A Page of Madness (1926)

Original title: 狂った一頁, Kurutta Ichipeiji

The Internet – well, and people who have read the script as well – tells me that A Page of Madness is about about a man (Masuo Inoe) taking on a janitorial position at an asylum to free his wife (Yoshie Nakagawa), who is imprisoned there.

One can understand about as much about Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness. But seeing how the film lacks intertitles, a third of its original runtime, as well as the narration that most probably accompanied it in Japan on its release, this is where any kind of unambiguous understanding ends when watching it, at least for me.

Instead, the viewer is drawn into a series of scenes that are influenced by the angles and shadows of German expressionism, and often wildly experimental. There are quick and violent edits, fades and superimpositions you wouldn’t expect in any movie made in the mid-20s, a bit like Eisenstein turning his montage technique inwards (or into the cosmic), or like Maya Deren in an aggressive mood. Some of this, I’d most probably be better able to understand on an intellectual level if I had a better grasp of traditional Japanese theatre forms, but feeling instead of thinking one’s way through a film like this might be the better approach in any case.

For most of the film’s wild and improbable (in the best way) technical experiments are put in service of visually reproducing altered states of mind, putting into moving pictures how it must feel to see reality like the “mad” do. The only way to really achieve that is by giving up much of already established filmic naturalistic language and aiming for something harsher, wilder and stranger.

Because mental illnesses are how they are, the film’s handful of moments of beauty are rare, short, and quickly dissolve into panic, anger and dread. A sense of doom lingers, shadows threaten and the only reasonable way to live may be to wear the mask of madness. So it is little wonder this is often seen as some kind of proto arthouse horror film. After all, A Page of Madness’ images linger and disturb, even nearly a hundred years after it was made.

The Man and the Monster (1959)

Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

Famous pianist Samuel Magno (Enrique Rambal) has retreated from the limelight for mysterious reasons, hiding away in a hacienda on the outskirts of a small Mexican village. He’s ready for some sort of comeback, though. He has arranged the big public reveal of his protégé Laura (Martha Roth), whom he believes to be the Greatest Pianist in the World (piano fans around the world are keeping records and score tables of piano duels, I assume).

Because of this coming attraction, surprisingly two-fisted music critic Ricardo Souto (Abel Salazar) comes to town for an unarranged interview. Magno, living alone with his severe and rather creepy, cat-carrying, mother (Ofelia Guilmáin) and Laura, is very reticent about any attempts of Ricardo’s to speak with him, but Laura is rather smitten by Ricardo (he is played by the writer/producer, after all).

Ricardo for his part stumbles upon Magno’s secret. It concerns the corpse of the former Greatest Pianist in the World (also Martha Roth) locked into a side-chamber, a pact with the devil, and the fact that Magno turns into a furry-faced fiend whenever he plays the piano (because the devil has a weird sense of humour).

As regular readers know, I just love Mexican horror cinema of this era. The Man and the Monster, directed by the often genuinely brilliant Rafael Baledón, is no exception to that rule.

As usual, I find myself particularly delighted by the film’s mixture of genres and tones. At its core, this is of course a contemporized gothic horror version of the Faustian pact (with shades of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, if you want to see it that way, and I certainly enjoy doing that, if only to annoy the squares), but it is also a vigorously played melodrama, as well as the kind of monster movie that includes a wild fist fight between a music journalist and a furry fiend the journalist actually wins.

As is so often the case in his movies, Baledón is a master of drenching rooms into long and deep shadows, of having his characters throw meaningful, heavy glances at the slightest provocation – though provocations here are generally not slight – and of treating the silliest, slightest moments of the script with a heaviness of emotion and expression that to me often seems at the core of what makes Gothic cinema so impressive and expressive.

Baledón is particularly honest about where the visual style of his gothic horror is actually coming from – the nods to Universal cinema and the shadows of a – typically not gothic as we non-academics understand the term – Val Lewton production are there and accounted for (lovely as ever), but there’s also that brilliant, minimalist scene in which Magno flashes back to his pact, emoting in front of a set that’s all classical movie expressionism and could be taken directly from Caligari.

On a subtextual level, this is a film curiously fitting to our times in some regards, seeing as it concerns a man of influence and power first taking control of the life of a young woman to then be able to destroy it for his own convenience. Of course, she is also saved by her two-fisted music critic instead of doing any of her saving  herself, which would not play well in a contemporary movie, but this is still a film made in 1959. And a rather wonderful one at that.

The Night God Screamed (1971)

Mild-mannered and pleasant Willis Pierce (Alex Nicol) is a curious preacher to get a homicidal mad-on for, but when he very mildly berates the leader of the dope-smoking (gasp!) Jesus freak hippie cult that’s robbing him of the little money he is able to collect for his work, he thereby enrages the leader of the pack so much, the poor man is crucified on the big cross he just bought. The preacher’s wife Fanny (Jeanne Crain), who wasn’t into Willis buying a cross already, sees insult added to injury by finding his corpse. Her statement is also going to be responsible to send the cult leader to the electric chair, rather to the anger of his gang.

A year later, Fanny is working for the judge who presided in the cult leader’s trial. He asks her to babysit his quartet of teenage children for a weekend, because those young ones clearly can’t be trusted without a responsible adult around.

Unfortunately, it is this night when some cult members decide to take vengeance on Fanny, and soon a tense siege situation evolves. And believe me, Rio Bravo did not include teenagers among the besieged for a reason.

Going by its plot, its title, and the year it was made, one would expect Lee Madden’s The Night God Screamed to be a rather nasty bit of exploitation cinema. Alas (or fortunately, if you’re as mild-mannered as Willis was) that is not the case. This is a bit of cheap but mostly classy cinema, so much so even its hippie bashing – an easy bit of work in 1971 – does lack the nastiness in tone you would expect (hope for?).

As it stands, the level of violence and exploitation on display throughout the film would have been on the mild side for an ABC Movie of the Week. However, like with many of those films, Night is a perfectly decent little movie, shot with a degree of technical acumen, effectively structured, and pretty satisfying when one doesn’t go into it expecting a movie about a night during which god screamed.

As any actual TV thriller of the style would, this, too, does feature an aging Old Hollywood star in the lead role, and as in an actual TV movie, Jeanne Crain gives the kind of effective performance that carries a film like this through the vagaries of mediocre teen actors.

The siege sequence are competently tense and effective, though somewhat lessened after the fact by a pretty stupid and not exactly surprising plot twist, so there’s really very little to complain about here. Beyond the fact this isn’t the film about a preacher crucifying cult and/or screaming godhoods I was hoping for, but October is still young.