Coming very soon – The Night God Screamed (1971) Part II of ‘Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge’ Starring Jeanne Crain.
The Electrical Secrets of Kenneth Strickfaden: or as Harry Goldman’s book title goes-“Dr. Frankenstein’s Electrician”
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) & Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964): Otto Preminger/Bryan Forbes – ‘A Conspiracy of Madness.’
No Way To Treat a Lady 1968 & Man On a Swing 1974: All the World’s a Stage: ‘Of Madness, Lipstick and ESP.’
And much much more from the clip joint, Hysterical Woman of the Week, Trailers to keep the Boogeyman away, Postcards From Shadowland and From The Vault!!!!
See ya soon-MonsterGirl
Read this wonderful review of a memorable film at the sensation blog Silver Screenings
Growing up in the 7os, a lot of what inspired me to follow my journey as a singer/songwriter had much to do with the brilliant, evocatively poignant and memorable compositions by artists like the great Paul Williams. I still can’t listen or sing one of his iconic songs without becoming a fountain of tears, melting into an emotional puddle of ‘feelings.’ His contribution to the world as a singer/songwriter has been so immense, that I feel inadequate just showing a little love here, instead of doing one of my long winded posts.
But I am too agitated with excitement about the documentary Paul Williams Still Alive, and to have found him alive and well on Twitter. I love you, We love you Paul Williams.
You have given us a magical, alchemical concoction of music that will forever flare up like molten gold in our hearts. It’s so good to see you again.
So here’s a just a little reminder of SOME of the things this beautiful, brilliant man has brought us from his heavenly throne where he sits with the other musical angels.
From the new documentary, here’s the official trailer for Paul Williams Still Alive
Karen Carpenter sings Rainy Days and Mondays
Kermit the Frog sings The Rainbow Connection from The Muppet Movie
Karen Carpenter sings We’ve Only Just Begun
Barbra Streisand sings Evergreen from A Star is Born
Jessica Harper sings Old Souls from Phantom of The Paradise
Here’s to the immortal genius! – With love Jo Gabriel the little singer/songwriting MonsterGirl
Barbra plays Daisy Gamble, a woman based on Bridie Murphy, who knows when the phone’s going to ring, and talks to flowers helping them to flourish. She seeks help from a doctor who specializes in hypnosis to help her quit smoking. Once she’s under, she becomes regressed back to several past lives and quite a few animated personalities, one of which he falls madly in love with. Co-Starring Yves Montand and Jack Nicholson, Simon Oakland, Larry Blyden and Bob Newhart.
With music by Burton Laneand lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, sung by the unchallenged songstress of the millennia Barbra Streisand, here’s just one of the spectacular, and transcendental songs of the film.
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever sung at the film’s coda
Mervyn LeRoy’sbold psychological thriller adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s play.
Nancy Kelly confronts her crispy clean dress wearin’ skipping little psychopathic child Rhoda (Patty McCormack) in a scene where both mother and child devolve into the realm of ‘hysterical’ over the truth behind poor Claude Daigle’s brutal death, prompted by his winning the penmanship medal.
“I have the prettiest mother in the world”
I was going to use Eileen Heckert’scompelling performance as the besotted mournful Hortense Daigle, but I couldn’t resist this climactic scene instead…
What’ll you give me for a basket of kisses?, I’ll give you a basket of hugs -MonsterGirl
Bette Davis plays Alicia Hull a librarian who is labeled a Communist by local politicians when she refuses to remove a controversial book from the library’s shelves. Directed by Daniel Taradash who wrote the screenplay for From Here To Eternity 1953, Picnic 1955, Don’t Bother To Knock 1952Â and Bell, Book and Candle 1958. Also starring Brian Keith and Kim Hunter.
The great graphic designer and iconic film TITLE master SAUL BASS
Saul Bassborn in my beloved New York City in 1920 is regarded as not only one of the finest graphic designers, was also an illustrator, film producer and director, publicist,and film editor but monumentally known for changing the look of opening sequences in the film industry and as THE man who created the ultimate film titles. Once you’ve seen a Saul Bass opening sequence, title and credits, you feel immediately drawn into the storytelling infrastructure, with just a few symbolic prompts.
He has created film credits and title sequences of over 60 films, and has often worked with directors such as Otto Preminger, Stanley Kramer just to mention a few. Especially notable for his work with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitch’s most memorable film Psycho, of which Bass designed the titles.
