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Post by wmcclain on Aug 11, 2021 19:17:42 GMT
The Baron of Arizona (1950), written and directed by Samuel Fuller. A fictionalized account of the career of James Reavis, forger and con-man, who spent years creating a phony history to establish his ownership of a big chunk of the American Southwest. This is a small, quickly made film. I review it because I want to be a completist for Vincent Price and director Fuller. Swindler though he is, somehow we are rooting for Reavis. This is an odd subject for tough-guy Fuller, who we expect to be on the side of the common folk rather than a would-be nobleman. We understand why the citizens of Arizona are angry when told they are now subject to a Baron and have to pay him rent on their own property, but lynch mobs are always unlovely. Our cast: - Vincent Price is delicious as the forger with big plans, playing a long game. It's not just the money: he has a need for greatness, to win big over everyone else. Eventually he falls in love with his wife, selected when she was a child for her role in his drama. He didn't expect that. Price starred in another historically-based film of American landed aristocracy: Dragonwyck (1946).
- Ellen Drew is the woman he has created as heir to old Spanish land grants. Last seen in Isle of the Dead (1945), she was in another tale of unwitting fraud: Christmas in July (1940).
- Familiar faces: Vladimir Sokoloff and Beulah Bondi.
- Ed Wood -- age 26 -- gets his first IMDB mention for uncredited stunt work. If there he is hard to spot.
Photographed by James Wong Howe. Available on DVD from Criterion. 
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Post by Isapop on Aug 11, 2021 19:48:09 GMT
Really? You mean I missed your review of Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs?
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Post by wmcclain on Aug 11, 2021 20:25:03 GMT
Really? You mean I missed your review of Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs? Someday, that and the Bikini Machine. Until then: Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962), produced and directed by Albert Zugsmith. Action Vincent Price! Penetrating the opium dens and slave girl markets underneath San Francisco's Chinatown! The first 10 minutes -- a hokey scene of landing a bunch of unhappy young women on the beach and fighting over them -- are dreadful, but it picks up in quality when Vincent Price appears, without ever turning into an actual good movie. He's a sardonic, philosophical seaman acquainted with the secret societies of China. Without much struggling he gets pulled into a gang war and we have continuous fighting, hiding, secret passages, underground rivers, and a really long bit with dancing girls at the underground slave market. He does a moody voice-over narration during much of this. Sort of 1962 Big Trouble in Little China (1986), it has a couple of points of interest: - Apart from Price almost the entire cast are Asian actors, something of an employment program for them, although they have to speak in stilted English and be inscrutable. Many familiar faces from Charlie Chan to the Kung Fu TV series and beyond.
- We have a bizarre sequence of psychedelica when Price smokes opium and does slow-motion fighting with the bad guys. (Research project: Vincent Price + drugs. There is another hallucination scene in The Tingler (1959)).
There is an historical context for the tong wars: The score is of mixed value: we have the generically absurd action music held over from the 1950s, but also eerie theremin bits for the suspense and dope dream. Finally, the titles read "Thomas de Quincey's classic --". I've read de Quincey and I suspect he would giggle over the association. Warner Archive title. Variable quality, but some of the scenes are remarkably good in detail and black levels. 1.66 aspect ratio, 85m long. 
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Post by politicidal on Aug 11, 2021 23:19:19 GMT
Terrific showcase for Vincent Price as an unconventional leading man. One of his very best performances and an interesting based on a true-story’ type of western.
