Luckily, I was only minoring in film studies, so I am still able to wring considerable joy and entertainment out of even the most insipid crap — or out of the most pretentious experiments (except for that one video where it’s just a shot of a stereo speaker with some guy talking about misunderstood communications as the speaker is slowly buried with sand, until what he’s saying can’t be understood at all — I get it; a noble message — did it need to take so long to deliver?). Finally I got to sit down and watch Werner Herzog films, all the old epics I missed, silent films I’d always wanted to see. I even learned to love Godard and the French New Wave. But a man only has so many hours in the day, especially when he has to devote a substantial amount of his time to solving murder mysteries in exotic locales while wearing a tuxedo and armed with nothing but a flashlight and boundless wit. So there still remain substantial gaps in my resume, even within the genres in which I consider or am consider by others to be something of an authority. And in some cases, the films I have not seen in those particular genres aren’t just major films; they are the films. The cornerstone. The one everyone should see and from which all intelligent discourse flows.
Case in point: I love Mario Bava movies. I love giallo. And while making a claim for any film as “the first giallo” will only degenerate into an unresolvable debate akin to naming the first punk rock band, a lot of people tend to agree that it’s Mario Bava’sBlood and Black Lace — which I’ve never seen.
Keith Allison is the ruthless overlord of Teleport City.
#1 by lyzard on August 30th, 2009
Wow…you may have just gotten your nose in front in the confession stakes.
One of the many things I, in my own misanthropic way, adore about this film is the misleading playfulness of the “cast as mannequins” opening credits; a supremely nasty joke.
#2 by KeithA on August 30th, 2009
When I originally pitched the “gaps in the resume” idea, it was specifically so I would finally watch this movie.
#3 by Doug on August 31st, 2009
Wow, that title is one letter away from a potentially awesome Kurosawa/Bulwer-Lytton mash-up.
#4 by The Beerman on September 3rd, 2009
I’ve often wondered if the rumors were true in that nobody, cast or crew, ever got paid for working on this picture.
#5 by Luke Blanchard on September 5th, 2009
If I might be forgiven a nit-pick, Hitchcock’s last film was Family Plot.