Han Hyeong-mo's The Hand of Fate is an interesting hybrid, part tragic romance, part political allegory, part spy thriller and part anti-communist propaganda. Made at a time when Korean cinema -- along with Korean society as a whole -- was struggling toward recovery in the wake of the Korean war, while not a commercial success, it marked a step forward in technical terms for its crisp editing and ambitious, bifurcated structure. Not to mention that it delivered Korea's first on-screen kiss.
"Rani Aur Jaani is a story of two sisters who are separated at the hands of fate and who have a thirst for each others blood. Ultimately the day comes when both sisters are at face to face and the younger sister is at the mercy of her elder sister. Moment to moment, tension mounts, enmity heightens, jealousy grows, fierce and deadliest plots and sub-plots are hatched to overthrow each other. But all ends well"Oh, and I probably should have added this:
The film is yet another trashy comic book thriller from Tollywood action director K.S.R. Doss, though this time one produced in the Hindi language. This change-up means that we have none of the pompadours or gyno-cam action of Doss's Telegu films, but a much greater number of familiar Bollywood faces (Jagdeep, Shetty, Aruna Irani, etc.). The presence of Doss at the helm also means that, just as in every other of his films that I've seen, we have a central performance by Tollywood item girl/action star Jyothi Laxmi.
I have to admit to having developed something of a fixation with Jyothi Laxmi. Though a woman who, even by the most even-handed journalistic standards, would have to be described as "plug ugly", she still somehow, mysteriously, has got it going on. And Doss really knows how to show off her unique presence to best advantage:
But truly it's Aruna Irani who's the star of the show here, and it's refreshing to see this item girl also-ran get a turn in the spotlight. It turns out that she makes a great plucky action heroine, and acquits herself well in the film's many acrobatic fight scenes.
In addition to being an apparent giantess, Aruna also has a secret weapon in the furry form of her trusty dog sidekick Peter, who earns his place alongside Bollywood animal heroes like Pedro, Moti and Sheroo by shooting Shetty with a revolver:
Rani Aur Jaani essentially tells a female-centric version of a Bollywood story that we've otherwise seen played out over and over again in Indian films from the 70s: that of two siblings separated by tragedy who grow up to confront each other from opposite sides of the law. Jyothi and Aruna are the daughters of a judge who, for some reason, encouraged them to constantly beat the crap out of each other when they were kids. (Without subtitles I can't be sure, but I'll make a wild guess that he wanted boys.) One day, a bandit whom the judge had previously convicted comes to the family home and shoots the judge in his bed, then attempts to kidnap the girls. He's only successful in kidnapping Jyothi, though, and she then grows up to be the fearsome bandit's faithful number two -- though, for the better part of the film, no one, including Aruna, seems to make the connection that she is the same girl who was abducted by the bandit years earlier. Aruna, on the other hand, grows up to be a CID inspector who is determined to bring the bandit and his gang to justice. Heating things up further is the fact that Aruna's undercover cop boyfriend (Anil Dhawan) is also posing as Jyothi's boyfriend in order to gain access to the gang.
Things finally come to a head after a not-so-friendly sing-off between Aruna and Jyothi escalates into a motorcycle chase fraught with daredevilry and fierceness:
I can't say that Rani Aur Jaani is "slap your mamma" good, even though Jyothi Laxmi does slap her mamma in it. (To be fair, she doesn't know that it's her mama when she does it.) Still, I think the screen caps that accompany this review testify to the fact that there are plenty of reasons to recommend it. At the end, it turns out that Jyothi's turn toward the good has come too late, and that, as penance, she must sacrifice her life in order to save Aruna's. So, just like the synopsis says, all ends well. Except if you're Jyothi Laxmi. Or Shetty, for that matter... or the girls' dad. Or any of the countless other people who are killed, beaten or tortured in the course of the film. But Aruna and Anil Dhawan are happy at least, as we can see as they dance around in a lush garden that includes the words "the end" spelled out in flowers. That's all that matters, really.
