In celebration of Sky Movies 007 HD launching on October 5—yes, an all-James Bond channel—here’s some fancy editing of all six Bonds pitted against each other in one glorious car chase scene.
The footage used is from Dr No, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Living Daylights, Goldeneye, The World Is Not Enough and Quantum of Solace.
Via High Definite
So rarely have I ever been quite beautifully claw hammered by a movie than I was by the 1965 film, Who Killed Teddy Bear? It’s one of those films that can leave you slack jawed over what you have just seen and all the while it just seeps further and further into your consciousness. It’s been days since I last watched it and I still cannot stop thinking about it.
The basic plot revolves around a young, beautiful DJ and aspiring actress, Norah (Juliet Prowse), who soon becomes the focal point of a stalker. He starts off as a creaky voiced, hot and heavy breathing obscene phone caller, making comments like “I know what you look like right now” and “I can make you feel like a real woman.” She’s annoyed at first but gets progressively more rattled as the number of calls grow and violence starts to blossom around her.
Where things get really interesting is that instead of building up the identity of Norah’s mystery obsessive to the very end, we find out who he is midway through the film. The lithe but muscular figure, often shiny with sweat and clad in white briefs, turns out to be the boyishly handsome busboy, Lawrence (Sal Mineo), who works with her at the discotheque. The jolt of seeing former teen idol and Rebel Without a Cause star Mineo as the sexually damaged obscene phone caller with homicidal tendencies is as strong now as it must have been back when it was originally released.
But Mineo’s performance is much more than just a teen dream novelty. He brings some serious depth and layers to Lawrence, creating a character who is alternately sad and frightening, mostly due to his childhood rooted dysfunction. Whether he is taking his mentally challenged sister to the zoo or working out with an intensity that precedes either the hottest sex act or the worst murder, Mineo is a powerhouse here. His Lawrence is right up there with Anthony Perkins in Psycho and John Amplas’s titular role in George Romero’s Martin.
The film itself is a powder keg of beautifully moody B&W cinematography and the grimy underbelly of the human condition. The opening credit sequence alone sets the tone, featuring a blurry undulation of bodies as a little girl watches, clutching her cherished teddy bear. She turns away, only to fall down the stairs, with her face now suddenly blank, as if she is dead or brain damaged. Without a breath of relief, the actual film starts in a cramped, shadowy bedroom, complete with a nightstand littered with lurid publications, featuring titles like French Frills and When She Was Bad. A mirror reflects the image of a man caressing his bare chest while looking at photos of Norah, right before calling her up.
The elements of sleaze continue as Norah encounters police Lieutenant Dave Madden (Jan Murray), a single dad whose fascination with all manners of sexual deviancy infects his home life. (At one point, one of his coworkers mentions how Dave’s young daughter talks like a “vice squad officer.”) Even Norah’s boss, the glamorous ball buster Marian (Elaine Stritch), comes across like an uneasy mixture of maternal and less than pure motive. We even get some now-historic footage of a seamier New York City, with the highlight being Lawrence’s jaunt to an adult bookstore. Seeing shelves lined with girlie mags and books ranging from Fanny Hill, William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch, Hubert Selby Jr.‘s Last Exit to Brooklyn to more purple prose titles like Dance Hall Dyke and My Naughty, Naughty Life is a much beloved peek into the pre-gentrification and Disneyfication of Times Square.
Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a brave film that gives you no easy answers. Sadly, it didn’t really do a thing for anyone that was involved, career-wise. Mineo did continue to do film, TV and theater work, including staging a controversial version of the prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes that featured a young Don Johnson. All of that was cut short in 1976, when he was murdered by a drifter. Elaine Stritch continues to be a monolithic character actress on Broadway, film and TV. Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray and Daniel J. Travanti, who has the small role of Carlo, Marian’s deaf bouncer, all went on to have healthy careers in television. The same could be said for director Joseph Cates, though perhaps that is the biggest shame given that he never was given the chance again to direct anything as nuanced and challenging as Who Killed Teddy Bear?. In an ideal world, this film should have forged a different career direction for Cates and certainly for Mineo, whose wounded eyes and brutal actions are hard to forget.
Who Killed Teddy Bear? is ripe for proper rediscovery. It’s a mystery why this great film is still not available legally on DVD here in the US. (It did get a release in the UK, though that appears to already be out-of-print.) It is viewable on YouTube, for anyone who does not have access to the UK, PAL formatted disc. Hopefully, it will someday get the proper release that it so justly deserves.
Alice Cooper’s pretty awful attempt at a title tune for the James Bond film, The Man With The Golden Gun, was given to Bond producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, but they chose instead to go with Lulu’s far more lascivious number, the raunchiest of all the Bond themes.
I think they made the right call. Some people hate the Lulu song, but it’s one of my top favorites, up there with Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” and Tom Jones belting out “Thunderball.”
“The Man With The Golden Gun” would appear on the final Alice Cooper group album, 1974’s equally tired Muscle of Love.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Thunderball’ opening credits with the theme song that Johnny Cash submitted
I highly recommend you watch Mitch Schultz’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule. It’s thoroughly engrossing, well-rounded, deeply insightful and goes directly to the folks who know the subject well for perspectives that are informed by experience, both scientific and metaphysic.
