by Sam Juliano
The annual New Jersey children’s book bonanza known as the Princeton Book Festival was staged Saturday at Hinds Plaza next to the Princeton Public Library. Jeremy, Sammy IV and I were thrilled to chat with Caldecott record-holder David Wiesner, who grew up in New Jersey and presented his new book “I Got It”; with good friend Lauren Castillo, whose new work “Imagine”, authored by Juan Felipe Herrera was center stage on her table, and with Rowboat Watkins, whose latest, “Big Bunny” was his own latest offering. We also crossed paths with David Ezra Stein, Greg Pizzoli, Daniel Salimieri, Susan Verdi, Angela Dominguez and others on this beautiful day in the center of the Garden State. (Jeremy pictured with Wiesner).
James Clark and J.D. Lafrance published magisterial essays this past week on Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets at the site.
Jamie Uhler’s continuing horrorfest essays this past week included fabulous pieces on George Waggner’s 1941 horror classic The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr. and Lynn Ransay’s 2017 psychological horror You Were Never Here:
“One of the last of the singularly title Universal monster films, I’ve long really liked this feature anyways. Universal’s long held, and rightly earned, ‘House of Horror’ was running on fumes as the Forties hit. Frankenstein and Dracula had already been done within 3 variations each (with a fourth Frankenstein title in 1942), and things looked bleak. None of the new enterprises seemed to add much to the stable, but with the retreads continuing to rake in the dough, who could really care to establish new (1940’s The Invisible Man Returns, for example, was a smash, prompting The Invisible Woman to be rushed into production)? It was under this that The Wolfman came, a genuine new venture, featuring a new monster not previously explored in full in quite this way. Werewolf of London, from 6 years prior, doesn’t attempt the emotional anguish of this film, as good as it is (and I’m slated to do it this season). Some works wonderfully, while some does not—Lon Chaney Jr. is a little sluggish as the sensitive, love struck wolf, but otherwise, this stands tall with the classics of the Universal monster stable.
The film is the tale of Lon Chaney Jr’s Larry Talbot moving to the otherwise tranquil Wales country side to take over the family estate upon receiving news that his brother has passed. His father–Claude Rains (also known as the Invisible Man in Universal lore) and him quickly reconcile, and Larry takes to becoming acquainted with the townsfolk whom he’s soon to be largely preside over (the Talbot’s are old money, living in a castle like estate and exert immense influence over the town). Larry soon takes to Gwen, a shop girl in an antique store in town. Larry spies her, and moves in, looking for any excuse to talk her up. He’s persuaded to buy an antique walking stick/cane emboldened with a silver wolf head handle, which allows the film an ingenious way for Gwen to broach the area lore of the werewolf. Quickly, Larry is trying his best to court the already engaged Gwen, taking her and a friend Jenny for a night stroll through a shadowing marsh like forest (the town is so small that is goes from Main Street to dense, foggy forest in about 25 yards). When a group of Gypsies promise fortune telling, Jenny becomes interested, but when Bela the Gypsy sees the ominous pentagram on her palm he runs away. Soon Bela is a werewolf and murdering Jenny (Bela is played by Bela Lugosi in a fun turn, giving the famous Dracula a chance to become another monster). Larry rushes in and murders the wolf with the silver handle of the cane, before himself collapsing in pain from being bitten near the heart by the beast. Larry awakens to murder charges—as in death the wolf returns to the human Bela form—and now, running through his veins, the ability to himself turn into a werewolf. From there we get Larry’s struggle as the films establishes the now werewolf standard that they kill whom they love, and Larry works to resist the urge to murder, knowing that it’s a battle he’ll ultimately lose.
The now famous Wolfman make-up is still a treat, it takes 10 seconds in an off-screen dissolve but took 10 hours in a makeup chair, and much of the pathos of the final reel is very consistent with the humanism so often found in Universal’s monster movies that looked to bring genuine sympathy to their horrid creations. Soon, the Wolfman character would become itself an overused entity, with Chaney Jr. donning the hair and fangs for no less than 4 sequels. In the end though I can’t really complain, I love Universal’s classic Horror works, and many of the sequels are great works in and of themselves. The ones that aren’t, especially the exquisitely silly ones, formed in their time the schlockier avenues Horror could be persuaded to go down as the decades came and went. Any true Horror fan loves trash, and few, if ever, did anyone due garbage as sedate and atmospheric as the silly Universal monsters sequels and retreads did.”
The Ramsay film:
“I wasn’t sure about initially picking You Were Never Really Here, not out of potential distaste, but instead a sinking suspicion that it might not be a full-fledged, actual Horror film, i.e. the sole reason for this annual watching extravaganza. But in the end my desire to see the film coupled with Ramsay’s previous masterwork, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), that was also a bracing psychological thriller, that cinched its selection. Thinking more about We Need To Talk About Kevin when gearing up to do this, I summarized that that is probably a Horror movie too, as, if you take my oft-stated Horror movie designation—“a film where the Director sets out to scare the viewer”—it certainly fits this description. It was one of the most gripping, psychological shattering works of any year, and, while You Were Never Really Here doesn’t match it in this way, it does add some other Horror like touches, and is very good in its own right.
It opens to an extended, hypnotically illusive first act, where we watch Joaquin Pheonix’s Joe clean up a hotel room that has presumably just seen a violent altercation. Ramsay is smart to cask her anti-hero in such a way, as paired with her reliance on his point of view for much of this, we are lulled into the aesthetic of the Slasher movie. It’s a conscious decision to cask doubt on Joe’s predilections, a fact drawn all the more clear when he arrives home to a mother nearing the end of a midnight television screening of Hitchcock’s Slasher opus Psycho. Here is a single son, living with an older mother bordering on senile, shown to having a predilection to self-harm, we begin to think we’re about to watch another Norman Bates, only this time not the slender, off-beat charming Anthony Perkins, but Pheonix’s bulked up, slightly heavy reincarnation. The character owes more to Travis Bickle in spirit and psychological state (and Tom Hardy in hulking stance) than Norman Bates. By the time Ramsay reveals more, we better understand Joe’s work; while he is very much a killer, expertly so as a matter of fact, he’s setting out to rescue kidnapped woman and young girls from actual monsters. Thus, we’ve subverted much of the style of the opening, and began additional points of inquiry when a brothel siege to rescue Nina evokes the Bickle massacre rescue at the end of Taxi Driver, with Ramsay stripping the scene free from any of Scorsese exciting bloodlust, and finding considerable worth by employing the haunting, airplane hanger recorded ‘Angel Baby’, by Rosie and the Originals. It’s one of the most haunting, beautiful works in all of Pop, and given inclusion in a film partially about the sex trade of kidnapped young women, the top 5 1960 hit seems positively eerie. The film then features a double cross, where Joe has to both bear the brunt of several violent altercations and show the endurance to again save Nina. Additional Horror touches are recalled when a water burial scene hauntingly lights the cascading of hair, which those paying attention will no doubt recall how the murdered Shelley Winters’ hair matches the swaying reeds in that frighteningly alluring sequence in Laughton’s seminal The Night of the Hunter. Joe might have something resembling salvation for a brief moment at the end, but like Taxi Drivers conclusion, we wonder how long such a damaged mental state can hold out.”
We saw (or will be seeing) two films at the Edgewater multiplex tonight and I will update with final grades in the morning:
White Boy Ricky (Edgewater multiplex)
Lizzie (Edgewater multiplex)