Money Money Money (Thailand, 1965)

So far my coverage of Thai megastar Mitr Chaibancha has -- as you might expect from a blog bearing this title -- focused exclusively on his work in action films. And while the actor’s background as a boxer made him ideal for such roles, his ubiquity during his brief reign necessitated that he be something of a jack-of-all-trades. 1965’s Money Money Money illustrates this nicely, showing that Chaibancha could carry his own in a romantic musical comedy as well as in one of his two-fisted adventures as the Red Eagle. (By the way, the Romanized spelling of this film’s Thai title is Ngern Ngern Ngern -- but before you take on the treacherous task of pronouncing it out loud, please be advised that, within the movie, it’s pronounced “Nun Nun Nun”.)

Money Money Money was helmed by Prince Anusorn Mongkolkarn, a popular director of the era who continued a long tradition of film industry involvement on the part of the Thai royal family, one that goes all the way back to the earliest days of Thai cinema, when King Chulalongkorn’s younger brother, Prince Sanbhassatra, returned from Europe with his first movie camera and took up filmmaking. (Mongkolkarn was the brother of Thai director Prince Bhanu Yukol, and the father of Prince Chatreechalerm Yukol, a well regarded director of the 1970s.) Money Money Money is a musical comedy that’s very heavy on the music, showcasing a wide cross-section of Thai music that ranges from the classical and traditional to the Western pop influenced. And from his handling of it, it’s easy to assume that Mongkolkarn had a sincere fondness for the subject. His involvement might also explain why one of those songs is an almost hymn-like paean to the glory of the king.

Giving us no relief from the tongue-tripping names, Chaibancha here plays Akkaraphol, a Western-educated young aesthete who is called back to Bangkok by his millionaire Uncle, Lord Hiran, to begin his apprenticeship in said uncle’s loan-sharking business. Sent to the village of Bang Ruen Suk to collect debts from the impoverished residents upon whose backs Hiran has made his fortune, Akkaraphol happens to see a local talent show, and is impressed by one of the bands that perform there. He is also impressed by feisty local girl Kingkaew, which is no wonder, as Kingkaew is portrayed by Petchara Chaowarat, the actress whom Americans might call the Hepburn to Chaibancha’s Tracy, and Pakistanis might call the Anjuman to Chaibancha’s Sultan Rahi.

These impressions combined inspire the kind-hearted Akkaraphol to impulsively forgive all of the villagers’ debt, and declare that he will instead open a nightclub in Bangkok where he will exploit the villagers’ musical talents to sensational effect. Soon he has allies in this project in the form of his sister Paradee (popular Thai singer Sumalee Thonglong) and her lover Rangsun (Charin Nantanakorn, another singing star), an underemployed music teacher who moonlights as a pop songwriter. The money-obsessed Lord Hiran, as might be expected, is none too pleased with this plan, and sets out to derail it at any cost. Thus Mitr and crew -- while mitigating the myriad culture clashes encountered by the bumpkin-like village musicians in the big city -- must struggle to ensure that the show goes on in the face of meager resources, crippling debt and the many obstacles thrown at them by the not-correspondingly-hamstrung Hiran.

Money Money Money is a pop film with the emphasis on the populist, although its politics, while manifestly heartfelt, aren’t all that strident. Still, it’s no less heartening to watch its climactic scene, in which Mitr and a crowd of placard-carrying villagers essentially “occupy” Lord Hiran’s lavish birthday party, ultimately expressing their economic grievances in the form of a catchy song. As for Chaibancha, his performance as the gentle and soft-spoken Akkaraphol is an ego-free one conscious of its place within a vibrant ensemble cast, always fading into the background as necessary when it’s a talented co-star’s turn to shine. Underscoring this self-effacement, the film pokes good-natured fun at the more screen-hogging exploits of Chaibancha’s action hero persona, in a scene where three idiotic thugs hired by Lord Hiran sport ridiculous looking parodies of the mask worn by him in the Red Eagle films. All of this really showed Chaibancha in a new light for me, making this film one that I think is essential for anyone who wants to understand the legendary star in all of his dimensions.

