.

Not that this work doesn’t stand on its own… For one thing, its two stories are quite cohesive thematically. They both revolve around the efforts of the successors of the First Foundation (the one that Hari Seldon set up to eventually replace the decaying Galactic Empire) to find the mysterious Second Foundation (the one that Hari Seldon supposedly set up as a backup plan… or as something else entirely). And they’re particularly adventurous as well, delivering rip-roaring quests in which opposing figures fight through psychic powers – including at least one mutant! – and there are so many conspiracies within conspiracies that characters cannot even trust themselves. So, yeah, while many of the thrills once again derive from intellectual confrontations resolved through debate and deductive reasoning, some of Second Foundation nevertheless brought to my mind Grant Morrison’s New X-Men comics, with their telepathic battles and super-geniuses outsmarting each other.

Instead of Frank Quitely’s art, though, we get Asimov’s descriptions:

“The cool, overhead warning light flickered. He could follow the progress of the man who had entered the palace and, almost against his will, he felt the soft wash of emotional content touch the fibers of his brain.

He recognized the identity without an effort. It was Channis. Here the Mule saw no uniformity, but the primitive diversity of a strong mind, untouched and unmolded except by the manifold disorganizations of the Universe. It writhed in floods and waves. There was caution on the surface, a thin, smoothing effect, but with touches of cynical ribaldry in the hidden eddies of it. And underneath there was the strong flow of self-interest and self-love, with a gush of cruel humor here and there, and a deep, still pool of ambition underlying all.”

Like with The Cyberiad, it’s tempting to see the onset of a Cold War mindset in this paranoia-inflected saga about elusive enemies and a powerful-yet-invisible menace. Sure, you may argue that supernatural elements like the ability to read – and surgically reprogram – minds feel somewhat out-of-place in such a rationalist series, but consider how in tune they were with the zeitgeist, kickstarting a decade when American culture seemed obsessed with psychiatry, subliminal advertisement, and foreign ideological infiltration, including the possibility that Korean War veterans had been hypnotized by China. Indeed, I’m surprised Second Foundation doesn’t earn a mention in Daniel Pick’s book Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control.

The novel’s other remarkable feature is the inclusion of more female characters, most notably the plucky Arcadia (aka Arkady), the 14-year-old granddaughter of the series’ only prominent woman in the previous volumes, Bayta Darell. The unchallenged assumption that authority would simply remain an exclusive masculine privilege for fifty thousand years into the future is one of these books’ most depressing dimensions (perhaps there was some kind of galactic Men’s Rights uprising somewhere in-between, reversing all the gender-related social progress…). In any case, at least Arkady is a pretty cool protagonist – like a true geek, she consciously approaches her predicaments as the pulpy tale of intrigue they effectively are. Thus, not only does she dominate every scene she’s in, she also manages to see farther than the tight-ass grown-ups around her:

“‘Tell me, how did you know your father was expecting me?’

‘Oh, that was easy. Last week, he received a Personal Capsule, keyed to him personally, with a self-oxidizing message, you know. He threw the capsule shell into the Trash Disinto, and yesterday, he gave Poli – that’s our maid, you see – a month’s vacation so she could visit her sister in Terminus City, and this afternoon, he made up the bed in the spare room. So I knew he expected somebody that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about. Usually, he tells me everything.’

‘Really! I’m surprised he has to. I should think you’d know everything before he tells you.’

‘I usually do.’ Then she laughed.”

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (16 October 2023)

Posted on October 16, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Today’s reminder that comic books can be awesome is a tribute to Mike and Laura Allred, who have perfected a mix of pop art and superheroes in their Madman comics:

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 3

Posted on October 12, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Welcome back to Gotham Calling’s ongoing list of notable films that gave an audiovisual expression to the Cold War (previous installments here and here). This time around, many of my choices are less explicit, as by the mid-1950s sci-fi horror became one of the key genres to tap into growing nuclear panic (especially following the testing of the powerful H-bomb).

That said, as the Cold War expanded geographically, you also get increasingly different settings – and different national cinemas filming the conflict’s impact from a more personal, close-to-the-ground perspective. The movies I selected this time, apart from being interesting on their own, are also meant to illustrate this wider contrast.

21. Godzilla (Japan, 1954)

Last time, we finished with Animal Farm – and this time we’ll start with a couple of very different animal-based allegories (‘animallegories’). The most influential monster picture of all time posits a blatant indictment of nuclear weapons. The original Godzilla is so moody (not least because of the music), downbeat (despite the cathartic appeal of destruction), and disturbing (if you look at it from the perspective of then-recent Japanese traumas) that you wouldn’t have expected this somber horrorfest to spur a franchise with such kid-friendly connotations.

