X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (1963)

You’ve gotta respect a medical scientist who lights a cigarette with a bunson burner.

I remember one of my mother’s old film books featuring a black-and-white still from X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (1963) depicting Don Rickles pulling at Ray Milland’s arm – Milland wearing dark shades – and Rickles bearing a big smile. The film itself is photographed in gorgeous colour, the type of 1960s film colour where everything seems bright and pastel. Directed and produced by Roger Corman, X exists between the cheapo sci-fi flicks he made in the 1950s and gestures towards his counter-culture cash-grabs.

Ostensibly a ‘mad scientist’ story, a variation on The Invisible Man, Milland plays a medical scientist who is researching how to extend the range of the human vision, going beyond the visible spectrum. He achieves this and experiments on himself, dosing with eye-drops and experiencing kaleidoscopic POV visions. His quest is to see through the human body and be able to identify what is wrong with a patient beyond x-ray technology of the time, but of course, his obsession takes him further than he anticipated, towards an existential terror in how much he can see and the fact that he can’t turn it off.

Diana Van der Vis plays a fellow doctor who is his only ally and love interest, while Rickles plays Crane, a carnival worker who employs Milland as a sideshow “psychic” when Milland is on the run from the law due to manslaughter. There’s also the welcome appearance of Corman regular Dick Miller in a small role and a great chance to see him exchange insults with Rickles. With a great score by Les Baxter and trippy spectral visual effects, I found X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes to be an ideal Corman film in its own way. While Milland might be slumming it in this sci-fi fare, he gives a gravity and emotional weight to his downfall, and in between the corny sequences (like seeing people without clothes on at a party), there are also artful moments of eerieness (the montage of Las Vegas neon signs blurred and distorted by X’s vision). Recommended

The Creatures (1966)

I had a cursory understanding of what The Creatures (1966), written and directed by Agnes Varda, was about. The film opens with a couple – Edgar (Michel Piccoli) and Mylene (Catherine Deneuve) – driving together, Mylene warning Edgar not to drive too fast, and upon that, they inevitably crash. What I was taken aback by was the forehead scar that Edgar sports after the accident, a line down the middle of his brow, stitches evident on both sides of that line. It’s quite an image, and it visually focuses our attention on his head. The contents therein, and how they are translated externally, is a significant part of The Creatures with Edgar being a writer, and the film focusing on his creative process.

Much like Varda’s La Pointe Courte, we have a couple contrasted against the scenery and inhabitants of its location, here the isle of Noirmoutier. On this island, Edgar walks around while Mylene is pregnant at home, and has become mute after the accident, using a chalk board to express herself. With The Creatures, there is symbolic and metatextual quality, which borders into areas of fantasy and science-fiction, and wears the influence of someone like Ingmar Bergman while remaining very Agnes Varda through her sense of humour. I believe the film articulates Varda’s creative process, or an understanding of it, particularly when set in contrast with Edgar’s neighbour, Monsieur Ducasse (Lucien Bodard), a loner who keeps to himself. For Edgar to write, he has to exist out in the world, experiencing it through interactions at his local shop or getting caught up in scrapes such as with two ruffians who run a sheet business. All of this helps to factor into his ideas for stories and situations, and the film takes a surreal turn when the fates of people on the island are rendered as pieces on a chessboard. Or as one commentator on Letterboxd has compared it to, a game of The Sims.

There are experimental flourishes such as when the movie switches from black-and-white into a singular colour to express emotional hypnotism. Or the use of the checkerboard as a symbolic item, and the way in which black-and-white patterns extend to what people are wearing. All of this complemented by Pierre Barbaud’s discordant orchestral score. Existing in its own peculiar universe, when you know more about Varda’s life and how each project was in some way an expression of her life, The Creatures is strengthened by connections to other works. When the wife is left alone in the house while the husband is busy creating, it’s hard to not to draw a line to the main character in Documenteur, left alone with their child in Los Angeles. Strange, sometimes silly, very symbolic and often surprising, The Creatures is available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.

Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

Guests in suits and evening dresses. A palace repurposed as a hotel. Refinement that feels like another time, another place. The camera tracks through the hallways, taking in the space, the high ceilings, the ornate interior decoration. In the hotel, people often stand still, pausing as if waiting for direction. Like actors in the small hotel theatre, performing for the assembled guests. Or like the statues outside on the hotel grounds. Then a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) talks to a woman (Delphine Seyrig): they met a year ago, he urges. The memory plays out for us in flashback scenes as the man narrates, and the moments change. Scenes repeat, vary. The woman has no recollection of this meeting. A mystery without answer unfolding in a haunting atmosphere.

Directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad (1961) has always been arthouse cinema with a capital A prospect, and continues to be divisive, feeling like the first to provoke audiences by withholding explanation and challenging any desire for clarity. It also feels like a strong influence on future horror movies like The Shining, and the cinema of unease, the influence of Ingmar Bergman on something like Carnival Of Souls. The presence of Seyrig also makes me think of the empty hotel in her later vampire film Daughters Of Darkness. The dance between the couple feels gendered. The man revealing his romantic obsession to someone who did not reciprocate or even notice his attention. Then again, maybe the refusal of the past is shutting out trauma: when the man talks about entering the woman’s room for a romantic tryst, the scene plays out with fear in her eyes. An intrusion and an invasion, rather than a secret rendezvous.