It being a musical comedy that clocks in at a full three hours and fifteen minutes, it can truly be said that Money Money Money is absurdly long, with even its epilogs having epilogs and subplots being introduced in the eleventh hour seemingly just to keep the narrative wheels turning that much longer. But, in its favor, you really do end up spending a lot of time with its characters. And at the end, when an MC steps onstage at Mitr’s club to present those of them who have married one another during its course, you really feel like you’re at the closing end of some lengthy family obligation, like a wedding reception at which no tradition -- be it the garter toss, the money tree, the throwing of the bouquet, the conga line -- was overlooked. Fortunately (and hopefully as with those relatives for whom we’ve endured that conga line) both those characters and their stories have proved endearing enough that we are willing to indulge them.

The Infernal Brains Podcast, Episode 7

The Infernal Brains are back! This time, Tars Tarkas and I say a lot of mean things about Wisit Sasanatieng's 2010 Insee Daeng reboot and a lot of nice things about the original series of Insee Daeng movies featuring Thai megastar Mitr Chaibancha. As usual, you can download the episode here. or view it along with a sexy, sexy slideshow below. 

4DK's holiday gift guide of stuff you know you're just going to buy for yourself, you selfish bastard

I love shitty bargain movie packs more than life itself, blending as they do the thrill of discovery, the mystery of the unknown, the bitter sting of disappointment, the siren's song of sweet death borne by the inevitable and the over-familiar, and, most importantly, ZZZZZZZZ... Oh and, of course, an attractive price point. I forgot to mention that.

This one that I learned of via Tars Tarkas' site may be more of all of the above than anything before it, and is certainly guaranteed to be the most disappointing Christmas gift ever for any fan of the movie Kick Ass. It has nothing to do with it. Instead, it contains a quartet of films that include among them the Godfrey Ho Franken-movie Robo Vampire and a retitling of the in-name-only sequel to Cannibal Holocaust.

But what's interesting to me are the two films that round out the set. One of them is The Fantastic Argoman, and, as you may have heard, I like that one quite a lot. If you don't already own it, here's your chance to own it for only two bucks -- that is, if you ignore the fact that you still have to pay the remaining six bucks to get the other three movies that you may or may not want.

The fourth film is something that's listed under the title The Red Eagle and given a production date of 1970. Judging by that date and the artwork on the DVD case, this film appears to be Insee Thong, aka The Golden Eagle, Thai superstar Mitr Chaibancha's final turn in the role of Red Eagle. What the wha..? I'm wondering now if this is the same subtitled version of that film that appears on the Thai DVD version from Triple X, or perhaps a dubbed, US release cut of the film that I didn't know about.

In any case, those last two films alone make this set well worth the price, no matter how dire the quality. (Not that it could be that much worse than any of the previously available versions of The Fantastic Argoman or Insee Thong.) So, how about it. Has anyone out there picked this set up?

Biff Bang Dishoom!

"Holy writer's block, Turkish Batman! It looks like some kind of links post."

Shut your hole, Turkish Robin! Who asked you? And, yes, you're right: It's a links post. What can I say? I got nuthin'.

Nick over at Tarstarkas.net has been doing an impressive job of spelunking to the depths of world pulp cinema, evidenced by his recent posting of a very detailed--and clip laden!--review of the typically copyright-flaunting Turkish superhero spectacle Bedmen Yarasa Adam.

Durian Dave, a notorious provocateur, has ignited yet another controversy over at his vintage Chinese cinema blog Soft Film with a photo of Hong Kong star Carrie Ku Mei and a certain Thai actor. What do you think, classic Thai cinema fans? Is that Mitr Chaibancha... or someone else? Even if you don't know, the post is worth checking out for the lead photo of Ku Mei in some kind of crazy Thai costumed hero picture. I think it's called Dark Heroine of the Distressingly Asphyxiating Looking Corset. Or something.

