Reading, Watching and Commenting

Jean Marais as Fantômas.

My first two months of 2019 have been occupied with four different audio commentary assignments, a little online writing, additional work on the Joe Sarno manuscript, and a good deal of recreational viewing and writing. All I can tell you at the moment about the commentary assignments is that one of them was for Andre Hunebelle's 1964 film FANTÔMAS with Jean Marais and Louis de Funès. It was going to come out "bare bones," as they say, but when I learned it was on Kino Lorber's roster for April, I pursued it and - fortunately - they let me come aboard at the last minute.

Fantômas is a name I first learned in the pages of CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN #9, which contained a brief essay by Mike Parry about the original Feuillade silents and the Hunebelle remake. Something about it captivated my imagination and when it appeared as an upcoming late night broadcast in my local TV GUIDE in 1969-1970, I tuned in and that sealed the deal. I've been a Fantômas fanatic ever since, having collected all the books in translation and also in the original French. I wrote about the original novel by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain in HORROR: ANOTHER 100 BEST BOOKS, edited by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones, and I'm sure you've seen the name pop up on this blog many times, as well. So this assignment was a personal blessing from my perspective, but the other few I've been working on were no less so, and I'll tell you about those as soon as I'm given the signal. I'm actually committed already to doing something like 14 commentaries this year, and a number of these titles are among my passions. 

Since posting my Boston Blackie series overview, I've become enmeshed in a couple of other series - the 1960s ITC series THE SAINT with Roger Moore, and random revisitings of the Charlie Chan films of the 1940s. After rediscovering THE SAINT on Amazon Prime, I found a decent price on the UK DVDs, which included some audio commentaries, a couple of short documentaries on the B&W and color years, and also an archive of episode scripts in PDF, so I sprang for them. I belatedly discovered the series about five or six years ago and watched the first two and a half seasons or so before I diverted to some other intrigue; so I returned to complete the second season and have since gone through the third and fourth seasons, the last in B&W, and am now discovering the fourth and first color season.

Roger Moore takes fire against an unexpected opponent in the SAINT episode "The House on Dragon Rock."

One of the great surprises of this period is that Roger Moore's contract renewal gave him opportunities to direct, and the episodes he directed are among the best in the series. I think he might well have become an outstanding director if he hadn't more lucrative options to pursue. In the UK order of broadcast, one of these is the last B&W episode "The Old Treasure Story," which features a nicely intimidating performance by Frank Wolff. Another of these is an easily laughed-off episode, “The House on Dragon Rock,” which - incredibly - takes Simon Templar into Kolchak territory as he confronts a giant ant created by mad science somewhere in foggy Wales. It took LOST IN SPACE three seasons to jump the shark to this extent; THE SAINT was starting its fifth and was at the height of its run. The episode conjures its atmosphere and tension very well until the ant turns up. The show didn’t have the budget or the effects team it needed to do their best, but it’s no one’s fault. By all reason, the episode shouldn’t have been half as good as it is. The one aspect that sometimes slips through Moore's directorial fingers is his own performance. The one thing that doesn’t ring true for me in this episode is Templar’s utter lack of surprise when he sees the damn thing - and the episode’s ingenue, after encountering it, doesn’t even tell him what it was - so he should have looked astounded. But he looks at it like it’s the license plate of a getaway car.

Another surprise comes along right away, in the UK broadcast order. It’s “The Convenient Monster,” which takes Simon Templar to Scotland where he finds locals being murdered by the Loch Ness Monster. THE SAINT had hitherto been so grounded in a certain kind of realistic, if romantic, fantasy that it's outrageous to suddenly find the character battling monsters, but at least here the monster is ultimately left ambiguous. It starts out as one of those SCOOBY-DOO plots, but the final coda thankfully leaves Nessie a tantalizing possibility. 

While catching up on these episodes, I happened to watch a Charlie Chan film on Amazon Prime and was led to check the status of my collection. I discovered I had a gap in the series, owed to the fact that I'd refused to pay full price for the CHANTHOLOGY box set when it was released, and a couple of others after that got past me as well. I found some used copies and have been reacquainting myself with the Monogram years - which is really where I first discovered the character on television, so I have a special love for them. Phil Karlson's DARK ALIBI and THE SHANGHAI COBRA are especially good, as are Phil Rosen's THE SCARLET CLUE (with its supporting character, the horror actor "Horace Karlos") and Terry Morse's SHADOWS OVER CHINATOWN, which somehow eluded my notice until last night. Considering that the series during this period was often locked down to interrogations being conducted in one room of "the murder house," SHADOWS has a pleasing construction; the action involves a lot of moving from place to place, and the mystery is allowed to unfold and become more complex as different and disparate subplots introduced on an opening bus trip gradually coalesce into the main story. Lots of welcome familiar faces here, including Mary Gordon from Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series, and Mantan Moreland has a memorable set piece as that lovable kook Birmingham Brown investigates a Chinese curio shop.

First edition art by L. Bennett.

I've also been doing a lot of reading. As a result of confluence between my ongoing interest in Jules Verne and the Orientalia of the Chan films, I decided to read Verne's THE TRIBULATIONS OF A CHINESE GENTLEMAN IN CHINA. It's a marvelously wry and gentle fable about a wealthy Chinese lord whose ease of existence leads to inescapable ennui and a determination to end his own life. Finding the notion of suicide distasteful, he makes a contract with his personal philosopher to kill him when he least expects it. Then a banking error occurs that makes him lose his fortune and it almost immediately is recovered as the error is found in error - but this hiccup in his status quo is sufficient for him to begin to appreciate what he has, and he decides to call off the hit he's taken out on himself. But his philosophy teacher has unexpectedly gone - so his life becomes even more precious as he and his principal servant undertake a journey to find the assassin and terminate their agreement before he, himself, is terminated. Naturally, life becomes more precious to him with each passing hour. 

