So that made eighty-five times he had seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Eighteen times to go. I wonder if he was the guy who sat behind me the last time I saw it at the Clark. He was reciting the dialogue under his breath and when the usher protested, he flashed a card with the name Fred C. Dobbs on it. (This is not made up.)
Anyway, after seeing Sierra Madre 103 times, Metzger was ready for the big time. Camille 2000 is shot in color. It is dubbed into English instead of subtitled. It is wide screen. It has a pretty girl in it. Her name is Daniéle Gaubert. Whoever painted that big sign in front of the theater has an accurate critical sense. The sign says: “See Daniéle Gaubert presented in the nude . . . and with great frequency.” That captures the essence of Metzger’s art.
Well, Daniéle Gaubert is presented in the nude all right, amd she has a lot of love scenes with Nino Castelnuovo. The way they make love is interesting. Their key technique is to assume the conventional configuration and then . . . not move! Mostly, they’re looking at themselves in the mirrors. There are mirrors all over her bedroom. No matter where they look, they see themselves in the mirror. Daniéle and Nino aren’t too bright, I guess. They’re just about to start making love when their eyes wander, and they get interested in that beautiful couple up on the ceiling.
Anyway, after twenty minutes of this, Metzger speeds up his pace. There’s a fascinating close-up of a flower, and as it goes in and out of focus we hear a lot of heavy breathing and see Daniéle’s face on the left side of the screen. Apparently something is happening to her. Maybe a manicure.
I’m not sure, but I think the heavy breathing was dubbed in from Metzger’s Therese and Isabel. That one starred Essy Persson, the all-time heavy-breathing champ. It was a movie about a woman who looked at the ceiling and breathed heavily. She didn’t need a lover, she needed a Vicks Inhaler.
Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh
(Directed by Bill Condon; Kelly Rowan, Tony Todd; 1995)
In the original Candyman (1992), a couple of Ph.Ds from the University of Illinois theorized that the Candyman was an urban legend, brought to life by the faith of all the people who believed in him. But it turned out there was a much more Gothic and supernatural explanation, and we learn more about his origins in the new Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh.
The Candyman stories, based on books by Clive Barker, are an attempt to make an intelligent fable out of a bogeyman, and Bernard Rose’s 1992 film did a good job of it, with Virginia Madsen and Kasi Lemmons as the researchers who track down tales of a slasher with a hook for a hand. He was terrorizing Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, but in the second film he has moved back home to New Orleans, and started preying on his own descendants instead of innocent bystanders.
In the new film, directed by Bill Condon, there’s once again an attempt to establish a real world in which Candymen aren’t possible. Kelly Rowan stars as a New Orleans schoolteacher whose father was killed years earlier, Candyman style. Now her brother has been accused of killing a Candyman expert, and a student in her class has started drawing the Candyman. How does the kid know about him?
The movie doesn’t develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film. It’s got one of those sound tracks where everyday sounds are amplified into gut-churning shockaramas, and where we are constantly being startled by false alarms. There’s a scene, for example, where a character walks up behind the teacher, and the sound track explodes. My notes read: Scream! Shock! Rumble! Crack!—followed, of course, by the guy saying, “Sorry, I thought you heard me.”
The movie also pulls the old “It’s only a cat routine,” where a shrieking, snarling presence from out of frame turns out, yes, to only be a cat. There is even an “it’s only a raven” sequence, no doubt in honor of Clive Barker’s predecessor in the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe.
The story proceeds. Characters near and dear to Kelly are slashed Candyman style. Eventually, led by the little student from her class, who seems tuned in to the Candyman, she is led to an old plantation, where all is explained. Read no further if you would rather not know that the Candyman turns out to have been a slave who fell in love with his master’s daughter, and she with him. When she became pregnant, the enraged plantation owner set a mob on the slave, which cut off his hand and smeared him with honey, so that he was stung by thousands of bees, which is how he got the name Candyman.
Is there an entomologist among us? Are bees attracted by honey? I would have guessed they’d be rather blasé about it, and would be more quickly attracted if the victim had been smeared with one of those perfumes they advertise on cable TV. Never mind. The slave, whose name is Daniel Robitaille, sees his bee-stung face in his lover’s mirror, and somehow his spirit goes into the mirror, so that if you look in a mirror and say “Candyman” five times, that’s going to be more or less the last thing you do. (I have tried this, and it doesn’t work.)
The story goes to some lengths to develop sympathy for the terrible tortures he was subjected to, as a victim of racism who dared to love a white woman. (Because the Candyman is played by Tony Todd, who has more than a passing resemblance to O.J. Simpson, there are several scenes that have a curious double resonance.)
I suppose that Clive Barker would be happy to explain for us how Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a statement against racism, and maybe it is, although it sure does go the long way around. The message may be that because slaves were mistreated, we pay the price today, perhaps every time we look in the mirror and see our racism reflected back at us. (Hey, I didn’t take those EngLit symbology classes for nothing.)
Like many movies with morals at the end, however, it has its slasher and eats him, too. If the last fifteen minutes of the movie are devoted to creating understanding for Daniel Robitaille, the first eighty-five are devoted to exploiting fears of slasher attacks by tall black men, with or without a hook for a hand. And the flashback is rather overelaborate: Did the mob vote against lynching Robitaille, deciding, “Naw, let’s just cut off his hand and smear him with honey, so he can become an urban legend?” If not, it seems they went to a lot more trouble than most mobs in those sad days.
I am left with questions. Why did the Candyman visit Chicago? Why did he prey on innocent young black victims who had done him no harm? Which is he? A mythical force brought to reality by psychic mind power, or an immortal being fueled by the life force of the bees, who lives in mirrors? I spend my days pondering questions such as these, so you won’t have to.
Cannonball Run II
(Directed by Hal Needham; starring Frank Sinatra, Burt Reynolds; 1984)
The clue to Cannonball Run II is in Frank Sinatra’s first scene, but you have to look carefully. The scene starts in Sinatra’s office, and we’re looking over Sinatra’s head at Burt and some other people. At least, it looks like Sinatra’s head, except there’s something a little funny about the ears. Then we see Sinatra. He talks. We see Reynolds. He talks. And so on, until, if we know something about movie editing techniques, we realize there isn’t a single shot showing Sinatra and Reynolds at the same time. Also, there’s something funny about Sinatra’s voice: He doesn’t seem to be quite matching the tone of the things said to him. That’s the final tip-off: Sinatra did his entire scene by sitting down at a desk and reading his lines into the camera, and then, on another day, Reynolds and the others looked into the camera and pretended to be looking at him. The over-the-shoulder shots are of a double.