22. Them! (USA, 1954)

In this Hollywood contribution to the ‘creature feature’ subgenre the symbolism is less straightforward, reflecting the double fear of homegrown radiation and of attacks on domestic soil by an enemy that cannot be reasoned with… and which can only be fought if all national institutions play their part. I’ve previously expressed my fondness for Them! here.

23. I Live in Fear (Japan, 1955)

A Tokyo businessman is so fearful of the hydrogen bomb that he tries to move all of his family (including a couple of mistresses and illegitimate children) to Brazil. I Live in Fear offers an intriguing snapshot of 1950s’ Japan (rather different from Godzilla!), courtesy of Akira Kurosawa’s restless camera and mise-en-scène…

24. Kiss Me Deadly (USA, 1955)

Another recurring recommendation in this blog… Loosely adapting a hardboiled detective novel by Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly both subverts the source material and injects a whole new conspiracy angle that firmly ties the story into the nuclear era.

25. Piagol (South Korea, 1955)

Refusing to accept the 1953 armistice, a North Korean unit engages in a mountain-based guerrilla and gradually self-destructs in this very gritty war movie, whose terse style and ingenious cinematography make the most out of the rugged landscape. Piagol would be interesting enough as a twisted South Korean depiction of the recent (and, technically, ongoing) enemy… What makes it an even more stimulating historical object is the fact that the film was initially banned because the Seoul authorities considered that it overly humanized the communists, so the director had to add a patriotic flag to the final shot to get it approved.

26. The Prisoner (UK, 1955)

The Prisoner delivers a cerebral, Kafkaesque nightmare in the form an unnamed dictatorship where a cardinal accused of treason has an enthralling battle of wills against his interrogator. While touching on key points of Western indictments of the Eastern European regimes (political persecution, psychological torture, anti-clericalism), the film actually turns into a smart character study, not least because of Alec Guinness’ nuanced performance.

27. Sky Without Stars (West Germany, 1955)

Sky Without Stars pulls at your heartstrings through a love story in divided Germany, as seen from the West. It works powerfully on both literal and allegorical levels: more than the communist system itself, the main source of (individual and national) tragedy are all the different borders keeping people apart. Manipulative, yet affecting.

28. A Berlin Romance (East Germany, 1956)

A Berlin Romance pulls at your heartstrings through a love story in divided Germany, as seen from the East. With its young protagonists searching for their place in the world, whether in West or in East Berlin, this is arguably the most sensitive of a brief surge of productions – made in the context of de-Stalinization – observing and even criticizing the GDR’s shortcomings (albeit still expressing faith in socialism). Manipulative, yet affecting.

29. China Gate (USA, 1957)

Linking up Asia’s conflicts, this bonkers adventure has veterans from the Korean War join the French Foreign Legion in 1954 Indochina in order to keep up the good fight – with the help of a sultry smuggler called Lucky Legs. China Gate is so brazenly anti-communist, colonialist, and committed to domino theory that it has to be seen to be believed (the opening narration alone is an entire treaty!), its melancholic ending coming across as even more tragic once you consider what lays ahead. That said, this utterly glorious mess is yet another gem written and directed by Sam Fuller, whose visceral style means that every shot is bombastic and, every time you think you have the film figured out, it’s bound to surprise you in some way (like when Nat King Cole starts singing the movie’s theme song among a village’s ruins, or when Lee Van Cleef shows up as a loquacious schoolteacher-turned-warlord praising Ho Chi Minh and dreaming of working in Moscow…). Seriously, this could be a companion piece to the first arc of Fury MAX: My War Gone By! Plus, like many of Fuller’s pictures, it revolves around an idiosyncratic examination of racism.

30. Enemy from Space, aka Quatermass 2 (UK, 1957)

Like giant monsters, 1950s’ extraterrestrial threats (especially depersonalization narratives) are often read as a quintessential manifestation of Cold War anxieties on screen, so I had to include at least one entry into this emblematic cycle. My pick is this sequel to the – also pretty awesome – cult classic The Creeping Unknown (aka The Quatermass Xperiment). Enemy from Space revisits – and expands – the original’s premise about an alien menace, now with an added conspiracy threat that puts a very British spin on Invasion of the Body Snatchers: as argued by Matthew Jones, if US sci-fi produced metaphors about communism infiltrating small communities, here the villains seem to represent the mole-ridden UK establishment, which in the climax is pitted against a mobilized working class.

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (9 October 2023)

Posted on October 9, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

As the world spirals further into a hellhole of wars, refugees, and climate disasters, I take small pleasures where I can find them… This week’s reminder that comics can be awesome is yet another tribute to Jack Kirby, who spent much of his career drawing huge monsters with silly names:

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