Plan 9 from Outer Space

Plan 9 from Outer Space
July 22, 1959
DCA
Sci-Fi
VHS
B-

This was one of the trickier movies to grade, partly because I want the grades to reflect not how "good" or "bad" a movie is, but rather how entertaining I find it.  Also, I've seen this movie multiple times (although not recently) and it's received so much attention-- especially with the Medveds calling it the worst ever-- it's as difficult to come to it fresh as it is to write about some of the "classics."  Watching this time, I tried just approaching it as a film, admittedly a cheap '50s sci-fi film.

What most struck me is how, intentionally or not, Ed Wood, Jr. (writer/director/producer/plus a cameo role) alienates the audience, pun sort of intended.  This is seen most obviously in the way he plays with time.  TV psychic Criswell speaks of the future and yet claims that the events onscreen have already happened.  We're told at one point that "modern women" have "been like this through the ages."  Wood also goes beyond "day for night" shots and seems to not care that it can be entirely different times of the day depending on whether we're at the Trents' home, the graveyard, or the field in between.  At least I think it's the field in between.  We're also dislocated in space.  In fact, space is dislocated in space, with "cigar-shaped" saucers that look more like paper plates (heck, they look more like sombreros than like cigars) able to travel from Earth to I forget what the planet was called in only one Earth day.  Characters keep contradicting each other and themselves, most notably the alien ironically named Eros, who's simultaneously a pacifist and a mass murderer.  A police officer asks a war veteran if he can handle a gun, after we've been treated to multiple scenes of the cop waving his own gun around and even scratching himself with it!

I was going to give this movie a B but, and I know this is an odd time to bring this up, it's too sexist.  Not only do we have everyone "protecting" Mrs. Trent (and putting her in harm's way), but I don't like the way Tanna (the female alien) is treated, especially by Eros.  (Joanna Lee would go on to much better things, as a TV writer, winning an Emmy for The Waltons.)  Yes, I know it's the '50s, and yes, I know the movie makes no sense anyway, but it bugs me because it seems so unnecessary.  You could argue that Gidget is also a sexist movie, with Grandma's old-fashioned sampler presented as profound wisdom about male-female relationships, but even if you don't like what happens to/with the girls in that movie, at least they're presented as full human beings.  That said, yeah, it's kind of fun to watch Vampira walk around as a sort of zombie, even if I can't believe she'd ever marry Bela Lugosi, living or dead.

Man on the Flying Trapeze

Man on the Flying Trapeze
August 3, 1935
Paramount
Comedy
DVD
B-

Well, this movie surprised me.  My expectations were low when I saw that Kathleen Howard again plays Fields's nagging wife, but there's more to her character here, although she's not given as much screen time.  The second half of the movie, with all the complications of Fields's job as a memory expert, his desire to see a wrestling match, and his family troubles (as usual, only the roughly 20-year-old daughter, here named Hope, is loyal to him), is much better than the first, although I can see how that first half sets things up.  The direction, by Fields himself, has much more energy than anything since International House, which admittedly was not just a Fields movie.  There are some nice comic touches, like the way his boss Peabody pronounces "decades" like "decayeds" and "condolences" like you've never heard it before.  Fields even gets a few lines past the censors, like "Nuts!" while stepping on walnuts, and calling a nosegay "nose candy."

Carlotta Monti, Fields's real-life live-in lover, does a fine job playing his secretary, even telling off Peabody, and she would play a receptionist in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.  Lew Kelly and Billy Bletcher were both in The Old Fashioned Way.  Jack Baxley would go on to Double Wedding, both Helen Dickson and Sarah Edwards to It's a Wonderful Life.  And one of the wrestlers is none other than future "star" of Plan Nine from Outer Space Tor Johnson!

Since it's a Paramount comedy, what does the title mean?  I thought that the classic song would be one that the burglars (one played by Walter Brennan, the other of course Tammany Young), the one friendly cop Fields meets, and Fields would sing in their basement quartet, but they don't.  I think the title is meant to be an ironic comment on how Fields's Ambrose Wolfinger isn't daring or young, nor does he float through the air (or life) with the greatest of ease, but there's something quietly heroic about him.  I think this is the first of his movies where I actually cared about his character.