Stanley Donen’s Charade is one of those films I can watch repeatedly and never seem to quite tire of its celluloid magic. It has that delightful filmic quality reminiscent of Alfred Hicthcock’s best work, and it is not surprising that Charade is often described as “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never directed.” This is probably true as choreographer turned director, Donen claimed he had:

“...always wanted to make a movie like one of my favorites, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest”

It’s fifty years since Charade opened at the box office, with its perfect star pairing of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, pitting their wits against Walter Matthau, James Coburn and George Kennedy in scenic Paris. Grant was concerned that at the age of 59, he might look a tad lecherous chasing after the beautiful, 33-year-old Hepburn. Peter Stone’s script was therefore changed to accommodate Grant’s concerns.

Hepburn had no such qualms as she had already been courted on celluloid by several “older men,” Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, both Humphrey Bogart and William Holden in Sabrina, Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon and Burt Lancaster in The Unforgiven. Hepburn also had a tempestuous affair with Holden that allegedly led the actor to have a vasectomy to stop Hepburn’s hopes to conceive his child.

Described as the most naturally beautiful woman in the world, Hepburn was a fascinating woman, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, sexually-liberated Belgian, who lived her life by her own rules. President Kennedy was smitten by her (which actress didn’t he desire?) and he said his favorite film was Roman Holiday. It was Hepburn who sang “Happy Birthday” to the JFK the year of his assassination.

CyborgCity made this five-minute version of Charade for 90to5 Editing Challenge. It is kind-of-like today’s trailers, where the whole of the film is revealed/ruined in that three-minute teaser. So, if you haven’t seen Charade, someone posted the entire film here. If you have, well, here’s a Charade refresher course in just five minutes.
 

Tim: Well, that’s no ordinary rabbit.
King Arthur: Ohh.
Tim: That’s the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!

If I bought these Monty Python and the Holy Grail rabbit slippers, they’d probably just end up being extra expensive Monty Python dog toys. My dogs are like that. Assholes.

The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog slippers are available through Firebox for $40.89.

Update: Some less expensive ones can be found here.
 

 
Via Laughing Squid

 
In 1951 the Swedish film industry went on strike to protest high taxes in the entertainment sector, and Ingmar Bergman, who at 33 had already directed a handful of movies and had also overseen the Gothenburg city theater for three years, signed on to do a series of commercials for Bris soap, in part to support his already teeming brood (two ex-wives and five children, with a sixth on the way). The commercials are playful, fascinating, and utterly Bergmanesque—in the best possible way.
 

 
What I don’t mean by “Bergmanesque” is that they’re brooding or depressing or austere—as Bergman’s popular image would dictate. No, they are loose and original and supremely confident in the form of cinema. Bergman has had the misfortune to be identified with a couple of not overly representative movies—Persona (1966) and above all, The Seventh Seal (1957)—and his true nature as a restless and protean prober of human nature somehow got a little lost in the mix. Bergman was nothing if not a relentlessly theatrical director, and few were more confident in exploring the limits of narrative in the medium. The parodies don’t quite suffice to encapsulate the director of the masterpieces Fanny and Alexander or Scenes from a Marriage.

Dana Stevens of Slate does a good job of pointing out some of Bergman’s trademark tropes in the video at the bottom of this page. She helpfully notes that the only limitation imposed on Bergman by the soap company was that one of two clunky phrases about soap and bacteria had to be included at some point. There are eight of the Bris commercials, they are all black-and-white, and the visual quality leaves something to be desired by the standards of 2013, but to Bergman’s credit, they are all wildly different and memorable and convey some succinct point about the nature of cinema as well as delivering the promised virtues of the soap.
 

 
One of the advertisements makes fun of the 3-D trend that Bergman had elsewhere disparaged; one of them is essentially a rebus (and is, apparently, so titled), which presents the same lengthy mix of images twice in succession; two of them feature an unmistakable battle between “good” Bris and “evil” bakterier, or bacteria (the first of those is certainly reminiscent of The Seventh Seal, as Stevens points out). Two of them feature characters from the distant, courtly past dressed in foppish wigs and ... giving off the general visual appearance of hankering after a snootful of snuff, or the like. One of the ads is “meta” insofar as we see a spokeswoman tout the soap’s advantages reflected in a camera lens, after which director and actress engage in a lengthy bit of what is apparently romantic dialogue. There’s a vitality of editing and montage here; a few of the ads use Georges Meliès-type effects, and the phrase “magic lantern show,” already strongly associated with Bergman (his autobiography, for instance), may waft into your head at various junctures.

To a surprising extent, the commercials showcase “Bergman in microcosm,” if such a thing is even thinkable, and they also may have provided a necessary experimental interlude just four scant years before his breakthrough, Smiles of a Summer Night, made him an international superstar.

Viewers will also learn that the traditional Swedish way of signaling the end of a narrative—“The End”—is, amusingly, “Slut.”
 