First up were select sequences from a couple of director D.G. Phalke's early mythologicals, 1919's The Killing of Kaliya and 1918's The Birth of Krishna, both of which star Phalke's seven-year-old daughter Mandakini as the young Krishna. While what we were shown of The Killing of Kaliya struck me as being a bit pedestrian, depending on the mere presence of moving bodies on screen as enough of a source of spectacle for India's early cinema audiences, The Birth of Krishna was another story altogether. The clip shown from that film contained a dizzying array of ambitious optical effects, made all the more impressive by the fact that Phalke accomplished them without the aid of an optical printer. The young Krishna rises up out of the ocean on the back of a multi-headed serpent, a man's head levitates off of his shoulders, and the evil Kamsa (D.D. Dabke) imagines himself besieged by an army of spectral Krishnas. All in all, it was an eye-opening display of technical sophistication, testifying to the fact that mid-century pioneers of Bollywood special effects like Babubhai Mistry, while definitely advancing the art, were not pioneering to quite the degree that we originally might have thought.
Also included in the evening was a selection from the 1929 British production A Throw of Dice, which was every bit as opulent as Memsaab described it in her recent review. Kapse then closed out the evening with clips from a couple of early sound films, including Achut Kanya, aka Untouchable Girl, another one from A Throw of Dice director Frantz Osten, this time produced by Bombay Talkies. Though only a statically shot song sequence, this clip was notable to me for the fact that stars Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar were not only singing in their own voices, but also doing so live through on-set microphones as the camera rolled, a far cry from what would become the norm within a few years. Finally, we were treated to an extended scene from V. Shantaram's 1939 Aadmi, a film that I am now dying to see in it's entirety. From what I saw, the movie has a wryly sophisticated, Preston Sturges kind of vibe, and leads Shanta Hublikar and Sahu Modak were utterly charming as they performed a song mercilessly lampooning Bollywood's obsession with love.
I haven't found any confirmation on this yet, but the website Shaw Brothers Reloaded is reporting that Celestial is gearing up to release another batch of Shaw Brothers titles on DVD, possibly as early as Autumn/Winter 2009. I really hope that this is true, especially because among those titles are a few that I've been wanting to see for quite a long time, in particular a couple of 1960s spy films directed by Umetsugu Inoue, the Japanese director responsible for fun-n'-frothy Shaw Brothers musicals like Hong Kong Nocturne and Hong Kong Rhapsody.
El Latigo (aka “The Whip”), who was the subject of a trio of Spanish language films during the late 70s, is not to be confused with El Latigo Negro (aka “The Black Whip”), who was the subject of a trio of Spanish language films during the late 50s, not to mention a long running series of Mexican comic books. Unless, of course, he is. Like El Latigo Negro, El Latigo is virtually indistinguishable from Zorro, with the only difference being that, while Zorro is known to occasionally use a whip when the situation calls for it, Latigo appears to use a whip for everything, be it to disarm a bad guy, activate the garage door opener, open a bottle of beer, or turn off the TV.
In the final Latigo film, El Latigo contra las Momias Asesinas, Latigo (Juan Miranda) spends most of his time -- either in his Latigo garb or as his civilian alter ego Alfonso, who looks and dresses like a tax lawyer -- walking around very slowly and looking at things, stopping occasionally to peer into a closet, page through a book filled with hieroglyphs, or simply sit and sigh resignedly. When this starts to become too boring for the audience, the producers have him stumble across a dead body. As you can imagine, this becomes boring quite often, so after a while the corpses really start to pile up.
And who is responsible for all of these corpses? Mummies! Four mummies, to be exact, who are acting under the orders of a much larger, shouty mummy played by Manuel Leal -- aka the masked wrestler Tinieblas, who also played a mummy in Las Momias de Guanajuato, as well as Beatnik Frankenstein in Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos. But these mummies are not the oatmeal-faced zombie-type mummies of Las Momias de Guanajuato and its sequels, but instead the more traditionally Hollywood bandage-wrapped kind, with the added feature of having eyes that flash on and off as if they were very slowly moving Chinese-made battery operated toys.
Eventually Latigo catches up to the four mummies and whips them until they explode, after which he goes after the boss mummy. Who will win: the whip-wielding, relatively athletic Latigo, or the slowly shambling, bandage-wrapped man? Watch El Latigo contra las Momias Asesinas to find out!