Drawing information and inspiration from Rick Strassman’s research on DMT and psychedelics and utilizing lysergic imagery created by Scott Draves, The Spirit Molecule takes us close to the edge and let’s us peer into an almost unfathomable mystery…one that ultimately must be experienced to be appreciated. Consider this film a springboard toward the infinite.
With Joe Rogan, Alex Grey, Rick Strassman, Terence McKenna and Ralph Metzner.
The Looters. Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Ray Winstone, and Paul Simonon. Photo: Caroline Coon.
Here’s a little something from the DM archives:
These are fictional music groups or solo acts that were created for film or TV. Some are quite excellent.
1. The Mosquitoes - “Gilligan’s Island”
2. Android - “Buck Rogers In The 25th Century”
3. The Looters -“Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains”
4. The Flowerbuds - “Carry On Camping”
5. Drimble Wedge And The Vegetations - “Bedazzled”
6. Steven Shorter - “Privilege”
7. The Bugaloos - “The Electric Company
8. Tom Monroe - “SCTV
9. The Queen Haters” - SCTV
To be continued…
Pathé Color, a process developed in 1905 that employs stencils to colorize black and white film, adds an almost lysergic intensity in this short movie exploring the lives of a family in South America, the nomadic Taureg and a village in Mali.
Cheerfully intrepid—some might say kamikaze—Danish journalist Mads Brügger (The Red Chapel) is back with an outrageous new comedic documentary, The Ambassador. In the film Brügger dons some expensive white linen suits, employs a gold-plated cigarette holder and becomes the mysterious “Mr. Corzen,” a shady character who purchases—yes, purchases—an ambassadorship from the country of Liberia via an Internet broker! Hilarity—as well as blood diamonds, murder and bribery—ensues.
In the video below, I asked Mads some questions, like “Why did no one ever comment on the absurdity of a white Danish guy acting as the envoy from Liberia to the Central African Republic?”, if there was ever at any point during the making of The Ambassador when Brügger feared that his brazen ruse was about to be exposed and if he’s worried now that Liberia wants Denmark to extradite him!
Tonight in Hollywood, Mads Brügger will be at the 8pm screening of The Ambassador at Cinefamily and tomorrow at the 7pm screening as well, and the film has a one-week run there through September 6th.
The Ambassador is currently screening in New York, San Francisco, Austin and several other cities across America and on most major cable TV video-on-demand platforms.
Watch the trailer, below:
As if it wasn’t already patently obvious to everyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, last night at the Republican National Convention, 82-year-old actor Clint Eastwood took to the stage and showed America and the rest of the world what the Republican Party is REALLY all about: Senile old white gits yelling crazy, incoherent shit.
Last night, without much effort, Eastwood’s loopy “skit” turned the house full of extremely Caucasian Republican convention goers “every which way but loose.” The rest of the country was just deeply embarrassed for the octogenarian Hollywood legend. The RNC apparently wanted Clint there as the embodiment of modern Republicanism, a stand-in for Ronald Reagan, if you will. Eastwood inadvertently delivered in spades, coming off like a sad, old, spaced cowboy, giving the, uh… strong impression, that the GOP is full of crazy elderly folks suffering from senile dementia.
At least they were happy to loudly cheer one on. As Michael Moore wrote at The Daily Beast this morning:
Speaking to Invisible Obama last night, in a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech & Chong, Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: “We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!”
With his cringe-worthy word salad performance on the same level as Sarah Palin’s, someone close to Clint Eastwood should have said “NO” and said it firmly and hung up the phone when the RNC came a callin’. Looking at the evidence of last night’s pathetic televised fiasco—and his loathsome wife and spoiled daughter’s execrable E! network reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company—Clint seems to be going the route of Charlton Heston, a once legendary Hollywood star, who now comes off like a cranky, punch-drunk fighter who has taken far too many blows to his noggin.
I’m sure Clint being offered the presidency of the NRA isn’t far behind!
The best part? How NO ONE is talking about Mitt Romney today. They’re all talking about how crazy old Clint Eastwood went on national tee-vee last night and shit in his diaper!
NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson put it succinctly when she described the cut-aways to Ann Romney during Eastwood’s skit as like watching “the mother of the bride listening to a drunken wedding toast.”
The Clint Eastwood memes are proliferating like Tribbles today. You’ve already seen the “Eastwooding” meme, here are a few more:
Watch and weep:
From the Dangerous Minds archives, a video/music mix I happen to like very much.
For you folks with a taste for the bizarre, here’s a mix of Indonesian horror films and garage/psyche rock from Southeast Asia.
Look Back In Angkor featuring music by Srei Sothear, Sin Sisamouth, Prum Manh, Meas Samon, The Gang Of Harry Roesli, Aka, and lots of tracks by artists unknown that appeared on rare homemade audio cassettes.
A nice video montage of Stanley Kubrick’s one-point perspective shots by kogonada on Vimeo.
Via Nerdcore