 
“Jabón Bris 1”

 
After the jump, seven more of Bergman’s delightful Bris commercials as well as an informative video by Slate’s Dana Stevens…..

 
A powerful live version of the epic “Higgs Boson Blues,” from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ stellar Push the Sky Away album, is the group’s latest video. Shot at London’s 3 Mills Studios by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Cave is joined by a stripped down unit consisting of Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, Barry Adamson and Martyn Casey.

This soars like a motherfucker. Might even be better than the album version.

Forsyth and Pollard’s semi-fictional documentary of 24 hours in the life of Nick Cave, 20,000 Days On Earth will be unveiled next month at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
 

 
A lot of concept art inspired by a specific artist completely fails to capture the spirit of their work, but I’ve been in love with Saul Bass’ aesthetic ever since I saw the opening credits for the 1963 Audrey Hepburn thriller, Charade, and these James Bond posters are dead-on. From the groovy color palette to the abstractions of geometry and scale, artist Alain Bossuyt really knows his Bass.

For reference, check out the video at the bottom for the opening credits of Charade.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Long after her forced retirement from acting, dancer-model-actress Maila Nurmi painted portraits of herself in the role she invented: the original Vampira. In her late seventies and eighties she sold these paintings through an L.A. art dealer and on eBay, along with autographed memorabilia. She made very little money to speak of as Vampira and was not remotely well off in her later years. Because she didn’t drive, she stopped painting when she moved to an artsy neighborhood that had no art supply stores within walking distance.

 

 

 

 
Nurmi relished her iconic image as the pioneering TV horror movie hostess for KABC-TV Channel 7 in L.A. in 1954, a regrettably short-lived gig, and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. She championed the integrity of the Vampira character despite understandable resentment over her shabby treatment by the entertainment industry and countless campier and sluttier imitations.

Mark Berry of SFX Magazine described Vampira’s glamorous allure:

Before encountering the infamous film director with a fetish for angora, Maila Nurmi, the Finnish-born artiste beneath the famous black wig and hemorrhage-red nails, created a phenomenon with her Vampira persona in 1954. Her iconic gothic style, sardonic wit and incredible hourglass-figure made her the ghoulish fantasy of guys and ghouls across the globe, despite appearing on a TV show that was only broadcast to the Los Angeles area. With a venomous stare that would wither a black rose, the voluptuous vamp would emerge every week from thick, dry-ice fog to the sound of creepy organ music. Vampira would silkily perch upon a skull-encrusted chaise-lounge, and in a sexy, Marlene Dietrich drawl, introduce old horror movies like White Zombie and Island Of Lost Souls. Between reels, she would recite weird poetry, drink poison cocktails and chase her pet spider Rollo around set.

A tongue-in-cheek recipe for the Vampira creation is attributed to Nurmi:

2 oz. Theda Bara (vamp, vamp)

2 oz. Morticia (morbid Victorian)

3 oz. Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard)

4 oz. Tallulah Bankhead (the voice, dahling)

2 oz. Marilyn Monroe (demons are a ghoul’s best friend)

3 oz. Katherine Hepburn (Victorian English)

2 oz. Bettie Davis (mama, baby)

3 oz. Billie Burke (dilettante)

3 oz. Marlene Dietrich (singing voice)

8 oz. Bizarre pin-up

Add 3 lizard eggs, 2 mothballs and a glass eye from a pygmy. Shake vigorously till steaming.

Until her death in 2008 Nurmi was quite approachable, giving interviews regularly in her L.A. neighborhood and graciously interacting with her devoted horror and Goth fans (including the original Misfits lineup with Glenn Danzig). There is a lot of wonderful interview footage in Kevin Sean Michaels’ 2006 documentary Vampira: The Movie . Nurmi’s friend R.H. Greene’s documentary Vampira and Me was released last year.

Below, Maila Nurmi, a.k.a. Vampira, talking about her artwork:

 
The blog Include Me Out informs us that the Barbican in London is showing William Klein’s 1958 short “Broadway at Night” as part of its current Pop Art Design exhibition, which runs through early February.

Klein’s mini-masterpiece, which clocks in a tidy 10 minutes, represents the cross-pollination of two admittedly related movements that took manufactured Americana as the starting point for a rethinking of aesthetic categories: Pop Art and La Nouvelle Vague. It’s difficult to imagine a major art movement today embracing corporate insignias in such a guileless manner. From today’s perspective it’s fascinating to see such artistic firepower elevating the likes of Sgt. Bilko, Little Lulu, and Mr. Peanut, all of whom can be glimpsed in “Broadway at Night.”

The movie has scant documentary value—girded by a moody, rambunctious, and percussive bebop score by Maurice Le Roux, it’s a formalist work first and foremost, finding beauty in the off-kilter patterns created by the pulsating light bulbs and other visual elements of the Great White Way. Naturally, this isn’t the Broadway of 2013, which isn’t half as charming.