The practice of describing non-Western pop cultural figures by equating them with Western ones is always dubious, and nowhere does that lazy shorthand do more of a disservice to its subject than when it refers, as I admittedly have on occasion, to manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka as the "Walt Disney of Japan". While the term does go some way toward giving a sense of Tezuka's impact on his homeland's culture, and the affection in which he's held, it does nothing to communicate the breadth of his work. Of course, to those only familiar with those cuddly creations -- like Kimba, the White Lion and Astroboy -- that were Tezuka's most successful exports, the comparison might seem apt. But those same people would likely be taken aback by the darker, less kid-friendly nature of some of the artist's later manga works like Black Jack and the Phoenix series. (And, for my purposes, let's just forget for the moment about the banshee in Darby O'Gill and the fact that the witch in Sleeping Beauty practically scared my sister to death when she was five.)
Tezuka's 1966 manga Vampire marks something of a transition point between his Kimba days and those more thematically sophisticated works of his later years. The story revolves around a pre-human race of human-to-animal shape-shifters who have designs on overthrowing their Earthly antecedents and reclaiming their place as masters of the planet. If I understand the description of the manga that's provided on the Tezuka in English website, the title "Vampire" here refers to the fact that the shape-shifters, when in their animal form, prey on humans, and isn't intended to suggest the presence of anything like what most Westerners would be lead by that term to expect. In fact, each of these creatures transforms into a different animal -- that transformation prompted by a visual trigger that varies from vampire to vampire, with our lead character, the teenaged Toppei, changing into a wolf whenever he spies the moon or gets overly anxious. So, really, if one were looking for a comfortable genre tag to hang on it, Vampire is more of a werewolf story.
Toei Studio's TV adaptation of Vampire (aka Banpaiya), which had a 26 episode run on Japanese television beginning in 1968, is unusual for a couple of reasons. For one, it's an early attempt at combining live-action and cell animation within a TV series format, and, while most of its scenes involve human actors, the latter technique is always used to depict our protagonist Toppei in his wolf form. The second thing that makes Vampire stand out is the presence in the cast of the original manga's creator, Osamu Tezuka himself - and playing himself, no less. Tezuka drew himself into the comic version of Vampire and, while I can't say to what extent Tezuka/"Tezuka" ultimately becomes involved in the plot of the TV series, in the book he was a major player, going from being Toppei's employer to becoming a key ally in his fight against the dark side.
Having only seen the first four episodes of Vampire, I can't really give much of a sense of the series' overall shape, or judge the degree to which it adheres to the original manga's basic concepts. As one might expect, what those initial episodes provide is an introduction to the main characters and some of the conflicts that will play out over the course. In the first, we see Toppei, who has left his vampire village to join the community of humans, arriving in Tokyo and taking a job as an assistant at Osamu Tezuka's studio. It is here that we also meet the main villain of the piece, the sinister boy genius Rock, who becomes privy to Toppei's secret and seeks to manipulate it toward his own evil ends. In the second episode, Toppei's little brother, Chippei, who turns into a wolf cub at the sight of any spherical object, hitches his way into town and joins his brother in his struggles. Finally, in the third and fourth episodes, we get a hint of the depths of Rock's villainy as we see him carry out an extortion scheme against a wealthy family who have taken him in and cared for him as their own. This scheme involves the kidnapping of the family's youngest daughter, Mika, a potential love interest for Toppei, and culminates in a tense, train station ransom drop sequence more than a little reminiscent of Kurosawa's High and Low.
While saddled with the stripped-down production values typical of such TV fare, Vampire also boasts some visual elements that make it pretty distinctive. For one thing, the blending of live-action and animation is done surprisingly well. While there is some obvious cutting of corners, there are also many instances of interactions between the human actors and their cartoon costars that are quite ambitious in conception and impressive in execution. Furthermore, the setting of so much of the action in a nocturnal urban landscape provides for a nice horror-noir feel. This is further enhanced by the genuine creepiness of much of what's on display, from the trio of cackling witches consulted by Rock in his quest for power to Rock himself, who is portrayed as a junior sociopath with an icy veneer of bloodless amorality. Rock's eerie androgyny also allows for some bizarre "master of disguise" moments in which he assumes the guises of various comely young women to throw his opponents off their game. (I couldn't help being reminded of Kinji Fukasaku's Black Lizard.) All in all, it makes for something very different from anything that was being attempted on American TV at the time… or since, come to think of it.
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