His trademark was to contribute Avant-garde title sequences and symbolic posters to a timeless art form, resonant, vibrantly reverberant and memorable, even still. Symbols have been a powerful, motivating and inspiring tool as far back as the creation of Runes. One single image can evoke an entire ethos into the collective consciousness.
His evocative opening sequences not only draw the audience in but Bass himself theorized that captivating the viewer, bringing the audience in right from the top , would make it so that you could tell what was going to happen in the story within the first few moments of the film.
The wonderful opening sequence in Walk On The Wild Side is particularly evocative for me, as it uses the fetish of female sexuality=feline energy. The black cat slinks across the screen as the titles roll-provocative as hell
He was also integral in helping out with visual concepts, storyboards but most significantly he created the titles for some of the biggest cinematic hit movies of the 20th century. Saul died in 1996.
Some of his other unmistakable title credits are for BONJOUR TRISTESSE, ONE,TWO THREE, THE CARDINAL, NINE HOURS TO RAMA, EDGE OF THE CITY (1957) SOMETHING WILD (1961) and he was uncredited for his work on ALIEN (1979) and the poster design for NO WAY OUT (1950)
Later on in his career he worked with Martin Scorsese on his remake of Cape Fear 1991, and his crime drama Goodfellas 1990.
So how did he get involved with TITLES? He began as a graphic designer, as part of his work he created many film symbols as part of the Advertising campaigns.
During that period he happened to be working on a symbol for Carmen Jones (1954) and Man With The Golden Arm for Otto Preminger. At one point in their working relationship Preminger and Saul Bass just looked at each other and said
“Why not make it move!… And it was really as simple as that"¦.”–Saul Bass
Saul thought to himself that initially the audience involvement with any film should and would really start with the very first frame"¦“You have to remember that until then titles had been a list of dull credits, mostly ignored or used for POPCORN TIME… So there seemed to be a real opportunity to use TITLES in a new way, to actually create a climate for the story that was about to unfold.”-Saul Bass
Just to show how effective using merely a powerful symbol to define a film’s motivation or theme, you could use the example of Man With The Golden Arm which opened in New York City in 1952. The only advertising gimmick used on the Marquee was the disjointed image of the illustrated arm, to suggest the subject of drug addiction.
When asked how the symbol functioned when translating it to the film’s narrative, Bass answered by saying this “Well you remember that the film was about drug addiction. And the symbol"¦that is"¦THE ARM"¦in it’s jagged form expressed the jarring disjointed existence of a drug addict. Now to the extent that it was an accurate and telling synthesis of the film in the Ad campaign, these same qualities came to it in the theater and of course with the addition of the motion of sound really came alive and set off the mood and the texture of the film.”
At some point in Bass’s career he made the transition of using a purely static graphic device, to creating movement and a choreography of postulations, evolving with IN HARMS WAY 1965 and SECONDS 1966.
“I started in graphics. Then as you’ve seen I began to move that graphic image in film. Somewhere down the line I felt the need to come to grips with the realistic or live action image which seemed to me at the time to be central to the notion of film"¦ Of course then, a whole new world was open to me.”
“Keep in mind however, despite my fascination with this, I still felt CONTENT was the key issue. I continued to look for simple, direct ideas. For example IN HARMS WAY 1965, the story about the sea war in the pacific, I used the violent and the eternal qualities of the sea, as a metaphor for the people in the events of the story.”
“In SECONDS 1966, a sixty year old man goes into a hospital, and through advanced surgical techniques is reconstituted in his entirety. And he comes out twenty five years old, and looking like Rock Hudson. Now tampering with humanity that way is pretty scary. So in the title, I broke apart,distorted and reconstituted the human face to set the stage symbolically for what was to come.”
the opening sequence from John Frankenheimer’s Seconds with Rock Hudson
Titles for William Wyler’s western starring Gregory Peck and Jean Simmons, THE BIG COUNTRY 1958, Carl Foreman’s intelligent war drama THE VICTORS 1963 and John Frankenheimer’sGRAND PRIX 1966 starring one of my favorite guys in the world, James Garner, seem to stretch the action even further toward total integration of the title and credits as they merge into the beginning of these films. With GRAND PRIXBass uses multiple identical images in one frame, much in the way the split screen is used. He also introduces the notion of the spectator, joining us as spectator.
