On a lighter note, this column has now been linked by the hilarious and hirsute gentlemen of the American Mustache Institute and their strange, redoubtable website -- at americanmustacheinstitute.org -- good evidence that wonders never cease. Long may their appendages wave.

Movie 62

The Day the Earth Stood Still
(Robert Wise, 1951, b&w, 92 m.)

I have ignored this movie for a long time, but looking at apocalyptic b&w stuff this week put me in the mood. What a pleasant surprise. This is certainly not your average B-movie sf junk. This is exceptionally high-level sf junk. Director Robert Wise had a long career doing science fiction, but he also did The Sand Pebbles, The Sound of Music, West Side Story and Run Silent, Run Deep. He won two Oscars. He worked on Citizen Kane. The cast includes Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe and Sam Jaffe, all notable in their day. The production values look B-budget, but the quality of the story is what stands out. Minimal gimmicks present a simple tale: Earth must stop the violence and aggression or the cosmic police will do it for us! A more straightforward commentary on earthly politics would be difficult to dream up. The movie actually won an award for international understanding. Another surprise, the mother-son relationship of Mrs. Benson (Patricia Neal) and Bobby (Billy Gray) looked like a clear preview of Shane. I swear some of their dialog was used again in that classic Western, which came out two years later.

Movie 61

The Road Warrior
(George Miller, Australia, 1981, 95 m.)

This is the second in Australia's most famous pair of movies, Mad Max and Mad Max 2, renamed for the American market. They cemented the international stardom of Mel Gibson, who plays a young policeman and dad in Mad Max, in a civilization almost unraveled. His family and his best friend are destroyed, and he becomes a one-man destruction squad in retaliation. A vigilante movie that is bleak, poetic and eerie. In this sequel, Max re-emerges as a world-weary warrior. The producer-director team of Byron Kennedy and George Miller claim they studied old American Westerns and Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces in preparation, and you can see much of that information in play. But the look of the movie definitely comes straight from A Boy and His Dog (below), and offers splendiferous characters including the Feral Kid, who throws a stainless steel boomerang, the charismatically ugly Gyro Captain in yellow long johns, Wez the punkest killer of them all, and the mysterious leader of the pack, the Humungus. One of the all-time great action movies.

Movie 60

A Boy and His Dog
(LQ Jones, 1975, 90 m.)

One of my favorites and a genuine original, based on a story by Harlan Ellison about a post-nuclear future when a boy and his telepathic dog go on raunchy adventures in the wasteland. He finds food for the dog, the dog finds females for him. Don Johnson is young and sharp as a boy about to get more sex, more systematically than he could possibly enjoy -- in the world of Down Under, which is at least as strange as the aboveground world of mutant green Screamers. The dog is so good that it nearly got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. With maybe the best surprise ending I've ever seen in a movie. The desertscape and post-WW4 gangs of this amazing movie are unquestionably the inspiration for the Australian gangs in The Road Warrior, and probably the source for Max's pet dog, too.

Movie 59

Eraserhead
(David Lynch, 1977, b&w, 89 m.)

I hadn't seen this movie on a big screen in years, so I went to Webster U.'s film series to get the bigger-than-life freakish experience. Whew. I remember my astonishment at the original release. Back then I thought, This is a screening of an entire nightmare. This time, I felt the same emotions but with less fascination and more discomfort. The movie has probably the most unappealing setting I've ever seen on a screen. Lynch clearly loves factories, as he says himself in Lynch (below), but that place in Eraserhead is at Edgar Allan Poe level. Actually scary, not campy. And then come the body parts and the body-things and the screechy music.

Movie 58

Lynch
(black&white, US/Poland, 2007, documentary, 84 m.)

One predictable documentary response to a famously weird director is to enlist him as the star of an idol-worshipping nonlinear movie about him at work. Strange angles, strange lighting, strangely sequenced establishing shots will often follow. (The director/s of this movie won't even name themselves normally.) Sure enough, we learn that director David Lynch is different from you and me. At least, the movie is a little bit playful and not entirely weighted with ponderous A&E genius-treatment, but it certainly could have been shorter. Even so, I ran into a young movie buff I know, who came for the screening of Lynch and left when Eraserhead came on! So, what do I know?

Nick Otten is assistant director in the Theater Program at Clayton High School and adjunct professor in the graduate Communications MAT Program at Webster University. He consumes vast quantities of books and movies. In his description of Nick's List, he says,  "For every single work, I’ll quickly post a brief commentary — each week, at least 1 book and 2 movies, usually more. Maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. Sometimes, not often, I may go crazy and write some kind of extra, a page or so, on some movie or pair of movies or some genre, actor, or something else, or how one book relates to another or a movie or you or me or us. Such stuff will be just one click away, guaranteed."

To read the previous Nick's List posts click May 26 , May 19 , May 12,   May 5 , April 28 , April 21 , March .