Madonna of the Seven Moons

Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger strike a pose

Arthur Crabtree's Madonna of the Seven Moons is a ridiculous melodrama released by Gainsborough Pictures in 1945. Unlike most of the Gainsborough romantic melodramas which are set in Restoration England, the picture is set in Italy before the Second World War. The picture centers on Maddalena (Phyllis Calvert) who, as the picture begins, is a teen being educated in a remote convent. In the first reel, Maddalena is raped by a peasant, the subsequent trauma triggers a "dual personality" in her with tragic repercussions. The film leaps two decades ahead and finds Maddalena married to a rich aristocrat (John Stuart, suitably dull as dishwater) and living in Rome. They are awaiting the arrival of their daughter Angela (Patricia Roc) who has been abroad in the UK for the past five years attending finishing school. She is not her mother's little girl anymore.

Whereas Maddalena has her hair up and is dressed primly. Angela has her hair down and shows as much skin as the British censors would allow. One of the many absurdities of the picture is that Ms. Calvert was only four months older than her onscreen daughter, Ms. Roc. Another is that the notion that the curvy Ms. Roc could have been birthed by the more boyish Ms. Calvert. Yet another is that even though almost all of the characters are Italian they speak with pronounced British accents. I don't think modern audiences can suspend this much disbelief. However, I must say I enjoyed some aspects of the picture. Peter Glenville has the most ridiculously pronounced British accent, but he superbly embodies an oily rake named Sandro. Angela succeeds in loosening up her tightly wound Ma, but an incident at a ball triggers her split personality.

This is when the script of the film, based on Margery Lawrence's novel goes as cuckoo as that justly forgotten author. We subsequently learn that Maddalena has had these episodes before in which she has abandoned hubby and child for a year at a time and then returned offering no explanation. While her husband dithers during her absence, the audience happily follows Maddalena to Florence where we meet her feisty doppelgänger, Rosanna. Calvert gets to let her hair down and show some cleavage as Rosanna. You can tell Calvert is having some fun with the role, unlike her clenched performance as Maddalena. Whenever Maddalena is having a traumatic flashback she curls her lip like Carol Burnett in her old comedy skits lampooning 40s movies and quakes. She looks like she is digesting a rotten apple and I suppose she is. Luckily, Rosanna has a dashing thief for a lover named Nino who is played by Stewart Granger. Granger adds some dash to the film without putting too much sauce on the pasta.

Stewart Granger and Phyllis Calvert

Granger and Calvert had both been featured in 1943's The Man in Grey which had been a big hit for Gainsborough and on which Crabtree had been the cinematographer. Madonna of the Seven Moons was his first effort as a director, both a reward for past services and a concession to wartime scarcity. Crabtree's pedestrian direction is the weakest aspect of the film. The lighting looks good, but the choreography of sequences is stilted. Even when he tries something relatively outlandish, a circle dolly around Angela after she has been slipped a mickey, it has little impact or emotional heft. The film's Carnival in Florence is especially feeble compared to similar sequences in Sternberg's films. The ludicrous script could only have been brought to fruition by a director with the audacity of a Sternberg, Hitchcock or Buñuel. Instead, what we have is an enjoyably bad movie. 

Neighboring Sounds

Irma Brown, WJ Solha and Gustavo Jahn     

Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds is set amidst a three block section of the coastal Brazilian city of Recife. The 2013 picture depicts interconnected lives that range across class and racial spectrums. The main character if there is one is a young mother named Bia (Maeve Jinkings) bedeviled by a neighbors' yapping dog who won't shut up at night. Slightly higher up the economic ladder is Joao (Gustavo Jahn) who manages the condo complex his grandpa Francisco (W. J. Solha) owns. We meet Joao after he has drunkenly hooked up with Sofia (Irma Brown). The movie follows the romantic arc of their relationship. A group of sinister seeming men arrive in the neighborhood promoting themselves as a security team, but they have really arrived to settle a lifelong vendetta. When the score is settled, it brings the film full circle back to the days of exploitive sugar plantations shown in period photographs that commence the film.