Saul Bass, went through an evolutionary process as he embraced the art of ceremoniously attracting us into the story. in his own words, “Absolutely, previously I used title to symbolize, summarize, establish mood or establish attitude. At one point it occurred to me that a title could make a more significant contribution to the storytelling process. It could act as a prologue. It could deal with the time before. For instance in BIG COUNTRY, I tried to establish the notion of an Island of people in a sea of land. The vastness of which is penetrated by a stage coach. After an endless journey it reaches this isolated group of people and only then does the story begin. So THE BIG COUNTRY was the free months before, and THE VICTORS it was twenty five years before. WWI and the middle of WWII, and in GRAND PRIX it was a moment before the preparation for the Monte Carlo race.”
The end credits utilizing graffiti for the textual content of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wises masterpiece West Side Story. Saul Bass’ brilliant idea to end the film with the long credits in order to ease the audience out of the violent deaths of the main characters in the film.
TRIVIA: Bass not only designed the title sequence in Psycho (1960) he has been attributed to helping conceptualize the scene where Arbogast (Martin Balsam) ascends those fateful stairs to his unwitting doom. He also was responsible for drawing the storyboards for the shower scene under the specific directions of Hitchcock himself. Although as referenced in the book Truffaut on Hitchcock it is stated that he didn’t wind up using those sketches as they “weren’t right.”
Here are some examples of the moody, the powerful, the evocative, the iconic work of Mr Saul Bass-
It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)-directed by Stanley Kramer music by Ernest Gold
Psycho 196o – directed by Alfred Hitchcock music by Bernard Herrmann using only string instruments.
Anatomy of A Murder (1959) – director by Otto Preminger with original music by Duke EllingtonÂ
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)-directed by Otto Preminger with original music by Paul Glass
Oceans 11 (1960)-directed by Lewis Milestone with music by Nelson Riddle
The Victors (1963)-directed by Carl Foreman music by Sol Kaplan
Seconds (1966) – directed by John Frankenheimer music by Jerry Goldsmith
The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) – directed by Otto Preminger with music by Elmer Bernstein
Walk on The Wild Side (1962)– directed by Edward Dmytryk music by Elmer Bernstein
Vertigo (1958) – directed by Alfred Hitchcock with music by Bernard Herrmann
North by Northwest (1959) – directed by Alfred Hitchock music by Bernard Herrmann
Not With My Wife, You Don’t (1966)-directed by Norman Panama and music by John Williams with lyrics Johnny Mercer
Saint Joan (1957) – directed by Otto Preminger with music by Mischa Spoilansky
Storm Center (1956) – directed by Daniel Taradash music by George Duning
Such Good Friends (1971)-directed by Otto Preminger music by Thomas Z. Shepard
The Big Knife (1955)-directed by Robert Aldrich with music by Frank De Vol
The Seven Year Itch (1955)– directed by Billy Wilder with music by Alfred Newman
Spartacus (1960)-directed by Stanley Kubrick with music by Alex North
PHASE IV (1974)– Saul Bass directing with music by Brian Gasgoigne
West Side Story (1961)– directed by Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise with music by Leonard Bernstein and Irwin Kostal
As of late, I am finding myself drawn to David Janssen, his quiet charisma and sexy self-restrained smile that just kind of makes me swoon. I’ve been devouring as much of his work as I can, guilty pleasures like Once is Not Enough 1975, and tv movies like The Golden Gate Murders 1979, Warning Shot 1967, and his other tv persona as cheeky private eye, Harry O.Each night I coil up with an episode of that quintessential noir television thriller, The Fugitive to waltz me into slumberland.
And so, in honor of this wonderful actor who left us way too early …I’m kicking off this new Last Drive-In offering, Hysterical Woman of the Week, with one of the most powerful episodes from the series about the man who runs away a lot… the valiant and zen Dr Richard Kimble.
So with just a little further MG ramblings here’s a little ‘hysteria’ god how I resent, no!…abhor this archetype which is why I harp on it perhaps way too much, The Hysterical Woman…!
Here’s the pretty and unsung Louise Sorel portraying Edith Waverly getting a little upset with mother Edith (Ruth White)
*years later she would do hysterical brilliantly yet again as Velia Redford in one of my favorite episodes of Rod Serling’sNight Gallery’sThe Dead Man.