With this book, I began to discover the problem that has long plagued English and American devotees of Verne - the English translations are often incomplete and distortive of the original texts. After finishing TRIBULATIONS in its Delphi ebook edition (which used the original title of THE TRIBULATIONS OF A CHINAMAN IN CHINA) and loving it despite a certain rushed feel about its final chapters, I did some further investigating and discovered that the original French text consisted of 22 chapters, while the translation I read had only 21, while covering the same basic ground. My version also had laconic chapter titles, rather than the wryly descriptive "in which" chapter titles of the French text. Further reading revealed to me that the original text included criticisms of England's involvement in the opium trade, not present in the version I had read. Apparently if you want the best available translation of this book, you need to turn to the Arco Publishing/Fitzroy edition of the 1960s, but even it is somewhat truncated and lacking the original illustrations.  

I want to continue delving into Verne - I've been collecting the more recent, pure translations published by Wesleyan University Press and the University of Nebraska - but I'm about a year between Gaston Leroux readings, so I've made an unusual commitment. I’m using Google Translate to read the first half of Gaston Leroux’s LA REINE DU SABBAT from the original French! This is necessary because the English translation of the first half of this work, published under the title THE MIDNIGHT LADY, has turned out to be what writers of the time would call deucedly elusive. I do have the second volume, THE MISSING ARCHDUKE, which is itself almost impossible to find - but I figured the only way I'll ever be able to enjoy it is if I tackle the French text with my decoder ring. I began doing this by blocking every few sentences from my French ebook of Leroux's complete works into the Bing translator that's built into my iPad... but Donna then showed me a way to photograph and translate entire pages at a time, so now I am photographing and reading a chapter at a time. I'm making good progress. Of course it’s not a perfect translation but it is making sense and I am following the story. LA REINE DU SABBAT ("The Queen of the Sabbath") was one of Jean Rollin’s favorite novels, and I can see why! Watchmakers, street waifs, circus freaks (including a five-limbed human spider named Magnus), gypsies, orgies, gnostic invocations, returns from the dead, a golden goddess who rides a white stallion out of fire, a seaside setting... his universe is all here.

There is a sublime moment in an early chapter when Petit-Jeannot (an extremely tall and thin young man, almost what sideshows would call a human skeleton) is walking along toward their destiny on a country road with his friend Magnus (a man with three arms and two legs who ambulates like a spider), who always whistles a mournful song. Petit-Jeannot breaks their fraternal silence by noting that they have been friends for many years - “You used to be such a gay, outgoing fellow, a man irresistible to women! Why are you so sad now?” Magnus confesses that his friend probably doesn’t know this, but he is a married man for many years. True, Petit-Jeannot did not know this. Magnus continues, admitting that he and his wife are having marital problems. Petit-Jeannot persists in his inquiry. “If you must know,” Magnus confesses, “my wife fell in love with someone else. And now she has run off with the man with the calf’s head. Yes, the man with the calf’s head...”

There is a moment when Petit-Jeannot and Magnus are required to keep up with Stella, the invoked golden goddess of a gypsy gathering, who rides a powerful white stallion. In order to keep up, they have to run after her - which Magnus does by linking all of his limbs and turning himself into a human wagon wheel! When this happened, I realized that this novel from 1910 had the contemporary feel of a movie directed by Brad Bird and produced by Guillermo del Toro! I do wish it was more widely accessible in English, but the tools are available to us to get "at it," if we care enough to take the trouble. The added work, I'm finding, actually helps with my focus and concentration because I am not just reading - I'm decoding.

In other reading...

To celebrate the recent completion of my audio commentary for André Hunebelle's FANTOMAS (1964) - coming from Kino Lorber in a box set of all three Fantomas films this April! - I just read Titan Comics' translation of Olivier Bouquet and Julie Rocheleau's Joe Shuster Award-winning graphic novel THE WRATH OF FANTOMAS. It's a few years old in French but just released in English translation. It’s a firecracker. To a reader familiar with the original novels, it’s like seeing the series’ greatest hits woven into a new story, a sprawling blockbuster suite. The Dickensian sentiment of the novels is largely missing in the headlong run of the narrative, replaced with a dazzling cinematic flair; the evil is as spectacular and pitiless as ever. Imagine Fantômas given a WATCHMEN treatment and that will give you an idea of what to expect.

And finally...

RIP Jay Douglas. Though, in the strange way my business is structured, I never interacted with him directly, Jay was the president of Anchor Bay Entertainment and, in that capacity, he gave the green-light to a number of the Mario Bava audio commentary and liner notes assignments I provided in the early 2000s. I'm sure that the earlier work I'd done for Image Entertainment and the audience for VIDEO WATCHDOG helped to show him there was at least a measure of gold to be mined from Euro horror, but he was among the first to put his money where my mouth was, so to speak. He was responsible, in the most literal way, for the great influx of Euro horror that came to DVD in the early years of this century. Without the early support offered to me by Anchor Bay, I might not have been able to fall back on the career supporting me now when VW folded. And for that - and for bringing into my orbit so much I'd not previously seen or known about - I say farewell, Jay, and thank you.

(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.