Ruslan and Ludmila

                Natalya Petrova                 

Aleksandr Ptushko's Ruslan and Ludmila, from 1972, is an epic Russian fantasy film. It is an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's fairy tale in verse which catapulted him to fame in 1820. The film is fairly faithful to the original poem, excising only a minor subplot and a number of ironic asides. Ptushko, who started as an animator, has been compared to everyone from Walt Disney to Mario Bava, but I think the best analogy is Ray Harryhausen. Like Harryhausen, Ptushko is a wizard in regards to design and practical effects, but is rather stodgy in the handling of his players. At times, Ruslan and Ludmila is as static as an opera production. This was Ptushko's final picture after a near half century career of fantastical films.

The film opens in a  castle in Kiev where Prince Vladimir is announcing the betrothal of his daughter Princess Ludmila (Natalya Petrova) to her beloved, the military hero Ruslan (Valeri Kozinets). However, an evil wizard, who we later learn is named Chernomor (Vladimir Fyodorov), snatches Ludmila away on her wedding night and imprisons her in his psychedelic lair. The decor of which is totally flip city, including a garden (above) which resembles a frosted H.R. Puffnstuf terrarium with stalagmites. Ruslan and three other less suitable suitors are tasked with rescuing Ludmila. Despite a tiger, evil henchmen, a wicked sorceress, the decapitated head of a giant and treachery, Ruslan accomplishes the heroic task while finding time to repel a Pecheneg army from the gates of Kiev. This hero's journey ends with Ruslan and Ludmila pledging their troth. 

Valeri Kozinets and Natalya Petrova

Ruslan and Ludmila lumbers along at a slow pace during the course of its 150 minutes. Viewers over ten may experience a soporific effect at times, but the film's longueurs have a benefit or two. The film's dialogue is largely dubbed and this, along with its slow pace, brings out the musicality of Pushkin's verse. There are also moments when individuals and choruses burst into song. Tikhon Khrennikov's stirring score helps bind together this pokey film without alluding to Glinka's opera. The accumulated aural effects helps turn the flick into a hymn to Russian nationalism, much like Alexander Nevsky and many other Soviet films. That Kiev is the citadel of Russian pride in the film has an extra resonance amidst Putin's invasion of the Ukraine. Since the founding of the first Slavic state Kievan Rus', around 900 CE or so, Kiev has been viewed as a part of the Motherland in the mind's eyes of Russian nationalists. This is further amplified by the status of Pushkin as the preeminent Russian author in his homeland. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and others may have gotten more ballyhoo in the West, but Pushkin is, rightly, revered in Russia as the father of modern Russian literature. All subsequent Russian authors are in his debt, as Dostoyevsky acknowledged in his famous 1880 speech about Pushkin.

There is an important aspect of Ruslan and Ludmila that may escape non-Russophiles. The evil wizard Chernomor's power lies in his beard. All Ruslan has to do is chop it off and the wizard is helpless. Now, as with Samson, one can look at Chernomor's bristles as a symbol of virility and potency, but there is a specific Slavic slant to this symbol. Peter the Great, the first Tsar to look to the West as a model of progress, instituted a controversial beard tax during his reign because he thought beards symbolized Russian backwardness. This was one of many examples of the tug of war in the Russian psyche between Western progressivism and traditional Russian nationalism. Pushkin was particularly sensitive to this tension. One of his best poems, The Bronze Horseman, culminates with a statue of Peter the Great chasing the narrator like a hell hound on his trail. Ruslan and Ludmila succeeds primarily as spectacle, but it contains a multitude of signifiers that shed light on the Russian character. The Deaf Crocodile disc looks spiffy.

Vladimir Fyodorov

                                       

High Time

Blake Edwards' High Time is a simple minded Bing Crosby vehicle that Edwards transforms into a pop tone poem of color and music. The story of the film is oft repeated dreck: a successful middle-aged businessman enrolls in college to see what he missed by not getting his sheepskin. This is a tale that has been told many a time in the cinema, the Rodney Dangerfield starrer Back to School has virtually the same plot. Garson Kanin is credited with the story and the Waldman brothers (The Party, The Return of the Pink Panther) the screenplay. The project was first pitched as a Gary Cooper vehicle, but then tailored for Der Bingle. He plays Harvey Howard, owner of a chain of "smokehouse" restaurants. We first see him being let off at college by his disapproving twenty something children. However, Harvey instantly bonds with his dorm mates, played by Fabian, Richard Beymer, and Patrick Adiarte.