The film is a cross cut look at society, like many of Altman's films especially Short Cuts. As with Altman's best films, the acting is exceptional. Some of the cast are amateurs, but you can barely tell. Even Mr. Solha who delivers a marvelous portrait of a fading patriarch boasted a scant six film acting credits. Part of the verisimilitude is due to the flow of Mr Mendonça's direction. His self-written script boasts a number of weighty themes, such as European emigration to Brazil in the 20th century, but they are not trumpeted as if on a soapbox. Rather Mr. Mendonça adroitly slips his themes fluidly into the criss-crossing rivulets of Neighboring Sounds. A part of the mix, not surprisingly gives the title, is the interesting soundscape constructed by Mendonça and the talented DJ Dolores. The film mixes pop songs (Queen, Jorge Ben) with a score that mixes electronica with found sounds, like in the work of Tom Ze. The soundtrack becomes one with the lives of the characters who use sound to vent micro-aggressions and camouflage murder.

Neighboring Sounds has the density of a great novel. I was fully engrossed by it. Mendonça has gone on to greater international acclaim with Bacurau and The Station Agent, but I think Neighboring Sounds is still his best film because of its polyphonic expansiveness.

The Caretakers

                        Janis Paige and Robert Stack                       

Hall Bartlett's The Caretakers is a turgid 1963 melodrama almost wholly set in a public mental hospital. The film is complete dreck, possibly the worst American feature of that year. Mr. Bartlett was at least consistent. His 1973 film of Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of the worst American films of any decade. Bartlett co-wrote the script with Jerry Paris who makes a brief cameo appearance during the film's opening as Polly Bergen runs into him on the street. Ms. Bergen then enters a movie theater and has a public meltdown which gets her a one way ticket to the loony bin. Bergen's performance is the type of Oscar grasping fiasco that can blight a career and it did. The rest of the cast is made up of fresh faces (Diane McBain, Robert Vaughn) and veterans reaching the end of their tether (Joan Crawford, Herbert Marshall). For the record, the best performances are by Ellen Corby and Barbara Barrie.

The Caretakers was made with the best intentions. Its brief is to make the case for the deinstitutionalization of public mental health in America. Making that case is Robert Stack as a crusading psychiatrist who has the novel notion that mental patients would be helped best by being treated like human beings as opposed to inmates. Most of the film is taken up by the group therapy session with his borderline patients, Bergen and a motley group of female patients each with a separate tic and traumatic backstory. Opposing the newfangled notions Stack champions is head nurse Crawford, here monikered Lucretia,  who wants to treat the inmates as the crazies they are. She touts the safety of the staff as her first priority. The camp highlight is the judo class Lucretia "teaches" in which Crawford and a bevy of beauties don leotards. Crawford sports a bizarre blonde wig. Indeed, The Caretakers is a veritable wig fest, an unsparing look at how the conformist styles of the 1950s were getting a little rococo in the Kennedy era before all hell broke loose. Individual characters' sanity levels can be gauged by how askew their wigs are. It is that kind of movie.

Yes, a movie that is over serious, slipshod, and kooky. The Caretakers feels both endless and abortive. Plot lines, like the film's parallel romances amongst the staff members, feel truncated. Bergen is about to be gang raped by the men's ward when the film cuts to her being comforted by Stack and the cast. What the heck happened! Bartlett utilizes a lot of distorted POV shots when Bergen is first in the hospital, but then drops the technique like a hot potato. Stack was the most emotionless actor of his generation, but the film gives him a traumatic backstory that explains his lack of people skills. He gives a committed performance, I'll avoid the obvious joke, but it ends up over emphasizing the overly earnest humorlessness of the project. Such talents as Lucian Ballard and Elmer Bernstein worked on this picture. All for nought. 

Though worthless as art, The Caretakers is interesting as a reflection of changes within the American mental health system. The borderline diagnosis was first formulated in 1938 by Adolph Stern. To boil it down to its essence, it describes patients who veer from neuroticism into psychosis. The concept took some time to be accepted which The Caretakers reflects. It was not until 1980's DSM3 that the diagnosis was codified by the America's psychiatric establishment. The Caretakers presents a false dichotomy between borderline patients and other mental health sufferers. In the film, if you aren't borderline, you are seemingly doomed to wallow in a catatonic state. The Caretakers posits outpatient clinics as the hope for the post-institution future. Needless to say, things have not worked out that way. The legacy of deinstitutionalization stalk the streets of America's urban centers to this day.

I think that the nature of psychiatry and mental health therapy is antithetical to drama. This is probably why the two best American nut house movies aren't really about mental health issues, but are allegorical portraits of the nation: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sam Fuller's truly great and crazed Shock Corridor.