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Post by kijii on Aug 12, 2021 0:45:42 GMT
The Baron of Arizona (1950), written and directed by Samuel Fuller. A fictionalized account of the career of James Reavis, forger and con-man, who spent years creating a phony history to establish his ownership of a big chunk of the American Southwest. This is a small, quickly made film. I review it because I want to be a completist for Vincent Price and director Fuller. Swindler though he is, somehow we are rooting for Reavis. This is an odd subject for tough-guy Fuller, who we expect to be on the side of the common folk rather than a would-be nobleman. We understand why the citizens of Arizona are angry when told they are now subject to a Baron and have to pay him rent on their own property, but lynch mobs are always unlovely. Our cast: - Vincent Price is delicious as the forger with big plans, playing a long game. It's not just the money: he has a need for greatness, to win big over everyone else. Eventually he falls in love with his wife, selected when she was a child for her role in his drama. He didn't expect that. Price starred in another historically-based film of American landed aristocracy: Dragonwyck (1946).
- Ellen Drew is the woman he has created as heir to old Spanish land grants. Last seen in Isle of the Dead (1945), she was in another tale of unwitting fraud: Christmas in July (1940).
- Familiar faces: Vladimir Sokoloff and Beulah Bondi.
- Ed Wood -- age 26 -- gets his first IMDB mention for uncredited stunt work. If there he is hard to spot.
Photographed by James Wong Howe. Available on DVD from Criterion. For the last few years I have been trying to complete as many directors as possible. I went through a Fuller phase too. I found this movie interesting. Is there any truth to the story as presented in this film?
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Post by wmcclain on Aug 12, 2021 0:49:23 GMT
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Post by manfromplanetx on Aug 16, 2021 0:41:23 GMT
Thanks for the review wmcclain.... A great film as always from Samuel Fuller, Vincent Price has said it was one of his favourite roles. "This is an odd subject for tough-guy Fuller,..." ? Samuel Fuller worked in journalism in the late 1920s & 30s, his stint at the New York Evening Graphic had a great impact on his original style of storytelling. Although he never graduated from college, Fuller was a deeply learned and astute chronicler of American history. Through his interest and passion for research, his films were composed with much attention to period detail, visually audacious and boldly outspoken... Fuller dove deep into an obscure chapter of early American history for the stranger-than-fiction true story of James Addison Reavis. A wonderfully offbeat yarn the film delighted him as a screenwriter, author, and to his background of tabloid crime reporting... Above all a master storyteller Fuller gave his films a unique spark of unexpected drama and emotional depth, The Baron Of Arizona a classic example.  |
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Post by petrolino on Aug 16, 2021 1:22:57 GMT
Having worked on bringing Sergio Martino's 'Silent Action' (1975) to blu-ray fully restored, now new film distribution company on the block, Fractured Visions, are working on bringing Umberto Lenzi's 'Free Hand For A Tough Cop' (1976) to blu-ray this autumn for their second release. Lenzi's filmmaking hero was always fellow journalist Sam Fuller.
Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Don Siegel, Phil Karlson, Richard Fleischer, Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller ... this was genre cinema.
"Actually, the director who influenced me most was Costa-Gavras, while Sam Peckinpah and Steven Spielberg were the American directors I especially loved. Anyway, budget limitations differentiated our genre films from the American ones. Our cinema collapsed when our handcrafted special effects had to compete with Hollywood digital special effects and politicians were not able to stimulate our technological progress. The cars that exploded in our movies were old, unlike those of Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971), but the final effect was the same. In any case, in my most productive years, I became American, because shooting these scenes required a degree of precision and attention that I had acquired shooting in the United States. Nonetheless, it is absurd to think how much we have risked making our films.
... With Torso, I was inspired by Richard Fleischer’s See No Evil (1971) and I tried to create a plot that could combine the fascination of this film with the Roman news."
- Sergio Martino, 'An American In Rome'
(Wim Wenders & Samuel Fuller)
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Post by lune7000 on Aug 16, 2021 2:06:01 GMT
Price was just getting started as a leading man around this time. Then 3-D House of Wax (1953) became a big hit and he pretty much went full time into horror. It seems that once a person became associated with horror they rarely were able to move into other genres. Price had a tender quality in him and I think he would have been wonderful in the romance genre- especially in one of those Sex and the Single Girl type of romances where the romance of an older couple parallels that of the younger.
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