The trio along with the always welcome Tuesday Weld are twisting away to Harvey's le jazz hot records when they meet. Edwards shoots the interiors theatrically. Transition sequences are titled cartoons with student extras performing like stagehands. The colors are bright and geometric patterns are repeated as a motif. Static scenes of singing and dialogue are alternated with spasms of choreographed action that verges on dance. Bing, Fabian, and the gang warbling "It Come Upon a Midnight Clear" in front of a white Christmas tree is juxtaposed with an antic snowball fight. The morning routine of the dorm mates is fast cranked like a silent comedy. Edwards treats the thin plot as a revue, a series of skits to be enlivened and united by color, movement, and music. There is no effort to move Bing into the age of rock and roll. He and the kids are listening to Henry Mancini's version of big band jazz not Elvis and Bo Diddley. There is no attempt at realism in this mild fantasy, which ends with Crosby "flying" over his graduation, and that is why Mancini's vivid score does more than any element of this piece of pop ephemera to hold it together.

Tuesday Weld and Bing Crosby

The cartoon like approach that Edwards employs, similar to Frank Tashlin, is not only appropriate to the featherweight nature of High Time, but also to the demands of making a Technicolor picture in Cinemascope. As in a lot of 'scope pictures, characterization takes second place to spectacle: in this case, sporting events, bonfires, hay rides, separate dormitories, and phone booth stuffing (look it up, kids). Bing is the same as ever, contentedly coasting along. Beymer is more spritely than usual: an Edwards effect. Weld's part is a boy crazy cliche, she even flirts with Bing, but she is always peaches and cream to me. Fabian is hopeless, but I think he was a better actor than Rick Nelson. As a crooner, he was pretty lousy, maybe the worst pin-up singer ever except for the terminally flat Bobby Sherman. Fabian sings a few bars of "Foggy Dew", a tip of the hat to the burgeoning folk movement I guess, but the number is thankfully truncated. Fabian is especially unconvincing as a basketball point guard, but I watched his ineptitude wistfully. Soon, he and the other payola assisted teen idols, like Frankie Avalon and James Darren, who were manufactured to be the new Elvis after the King was drafted, were to be swept away by the rising tide of Beatlemania.

Nicole Maurey plays Bing's romantic interest, a divorced French professor. Maurey had a wide ranging career (from Diary of a Country Priest to The Day of the Triffids) and had teamed with Crosby for Little Boy Lost, but the sexual chemistry between the two is zilch in High Time. The relationship and the hit tune Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen concocted to celebrate it ("The Second Time Around") seems tailor made to burnish Crosby's image after he had recently remarried. Though he had been a romantic idol in the 1930s, by 1960 the torch had been passed to Fabian and his ilk and Crosby was better off playing a priest. There are other aspects of the film that have dated badly. At one point, Crosby has to attend a faux antebellum ball, in drag, to satisfy a requirement of his fraternity initiation. The ball seems a remnant of the pernicious romanticism of the noble lost cause view of the Confederacy. Crosby is game, but this farcical transvestism would seem better suited to a clown like Danny Kaye or Jerry Lewis.

Nicole Maurey, Bing, and Tuesday

However, when viewed within the context of Blake Edwards' career, the transvestism in High Time can be seen as a consistent leitmotif that was explored most fully in Victor/Victoria. Likewise the choreographed physical schtick that is the highlight of High Time led to the hijinks of the Pink Panther films, The Great Race, and The Party. The contributions of editor Robert Simpson and choreographer Miriam Nelson helps ensure that High Time is a motion picture that really moves. Fans of vintage television will enjoy seeing the contributions of Gavin Macleod and Yvonne Craig. 

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Andy Lau

Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (henceforth Detective Dee 1) is a relatively diverting martial-arts spectacle from 2010. A major figure in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s, Mr. Hark has amassed over fifty directorial credits and even more as a producer. Most of what I've seen of his work is gaseous and over blown with little characterization or thematic impact. Detective Dee 1 is greatly helped by the efforts of the director of its action sequences, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, who started as a stunt man in 1969 and who gives Detective Dee the palpable thump it needs. The efforts of action sequence directors in martial arts films is akin to that of the choreographers, like Jack Cole, who staged the song and dance numbers in Hollywood musicals; often without credit.

The scenario for Detective Dee 1 is a jumbled tale of intrigue set during a fancifully depicted Tang dynasty. An advisor to the Empress (Carina Lau) spontaneously combusts and, soon, other characters suffer the same fate. Detective Dee (Andy Lau), who has been languishing in jail after a trumped up treason charge, is given the task of finding the culprits behind these mysterious deaths. Amidst a background warring clans, Dee learns the truism of every half-assed mystery: no one is to be trusted. So, the plot is hooey, but the numerous action sequences are propulsive. A film like Detective Dee 1 is designed to appeal to the eight year old in all of us. How else can you explain a flick in which a character is named Donkey Wang with Scabies? Judged purely as a popcorn picture, Detective Dee 1 is better crafted and more exhilarating than, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.