Vicious rabbits, hypnotic hyjinks and more movie questions
Last Year at Marienbad courtesy StudioCanal
Questions about a two-headed rabbit movie, a killer hypnotist and why credits moved to the end of the movie from the start and more.
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FlickChick.
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Question: In a film class a few years ago I saw a movie about a man trapped on an island. He falls in love with a woman, who is in love with or engaged to a different man. The image that's stuck in my memory is of the three of them in a garden: They make shadows on the ground, but the statues in the garden cast no shadow. I was just sitting in on the class and have absolutely no memory of anything else in the film but that scene. I tried googling what I could remember with no luck- can you help me? -- Penny
FlickChick: Something about the shadows (here's a larger
image) makes me think
Last Year at Marienbad (1962), which involves an oblique, almost ghostly relationship between a man referred to as X (
Giorgio Albertazzi), a woman referred to a A (
Delphine Seyrig) and A's husband or lover (
Sacha Pitoeff). It's a classic film-course film and while they're not on an island, they are isolated within the grounds of a luxurious European spa hotel (the real Marienbad spa is in the Czech Republic). The plot, such as it is, involves X's attemps to convince A that they met and fell in love the previous year, and that she promised to run away with him. It's one of the love-it-or-hate-it greats of sixties art cinema and interestingly, it was inspired uncredited - by a novel called the
Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares that does take place on an island. Reading it sheds an interesting light on the movie's notoriously slippery narrative.
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FlickChick.
Question: Here's something that's been bothering me for some time. When and why did movies change from the credits being in the beginning to the end? Older movies have all the credits prior to the beginning of the film and now the information is at the end. Why and when did it change? Thanks. J. S.
FlickChick: Sometime in the mid-sixties, and it was because credits got longer. That, in turn, I can only assume is because various unions militated for greater onscreen representation as part of their contracts and got it. If you look at movies made in the 1930s and '40s, the number of behind-the-scenes personnel credits onscreen is extremely small, whereas now the end credits can run for five or ten minutes (or more for a movie with heavy-duty special effects), which is a long time to expect moviegoers to wait for something to happen. The concession is that now you get the top credits at the beginning stars, director, writer, producer and a handful of others and everybody else goes to the end of the line. And almost all movies now show the credits over the movie's first scene, so even as you're seeing the names of high profile you're also getting into the movie. The downside is that moviegoers tend to walk out during the end credits. The upside is that you stand a far better chance of finding out who "laughing girl in elevator" was than you do with older movies. That may sound silly, but maybe "laughing girl in elevator" made a real impression in her two-minutes on screen and you want to look out for her in future. Fuller credits make it much easier to trace an actor's career from bit parts to starring roles than it was when you had to really on anecdotal evidence (an interview with someone who worked on a movie and remembers that she met a sweet girl named
Marilyn Monroe who played the other cigarette girl) or squinting and saying "Wow, could that kid be a really young
Burt Reynolds?"
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FlickChick.
Question: I remember a horror movie about women who disfigure their faces after seeing a hypnotist or something like that. One sticks her face over the gas stove thinking it was a steamer or the sink or something. It was B&W and no, it wasn't
The Wizard of Gore. Know the title? -- Kevin
FlickChick: You saw
The Hypnotic Eye (1960), a nasty little shocker about a deranged mesmerist billed as "The great Desmond" (
Jacques Bergerac) who hypnotizes women into mutilating themselves when they go home after his show. Is it good? No. Is it pretty amazing in a super-sleazy way? Yes, yes, yes. Especially when the "hypnotic eye" - a swirling op-art disk fills the screen.
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FlickChick.
Question: I saw part of this movie over 15 years ago, when I was a child. It was back when you got charged for pay-per-view movies if you watched the channel for a longer then a few minutes. The movie had something to do with infected rabbits: I remember one scene in which a man and women character looked into a rabbit cage in some kind of medical building and the rabbit had two heads and scary teeth. Do you have any idea what it is? -- Michelle
FlickChick: I haven't seen
Night of the Lepus (1972) in a long, long time frankly it's such a bad, slow movie that I'm loathe to sit through it again, even with my finger on fast-forward but when I hear about a scary movie with rabbits it's the first thing that comes to mind. A pair of zoologists are hired to try to disrupt the rabbit breeding cycle on behalf of a rancher with a serious bunny problem. But their research instead mutates their test rabbits into giant, meat-eating killer rabbits. Are you scared yet?
However, I also wonder whether you might have seen a few minutes of
The Thing With Two Heads (1972), whose special effects team includes future effects guru Rick Baker I remember a couple of lab scenes involving two-headed animal try-outs for the final transplant, which involves grafting the head of a white racist (poor one-time major movie star
Ray Milland) onto the body of a black man (football player-turned-actor
Rosie Grier) , whereupon the two heads launch into a screaming match across the inch or so that divides them.
Readers, any other thoughts?
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FlickChick.