Over at Beth Loves Bollywood, Beth has posted a poll asking her readers to identify what they consider to be "foundation" masala films. For those of you less invested in all thing Bollywood, masala films are those sprawling, colorful entertainers made up of equal parts family melodrama, two-fisted action, romance, criminal intrigue, comedic hi-jinks and any other potentially crowd-pleasing element that could be squeezed into them that, while still made today, seemed to thrive especially in the seventies. So far the responses have been both fascinating and informative, and have resulted in numerous titles being added to my already bloated list of Bollywood must-sees.

And If you're interested in more on that subject, Rum offers a delightful travelogue of the various regions of Masala-land on her blog Roti Kapada Aur Rum.

While you're busy perusing the above, I'm going to be polishing up my upcoming Teleport City review of In The Dust of the Stars, an East German space opera that comes across like a combination of an episode of Star Trek, a Jess Franco film, and ABBA: The Movie. Intrigued? Of course, you are!

Happy Monday

Like Robocon, I'm a robot who's not afraid to show his emotions, which is why I'd like to start the week off by thanking Wise Kwai from the bottom of my painted on little heart for his generous mention of my Operation Black Panther review on his Thai Film Journal blog. In the same post, Wise Kwai also linked to a review of Insee Thong over at the blog Coffee Coffee and More Coffee, which further gave me all kinds of annoyingly warm and fuzzy feelings inside. It's great to see more being written in English about the joys of vintage Thai popular cinema, and Peter over at CC&MC really gives this Mitr Chaibancha costumed hero romp its due. If you'd like to check out my own take on that film -- as well as the series of Red Eagle films of which it is a part -- you can do so over at my second home, Teleport City. Now, get back to work!

Red Eagle redux

Back in December, I wrote a review for my site The Lucha Diaries of the 1970 Thai film Insee Thong, the last of a series of films starring Thai superstar Mitr Chaibancha as the masked hero The Red Eagle. An updated version of that review has just been posted over at Teleport City which includes a couple bits of new information I gleaned from the kind and knowledgeable commentors over at Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal, mainly in the form of corrected film titles and dates. I also took the opportunity to add a few more screen caps. This was a really fun piece for me to write on what -- to me, at least -- is a really fascinating subject, so I hope y'all will take the time to check it out if you haven't already.

Insee Daeng: You know you want it

I've mentioned a few times now that Wisit Sasanatieng is working on a new film based on the Thai costumed hero Insee Daeng (Red Eagle), who was originally personified on screen by Mitr Chaibancha back in the sixties. I came across a link to the film's official site over at Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal and thought I would pass it along:

http://www.inseedangthemovie.com/

There's not much up there right now other than a couple of slick graphics, but I imagine it's worth keeping an eye on, since the movie is scheduled for release some time this year. Wise Kwai also has a few posts detailing the announcements that have been made about the film so far, which are worth a peek.

Given Sasanatieng's obvious love for classic Thai cinema--something he demonstrated with great virtuosity and style in the wonderful Tears of the Black Tiger--he's the perfect person to be helming this project, and it's one that's well worth getting excited about. In fact, if you're not already excited about it, it's only because you're afraid someone's going to see you getting excited about it and think you're a big geek, so just get over it.

Geek.

Khon Nuer Khon aka Top Secret (Thailand, 1967)

Reviewing Top Secret is going to be an interesting proposition, because I can't say for sure that I actually saw Top Secret. I mean, the slip case said "Top Secret", the VCD itself said "Top Secret", and that VCD definitely contained digital information that translated into some kind of image on my screen, but for the most part that image looked like this:

So it's sort of like one of those grainy, out of focus photos of a purported UFO sighting; one person can look at it and see the northern lights, another a paper plate on a string, and another the real deal. It's subjective. Assuming this is Top Secret, though, I've got to say that this is the most abused Thai film of its era I've yet to see (and if you've read any of my other pieces on 1960's Thai cinema, you know that's saying a lot).