The French opening scroll says something akin to the following:

Americans invented jazz to console death, the star to console woman.

To console the night, they invented Broadway.

Every evening, in the center of New York, an artificial sun rises.

Its purpose is to announce shows, to advertise products, and the inventors of these advertisements would be astounded to learn of the most fascinating spectacle, the most precious object is the street transformed by their signs.

This day has its inhabitants, its shadows, its mirages, its ceremonies.

It also has its sun…

“Console woman,” huh? Only a bunch of men could have written that, and a glance at the credits confirms—likewise revealing the participation of two future greats of the nouvelle vague movement, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. This movie must have had quite an impact in its day. Orson Welles said, rather grandly, that it was “the first film I’ve seen in which color was absolutely necessary.”

This is a movie that cries out for its individual frames to be converted into stills, so I offer a few of those below.
 

 

 

 

 
Tuesday, November 22nd, 1966, jazz musician Charlie Mingus waited with his five-year-old daughter Carolyn, to be evicted from his studio at 22 Great Jones Street, New York. Mingus had planned to open a music school and jazz workshop at this Lower East Side loft, but he had been frustrated in his intentions and had fallen behind in the rent.

As he waited for the NYPD and the Sanitation Department to arrive and remove his belongings, filmmaker Thomas Reichman recorded an intimate portrait of one of the jazz music’s greatest composers and performers. In the film, Mingus is seen moving distractedly amongst his boxed possessions, showing great affection for his daughter, recalling happier times living on Fifth Avenue, and acknowledging the inherent racism in America by offering his own Pledge of Allegiance:.

”I pledge allegiance to the flag—the white flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of America. When they say Black or Negro, it means you’re not an American. I pledge allegiance to your flag. Not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. The white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.”

Reichman’s verite film is intercut with Mingus performing “All the Things You Are,” Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Secret Love,” at Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike in Peabody, Massachusetts. The film ends with Mingus being arrested for possession of a rifle and a box of hypodermic needles. Outside on the street, an NBC news reporter asked Mingus:

”Do you deny taking the heroin?”

It’s the sort of low level kick-you-when-you’re-down question, that reveals everything about the interrogator and nothing about Mingus. The needles were legitimate, and were used by the musician for his Vitamin-B injections.

The following day, Mingus reclaimed the gun and needles from the police, after presenting them with all the relevant paperwork. Outside the station he quipped to reporters:

”It isn’t every day you see a Negro walk out of a police station with a box of hypodermic needles and a shotgun.”

Reichman’s film Mingus is a powerful and heartbreaking portrait of one of Jazz music’s most important artists. 
 

Still from ‘The Queen Is Dead’

I only recently learned that the singular British polymath artist Derek Jarman, director of Caravaggio, Blue, and Jubilee, directed a bunch of music videos in the 1980s, including several for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, which is a perfect fit when you think about it.

The Smiths, “Ask”

 
This 12-minute short movie, already tackled for DM by Paul Gallagher in 2012, is called The Queen Is Dead—basically it’s three videos strung together for the title track, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic”:

 
Both of Jarman’s videos for Pet Shop Boys were for their second album, Actually. 
 
Pet Shop Boys, “It’s a Sin”

 
Pet Shop Boys, “Rent”

 
Some artists, like Picasso and Dali, were discovered when they were young and their talents grew to maturity before the public eye. Sometimes, however it takes… well, dying before the art world sits up and takes notice of you, This was certainly the case with Brion Gysin, the Canadian/British painter and author who long stood in the shadows, figuratively speaking, of William S. Burroughs, his lifelong friend and collaborator. Burroughs once said that Brion Gysin was the only man he ever truly respected.

Gysin is an artist whose work must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. Of course this is said about every artist’s work, but it’s particularly true with Brion Gysin. What might appear to be random chicken scratch calligraphy when reproduced in a book, becomes ALIVE when seen in person. Seemingly careless hash marks become scenes of hundreds of people around a bonfire or a crowded Arab marketplace when you’re staring right at it.

The man was a master. And he left an awful lot of work behind. Although there were various Gysin gallery exhibits in New York while he was still alive—I recall being astonished by some large works on paper in a great 1985 show at the Tower Gallery—there was never a museum-level retrospective of Gysin’s work in the United States until 2010 at the New Museum in Manhattan:

One of the things Gysin is best know for is inventing the Dreamachine—a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes flicker effect to induce visions—a drugless turn-on.

FLicKer is a 2008 Canadian documentary about Gysin’s Dreamachine, directed by Nik Sheehan. Kenneth Anger, Marianne Faithfull, Gysin biographer John Geiger, Iggy Pop, Genesis P-Orridge, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, DJ Spooky and yours truly are interviewed.
 

 
H/T R.U. Sirius