Oh, what might have been ...

Some test footage for an alas never-realized adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars by famed Warner Brothers animator Bob Clampett, which, had it been made, would have been the first feature-length animated film.

Today in History: The Great Molasses Flood

On January 15, 1919, a storage tank belonging to the Purity Distilling Company burst, spilling an estimated 2,300,000 gallons of molasses into the streets of Boston's North End in a huge wave that killed 21 people and injured 150. Eric Postpischil has written a fascinating account of the disaster, originally published in Yankee magazine.

The estimable Dame Darcy, who draws the delightfully twisted comic, Meat Cake, has a song about it that you can listen to here.

Patrick McGoohan (1928-2008)

As a kid, I remember being thrilled by the adventures of McGoohan's two-fisted vicar, Dr. Syn, in the surprisingly-dark-for-Disney The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. Later, like a lot of people, I was simultaneously fascinated with and baffled by The Prisoner. I've seen comparatively little of his work since then, although he brought exactly the right tone of understated menace to his role as Dr. Paul Ruth in David Cronenberg's Scanners.

I have vaguer memories of The Prisoner's immediate predecessor, Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US), but what had always stuck with me, oddly enough, was that show's art direction. The adventures of globe-trotting spy John Drake were shot on the cheap on the studio back lot, but rarely looked it because the show's producers managed to boil the essence of its far-flung locations down to a handful of shorthand visual cues: get a few pieces of rattan furniture, a potted palm or two, and a slowly-rotating ceiling fan, then throw some venetian blind shadows on the wall behind them and voilà -- you were instantly in some Graham Greene-ish post-colonial backwater.

Because, let's face it, McGoohan's intensity as Drake was all the realism you needed anyway.

Too late for Christmas, alas ....

But if anyone's looking to get a jump on next year's cards ....

A Few Words in Defense of the Indefensible....

I've always had something of a soft spot for Ken Russell's films -- sure, they're usually garish, stylistically overblown, and often in what is at best questionable taste, but I've always felt that in his case these were features, not bugs, and that if he had even the slightest amount of taste or restraint his stuff would actually be worse rather than better. As it is, if he finds a subject that fits his peculiarly florid style, he can produce a genuinely great film (The Devils, Women in Love), a camp classic (Lair of the White Worm, Gothic), or something that's a little of both (Altered States).

But on the other hand, there's also ... LISZTOMANIA.

I'd seen this years ago, in what I seem to recall may have also been an altered state, but on seeing it again, it's possible it may only have seemed like it in retrospect.

We can't know for sure until that far-off day when Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried is released, but until then, this may be the most aesthetically indefensible film ever made. Russell takes a not-necessarily-bad idea -- that Franz Liszt was the 19th century equivalent of a rock star (more or less true -- in fact, the term "Lisztomania" isn't Russell's, but a contemporary one coined by the German poet Heinrich Heine to describe the hysteria provoked by his concerts), and then proceeds to beat the life out of it over the course of 103 jaw-droppingly weird minutes.

This is a film which opens with Roger Daltry as Liszt, fighting a duel wearing only a loincloth while a pair of cornpone Homer-and-Jethro-type narrators fill in his backstory, then proceeds through a series of truly craptacular musical numbers, one of which features a chorus line of Liszt's mistresses and a twelve-foot penis (don't ask. I mean, really, just don't ask), and finally conludes with a scene that's hard to believe even if you have seen it (hey, don't just take my word for it, check it out for yourself).

The film strains to be "provocative" but, thanks to its uneven mix of over-the-top fantasy scenes and Carry On-level humor, it's mostly just strident and grotesque. And that's not taking into account the stunt casting of Daltry (with Ringo Starr as the Pope), Rick Wakeman's appalling prog-rock score ("with the assistance of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner" according to the credits, for which I'm sure they'd be grateful), and the heavy-handed attempts at satire (Wagner, first seen wearing a sailor suit whose hatband reads "S.S. Nietsche", is depicted as a proto-Nazi and a vampire -- literally), which turn every scene into a fresh assault on the very notion of good taste, until finally the film threatens to collapse into a singularity of sheer dreafulness from which nothing recognizable as art can possibly escape.

Now, I can't in good conscience recommend that any of you see this -- that's 103 minutes you'll never get back, and I ain't taking the rap for that. But on the other hand, there's something perversely liberating about watching someone throw every possible shred of restraint and dignity to the winds. I, for one, enjoyed every cringe-inducing minute of it.

Comedy gold!

On Exactitude in Science

...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Jorge Luis Borges. A Universal History of Infamy (1935)