The paradoxical thing about watching a film that's in this advanced a state of decay is that it makes you feel fortunate to be able to see it at all, no matter how underwhelming it might actually be behind that noisome curtain of funk. In a way, it gains that "survivor" aura that we Americans seem to value so much. In the case of Top Secret, assuming that the VCD was made from the best print available, the film looks to have had only a couple months before turning into celluloid dust, so it really is a kind of minor miracle that it can be viewed. Because of that I felt honor bound to watch it, even though the experience was akin to watching a satellite transmission from Mars with my head wrapped in grimy cellophane.

Another reason that I stuck with Top Secret is that, at times, when I could see it, it looked like this:

So you have Thai mega-star Mitr Chaibancha in all his pompadoured glory, doing his best James Bond impression against a groovy pop art back drop, which is exactly what I signed on for. I'm easy that way.

Top Secret pairs Chaibancha up with the other great action star of Thai pop cinema's golden age, Sombat Methanee. Both play secret agents--Methanee working from the inside, posing as a member of the bad guys' gang, and Chaibancha working from the outside--and it's a straight up 007 clone. In fact, just like in Goldfinger, Mitr spends a large part of the film imprisoned by the villain while the supporting cast steps up to move the plot forward.

I'm not going to pretend that I even bothered to try to follow that plot, but from what I could see, it looked like it could be a fun film if watched in a context that didn't threaten permanent eye damage. There's a squadron of female karate commandos, a cool mod villain's lair with all kinds of hidden doors and booby traps, and plenty of shootouts between our very similar looking heroes and the villain's uniformed, tommygun toting hench-army. The production values are quite good, with an impressive display of military hardware on hand. (I've concluded that either the Thai government was very supportive of the film industry, or their military was just movie mad.) Finally, it's also something of a musical, with characters taking time out from the action to burst into song, and as such has it's own, equally distressed, audio track--which you can't always count on with Thai films of this vintage.

So here's my--undoubtedly naive and completely unfounded--hope: That Wisit Sasanatieng's upcoming revival of Insee Daeng (aka The Red Eagle) will be so awesome that it will inspire renewed interest in both the films of Mitr Chaibancha and 1960's Thai cinema in general, and that as a result we'll finally get to see more of these older films restored--if that's even possible--and subtitled on DVD.

Don't let me down Wisit. You've got me a little nervous, because The Unseeable kind of sucked.

Top Secret, like all of the Thai films I review here, is available from the ever-reliable eThaiCD.

Operation Bangkok (Thailand, 1967)

Thai popular cinema of the 1960s is one of those things that I'm fascinated by that I'm hesitant to recommend without qualification. I expended a lot of words a couple months back discussing the Red Eagle films, and while those movies boast striking visuals and a look that is unique in world cinema, I'm not sure that many people would share my enthusiasm for them to the extent that it would be worth their sitting through them in all their lengthy, un-subtitled, weirdly post-dubbed and distressingly deteriorated current condition.

I'm also fascinated by the phenomenon and story of Mitr Chaibancha, the undisputed king of 1960s Thai cinema. So in demand was this actor that he starred in roughly one in three of the near one hundred movies made in Thailand each year during that decade. After Chaibancha was killed during the filming of Insee Thong, the final Red Eagle film, a shrine was erected at the spot that is still visited by worshipful fans to this day.

Chaibancha also did some cross-over work in Hong Kong cinema, and his popularity was such in his homeland that Hong Kong studios saw an incentive to try to tap into that market as well. Operation Bangkok is a 1967 Thai production that received backing from Hong Kong's then still-powerful Cathay Studios, and it pairs Chaibancha with Cathay star Regina Pai Ping as a couple of undercover operatives working as part of a joint Thai/Hong Kong operation to bring down an international drug ring.

