Three Films Make A Post: A Reign Of HORROR... a man-made monster on the loose!

Black Friday (1940): Arthur Lubin’s gangster brain transplant movie with Boris Karloff as a rather mad scientist and Stanley Ridges as a mild mannered English literature professor who gets parts of a gangster’s brains grafted on to save his life (and Karloff’s ego) with the expected results seems a bit like an attempt by Universal to poach on Warner’s territory. The mix of gangster film and mad science yarn doesn’t exactly play to Universal's strengths as a studio, though, curiously enough, it’s not the gangster movie parts that don’t work but the mad science. Lubin shows a decent eye for the former and very little flair for the latter. Karloff’s as good as always and Ridges works his double role rather well. Bela Lugosi pops in for a couple of scenes too but doesn’t really have much to do here. Otherwise, this is exactly the movie you’ll expect it to be, for better or for worse.

The Song Keepers (2017): I was a little disappointed by Naina Sen’s documentary about the history of Aboriginal Women’s Choirs singing German Lutheran hymns translated (and wonderfully and wondrously changed) into their respective languages and one contemporary choir’s travel to Germany to perform these hymns there. It’s the kind of film you really want to like - it’s about people who more than deserve their moments, fascinating (and pretty beautiful) music, and the messiness of colonial history, after all. But its execution is rough, with way too many scenes of everyone complimenting everyone else on their awesomeness, scenes that seem to belong into a private holiday video more than into a documentary, intercut with interviews that reach from the bland, to the informative, to the sort of thing that’ll make every sane person cry, all mixed with little focus or artistry in a manner that often borders on the random. It’s a shame, really, because these women and their stories are much more interesting and important than the film’s presentation makes them out to be.


I Know Where I’m Going (1945): One of the strengths of The Archers – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – was to make films that combined a sense of place and landscape – here the coast of Scotland – and a naturalistic feel set apart from the stagey predilections of much of British cinema of their time with a sense of mood and metaphor that was (and still is) anything but naturalistic. This is the sort of artistry that never feels contrived and artificial even if it by all rights should, so a film like this which puts its critique on a very specific type of materialism into the form of a romance of slow self-discovery with heavy folkloric undertones seems perfectly logical and natural, and not at all contrived. It’s also a film about the very British interpretation of the connection between people and landscapes, a love of rural communities that never becomes that sickly kind of love that tends to end in pogroms, about superstition and folk belief, and the dangers of straight lines.