The cinematography and editing create temporal displacement for the viewer. A movement carries between shots but in the gap of an edit, we’re now in a different room, or outside. Are we in the here and now, or have we transported to last year? This trick is subtle, and becomes culminative as I felt always off guard watching Last Year At Marienbad; the disorientation only registers afterwards. There’s not so much emotional investment in the individual characters but in the overall mood of the film, the point of comparison to the statues that the couple discuss in their “past.” Frozen and mythic. Or the various paintings of the building’s outside grounds. Items of contemplation. The recurring card game that can never be won. An itch that can never be scratched.

I watched this early in the morning on an iPad, the first new movie of 2024, and I kept feeling drowsy, not the fault of the movie, pausing it at one point to sleep for a moment before resuming. The way it disrupted the conventional understanding of shot and editing relationships, artfully framing figures in tableaus and never fully resolving the mystery between the characters and their location, all of it compelling and eerie.

Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.

Boom! (1968)

“What’s human or inhuman is not for human decision!”

I love Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and have always been curious about the other movies they made together, particularly when their tabloid exploits as a movie star couple overshadowed them. Most of them I’ve heard are not so hot (barring The Taming Of The Shrew and The Sandpiper which I have heard are both good). Boom! (1968) has always held a stronger reputation as a cult object, mainly through reading about director John Waters love for it as a “so bad it’s good” favourite; I was reminded of this at a triple feature of John Waters movies, with two of them referencing Boom! (a poster hung up in a character’s home in Pink Flamingos, the title card used in a sex montage from A Dirty Shame).

The experience of watching Boom! felt like a midway point between a Michelangelo Antonioni art film and a Planet Of The Apes sequel. Based on a Tennessee Williams play and directed by Joseph Losey, the story is set on a coastal Italian island (actually shot on Sardinia) owned by a massively wealthy widow Flora “Sissy” Goforth (Taylor) who is slowly dying, receiving blood infusions and injections from a private doctor, while she dictates her memoirs to a secretary (Joanna Shimkus) and barks orders at her staff. She also changes outfits constantly, the highlight being a towering headpiece that she wears to dinner with her gossipy friend, only known as “The Witch Of Capri” (Noel Coward). Arriving on the island is a poet named Christopher Flanders (Burton) who has a reputation for shacking up and freeloading from wealthy older women; a character written as a young drifter in the original play but here portrayed by a grey-haired chested, middle-aged Burton. As they spar in flowing robes on the terrace with its view of the other rocks jutting out of the ocean and the crashing waves, it feels like the movie star version of Pink Floyd’s Live In Pompeii – a performance given in ancient ruins to an audience of no-one.

Ornate and overwrought, and ultimately ponderous and strange, fuelled by the giddy application of the word “bitch” (the height of its foul language), Boom! feels like a product of the late 1960s studio Hollywood era, a behemoth about to be upset by the Easy Riders etc, even as it strains for symbolic meaning and gaudy artiness, as if just catching up to being Bergmanesque or Felliniesque. Yet even within the thinking of “Who was this for?” it is an enjoyable bout of excess and ego, with Taylor dominating her scenes and Burton surprisingly underplaying it in contrast. Nothing funnier to me than the mise en scene of Taylor reliving and re-enacting her husband’s death dramatically in her bedroom over the intercom, and the cut to her staff in the kitchen listening in boredom. John Barry provides a memorable theme with the score, which is both jaunty and eerie. Recommended.

A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

Watching Japanese 1960s crime flicks (particularly those produced by Nikkatsu Corporation) is always an insight into how much Quentin Tarantino has ripped off them off (also Jim Jarmusch when he makes hitman movies, and I tend to think of Jarmusch a bit more just because there’s a certain level of economy shared). Then again, A Colt Is My Passport (1967) opens with Harumi Ibe’s music aping Ennio Morricone’s scores, and the film is influenced itself by the French New Wave and filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville as well as Sergio Leone westerns. The layering of these genre influences helps to create something unique, and this film also stands out to me in contrast to the other flicks I’ve seen with the chipmunked-cheeked Joe Shishido in the lead (like Youth Of The Beast or Branded To Kill) as there’s a humanity to this one and a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t go towards darkly comic nihilism. We open with Shishido as a hitman, Shuji, who is taken through the daily routine of a target by his partner, Shun (Jerry Fujio). As in the great tradition of all movies about assassins, the job goes right but the consequences turn bad when the war between two Yakuza gangs result in a corporate merger that leaves Shuji and Shun as expendable collateral. On the run, hiding out in a motel where truckers congregate, they meet a waitress, Mina (Chitose Kobayashi), who has had her own dark past with the mob, and feels a connection with the aloof Shuji. All of this builds to a showdown between Shuji and his enemies, as he demonstrates his loyalty and love for his partner Shun. Directed by Takashi Nomura and based on a novel by Shinji Fujiwara, this clocks in at an efficient 84 minutes and has a clear sense of jazzy noir style, crisp suits and apartment blocks, tempered with a feeling for post-war Japan and survivalist impulses. Across highway tunnels, wharf barges and dirt piles, life and death are metered out between the collective and the individual. As I said before, there’s a greater emotional resonance with Mina’s characterisation, her longing and desperation, and the bond shared between the two male co-workers, and the film also offers a very effective and thrilling climax. There’s even time for a tune from the talented Fujio and a stray guitar. Streamed on the Criterion Channel within their Japanese Noir collection. Recommended.