Operation Bangkok's relatively lavish funding means that it is in many ways not typical of Thai movies of its period. The typical Thai film in 1967 would have been shot on 16mm color reversal film stock, a process that resulted in such extreme color saturation that even the most muted colors showed up on screen as day-glo. Films of that period were also most often shot without sound, with the voice-overs to be provided by live actors in the venues--often makeshift outdoor cinemas--where they were shown. (For a wonderfully evocative illustration of this practice see director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's lovely 2001 film Monrak Transistor.) Modern DVD and VCD release of these films compensate for this last practice by providing bizarre, much later recorded audio tracks comprised of un-synched actors reading the movie's script (or making it up as they go along) over the movie's action, accompanied by only very minimal sound effects and a patchwork of anachronistic music.

Operation Bangkok, on the other hand, appears to be shot on 35mm and has synchronous sound, so for once we get to hear the actual voice of, not just Chaibancha, but also his frequent female co-star Petchara Chaowarath. Though not quite as riotous in its color presentation as the aforementioned 16mm productions, the film still shows enough of the Thai preference for vivid color in its art direction and costume design to provide that visual pop that fans of this cinema expect. The added budget also serves to enhance the usual rough-and-tumble thrills you'd expect from a Thai action film of this time, giving us some well shot and executed car and speedboat chases in addition to the plentiful--and credibly harm-producing--physical brawls that break out at regular intervals. Regular Cathay director Tong Wong does a good job of keeping things moving at a fast clip, despite the fact that--at almost two hours (and perhaps more, given that parts are very likely missing from the currently available print)--the film feels a little over-long.

Though, like the other old Thai films I've seen, I found Operation Bangkok entertaining on a purely visual level, the fact that it features a large cast of characters, many of whom are operating under false identities, makes its plot difficult to negotiate without subtitles--something that might prove to be a deterrent factor for those non-Thai speakers considering giving it a chance. Another such factor might be that, like pretty much every surviving Thai film of its vintage, the available print of Operation Bangkok is absolutely ravaged--so much so that the experience of viewing it is like watching it through a thick curtain of scratches, tears and stains. In my review of Insee Thong I made the case that this condition contributed to the unique experience of watching these particular films, but I understand that this opinion might not be shared by everybody.

Still, one thing that I will without hesitation recommend Operation Bangkok for is its soundtrack. A lot of the movie's action takes place in various nightclub settings and, as a result, the film is peppered with performances by what look to be actual beat groups from the region (in addition to some enjoyable vocal numbers by Regina Pai Ping). Anyone who's purchased any of the compilations of Southeast Asian go-go music that have been made available over the last few years will find a lot to love here--as will anyone, like myself, who revels in go-go culture in all its international guises.

Like much of Mitr Chaibancha's output, Operation Bangkok is only available on VCD, and can be found from the always dependable eThaiCD. For me the best part about these Thai VCDs--aside from the fact that you can get them for just a few dollars shipped--are their packaging, which usually includes a brightly colored, relief-printed slip cover featuring the original hand-painted poster artwork for the film. If you've ever witnessed the glories of Thai film poster artwork, you know why that would be incredibly appealing. This guarantees that, even if you find the film contained therein disappointing, you're still left with a pleasing artifact--which makes taking a chance on this unique and, to me, irresistibly compelling avenue of world cinema not that much of a gamble at all.

Insee Thong (Thailand, 1970)

When watching one of the Insee Daeng movies - or any other existing example of popular Thai cinema from the 1960s - its possible to see a separate story being told in the countless pops, skips and scratches that riddle the severely weathered and damaged available prints, much as you might see a story in the lines etched in an aged human face. And that story, depending on how you look at it, can be either a sad one or a happy one. On the one hand, those wounds and blemishes speak of a unique part of world popular cinema that is on the verge of being lost to history - the ragged condition of each surviving film testifying to the many, many more that have ceased to exist entirely. On the other, as with a child's threadbare teddy bear, that conspicuous wear and tear serves as evidence of just how much these movies have been loved and enjoyed by their intended audience, thread over and over again through projectors - be they in urban cinemas or makeshift outdoor screenings in small villages - until there was little left of them to thread; in short, loved by their audience to the extent that today they have been virtually devoured...

Read the full review at The Lucha Diaries